From a Cornish Window
by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #24946 · 502,103 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: From a Cornish Window
Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch
Release date: March 29, 2008 [eBook #24946]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24946
Credits: Produced by Lionel Sear
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM A CORNISH WINDOW ***
Produced by Lionel Sear
FROM A CORNISH WINDOW.
By
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.
DEDICATION.
MY DEAR WILLIAM ARCHER,
Severe and ruthlessly honest man that you are, you will find that the
levities and the gravities of this book do not accord, and will say so.
I plead only that they were written at intervals, and in part for
recreation, during years in which their author has striven to maintain a
cheerful mind while a popular philosophy which he believed to be cheap
took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew
to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of
the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part
of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and
conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in
our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated:
but let us remove it from all spheres in which we are interested and
contemplate it as expounded by an American Insurance 'Lobbyist,' a few days
ago, before the Armstrong Committee:--
"The Insurance world to-day is the greatest financial proposition in
the United States; and, _as great affairs always do, it commands a
higher law._"
I have read precisely the same doctrine in a University Sermon preached by
an Archbishop; but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric:
the point being that in life, which is a struggle, success has in itself
something divine, by virtue of which it can be to itself a law of right
and wrong; and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the noble
obligation to command himself so soon and in so far as he is rich enough
or strong enough to command other people.
But why (you will ask) do I drag this doctrine into a dedication?
Because, my dear Archer, I have fought against it for close upon seventeen
years; because seventeen years is no small slice of a man's life--rather,
so long a time that it has taught me to prize my bruises and prefer that,
if anybody hereafter care to know me, he shall know me as one whose spirit
took its cheer in intervals of a fight against detestable things; that--
let him rank me in talent never so low beside my contemporaries who
preached this doctrine--he shall at least have no excuse but to acquit me
of being one with them in mind or purpose; and lastly, because in these
times few things have brought me such comfort (stern comfort!) as I have
derived from your criticism, so hospitable to ideas, so inflexible in
judging right from wrong. As I have lived lonelier it has been better for
me, and a solace beyond your guessing, to have been reminded that
criticism still lives amongst us and has a Roman spirit.
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
The Haven,
FOWEY,
April 3rd, 1906.
PREFACE.
My old friend and publisher, Mr. Arrowsmith, maintains that the time has
come for a cheap edition of this book. Should the public endorse that
opinion, he will probably go about pretending that his head is as good as
his heart.
_From a Cornish Window_ first appeared between cloth covers some six or
seven years ago. I see that its Dedication bears the date, April 3rd,
1906. But parts of it were written years before in the old _Pall Mall
Magazine_, under the editorship of Lord Frederic Hamilton (who invented
its title for me), and a few fragments date back almost to undergraduate
days. The book, in short, is desultory to the last degree, and discourses
in varying moods on a variety of topics. Yet, turning the pages again,
I find them curiously and somewhat alarmingly consistent--consistent not
only in themselves, but with their surviving author as he sits here
to-day, using the same pen-holder which he bought for twopence in 1886,
and gazing out of the same window, soon to be exchanged for another with a
view more academic: and 'alarmingly consistent' because (as Emerson has
very justly observed) a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds. To persevere in one fixed outlook upon life may be evidence of
arrested capacity to grow, while on the other hand mere flightiness
is a sure sign that the mind has not even arrived at man's estate.
The best plan seems to be to care not a farthing for consistency or
inconsistency, but to keep the eye turned outwards, and to keep it fresh
by taking on new interests (however trivial), and reading new books, but
still comparing them with the old. I think we ought to be especially
careful to read new poetry as we get on in life, if only as a discipline--
as men with increasing waists practise calisthenics--because poetry is
always trying to reach beyond the phenomena of life, and because these are
all the while, if imperceptibly, narrowing us within the round of daily
habit. As the author of _Ionica_ put it (I quote from memory)--
Our feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after thirty years or so:
Professionising modern men
Thenceforth admire what pleased them then.
But on the whole I do not regret this consistency, believing that the
years 1896-1906 laid an almost holy constraint on the few who believed
neither in Sham-Imperialism nor in the Superman, to stand together,
to be stubborn, to refuse as doggedly as possible to bow the knee to these
idols, to miss no opportunity of drawing attention to their feet of clay.
I seem to perceive that the day of the Superman is drawing to its close.
He is a recurring nuisance, like the influenza, and no doubt will afflict
mankind again in due season. But our generation has enjoyed a peculiarly
poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected
upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting
sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to
sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the
byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he _had_
the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar--the
Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and
philosophers--that Europe would seem to be recovering to-day. Well, I
believe that the Christian virtues, the lovable and honourable code of
ancient gentlemen, may always be trusted to win in the long run, and
extrude the impostor. But while his vogue lasts, it may be of service to
keep reminding men that to falsify another man's dispatch is essentially a
stupider action than to tilt at windmills: and that is the main moral of
my book.
Arthur Quiller-Couch.
December 2nd, 1912.
JANUARY.
Should any reader be puzzled by the title of this discursive volume, the
following verses may provide him with an explanation. They were written
some time ago for a lady who had requested, required, requisitioned
(I forget the precise shade of the imperative) something for her album.
"We are in the last ages of the world," wrote Charles Lamb to Barry
Cornwall, "when St. Paul prophesied that women should be 'headstrong,
lovers of their own will, having albums.--'"
BEATUS POSSIDENS.
I can't afford a mile of sward,
Parterres and peacocks gay;
For velvet lawns and marble fauns
Mere authors cannot pay.
And so I went and pitched my tent
Above a harbour fair,
Where vessels picturesquely rigg'd
Obligingly repair.
The harbour is not mine at all:
I make it so--what odds?
And gulls unwitting on my wall
Serve me for garden-gods.
By ships that ride below kaleid-
oscopically changed,
Unto my mind each day I find
My garden rearranged.
These, madam, are my daffodils,
My pinks, my hollyhocks,
My herds upon a hundred hills,
My phloxes and my flocks.
And when some day you deign to pay
The call that's overdue,
I'll wave a landlord's easy hand
And say, "Admire _my_ view!"
Now I do not deny that a part of the content expressed in these lines may
come of resignation. In some moods, were I to indulge them, it were
pleasant to fancy myself owner of a vast estate, champaign and woodland;
able to ride from sea to sea without stepping off my own acres, with
villeins and bondmen, privileges of sak and soke, infangthef,
outfangthef, rents, tolls, dues, royalties, and a private gallows for
autograph-hunters. These things, however, did not come to me by
inheritance, and for a number of sufficient reasons I have not amassed
them. As for those other ambitions which fill the dreams of every healthy
boy, a number of them had become of faint importance even before a
breakdown of health seemed definitely to forbid their attainment.
Here at home, far from London, with restored strength, I find myself less
concerned with them than are my friends and neighbours, yet more keenly
interested than ever in life and letters, art and politics--all that men
and women are saying and doing. Only the centre of gravity has shifted,
so to speak.
I dare say, then, that resignation may have some share in this content;
but if so 'tis an unconscious and happy one. A man who has been writing
novels for a good part of his life should at least be able to sympathise
with various kinds of men; and, for an example or two, I can understand--
1. Why Alexander cried (if he ever did) because he had no second
world to conquer.
2. Why Shakespeare, as an Englishman, wanted a coat of arms and
a respectable estate in his own native country town.
3. What and how deep are the feelings beneath that _cri du
coeur_ of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's 'Old Squire:'--
"I like the hunting of the hare
Better than that of the fox;
I like the joyous morning air,
And the crowing of the cocks.
"I covet not a wider range
Than these dear manors give;
I take my pleasures without change,
And as I lived I live.
"Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one's own sole king
Upon one's own sole ground.
"I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me day by day
The memory of old days as fair,
With dead men past away.
"To these as homeward still I ply,
And pass the churchyard gate,
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
"I like the hunting of the hare:
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days ere I was born."
4. What--to start another hare--were Goldsmith's feelings when he
wrote--
"And as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return--and die at home at last."
5. With what heart Don Quixote rode forth to tilt at sheep and
windmills, and again with what heart in that saddest of all
last chapters he bade his friends look not for this year's
birds in last year's nests.
6. Why the young man went away sadly, because he had great
possessions and could not see his way to bestowing them all
on the poor; why, on the contrary, St. Paulinus of Nola and
St. Francis of Assisi joyfully renounced their wealth; what
Prudhon meant by saying that 'property is theft'; and what a
poor Welsh clergyman of the seventeenth century by
proclaiming in verse and prose that he was heir of all the
world, and properties, hedges, boundaries, landmarks meant
nothing to him, since all was his that his soul enjoyed; yes,
and even what inspired him to pen this golden sentence--
"_You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself
floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens
and crowned with the stars._"
My window, then, looks out from a small library upon a small harbour
frequented by ships of all nations--British, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian,
Russian, French, German, Italian, with now and then an American or a
Greek--and upon a shore which I love because it is my native country. Of
all views I reckon that of a harbour the most fascinating and the most
easeful, for it combines perpetual change with perpetual repose. It
amuses like a panorama and soothes like an opiate, and when you have
realised this you will understand why so many thousands of men around this
island appear to spend all their time in watching tidal water. Lest you
should suspect me of taking a merely dilettante interest in the view, I
must add that I am a Harbour Commissioner.
As for the house, it is a plain one; indeed, very like the house a child
draws on a slate, and therefore pleasing even externally to me, who prefer
the classical to any Gothic style of architecture. Why so many strangers
mistake it with its modest dimensions for a hotel, I cannot tell you.
I found one in the pantry the other day searching for a brandy-and-soda;
another rang the dining-room bell and dumbfoundered the maid by asking
what we had for lunch; and a third (a lady) cried when I broke to her that
I had no sitting-room to let. We make it a rule to send out a chair
whenever some unknown invader walks into the garden and prepares to make a
water-colour sketch of the view.
There are some, too, whose behaviour cannot be reconciled with the
hallucination of a hotel, and they must take the house for a public
institution of some kind, though of what kind I cannot guess.
There was an extremely bashful youth, for instance, who roamed the garden
for a while on the day after the late Duke of Cambridge's funeral, and,
suddenly dashing in by the back door, wanted to know why our flag was not
at half-mast. There was also a lady who called on the excuse that she had
made a life-study of the Brontes, and after opining (in a guarded manner)
that they came, originally, from somewhere in Yorkshire, desired to be
informed how many servants we kept. I have sometimes thought of
rechristening our house The Hotel of the Four Seasons, and thereby
releasing its true name (The Haven) to a friend who covets it for his own.
On the whole, however, these visitors disturb the house and the view from
my window very little. The upper halves of them, as they pass up and down
the road, appear above my garden wall much as the shadows that passed in
Plato's cave. They come, enjoy their holiday, and go, leaving the window
intent upon the harbour, its own folk and its own business.
And now for the book, which is really not a book at all, but a chapter of
one.
Last autumn I returned from a holiday to find that the publishing season
had begun. This was announced by a stack of new books, review copies and
presentation copies, awaiting me on my window-seat. I regarded it sourly.
A holiday is the most unsettling thing in the world. At the end of it I
regain the well-worn chair with a sigh of pleasure and reach for the
familiar tobacco-jar, wondering how I could have been fool enough to leave
them; yet somehow this lively sense of repurchased habit does not go far
enough and compel me to work. Being at home is a game, and so good a game
that I play at it merely, rearranging my shelves and, under pretence of
dealing with arrears of correspondence, skimming the literary papers and
book-catalogues found amid the pile of letters.
It happened that the first postal-wrapper to be broken enclosed a copy of
_The Academy_, and _The Academy_ opened with this sentence: "Since our
last issue we have received one hundred and nineteen new books and
reprints." I looked across to the pile on my window-seat and felt it to
be insignificant, though it interfered with my view of the English
Channel. One hundred and nineteen books in a single week! Yet who was I
to exclaim at their number?--I, who (it appeared) had contributed one of
them? With that I remembered something which had happened just before my
holiday, and began to reflect on it, for the first time seriously.
A publisher had asked me for a complete list of my published works, to
print it on the fly-leaf of another of them. I sat down with the best
intention and compiled it for him, and, in honest oblivion, omitted a
couple--of books, mind you--not of pamphlets, reviews, stray articles,
short stories, or any such trifles, but of books solemnly written for this
and future ages, solemnly printed, bound, and put into circulation at the
shops and libraries. (Here, for the due impressiveness of the tale, it
becomes necessary to tell you that their author is an indolent and painful
writer, slow at the best of times.)
Well, the discovery that I had forgotten two of my own books at first
amused and then set me thinking. "Here you are," said I to myself,
"a writer of sorts; and it's no use to pretend that you don't wish to be
remembered for a while after you are dead and done with."
"Quite right," the other part of me assented cheerfully.
"Well, then," urged the inquisitor, "this is a bad look-out. If you had
been born a Dumas--I am speaking of fecundity, if you please, and of
nothing else--if you had been born a Dumas, and could rattle off a romance
in a fortnight, you might be excused for not keeping tally of your
productions. Pitiful, dilatory worker that you are, if _you_ cannot
remember them, how can you expect the world (good Heavens!) to take the
trouble?"
"I suppose it won't," responded the other part of me, somewhat dashed;
then, picking up its spirits again, "But, anyhow, I shall know where to
lay the blame."
"On yourself?"
"Most assuredly not."
"Where, then?"
"Why, on the publishers."
"Ah, of course!" (This with fine irony.)
"Yes, on the publishers. Most authors do this during life, and now I
begin to see that all authors do it sooner or later. For my part, I shall
defer it to the future state."
"Why?"
"Obviously because there will be no publishers thereabouts to contradict
me."
"And of what will you accuse them?"
"That they never issued my work in the form it deserved."
"I see. Poor fellow! You have the 'Edinburgh' Stevenson or something of
that sort on your mind, and are filled with nasty envy."
Upon this the other part of me fairly lost its temper.
"The 'Edinburgh' Stevenson! The 'Edinburgh' Ste--, and you have known me
all these years! The 'Edinburgh' Stevenson is a mighty handsome edition
of a mighty fine writer, but I have no more desire to promenade the ages
in that costume than to jump the moon. No, I am not going to break any
more of the furniture. I am handing you this chair that you may seat
yourself and listen . . . Now! The book which I shall accuse my
publishers of not having produced will be in one volume--"
"Come, come. Modesty is all very well, but don't overdo it."
"--folio."
"Oh!"
"--Of three thousand odd pages, printed (blunt type) in double columns,
and here and there in triple."
"O--oh!"
"--with marginalia by other hands, and footnotes running sometimes to
twenty thousand words, and, including above six thousand quotations from
the best poets--every one, in short, which has given me pleasure of a
certain quality, whether gentle or acute, at one time or another in my
life."
"!!!"
"--The whole profusely, not to say extravagantly, adorned with woodcuts in
the text, not to mention fifty or sixty full-page illustrations in
copper."
"By eminent artists?"
"Some of them by eminent artists, for the reason only that I number such
among my friends; the rest by amateurs and members of my household who
would help, out of mere affection, in raising this monument."
"They would do it execrably."
"I dare say; but that would not matter in the least. The book should be
bound in leather and provided with serviceable clasps, as well as with a
couple of inner pockets for maps and charts. The maps should contain
plenty of sea, with monsters rising from it--leviathans and sea-serpents--
as they do in Speed's map of Cornwall which hangs in the hall."
"Your book will need a window-seat to hold it."
"Ah, now you talk intelligently! It was designed for a window-seat, and
its fortunate possessor will take care to provide one. Have you any
further objections?"
"Only this: that a book of such a size written by one man (I make the
objection as little personal as I can) must perforce contain many dull
pages."
"Hundreds of them; whole reams of dull pages."
"They will be skipped."
"They will be inserted with that object."
"Oh!"
"It is one of the conditions of becoming a classic."
"Who will read you?"
"Look here. Do you remember the story of that old fellow--a Dutchman, I
think--who took a fancy to be buried in the church porch of his native
town, that he might hear the feet of the townsfolk, generation after
generation, passing over his head to divine service?"
"Well?"
"Well. I shall stand on my shelf, bound in good leather, between (say)
_Bayle's Dictionary_ and _Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis, his Delectable
Treatise_; and if some day, when the master of the house has been coaxed
by his womenfolk to take a holiday, and they descend upon the books, which
he (the humbug) never reads, belabour and bang the dust out of them and
flap them with dusters, and all with that vindictiveness which is the good
housewife's right attitude towards literature--"
"Had you not better draw breath?"
"Thank you. I will: for the end of the protasis lies yet some way off.
If, I say, some child of the family, having chosen me out of the heap as a
capital fellow for a booby-trap, shall open me by hazard and, attracted by
the pictures, lug me off to the window-seat, why then God bless the child!
I shall come to my own. He will not understand much at the time, but he
will remember me with affection, and in due course he will give me to his
daughter among her wedding presents (much to her annoyance, but the
bridegroom will soothe her). This will happen through several generations
until I find myself an heirloom. . . ."
"You begin to assume that by this time you will be valuable.
Also permit me to remark that you have slipped into the present
indicative."
"As for the present indicative, I think you began it."
"No."
"Yes. But it doesn't matter. I begin precisely at the right moment to
assume a value which will be attached to me, not for my own sake, but on
account of dear grandpapa's book-plate and autograph on the fly-leaf. (He
was the humbug who never read me--a literary person; he acquired me as a
'review copy,' and only forbore to dispose of me because at the current
railway rates I should not have fetched the cost of carriage.)"
"Why talk of hindrances to publishing such a book, when you know full well
it will never be written?"
"I thought you would be driven to some such stupid knock-down argument.
Whether or not the book will ever be finished is a question that lies on
the knees of the gods. I am writing at it every day. And just such a
book was written once and even published; as I discovered the other day in
an essay by Mr. Austin Dobson. The author, I grant you, was a Dutchman
(Mr. Dobson calls him 'Vader Cats,') and the book contains everything from
a long didactic poem on Marriage (I also have written a long didactic poem
on Marriage) to a page on Children's Games. (My book shall have a chapter
on Children's Games, with their proper tunes.) As for poetry--poetry,
says Mr. Dobson, with our Dutch poet is not by any means a trickling rill
from Helicon: 'it is an inundation _a la mode du pays_, a flood in a flat
land, covering everything far and near with its sluggish waters.'
As for the illustrations, listen to this for the kind of thing I demand:--
"Perhaps the most interesting of these is to be found in the
large head-piece to the above-mentioned Children's Games, the
background of which exhibits the great square of Middleburgh,
with its old Gothic houses and central clump of trees.
This is, moreover, as delightful a picture as any in the
gallery. Down the middle of the foreground, which is filled by
a crowd of figures, advances a regiment of little Dutchmen,
marching to drum and fife, and led by a fire-eating captain of
fifteen. Around this central group are dispersed knots of
children playing leap-frog, flying kites, blowing bubbles,
whipping tops, walking on stilts, skipping, and the like.
In one corner the children are busy with blind man's buff;
in the other the girls, with their stiff head-dresses and
vandyked aprons, are occupied with their dolls. Under the pump
some seventeenth-century equivalent for chuck-farthing seems to
be going on vigorously; and, not to be behind-hand in the fun,
two little fellows in the distance are standing upon their
heads. The whole composition is full of life and movement,
and--so conservative is childhood--might, but for the costume
and scene, represent a playground of to-day."
"Such are the pictures which shall emerge, like islands, among my dull
pages. And there shall be other pages, to be found for the looking. . . .
I must make another call upon your memory, my friend, and refer it to a
story of Hans Andersen's which fascinated the pair of us in childhood,
when we were not really a pair but inseparables, and before you had grown
wise; the story of the Student and the Goblin who lodged at the
Butterman's. The Student, at the expense of his dinner, had rescued a
book from the butter-tub and taken it off to his garret, and that night
the Goblin, overcome by curiosity, peeped through the keyhole, and lo! the
garret was full of light. Forth and up from the book shot a beam of
light, which grew into the trunk of a mighty tree, and threw out branches
over the bowed head of the student; and every leaf was fresh, and every
flower a face, and every fruit a star, and music sang in the branches.
Well, there shall be even such pages in my book."
"Excuse me," said I, "but, knowing your indolence, I begin to tire of the
future indicative, which (allow me to repeat) you first employed in this
discussion."
"I did not," said the other part of me stoutly. "And if I did, 'tis a
trick of the trade. You of all people ought to know that I write
romances."
I do not at all demur to having the value of my books enhanced by
the contributions of others--by dear grandpapa's autograph on the
fly-leaf, for example. But it annoys me to be blamed for other folks'
opinions.
The other day a visitor called and discoursed with me during the greater
part of a wet afternoon. He had come for an interview--'dreadful trade,'
as Edgar said of samphire-gathering--and I wondered, as he took his
departure, what on earth he would find to write about: for I love to smoke
and listen to other men's opinions, and can boast with Montaigne that
during these invasive times my door has stood open to all comers. He was
a good fellow, too; having brains and using them: and I made him an
admirable listener.
It amused me, some while after, to read the interview and learn that _I_
had done the talking and uttered a number of trenchant sayings upon female
novelists. But the amusement changed to dismay when the ladies began to
retort. For No. 1 started with an airy restatement of what I had never
said, and No. 2 (who had missed to read the interview) misinterpreted No.
1.'s paraphrase; and by these and other processes within a week my
digestive silence had passed through a dozen removes, and was incurring
the just execration of a whole sex. I began to see that my old college
motto--_Quod taciturn velis nemini dixeris_--which had always seemed to me
to err, if at all, on the side of excess, fell short of adequacy to these
strenuous times.
I have not kept the letters; but a friend of mine, Mr. Algernon Dexter,
has summarised a very similar experience and cast it into chapters, which
he allows me to print here. He heads them--
HUNTING THE DRAG.
CHAPTER I.
_Scene: The chastely-furnished writing-room of Mr. Algernon Dexter, a
well-known male novelist. Bust of Pallas over practicable door L.U.E.
Books adorn the walls, interspersed with portraits of female relatives.
Mr. Dexter discovered with Interviewer. Mr. D., poker in hand, is bending
over the fire, above which runs the legend, carved in Roman letters across
the mantelpiece, 'Ne fodias ignem gladio._'
INTERVIEWER (_pulling out his watch_): "Dear me! Only five minutes to
catch my train! And I had several other questions to ask.
I suppose, now, it's too late to discuss the Higher Education of Women?"
Mr. D. (_smiling_): "Well, I think there's hardly time. It will take you
a good four minutes to get to the station."
INTERVIEWER: "And I must get my typewriter out of the cloakroom.
Good-day, then, Mr. Dexter!" (_They shake hands and part with mutual
esteem._)
CHAPTER II.
_Extract from 'The Daily Post_.'
"MONDAY TALKS WITH OUR NOVELISTS.--No. MCVI. Mr. ALGERNON DEXTER.
"'And now, Mr. Dexter,' said I, 'what is your opinion of the Higher
Education of Women?'
"The novelist stroked his bronze beard. 'That's a large order, eh?
Isn't it rather late in the day to discuss Women's Education?'
And with a humorous gesture of despair he dropped the poker."
CHAPTER III.
_Tuesday's Letter_.
Sir,--In your issue of to-day I read with interest an account of an
interview with Mr. Dexter, the popular novelist, and I observe that
gentleman thinks it 'rather late in the day' to discuss the Higher
Education of Women. One can only be amused at this flippant dismissal of
a subject dear to the hearts of many of us; a movement consecrated by the
life-energies--I had almost said the life-blood--of a Gladstone, a
Sidgwick, a Fitch, and a Platt-Culpepper. Does Mr. Dexter really imagine
that he can look down on such names as these? Or are we to conclude that
the recent successes of 'educated' women in fiction have got on his
nerves? To suggest professional jealousy would be going too far, no
doubt.
Yours faithfully.
'HIGH SCHOOL'
CHAPTER IV.
_Wednesday's Letters_.
(1) Sir,--I, too, was disgusted with Mr. Algernon Dexter's cheap sneer at
women's education. He has, it seems, 'no opinion' on it. Allow me to
point out that, whatever his opinion may be, Women's Education has come to
stay. The time is past when Women could be relegated to the kitchen or
the nursery, and told, in the words of the poet Byron, that these
constituted her 'whole existence.' Not so; and if Mr. Dexter is inclined
to doubt it let him read the works of George Elliot (Mrs. J. W. Cross) or
Marion Crawford. They will open his eyes to the task he has undertaken.
I am, Sir, yours, etc,
"AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM."
(2) SIR,--Mr. Algernon Dexter thinks women's education 'a large order'--
not a very elegant expression, let me say, _en passant_, for one who
aspires to be known as a 'stylist.' Still a large order it is, and one
that as an imperial race we shall be forced to envisage. If our children
are to be started in life as fit citizens of this empire, with a grasp on
its manifold and far reaching complexities of interest, and unless the
Germans are to beat us, we must provide them with educated mothers. 'The
child is father of the man,' but the mother has, _me judice_, no less
influence on his subsequent career. And this is not to be done by putting
back the hands of the clock, or setting them to make pies and samplers,
but by raising them to mutually co-operate and further what has been aptly
termed 'The White Man's Burden.' Such, at any rate, though I may not live
to see it, is the conviction of:
"A MUS. DOC. OF FORTY YEARS' STANDING."
(3) SIR,--'High School' has done a public service. A popular novelist may
be licensed to draw on his imagination; but hitting below the belt is
another thing, whoever wears it. Mr Dexter's disdainful treatment of that
eminent educationalist Mr. Platt-Culpepper--who is in his grave and
therefore unable to reply (so like a man!)--can be called nothing less.
I hope it will receive the silent contempt it deserves.
Yours indignantly,
"MERE WOMAN."
CHAPTER V.
_Thursday's letters_.
(1) SIR,--Your correspondents, with whose indignation I am in sympathy,
have to me most unaccountably overlooked the real gravamen of Mr. Dexter's
offence. Unlike them, I have read several of that gentleman's brochures,
and can assure you that he once posed as the unbounded license for women
in Higher Education, if not in other directions. This _volte face_
(I happen to know) will come as a severe disappointment to many; for we
had quite counted him one of us.
"We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,"
Shall have, it seems, to 'record one lost soul more, one more devil's
triumph,' etc. I subscribe myself, sir, more in sorrow than in anger.
PERCY FLADD,
_President, H.W.E.L._
(_Hoxton Women's Emancipation League_).
(2) Sir,--Why all this beating about the bush? The matter in dispute
between Mr. Dexter and his critics was summed up long ago by Scotia's
premier poet (I refer to Robert Burns) in the lines--
"To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life,"
And _vice versa_. Your correspondents are too hasty in condemning Mr.
Dexter. He may have expressed himself awkwardly; but, as I understood
him, he never asserted that education necessarily unsexed a woman, if kept
within limits. 'A man's a man for a' that'; then why not a woman?
At least, so says:
"AULD REEKIE."
(3) Sir,--Let Mr. Dexter stick to his guns. He is not the first who has
found the New Woman an unmitigated nuisance, and I respect him for saying
so in no measured terms. Let women, if they want husbands, cease to write
oratorios and other things in which man is, by his very constitution,
_facile princeps_, and let her cultivate that desideratum in which she
excels--a cosy home and a bright smile to greet him on the doorstep when
he returns from a tiring day in the City. Until that is done I, for one,
shall remain:
"UNMARRIED."
P.S.--Could a woman have composed Shakespeare?
(4) Sir,--I had no intention of mixing in this correspondence, and
publicity is naturally distasteful to me. Nor do I hold any brief for the
Higher Education of Women; but when I see writer after writer--apparently
of my own sex--taking refuge in what has been called the 'base shelter of
anonymity,' I feel constrained to sign myself:
Yours faithfully,
(Mrs.) RACHEL RAMSBOTHAM.
CHAPTER VI.
_Friday's Letters_.
(1) Sir,--After reading 'Unmarried's' letter, one can hardly wonder that
he is so. He asks if any woman could have written Shakespeare, and
insinuates that she would be better occupied in meeting him ('Unmarried')
on the doorstep 'with a bright smile.' As to that, there may be two
opinions. Everyone to his taste, but for my part, if his insufferable
male conceit will allow him to believe it--I would rather have written
Shakespeare a hundred times over, and I am not alone in this view. Such
men as Mr. Dexter and 'Unmarried' are the cause why half of us women
prefer to remain single; the former may deny it, poker in hand, but murder
will out. In conclusion, let me add that I have never written an oratorio
in my life, though I sometimes attend them.
Yours, etc.,
"MERE WOMAN."
(2) Sir,--Allow me to impale Mr. Dexter on the horns of a dilemma.
Either it is too late in the day to discuss woman's education, or it is
not. If the latter, why did he say it is? And if the former, why did he
begin discussing it? That is how it strikes.
"B.A. (Lond.)."
(3) Sir,--_Re_ this woman's education discussion: I write to inquire if
there is any law of the land which can hinder a woman from composing
Shakespeare if she wants to?
Yours truly,
"INTERESTED."
(4) Sir,--Allusion has been made in this correspondence (I think by Mr.
Dexter) to the grave of that eminent educationist, the late
Platt-Culpepper, which is situate in the Highgate Cemetery. My interest
being awakened, I made a pilgrimage to it the other day, and was shocked
by its neglected condition. The coping has been badly cemented, and a
crack extends from the upper right-hand corner to the base of the plinth,
right across the inscription. Doubtless a few shillings would repair the
damage; but may I suggest, Sir, that some worthier memorial is due to this
pioneer of woman's higher activities? I have thought of a plain obelisk on
Shakespeare's Cliff, a locality of which he was ever fond; or a small and
inconspicuous lighthouse might, without complicating the navigation of
this part of the Channel, serve to remind Englishmen of one who diffused
so much light during his all too brief career. Choice, however, would
depend on the funds available, and might be left to an influential
committee. Meanwhile, could you not open a subscription list for the
purpose? I enclose stamps for 2 shillings, with my card, and prefer to
remain, for the present.
"HAUD IMMEMOR."
CHAPTER VII.
_Saturday's Letters_
(1) Sir,--H. Immemor's suggestion clears the air, and should persuade
Mr. Dexter and his reactionary friends to think twice before again
inaugurating a crusade which can only recoil upon their own heads.
I enclose 5 shillings, if only as a protest against this un-English
'hitting below the belt,' and am:
Yours, etc.,
"PRACTICAL."
(2) Sir,--It is only occasionally that I get a glimpse of your invaluable
paper, and (perhaps, fortunately) missed the issues containing Mr.
Dexter's diatribes anent woman. But what astounds me is their cynical
audacity. Your correspondents, though not in accord as to the name of the
victim (can it be more than one?) agree that, after encouraging her to
unbridled license, Mr. Dexter turned round and attacked her with a poker--
whether above or below the belt is surely immaterial. 'Tis true,
'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true; but not once or twice, I fear me, in
'our fair island-story' has a similar thing occurred. The unique (I hope)
feature in this case is the man Dexter's open boast that the incident is
closed, and it is now 'too late in the day' to reopen it. 'Too late,'
indeed! There is an American poem describing how a young woman was raking
hay, and an elderly judge came by, and wasn't in a position to marry her,
though he wanted to; and the whole winds up by saying that 'too late' are
the saddest words in the language--especially, I would add, in this
connection. But, alas! that men's memories should be so short! Is the
reflection of:
"A MOTHER OF SEVEN."
[This correspondence is now closed, unless Mr. Dexter should wish to reply
to his numerous critics. We do not propose to open a subscription list,
at any rate for the present.--Ed. _Daily Post._]
FEBRUARY.
"O That I were lying under the olives!"--if I may echo the burthen of
a beautiful little poem by Mrs. Margaret L. Woods. I have not yet
consulted Zadkiel: but if I may argue from past experience of
February--'fill-dyke'--in a week or so my window here will be
alternately crusted with Channel spray and washed clean by lashing
south-westerly showers; and a wave will arch itself over my garden wall
and spoil a promising bed of violets; and I shall grow weary of
oilskins, and weary of hauling the long-line with icily-cold hands
and finding no fish. February--_Pisces?_ The fish, before February
comes, have left the coast for the warmer deeps, and the zodiac is
all wrong. Down here in the Duchy many believe in Mr. Zadkiel and
Old Moore. I suppose the dreamy Celt pays a natural homage to a
fellow-mortal who knows how to make up his mind for twelve months
ahead. All the woman in his nature surrenders to this businesslike
decisiveness. "O man!"--the exhortation is Mr. George Meredith's, or
would be if I could remember it precisely--"O man, amorously
inclining, before all things _be positive!_" I have sometimes,
while turning the pages of Mrs. Beeton's admirable cookery book,
caught myself envying Mr. Beeton. I wonder if her sisters envy
Mrs. Zadkiel. She, dear lady, no doubt feels that, if it be not in
mortals to command the weather her husband prophesies for August, yet
he does better--he deserves it. And, after all, a prophecy in some
measure depends for its success on the mind which receives it.
Back in the forties--I quote from a small privately-printed volume by
Sir Richard Tangye--when the potato blight first appeared in England,
an old farmer in the Duchy found this warning in his favourite
almanack, at the head of the page for August:--
"And potentates shall tremble and quail."
Now, 'to quail' in Cornwall still carries its old meaning,
'to shrink,' 'to wither.' The farmer dug his potatoes with all
speed, and next year the almanack was richer by a score of
subscribers.
Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, "O that I were
lying under the olives!" "O to be out of England now that February's
here!"--for indeed this is the time to take the South express and be
quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon the Mediterranean
shore before the carnivals and regattas sweep it like a mistral.
Nor need you be an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson
dilates in that famous little essay in "_Virginibus Puerisque_"
(or, as the young American lady preferred to call it, "Virginis
Pueribusque."):--
"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a
spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of
flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden;
and something significant or monumental in the grouping,
something in the harmony of faint colour that is always
characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come
home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction
with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more
beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the
infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour
is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it
was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like
'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at
the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken
up with little momentary silverings and shadows."
English poets, too, have been at their best on the Riviera: from
Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little
landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visited
and:
"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those niched shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old."
[I suppose, by the way, that every one who has taken the trouble to
compare the stanza of 'The Daisy' with that of the invitation 'To the
Rev. F. D. Maurice,' which immediately follows, will have noted the
pretty rhythmical difference made by the introduction of the double
dactyl in the closing line of the latter; the difference between:
"Of olive, aloe, and maize, and vine,"
And:
"Making the little one leap for joy."]
But let Mrs. Woods resume the strain:--
"O that I were listening under the olives!
So should I hear behind in the woodland
The peasants talking. Either a woman,
A wrinkled granddame, stands in the sunshine,
Stirs the brown soil in an acre of violets--
Large odorous violets--and answers slowly
A child's swift babble; or else at noon
The labourers come. They rest in the shadow,
Eating their dinner of herbs, and are merry.
Soft speech Provencal under the olives!
Like a queen's raiment from days long perished,
Breathing aromas of old unremembered
Perfumes, and shining in dust-covered palaces
With sudden hints of forgotten splendour--
So on the lips of the peasant his language,
His only now, the tongue of the peasant."
Say what you will, there is a dignity about these Latin races, even
in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those
lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost
seem to be memories of a time when all the world was poetic:--
"Oi d'ote de limenos polubentheos entos ikonto
Istia men steilanto, thesand d'en nei melaine . . .
Ek de kai antoi Bainon epi regmini thalasses."
"And how poetic," says Pater, "the simple incident seemed, told just
thus! Homer was always telling things after this manner.
And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but
the almost mechanical transcript of a time naturally, intrinsically
poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without
ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a
picture in 'the great style' against a sky charged with marvels."
One evening in last February a company of Provencal singers, pipers,
and tambour players came to an hotel in Cannes, and entertained us.
They were followed next evening by a troupe of German-Swiss jodelers;
and oh, the difference to me--and, for that matter, to all of us!
It was just the difference between passion and silly sentiment--silly
and rather vulgar sentiment. The merry Swiss boys whooped, and
smacked their legs, and twirled their merry Swiss girls about, until
vengeance overtook them--a vengeance so complete, so surprising, that
I can hardly now believe what my own eyes saw and my own ears heard.
One of the merry Swiss girls sang a love-ditty with a jodeling
refrain, which was supposed to be echoed back by her lover afar in
the mountains. To produce this pleasing illusion, one of the merry
Swiss boys ascended the staircase, and hid himself deep in the
corridors of the hotel. All went well up to the last verse.
Promptly and truly the swain echoed his sweetheart's call; softly it
floated down to us--down from the imaginary pasture and across the
imaginary valley. But as the maiden challenged for the last time, as
her voice lingered on the last note of the last verse . . .
There hung a Swiss cuckoo-clock in the porter's office, and at that
very instant the mechanical bird lifted its voice, and nine times
answered 'Cuckoo' _on the exact note!_ "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, O word of
fear!" I have known coincidences, but never one so triumphantly
complete. The jaw of the Swiss maiden dropped an inch; and, as well
as I remember, silence held the company for five seconds before we
recovered ourselves and burst into inextinguishable laughter.
The one complaint I have to make of the Mediterranean is that it does
not in the least resemble a real sea; and I daresay that nobody who
has lived by a real sea will ever be thoroughly content with it.
Beautiful--oh, beautiful, of course, whether one looks across from
Costebelle to the lighthouse on Porquerolles and the warships in
Hyeres Bay; or climbs by the Calvary to the lighthouse of la Garoupe,
and sees on the one side Antibes, on the other the Isles de Lerins;
or scans the entrance of Toulon Harbour; or counts the tiers of
shipping alongside the quays at Genoa! But somehow the Mediterranean
has neither flavour nor sparkle, nor even any proper smell.
The sea by Biarritz is champagne to it. But hear how Hugo draws the
contrast in time of storm:--
"Ce n'etaient pas les larges lames de l'Ocean qui vont devant elles
et qui se deroulent royalement dans l'immensite; c'etaient des
houles courtes, brusques, furieuses. L'Ocean est a son aise,
il tourne autour du monde; la Mediterranee est dans un vase et
le vent la secoue, c'est ce qui lui donne cette vague haletante,
breve et trapue. Le flot se ramasse et lutte. Il a autant de
colere que la flot de l'Ocean et moins d'espace."
Also, barring the sardine and anchovy, I must confess that the fish
of the Mediterranean are what, in the Duchy, we should call
'poor trade.' I don't wish to disparage the Bouillabaisse, which is
a dish for heroes, and deserves all the heroic praises sung of it:--
"This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is--
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace:
All these you eat at Terre's tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse."
To be precise, you take a langouste, three rascas (an edible but
second-rate fish), a slice of conger, a fine 'chapon,' or red rascas,
and one or two 'poissons blancs' (our grey mullet, I take it, would
be an equivalent). You take a cooking-pot and put your langouste in
it, together with four spoonfuls of olive-oil, an onion and a couple
of tomatoes, and boil away until he turns red. You then take off the
pot and add your fish, green herbs, four cloves of garlic, and a
pinch of saffron, with salt and red pepper. Pour in water to cover
the surface of the fish, and cook for twenty minutes over a fast
fire. Then take a soup-plate, lay some slices of bread in it, and
pour the bouillon over the bread. Serve the fish separately.
Possibly you incline to add, in the immortal words of the late Mr.
Lear, "Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as
fast as possible." You would make a great mistake. The marvel to me
is that no missionary has acclimatised this wonderful dish upon our
coasts, where we have far better fish for compounding it--red mullet,
for instance, in place of the rascas; and whiting, or even pollack or
grey mullet, in place of the 'poissons blancs.' For the langouste, a
baby lobster might serve; and the saffron flavour would be no severe
trial to us in the Duchy, who are brought up (so to say) upon saffron
cake. As for Thackeray's 'dace,' I disbelieve in it. No one would
add a dace (which for table purposes has been likened to an old
stocking full of mud and pins: or was that a tench?) except to make a
rhyme. Even Walton, who gives instructions for cooking a chavender
or chub, is discreetly silent on the cooking of a dace, though he
tells us how to catch him. "Serve up in a clean dish," he might have
added, "and throw him out of window as fast as possible."
"O that I were lying under the olives!" And O that to olive orchards
(not contiguous) I could convey the newspaper men who are almost
invariably responsible when a shadow of distrust or suspicion falls
between us Englishmen and the race which owns and tills these
orchards. "The printing-press," says Mr. Barrie, "is either the
greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one
sometimes forgets which." I verily believe that if English newspaper
editors would nobly resolve to hold their peace on French politics,
say for two years, France and England would 'make friends' as easily
as Frenchmen and Englishmen 'make friends' to-day.[1] One hears talk
of the behaviour of the English abroad. But I am convinced that at
least one-half of their bad manners may be referred to their
education upon this newspaper nonsense, or to the certainty that no
complaint they may make upon foreign shortcomings is too silly or too
ill-bred to be printed in an English newspaper. Here is an example.
I suppress the name of the writer--a lady--in the devout hope that
she has repented before this. The letter is headed--
"THE AMENITIES OF RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN FRANCE.
"Sir,--As your newspaper is read in France, may I in your columns
call attention to what I witnessed yesterday? I left Dinard by
the 3.33 p.m. train _en route_ for Guingamp, having to change
carriages at Lamballe. An instant before the train moved off
from the station, a dying man belonging to the poorest class was
thrust into our second class carriage and the door slammed to.
The poor creature, apparently dying of some wasting disease,
was absolutely on the point of death, and his ghastly appearance
naturally alarmed a little girl in the carriage.
At the next station I got down with my companion and changed
into a first-class compartment, paying the difference.
On remonstrating with the guard (_sic_), he admitted that a
railway carriage ought not to be turned into an hospital,
but added, 'We have no rules to prevent it.'
"I ask, sir, is it decent or human, especially at such a time,
to thrust dying persons in the last stage of poverty into a
second-class carriage full of ladies and children?"
There's a pretty charity for you! 'A dying man belonging to the
_poorest class_.'--'_Our_ second-class carriage'--here's richness!
as Mr. Squeers observed. Here's sweetness and light! But England
has no monopoly of such manners. There was a poor little Cingalese
girl in the train by which I travelled homeward last February from
Genoa and through the Mont Cenis. And there were also three
Englishmen and a Frenchman--the last apparently (as Browning put it)
a person of importance in his day, for he had a bit of red ribbon in
his buttonhole and a valet at his heels. At one of the small
stations near the tunnel our train halted for several minutes;
and while the little Cingalese leaned out and gazed at the unfamiliar
snows--a pathetic figure, if ever there was one--the three Englishmen
and the Frenchman gathered under the carriage door and stared up at
her just as if she were a show. There was no nonsense about the
performance--no false delicacy: it was good, steady, eye-to-eye
staring. After three minutes of it, the Frenchman asked
deliberately, "Where do you come from?" in a careless, level tone,
which did not even convey that he was interested in knowing.
And because the child didn't understand, the three Englishmen
laughed. Altogether it was an unpleasing but instructive little
episode.
No: nastiness has no particular nationality: and you will find a
great deal of it, of all nationalities, on the frontier between
France and Italy. I do not see that Monte Carlo provides much cause
for indignation, beyond the _tir aux pigeons_, which is quite
abominable. I have timed it for twenty-five minutes, and it averaged
two birds a minute--fifty birds. Of these one escaped, one fluttered
on to the roof of the railway station and died there slowly, under my
eyes. The rest were killed within the enclosure, some by the first
barrel, some by the second, or if they still lingered, were retrieved
and mouthed by a well-trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed.
Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would walk about for a
second or two, apparently unhurt; then suddenly stagger and topple
over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed.
Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast
feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a
carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside the Casino, it was
largely Semitic. On the road between Monte Carlo and Monaco, as
Browning says--
"It was noses, noses all the way."
Also it smelt distressingly: but that perhaps was its misfortune
rather than its fault. It did not seem very happy; nor was it
composed of people who looked as if they might have attained to
distinction, or even to ordinary usefulness, by following any other
pursuit. On the whole, one felt that it might as well be gathered
here as anywhere else.
"O that I were lying under the olives!" But since my own garden must
content me this year, let me conclude with a decent letter of thanks
to the friend who sent me, from Devonshire, a box of violet roots
that await the spring in a corner which even the waves of the equinox
cannot reach:--
TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME A BOX OF VIOLETS.
Nay, more than violets
These thoughts of thine, friend!
Rather thy reedy brook
--Taw's tributary--
At midnight murmuring,
Descried them, the delicate,
The dark-eyed goddesses.
There by his cressy beds
Dissolved and dreaming
Dreams that distilled in a dewdrop
All the purple of night,
All the shine of a planet.
Whereat he whispered;
And they arising
--Of day's forget-me-nots
The duskier sisters--
Descended, relinquished
The orchard, the trout-pool,
The Druid circles,
Sheepfolds of Dartmoor,
Granite and sandstone,
Torridge and Tamar;
By Roughtor, by Dozmare,
Down the vale of the Fowey
Moving in silence.
Brushing the nightshade
By bridges Cyclopean,
By Glynn, Lanhydrock,
Restormel, Lostwithiel,
Dark woodland, dim water,
dreaming town--
Down the vale of the Fowey,
Each in her exile
Musing the message--
Message illumined by love
As a starlit sorrow--
Passed, as the shadow of Ruth
From the land of the Moabite.
So they came--
Valley-born, valley-nurtured--
Came to the tideway,
The jetties, the anchorage,
The salt wind piping,
Snoring in equinox,
By ships at anchor,
By quays tormented,
Storm-bitten streets;
Came to the Haven
Crying, "Ah, shelter us,
The strayed ambassadors!
Lost legation of love
On a comfortless coast!"
Nay, but a little sleep,
A little folding
Of petals to the lull
Of quiet rainfalls,--
Here in my garden,
In angle sheltered
From north and east wind--
Softly shall recreate
The courage of charity,
Henceforth not to me only
Breathing the message.
Clean-breath'd Sirens!
Henceforth the mariner,
Here on the tideway
Dragging, foul of keel,
Long-strayed but fortunate,
Out of the fogs,
the vast Atlantic solitudes,
Shall, by the hawser-pin
Waiting the signal--
"Leave-go-anchor!"
Scent the familiar
Fragrance of home;
So in a long breath
Bless us unknowingly:
Bless them, the violets,
Bless me, the gardener,
Bless thee, the giver.
My business (I remind myself) behind the window is not to scribble
verses: my business, or a part of it, is to criticise poetry, which
involves reading poetry. But why should anyone read poetry in these
days?
Well, one answer is that nobody does.
I look around my shelves and, brushing this answer aside as flippant,
change the form of my question. Why do we read poetry? What do we
find that it does for us? We take to it (I presume) some natural
need, and it answers that need. But what is the need? And how does
poetry answer it?
Clearly it is not a need of knowledge, or of what we usually
understand by knowledge. We do not go to a poem as we go to a work
on Chemistry or Physics, to add to our knowledge of the world about
us. For example, Keats' glorious lines to the Nightingale--
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird . . ."
Are unchallengeable poetry; but they add nothing to our stock of
information. Indeed, as Mr. Bridges pointed out the other day, the
information they contain is mostly inaccurate or fanciful. Man is,
as a matter of fact, quite as immortal as a nightingale in every
sense but that of sameness. And as for:
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,"
Science tells us that no such things exist in this or any other
ascertained world. So, when Tennyson tells us that birds in the high
Hall garden were crying, "Maud, Maud, Maud," or that:
"There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate:
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near';
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late' . . ."
The poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by scientific
standards of truth is demonstrably false, and even absurd.
On the other hand (see Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, c. xiv.),
the famous lines--
"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November, . . ."
Though packed with trustworthy information, are quite as demonstrably
unpoetical. The famous senior wrangler who returned a borrowed
volume of _Paradise Lost_ with the remark that he did not see what it
proved, was right--so far as he went. And conversely (as he would
have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's
_Principia_ and Darwin's _Origin of Species_ by casting them into
blank verse; or Euclid's _Elements_ by writing them out in ballad
metre--
The king sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'
We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what Science, with
other methods, can do much better. What craving, then, does it
answer? And if the craving be for knowledge of a kind, then of what
kind?
The question is serious. We agree--at least I assume this--that men
have souls as well as intellects; that above and beyond the life we
know and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas there exists a
spiritual life of which our intellect is unable to render account.
We have (it is believed) affinity with this spiritual world, and we
hold it by virtue of something spiritual within us, which we call the
soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual region and remain, I dare
say, an estimable citizen; but I cannot see what business you have
with Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, Poetry
demands that you believe something further; which is, that in this
spiritual region resides and is laid up that eternal scheme of
things, that universal _order_, of which the phenomena of this world
are but fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows.
A hard matter to believe, no doubt! We see this world so clearly;
the spiritual world so dimly, so rarely, if at all! We may fortify
ourselves with the reminder (to be found in Blanco White's famous
sonnet) that the first man who lived on earth had to wait for the
darkness before he saw the stars and guessed that the Universe
extended beyond this earth--
"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?"
He may, or may not, believe that the same duty governs his
infinitesimal activity and the motions of the heavenly bodies--
"Awake, my soul, and _with the sun_
Thy daily stage of duty run . . ."
--That his duty is one with that of which Wordsworth sang--
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are
fresh and strong."
But in a higher order of some sort, and his duty of conforming with
it, he does not seem able to avoid believing.
This, then, is the need which Poetry answers. It offers to bring men
knowledge of this universal order, and to help them in rectifying and
adjusting their lives to it. It is for gleams of this spiritual
country that the poets watch--
"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land. . . ."
"I am Merlin," sang Tennyson, its life-long watcher, in his old age--
"I am Merlin,
And I am dying;
I am Merlin,
Who follow the gleam."
They do not claim to see it always. It appears to them at rare and
happy intervals, as the Vision of the Grail to the Knights of the
Round Table. "Poetry," said Shelley, "is the record of the best and
happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
If this be the need, how have our poets been answering it of late
years? How, for instance, did they answer it during the South
African War, when (according to our newspapers) there was plenty of
patriotic emotion available to inspire the great organ of national
song? Well, let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,'
we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of
song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the
nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the
Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr.
Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into
causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and
Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate
when neglecting or giving the lie to his pet political doctrines, and
invariably below form when enforcing them. For the rest, the Warden
of Glenalmond bubbled and squeaked, and Mr. Alfred Austin, like the
man at the piano, kept on doing his best. It all came to nothing: as
poetry it never began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a few
mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of war. Mr. Owen Seaman
(who may pass for our contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty
at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a little deeper than
surface-polish. One man alone--Mr. Henry Newbolt--struck a note
which even his opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty
of the turbulence of passion, but none of the gravity of thoughtful
emotion. I don't doubt they were, one and all, honest in their way.
But as poetry their utterances were negligible. As writers of real
poetry the Anti-Jingoes, and especially the Celts, held and still
hold the field.
I will not adduce poets of admitted eminence--Mr. Watson, for
instance, or Mr. Yeats--to prove my case. I am content to go to a
young poet who has his spurs to win, and will ask you to consider
this little poem, and especially its final stanza. He calls it--
A CHARGE
If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem
Commissioned by thy absent Lord, and while
'Tis incomplete,
Others would bribe thy needy skill to them--
Dismiss them to the street!
Should'st thou at last discover Beauty's grove,
At last be panting on the fragrant verge,
But in the track,
Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love--
Turn, at her bidding, back.
When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears,
And every spectre mutters up more dire
To snatch control
And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears,--
Then to the helm, O Soul!
Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish--let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey.
The author of these lines is a Mr. Herbert Trench, who (as I say) has
his spurs to win. Yet I defy you to read them without recognising a
note of high seriousness which is common to our great poets and
utterly foreign to our modern bards of empire. The man, you will
perceive, dares to talk quite boldly about the human soul. Now you
will search long in our Jingo bards for any recognition of the human
soul: the very word is unpopular. And as men of eminence write, so
lesser wits imitate. A while ago I picked up a popular magazine, and
happened on these verses--fluently written and, beyond a doubt,
honestly meant. They are in praise of King Henry VIII.:--
King Harry played at tennis, and he threw the dice a-main,
And did all things that seemed to him for his own
and England's gain;
He would not be talked to lightly, he would not be
checked or chid;
And he got what things he dreamed to get, and did--
what things he did.
When Harry played at tennis it was well for this our Isle--
He cocked his nose at Interdicts; he 'stablished us the while--
He was lustful; he was vengeful; he was hot and hard and proud;
But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.
So Harry played at tennis, and we perfected the game
Which astonished swaggering Spaniards when the fat Armada came.
And possession did he give us of our souls in sturdiness;
And he gave us peace from priesthood: and he gave us English
Bess!
When Harry played at tennis we began to know this thing--
That a mighty people prospers in a mighty-minded king.
We boasted not our righteousness--we took on us our sin,
For Bluff Hal was just an Englishman who played the game to win.
You will perceive that in the third stanza the word 'soul' occurs:
and I invite you to compare this author's idea of a soul with Mr.
Trench's. This author will have nothing to do with the old advice
about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before God.
The old notion that to conquer self is a higher feat than to take a
city he dismisses out of hand. "Be lustful be vengeful," says he,
"but play the game to win, and you have my applause. Get what you
want, set England fairly in sight of the crowd, and you are a
mighty-minded man." Now the first and last comment upon such a
doctrine must be that, if a God exist, it is false. It sets up a
part to override the whole: it flaunts a local success against the
austere majesty of Divine law. In brief, it foolishly derides the
universal, saying that it chooses to consider the particular as more
important. But it is not. Poetry's concern is with the universal:
and what makes the Celts (however much you may dislike them) the most
considerable force in English poetry at this moment is that they
occupy themselves with that universal truth, which, before any
technical accomplishment, is the guarantee of good poetry.
Now, when you tell yourself that the days of 'English Bess' were
jolly fine empire-making days, and produced great poets (Shakespeare,
for example) worthy of them; and when you go on to reflect that these
also are jolly fine empire-making days, but that somehow Mr. Austin
is your laureate, and that the only poetry which counts is being
written by men out of harmony with your present empire-making mood,
the easiest plan (if you happen to think the difference worth
considering) will be to call the Muse a traitress, and declare that
every poem better than Mr. Austin's is a vote given to--whatever
nation your Yellow Press happens to be insulting at this moment.
But, if you care to look a little deeper, you may find that some
difference in your methods of empire-making is partly accountable for
the change. A true poet must cling to universal truth; and by
insulting it (as, for example, by importing into present-day politics
the spirit which would excuse the iniquities of Henry VIII. on the
ground that 'he gave us English Bess'!) you are driving the true poet
out of your midst. Read over the verses above quoted, and then
repeat to yourself, slowly, these lines:--
"Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish--let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey."
I ask no more. If a man cannot see the difference at once, I almost
despair of making him perceive why poetry refuses just now even more
obstinately than trade (if that be possible) to 'follow the flag.'
It will not follow, because you are waving the flag over
self-deception. You may be as blithe as Plato in casting out the
poets from your commonwealth--though for other reasons than his.
You may be as blithe as Dogberry in determining, of reading and
writing, that they may appear when there is no need of such vanity.
But you are certainly driving them forth to say, in place of
"O beloved city of Cecrops!" "O beloved city of God!" There was a
time, not many years ago, when an honest poet could have used both
cries together and deemed that he meant the same thing by the two.
But the two cries to-day have an utterly different meaning--and by
your compulsion or by the compulsion of such politics as you have
come to tolerate.
And therefore the young poet whom I have quoted has joined the band
of those poets whom we are forcing out of the city, to leave our
ideals to the fate which, since the world began, has overtaken all
ideals which could not get themselves 'accepted by song.' Even as we
drum these poets out we know that they are the only ones worth
reckoning with, and that man cannot support himself upon assurances
that he is the strongest fellow in the world, and the richest, and
owns the biggest house, and pays the biggest rates, and wins whatever
game he plays at, and stands so high in his clothes that while the
Southern Cross rises over his hat-brim it is already broad day on the
seat of his breeches. For that is what it all comes to: and the
sentence upon the man who neglects the warning of these poets, while
he heaps up great possessions, is still, "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee." And where is the national soul you
would choose, at that hasty summons, to present for inspection,
having to stand your trial upon it? Try Park Lane, or run and knock
up the Laureate, and then come and report your success!
Weeks ago I was greatly reproached by a correspondent for misusing
the word 'Celtic,' and informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench
a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms; that a notable percentage
of the names connected with the 'Celtic Revival'--Hyde, Sigerson,
Atkinson, Stokes--are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short,
I have been following the multitude to speak loosely. Well, I
confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word
'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the
attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of
this or that poet and straightly assign this or that quality of his
verse to a certain set of corpuscles in his mixed blood. Although I
believe that my correspondent is too hasty in labelling men's descent
from their names--for the mother has usually some share in producing
a child; although I believe that Mr. Yeats, for instance, inherits
Cornish blood on one side, even if Irish be denied him on the other;
yet the rebuke contains some justice.
Still, I must maintain that these well-meaning theorists err only in
applying a broad distinction with overmuch nicety. There is, after
all, a certain quality in a poem of Blake's, or a prose passage of
Charlotte Bronte's, which a critic is not only unable to ignore, but
which--if he has any 'comparative' sense--he finds himself accounting
for by saying, "This man, or this woman, must be a Celt or have some
admixture of Celtic blood." I say quite confidently that quality
cannot be ignored. You open (let us say) a volume of Blake, and your
eye falls on these two lines--
"When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,"
And at once you are aware of an imagination different in kind from
the imagination you would recognise as English. Let us, if you
please, rule out all debate of superiority; let us take Shakespeare
for comparison, and Shakespeare at his best:--
"These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Finer poetry than this I can hardly find in English to quote for you.
But fine as it is, will you not observe the matter-of-factness
(call it healthy, if you will, and I shall not gainsay you) beneath
Shakespeare's noble language? It says divinely what it has to say;
and what it has to say is full of solemn thought. But, for better or
worse (or, rather, without question of better or worse), Blake's
imagination is moving on a different plane. We may think it an
uncomfortably superhuman plane; but let us note the difference, and
note further that this plane was habitual with Blake. Now because of
his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as
almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength,
and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet
of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination
than the whole five acts of _Hamlet_. So great is Shakespeare, that
he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down
a line or two of Blake's--
"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage . . .
A skylark wounded on the wing
Doth make a cherub cease to sing."
--And, simple as the thought is, at once you feel it to lie outside
the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. Shakespeare's men are fine,
brave, companionable fellows, full of passionate love, jealousy,
ambition; of humour, gravity, strength of mind; of laughter and rage,
of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters
into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means
men to go to death for an idea. We remember what figure Shakespeare
made of Sir John Oldcastle, and I wish we could forget what figure he
made of Joan of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy--the
philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full-blooded men--
he is a great encourager of virtue; and so such lines as--
"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action . . ."
Are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as--
"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage . . ."
Are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. He can tell
us that:
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
He can muse on that sleep to come:--
"To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
But that even in this life we may be more truly ourselves when
dreaming than when waking--that what we dream may perchance turn out
to be more real and more important than what we do--such a thought
overpasses his imaginative range; or, since to dogmatise on his
imaginative range is highly dangerous, let us be content with saying
that it lies outside his temperament, and that he would have hit on
such a thought only to dismiss it with contempt. So when we open a
book of poems and come upon a monarch crying out that:
"A wild and foolish labourer is a king,
To do and do and do and never dream,"
We know that we are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean
at all, not practical, not English. And we want a name for that
note.
I have followed the multitude to call it Celtic because in practice
when we come upon this note we are pretty safe to discover that the
poet who utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, for
instance, told me that he must be an Irishman before ever I reflected
that his name was Irish, or thought of looking up his descent).
Since, however the blood of most men in these islands is by this time
mixed with many strains: since also, though the note be not native
with him, nothing forbids even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from
learning it and assimilating it: lastly, since there is obvious
inconvenience in using the same word for an ethnical delimitation and
a psychological, when their boundaries do not exactly correspond--and
if some Anglo-Saxons have the 'Celtic' note it is certain that many
thousands of Celts have not; why then I shall be glad enough to use a
better and a handier and a more exact, if only some clever person
will provide it.
Meanwhile, let it be understood that in speaking of a 'Celtic' note I
accuse no fellow-creature of being an Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman,
Manxman, Cornishman, or Breton. The poet will as a rule turn out to
be one or other of these, or at least to have a traceable strain of
Celtic blood in him. But to the note only is the term applied,
Now this note may be recognised by many tokens; but the first and
chiefest is its insistence upon man's brotherhood with bird and
beast, star and flower, everything, in short, which we loosely call
'nature,' his brotherhood even with spirits and angels, as one of an
infinite number of microcosms reflecting a common image of God.
And poetry which holds by this creed will hardly be subservient to
societies and governments and legalised doctrines and conventions;
it will hold to them by a long and loose chain, if at all.
It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all
manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the
market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with
an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'--if you will give that word its
literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues carry no
reflection of heaven; it sees that heaven, on the other hand--so
infinite is its care--may shake with anger from bound to bound at the
sight of a caged bird. It sees that the souls of living things, even
of the least conspicuous, reach up by chains and are anchored in
heaven, while 'great' events slide by on the surface of this skimming
planet with empires and their ordinances.
"And so the Emperor went in the procession under the splendid
canopy. And all the people in the streets and at the windows
said, 'Bless us! what matchless new clothes our Emperor has!'
But he hasn't anything on!' cried a little child. 'Dear me,
just listen to what the little innocent says,' observed his
father, and the people whispered to each other what the child
had said. 'He hasn't anything on!' they began to shout at last.
This made the Emperor's flesh creep, because he thought that
they were right; but he said to himself, 'I must keep it up
through the procession, anyhow.' And he walked on still more
majestically, and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the
train, though there was none to carry."
This parable of the Emperor without clothes can be matched, for
simplicity and searching directness, against any parable outside of
the Gospels, and it agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the
wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that wisdom here.
I observe that when the poets preach it we tender them our applause.
We applaud Vaughan's lines:--
"Happy those early days, when I
Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . .
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back--at that short space--
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flow'r
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity. . . ."
We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode--
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! . . ."
We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he tells us of a Child
that--
"The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his
first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's
example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his
pureness, the other falls into his simplicity. . . . His father
hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those
days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what
innocence he hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with
his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and
exchanged but one heaven for another."
But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine
wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into
practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth
prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our
instincts of immortality;" and he might have added that, while the
Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of
spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with
Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition
of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to
act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise
and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too
impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of
all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to
upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil
and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of
our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is
quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society
could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the
Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they
amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of
Gospel Christianity.)
No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches
on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a
special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children.
Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of
property. They steal apples.
And yet--there must be something in this downright wisdom of
childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to
lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily
when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of
course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent
men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows.
'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn
note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as
we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised
rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that--
"Those little new-invented things--
Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys,
So ribbands are and rings,
Which all our happiness destroys.
Nor God
In His abode,
Nor saints, nor little boys,
Nor Angels made them; only foolish men,
Grown mad with custom, on those toys
Which more increase their wants to date. . . ."
He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after
two hundred years of oblivion. (It appears, nevertheless, that he
was a happy man.)
And yet--I repeat--since we respond to it so readily, whether in
welcome or in irritation, there must be something in this claim set
up for childish simplicity; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate
and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken to sounding its
note so boldly. Whatever else they do, on the conventional ideals of
this generation they speak out with an uncompromising and highly
disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they are held, if at
all, by a long and loose chain to the graven images to which we stand
bound arm-to-arm and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take
a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with a boldness which
is the more impressive for being unconscious. And they declare that
they see us tied to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas.
P.S.--I made bold enough to say in the course of these remarks that
Euclid's _Elements_ could hardly be improved by writing them out in
ballad metre. A friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion,
cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I do so with
pleasure in the following--
[In the original text, there is shown a geometrical diagram which
consists of two equally sized circles superimposed so that they each
intersect the other's centre which points are marked A and B. The
outermost points on the two circles in line with AB are marked D and
E. The upper point where the two circles intersect is marked C and
an equilateral triangle is shown by joining points A, B and C.]
NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS.
The King sits in Dunfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine:
"O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?"
O up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King's right knee--
"Of a' the clerks by Granta side
Sir Patrick bears the gree.
"'Tis he was taught by the Tod-huntere
Tho' not at the tod-hunting;
Yet gif that he be given a line,
He'll do as brave a thing."
Our King has written a braid letter
To Cambrigge or thereby,
And there it found Sir Patrick Spens
Evaluating PI.
He hadna warked his quotient
A point but barely three,
There stepped to him a little foot-page
And louted on his knee.
The first word that Sir Patrick read,
"_Plus_ x," was a' he said:
The neist word that Sir Patrick read,
'Twas "_plus_ expenses paid."
The last word that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his e'e:
"The pound I most admire is not
In Scottish currencie."
Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he north:
He fetched a compass frae his ha'
And stood beside the Forth,
Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth,
And gurlier by-and-by--
"O never yet was sic a storm,
Yet it isna sic as I!"
Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth
Until Dunfermline toun;
And tho' he came with a kittle wame
Fu' low he louted doun.
"A line, a line, a gude straight line,
O King, purvey me quick!
And see it be of thilka kind
That's neither braid nor thick."
"Nor thick nor braid?" King Jamie said,
"I'll eat my gude hat-band
If arra line as ye define
Be found in our Scotland."
"Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule,
It sail be ruled by me;"
And lichtly with his little pencil
He's ruled the line A B.
Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he west;
"Ye touch the button," Sir Patrick said,
"And I sall do the rest."
And he has set his compass foot
Untill the centre A,
From A to B he's stretched it oot--
"Ye Scottish carles, give way!"
Syne he has moved his compass foot
Untill the centre B,
From B to A he's stretched it oot,
And drawn it viz-a-vee.
The tane circle was BCD,
And A C E the tither:
"I rede ye well," Sir Patrick said,
"They interseck ilk ither.
"See here, and where they interseck--
To wit with yon point C--
Ye'll just obsairve that I conneck
The twa points A and B.
"And there ye have a little triangle
As bonny as e'er was seen;
The whilk is not isosceles,
Nor yet it is scalene."
"The proof! the proof!" King Jamie cried:
"The how and eke the why!"
Sir Patrick laughed within his beard--
"'Tis _ex hypothesi_--
"When I ligg'd in my mither's wame,
I learn'd it frae my mither,
That things was equal to the same,
Was equal ane to t'ither.
"Sith in the circle first I drew
The lines B A, B C,
Be radii true, I wit to you
The baith maun equal be.
"Likewise and in the second circle,
Whilk I drew widdershins,
It is nae skaith the radii baith,
A B, AC, be twins.
"And sith of three a pair agree
That ilk suld equal ane,
By certes they maun equal be
Ilk unto ilk by-lane."
"Now by my faith!" King Jamie saith,
"What _plane_ geometrie!
If only Potts had written in Scots,
How loocid Potts wad be!"
"Now wow's my life!" said Jamie the King,
And the Scots lords said the same,
For but it was that envious knicht,
Sir Hughie o' the Graeme.
"Flim-flam, flim-flam!" and "Ho indeed?"
Quod Hughie o' the Graeme;
"'Tis I could better upon my heid
This prabblin prablem-game."
Sir Patrick Spens Was nothing laith
When as he heard "flim-flam,"
But syne he's ta'en a silken claith
And wiped his diagram.
"Gif my small feat may better'd be,
Sir Hew, by thy big head,
What I hae done with an A B C
Do thou with X Y Z."
Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew,
And loudly laucht the King;
But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew,
And _played_ that eldritch thing!
He's play'd it reel, he's play'd it jig,
And the baith alternative;
And he's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg,
That's Proposetion Five.
And there they've met, and there they've fet,
Forenenst the Asses' Brigg,
And waefu', waefu' was the fate
That gar'd them there to ligg.
For there Sir Patrick's slain Sir Hew,
And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens--
Now was not that a fine to-do
For Euclid's Elemen's?
But let us sing Long live the King!
And his foes the Deil attend 'em:
For he has gotten his little triangle,
_Quod erat faciendum!_
[1] This was written some time before the _entente cordiale_.
MARCH.
How quietly its best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a
single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the
entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper
help us to take long views!
Whether England could better afford to lose Shakespeare or her Indian
Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman
knows in his heart which of these two glories of his birth and state will
survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end
the greater honour. Though in our daily life we--perhaps wisely--make a
practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most
perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which
outlast all phenomena.
The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross
Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet.
Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters
under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the
wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should
knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as
partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies--and on occasion will fight
for--the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who
took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the
out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a
drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better
reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing.
He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature.
He has edited James Thomson, him of _The City of Dreadful Night_.
He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even
written poems of his own and printed them under the title of _Rosemary and
Pansies_, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'--a warning which I, as one of
the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has
discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.
Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehearse
the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne.
He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came
in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he
entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the
University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in
Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669;
became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and
died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight.
He wrote a polemical tract on _Roman Forgeries_, which had some success; a
treatise on _Christian Ethicks_, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was
utterly neglected; an exquisite work, _Centuries of Meditations_, never
published; and certain poems, which also he left in manuscript. And there
the record ends.
Next let us tell by how strange a chance this forgotten author came to his
own. In 1896 or 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes of MS.
on a street bookstall, and bought them for a few pence. Mr. Brooke
happened to be a man learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he no
sooner began to examine his purchase than he knew that he had happened on
a treasure. At the same time he could hardly believe that writings so
admirable were the work of an unknown author. In choice of subject, in
sentiment, in style, they bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry
Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they must be assigned to
Vaughan. He communicated his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who
became so deeply interested in it that he purchased the manuscripts and
set about preparing an edition of Vaughan, in which the newly-found
treasures were to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in passing, was
by no means a safe judge of characteristics in poetry. With all his
learning and enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read a poem with
which he was unacquainted or which perchance he had forgotten, to assign
it to its true or even its probable author. But when you hear that so
learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these writings worthy of Vaughan,
you may be the less apt to think me extravagant in holding that man to
have been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines:--
"How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among His works I did appear
how their Glory me did crown!
The world resembled His Eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And everything that I did see
Did with me talk.
"The streets were paved with golden stones,
The boys and girls were mine,
O how did all their lovely faces shine!
The sons of men were holy ones;
In joy and beauty they appeared to me:
And everything which here I found,
While like an angel I did see,
Adorned the ground."
'Proprieties.'--
That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'--
"Proprieties themselves were mine,
And hedges ornaments,
Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents
Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed
My joys by others worn;
For me they all to wear them seemed
When I was born."
Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of
Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find
means to publish. After his death the two manuscripts passed by purchase
to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who
in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's
library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought--and this is perhaps the
strangest part of the story--a third manuscript volume, which Dr. Grosart
had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr.
Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the
other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."
Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began
to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their
author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?
Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's,
_Christ's Victory and Triumph_, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had
appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected;
and to one of these, entitled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's
attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the
resemblance between it and the manuscript poems was at once evident.
Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum
entitled, _A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God,
in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same_
(a publisher's title it is likely): and this book contained other pieces
in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he
examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the manuscript
poem and of the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be one and the
same person. But, again, who could he be?
A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the _Devout and
Sublime Thanksgivings_ provided the clue. The editor of this work
(a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many
virtues wound up with a casual clue to his identity:--
"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord
Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those
blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."
But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have
been resolved. As it was, the clue--that the author of _Devout and
Sublime Thanksgivings_ was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman--had
only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne.
This information was obtained from Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, which
mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, _Roman Forgeries_ and
_Christian Ethicks_.
The next step was to get hold of these two works and examine them,
if perchance some evidence might be found that Traherne was also the
author of the manuscripts, which as yet remained a guess, standing on Mr.
Dobell's conviction that the verses in the manuscripts and those in
_Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be by the same hand.
By great good fortune that evidence was found in _Christian Ethicks_, in a
poem which, with some variations, occurred too in the manuscript
_Centuries of Meditations_. Here then at last was proof positive, or as
positive as needs be.
The most of us writers hope and stake for a diuturnity of fame; and some
of us get it. _Sed ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata
perierunt?_ "That bay leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert
after a hundred and fifty years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir
Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain green in the dust for close
on two hundred and thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that
only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a chance sentence in a dark
preface to a forgotten book has it come to light.
I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery?
His was by choice a _vita fallens_. Early in life he made, as we learn
from a passage in _Centuries of Meditations_, his election between worldly
prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting
phenomena and rest upon the soul's centre:--
"When I came into the country and, being seated among silent trees and
woods and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend
it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to
satiate the burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my
youth; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon
ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and to feed upon
bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself,
than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my
time would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to
accept of that desire that from that time to this I have had all
things plentifully provided for me without any care at all, my very
study of Felicity making me more to prosper than all the care in the
whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and kingly
life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, or, much more, as
it is at this day."
Yet Traherne is no quietist: a fervent, passionate lover, rather, of
simple and holy things. He sees with the eyes of a child: the whole world
shines for him 'apparell'd in celestial light,' and that light, he is well
aware, shines out on it, through the eyes which observe it, from the
divine soul of man. The verses which I quoted above strike a note to
which he recurs again and again. Listen to the exquisite prose in which
he recounts the 'pure and virgin apprehension' of his childhood:--
"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped
nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to
everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as
gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees
when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and
ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap
and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful
things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the
aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and
sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and
beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels;
I knew not that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets were
mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and
gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair
skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and
moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator
and enjoyer of it. . . ."
All these things he enjoyed, his life through, uncursed by the itch for
'proprietorship': he was like the Magnanimous Man in his own _Christian
Ethicks_--'one that scorns the smutty way of enjoying things like a slave,
because he delights in the celestial way and the Image of God.' In this
creed of his all things are made for man, if only man will inherit them
wisely: even God, in conferring benefits on man, is moved and rewarded by
the felicity of witnessing man's grateful delight in them:--
"For God enjoyed is all His end,
Himself He then doth comprehend
When He is blessed, magnified,
Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified."
Yes, and 'undeified almost, if once denied.' A startling creed, this; but
what a bold and great-hearted one! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which not
only receives the rivers of God's bliss but 'all it doth receive returns
again.' It is the Beloved of the old song, 'Quia Amore Langueo;' whom God
pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all things. So in one of his
loveliest poems he shows it standing on the threshold to hear news of a
great guest, never dreaming that itself is that great guest all the
while--
ON NEWS
I.
News from a foreign country came,
As if my treasure and my wealth lay there:
So much it did my heart enflame,
'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear,
Which thither went to meet
The approaching sweet,
And on the threshold stood
To entertain the unknown Good.
It hover'd there
As if 'twould leave mine ear,
And was so eager to embrace
The joyful tidings as they came,
'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place
To entertain that same.
II.
As if the tidings were the things,
My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure,
Or else did bear them on their wings--
With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure--
My Soul stood at that gate
To recreate
Itself with bliss, and to
Be pleased with speed. A fuller view
It fain would take,
Yet journeys back again would make
Unto my heart: as if 'twould fain
Go out to meet, yet stay within
To fit a place to entertain
And bring the tidings in.
III.
What sacred instinct did inspire
My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong?
What secret force moved my desire
To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young?
Felicity I knew
Was out of view;
And being here alone,
I saw that happiness was gone
From me! For this
I thirsted absent bliss,
And thought that sure beyond the seas,
Or else in something near at hand
I knew not yet (since nought did please
I knew), my bliss did stand,
IV.
But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by:
And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
Yet thus it was: The Gem,
The Diadem,
The Ring enclosing all
That stood upon this earthly ball;
The Heavenly Eye,
Much wider than the sky,
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious Soul that was the King
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing.
I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down
the lines:--
THE SALUTATION.
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins--
Where have ye been? Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!
These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a
street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the
unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with
Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be
not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the
known account of Time?"
I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related
to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery
here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my
pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass.
For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk
might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great
thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class
apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up
in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so
far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries
engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man
(who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast
it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have
actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of
which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with
those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of
the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the
Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that
gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway,
resting his case upon--
SONNET CCXVIII.
Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will:
And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_
So in device thy wit is starved still
And as devised by Will. That is to say,
My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal
Thou hast; but all that capital messuage
Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall.
Haply the disproportion may engage
The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise
Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue
That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise
My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo!
And here revoke all previous testaments:
Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.
After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may
happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.
Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another
_trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--
"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased,
I came upon some loose leaves which were headed _A Prospect of
Society_. The title struck me as familiar, and I had only to
read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's]
_The Traveller_. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the
opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two
lines of _A Prospect of Society_ are lines 353-4 in the first edition
of _The Traveller_. . . . A further examination of the fragment which
I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as
a 'proof' of _The Traveller_, but rather the material, as yet
formless and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally evolved."
Now--line for corresponding line--the text discovered by Mr. Dobell often
differs, and sometimes considerably, from that of the first edition of
_The Traveller_, and these variations are highly interesting, and make Mr.
Dobell's 'find' a valuable one. But on studying the newly discovered
version I very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's opinion that
we had here the formless, unarranged material out of which Goldsmith built
an exquisitely articulated poem.[1] And, doubting this, I had to doubt
what Mr. Dobell deduced from it--that "it was in the manner in which a
poem, remarkable for excellence of form and unity of design, was created
out of a number of verses which were at first crudely conceived and
loosely connected that Goldsmith's genius was most triumphantly
displayed." For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on
_A Prospect of Society_ before it became evident to me (1) that the lines
were not "unarranged," but disarranged; and (2) that whatever the reason
of this disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible; that the disorder
was too insane to be accepted either as an order in which he could have
written the poem, or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed it to
circulate among his friends, unless he desired them to believe him mad.
Take, for instance, this collocation:--
"Heavens! how unlike their Belgic sires of old!
Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold;
Where shading elms beside the margin grew,
And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew."
Or this:--
"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign,
We turn, where France displays her bright domain.
Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please,
How often have I led thy sportive choir
With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire?
No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display,
But Winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare and frowning storms invest."
Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would account for that sort of
thing, whereas a poem more pellucidly logical than _The Traveller_ does
not exist in English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil and
began some simple counting, with this result:--
The first 42 lines of _The Prospect_ correspond with lines 353-400 of
_The Traveller_.
The next 42 with lines 311-352.
The next 34 with lines 277-310.
The next 36 with lines 241-276.
The next 36 with lines 205-240.
The next 36 with lines 169-204.
The next 38 with lines 131-168.
The next 28 with lines 103-130.
And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with lines 73-92.
In other words, _The Prospect_ is merely an early draft of _The Traveller_
printed backwards in fairly regular sections.
But how can this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and
ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for
press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was
done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all.
Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with
the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered--
an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the
result delightful, and (when you come to think of it) the blunder just so
natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.
Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon the hypothesis that
Goldsmith patiently built a fine poem out of a congeries of fine passages
pitchforked together at haphazard--a splendid rubbish heap; and Mr.
Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect set of duplicate proofs--fellow,
no doubt, to that set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own or the
printer's carelessness, sliced up with the scissors and rearranged before
submitting it to Johnson's friendly revision.
The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to come. We all know
how easy it is to turn obstinate and defend a pet theory with acrimony.
Mr. Dobell did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm had committed
him to no little expense in publishing _The Prospect_, with a preface
elaborating his theory, he did a thing which was worth a hundred
discoveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my explanation was the
right one, and promptly committed himself to further expense in bringing
out a new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. So do men behave
who are at once generous of temper and anxious for the truth.
He himself had been close upon the explanation. In his preface he had
actually guessed that the "author's manuscript, written on loose leaves,
had fallen into confusion and was then printed without any attempt at
rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the right solution, and only
failed to follow up the clue.
His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far as it goes we can
collate it with the first edition of _The Traveller_, and exactly discover
the emendations made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion with
Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor "in the year 1783, at my
request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are
only line 420, 'To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' and the
concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one. . . . He added,
'These are all of which I can be sure.'" We cannot test his claim to the
concluding lines, for the correspondent passage is missing from Mr.
Dobell's fragment; but Johnson's word would be good enough without the
internal evidence of the verses to back it. "To stop too faithful, and
too faint to go," is his improvement, and an undeniable one, upon
Goldsmith's "And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not been
at pains to examine all the revised lines, but they are numerous, and
generally (to my thinking) betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost
consistently improvements. There is one alteration, however,--
unmistakably due to Johnson,--which some of us will join with Mr. Dobell
in regretting. Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally showed
some restiveness at the lines--
"Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour
When first ambition toil'd for foreign power,"
And induced Goldsmith to substitute--
"Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour
When first ambition struck at regal power,"
Which may or may not be more creditable in sentiment, but is certainly
quite irrelevant in its context, which happens to be a denunciation of the
greed for gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, all but
meaningless, and must have irritated and puzzled many readers of a poem
otherwise clearly and continuously argued. In future editions of _The
Traveller_, Goldsmith's original couplet should be restored; and I urge
this (let the Tory reader be assured) not from any ill-will towards our
old friend the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred name of
Logic.
Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be
worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by
which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a
freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the
writer of such words as these--
"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of
a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would
be contemptible virtues."
"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving God or man.
Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of
necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue.
That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so
bitter and comfortless to men, is its _death_ in the separation and
absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."
"All things do first receive that give:
Only 'tis God above
That from and in Himself doth live;
Whose all-sufficient love
Without original can flow,
And all the joys and glories show
Which mortal man can take delight to know.
He is the primitive, eternal Spring,
The endless Ocean of each glorious thing.
The soul a vessel is,
A spacious bosom, to contain
All the fair treasures of His bliss,
Which run like rivers from, into, the main,
And all it doth receive, return again."
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your
veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the
stars."
[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, _The Traveller; or,
A Prospect of Society_. Later editions dropped the sub-title.
APRIL.
"Thus, then, live I
Till 'mid all the gloom
By Heaven! the bold sun
Is with me in the room
Shining, shining!
"Then the clouds part,
Swallows soaring between;
The spring is alive
And the meadows are green!
"I jump up like mad,
Break the old pipe in twain,
And away to the meadows,
The meadows again!"
The poem of FitzGerald's from which these verses come was known,
I believe, to very few until Mr. E. V. Lucas exhumed it from _Half-hours
with the Worst Authors_, and reprinted it in that delightful little book
_The Open Road_. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned
executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time
of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyam--perversely, no doubt.
In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder
and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club
took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other
irrelevant persons in the chair, and since his fame has become vulgarised
not only in Thames-side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the
North American continent, one at least of his admirers has suffered a not
unnatural revulsion, until now he can scarcely endure to read the immortal
quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, and deserve to be by reason of
their style--"fame's great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin
after all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a grown man's
thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's or Wordsworth's, or a page of
Ibsen's _Peer Gynt_ against the whole of it, any day.
This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of FitzGerald's verses to
express that jollity which should be every man's who looks up from much
reading or writing and knows that Spring has come.
"_Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et favoni
Trahuntque siccas machinae carinas_ . . ."
In other words, I look out of the window and decide that the day has
arrived for launching the boat--
"This is that happy morn,
That day, long wished day!"
And, to my mind, the birthday of the year. Potentates and capitalists who
send down orders to Cowes or Southampton that their yachts are to be put
in commission, and anon arrive to find everything ready (if they care to
examine), from the steam capstan to the cook's apron, have little notion
of the amusement to be found in fitting out a small boat, say of five or
six tons. I sometimes doubt if it be not the very flower, or at least the
bloom, of the whole pastime. The serious face with which we set about it;
the solemn procession up the river to the creek where she rests, the high
tide all but lifting her; the silence in which we loose the moorings and
haul off; the first thrill of buoyant water underfoot; the business of
stepping the mast; quiet days of sitting or pottering about on deck in the
sunny harbour; vessels passing up and down, their crews eyeing us
critically as the rigging grows and the odds and ends--block, tackle and
purchase--fall into their ordered places; and through it all the
expectation running of the summer to come, and 'blue days at sea' and
unfamiliar anchorages--unfamiliar, but where the boat is, home will be--
"Such bliss
Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss."
Homer, who knew what amused men, constantly lays stress on this business
of fitting out:--
"Then at length she (Athene) let drag the swift ship to the sea, and
stored within it all such tackling as decked ships carry. And she
moored it at the far end of the harbour. . . . So they raised the
mast of pine tree, and set it in the hole of the cross plank, and
made it fast with forestays, and hauled up the white sails with
twisted ropes of oxhide."
And again:
"First of all they drew the ship down to the deep water, and fixed the
oars in leathern loops all orderly, and spread forth the white sails.
And squires, haughty of heart, bare for them their arms,"--but you'll
observe that it was the masters who did the launching, etc., like
wise men who knew exactly wherein the fun of the business consisted.
"And they moored her high out in the shore water, and themselves
disembarked. There they supped and waited for evening to come on."
You suggest, perhaps, that our seafaring is but play: and you are right.
But in our play we catch a cupful of the romance of the real thing.
Also we have the real thing at our doors to keep us humble. Day by day
beneath this window the statelier shipping goes by; and our twopenny
adventurings and discoveries do truly (I believe) keep the greater wonder
and interest awake in us from day to day--the wonder and interest so
memorably expressed in Mr. Bridges's poem, _A Passer By_:--
"Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,
That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,
Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?
Ah! soon when Winter has all our vales opprest,
When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling,
Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest
In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling?
"I there before thee, in the country so well thou knowest,
Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air:
I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest,
And anchor queen of the strange shipping there,
Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare.". . . .
"And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless,
I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine
That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless,
Thy port assured in a happier land than mine.
But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine.
As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding,
From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line
In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding."
Though in all human probability I shall never be the first to burst into a
silent sea, I can declare quite seriously that I never steer into an
unfamiliar creek or haven but, as its recesses open, I can understand
something of the awe of the boat's crew in Andrew Marvell's "Bermudas;"
yes, and something of the exultation of the great Columbus himself!
In a later paper I may have to tell of these voyages and traffickings.
For the while I leave the reader to guess how and in what corner of the
coast I happened on the following pendant to Mr. Dobell's _trouvaille_.
It may not challenge comparison with Mr. Flinders Petrie's work in Egypt
or with Mr. Hogarth's Cretan explorations; but I say confidently that,
since Mr. Pickwick unearthed the famous inscribed stone, no more fortunate
or astonishing discovery has rewarded literary research upon our English
soil than the two letters which with no small pride I give to the world
this month.
Curiously enough, they concern Mr. Pickwick.
But, perhaps, by way of preface I shall remind the reader that the final
number of _Pickwick_ was issued in November, 1837. The first French
version--which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald justly calls 'a rude adaptation rather
than a translation'--appeared in 1838, and was entitled _Le Club de
Pickwickistes, Roman Comique, traduit librement de l'Anglais par Mdme.
Eugenie Giboyet_. With equal justice Mr. Fitzgerald complains
(_The History of Pickwick_, p. 276) that "the most fantastic tricks are
played with the text, most of the dialogue being left out and the whole
compressed into two small volumes." Yet, in fact, Mme. Giboyet (as will
appear) was more sinned against than sinning. Clearly she undertook to
translate the immortal novel in collaboration with a M. Alexandre D--',
and was driven by the author's disapproval to suppress M. D--'s share of
the work. The dates are sufficient evidence that this was done (as it no
doubt had to be done) in haste. I regret that my researches have yielded
no further information respecting this M. Alexandre D--'. The threat in
the second letter may or may not have been carried out. I am inclined to
hope that it was, feeling sure that the result, if ever discovered, will
prove in the highest degree entertaining. With this I may leave the
letters to speak for themselves.
(1)
"45 Doughty Street,"
"September 25th, 1837."
"MY DEAR MADAM,--It is true that when granting the required permission
to translate _Pickwick_ into French, I allowed also the license you
claimed for yourself and your _collaborateur_--of adapting rather
than translating, and of presenting my hero under such small disguise
as might commend him better to a Gallic audience. But I am bound to
say that--to judge only from the first half of your version, which is
all that has reached me--you have construed this permission more
freely than I desired. In fact, the parent can hardly recognise his
own child.
"Against your share in the work, Madame, I have little to urge, though
the damages you represent Mrs. Bardell as claiming--300,000 francs,
or 12,000 pounds of our money--strikes me as excessive. It is rather
(I take as my guide the difference in the handwriting) to your
_collaborateur_ that I address, through you, my remonstrances.
"I have no radical objection to his making Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle,
and Tupman members of His Majesty King Louis XIII.'s corps of
Musketeers, if he is sincerely of opinion that French taste will
applaud the departure. I even commend his slight idealisation of
Snodgrass (which, by the way, is not the name of an English
mountain), and the amorousness of Tupman (Aramis) gains--I candidly
admit--from the touch of religiosity which he gives to the character;
though I do not, as he surmises, in the course of my story, promote
Tupman to a bishopric. The development--preferable as on some points
the episcopal garb may be considered to the green velvet jacket with
a two-inch tail worn by him at Madame Chasselion's _fete champetre_--
would jar upon our Anglican prejudices. As for Winkle (Porthos), the
translation nicely hits off his love of manly exercises, while
resting his pretensions on a more solid basis of fact than appears in
the original. In the incident of the baldric, however, the imposture
underlying Mr. W.'s green shooting-coat is conveyed with sufficient
neatness.
"M. D--' has been well advised again in breaking up the character of
Sam Weller and making him, like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.
Buckingham (Jingle) and Fenton (a capital rendering of the Fat Boy)
both please me; and in expanding the episode of the sausage and the
trouser-buttons M. D--' has shown delicacy and judgment by altering
the latter into diamond studs.
"Alas! madam, I wish the same could be said for his treatment of my
female puppets, which not only shocks but bewilders me. In her
earlier appearances Mrs. Bardell (Milady) is a fairly consistent
character; and why M. D--' should hazard that consistency by
identifying her with the middle-aged lady at the great White Horse,
Ipswich, passes my comprehension. I say, madam, that it bewilders
me; but for M. D--'s subsequent development of the occurrences at
that hostelry I entertain feelings of which mere astonishment is,
perhaps, the mildest. I can hardly bring myself to discuss this with
a lady; but you will allow me to protest in the very strongest terms
that Mr. Pickwick made that unfortunate mistake about the sleeping
apartment in the completest innocence, that in ejaculating 'ha-hum'
he merely uttered a note of warning, and that 'ha-hum' is _not_
(as M. D--' suspects) an English word from which certain syllables
have been discreetly removed; that in thrusting his head through the
bed-curtains he was, as I am careful to say, 'not actuated by any
definite object'; and that, as a gentleman should, he withdrew at the
earliest possible moment. His intercepted duel with Mr. Peter Magnus
(De Wardes) rests, as I fondly imagined I had made clear, upon a
complete misunderstanding. The whole business of the _fleur-de-lys_
on Mrs. Bardell's shoulder is a sheer interpolation and should be
expunged, not only on grounds of morality, but because when you reach
the actual trial, 'Bardell _v_. Pickwick,' you will find this
discovery of the defendant's impossible either to ignore or to
reconcile with the jury's verdict. Against the intervention of
Richelieu (Mr. Nupkins) I have nothing to urge. M. D--' opines that I
shall in the end deal out poetical justice to Mrs. Bardell as Milady.
He is right. I have, indeed, gone so far as to imprison her;
but I own that her execution (as suggested by him) at the hands of
the Queer Client, with Pickwick and his friends (or, alternatively,
Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. Perker, and Bob Sawyer) as silent spectators,
seems to me almost as inconsistent with the spirit of the tale as his
other proposal to kidnap Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the boot of Mr.
Weller's coach, and substitute for his lordship the Chancery prisoner
in an iron mask. I trust, madam, that these few suggestions will,
without setting any appreciable constraint on your fancy, enable you
to catch something more of the spirit of my poor narrative than I
have been able to detect in some of the chapters submitted; and I am,
with every assurance of esteem,
Your obliged servant,
Boz."
"P.S.--The difference between Anjou wine and the milk punch about
which you inquire does not seem to me to necessitate any serious
alteration of the chapter in question. M. D--'s expressed intention
of making Master Bardell in later life the executioner of King
Charles I. of England must stand over for some future occasion.
The present work will hardly yield him the required opportunity for
dragging in King Charles' head."
(2)
"MADAME,--Puisque M. Boz se mefie des propositions lui faites sans but
quelconque que de concilier les gens d'esprit, j'ai l'honneur de vous
annnoncer nettement que je me retire d'une besogne aussi rude que
malentendue. Il dit que j'ai concu son _Pickwick_ tout autrement que
lui. Soit! Je l'ecrirai, ce _Pickwick_, selon mon propre gout.
Que M. Boz redoute mes _Trois Pickwickistes!_ Agreez, Madame, etc.,
etc.,
Alexandre (le Grand)."
I am told that literary aspirants in these days do not read books, or read
them only for purposes of review-writing. Yet these pages may happen to
fall in the way of some literary aspirant faint on a false scent, yet
pursuing; and to him, before telling of another discovery, I will address
one earnest word of caution. Let him receive it as from an elder brother
who wishes him well.
My caution is--Avoid irony as you would the plague.
Years ago I was used to receive this warning (on an average) once a week
from my old and dear friend Sir Wemyss Reid; and once a week I would set
myself, assailing his good nature, to cajole him into printing some piece
of youthful extravagance which he well knew--and I knew--and he knew that
I knew--would infuriate a hundred staid readers of _The Speaker_ and
oblige him to placate in private a dozen puzzled and indignant
correspondents. For those were days before the beards had stiffened on
the chins of some of us who assembled to reform politics, art, literature,
and the world in general from a somewhat frowsy upstairs coffee-room in
C--' Street: days of old--
"When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek
And all the world and we seem'd much less cold
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold. . . ."
Well, these cajoleries were not often successful, yet often enough to keep
the sporting instinct alive and active, and a great deal oftener than
F--'s equally disreputable endeavours: it being a tradition with the staff
that F--' had sworn by all his gods to get in an article which would force
the printer to flee the country. I need scarcely say that the tradition
was groundless, but we worked it shamelessly.
In this way on January 9th, 1897 (a year in which the Westminster Aquarium
was yet standing), and shortly after the issue of the New Year's Honours'
List, the following article appeared in _The Speaker_. The reader will
find it quite harmless until he comes to the sequel. It was entitled--
NOOKS OF OLD LONDON.
I.--THE WESTMINSTER SCUTORIUM.
Let me begin by assuring the reader that the Westminster Scutorium
has absolutely no connection with the famous Aquarium across the
road. I suppose that every Londoner has heard, at least, of the
Aquarium, but I doubt if one in a hundred has heard of the little
Scutorium which stands removed from it by a stone's throw, or less;
and I am certain that not one in a thousand has ever stooped his head
to enter by its shy, squat, fifteenth-century doorway. It is a fact
that the very policeman at the entrance to Dean's Yard did not know
its name, and the curator assures me that the Post Office has made
frequent mistakes in delivering his letters. So my warning is not
quite impertinent.
But a reader of antiquarian tastes, who cares as little as I do for
hypnotisers and fasting men, and does not mind a trifle of dust, so
it be venerable, will not regret an hour spent in looking over the
Scutorium, or a chat with Mr. Melville Robertson, its curator, or
Clerk of the Ribands (_Stemmata_)--to give him his official title.
Mr. Robertson ranks, indeed, with the four pursuivants of Heralds'
College, from which the Scutorium was originally an offshoot.
He takes an innocent delight in displaying his treasures and
admitting you to the stores of his unique information; and I am sure
would welcome more visitors.
Students of Constitutional History will remember that strange custom,
half Roman, half Medieval, in accordance with which a baron or
knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities,
deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself
together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued--
plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old
Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the
important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.--that
this offering was a formal recognition of the _patria potestas_ of
the monarch as father of his people. Few are aware, however, that
the custom has never been discontinued, and that the cupboards of
Westminster contain a waxen memorial of almost every man whom the
king has delighted to honour, from the Conquest down to the very
latest knight gazetted. The labour of modelling and painting these
effigies was discontinued as long ago as 1586; and the masks are no
longer likenesses, but oval plates of copper, each bearing its name
on a label. Mr. Robertson informed me that Charles I. made a brief
attempt to revive the old practice. All the Stuarts, indeed, set
store on the Scutorium and its functions; and I read in an historical
pamphlet, by Mr. J. Saxby Hine, the late curator, that large
apartments were allocated to the office in Inigo Jones's first
designs for Whitehall. But its rosy prospects faded with the
accession of William of Orange. Two years later the custody of the
shields (from which it obtained its name) was relegated to the
Heralds' College; and the Scutorium has now to be content with the
care of its masks and the performance of some not unimportant duties
presently to be recounted.
A reference from the Heralds' College sent me in quest of Mr.
Melville Robertson. But even in Dean's Yard I found it no easy
matter to run him to earth. The policeman (as I have said) could
give me no help. At length, well within the fourth doorway on the
east side, after passing the railings, I spied a modest brass plate
with the inscription _Clerk of the Ribands. Hours 11 to 3_.
The outside of the building has a quite modern look, but the
architect has spared the portal, and the three steps which lead down
to the flagged entrance hall seem to mark a century apiece.
I call it an entrance hall, but it is rather a small adytum, spanned
by a pointed arch carrying the legend _Stemmata Quid Faciunt_.
The modern exterior is, in fact, but a shell. All within dates from
Henry VI.; and Mr. Robertson (but this is only a theory) would
explain the sunken level of the ground-floor rooms by the action of
earthworms, which have gradually lifted the surface of Dean's Yard
outside. He contends the original level to be that of his office,
which lies on the right of the adytum. A door on the left admits to
two rooms occupied by the _nomenclator_, Mr. Pender, and two
assistant clerks, who comprise the staff. Straight in front, a
staircase leads to the upper-apartments.
Mr. Robertson was writing when the clerk ushered me in, but at once
professed himself at my service. He is a gentleman of sixty, or
thereabouts, with white hair, a complexion of a country squire, and
very genial manners. For some minutes we discussed the difficulty
which had brought me to him (a small point in county history), and
then he anticipated my request for permission to inspect his masks.
"Would you like to see them? They are really very curious, and I
often wonder that the public should evince so small an interest."
"You get very few visitors?"
"Seldom more than two a day; a few more when the Honours' Lists
appear. I thought at first that your visit might be in connection
with the new List, but reflected that it was too early. In a day or
two we shall be comparatively busy."
"The Scutorium is concerned then with the Honours' Lists?"
"A little," replied Mr. Robertson, smiling. "That is to say, we make
them." Then, observing my evident perplexity, he laughed.
"Well, perhaps that is too strong an expression. I should have said,
rather, that we fill up the blanks."
"I had always understood that the Prime Minister drew up the Lists
before submitting them to Her Majesty."
"So he does--with our help. Oh, there is no secrecy about it!" said
Mr. Robertson, in a tone almost rallying. "The public is free of all
information, only it will not inquire. A little curiosity on its
part would even save much unfortunate misunderstanding."
"In what way?"
"Well, the public reads of rewards (with which, by the way, I have
nothing to do) conferred on really eminent men--Lord Roberts, for
instance, or Sir Henry Irving, or Sir Joseph Lister. It then goes
down the List and, finding a number of names of which it has never
heard, complains that Her Majesty's favour has been bestowed on
nonentities; whereas this is really the merit of the List, that they
_are_ nonentities."
"I don't understand."
"Well, then, _they don't exist_."
"But surely--"
"My dear sir," said Mr. Robertson, still smiling, and handing me his
copy of _The Times_, "cast your eye down that column; take the names
of the new knights--'Blain, Clarke, Edridge, Farrant, Laing, Laird,
Wardle'--what strikes you as remarkable about them?"
"Why, that I have never heard of any of them."
"Naturally, for there are no such people. I made them up; and a good
average lot they are, though perhaps the preponderance of
monosyllables is a little too obvious."
"But see here. I read that 'Mr. Thomas Wardle is a silk merchant of
Staffordshire.'"
"But I assure you that I took him out of _Pickwick_."
"Yes, but here is 'William Laird,' for instance. I hear that already
two actual William Lairds--one of Birkenhead, the other of Glasgow--
are convinced that the honour belongs to them."
"No doubt they will be round in a day or two. The Heralds' College
will refer them to me--not simultaneously, if I may trust Sir Albert
Woods's tact--and I shall tell them that it belongs to neither, but
to another William Laird altogether. But, if you doubt, take the
Indian promotions. Lord Salisbury sometimes adds a name or two after
I send in the List, and--well, you know his lordship is not fond of
the dark races and has a somewhat caustic humour. Look at the new
C.I.E.'s: 'Rai Bahadur Pandit Bhag Rum.' Does it occur to you that a
person of that name really exists? 'Khan Bahadur Naoraji
('Naoraji,' mark you) Pestonji Vakil'--it's the language of
extravaganza! The Marquis goes too far: it spoils all
verisimilitude."
Mr. Robertson grew quite ruffled.
"Then you pride yourself on verisimilitude?" I suggested.
"As I think you may guess; and we spare no pains to attain it, whether
in the names or In the descriptions supplied to the newspapers.
'William Arbuthnot Blain, Esq.'--you have heard of Balzac's scouring
Paris for a name for one of his characters. I assure you I scoured
England for William Arbuthnot Blain--'identified with the movement
for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes'--or is that
Richard Farrant, Esq.? In any case, what more likely, on the face of
it? 'Frederick Wills, Esq., of the well-known tobacco firm of
Bristol'--the public swallows that readily: and yet it never buys a
packet of their Westward Ho! Mixture (which I smoke myself) without
reading that the Wills's of Bristol are W. D. and H. O.--no Frederick
at all."
"But," I urged, "the purpose of this--"
"I should have thought it obvious; but let me give you the history of
it. The practice began with William III. He was justly scornful of
the lax distribution of honours which had marked all the Stuart
reigns. You will hardly believe it, but before 1688 knighthoods, and
even peerages, went as often as not to men who qualified by an
opportune loan to the Exchequer, or even by presiding at a public
feast. (I say nothing of baronetcies, for their history is
notorious.) At first William was for making a clean sweep of the
Honours' List, or limiting it to two or three well-approved
recipients. But it was argued that this seeming niggardliness might
injure His Majesty's popularity, never quite secure. The Scutorium
found a way out of the dilemma. Sir Crofton Byng, the then Clerk of
the Ribands, proposed the scheme, which has worked ever since.
I may tell you that the undue _largesse_ of honours finds in the very
highest quarters as little favour as ever it did. Of course, there
are some whose services to science, literature, and art cannot be
ignored--the late Lord Leighton, for instance, or Sir George Newnes,
or Sir Joseph Lister again; and these are honoured, while the public
acclaims. But the rest are represented only in my collection of
masks--and an interesting one it is. Let me lead the way."
But I have left myself no space for describing the treasures of the
Scutorium. The two upper stories are undoubtedly the least
interesting, since they contain the modern, unpainted masks.
Each mask has its place, its label, and on the shelf below it,
protected by a slip of glass, a description of the imaginary
recipient of the royal favour. One has only to look along the
crowded shelves to be convinced that Mr. Melville Robertson's office
is no sinecure. The first floor is devoted to a small working
library and a museum (the latter undergoing rearrangement at the time
of my visit). But the cellars!--or (as I should say) the crypt!
In Beaumont's words--
"Here's a world of pomp and state
Buried in dust, once dead by fate!"
Here in their native colours, by the light of Mr. Robertson's duplex
lantern, stare the faces of the illustrious dead, from Rinaldus
FitzTurold, knighted on Senlac field, to stout old Crosby Martin,
sea-rover, who received the accolade (we'll hope he deserved it) from
the Virgin Queen in 1586. A few even are adorned with side-locks,
which Mr. Pender, the _nomenclator_, keeps scrupulously dusted.
In almost every case the wax has withstood the tooth of time far
better than one could have expected. Mr. Robertson believes that the
pigments chosen must have had some preservative virtue. If so, the
secret has been lost. But Mr. Pender has touched over some of the
worst decayed with a mixture of copal and pure alcohol, by which he
hopes at least to arrest the mischief; and certainly the masks in the
Scutorium compare very favourably with the waxen effigies of our
royalties preserved in the Abbey, close by. Mr. Robertson has a
theory that these, too, should by rights belong to his museum: but
that is another story, and a long one. Suffice it to say that I took
my leave with the feelings of one who has spent a profitable
afternoon: and for further information concerning this most
interesting nook of old London I can only refer the reader to the
pamphlet already alluded to, _The Westminster Scutorium: Its History
and Present Uses_. By J. Saxby Hine, C.B., F.S.A. Theobald & Son,
Skewers Alley, Chancery Lane, E.C.
This article appeared to my beloved editor innocent enough to pass, and to
me (as doubtless to the reader) harmless enough in all conscience.
Now listen to the sequel.
Long afterwards an acquaintance of mine--a barrister with antiquarian
tastes--was dining with me in my Cornish home, and the talk after dinner
fell upon the weekly papers and reviews. On _The Speaker_ he touched with
a reticence which I set down at first to dislike for his politics.
By and by, however, he let slip the word "untrustworthy."
"Holding your view of its opinions," I suggested, "you might fairly say
'misleading.' 'Untrustworthy' is surely too strong a word."
"I am not talking," said he, "of its opinions, but of its mis-statements
of fact. Some time ago it printed an article on a place which it called
'The Westminster Scutorium,' and described in detail. I happened to pick
the paper up at my club and read the article. It contained a heap of
historical information on the forms and ceremonies which accompany the
granting of titles, and was apparently the work of a specialist.
Being interested (as you know) in these matters, and having an hour to
spare, I took a hansom down to Westminster. At the entrance of Dean's
Yard I found a policeman, and inquired the way to the Scutorium. He eyed
me for a moment, then he said, 'Well, I thought I'd seen the last of 'em.
You're the first to-day, so far; and yesterday there was only five.
But Monday--_and_ Tuesday--_and_ Wednesday! There must have been thirty
came as late as Wednesday; though by that time I'd found out what was the
matter. All Monday they kept me hunting round and round the yard,
following like a pack. Very respectable-looking old gentlemen, too, the
whole of 'em, else I should have guessed they were pulling my leg.
Most of 'em had copies of a paper, _The Speaker_, and read out bits from
it, and insisted on my searching in this direction and that . . . and me
being new to this beat, and seeing it all in print! We called in the
postman to help. By and by they began to compare notes, and found they'd
been kidded, and some of 'em used language. . . . I really think, sir, you
must be the last of 'em.'"
MAY.
I was travelling some weeks ago by a railway line alongside of which ran a
quickset hedge. It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to the base
of embankments, looped itself around stations, flickered on the skyline
above us, raced us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again on
their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, ran round and waited for us
as we emerged. Its importunity drove me to the other side of the
carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving similarly.
Now I can understand that a railway company has excellent reasons for
planting quickset hedges alongside its permanent way. But their
unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do we neglect the real parks of
England?--parks enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here and
there and in the most timid fashion. And how better could our
millionaires use their wealth (since they are always confiding to us their
difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and
endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves
monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?--for, as Victor Hugo said,
the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and
experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper
trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library has been
sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. So, you may say again, have
free public gardens and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit that a
fair percentage of the public avails itself of these libraries and parks;
still the mass does not, and they were intended for the mass.
Their attractiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The stream of
public appreciation which pours through them is not fathomless; beyond a
certain point it does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking slowness;
and candid librarians and curators can sound its shallows accurately
enough. What we want is not a garden into which folk will find their way
if they have nothing better to do and can spare the time with an effort.
Or, to be accurate, we do want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment; but
what we want more is to catch our busy man and build a garden about him in
the brief leisure which, without seeking it, he is forced to take.
Where are these gardens? Why, beside and along our railway lines.
These are the great public parks of England; and through them travels
daily a vast population held in enforced idleness, seeking distraction in
its morning paper. Have you ever observed how a whole carriageful of
travellers on the Great Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on
Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? A garish appeal, no
doubt: a few raying spokes of colour, and the vision has gone. And I
forestall the question, "Is that the sort of thing you wish to see
extended?--a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or of scarlet lobelias,
or of bright-blue larkspurs, all the way from London to Liverpool?"
I suggest nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, when they
follow the valleys--as railway lines must in hilly districts--are
extraordinarily beautiful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing
better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye Valley or in the
Derbyshire Peak country, and even the rich levels of Somerset have a
beauty of their own (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets of
buttercups) which artificial planting would spoil. But--cant about Nature
apart--every line has its dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which
might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need not labour this: here
and there by a casual bunch of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of
primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing is proved, and has
been proved again and again to me by the comments of fellow-passengers.
Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of mine, and must pause to dwell
on some of its beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise it
in the most modest fashion and test the appreciation of the public as we
go along. Our flowers would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for
the most part, native British plants, costing, say, from thirty shillings
to three pounds the hundred. A few roods would do to begin with, if the
spot were well chosen; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to begin
modestly, for though England possesses several great artists in landscape
gardening, their art has never to my knowledge been seriously applied to
railway gardening, and the speed of the spectators introduces a new and
highly-amusing condition, and one so singular and so important as to make
this almost a separate art. At any rate, our gardeners would have to
learn as they go, and if any man can be called enviable it is an artist
learning to express art's eternal principles in a new medium, under new
conditions.
Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not despond over ways and means.
The beauty-spots of Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry
of advertisement. Why should not this rivalry be pressed into the service
of beautifying the railway lines along which the tourist must travel to
reach them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to speak) of our
temples? Would not the tourist arrive in a better temper if met on his
way with silent evidence of our desire to please? And, again, is the
advertising tradesman quite wise in offending so many eyes with his
succession of ugly hoardings standing impertinently in green fields?
Can it be that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the liver which
he promises to cure? And if not, might he not call attention to his wares
at least as effectively, if more summarily, by making them the excuse for
a vision of delight which passengers would drop their newspapers to gaze
upon? Lastly, the railway companies themselves have discovered the
commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and long before their discovery
(and as if by a kind of instinct they were blundering towards it) they
began to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens--with what happy
result all who have travelled in South Wales will remember. They should
find it easy to learn that the 'development' of watering-places and
holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by spending care upon their
approaches.
But I come back to my imaginary millionaire--the benevolent man who only
wants to be instructed how to spend his money--the 'magnificent man' of
Aristotle's _Ethics_, nonplussed for the moment, and in despair of
discovering an original way of scattering largesse for the public good.
For, while anxious to further my scheme by conciliating the commercial
instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in the conception of
our railways as vast public parks only hindered by our sad lack of
inventiveness from ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands
and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The millionaire I want is
one who can rise to this conception of it, and say with Blake--
"I will not cease from mental fight,"
(Nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter)
"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions.
The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers
will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose
yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of
dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I
offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have
more money than they know how to use.
The railway--not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to
which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor--took me to pay a pious
visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking--
especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy
blessing' on the evening before holidays--of a passage in Izaak Walton's
_Life of Sir Henry Wotton_:--
"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he
changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he
was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester
towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that
journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his
friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place,
because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which
possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far
experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing
the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to
remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me:
sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous
pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when
time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth into
manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but
empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did
foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.'
Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same
recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that
then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in
their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"
But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than
of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close;
not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his
lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me--a small boy whom he
had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter
(I dare say) had forgotten.
"T. E. B."
Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of
Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years
later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St.
Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter
penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.
"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were
associated with its history . . . 'The only church in Douglas where
the poor go'--I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it
will continue to be so. . . . I postulate the continuity. . . ."
I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware
how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the
privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be
characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this
'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a
note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral,
nature it has ever been my lot to meet.
Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was
by choice a _vita fallens_ and "curiously devoid of incident." The boy
was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage,
near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots
mother and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son
and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:--
"To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God
forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from
them; at any rate, _theirs!_ Pitying with an eternal pity, but not
exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was
'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin.
Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment
that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness.
Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do
you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy?
God only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness
of that delicacy descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and
modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the
others could not fail to be present."
Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a
scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that
he would make his son read some fragment of an English classic to him
before answering an invitation! "To my father style was like the instinct
of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes which echoed through the
life of his son--who worshipped continuity.
From a course of tuition divided between his father and the parish
schoolmaster, Brown went, at fifteen or over, to King William's College,
and became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of well-meaning
friends (but at the cost of much subsequent pain), to Christ Church,
Oxford, as a servitor. He won his double first; but he has left on record
an account of a servitor's position at Christ Church in the early fifties,
and to Brown the spiritual humiliation can have been little less than one
long dragging anguish. He had, of course, his intervals of high spirits;
but (says Mr. Irwin, his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he did
not exaggerate what the position was to him. I have heard him refer to it
over and over again with a dispassionate bitterness there was no
mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused to nominate him, after his
two first classes, to a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished
it. "A servitor never has been elected student--_ergo_, he never shall
be." Brown admired Gaisford, and always spoke kindly of him "in all his
dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one
of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and
of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April,
1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its
peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length the
ball at his feet.
"This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to his mother; "it
gives me an income of about 300 pounds per annum as long as I choose
to reside at Oxford, and about 220 pounds in cash if I reside
elsewhere. In addition to this it puts me in a highly commanding
position for pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to
expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make between 500
and 600 pounds altogether per annum. So you see, my dear mother,
that your prayers have not been unanswered, and that God will bless
the generation of those who humbly strive to serve Him. . . I have
not omitted to remark that the election took place on April 21st, the
anniversary of your birth and marriage."
How did he use his opportunity? "He never took kindly to the life of an
Oxford fellow," thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow of
Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the
University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to
much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness.
After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and
there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his old school. We can
only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we
may include among them, if we choose, that _nostalgia_ which haunted him
all his days, until fate finally granted his wish and sent him back to his
beloved Argos "for good."
In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter
of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to
become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School,
Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs
to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally,
that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley--destined to gather into his
_National Observer_, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not
least memorable efflorescence in poesy.
From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival
(now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton
College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into
the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take
the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend
reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton--Mr. Wilson (now Canon
of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and
named him.
"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an
appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it,
I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat
Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to
keep himself still, and looking decidedly _volcanic_. We very soon
came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton
as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless
to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever
since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal
to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished,
teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel
College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs,
and of all the great souls that had passed to and fro over the
pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the
undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at
Christ Church."
Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with
some reservation, we may say 'yes'--'yes,' although in the end he escaped
from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed
formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a
nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault
in him, it was that now and then he soon _tired_. A man so spendthrift of
emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers;
and no doubt he was true _to a mood_ when he wrote--
"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill
My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod,
But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still,
And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass--thank God!
"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule,
I step and square my shoulders with the squad,
But there are blaeberries on old Barrule,
And Langness has its heather still--thank God!"
--With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow
that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay
seriousness and on which side humour. Still it _was_ a mood; and it was
Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':--
"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil
Or here or there,
Or loam or peat,
Wherein he best may grow
And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil--
The lily is most fair,
But says not' I will only blow
Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil
What rock shall owe
The springs that wash his feet;
The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil
That for his purple radiance is most meet--
Lord, even so
I ask one prayer,
The which if it be granted,
It skills not where
Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."
"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian.
. . . "I demur to your statement that when you take up
schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be
practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in
you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief.
My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary--the one the
outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished
life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill
the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not. . . .
The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain
form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."
These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than
utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was
as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men
whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent
friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must
have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he
had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he
certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to
his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was
unhappy.
Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him?
A sturdy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face
extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and
radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad
mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There
are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not
Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this
area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a
Godlike function.
"God sits upon His hill,
And sees the shadows fly;
And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"
And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine
manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain God
made fools for us to enjoy, but there must be _an economy of joy_ in the
presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this
overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the
high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was
ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's
orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural
piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."
"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from
the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875,
"especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term. . . .
Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention
it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He
has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially
disagreeable people, get caught--and lo! the universe for me!!! me--
me. . . ."
I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once
fell to me--a blundering innocent in the hands of fate--to put them to
severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton--awkward, and
abominably conscious of it, and sensitive--I had been billeted on Brown's
hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was
responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of
kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the
unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than
that he took me into the family circle--by no means an expansive one, or
accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders--and for the
inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so
easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor
could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers.
. . . "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over
some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too,
like the most of his countrymen--"jus' the shy "--but with a proud reserve
as far removed as possible from sham humility--being all too sensible and
far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing
on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I
remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one
of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'"
That smile had just sufficient irony--no more.
To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature--
external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be
present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental
mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are
beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was
imprehensible--"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go
to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:
"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we
miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and
all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings
of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with
the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the
time."
Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more
remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct
influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as
proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons
will serve. Falstaffian--with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian--with a
fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets
fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and
Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate
friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."
I have said that we--those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's
House--were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather
than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated.
Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less
than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its
success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition
which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five
times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it
and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other
types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type
an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded
some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it.
But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty
years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity'
had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a
passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to
interrupt this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . that is
what we want--to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this
passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a
fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?--the voice
ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say to
_that?_"
"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all
life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a
letter to a friend:--
"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of
the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no
separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good
and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is
unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be
otherwise. . . . When love has done its full work, has wrought soul
into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life--
_quis separabit?_ Can you conceive yourself as existing at all
without _her?_ No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't,
and never will."
I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept
him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the
Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of
living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his
parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him--master as he was of
varied and vocal English--to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx
dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably
mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly
educated.
"I would not be forgotten in this land."--
This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1]
has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters.
But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity--to be
remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very noble one, he
transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror
that Time might obliterate the moment:
"And all this personal dream be fled,"
Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness. _Antiquam
exquirite matrem_--he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress
of earning daily bread, were careless to do--would explore for them the
ancient springs of faith and custom.
"Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to us
Of ancient heritage--
Of manners, speech, of humours, polity,
The limited horizon of our stage--
Old love, hope, fear,
All this I fain would fix upon the page;
That so the coming age,
Lost in the empire's mass,
Yet haply longing for their fathers, here
May see, as in a glass,
What they held dear--
May say, ''Twas thus and thus
They lived'; and as the time-flood onward rolls
Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls."
This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic.
"What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page,
'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic
cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever
found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were
penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he
also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate,
comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too--not always, but as a
rule--from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously
prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was
Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can
do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt
that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt
that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater
Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an
acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of
late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted.
To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally
catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered
about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully
rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of
lambent common sense. For a few examples:--
"I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many
French _litterateurs_ give me the idea that they don't go nearer the
Greek authors than the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve
[_Nouveaux Lundis_, vii. 1--52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an
enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never
strikes me as knowing much about the matter!"
"Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old
Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he
has not a scrap of modern _impedimenta_. You go through the customs
at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have _nothing to
declare_. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to
begin with, and you pass together as cheerfully as possible. . . ."
"I have also been reading Karl Elze's _Essays on Shakespeare_.
He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of
men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors,
proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and
self-sought exigency?"
"Did you ever try to write a Burns song? I mean the equivalent in
ordinary English of his Scotch. Can it be done? A Yorkshireman--
could he do it? A Lancashire man (Waugh)? I hardly think so.
The Ayrshire dialect has a _Schwung_ and a confidence that no-English
county can pretend to. Our dialects are apologetic things,
half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no doubts, and for his
audience unhesitatingly demands the universe. . . ."
"There is an ethos in Fitzgerald's letters which is so exquisitely
idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes you with him, exactly
accommodating his pace to yours, walks through meadows so tranquil,
and yet abounding in the most delicate surprises. And these
surprises seem so familiar, just as if they had originated with
yourself. What delicious blending! What a perfect interweft of
thought and diction! What a _sweet_ companion!"
Lastly, let me quote a passage in which his thoughts return to Clifton,
where it had been suggested that Greek should be omitted from the ordinary
form-routine and taught in "sets," or separate classes:--
"This is disturbing about Greek, 'set' Greek. Yes, you would fill
your school to overflowing, of course you would, so long as other
places did not abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable
treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me the
_learning_ of any blessed thing is a matter of little moment.
Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School
boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational
than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a regeneration which
releases us from I know not what original sin. And if a man does not
see that, he is a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he
gravely asked me to explain what I meant by original sin in such a
connection. . . ."
So his thoughts reverted to the school he had left in 1892. In October,
1897, he returned to it on a visit. He was the guest of one of the house
masters, Mr. Tait, and on Friday evening, October 29th, gave an address to
the boys of the house. He had spoken for some minutes with brightness and
vigour, when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. He died in
less than two hours.
His letters have been collected and piously given to the world by Mr.
Irwin, one of his closest friends. By far the greatest number of them
belong to those last five years in the Island--the happiest, perhaps, of
his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. "Never the time and the
place . . ." but at least Brown was more fortunate than most men.
He realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. He could not carry
off his friends to share it (and it belongs to criticism of these volumes
to say that he was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could
return and visit them or stay at home and write to them concerning the
realisation, and be sure they understood. Therefore, although we desire
more letters of the Clifton period--although twenty years are omitted,
left blank to us--those that survive confirm a fame which, although never
wide, was always unquestioned within its range. There could be no
possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He was absolute. He lived a
fierce, shy, spiritual life; a wise man, keeping the child in his heart:
he loved much and desired permanence in the love of his kind.
"Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth-century namesake, "is a dream and
folly of expectation. There is nothing strictly immortal but
immortality." And yet, _prosit amasse!_
The railway took me on to Oxford--
"Like faithful hound returning
For old sake's sake to each loved track
With heart and memory burning."
"I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her husband, the late John Richard
Green, "the passionate enthusiasm with which he watched from the train for
the first sight of the Oxford towers against the sky:" and although our
enthusiasm nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that which
saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach topped the rise of Shotover
and its passengers beheld the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful
son of Oxford can see her towers rise above the water-meadows and re-greet
them without a thrill?
In the year 1688, and in a book entitled _The Guardian's Instruction_,
a Mr. Stephen Penton gave the world a pleasing and lifelike little
narrative--superior, in my opinion, to anything in _Verdant Green_--
telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to send his son to Oxford;
what doubts, misgivings, hesitations he had, and how they were overcome.
I take the story to be fictitious. It is written in the first person,
professedly by the hesitating parent: but the parent can hardly have been
Penton, for the story will not square with what we know of his life.
The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and educated at Winchester
and New College; proceeded to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to 1670,
and was Principal of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. He appears to
have been chaplain to the Earl of Aylesbury, and, according to Antony a
Wood, possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706.
The writer in _The Guardian's Instruction_ is portrayed for us--or is
allowed to portray himself--rather as an honest country squire, who had
himself spent a year or so of his youth at the University, but had
withdrawn when Oxford was invaded by the Court and the trouble between
King Charles and Parliament came to a head: and "God's grace, the Good
example of my parents, and a natural love of virtue secured me so far as
to leave Oxford, though not much more learned, yet not much worse than I
came thither." A chill testimonial! In short, the old squire (as I will
take leave to call him) nursed a somewhat crotchety detestation of the
place, insomuch "that when I came to have children, I did almost _swear_
them in their childhood never to be friends with Oxford."
He tried his eldest son with a course of foreign travel as a substitute
for University training; but this turned out a failure, and he had the
good sense to acknowledge his mistake. So for his second boy he cast
about to find a profession; "but what course to take I was at a loss:
Cambridge was so far off, I could not have an eye upon him; Oxford I was
angry with."
In this fix he consulted with a neighbour, "an old grave learned divine,"
and rigid Churchman, who confessed that many of the charges against Oxford
were well grounded, but averred that the place was mending. The truth
was, the University had been loyal to the monarchy all through the
Commonwealth times; and when Oliver Cromwell was dead, and Richard
dismounted, its members perceived, through the maze of changes and
intrigues, that in a little time the heart of the nation would revert to
the government which twenty years before it had hated. And their
impatient hopes of this "made the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and
curse Meroz in the very streets; insomuch that when the King came in, they
were not only like them that dream, but like them who are out of their
wits, mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy 'rag' (to modernise the old
gentleman's language) continued for a twelvemonth: that is to say, until
the Vice-Chancellor--holding that the demonstration, like Miss Mary
Bennet's pianoforte playing in _Pride and Prejudice_, had delighted the
company long enough--put his foot down. And from that time the University
became sober, modest, and studious as perhaps any in Europe. The old
gentleman wound up with some practical advice, and a promise to furnish
the squire with a letter of recommendation to one of the best tutors in
Oxford.
Thus armed, the squire (though still with misgivings) was not long in
getting on horseback with his wife, his daughters, and his young hopeful,
and riding off to Oxford, where at first it seemed that his worst
suspicions would be confirmed; "for at ten o'clock in the inn, there arose
such a roaring and singing that my hair stood on end, and my former
prejudices were so heightened that I resolved to lose the journey and
carry back my son again, presuming that no noise in Oxford could be made
but _scholars_ must do it,"--a hoary misconception still cherished, or
until recently, by the Metropolitan Police and the Oxford City Bench.
In this instance a proctor intervened, and quelled the disturbance by
sending 'two young pert townsmen' to prison; "and quickly came to my
chamber, and perceiving my boy designed for a gown, told me that it was
for the preservation of such fine youths as he that the proctors made so
bold with gentlemen's lodgings." The squire had some talk with this
dignitary, who was a man of presence and suitable address, and of
sufficient independence to deny--not for the first time in history--that
dons were overpaid.
Next morning the whole family trooped off to call upon the tutor whom
their old neighbour had recommended. Oddly enough, the tutor seemed by no
means overwhelmed by the honour. "I thought to have found him mightily
pleased with the opinion we had of his conduct, and the credit of having a
gentleman's son under his charge, and the father with cap in hand.
Instead of all this he talked at a rate as if the gentry were _obliged_ to
tutors more than tutors to them." The tutor, in short, was decidedly tart
in his admonitions to this honest family--he did not forget, either, to
assure them that (_generally_) a college tutor was worse paid than a
dancing-master. Here is a specimen of his advice--sound and practical
enough in its way:--
"I understand by one of your daughters that you have brought him up a
_fine padd_ to keep here for his health's sake. Now I will tell you
the use of an horse in Oxford, and then do as you think fit.
The horse must be kept at an _ale-house_ or an _inn_, and he must
have leave to go once _every day_ to see him eat oats, because the
master's eye makes him fat; and it will not be genteel to go often
to an house and spend nothing; and then there may be some danger of
the horse growing _resty_ if he be not used often, so you must give
him leave to go to _Ab
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