0ra;i^f^-:;:;!;Msa:iS: ;M;iju;i*f Ge •':-H e-^tett ■ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE EXTEMPORARY ESSAYS Essays by thk same Writer 'IN A GREEN SHADE' WILTSHIRE ESSAYS EXTEMPORARY ESSAYS BY MAURICE HEWLETT HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFDRI) UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPK TOWN BOMBAY MADRAS CALCUTTA SHANGHAI 1922 PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BY FREDERICK HALL CONTENTS Preface : The Maypole and the Column W. H. Hudson : Hail and Farewell The Early Quakers Shelley's Swan-Song The Wives of ihe Hag-Ridden The De Morgans . Poetic Relativity The Iberians The Ballad-Touch The ' Fa( is' Analogy from the Tailor's . The Root ok Poesy Edward .... All's Well That Ends Well Byron ai his Worst An Armenian Knight's Entertainmeni The Limits of the Readahi.e . Daily Bkkad .... The Antholo(;y in Hn(;i.isii NosF.s IN the Air Montaigne .... Dreams ..... page 7 13 17 22 27 32 38 43 47 52 67 72 77 82 94 lOI n8 123 127 133 »39 146 CONTENTS PAGE WoKK AND 'Business' 151 The Morris .... . 156 Theology and Fine Women 160 Dedications 166 Junketings New and Old . 172 Teufei.sdrockh in Hexameters 176 The Lave O't 188 Alter Egos .... 191 A Fair-weather Apologue 195 Wind in the Downs 200 Beginnings 204 Thoughts on Doric 216 The Death of Society . 222 Gentlemen's Seats 227 Kentucky .... 232 Eutopia 237 The Wisdom of THE Simple 242 The Peasant in Church . , 247 The Letter-Writers 252 PREFA CE Th^ dMaypok and the Column IN days of more single purpose than these, young men and maidens, in the first flush of summer, set up a maypole on the green ; but before tliey joined hands and danced round about it tliey had done honour to what it stood for by draping it with swags of flowers and green-stuff, hang- ing it with streamers of divers colours, and sticking it with as many gilt hearts as there were hearts among them of votive inclination. So they transfigured the thing signified, and turned a shaven tree-trunk, from a very crude emblem into a thing of hajipy fantasy. That will serve me for a figure of how the poet deals with his little idea, or great one ; and in his more sober mood it is open to the essayist so to deal with his, supposing he have one. He must hang his i>ole, or concept, not with rhyme but with wise or witty talk. He mu>t turn it about and about, not to set the ornaments jingling, or little bells ringing ; rather that you may see its shapeliness enhanced, its proportions emphasized, and in all tiie shifting lights and shadows of its ornamentation discern it still for tlie notion that it is. 'I'hat at least is my own notion of what the essayist should do, though I am aware that very distinguisheil practitioners have not agreed with me and do not agree at this hour. The modern essayist, for reasons which I shall try to ex- pound, has been driven from the maypole to tlie column. 8 THE MAYPOLE AND THE COLUMN Certainly, the parent of the Essay draped no maypoles with speech. Montaigne was a sedentary philosopher, of the order of tlie post-prandials ; a wine-and-walnuts man. One thing would open out into another, and one seem better than the other, at the time of hearing. 'Je n'enseigne point; je raconte,' he tells you of himself; and it is true. To listen to him is a liberal education ; yet you can hardly think of Montaigne footing it on the green. Bacon's line, again, was the aphoristic. He shreds off his maypole rather than clothes it : but he has one set up. He can give his argument as witty a turn as the Frenchman when he pleases — 'There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?'. That is the turn his thoughts take upon Revenge, and a fair sample of his way with an abstract idea — shredding off it all the time, getting down to the pith. But he can be very obscure : ' A single life doth well with Churchmen ; for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.* That isproleptic reasoning. We are to caper about tiie pole before the ornaments are on. But since his time the Maypole has gone out of use. The modern essayist has had a column reared for him in- stead, which he is required, not to drape, but to fill. That kind of column is no symbol of the earth's fertility, but too often the grave of it. It has been, however, the oj)por- tunity of the babbler, the prater, the prattler, and the agreeable rattle : all 's one to the Column so that it be filled. You may write on something, or nothing ; you may grind axes on your column, or roll logs on it. But you must fill it. THli MAYPOLE AND THE COLUMN .; To be too long for it is nothing. There is the Procrustean sword. To be too short Minotaur will howl for more. Hazlitt is the typical journalist essayist. He could fill a column with any man born, yet not with pure gain to literature. He makes an ungracious figure in history, un- social and anti-social too, with his blundering, uncouth loves, his undignified quarrels, and insatiable hatreds. His spleen engulfed him, and I have often wondered what our Wiltshire shepherds made of him, lowering like a storm about the coombes of Winterslow. None of the ' pastoral melancholy ' of that grassy solitude shows in his writing, whose zest is that of hunger rather than wholesome appetite. Indeed, I don't think he was a tolerable essayist. He was too eager to destroy, and the very moral of his own .John Bull who would sooner, any day, give up an estate than a bug- bear. How many jteople he hated, and how much ! Whole nations at once— such as the French. He hated Southey and Gifford, and for their sakes the Quarterly, Pitt and Castlereagh, Byron and Coleridge. He was a fierce lover, too, but not comfortable in his loves. Sometimes he knew both passions for the same jx-rson. Burke, for instance: ()
  • amb all did that — Lamb less tiresomely than any ; for Lamb enhanced tlie image, or shifted it into liappier view, with every addition. But Hazlitt left it where it was, or hid it. Lamb was essayist first, and journalist with wiiat remained over. A column was set up : he made it a may- pole. No craftsman has draped his idea, or capered about it as Lamb did. He transfigures whatever he touches ; more, he transmutes it. His seventeentli-century jargon, which you may find tiresome, is part of the fun. It is, so to speak, joco-serious with him. He is generally better witiiout it, as in 'Blakesmoor' or 'Barbara S ', or • Dream-Children '; yet of all Elia tiie most beautiful thing to me is one which has Burton and Sir Thomas Browne all over it, ' A Quakers' Meeting '. There you have exactly what I mean by my overworked figure of the May- pole. A theme set up, and hung with loving art ; then round about it a measure trodden, sedately for the most part, but with involuntary skips aside as the whim takes him. Lamb could not spare a joke even at a funeral ; but this is sheer beauty, a serene and lovely close : ' The very garments of a Quaker seerii incapable of receiving a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their THE MAYPOLE AND THE COLUMN ii Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.' That is to do more than dance about a maypole. It is to dance before tiie Lord. All the pieces which follow were written for and pub- lished in daily newspaper or weekly or monthly review : The Times and Manchester Guardian, Nation and Out- looh. Nineteenth Century and After^ London Mercury, Corn- hill. Well or ill, they were intended to deck their column as if it had been a maypole. Rightly or wrongly, they were to be literature as well as journalism. Journal- ism loves the particular, but literature must hold fast to the general. Journalism accepts the ephemeral, gives you its daily screed in exchange for its daily bread ; but literature has its eye on posterity, expresses the spirit of fact rather than the body of it ; and its servants, if not exacting a monument more perdurable than brass, wish that they may get, and try to deserve it. Genius does what it must, and need not concern us here. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet tor hire, and Walter Scott The Bride of Lammermoor, that he might add iield to iield by Tueedside. They had their monument without a thought thrown that way. And Keats, who said that his name was writ in water? Did he not know that it was writ in ink, which grows blacker with age ? But let the smaller man ilo consciously and with premeditation what his betters did by the Grace of God. No man needs be the worse journalist for taking immense pains to be something beside. It is hard work. ' 1 never have a holiday. On Monday 12 THE MAYPOLE AND THE COLUMN towards noon I lift up my head, and breathe for about an hour ; after that the wicket shuts again and I am in my prison cell for seven days.' So said Sainte-Beuve ; and Matthew Arnold comments upon the saying, ' The causer'ies were at this price.' Hard work but the only way to serve your two masters, turn your column into a maypole and pace out your dedicatory dance. Broad Chalke, IJth September I<)22. W. H. Hudson Hail and Farewell SO far as you could love a man with whom your hours of free converse could be told on the fingers, and your correspondence paid for with a shilling, I loved Hudson. That only means to say that the short commerce I had with him enriched my regard for him, but did not cause it. Nor, though we had much in common — booksof his which, as I read them, seemed to have been written directly for me, tastes and habits which coincided, a countryside shared — did I on such accounts love him. There was something else in his writings besides their matter — and that was himself. He was of those few authors who make themselves prized not for what they say, nor for their manner of saying, but for what they arc. Hudson was of all the men I have ever known of the most radiant sincerity, and in the flesh proved to be so gentle, quiet, and candid, that you seemed to see the very soul of him, and how jierfectly it consorted with its case. He reminded me of nobody so much as Dorothy Wordsworth, who must have been, within and without, of the same iioniogeneity. To love Hudson, therefore, or Dorothy Woniswortii, was to love moral beauty — which every one does when he sees it. But that is the difficulty. It is not at all easy to see. Well, in Hudson you could not fail of seeing it ; and once seen, to see it again did not greatly matter. You knew it was there. 14 W. H. HUDSON One of his best books was written about South Wilts., where I live ; and to write part of it he stayed in my village for some weeks, lodging with the blacksmith, and spending his days wandering in and out of the Downs. As I spent most of mine in the same manner I wonder that I did not meet him ; but I never did, nor knew that he had been there until, later on, I became acquainted with him. The book I mean is A Shepherd' s Life, and is entirely occupied with the valleys of the Five Rivers which concentre at Salisbury or thereby. The title is not a good one, for it is not so much the lives of the shepherds which he describes as the life of Hudson in a country of shepherds — in their broad grey downs and sheltered coombes, in their villages of hill and vale, in their markets and fairs, and in the ingles of their cottage hearths. He knew more of our birds than of our people. He sentimentalized the latter, the former not at all. His eye for the country was infallible and deeply appreciative, without being microscopic like JefFeries' or economico-philanthropic like Cobbett's. He wrote of it better than either. His harvest of it inhabits, informs the pages ; and as you read of something or other which interested him on his journey, the landscape unfolds itself quietly before you, so that when you look up from the thing of the moment, there are the downs with their flitting cloud-shadows and velvety flanks, there is the clump of beeches on the turf-rampart, there the valley with its elms and water-meadows about the slow river, and there a grey village in the midst, with a square-towered church — and the thing of the moment enacting itself there ! Our best prose has been of this quietist kind, doing its descriptive work by the way. Cobbett's landscape is better than Jefferies', but Hudson's is better than Cobbett's. It is \V. H. HUDSON 15 foolish work comparing two arts ; yet I feel like saying that while there was no Constable in Hudson's art, there was some David Cox, and a good deal of Old Crome. He has been likened to George Borrow as a writer, and with some truth. His art was as masterly, though much more charming, because he was so himself. There was a swashbuckler in Borrow. It is difficult to believe that a man so much the master of himself, so much at ease in a world which must at many j)oints have given him acute discomfort, had little or no sense of the ridiculous ; yet I have never been sure whether Hudson had it or not. Green Mansions alone might settle that. I don't read in that romantic tale that he had any notion how near the comic he sometimes conducted it. But then there is The Purple Land, in which the tender relations of the hero with damsel after damsel, each pining in her esta/icia, each comforted, and then left after a des- perate farewell, are heightened to a point of irresistible comedy by the discovery that he has a wife awaiting him somewhere with whom he immediately resumes his philandcrings at the end of his sentimental journey. The book, in fact, becomes a delightful farce ; but I should not care to assert that Hudson knew it, still less that he intended it. 'I'hc tragic, of course, is there too. Some of the maidens were very forlorn indeed. Hudson must have been only too will acquainted with lliat. /,"/ Om/u), an earlier and a shorter study, is exceedingly tragic, and a masterpiece of descriptive writing, with the landscape itself, tlie sun- scourged land in which the doomed house stood and the doomed man agonized, an actor in the story. So Mr. Hardy gave Egdon Heath a jKirt in 77je Re/urn of the Native. There are masterly feats of the same kind in Far i6 W. H. HUDSON Aivay and Long Ago^ to the end of which, enchanted, you walk for some hours on the limitless Argentine plain. But the great charm of that book is the self-unfolding of the writer. You cannot understand the peculiar quality of Hudson the man until you know Hudson the child. He had a mentally afflicted wife, to whom he devoted himself, and for whose sake he lived in London a more secluded life than he would iiave lived on Salisbury Plain. She died, I think, last year ; and then he went to Penzance, and I heard from him once or twice. T hoped he would have found in Cornwall what Cornwall Road, Bayswater, could never have given him. He has found it now, but not in Cornwall. They say that he died in his sleep — the very end so gentle and peace-loving a spirit had earned. The Early ^et them pass,' I cried, ' the world and its mysterious doom Is not so much more glorious than it was That I desire to worshij) tiiose who drew New figures on its false and fragile glass As the old faded.' He joins the throng of captives, is stayed by no accident 26 SHliLLljlY'S SWAN-SONG of the road, crosses ^the [glen through which tlicy surge, and behold — the grove Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers, The Earth was grey with phantoms, and the air Was peopled with dim forms. . . . He watches them closely, sees how some melt into nothing- ness like snow-riakes, others dance like gnats in a cloud, some sit chattering ' like restless apes ', some, ' more humble ', like falcons on the fist. The closelier he looks the greyer his outlook : youth, hope, love itself, pride, strength — From every form the beauty slowly waned ; From every firmest limb and fairest face The strengtii and freshness fell like dust, and left The action and the shape without the grace Of life The darkness gathered, the restless shapes wearied of their ghastly dance. And fell, as I have fallen, by the wayside. , , . He ends upon a cry of amaze, a wounded note— • Then, what is life ' ? I cried. . . . Said I not well it was his swan-song ? It is tragic reading, tainted and dusty with death. There is no philosophy behind this poem ; it is not written on a large scale. It is a fragment, and must have remained so ; for Shelley's buoyancy, which alone had sufficed so far to answer his questionings, was gone. With Ariel's power of the wing was gone, too, Ariel's office. ' Call no man happy till he is dead.' No, indeed, when he is the slave of his temperament. The fFives of the ' Hag-ridden "September 12. 1862. — I am in love, as I did not think it was jjossible to be in love. I am a madman ; I'll shoot myself, if it goes on like this. They had an evening party ; she is charming in everything.' Next day he proposed, ten days later ' we were married in the royal church of the Nativity of Our Lady.' 'We' were Leo Nikolacvich Tolstoi and Sophie Andreevna Bers. That citation from Tolstoi's diary was made by his widow in iier tragic Antobtography, now published in translation by the Hogarth Press. It is a hasty, tempestuous, incomplete little volume, full to tlic covers with a sense of injury, lost to regret for the happy years in resentment at those of misunderstanding and estrangement ; imi)lying much more than it is able to express, charged with facts which are not fairly stated, bringing the writer's griefs to a point, and then missing the |)oint. ' The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because / in my heart went away from him. It was /r who went away, not in his everyday lite, l)ut in his writings and his teaciiings as to how j)eopIe should live. I felt myself unable to- follow his teaching myself. . . . ' That is her point, but not the jioint. That lies rather in a breach of promise implied. A young man of genius rushes a girl into marriage. She accepts him as he stands with 0])en arms ami a full heart. Nevertheless his genius lies between them in the marriage-bed, unsuspected by 28 THE WIVES OF THE HAG-RIDDEN cither, and imperceptibly pushes them farther apart. When discovery comes, when their eyes are open and they can measure the gulf which separates tliem, is theie not a breach, not of promise of marriage but of promise in it ? He has grown, she has not. He, ridden and spurred by his hag, fleets far and wide over countries of the mind — moor and marsh, desert and tilth, forest and lake — of which she, sleeping in his arms, never dreams. They wake, they look, at each other : she cannot read of his wild traverse in his eyes — the eyes are easily schooled. So the hag grows masterful and rides him linally to a pass where, to cross it, the truth must be told because it cannot be hidden. Can she not cry then, like any jilted girl of the people, Sceglier fra mille un cuore, Da lei vol' farsi un nido ; E poi trovarlo isfido E troppo gran' dolor' — P Nobody can call it unreasonable, though every one feels that it is so. That is the paradox involved in our existence. Trouble seems to have begun in '74-75, when he lost two aunts and three young children. Tolstoi hunted for consolation ; ' his seeking for truth became acute '. He contemplated hanging himself. From teacher to teacher, faith to faith he ran : there was none to show him any good. ' A spirit which rejected the existing religions, pro- gress, science, art, family, . . . had been growing stronger and stronger in Leo Nikolacvich, and he was becoming gloomier and gloomier.' What he did presently find — ways and means of reducing life to its elemental terms — satisfied him for a while. The Countess did not, could not be expected to, sympathize with him. THE WIVES OF THE HAG-RIDDEN 29 'In the summer of 1884 Leo Nikolaevich worked a great deal on the hmd ; for whole days he mowed with the peasants, and, when tired out, he came home in the evenings, he used to sit gloomy and discontented with the life lived by the family.' His hag was remorseless, and made him ciuel. ' At one time he thought of taking a Russian peasant woman, a worker on the land, and of secretly going away with the peasants to start a new life : he confessed this to me him- self.' He did actually go away, with a sack on his shoulder, when his wife was about to be confined. But he came back : ' lie was gloomy and said nothing to me. . . . I could never forget that terrible, bright June night.' If that is true, it is jiitifiil. In the matter of unreasonableness there was not much to choose between this doomed pair. ' Once Leo Nikolaevich called me into his study and asked me to take over in full ownershiji all his property, including his copyriglits. I asked liim what need there was for that, since we were so intimate and had children in common. He replied that he considered property an evil and that he did not wish to own it. " So you wish to hand over that evil to me, the creature nearest to you," I said in tears. " I do not want it and I shall take nothing." ' There 's a cjuibblc there, of course. The Countess did not consider property an accursed thing, and therefore, for her part, was not offered one. But Tolstoi cjuibbled too, for in handing over an accursed thing to his wife antl cliildren he was not ridding himself (if it. Nor was he necessarily leading a simple life because he ate black beans out of a basin and did not dress for dinner. It is all very childish, or would be if theie were not a tragic reality behind it. 30 THK WIVES OF THE HAO-RIDDRN ' Nobody and nothing satisfied Leo Nikolacvich or put his mind at rest. ... It was as tliougli his inner eye was turned only to evil and suffering, as though ail that was joyful, beautiful, and good had disajjpeared. I did not -know how to live with such views. I was alarmed, frightened, grieved. But with nine children I could not, like a iveather-cock, turn in the ever-changing direction of my husl>and's spiritual going aivay^ The italics are mine, designed to emphasize the fact that, with nine children, quibble as you will and give point for point, the issue is practical and not to be avoided. At the end of this unhappy little book are some extracts from Tolstoi's papers, not so much justificatory as recrimi- native. He writes^most unfortunately, to his daugliter — of perpetual spying, eavesdropping, incessant complaining, ordering me about . . . constant managing, pretended hatred of the man who is nearest and most necessary to me,' and so on. There was no pretence about the Countess's feel- ings towards Chertkov — but what are we to believe ? The poor lady had exhausted herself with service. She had had thirteen children, of whom nine lived. Chertkov may have been necessary to Tolstoi, and her jealousies un- warrantable. But there they were, and, again, not unreason- ably. The impression left by my reading is that Chertkov did make mischief, did make bad worse, and at the end, when the old man was dying, seems to have acted with incredible barbarity to his wife of fifty years' standing. I forbear to quote Tolstoi's own account of his ' escape ', as he felt it to be. It should be read by the married. One human touch, however, I must record. He wrote it in the train on his last journey. ' . . . now we are in the train ; we start. . . . The fear passes. And pity for her rises in me, but no doubt THK WIVES OF THE HAG-RIDDEN 31 at all that I have done what I ought to do. Perhaps I am wrong to justify myself — not Leo N. T., but that which at times exists, though ever so feebly, in me. . . .' That goaded thing was free for the moment of its hag- rider when Tolstoi penned his pity. There are diversities of hags, but the same spirit in the ridden. I wrote of Shelley's case just now. He was a hag-ridden man. And Carlyle ! The Chertkov of that story was Lady Ashburton, whose relation to himself, at the cost of his wife, Carlyle never was able to iustify. Froude in Letters and Memorials (ii. 273) quotes a letter from Geraldine .lewsbury which puts Mrs. Carlyle's grievance as forcibly as possible. The two cases, neverthe- less, differ widely. Mrs. Carlyle would have been happy, perhaps, if she had had children ; the Countess, perhaps, if she had not. Tolstoi had been gently bred and did his best to become a boor. Carlyle ivas a boor, and his wife had known it from the beginning. But tactless as the Sage o\ Craigen]nitt()ck was, I doubt if he could ever have been guilty of an act so gross as that of sharing with a daughter his charges against her own mother. Carlyle mayha\e had no ven»;ibilities but had Tolstoi no heart? The T)e dMorgans' SERIOUS intention has combined with happy memories to make Mrs. Stirling's Memoir of William and Evelyn De Morgan a beautiful book. For the De Morgans were lovely in their lives and in death not long divided. Few such wedded pairs have shone, like a constellation, upon a naughty world. No doubt but there are plenty of them with a more local beam. But such households are hidden from the main of us. We may come upon them — to pursue the figure — unawares when we are groping in the dark : a mild and steady radiance illuminating some inches of a mossy bank. But the De Morgans shone above the hiving streets. One could steer by them, if need were. And one did. There, beyond these voices, there was peace. The book therefore preserves a valuable thing. It might easily have been spoiled in the doing ; yet because it has been done with great simplicity, it could hardly have been better done. De Morgan had a happy childhood and youth, with a dry but essentially humane father for leading-light. Professor Augustus De Morgan, whose careful portrait will be dis- cerned in the Professor Thorpe of Joseph Fance, be- queathed certain qualities to his son which were more to be desired than much fine gold, and incidentally brought it him. Steadiness of temper was one, intellectual honesty was another, and a lambent humour which played about the surfiices of things and illuminated them often to the ' William Dc Morgan and his Wife, by A. M. W. Stirlinj,'. (Butterwortli.) THE DE MORGANS 33 deeps — that was a third. Tuberculosis haunted his family ; one by one his younger children left him. Wanting the' consolation of the orthodox, he had thought out the chances for himself, and had tabled the pro et contra with un- flinching candour and a good deal of wit : ' A strong and practical conviction of a better and higher existence', he wrote to his old friend, Sir John Herschel, ' reduces the whole thing to emigration to a country from which there is no way back, and no mail packets, with a certainty of following at a time to be arranged in a better way than I can do it.' Within a short time of writing that he received — to use. his own trope — his ticket, ' During the last two days of his life his son William, watching by him, observed that he seemed to recognize the presence of all those of his family whom he had lost by death — his three children, his mother and sister, all of whom he greeted audibly, naming tiiem in the reverse order to that in which they had left this world.' And then, in his will, he thus proclaimed his belief: ' I commend my future with hope and confidence to Almighty God ; to God the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom I believe in my heart to be the Son of God, but whom I have not confessed with my lips, because in my time such confession has always been the ivay up in the ivorld.^ The italics would have been mine if they had not been Mrs. Stirling's, for the words areas strongly characteristic of the son as tliey were of the father. William De Morgan talked and wrote like that. He was more of a Christian than he would ever have confessed himself, and his pre- occupation with the soul's destiny is manifest in every book of his. C 34 THE DE MORGANS To such a father, who both saw and put the facts of this life in a dry light, William's determination to be an artist could not be a matter of enthusiasm. He did no more, however, than apply frequent cold douches, and when he found that the young man's heart was set, having it, as he requested, ' after a fortnight's delay, in writing ', he gave it up with the final prophetic advice, William says, ' to read hard, especially the classics, and I should one day write well '. ' But I ', he adds, ' must needs be an artist '. And so he was — first at the Academy Schools, then very easily and desultorily, in Soho and Bloomsbury, until he drifted into the acquaintance and ultimate friendship of Burne-Jones and Morris ; then into glass-painting ; finally into pottery, at which he laboured long and (in all respects but one) successfully. Last of all, and through those means, he found the predestined companion of his rest of days. He was forty, a staid and apparently rooted celibate. Evelyn Pickering, a good deal his junior, the wild one of a settled upper-class family, had burned like a meteor across all the conventions of Grosvenor Street and Bryanston Square, and found her orbit in another heaven than theirs. She also ' must needs be an artist', stole her first hours of work, stormed her way into the Slade, went out to Italy by herself, half-starved in Rome, came home to studio-life and a latch-key, and presently met her appointed other artist at a fancy-dress ball in Chelsea, where she had described herself as ' a tube of rose madder ', and he as ' madder still '. ' The new acquaintance was clinched in typical fashion. Perturbed at the perversity of a glove which refused to be buttoned, he at length turned despairingly to his partner. 'If you will button my glove for me', he pleaded, 'I THE DE MORGANS 35 will give you one of my pots.' The bargain was struck, the glove was buttoned, the pot accepted, and the comradeship cemented for all time.' How happy a comradeship, how profitable, delightful to witness, encouraging to know about, Mrs. Stirling's book is here to declare. Evelyn De Morgan was a sound artist of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, cryptic, allusive, full of symbolism and all sorts of emotional urgencies with which art perhaps has little to do. Yet she served Beauty all her days ; and if some of that which she saw and served was not of this, or any, world, so much the worse, I dare say, for this, and any, world. She was in her way a mystic, shrank from exhibition, and (says Mrs. Stirling) kept certain of her pictures by her, not as unsaleable, but as not for sale. It is certain that she was both help and insjjiration to her husband. The best thing he ever did in pottery was of her modelling. The bust of Pan is a fine and strong piece of work. Donatello need not have scorned it. I don't remember to liave seen it in exhibition, where it should have been, or should be. When the pottery failed him, having exhausted his store of health, and his wife's and his own store of money too, at the age of sixty-five l)e Morgan commenced novelist. Joseph Vance s origin is like IVaverley s : ' In 1901, during a spare hour, he had written two ciiapters of a novel, "just to see what I could do", he explained subsequently. " I always loved grubby little boys, and I thought I should like to write a story of a grubby little boy. I began and got interested in him. But when I read over wli.il I h.id written, I was so little impressed with the result that 1 nearly hurnl it ; in any case I put it away in a drawer and forgot all about it. Later in the year, when we were going out to Florence, it c 2 36 THE DE MORGANS accidentally came with us among a great mass of business papers.' . . . Shortly afterwards De Morgan was ill in bed, suffering ostensibly from influenza, but principally from the unwonted idleness wliich filled him with depres- sion and sapped his vitality. Evelyn took the piece of manuscript to liim and laid it by his bedside, with a pencil temptingly adjacent. " I think something might be made of this ", she said briefly. When she looked in softly half an hour later he had started on the occupation which he was never again to abandon, and was writing rapidly.' Its success astonished and delighted him. He was not at all prepared for it. ' My book was written in the serenest independence an author can enjoy, to wit, a total disbelief in ultimate publication. I never considered the feelings of my reader for a moment — nor his eyesight.' After it, and the ensuing fuss made about him, it had been much to expect that he should be able to continue that happy, amateur way of writing. Yet ht did it with extra- ordinary ease. Once only, I think, did he repeat himself, when he renewed in, A Likely Story, one of the motifs of // Never Can Happen Again. His bonnet, no doubt, was duly furnished witii its bee. Every novelist, more or less, is a Mr. Dick. What would have happened to Trollope if nobody had told him of King Cophetua .' What would Dickens have done if nobody had ever been cruel to a child ? How would Dumas have enjoyed himself without a man who could play the God .'' In De Morgan's case it only means that certain vistas of life, the shadowy border-country, for instance, between life and the Beyond, with the cloudy company waiting there, were always in his view. Life itself, all life, was his subject ; he scorned nothing, overlooked nothing, relished THE DE MORGANS 37 everything. In all that he resembled Dickens, on whose shoulders he stood for his take-off. He had Dickens's knack of getting behind every character in turn, and so of giving depth and personality even to the supers on his scene. But he rarely caricatured, was nothing of a cartoonist. He made no monsters — Quilps, Creakles, Squcerses ; no bighcads — Mrs. Gamps, Joey Bagstocks, Cousin Feenixes; and while he liad more true humour than Dickens, he had less vitality, lower spirits, a slyer sense of fun. You don't crack your sides over De Morgan ; you chuckle. Capt'n Cuttle, so far as he goes, is in the Falstaff tradition. Jim Coupland comes nowhere near either. He is a human being. Lizerann is beyond Dickens's reach. De Morgan had the artist's restraint. He could be tender without being mawkish : that was where humour served him. Mrs. Steptoe does not fill the stage like Mrs. Gamp. But do, or should, Mrs. Steptoes fill the stage ? l"or a pair of portraits at full length, incomparably better than anything of the sort in Dickens, let me put forward Charlotte Eldridge, a master- piece, and Marianne Cliallis, j)erfect!y true, perfectly reason- able, extremely comic, and extremely touching, all at once. Challis, her husband, is a failure. If you take a novelist for your hero you are inviting failure. Judith Arkroyd is let off too easily. But I don't know any book of Dickens's which gives such a sense of real life as Joseph Vance and // Never Can Happen /l^a'in. It is rash to predict longevity for work of our own day — which, in a sense, his was not— but I know no imaginative prose literature which has more certitude of it than De Morgan's. Wisdom, urely, has found her an house there. Toetic Relativity I REMEMBER very well being in the shop of the late Mr. Elkin Mathews — and let me here lament the loss of so kind a friend of the poets and so true a lover of their mystery — on some occasion of mine many years ago, and alone in it except for an attendant clerk, when there entered to us a tall and serious young man in a brown ulster and broad-brimmed felt, a portfolio under his arm. He inquired for Mr, Mathews, not of me but of the attendant who was hovering near. Mr. Mathews, he was told, was not within a1 the moment, but — what name should he say ? The young man immediately drew himself up. Tall by nature, he seemed now to tower. ' I am a poet ', he said, and took off his hat. Then he added with savage pride, 'And what 's more, I am the only poet this year who has made poetry pay.' Upon that he turned his back upon us, left the shop, and I saw liim, like great Orion, sloping grandly to the West, his hat still in his hand. My companion caught my eye, and (I believe) winked his own. ' Satisfied ! ' he said. ' They are like that.' Yes, they are like that. The ' sudden glory ' which came upon that youth as he announced, not his forensic but his incondite self, is the symptom of a steadier glow, one which I think to be peculiar to the poetic calling,, and by no means only to those who do it credit. The servants of the Fine Arts seem not to know it. I doubt whetlier the architect or the painter treads the ways of this world as if they were Milky Ways. POETIC RELATIVITY 39 The novelist may think snugly of himself, and some of them have excellent reasons ; but those are personal reasons. His view is likely to be that he ennobles rather than is ennobled by his profession. He never, so far as my know- ledge goes, has predicted immortality for himself. The poet has often done so, and more frequently believed it. And that belief, or that assertion, may have been entirely independent of tiie excellence or otherwise of his poetry. Wordsworth had no more doubt of his poetical than of his personal immortality, and justly. But Southey had none either, of his. ' If Gilford could see me by this fireside,' he wrote to his friend Bedford, ' he would see a man . . . working hard and getting little — a bare maintenance and hardly that ; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul ; one daily progressive in learning, not so learned as he his poor, not so poor as proud ; not so i)roud as lia]-py. Grosvenor, there is not a lighter- hearted nor a ha]ipiLr man upon tlie face of this wide world.' A letter, surely, none the less gallant, none the less noble, and none the less sincere for the fallacy upon which it rests. He wrote poems for posterity, to which posterity has had nothing to say ; jioems which, it is likely, weie forgotten before his lionourable and laborious life went out in total eclipse. They are not so positively bad as merely negli- gible. No matter. He shrank from no comparison on their account. .John Rickman found fault with Madoc, but Southey was not at all iiurt. He even confessed to 1 blemish or two. Tiien he said : ' Having confessed thus much, 1 ought to add, that the poem is better than you think it . . . compare it with tiic Odyssey, not the //idd; witii King John or 40 POETIC RELATIVITY Cor'iolaniis, not Macbeth or The Tempest. ... As far as I can see, with the same eyes wherewith I lead Homer and Sliakespeare and Milton, it is a good poem and must live.' An astounding profession which can throw glory, like dust, in a man's eyes ! * Must live ', he says, not ' should live'. And then, Madoc and the Odyssey — alas, my brother ! But, as Mr. Mathew's young man said, ' They are like that '. It follows, I tliink, or it may be inferred at least from those examples, that the certainty of fame resides in the pride of the profession of poet, not in the vanity of the individual. And, after all, is it so soon to be dismissed ? You never can tell. These are early days to be sure of Southey, or of Hayley cither. Madoc, or The Triumphs of Temper may yet revive, Shakespeare, we know, predicted highly of himself, and happens to have been right. Yet his fame was a long time on the road. Fuller, in 1670, included him as a Worthy of Warwickshire, thinking that in him ' three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded ' — which is a very guarded judgement. His three were Martial (but only as having a warlike name, like Shakespeare), Ovid as ' the most natural and witty of all the poets ', and Plautus, ' an exact comoedian yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. He continues, ' Add to all these that though his genius generally was jocular and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious.' So much for the author of Lear in 1670. Not extravagant praise. Fuller did not even know the year of his death ; he left it blank. Pepys treated him with equal freedom. He tliought many of his jjjays 'silly' and probably perferred POETIC RELATIVITY 41 Sir George Etherege. May not such facts as these have encouraged Hayley, supposing him to have needed encourage- ment ? It is not so surprising, then, that the critical faculty is uncertain in the poets. If you excuse them for being blind to their own faults, even for believing them to be merits, you must not expect a more reasonable judgement of the work of their friends. Landor thouglit Southey sure of an eternity of fame, while he was much more cool in his estimate of Wordsworth. But Landor, perhaps, was not of a critical quality. Gray certainly was. Yet Gray took an infinity of pains with Mason, took him much more seriously, for instance, than Collins. And Collins is now with Gray ; and where is Mason ? Walpole, who detected Chatterton for a cheat, never did for a poet. He happened to be both, and as a poet he lives. But one might go on so forever, and be both right and wrong in drawing conclu- sions. I feel safe only in saying that a good poet may know how good he is, but rarely how bad ; and tliat a bad poet always thinks he is not so bad. Nor does it in the least matter to his happiness (which is the great thing, after all) how bad or how good he is. The sense of vocation, the uplifting, the sting of the oestrus, the consecration and the dream ; the power, the glory, the wings, the all-discerning eye ; the pangs of gestation and birth ; the sympathy, laughter and tears ; the bleeding heart, soaring head, labouring bosom — all these the worst poet in the world shares witli the best. Tiicre lies his reward, whether he makes poetry pay or not. And, as for the scoffing world, I have a tale about that, none the worse for being a true one. A friend of mine met a poet one day in the entry of a clul). I su|)pose, if every one had his 42 POETIC REI-ATIVITY rights, lie might claim to be the worst poet in England, if not in Europe. He had in his hand, when my friend met him, the number of a Review in which, as was notorious, he had been treated as Apollo treated Marsyas. ' Ah ', said my friend, ' I see that you know the worst '. The victim struck the offending quire with his free hand. ' That', he said, ' should never have been written.' Thev are like that. Th(^ Ibmans SIR ARTHUR KEITH, a distinguished man of science, and not the less so for being a man of imagina- tion, reported the other day at some length upon the skull of Sir Thomas Browne. His millimetric scale enabled him to presume Iberian or Mediterranean lineage for the illustrious doctor, advancing upon which lie oj)ened, very tentatively (as is the scientific way), a new road of travel for the explorers of our idiosyncrasy. The line of his argument would seem to be something of this kind. It is true that we English, with every other European nation, are of mixed descent, and that into our production have gone Celtic and Nordic strains ; but the base, so to speak, of the brew is Mediterranean ; and it is to that, and its reactions in the other interbreeding races, that we must look if we desire to account for the specific quality of the British genius. It is the rash act of an amateur to enlarge professional nods and becks, but I hope I do him no wrong. We know notliing, or almost nothing, of our neolithic ancestry, but that they were heie, were never extirpated, and can be traced to-day. We know how they maintained themselves, sheltered themselves, and buried each other. We believe them to have been sun-worshippers, skilled in the courses of the stars ; we think that they were small, long-headed people, dark of skin, grey in the eye. We can detect those features easily still in the south-west, more s])arsely in the south-east, rarely in the midlands. Wc have no traces left of their sj)eech, unless the root of the word 44 THE IBERIANS Britain is the root of other race-names like Aquitaine and Lusitaine, and also an aboriginal root.' That is not much to go upon ; yet it is all. The rest is postulate or inference. We put it generally that no race was ever exterminated by invaders ; and I should like to put it on my own account that if physical characteristics can persist through many successive invasions, so must moral characteristics, depending as they do much upon tradition. Is it possible to over-rate the persistence of tradition, or too much to say that it can hardly be distinguished from instinct.'' I would not go so far as a natural philosopher did the other day, who saw in the nurse's familiar re])roach, ' You little monkey ', a recollection of our supposed original, but should not be afraid to suggest that in custom and locution, in nursery rhyme and game lie hidden modes of being which can be traced back to the very roots of our history. The first things which a child hears its mother say or sing are precisely those which that mother, herself a child, learned from hers. And so we can work backwards, as I believe, to Britons who were here before Stonehenge was, and might conceivably have seen the last of the glaciers. Tradition of that sort, lap-lore, would be as certainly derived through the mother as, it appears, the stature, form, and colouring of our latter-day peasantry are derived. Tradition, uncon- scious memory — which now is this ? A country-woman, writing to me the other day about the troubles of a friend ' The learned Dr. .Sayce has suggested that certain of our words of unknown or of no etymology — dog, pig, boy, girl, he gives — are neolithic survivals. In ' structure ', he adds, on the authority of Professor Breal, ' no comparative philologist would imagine our language to be Indo-European '. Some one should compare linglish and Basque in these particulars. THE IBERIANS 45 of hers, said of her, ' She had a good husband too, one that looked out for her '. Not, observe, ' looked after her '. ' Looked out for her.' I hope it is not too fanciful to trace that locution back to the pit-dwelling on the hill-top, to the dyked enclosure and the borstal and the mist-pool ! But when Sir Arthur Keith suggests that we may be able to account for the quality of Sir Thomas Browne's genius, and by inference that of other great men of ours, by his Mediterranean descent, there are difficulties which do not confront us when we lay to that far lineage the out- standing moral quality of the peasantry. Aesthetic quality would not so easily be accounted for by tradition. And it would be necessary to presume a peasant origin for Sir Thomas ; for it is a matter of certainty, surely, that while extirpation did not await our aborigines, two other fates did — servitude for the men and concubinage for the women. I don't see how that can be doubted. It is therefore only in the peasantry that Iberian descent can be certainly pre- sumed. And even if Sir Thomas was come of a peasant stock which had gone up in the world, it would be difficult to prove the same fact of all our poets. Yet it would be as easy to show a specific aesthetic quality in our literature as a specific moral quality in our peasantry. I am the more interested in Sir Arthur's report because scientific acceptance of the persistence of Iberian quality affords me reasonable support for the statement which I made (in a book of serious intention), that the English have always been, and arc now, in reality two nations, a dominant conquering race, and a conquered one, which have never coalesced. I called them then the Norman and the English, but think now that it would be better to call them the English and the British. English and Normans, aristocracy 46 THE IBERIANS and middle-class, are by this time one people. The Public Schools, the Services and the Professions have seen to that. But the more we know of the peasantry the more separate they seem to be. Their outlook is different, their moral habit, temperament, intellectual habit. Race and tradition will account for it. Such a state of things is, to me, a matter of great interest. To live familiarly, as I do, with the possessors of such a venerable inheritance thrills me. But it has its inconvenient side. Some friends of mine enjoyed the services of a valued and charming maid. She had been with them for many years, had made herself necessary to their comfort, and seemed as happy to impart as they were to receive it. Through all the vicissitudes of domestic fortune which most of us have had to undergo of late she only had remained constant ; and they had learned to count upon her. Quite suddenly, then, she said that she must leave. She was needed at home ; it was urgent. Nothing could stay her, she must go. And she did. Next day the only two servants remaining in the house, a man and wife, silently flitted in the small hours (not without plunder), and the household was derelict —as I may say, marooned upon its own hearth. Now the point is that that charming, grace- ful, resourceful, and apparently faithful girl had known of the intention of the evil pair, and while she was forbidden by all the laws of her nation from warning her employers of it,' was clear in her own mind that she was not piepared to cope singlehanded with a largeish establishment. So she had gone, leaving my friends to their fate. The remedy of the conquered race ! I pointed it out, showed how interesting it all was, to my friends. But they didn't see it. The Ballad-touch 7^HE Beggar s Opera itself is a decadent night's enter- tainment, spiced for jaded appetites, like devilled bones after a revel ; and the songs in it, which were all composed for extant airs, are at least as provocative by their contrast with them as by their accord. Most of the airs are simple country things, ballads, jigs, rounds, catches, and so on, soft recorders of homely and material pleasures ; but most of the lyrics to which they are made to lend them- selves are of the sophisticated logic of the Restoration, concerned with sentiment rather than experience, genera- lities about wonjen and wine and such-like : If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares, The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears ; or If love the virgin's heart invade, How like a moth the simple maid Still ])lays about the flame I — reflections which certainly commit one to nothing very definite. Really, it is all belated Charles IL just the thing for Mr. Pepys, who loved good music and fine women, but loved thinking about them at least as much as dealing with them. Knipp would have made a saucy Macheath — and how Nell Gwynn would have brought down the house with 'Jicforc the b.irn-door crowing! ' Polly, to be sure, belongs to a more wholesome tradition. She is new. It was Polly — in other words, heart — no acquaintance of the seventeenth century's, which saved The Beggar s Optra for posterity, as the plays of Dryden and Congreve and 48 THE BALLAD-TOUCH the rest of them have not been saved. I do not know that any work of literary art in which heart has not entered has survived its day. The Beggar s Opera is as good an example as one could want of that saving grace. Many wittier plays have been seen on the London boards, and many more suggestive ; but their glitter and inuendo have not availed them. What, indeed, of the whole wordy seven- teenth century has kept the stage but Shakespeare ? Apart from their music Gay's songs are little worth, for the simple reason that being of the head rather than the heart they have nothing worthy to report. General statements will not make poetry, which must proceed upon facts, things done or suffered. So it is that the ballad is the true lyric in the historic sense that to illuminate narra- tive was the first office of the lyre. Children dancing in a ring will be near enough for the beginning of lyrical poetry, whether singing because they were dancing, or the other way about, doesn't greatly matter. Nonsense words, to which no one could help mopping and mowing — ' Lillum- wham, Lillum-wham ', or .laques's 'Ducdam6, ducdamc, ducdame ' — presently gave way to sense ; and the sense was narrative because, before men had sentiments they had experiences, before they thought about things (and long before they thought about feeling them) they felt them. Fact was then the main business of life, as it is not now : fact past, present, or to come. Neither tense nor mood could impeach narrative ; for as tilings have happened to us, so they will. So it is that Shakespeare can cast narra- tive into the imperative, or forecast it into the future : Take, O take those lips away .... or What shall he have that killed the deer.-" THE BALLAD-TOUCH 49 No doubt but the songs with whicli Shakespeare be- jewelled his Comedies were fitted to airs ready made. The learned will know, but I am not myself aware that any of them have survived. All 's one for that, since they sing themselves. Counting in the fragments, such as those heartbreaking snatches of Ophelia's, or those with which Edgar and the Clown add to the mad humours of the wind- swept Lear^ there are more than forty of them altogether, and it is a noteworthy thing that all but two or three are concerned witii fact. Juno and Ceres in the Masque of The Tempest promise blessing by and large ; and perhaps Hymen's song in /is Tou Like It, ' Wedding is great Juno's crown ', and that gracious interlude, ' Tell me where is Fancy bred ', which is sung while Bassanio is choosing his casket, make some approach to the generalizing of expe- rience. I don't think there are any others which are not in the narrative vein, or which do not deal with the affairs of men and maids, flowers and bees and birds, as we find each other in this our life. The eight songs in The Tempest turn the play into a fairy opera, and all but one glorify life as we know it. From the sparkle and salt s])ray of ' Come unto these yellow sands ' we turn to hear the passing-bell of ' Full fathom five ', and then — how like life I — we crash into the rollicking chorus. The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I ; and end with ' Where the bee sucks ' ! Heavenly, or rather earthly entertainment; entertainment for the Earthly Para- dise. /Is Tou L'tke It has six, if not seven, songs in it ; and Cymbeline, which is a very rhetorical, diflicult play, of rough versification and more parentheses to its length tiian any other, contain<< two of Shakespeare's j)erfect lyrics — ' Fear no more ', which to my mind has but one equal, D 50 THE BALLAD-TOUCH and ' Hark, hark. ! the lark ', a lovely, fresh thing which makes the mouth of Cloten golden for the moment. Think again of The Beggar s Opera in that connexion, and imagine the kind of aiibade Filch would have made of it : Press her, caiess her. With blisses and kisses, or some such apophthegm of erotic philosophy. I am comparing small things with great, for in art, per- fection is the staple by which all must be tested ; but the truth seems to be, as I have suggested, that you cannot make good lyrical verse, which will sing, out of generaliza- tions, erotic or other. I don't mean, of course, that you cannot fit words to tunes, because Gay did that happily enough : rather I mean that the singing quality must be in the content as well as in the words. It is the heart that must indite the good matter; and far though the cast may be I believe that we must reacli forward to Burns to find Shakespeare's equal in song : O wha my babie-clouts will buy ? Wha will tent me when I cry ? Wha will kiss me where I lie ? The rantin' dog the daddie o't. That is in a Shakespeare vein, and in a ballad vein, as un- premeditated and as artless as the song of the chaffinch, having the irresistible flow, the singing, dancing quality which can only spring from the wedding of fact and heart. You get exactly the same touch in the ballad, which is the expression of the lowliest of us : The wind doth blow to-night, my love, A few small dro])S of rain : I never had but one true love, In cold grave she was lain. THE BAIJ, AD-TOUCH 51 How exactly the very grain of that is in Shakespeare ! He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone ; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. And in Burns too : the same matter, the same gush of sound ; like a bird singing in a brake. And after those two. Heine. And tliat 's about all. D 2 The 'Facts' THE old definition of Poetry, that it is a branch of literature which ' states the facts and rhymes in places', comes into mind when reflecting upon the evil days wliich have befallen the Sublime — that high Sublime of which Longinus discoursed with such sagacity, and Burke with such a want of it. It is badly blown upon, that ' big Bow-wow ', as Sir Walter called it. It has a kind of taste which the Georgian poets cannot away with. The reaction has been sharp, not to say astringent. For whereas the Sublime stated too few facts and rhymed in too many places, now wc have no rhymes at all, and the facts thrown out with a shovel. To walk through the neo-Georgian page is to set one longing for the steam-roller upon it, to set one sighing for the good easy travelling of the 'seventies and 'eighties, when you could glide down quires of Swinburne or William Morris on rivers of smooth iambics or brisk tidal freshets of anapaests. Yet it is not to be wondered at. We have suffered a surfeit of uplifting. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. No later ago than the 'nineties there was an Ossianic revival. Fiona Macleod was the forensic name of a bard who, in private life, was a gentleman, a burly man of letters, of wide reading, and a great deal of wit. That he found a market for his vaporous highland rhetoric can have sur- prised nobody more than himself; but he found a very good market indeed, and came in, as they say, on the top THE,' FACTS' 53 of it. That is what, even in our day, an ingenious Oriental has also done ; so true it is that there will always be readers who demand of literature an anodyne rather than a stimu- lant. But what proved to be fatal to Fiona Macleod was her daring the ordeal of the theatre. You may drug your- self with written words until you fall liappily asleep : on the stage something must happen. On Fiona's nothing did until the middle of the second act, and what happened then was final. I well remember sitting through her play, mostly in literal, and quite in figurative, darkness. The auditorium was like night, the stage crepuscular. Keen blasts of air blew from it ; dim grey shapes flitted moaning about it, talking of tlie weather and lifting up their arms. One did not know what else they talked of, unless it was mythology ; but I remember that they did nothing else. It seemed that one had been sitting there for weeks before the end came — and the end was this. In a lull of the flitting and talk, a distraught old man in a white beard stood forward and blinked at us. Tlien he smote himself upon the forehead once or twice, saying, ' Wind, wind, nothing but wind ! ' and looked very much surprised when the whole audience rose at him, roaring unquencliable laughter — which was the end of the jiiay. Against false sublimity of the kind the neo-Georgians are protesting now with chunks of ugly and unrelated facts. The eighteenth century, when it took holil of the Sublime and ran it hard, was exceedingly unsuiled to deal with any such thing. Taste, which had been its safest possession, then deserted it. (Jray, with as cool a judgement in art as you could have wished for, was much bitten with Ossian, which to us is so much woolwork; but Gray him- self had produced sonie warrantable specimens of tiie false 54 THE ' FACTS' sublime. There is no difference in kind, only in degree, between ' The Bard ' and ' The Sisters ', and the vapid impersonations of Mason, or the 'big Bow-wow' of Sir Walter Scott. From Gray's time, indeed, until Words- worth's real sublimity disappeared in a flood of insincere, frothy stuff which had no purpose in art at all but to produce — which, whatever it did then, it now does not — a frame of mind in the reader who, it was believed, could be moved and uplifted less easily by facts than by qualifications of them. It would not be untrue to consider the literary period of 1750-1800 as the reign of the adjective — a reign whose patli was made smooth and its way straight by the study of Longinus and the sophistications of Burke. The Greek had desiderated elevation of tiiought, and believed it could be induced by inflation of language; Burke saw the root pf sublimity in terror, and laid it down that ' to make anything very terrible obscurity seems in general to be necessary '. He may be excused for taking things as he found them. You had had fiom Gray : Now the storm begins to lour, (Haste, the loom of Hell prepare,) Iron sleet of arrowy sliower Hurtles in the darken'd air; who then invoked — Mista, black, terrific maid, and other lath-and-plaster machines of the sort. From Mason and liis like you had nothing else. Sad stuff — but if you choose to depend upon adjectives for inducing a frame of mind, that is what happens to poetry. It lias been truly said that the adjective is the natuial enemy of the verb. Of course it is, and of the noun, too : THE 'FACTS' 55 since for every noun heightened by a quaHlication you can show a score bled to death. Not a doubt of" it but the high Sublime has died .of adjectives. Longinus, I know, declared that ' vastness and mystery ' ai e concomitants of sublimity, and his disciples saw no readier way of getting either than by underscoring the facts with which they dealt. But let the reader be pleased to observe what troubles in- volve Gray in the last two lines of the quatrain just quoted from him : in the lirst of them a bald tautology, since his qualification of the effect merely forestalls that of the cause ; in the second, his anticipation of the result of the hurtling of arrows washes out the value there might have been in that strong verb. For, obviously, if you state that the air is already ' darken'd air ', it is not the hurtling which is going to darken it. It was not, however, Longinus who went on from his postulate to infer tiiat, since ' vastness and mystery ' are necessary, therefore ' a ckar idea is a little idea '. That was Burke, and arrant nonsense it is. What is extraordinary, though, is that, relying as he did on the Book of .lob to prove his case, he did not sec how precise the images in tliat great poem are. ' Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee ? Canst thou bind tiie unicorn with his band in the furrow ? . . . Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? . . . Will he make a covenant .with thee ? ' Vastness, yes, and mystery ; sublimity enough : but what could be clearer? And what adjectives do you find there to qualify your great facts ? Not one. It is hardly worth while to remark that literature has no way of escape from the facts by way of vagueness and mystery, it may try to tran^^cend the facts, but it cannot esc.ipe them. You don't escape a thing by jumping over it. Literature 56 THE ' FACTS' is an art, and depends upon the facts, because l>ite docs. But when you seek rather to induce a frame of mind than' clothe the spirit of fact, it is astonishing liovv Httle fact you can do with. I remember calling one day, in Florence, upon the learned and gifted lady who chooses in Literature to be known as Vernon Lee. I found her in her drawing- room with a book, half a sheet of note-paper, a pencil, and a frown. The book was a volume of Swinburne, the half- sheet was blank, and my friend greatly irritated. She told me that she had been going through Hertha, intending to jot down 'the facts' as she went. But there was notliing to jot. Two things, among others, astonish one in Swinburne : the small proportion of fact to diction, the large proportion of adjective to fact. ■ Nevertheless, it does not do to generalize about Litera- ture. No doubt there is a high Sublime to be reached. Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth will lift you to it upon ever-widening circles of splendid imagery. Burke's notion that you cannot be supremely moved unless you experience 'delightful horrour' is nonsense. You can be moved by feeling and sharing the poet's power and mastery. And that is what happens to us when, on his broad back, we sweep upwards and sj^rn the stars with our footsoles. But there is another way of uplifting in which no prepara- tion or building up of imagery is used at all. Supreme emotion may be caused by the use of significant fact alone ; and Longinus, the exponent of the Sublime, was forced to allow it, though it was against the run of his argument. There Is a sublimity, he says, which will do ' like a flash of lightning ' what skill, art, and arrangement may attain in a treatise, or the use of lofty diction persuade you into believing. That kind of sublime resides in fact. ' A bare THE 'FACTS' ' 57 idea', he says, ' by itseU, without spoken word, sometimes excites our admiration because of the greatness of soul inipHed ', He gives two examjjles from Homer, one being the silence of Aias in Hades, when Odysseus went down and saw him there among the dead heroes ; and then a third, and a very interesting one, from the Pentateuch. He takes it, he says, ' from the legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man '. In fact, Moses. ' God said — what? Let there be light ; and there was light.' As sublime as you can have — but perfectly unqualified. If he had searched tiie Scriptures further he would have found examples of that sort of sublimity in every page. To say no more of Job, he could have ])aralleled the silence of Aias, from the Apocalypse. ' And when he had Oldened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour ', — than which, considering all things, I don't know a more tremendous statement in the whole range of the Bible. But Longinus confines himself to epic poetry and rhetoric for his examples both of the high and elevated, and of the other sublime. I wish to go lower in tlie scale, and to sug- gest that in lyric poetry also there is a sublimity discernible which de]jcnds for its power upon the exact contrary of the high sublimity ; one which depends uj)on fact alone, upon plainness of statement and perfect clearness, and wliiiii would be diminished, would imperil, even lose, its sublimity by any vagueness or vastness or elevation or inflation of language. To me the most curious thing about tiiat sort of sublimity is that the lower you go in tiu- pretensions of poetry the more of it you get. It is, imleed, the only k'md of sublimity or uplift which you do get. And it follows, and is true, tliat the closer the Jioet is to the folk, the 58 THE 'FACTS' common people, the less he relies uj)on qualifying adjectives, and the more upon stark fact. It is partly because of this lowly origin (for I cannot doubt but that it originated where we find it most frequently), and partly because of its innocence of apparatus, that I call this kind of power in literature the Little Sublime, and seek to distinguish it from the ' big Bow-wow ' or High Sublime. One needs go no farther afield than ' The Ancient Mariner ' to find an example of each kind of sublimity. Here, firstly, is the High Sublime : O wedding guest ! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea : So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. There is a fine image there, as vague as you please, as ' vague indeed as men's ideas about God are bound to be. It gets its effect by qualification, by adjective. It is not enough for the poet, though it might well have been, that he was alone at sea : he feels bound to tell you more about the sea, and to tell it you twice ; and then he must attempt to tell you how much alone he was. But it is a fine image, all the same. Now, farther on, we have a good examj)le of the Little Sublime : O happy living things ! no tongue Their Beauty might declare : A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware. Mere statement of what happened : A spring of love gushed from my heart. You may be moved by both, or by one more than the other ; but I as a human being declare that the things which move me most are the things which men do, not the things which they think. When I read in a THE 'FACTS' 59 ])oem. just in that ])lace in it (for that is essential), that 'a spring of love ' gushed from the iieart I feel that Hash of lightning which Longinus was driven to admit of. No adjective, no qualification ; any qualification would have weakened it. Just in that place, after long tension, that supreme fact has the effect of sublimity upon me. It lifts, and it moves. I receive ' a sudden glory '. As I have said, you find such fierce and stabbing simpli- city chiefly in the folk-poets. Homer is one of them, who- ever Homer was. The Bible is another, however and by whomsoever the nanative parts of it were written and com- piled. I need not enlarge here upon the precision of the statements there. Fact is all in all. There is neither heightening nor the need of it. Other poets, not at all of the folk, and for other reasons, have dejjended upon fact and i)lain statement ; Dante was one, a very learned hand ; Chaucer was one, thougii he was a court poet. But the man of ours whom I have chielly in my mind at the moment is Sir Thomas Malory ; and that for a i)articular reason. First, however, consider this: Lancelot in the Castle of the Saiigreal; ' 80 came he to the chamber door, and would have entered. And anon a voice said to him, I'lce, Lancelot, and enter not, for thou ouglitest not to tio it. And if thou enter thou shalt foi think it. Then he withdrew him back right heavy. Then looked he u\> in the midst of the chamber and saw a table of silver and the holy vessel covered with red samite, and many angels about it, whereof one held a c.mdle of wax burning, and the other held a cross and the ornaments of an altar ; and before the holy vessel he saw a gooil man clothed as a piiest. And it seemed he was at the sacring ol the mass. And it seemed to Lancelot that above the priest's 6o THE 'FACTS' hands were three men, whereof the two put the youngest by likeness between the priest's hands, and so he lift it up right high and seemed to show it to the people.' That is naked language, as naked as the Bible, but as vivid and as beautiful. No folk-speech could have been less adorned, more unqualified. The reason for its bareness, and for its use by me in this place, is resident in the very nature of romance. Romance looked at life with new eyes and saw everything isolated, startling, stiange. The only possible way of rendering that strangeness was to keep the expression as naked as the thing. Any adjective except its literal equivalent would have blurred the image. Folk-poets may have relied upon fact because, to them, it was the most momentous thing in life. The romance writers valued it because of its strangeness — a strangeness in which they saw an essen- tial element of beauty. But after Malory and the Bible, when Literature found itself and became more art than instinct, the poets mounted their high horses. Literature then shared functions with rhetoric and cookery, sought to persuade, sought to beguile. You had the rodomontade of Marlowe, the sophisticated, italianated romance of Spenser ; you had Shakespeare, wlio could do everything, and had something of everything, including some of the Little Sublime as well as much of the Big ; then Milton, who had practically none ; then the Augustans, who developed the false sublime ; and then the revival. At the very beginning of tliat revival — before Burns, before Blake — you find a beautiful example of the Little Sublime in Lady Ann Lindsay's 'Auld Robin Gray'. There are two lines in the first stanza of that masterpiece which are as fine an example as I know of the poetical use THE 'FACTS' 6i of fact in poetiy. And yet in themselves they are nothing at all. Young Jamie loved me well, And sought me for his bride. But saving a crown He had nothing else beside : To make the crown a pound, Young Jamie went to sea ; And the croivn and the pound Ihey luere loth for me. Mentem mortalia tangunt. Those two last lines always move me. The pathos of the story, the clou of the tragedy is in so inconsiderable a tiling as that. The whole stanza is amazingly good narrative, but the ' sudden glory ' comes at the end. You are let into a cottage interior. A flash of lightning — and you see into the heart. Lady Ann caught the art of that levin-stroke (for with her it was art) from the ballads, which obviously she knew. Where did Wordsworth get it, except under the urge of his daemon ? Unfortunately, though he knew how to use it, and none better, he allowed himself also to abuse it. Here is a curious case, where he overdoes it, and endangei s a poem ; and then saves it by a line— one line of the real thing : The cock is crowing. The stream is flowing. The small birds twitter, The lake doth glitter, The green field sleeps in the sun ; The oldest and youngest Are at work with the strongest, The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising : There are forty feeding like one ! 62 THE ' FACTS ' All that is a catalogue, and, to me, perfectly ineffective, until the last line — the solvent of his brew, which absolutely does the poet's business. Everything drops into its place. Really, it is like a penny in a slot which sets all sorts of machines turning and running about. What was it happened — I forget— whereupon 'the butcher began to kill the ox, the ox began to drink the water, the waterbcgan to quench the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig' — and the pig to get over the stile ? The last line of Wordsworth's ' Poem by Brother's Water' has that effect upon all the others, to my ear. One should not, Socrates said, lay hands upon one's father Parmenides, and I don't want to dwell upon what is undoubtedly true, that Wordsworth ran the use of plain statement to death. Fact ill-used is worse than none ; fact out of place will kill a poem dead. Rightly placed, one fact will make a poem immortal. My last quotation should have settled that. To Wordsworth, I have no doubt, fact was never out of place. Yet — I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis six feet long and three feet wide, is nothing but annoying to the reader. There are many worse cases than that, but I am not going to consider them now. He is a great poet, and may do what he likes for me. And Crabbe : Squire Thomas flattered long a wealthy aunt or Grave Jonas Kindred, Sibyl Kindred's sire,' Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher. ' This seems to desire, as it deserved, Rejected Addresses: John Richard William Alexander Dwyer. Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire. THE • FACTS ' 63 It didn't matter how grave he was, or how high — but Crabbe could never see it. I said a moment ago that the nearer you went to the people, the more of the Little Sublime you found. I am sure that is very true. ' Fact is the constant daily concern of the people who are up against it at every turn. They don't appreciate quality ; their stock of adjectives is restricted, and highly conventional. I have often thought that to hear a good peasant talk is something like listening to Homer, when it is not almost exactly like hearing the Bible, as in Scotland it still is. Well, Homer is folk- poetry, and so is the Bible. The adjectives in each are either conventional or literal. If Homer calls a wave blue, it is blue — and when the Bible says. He went forth a lejjcr as white as snow — there 's no mistake whatever about his whiteness. The Ballads are just like that, and I shall close my paper with them. There are bad ballads as well as good ones ; but the bail ballads are never false, and consequently not nearly so bad as bad sublimity — as Collins on the Passions, or Gray on the Bards. Those things commit the sin against the Holy (Jhost. Bad ballads, like the Robin Hood set, are merely stupid. The good ballads are among the most beautiful things that we possess. Let any one redd the greatest of all, ' The Wife of Usher's Well '.' That is, as the law- yers say, my case. I call attention (c/) to the abundance and significance of plain fact in it ; (/y) to its extraordinary frugality in the use of adjectival qualification ; (r) to the magic, or romantic, envelopment which is obtained by the use of fact alone. It is not possible to get better narrative tlian that, or the effect of the supernatural with a reater ' Child, p. 168. 64 THE 'FACTS' parsimony of means. It is all simple, straightforward rela- tion until we come to — It fell about the Martinmass, When nights are lang and mirk, The carlin wife's three sons came home, And their hats were of the birk. and then and there we are immediately lifted, by no palpable means, into the supernatural. The toucii ' Their hats were of the birk ' certifies us. Directly we hear that we know where we are. Why so, we cannot tell. And this clinches it : It neither grew in syke nor ditch, Nor yet in any sheugli ; But at the gates of Paradise That birk grew fair enengh. Literally it is all done with that. Who can explain it ? Not I. But what adjectival heightening could enhance it ? None. You never know where a fact is going to find you out. It may be in the middle of a poem, as in ' Usher's Well ', or at the beginning, as in ' The Unquiet Grave ; ' and there again I don't know why I am moved by it, as I un- doubtedly am. In that ballad a young man is lamenting at his girl's grave ; and it begins : The wind doth blow to-day, my love, /Ind a fenv small drops of rain : I never had but one true love, In cold grave she was lain. So far as I am concerned, though I can't for the life of me tell how or why, the first two lines turn that ballad for me into the thing of beauty and tenderness which I find it to be; two apparently irrelevant facts about the weather, un- related to anything which is to follow them. I wish I THE ' FACTS ' 65 knew ; but all I have to suggest is based by analogy upon what I believe to be the truth, that certain chords of organ- music will cause glass windows to ring, and sometimes will shatter them. So I tiiink it may not be too fanciful to suppose that certain facts related in their proper place in a harmony or sequence of facts may have an intimate bear- ing upon what we are pleased to call the heart-strings. That happens in life : a thing seen, an emotion voiced may break us down. A spring of love may gush in the heart, when that sealed fountain is struck with the right rod. I can suggest no other reason. If I were to choose two more ballads to bear witness to the uplifting power of bare fact, or to the heartrending power of it, I should choose for the first, 'Thomas Rymer ',' where the clou to the poet's weird experience lies in the statement that — For forty days and forty nights He wade thro' red blude to the knee ; And he saw neither sun nor moon, But heard the roaring of tlie sea. — ])ortents which really make the i)oem ; and for the second, tlie toucliing plea of I'air Annie when Lord Thomas not only proposed to play her false, but invited her to minister to his coming bride.'' So nnu h siie will do for him, she says. Whereupon he — But she that welcomes my brisk bride Maun gang like maiden fair ; She maun lace on her robe sae jimj) And braid her yellow hair. But at the ' jimp ' robe Annie breaks down. Tlv simplicity of her answer ])ierces the heart. » Chilfl.p. 64. " Ibid, p. 118. E 66 THE ' FACTS ' But how can I gang maiden-like, When maiden I am nane ? ^ Have I not born seven sons to thee, And am with child again ? So much, then, for the Little Sublime in literature, which may stir you by a lonely word, or by a concrete image. It is a simple truth that if in narrative poetry you wisii to realize a spade, the best tiling you can do is to call it one, and leave it at that. The revulsion against the ' big Bow- wow ' which we are in the midst of just now will be wortii the eccentricity, the frivolity, the ugliness and brutality which disfigure much present-day poetry, if it lead us ultimately back to the right use of significant fact. We shall in time rediscover the illuminating and transfiguring power of plain statement. z^nalogy from the Tailor's WHEN Hcrr Teufclsdrockh's paper bags, contain- ing the materials for Die Kh'tder, ihr ll^enlen iiml Werken, were consigned to their editor, it does not appear that they included all possible branches of his great subject. There were, in modern phrase, ' avenues ' unexplored, one of which would certainly have led the philosopher to the snow-line of Parnassus. For if literature is not the garment of thought, what on earth can it be ? Who, in these days at least, will suggest oratory as a tolerable substitute? A cloak of darkness, a domino, chain-mail, motley, anything you please in the way of disguise ; but not clothes. If literature, then, be a department of tailoring, consider whether there is not a complete analogy between the way a man wears liis clothes and the style in which he dresses out his thought. I commend it to a colleague of mine ' who has recently anatomized this hardy |)erennial, I hojie to the discharging of iiis bosom — for the stuff is undoubtedly ])erilous. The best-dressed man in London — if there are men left in London who still dress — is he whose old clothes look as if they might be new, and his new as if they were old. (To achieve this distinction it used to be said by dandies, that it was essential to have a man-servant of your own build wlio would not only hot-press your old clothes, but ' J. Middleton Miirry, f/ie Prohlan of .Style. (Oxford University Tress, I'ju.) V. 2 68 ANALOGY FROM THE TAIT>OR'S wear your new before you did.) The ideal which such an exquisite had always before his eyes was that of one whom you should pass in the street, and remark, and go your way remembering, and yet be entirely unaware how he was dressed, or whether he was dressed or not : an ideal, that is, of completeness and distinction of personality, without any local excrescence ; success, in a word, without visible effort. Observe, however, that though the perfectly-dressed man was sensibly, (if you like) palpably clothed, there was nevertheless a something, not himself, not his clothes, but between them, which made him remarkable. He passed you by as himself and nobody else, but also as a memorable man as well as an individual. An emanation, an aura, a presence distinguished him, you knew not how. As some women are known by a perfume, and some men by a white hat or nankeen trousers, so your consummate dandy is known by his totality. So it is with your stylist in literature. That there has ever been a close connexion between literature and the fashions will not, I think, be disputed. The same mental process, the same emotional stresses underlie each mode of expression. You can date a portrait, you can date a poem, by tlie manner of its presentation. Is there no Zuccaro apparent in Elizabethan writing ? No Vandyke in Caroline ? Surely. Do we not read the per- ruque into Congrcve, the Ramillies into Addison, the tie-wig into Gray ? But enough of the fashion, with which style has only so much to do that it keeps a bowing acquaintance with it, ' neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance '. A rough survey of some particular school of writing, such as the Elizabethan or .Jacobean, would perhaps decide the hasty student off- ANALOGY FROM THE TAILOR'S 69 hand that style was universal in those spacious days. It was not ; but fashion was, from which all writers started, which few left, which the many — as is their way — overshot in their exuberance. When Florio went to work on Montaigne, North on Plutarch, Fenton on Bandello, Chapman on Homer, each followed the fashion and outwent it. They were remarkable writers, with tricks which could be caught, with a manner whicli could be copied. But who could copy Shakespeare, who so clothed his thought that, though you could date him by a sequence of six words, you know that their quality rather makes the sixteenth century than is made of it ? There is a sense in which Siiakespeare is an Elizabethan ; yet, as there is no other like him, there is a sense in which he is only Shakespeare, ' not of an age, but of all time '. Don't choose a crowning passage, like Hamlet's ' What a ])iece of work is man ', which you will only better in Isaiah or Job, but a passage of his journey- work : ' She did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart, and brimstone in your liver. You should then have accosted her ; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness.' Banged the youth into dumbness ! Where else among the Klizabethans will you find the like of that ? He could, of couise, out- Florio Florio when he felt like it. He could be as tiresome as Ben .lonson, as cryptic as Bacon, very nearly as foolish as Coryat. He could mouth like Marlowe and make doggerel like Tusser. Much of that was demanded of him, some of it, I think, amused him in the doing. In those j)hases of liis wit where he was pleased to write no 70 ANALOGY FROM THE TAILOR'S better than a Christian or an ordinary man I suppose it must be owned that he shared our rueful heritage of being enabled to drop below our best. Even so, he wore his rue with a difference. How Sir Thomas Browne wore his plain commonwealth habit, and how Milton his ; the one with what a quiet grace, with what a feeling for the distinctive in line and in tone ; the other how encased in the buckram, liow tormented by the starch, it were not hard to show. But Milton's prose forbids quotation, because his sentences are interminable. The Areopagitica goes on and on, like a goods train lumber- ing over Shapp ; Urne-Bunall sheds its mournful wisdom like rose-leaves on the page — elegant'ui quadam propt d'lv'inum. Sir Thomas wears his pedantry lightly. It encumbers Milton at every turn. And then, in full Restoration, Dryden inaugurated a standard of writing which the best after him have always striven after, the standard of extreme plainness and ease of expression, with personal distinctions so subtle as to be unnoticeable except by the a-vviToX. It is remarkable in Swift and Defoe ; it is in the letters of Walpole and Cowper ; it is lost alike by Gibbon and Jolinson ; and in the days of the Regency and the Essayists, with a likeness among them so strong as to make hazardous the work of their biographers and bibliographers, it would have disappeared altogether but for William Cobbett. One can hardly call Cobbett's a quiet style ; yet it is in the Swift tradition. It is plain English, and it is Cobbett too ; not a manner, but a style. In our days, heirs of the ages as we are, with all that effort and splendour behind us, the very wealth we enjoy make style more hard to come by. How can we help being eclectics ? Yet in whose wardrobe had Kinglake plundered ANALOGY FROM THE TAILOR'S 71 to dress out E'dthen ? Of whom was Matthew Arnold tlie sedulous ape ? With great respect to a recent Literary Supplement 1 would urge that Carlyle had manner rather than style, as Emerson, as Meredith. One knows that, surely, because, such as it was, it ended by hiding their thought, born though it had been of a struggle to reveal it. I can recall no cases where style has sprawled into manner ; but over and over again manner has iiardened into mannerism. And of the ultra-moderns one sliould siiy something on this side of discretion. Durst it be hinted that Mr. B — m's literary vesture is the least in life too drawn-in at the waist, the sleeves a thought too tight, the trousers, if anything, with too razor-like an edge ? Or that Mr. C — n's is unduly decollete ? Or Mr. B — c's too weighty for daily wear ? Or that Mr. S — y's ? But no : 1 feel sure that the last-named beau must do as he pleases. The Root of Toesy IN the ' Apology ' prefixed to his latest volume ' Mr. Hardy, certainly the most re\crcd but one of our bards, complains of criticism — of some specifically, and in more general terms of some whicli in fact is hardly criticism at all, but rather an absence of warmth ; not ' glacial judge- ments ', but a reception which has been respectful but unenthusiastic. I suppose it would not be possible to set bounds to the tribute which a poet would receive, as his due, from the public. If the recent Convention of Genoa had been held up while Mr. Lloyd George, assisted by interpreters, read aloud Late Lyrics and Earlier to the plenipotentiaries and united staff; or if the House of Commons had adjourned for a day to possess themselves (say) of some immortal work of my own, I don't know that either Mr. Hardy or I would have thought it anything out of the way. As Mr. Mathews' young man said to me upon a certain occasion, ' They are like that'. But in soberness, and remembering that, as the tag has it, we can't all do every- thing, I don't know that, with all the will in the world, Mr. Hardy's could be described as an endearing Muse. Nearly all his poetry is elegiac — The Dynasts itself is full of elegy ; and elegies, from the time of Gray at least, have been favourites with us. Wistful repining, ' pastoral melancholy ', are what might be looked for from a nation at once serious and restrained, pious and patient. But the tops of the various quills which Mr. Hardy has touched have not been tender. His melancholy could never be ' Late Lyrics and Earlier, by Tliomas Hardy. Macmillan, 1922. THE ROOT OF POESY 73 called a leucocholy. His elegy is frequently ironic, some- times sardonic. He hai-ps upon disillusion, has a crow to pluck with Fate. He is more concerned with the shock of new loss than recollections of old happiness. He does not, indeed, allow us to feel sure that he has ever been happy, ever able to ignore the amari al'tqutd which may have been lurking for him. He has willingly — I do not at the moment say wilfully — courted the Ghosts with which any sensitive man's v;orld may be thronged. He has dwelt much in the past, not with satisfaction ; and has allowed it to overshadow his present. The sun, in fact is behind him, chiefly, as I think, because he has turned it his back. In reading his poetry, strangely difficult, struggling, as it often is, with a reticence which is natural to him and a languor which must be temperamental, one cannot be sure whether he regrets so much as resents that which moves him to utterance. Out of the fullness of the heart the lyre should speak : but of what is Mr. Hardy's heart full ? Or is it his heart, anyhow, which instructs his lyre? It is perhaps extraordinary, but I think it is his head, rather. If that be so it is hojx.-less for him to expect a general or a generous response to his strains. Dee]) calls unto deep, and heart to heart, and head to head ; but seldom, I believe, head to heart. We bend the knee to a mighty intellect, but we neither fall flat on oui faces nor seize Mr. Hardy and carry him shoulder high to the Capitol. His best jjoems are narrative, truly observed, and truly felt. There 's no doubt about the heart there. ' 'I'he Trampwoman's Tragedy ', ' The Sunday Morning's Tragedy ' are piercing ballads, and the former is much more than that — full of wild air, full of landscaj)e, instinct with the ethos of the wanderers of our green roads. In 74 THE ROOT OF POESY such poems, and in certain generalized, plangent scenes in The Dynasts^ Mr. Hardy rises to the height of his power, which is the height of a great English poet. Few have attained sflch a height, still fewer have kept there long. Mr. Hardy has not ; but while he is up he has all our homage. It is when he allows himself to repine, to lament lost opportunity, to contrast what was with what is, apparently to tlieir mutual disadvantage, that, as Dr. Johnson said of equally futile matter, 'the attention naturally retires'. And when, as it were, for mere wantonness, the poet yields to his curious research into the sometimes shocking contluence of things, the attention does not so much retire as sharply withdraw itself — as when the pros- pecting snail fetches up against a brick-and-flint wall. Certain incongruities which he collected and called Satires of Circumstance, he may rest assured, fairly revolted the reader. Of that kind of naughtiness the reception would be glacial indeed. Incongruity may amuse — as his did not ; or it may shock — as his did. Yon may call the peripeteia of the Oedipus both incongruous and shocking : but it was not ' a sell '. The reader was not ' smoked '. The reader does not like to be ' smoked '. Now here, in Late Lyrics ami Earlier, he is smoking us again, not once but repeatedly. In 'Two Serenades' a man sings to his mistress, and (next year !) to a new one (next door!). That is wantonness. In ' I'he Collector Cleans his Picture ' a iigure emerges under his fingers, as he supposes, of ' the ranker Venus '. He kisses the fair similitude and goes on rubbing. Finally he discovers a hag, pointing with her finger towards a bosom Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime. THE ROOT OF POESY 75 A grim morality, treated intellectually rather than emo- tionally. We should be impressed ; the heart should stand still for a moment — instead, the gorge rises. It is not grounded upon emotion. It is an intellectual fantasy. ' The Woodfire ' will offend many, and gratuitously. A man is burning on his hearth logs made of the Tree of Calvary, ' with cuts and stains thereon '. Mr. Hardy must allow me to say that he is too old for such gibes. Let him remember ' Le Procurateur de Judee '. If the thing must be done, that is how to do it. Nevertheless, I think that you shall as well scoff at a man's mother as at his religion. ' Sir Nameless ' is a subject for Ouarles, an apologue upon Mutability, and perfectly legitimate ; but ' The Chapel Organist ' is spoiled by being stretched out beyond the limits of the j)robable into those of the absurd. Many women have sunk, some have deliberately dipped, into ])rostitution — but not in order to play the organ. Humour would have kept him from that tumble into bathos. ' The Whipper-in' is a 'sell', after the order of Satires of Circumstance. A boy comes home from sea and warms at the sight, as he thinks, of his father, the Whip, in his red coat. It is his father's coat, but used now to scare the crows. His father is dead. 'A Military Appointment' is of the same stuff. A girl is waiting for hei- lover, ami another tells her that he will be there, but late. She will wait all night for him, she says. Then the friend tells her that he will be there, but to meet someone else : in fact — he has grown the lover of me ! — That lover of yours — And it 's here our meeting i-^ planned to be.' One cannot cry at that. One smiles- but sourly. There are others of the sort, and I am sorry for them. 76 THE ROOT OF POESY If Mr. Hardy had felt them, he would have written some of them differently, and some he would not have written at all. But we may as well admit — what is indeed sutH- ciently obvious from his novels — that he can be as perverse as the best of us, and is perfectly incurable. Very well ; but then he must not complain of ' glacial judgements ', You may ' smoke ' some readers all the time, and all readers some of the time — at least Mr. Hardy can. But neither Thomas Hardy nor William Shakespeare can ' smoke ' all readers all the time. Edward PERHAPS 'Edward 'is alone in folk-minstrelsy — • I cannot recall another example— in bringing high tragedy into the market-place. By that I mean that it handles crime on the great scale, the dreadful ends which passion may work in a strong character. As a whole the ballads are sad, but not terrible, and their psychology is elementary. Life used to be sad, as it still is ; and the people have always found more relief in tears than in laughter, more balm. Ballad pathos turns upon intimate, sometimes sinful, sometimes merely hapless matter : the jealousy of sisters, the undue pride of brothers, false sweet- hearts, untimely death, lawless love, and such like. If sin there be, it is the sin with which we are most acquainted, that which results from instinct working upon frailty. A mother kills her unlawful child, a brother loves his sister, a lover tries his mistress too hard. Or romance comes in, with startling effect, seldom to hap])y issues. Tamlin is stolen by the ferlies, the carlin wife's dead sons come home ; by their hats ' of the birk ' you shall know them. Tragic pathos is that of 'Lord Randal', where a cruel lady poisons her lover, who creeps liome to his mother to die. Or Barbara Allen gibes at her young man on his death-bed ; or one sister drowns another ; or Lord Thomas comj)els Fair Annie to minister to liis new wile. Pity, these things call for, not terror. But • Edward' is terrible, as terrible as ' Macbeth ', and in its way as powerful. It is no mere piling of horrors. Nearly everything can bj 78 EDWARD made out of a dialogue as elliptic as the kommos of a Greek tragedy, almost as terse as its stichomathy. Yet though it is peeled down to the bones, it is all there, and can be made out with attention. I believe that I have followed to their springs all its implications. Edward is a young man of rank. He has hawks and horses, a turrettcd hall. He is established in tiic world, has a wife and children. Not far off his father and mother arc living; and he may have been their only child. I think that can be inferred. A certainty is that, he was on bad terms with his father, but closely intimate with his mother. Out of that the tragedy grew, for badly as father and son may have stood to each other, father and mother stood worse. Edward's mother hated her husband, justly or unjustly, reasonably or not, on her son's account or on her own, there 's no telling now. I am inclined to think that she desired Edward to inherit — there are hints of that, which make the matter worse. She made no secret of her hatred either. Edward knew all about it. Evidently his mother could never leave it alone. That appears from the way the sequel works out. Edward knew, cannot but have known, what she desired ; though it is plain too that she never told it him in so many words. She made him aware that her griefs were unendurable ; she made her cause seem his, made the worse the better reason ; she tarred him on to quarrel with iiis father. I don't doubt but she arrar^ged the chance meeting on the heath or in tlie wood. Now she stands biting her nails at the hall window at the shutting down of the day, and presently hears the hoofs of a horse, a muffled knocking on the grass ride. Edward comes in, stands in the hall door. He does not look at her, says nothing; but she watches him and is drawn towards him EDWARD 79 in spite of herself. When she is near enough she sees one thing, and that only. He has a sword in his hand, which is wet. She must speak now. So the dialogue begins. The position is this : the one rag the woman has left with which to cover her nakedness is that she had never told Edward to do it. He could not say she had told him. She had been much too careful, too provident of the rag which covers her now. Yet now, although she believes he has done it, she must positively know it. Since he will say nothing, she must ask him. Not in so many words, because that would betray her. That would show Edward what she knows and he (she thinks) does not — that she had contrived it all ; first put the thing in his mind, then laid the grounds of quarrel, and arranged the chance meet- ing. Nevertheless, if he will not tell her she must get at it somehow ! The wet blade insists. It holds her eyes. She cannot now think or sjieak of anything else. So she begins : Why does your brand so drip with l)lood, Edward, luiwartl, And why so sad gang ye O ? He answers in a dream, never looking at her: Oh, I have killed my hawk so good, Mother, mother, And I had no more than he ( ). That won't do for her. She had not expected that he would hold her off" like that. liesides, it is too thin a story. So she tells him. Your hawk's blood was never so red, Edward, Edward, My dear son, I tell thee O. 8o EDWARD I believe that he lends himself to her shifts, scoffs at them, perhaps, in his next evasion : Oh, I have killed my red-roan steed, Mother, mother, That erst was fair and free O. I judge by his choice of animal, Will that be red enough for you ? But she must go through with it, and drag him after : Your steed was old, and you have mair, Edward, Edward, Some other dule you dree O. The thought of that breaks him. He tells her the truth. Oh, I have killed my father dear. Mother, mother, Oh, I have killed my father dear, Alas, and woe is me O ! There are limits to what one can do even in self-defence. She is not going to pretend to Edward that she is shocked or startled. She knows that she can't carry that off. But she must find out more about his own feelings — everything about them if she can ; and especially how they are towards herself. She makes a wide circuit. And whatten penance will ye dree for that, Edward, Edward ? My dear son, now tell me O. He will ship oversea, he says. The boat is there wait- ing. But he stands dazed as before ; neither looks at her, nor goes to his boat. He has done her business, and she is free. She need not care whither he goes, nor how he goes. But there is more to know yet — one thing which she must know. She EDWARD 81 pursues her roundabout way. He will go oversea ? But what of his house and lands ? They don't interest Edward. Let the house fall, he says. But his wife and children — nothing for them ? Yes, indeed, he will leave them the best thing he has. The world's room, let them beg through life, Mother, mother. For them no more will 1 see O. Now she is up against it. After all, lie is her only child — and it may all have been done for him. So she risks it. And what will ye leave to your own mother dear, Edward, Edward, My dear son, now tell me O. Then, as I think, he looks at her for the first time, and strips her of her rag. 'i^he curse of hell from me shall you bear, Motlier, mother. The curse of hell from me shall you bear, Such counsel you gave me O. 'I'hat is the most tragic of all the ballads, and ])i.r!iaps as tragic a story as there is in the world. 'o///'^ Well that Ends We IF IT must have been remarked before, though I cannot recall it, how prone Shakespeare was to fairy-tale plots for his comedies, and iiow liable to upset their delicate logic by the introduction of realism in some part or another, A Winters Tale is thus endangered by the jealousy of Leontes, treated with dreadful sincerity ; Shylock over- weights The Merchant of Venice ; Malvblio is apt to turn Tiveljth Night into a tragedy ; Measure for Measure is an outrage to the moral sense ; The Tempest is threatened by Caliban. A Midsummer Night's Dream and As Tou Like It are successful throughout because they are fantasy throughout. If, in fact, you make a fairy boat for your- self, you may load it with kings and queens of pastoral Garamant and witches of Atlas, but a Count Cenci will capsize it. AlTs Well that Ends Well, a comedy not often performed, but about to be so,' as I have heard, presents some curious considerations to a close reader. It is an unpleasant version of a charming original. It is undoubted Shakespeare, but Shakespeare at his worst. Troilus and Cressida is more perverse, but finelier written. It is so well written that one cannot help su])posing that it means something more than it appears to mean. Nobody need thinkthat of ^//'j IVtll. ' Giletta of Nerbona cures the King of France of a fistula and asks of him in marriage Beltramo of Ros- ' It has actually been done since I wrote, at Stratfonl, with the not surprising result, as I understand, that Parolles and the comic relief became the main business of the comedy. 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 83 siglione, who, being married to her against his will, scorns her and goes away to Florence. While he is there, paying court to a young lady. Giletta, impersonating her, consorts witii him and wins of him twin sons : whereupon he is inspired with affection for her and takes her to wife.' That is Boccaccio's summary of the ninth novel of the third day of the Decameron, the source of Shakespeare's play, and a fair statement of a tale which, if not very much like life as it is, or was, is ])erfectly agreeable to life as it might and could be. Giletta, according to Boccaccio, was not an adventurer in love, but in business — her own and Nature's. She, a nominal countess, intended to be a real countess ; she, a nominal wife, intended to be a wife and mother. Beltramo was equally human. He had not been prepared to take a surgeon's daugliter to his heart, but having had lur there unbeknown, when he saw her the undoubted mother of his sons, he did what gentlemen, and most parties to commercial marriages, tio : he felt his heart warmed to her and desired to do her honour. If Shake- speare had followed Boccaccio more closely than he did he might have made a better comedy ; but a fair summary of /Ill's IV til that Ends Well works out like this: ' Helen of Narbonne, having won by a trick the hand of Bertram Count of Koussillon in marriage, with no pretensions to his heart, is re])udiatetl by him after the ceremony. She hears of him jiresently as in I'lorence, laying siege to a lady of that city ; goes thither herself, and by a second trick wins the ring off his finger and a pledge of his |)assion for another ];erson : confronting him with which, he is content to take her.' One difference Ix-tween the two plots is exposc-d in this outline of Shakesj)eare's. Our poet was obliged to insist K 2 84 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' upon the ring because lie could not wait for the twins, or for even one of them. Another and equally important difference cannot be so brought out. It lies in this, that Shakespeare was driven, it would seem, to bring Diana, the Florentine young lady, into his last act, whereas Boccaccio, having made his use of her, could leave her snug in Florence with Giletta's dowry ducats in her pocket. But why it was that, having his Diana at Roussillon, he should cause her to be flatly repudiated in insulting terms by his Bertram, and cause Bertram consequently to be the only hero of a comedy who was proved a liar and no gentleman in just about two minutes, is not so easy to account for, except by supposing that Shakespeare was in a Troilus-and-Cressida mood at the time, and thought that men were uncommonly like monkeys. An alternative, and (to my mind) the right one, is that he was in a What-You-Will mood, for in the last act of this preposterous play one of those lightning conver- sions from loathing to love which he had tried in Tivo Gentlemen of l^erona is made to bring down the curtain. Each of them, perhaps, comes to the same thing : if Shake- speare thought that men were like monkeys, it would follow that he despised his audience. But there is more at stake in it than literary conscience : a theory of human love is at stake ; and one of these days a methodical study of Shake- speare's philosophy of love must be undertaken. One knows what Homer's was ; one knows what Dante's was. Each was of its time, and fairly stated. But Shakespeare was a dramatic, not a narrative, poet. The realism of the stage made theory stare at you as if it had been covered with whitewash. Every contour of it was thrown up by a hard shadow. It was a thing for admiration, for accept- ance or abhorrence. In Shakespeare it was not constant. 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 85 but varied from year to year. There is not mucli doubt what was the matter with it when AITs IVell was put to- gether. Nor is there any doubt about Boccaccio's theory of love. It belonged to his time and nation, to which Dante's also belonged ; and the one did not exclude the other. It did not enter Giletta's head to blame Bcltramo for his pursuit of Diana, nor would it have entered it if Beltramo and she had been in normal marital relations. At the same time she did not doubt but that Diana, given a dowry, could be comfortably provided with an alternative lover. When you read all that in its Italian-garden setting, and have it told you in the hard, bright, cogent Italian manner by a man who is sure in his own mind alike of his facts and jjsy- chology, it sounds exceedingly reasonable. Observe, for instance, how Boccaccio deals witii tiie turning-point of his intrigue. GiletUi in Florence, disguised as a pilgrim, scrapes acquaintance with Diana's mother and lays open her griefs. These being symj)athctically received, she goes further. It is necessary, she says, tliat,she have her liiisbanti's ring, and also that she bear him a child — ' two things which, so far as I know, no other person can help me to obtain cxce))t yourself, if that which I have heard is true, namely that tiie Count my husband seriously loves your daughter.' To whom the lady made answer, ' Madonna, wiulher the Count loves my il.iugiiter or not 1 am unable to tell you ; he gives every a])j)earance of it at least. But how can I Ix" of service to you in such a matter, and wiiat do you desire of me ? ' ' Madonna,' re|)lied the Countess, ' I will tell you ; but in ihe first place I desire to point out what will follow u])on your serving me. I sec your daughter a 86 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' lian'dsonie girl of marriageable age, and from what I have understood, and is indeed apparent, the lack of means to make a marriage causes you to keep her at home. I propose, in recompense for the service which you will do ' me, to bestow upon her immediately out of my resources such a dowry as you may consider suitable for her honourable settlement.' This jjroposal was pleasing to the lady who, being of high mind, said nevertheless, ' Tell me, Madonna, in what way I can go to work for you, and if it be lawful for me I will willingly do it — after which you may do as it seems fitting.' Then said the Countess, ' It will be necessary that you let it be known to the Count by some trustworthy person of yours that your daughter is ready to do his ])leasure so soon as she is sure that he loves her as lie has declared. That, how- ever, she will never believe until he send her the ring which he wears on his hand, upon whicli she has heard that he sets great price. That ring, siiould he send it, you will give to me. You will then send word to tlie Count that your daughter will be prepared to do his will ; you will cause him to come to your house under cover of the dark ; and secretly, in exchange for your daughter, you will put me beside him. It may be that God will give me the grace to conceive, and that then, having his ring on my finger and his son in my arms, by himself begotten, I shall recover him, and dwell with him as wives should with their husbands : of which happiness you will have been the cause.' Nothing could be more reasonable than that, given the time, j)lace, and persons of the dialogue. Not only is it reasonable, but it is touching. ' It may be that God will give me the grace to conceive. . . .' That was, is, and will be the way of it to those among whom Boccaccio lived, for whom he wrote, of whom he was. But in AWs Well we are prepared for another state of 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 87 mind. From the opening scene there can be no doubt of Helena's distemper. There is no living, none, If Bertram be away. It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it, he is so above me : In his briglit radiance and collateral light ■ Must I be comforted, not in his sj)here. Th' ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated by the lion Must die for love. . . . In that, in her sudden outburst to Parolles, the best speech in the play : Not my virginity yet. There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother, and a mistress, and a friend, A phoenix, captain, and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear: His humble ambition, pioud humility. His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet, His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world Of pietty, fond, adoptious Christendoms, That blinking Cupid gossips . . . ; and in her confession to the Countess, on her knees : I know I love in vain, strive against hope ; Yet, in this c.ipiious and intcnible sieve I still pour in the waters of my love. And lack not to lose still : tims, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshij)per, But knows of liim no more, . . . we are to learn that we have a matter of higli passion before us, a matter of exalted physical stress, sucii as .luliet's 88 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WEl,L' was, i.uch as Viola's. If we are to allow, which is hard, tliat it was high enough to justify the tricked marriage, we must remember that to Shakespeare at a certain stage of his theory high passion was unsophisticated physical desire, and sim))ly leave it there. In Viola there are symptoms that something more transcendent may have been at work, that there was related to the physical a spiritual need. At any rate, Helena is his only heroine who has none of the qualms of maidenhood. Those qualms apart, there is seldom anything else the matter with his maidens than a desire, frankly expressed, to be married as summarily and as completely as possible. 1 pass over the business between the afflicted King and Helena with the remark that, in Stevenson's phrase about the resurrection of the Master of Ballantiae, it is ' steep, sir, steep ! ' in both versions, but that on the whole Boccaccio carries it off the better, because tiie quicklier. That is where tlie novelist has a pull. He can skim over his thin ice, while the dramatist must remain in it, and risk wef feet, if not drowning. It is in the Florentine intrigue that Shakespeare varies his original, and for the worse. To begin with, he was in two minds about it. In III, V, it is the mother of the courted Diana who has the idea, or half the idea, of the trick. Hearing of Bertram's lady as ' the wife of a detesting lord ', and pitying her, she adds musingly : This young maid might do her A shrewd turn, if she pleased.' " It is just possible that the widow means a ' turn ' for tlie worse, for ' shrewd ' is generally used in the sense of injury ; but I cannot imagine that Shakespeare would have thought the fact worse than the ii.Untion. 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 8y No more is made of it there, and it is forgotten by the poet, who in III, vii, makes Helena propound it to the widow. This scene is both short and crude, forty-eight lines all told. In it, without any preamble, Bertram is made the stuff of brokeiage. Three thousand crowns are to obtain his ring and his company. Helena closes with a characteris- tic tag : Why then to-night Let us assay our plot ; whicli, if it speed, Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed. And lawful meaning in a lawful act, Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact. It is not possible to deny that Boccaccio puts the better face upon what is at best an uncomfortable situation, if only because in his story it was a matter of business and desire of children, whereas in Shakespeare it was a matter of love. But Shakespeare is at no pains to explain how or wiiy Helena could have tiiought Bertram worth having on such terms. It was necessary that he should have done so because of the exalted note u])on which he opened her sorrows. It was not necessary for Boccaccio, who is therefore able to carry it off. He may not convince us that it was a reasonable procedure, but he is successful in jH-'rsuading us that his two ladies thought it was. He does more. In making Gilctta stress the possibilities of what Helena, a true Shakes])earian, calls ' the encounter ', he makes her a human being, and a touching one. Helena says nothing about the grace of God. All her thought is possession of the ring, possession by Bertram. She gives the im])ression of JK-ing all for the fact ; consequently she is not like a human being, or at least she is not like a girl in love. 90 'ALL"S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' The end of the play is one of the worst in Shakespeare. It is worse than that of Tivelfth Nighl, because it is not condoned by poetry and because none of the characters are sympathetic ; it is worse than that of Tiuo Gentlemen of Verona, because that is a frank absuidity, and nobody cares two straws about anything in it but its being over. Yet in Boccaccio the end is charming, as this will surely prove : ' When it seemed to her that the time was come, she took to the road without being known of anybody, and went to Montpelier, where for a few days she rested, and inquired here and there whereabouts the Count might be. Understanding that he would be in Roussillon at All Saints, and would make great cheer there for ladies and their cavaliers, tliither she went in her mere pilgrim garb, as she had been used, and, finding that the company was assembled in the Count's palace and about to go to table, without change of dress, with her two children in her arms, she thrust into the hall, and went about from man to man until she saw the Count. Throwing herself at his feet, weeping, she said, " My lord, I am your un- happy wife, who, to allow you to return to your house, has been long wandering about the world. I require you, in the name of God, to keep the pact between us. See here in my arms, not one son of yours, but two ; see here your own ring. Now then is the time come when I should be received by you as your wife, as you have promised ". Hearing all this, the Count came to himself and knew the ring, and the children too, so like they were to him. Nevertheless he said, '" How can this have come about ? " ' Giletta told her story, ' whereupon the Count, seeing that she had told him the truth, seeing also her perseverance and her wit, seeing moreover two such children — to keep the promise he had made her, and to please his company of knights and 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 91 their ladies, who all besought him to receive and honour her thereafter as his lawful wife — put away from him his rooted displeasure, caused her to rise up from her knees, embraced and kissed her, and acknowledged her for his lawful wife, and her children for his own.' And so they went to dinner, and ' lived happily ever after ', as in fairy tales they always do, no one doubting it. That I certainly think a j)retty and affecting end to a Griselda kind of story. It was altogether too unsophisticated for Shakespeare and his clients of the playhouse ; and accordingly in AlFs Well Diana is imported into Roussillon, and man-handled in true Elizabethan fashion. There is much of the usual equivoque about maid and no maid ; more than doubts are expressed about her quality : This woman's an easy glove, my lord ; she goes off and on at pleasure. One knows that there was no preferential treatment for virginity in the days of tlie Virgin Oueen. What is extraordinary is that Bertram flatly denies her ; more than that, he asperses her with insult : She 's im])udent, my lord, And was a common gamester in the camj). That not only puts Bertram finally out of court, but also makes him ridiculous, since Diana has the means of prov- ing immediately that he had paid a high price for her favour. She jjroduces the ring, silences the hero, chills the audience to the marrow, and finally brings in Helena, who should surely have produced the ring herself as her only overt testimony. Notwithstanding that she has to take tlie ring from Diana and can only affirm that she is 92 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' with child, she is nevertheless instantly accepted. The King recognizes her : King. Is't real that I see ? Hel. No, my good lord ; 'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; The name and not the thing, wliereupon, for no apparent reason at all, Bertram exclaims : Both, both : O pardon ! and is allowed to ride off on that, and a promise tliat if she can make him know it clearly, he'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. I wonder if that was good enough for a Blackfriars audience, and what Pepys would have thought of it. The turning over of Olivia to Sebastian in Tivelfth Night is pretty perfunctory, but I don't think there is any- thing in Shakespeare like the Hat repudiation by the hero of the woman whom he thought he had loved, and his immediate promise to love 'ever, ever dearly' the one he had vowed he never would love. ' What You Will ', indeed ! Hazlitt, who was the boy for an extreme position, and could never admire a thing heartily unless he thought that all the world condemned it, begins his study of this play by saying that it is 'one of the most pleasing of our author's comedies ' ! It is impossible that he can have thought so, and he proves that he did not by what he goes on to say : ' The character of Helen is one of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and a wife: yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her checks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem.' 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL' 93 One of the most remarkable bits of special pleading to be found in the works of this remarkable pleader. He con- cludes by telling us that — ' the poet has dramatized the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible.' The italics are his own. The plain fact is that Shakespeare took his plots where he could get them, stuck into them what his present occasion demanded, and trusted to his vein to pull him through. When he was in a tight place he rhymed elabo- rately, as he does here, to get out of it, or let loose a shower of verbal quips which made sense out of nonsense or nonsense out of sense, as suited him. He tickled also the groundlings' ears with equivoque, and went as near to the bone as he could, if he did not bite into it. Mostly his luck, if not his genius, saved him. In Measure for Measure the seriousness of the matter and the beauty of the verse did his affair. In The Merchant of Femce tJie moonlight of the last act carries off the moonshine of those preceding it, but only in retrospect. At the time of hear- ing we refuse our credence to the caskets, and none of the sonorous rhetoric can avail. Rhetoric cannot do what poetry can. A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and /Is Tou Like It are all fairy tales with fairy-tale plots, and all saved by jnire poetry. But All's IVellXwK'i, hardly any poetry, and is not treated as the fairy tale it is. There is rhetoric in if, and I'arolles is a good foretaste of Ancient Pistol. I'm rhetoric lacks the power ot the wing, which belongs to jioetry alone. Byron at his Worst ' IT is possible that everything to the credit or discredit of a man of Byron's renown should be known by somebody or other: whether he did or did not sin against nature with Augusta Leigh ; whether Lady Caroline Lamb did or did not betray her William ; how far he went in the seduction of Lady Frances Webster ; what he did or did not to Mrs. Chaworth Musters. That is possible. To the generality of us, who are aware, through what has long been available, how very capable he was of excellence in all or any of those feats, further knowledge of the kind is neither exemj)lary nor important. There are men alive at this day who spend time and pains in adding one more to the tale of nymphs at Casanova's disposal, or in imputing such and such an extra odalisque to the Pare aux Cerfs : so also there are men who give nights and days to proving that the British are a lost tribe of Israel. To men of that stamp the first volume of these Letters will be a gold-mine. I find it wearisome and ignoble to the last degree. Let us put the case fiatly. Byron, introduced abruptly into London society in 1812, lost his head, and became for good and all a posturer, a coxcomb, and worse. In Lady Melbourne, forty years older than himself, he found a silly old woman who allowed him to write to her every day about his disgustful amours, and what is more, answered ' f.ord Byron s Correspondence, edited by John Murray. Murray, 1922. BYRON AT HIS WORST 95 his letters ; a silly old woman and coarse-grained beyond all credence, seeing that the girl whose heart he used as a looking-glass was the wife of her son ; seeing that the woman on whose honour he proposed to ride off was her niece. Add to all that, that before he had done with Lady Catherine he had begun with Lady Oxford ; before he had done with Lady Oxford lie proposed to begin upon her dauj^hter ; before he had begun tliat he laid himself out elaborately to entrap Lady Frances Webster ; and while he was so engaged he was expecting to marry Miss Milbanke. That is what it comes to : we may as well know where we are. Every look, whisper, sigh, billet, kiss, in these intrigues was communicated to Lady Melbourne, who meantime was doing Pandarns's best to accomplisii the Seaham marriage. There is much more tliat might be said, but little that need be said. To any one who knows what there lias been to know about Byron it is obvious that he was a coxcomb ; a young man without judgement, or morals, or truth, or conduct, or manners. There are things in these letters which prove him to have been a cad, others which show him as a l)lackguard. All that was known before ; but I don't think anything quite so beastly as the tale of Lady 1'' ranees Webster's methodical seduction can Ik- found out of /wj Liuisons Diiii\^ereuscs. Still — one knew the kind ot thing, and there is no mnl to labour it. I would not be misunderstood. I ilon't set up for a jirecisian in sexual matters, and am as ready as anybody to allow for the effects of passion in men and women. But in these disgusting affairs, on Byron's side at least, there was no passion at all : nothing but vanity. The chase amused him, the kill flattered his self-esteem. The 96 BYRON AT HIS WORST writhing of the quarry, however prolonged, roused neither shame nor pity in him. It is quite clear from these new letters that he continued to experiment upon the miserable Caroline long after he had lost all healthier taste for her. She, poor wretch, of whom the truth may best be known in the knowledge of her idiotic mother, lent herself to every turn of the knife, betrayed the most exquisite suffering, and afforded the triumphing male the highest enjoyment he was fit for. Stab by stab, jerk by jerk, all was retailed to the old mother-in-law in Whitehall. Such nauseous fare has not been mine for a long time. If this sort of publicity is a sequela of fame, then indeed, ' how indigent the great ' ! The second volume is another matter. Although it exhibits Byron in one of the most discreditable acts of his life, there are new letters from Shelley in it which do him infinite honour, make the book, indeed, his rather than Byron's. For the first time, too, Mary Shelley's letter to Mrs. Hoppner in her husband's vindication is given in full. The accusation of Shelley, brought by a discharged nurse- girl and believed by the Hoppners, was that he had lived with Clare Clairmont, and that she had borne him a child in Naples. Hoppner repeated the story to Byron, who knew the Shelleys intimately and professed to esteem them. Byron replied : ' The Shiloh (Shelley) story is true, no doubt, though Elise is but a sort of Queen s evidence. You remember how eager she was to return to them, and then she goes away and abuses them. Of the facts, however, there can be little doubt ; it is just like them. You may be sure that I keep your counsel.' Match me that for disloyalty from any one, even from Elise herself. It is needless to say tliat he did not keep BYRON AT HIS WORST 97 Hoppner's counsel, but retailed the story to Shelley. Shelley told Mary, and Mary wrote a nobly vehement letter of indignation to Mrs. Hoppner. It is imperfectly printed in Dowden's book and in Mrs. Marshall's, but here in full. She sent it to Shelley to be forwarded, desiring that it should be shown to Byron. ' I wish also that Lord Byron should see it', she wrote. ' He gave no credit to the tale, but it is as well that he should see how entirely fabulous it is.' According to that, Byron had lied to Shelley, for, as we know, he had thrown them to the wolves in writing to Ho])i)ner. Mary's letter was found among Byron's papers after his death, with the seal broken. The plain inference is that it was never sent on. If it had been it would not have been sent back — obviously. If it had been, it would have been answered. But it was not answered. I cannot think Mr. Edgcumbe makes any case for Byron in this black business. How should he ? Shelley himself, in comparison with the cahnt'm lord, appears as a kind of seraj)h. 'You are now in Italy,' he writes in t8i6; 'you have perhaps forgotten all tliat my unwelcome anxiety reminds you of. You contemplate objects that elevate, inspire, trancjuillize. You communicate the feelings, which arise out of that contemplation, to mankind ; perhaps to the men of distant ages. Is there nothing in the ho])e of being the parent of greatness, and of good- ness, which is destined j)erhaps to ex])and indefinitely? . . . What would the human race have been if Homer, or Shakcs])eare, had never written ? . . . I do not com- pare you with these, I do not know how great an intellectual compass you are destined to fill. I only know that your powers are astonishingly great, anil that they ought to be exerted to their full extent.' So he goes on, in a long and serious exhortation. ' It G 98 BYRON AT IIIS WORST is not that I should counsel you to aspire to fame. The motive' to your labours ought to be more j)ure and simple. . . .' Then he suggests an Ej)ic of the French Revolution, ' as a theme involving pictures of all that is best qualified to interest and instruct mankind.* Noble and touching words : one loves him the betterfor his wasted pains. Mr. Saintsbury, the other day, in a deserved tribute to the beauty of Shelley's letters, contrived to claim for him, among other qualities, a sense of humour. Knowing what he did of Byron, and writing so to him ! No : Shelley had nearly every good gift. But humour was denied him. A strange and overwrought letter of 17th January 181 7, announces Harriet's death. 'The circumstances which attended this event are of a nature of such awful and appal- ling horror, that I dare hardly avert [j/V] to them in thought.' He then explains. ' The sister of whom you have heard me speak may be truly said (though not in law, yet in fact) to have murdered her for the sake of her father's money. Thus did an event which I believed quite indifferent to me, following in the train of a far severer anguish, communi- cate a shock to me which I know not how I have survived.' I don't at all know what that means. What was the event which he believed indifferent? Harriet's death ? If so, the ' far severer anguish ' must imply that Harriet, in his belief, had been unfaithful.' There is no clear evidence of that, but we know that he believed it. I have seen no evidence at all of the charge against Eliza Westbrook. These are matters of real importance, as anything relating to a man of high passion and extreme sincerity must ' On reconsideiation, I think that the ' severer anguish ' may have been due to the suicide of Fanny Godwin, on ihe 10th December 18 16. BYRON AT HIS WORST 99 always be. Whatever chips he knocked off the Tables of Stone, he is never at any time in the same plane with Byron. Shelley had a moral code and obeyed it, though it was not that of Sinai, Byron may have had one, but did not obey it. That is the difference. But Siielley shines like a star in this book. Byron had gibed at Keats when he was dead ' for cockneyfying and Suburbing and versifying Tooke's Pantheon and Lempri^re's Dictionary '. I don't suppose Shelley had seen tiie letter which contained those gems of criticism, but he must have seen something of the kind. He gravely expostulates that the 'argument' (that Keats would have died anyhow) ' does not reconcile me to the employment of contemptuous and wounding expressions against a man merely because' he has written bad \erses ; or, as Keats did, some good verses in bad taste. Some plants, which require delicacy in rearing, might biing forth beautiful flowers if ever they should arrive at maturity.' Then, presently, he goes on to praise Hyperion. ' The energy and beauty of his powers seem to disperse the narrow and wretched taste in which (most unfortunately for the real beauty which they hide) he had clothed his writings.' J>y and by lie sends Byron /Idonais. ' Although 1 feel tiie truth of wiiat 1 have alleged about his '' Hyperion ", and I doubt, if you saw that particular poem, whether you would not agree with me ; yet I need not be told that I have been carried too far by the enthusiasm of the moment ; by my l)iety, anil my indignation, in panegyric. But if I have erred I console myself by reflecting that it is in defence of the we.ik not in conjunction with the powerful. And j)erhaps 1 have erred from the narrow view of considering Keats rather as he surpasses me in particular, than as he was inferior to others : so subtle is the principle of self! ' G 2 loo " BYRON AT HIS WORST Subtle indeed, too subtle for his lordship, I doubt. But said I not well that in such a book as this Shelley appears as a star — When only one Is shining in the sky? It is proper to say that Byron shows up better as he draws near his end. Nothing, certainly, became him like that. He was generous to Mary Shelley involved in her wreckage. He mortally hurt Hunt's feelings by treating him as an object of charity. Yet he tuas charitable to him. And I can agree with Mr. Murray and his assistants that, when once he had shaken off his Guiccioli and other Italian parasites, a new tone was observable in him. He was, for the first time in his life, genuine, sincere^ and in earnest. What would have been the end of his career if he had survived Missolonghi it is as idle to speculate as it would be to consider what he might have been if he had been decently brought up. ' God made him. therefore let him pass for a man.' [ (^Ati z^rmenuui Knighfs Entertainment ' Let him add a few lines more in regard to the common people of England : — Suppose a foreigner (or, as they would call him, an outlandi^hman), whetlier a Turk or a Jew, should come amongst them, and ciiance to be affronted by any of their dear countrymen in the street ; if he should be spirited enough to return the blow, they would be jjleased, crying out, " Well done ", and "fair j)lay !" If the foreigner should happen to knock down, which God forbid, the Englishman, and should not keep him under, they would say, " Let him get up again ", preserving justice all the while till the end of the battle; whereas in all other foreign countries which the author has observed in his travels, if sucli an affray should happen, the Lord have mercy upon llie poor wretch who should affront any one of the natives ; the whole multitude would rise to crush him under their feet, as if he were guilty of murder.' THA'l' very handsome observation was made in 1788 l)y a man who had reason to know wliat lie was talking about. He was .Iosej)h Emin, or Ameen, a stray Armenian, who had driffd from I'agdad into India under stress of iKTsecution, and thence into our port of London, which turned out to be a prosperous haven for him. Ciod, who has an eye for the fall of sparrows, kept also within iiis providence this waif from the Levant, as much of a sparrow himself as any man can well be : bold, assured, tenacious ; cheerful in adversity, giving as good as he got, and after 102 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S hardships gallantly borne, dropping into anything he desired, so far as we could give it liim — all this is true of Emin, as it is true of most sparrows. Working his way out from Calcutta before the mast, at something like nineteen years old ; landed at Woolwich without a friend or a sixpence ; a porter, a bricklayer's labourer, an errand-boy, a copying- clerk ; starving more often than not, without a shirt to his back, he became the friend and client of celebrated persons, the hero of fashionable ladies, a reputed millionaire (on a hundred a year); hobnobbed with Frederick the Great, was patronized by Catherine of Russia ; advised the Prince of Georgia for his good, levied war on the Shah of Persia, and, after all that, married, wrote his memoirs in a gigantic volume, and died in his bed. His book is now edited by his great-great-granddaughter, and published by Luzac and Company. It is nearly as big as the London Directory. You may call him, not intending any offence to his memory, an amiable parasite. He was undoubtedly both. Not all parasites are noxious, not all prey upon their kind. Emin was not rapacious. He attached himself to mankind because other men had things which he lacked. But he neither levied nor begged. He stated his needs, and they were supplied. He was a friendly as well as a bold creature : very like a si)arrow, indeed. Sparrowhood shines in his portrait, which Lord Lyttelton had painted for Hagley. If it had not been for that I would have dubbed him cock-robin, an equally amiable but a showier friend of man. Emin was a little man, and a pleasant- faced but a plain little man. Sparrow all over are his bright inquiring eyes, with their look of ' Can I venture ? Surely I may ! ' You see sparrow in his forward, hardy, pliant lips, as prehensile as any beak ; most of all you see ENTERTAINMENT 103 it in the Insinuating cock of his friendly little head. Insinuating indeed ! nobody came amiss to him, from Sally, 'the beautiful Sally, lately married to a sailoi who had gone to sea ' — the first of many good angels of her sex — to Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blues, to whom he subscribed himself her 'Persian slave'; from Mr. Emir, so called, the Christian bricklayer, who gave him his first permanent job, to the Duke of Cumber- land, his ' royal master ' — or one of them. His method with all classes and both sexes was the same. He said exactly what he wanted, and left it to you. But he was a man of courage, a man of his hands. On his voyage out from Calcutta, a runaway of nineteen, he knocked a seaman down who had abused him, ' with a single slap on the left side of the face ' — which, slap or not, according to his own account was a knock-out. Before that, at a still earlier age, he had rescued his grandfather from imprisonment in Ispahan at the hands of a predatory Beg, by going to the palace and asking for an interview with the Shah. Direct action was always the line he took with kings. He interested some court official in his tale, and the interview was actually arranged. Then arrived the Beg and his jjrisoner, appealing on their knees against further j)roceedings. The officer then said to Emin, ' Go, my brave boy, serve your old grandfather and obtain his blessing. I see in your countenance that one day you will become a great man. Then remember what I have told you.' I think Emin had the makings of a great man, of a kind, though not of the kind which he aimed to be. He was, at any rate, a first-class j)arasitc. He had the right sparrow eye which kncjws infallil)ly where the chances are. After he had been in London for 104 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S a year or more, mostly starving, and growing, no doubt, seedier and seedier as he went on, walking one afternoon in St. James's Park, he saw there a Mr. Bodley, a lawyer of the Calcutta Bar whom he knew by sight. Did he accost Mr. Bodley for news of his father ? He did not. But Mr. Bodley was accompanied by another person, ' very tall and well made, a stranger to the author ' ; and after the author had followed the pair up and down the Mall three or four times, it was ' Mr. Bodley 's noble- looking companion ' that he presently saluted. ' Accosting him, he told him that he knew that person.' The stranger, truly affable, asked him to give the person's name. ' Mr. Bodley,' says Emin. Asked then why, if he knew his name, he had not rather adventured him than another, Emin said, with great address, that Mr. Bodley ' had been so many years in the East, breathing the air of that quarter, he feared some rebuking word from him.' Such a way of putting it at once touched and flattered the stranger. Emin, shabby as he may have been, was presented to Mr. Bodley and invited to walk with him and his friend. He heard news of his father, was pressed for an account of himself, and perceiving that ' the noble stranger ' was interested ' thought it proper to open to him the wounds of his heart.' What these were he does not tell us. They may have been the desolations of his countrymen, then as now the victims of Turkish massacre ; but if he then had any ambition to become the Liberator of Armenia, he does not say so. Mr. Bodley presently going home, his 'noble companion' invited Emin to his lodging, which was ' up two pair of stairs, at the sign of the Pope's Head, at a bookseller's shop near the Temple '. The conversation was renewed ; ENTERTAINMENT 105 Emin had plenty to tell, was sympathetically heard ; then begged the name of a gentleman wlio treated him with so much courtesy. ' He very politelyanswered, "Sir, my nameis Edmund Burke, at your service ; I am a runaway son from a father, as you are." He then took half a guinea out of his pocket, presented it to Emin, and said, " Upon my honour this is what I have at present, please to accept it.' Emin thanked him, took three guineas and a half out of his own pocket, and said, " I am worth so much ; it will not be honest to accept of that ; not because it is a small sum ; if it were a thousand pounds I would not. I am not come away from my friends to get money ; but if you will continue your kind notice towards me, that is all I want ; and I shall value it more than a prince's treasure."' That was well said, and perfectly true. Emin wanted many things of his friends and patrons, but money was l»erhaps the last thing that he wanted. He had it, took It, and spent it — but by no means on himself. Burke, and his kinsman William Burke in India, proved long and good friends. At the moment the statesman was invaluable. He 'always advised him to put his trust in God', and gave him writings to copy. ' The first was an Imitation of the late I,ord Bolingbroke's Letter; the second, the Treatise of Sublinje anti Beautiful.' His next accpi.iintance came by just such another fortu- nate chance. Walking up Cheapside, he saw an oriental and accosted him in 'i'urki'-h. 'He fouml liim to be an Armenian ; both parties were glad to see each other.* This man's name was Asataim ; he was a groom, sent over from Aleppo with an Arab iiorse for the Duke io6 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S of Northumbcihind. He had himself no English and was at his wits' ends for an interpreter. Emin seemed the very man — and was so. They returned to Northumberland House, where Emin stood interpreter between Asataim and the servants, ' more particularly his Grace's gentleman, Mr. Bale.' His Grace came by these means to hear of Emin, and sent Mr. Bale for him. ' He (Emin) said, " Let me go back to put on a clean shirt and a more decent coat." Mr. Bale said, " My lord will know a man without iine clothes." Emin consented, called God in his heart to his assistance, and entered the library where the duke was standing by the side of the table. After making his bow and paying respects due to his greatness, the duke said to him, " The Armenian groom Asataim does not understand English, nor is he, with his broken lingua franca, able to make us understand him. We are at a loss to explain to him the different marks of horses. Have you seen the chestnut-coloured Arab that he has brought over ? " "Yes, my Lord." "Pray, Mr. Emin, what do you think of it ? Is it a true one ? " " Yes, my lord," said Emin, "if your lordship will give me a commission, I give you my word I can procure a better." ' The duke stopped him there with an abrupt, ' Pray, sir, where is your father ? ' ' In Bengal, my lord.' 'What is your reason for choosing to go to Aleppo?' Emin thereupon told a fib, saying tliat India didn't agree with him. It was clever of the Duke to see that Emin was neither going to Aleppo for the sake of the commission on a horse- deal nor for his health. He was not : he tells us himself in a parenthesis that he wished to use that port as a ENTERTAINMENT 107 jumping-off ground for the mountains of Armenia where, owing to the death of Nadir Shah, as he understood, ' people were stirring pretty briskly '. It is the first hint he gives us of what he was driving at. The Duke dropped the ' horse-story ', as he called it, and asked Emin point-blank to declare himself. ' " Pray, Mr. Emin, conceal nothing from me. Tell me the truth, for I see there is some extraordinary thing in your mind. Conceal nothing from me ; I will upon my honour stand your friend." Emin talked to him till one in the morning of " the various misfortunes of his life, the hardships he had been through, and the adver- sity which still awaited him in the cause of his country. It affected his lordship so, that he could not refrain from shedding tears. To show the feelings of the human mind, he is now no more, to the great grief of Emin's bleeding heart." ' I wish I had space for the memoiial which, at the Duke's request, Emin drew up for his consideration. It does him great credit, and carries in its simple but romantic l)liraseology the conviction of its truth. He said that he came of a family of warriors : ' As long aS I can remember my own family . . . they have always been soldiers, and always did remember Christ. Tho' tiiey were torn out of their country of Armenia by Sliah Abbas and planted in Hamadan, after their captivity tliey were soldiers still.' Then, when his father brought him fugitive to Calcutta — ' there I saw the forts of tlie Europeans and the soldiers exercise . . . and that they were dextrous and jerfect in .ill things, then I grieved with myself, for my religion and my country, that we were in sl.ivery and ignorance like .lews, vagabonds uj)on Earth.' 1 Ic was, we see, an oriental, one of few, impressed witii Wt-stern mctliods, order and io8 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHTS discii)linc. ' I resolved I wou'd go to Euroi)e to learn Art Military and other Sciences to assist that Art; and I was sure that if I would go into Armenia like an European officer I may be useful at least in some degree to my country ; but my father did not listen to me, for God did not give him understanding in these things.' He relates liis escape on the Walpole and his subsequent misfortunes ; then puts forward his proposals. His father, he said, was well off, and could keep him very easily while he was studying Arms, if he could once be assured that the runaway was serious. ' If Governor Davis writes that I have a Great Man here my Protector, my father who looks upon me as a person run away and forsaken, will make me an allowance to learn. If I could clear my own eyes and serve my country and my religion that is trodden under foot of Mussulman, I would go thro' all slavery and danger with a glad heart ; but if I must return after four years' slavery and misery to the same ignorance without doing any good it would break my heart, my Lord, in the end.' Much more to that effect : but it is a good and touching letter, by whose means the sparrow did indeed find him a nest. For the Duke of Northumberland became so far the ' Great Man his Protector ', as to win him the patronage of a greater — the Duke of Cumberland ; to find him in certain funds, and to stand for that reputed bottomless English purse which served Emin even better than ready money. Introductions, too, he had : dukes and their duchesses, earls and their countesses; Lady Anson, Lady Sophia Egcrton, Lord Cathcart, Lord Lyttelton ; best of all, the famous Mrs. Montagu, to whom his iinest letters are addressed. He adojitcd her as his Queen, declared himself her ENTERTAINMENT 109 ' Persian slave ', laid on his rahat lahhoiim with a trowel, and never hesitated to ask for what he wanted. ' Then if you can make any interest for me to the Duke of Marlborough by Mr. Medows who is my friend and knows his Grace very well, to procure me a commission of Leutenantcy in the Royal Regiment of Artillery of Wool- wich it will be much better for me, for then I can go to the King of Prussia at my own charge by the leave of my general, and I will have no more wailing at Great People's Door from eight in the morning to four or five in the after- noon, at last hardly any admittance.' Very much better for him, no doubt. And he had it. One or other of his new friends procured him, through the Duke of Cumberland, the entry at Woolwich, ' a blue uniform and a guinea a month pocket-money '. Then the Duke went his way to the wars on tiie Elbe, and forgot Emin. But he did not know his man. Emin scraped up the money and went after him. He edged himself into the levee, was seen and recognized. ' I know you had no money ', said the Duke, ' how then did you manage it ? ' He who gave Emin an opening gave him all that he wanted. ' Emin said, "May it please your Royal Highness, while your humlilc servant was not known to you, he was in a state of misery ; but since he has been honoured by your j)rotection his heart feels an increase in tiu- riches of happiness. Should he in your absence be dashed on the hardest rocks, he is sure milk anil honey will flow from them under your auspices. He was assisted ; and he hopes he shall never be in want of money, but that iiis conduct will gain him the good ojiinion of the woiKi, and maintain the good-will of his magnanimous royal protector, whom Heaven pre- serve. no AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S That is pretty stiff, as we say ; but Emin calls it a ' short, oriental speech '. It had its effect. A Major Frcytag was sent for, and ' no sooner was the officer come in than the glorious Duke took Emin the porter's hand, and putting it into Major Freytag's, said these very words : " I am some- how doubtful of this man's courage. As he is so desirous of seeing service, I charge thee to be very strict, putting him in the front of every action, and bringing me word how he behaves himself." Then turning to Emin, he said, " Go with him ; let me hear a good character of thee." Here Emin's heart broke the chain of slavery, and jumped for joy, forgetting all his former distresses ; when he, who was but a weak sheep before, became a loose tearing lion.' We must take his looseness for granted, for beyond assuring us of his patron's approval earned ' by his wild rapidity in a whole campaign, in eighteen different skirmishes, and at the battle of Hastenbeck ', he leaves us in the dark as to why it was he was given twenty ducats at the end of it all, sent back to London, and again forgotten by the Duke. No matter : he had several strings to his bow, and in anticipating some such fatality had written ' To all the Ladies and Patronesses of Joseph Emine ' a letter of candid statement of his further desires and expectations : ' I was in great hopes of serving a Campaign under the King of Prussia after this, but I find I must give over that hope, for it is impossible for me to do it with less than hundred and fifty pounds for year, let me live ever so near ; for which money I shall never trouble your good- ness, nor bend any more my neck to the Greatest Prince in the Universe.' Again, he had it ! I don't know that Mrs. Montagu believed everything he told her. She did not, for instance, ENTERTAINMENT iii ' hope to see him on the Persian throne, or giving laws to the East.' But she believed a great deal. ' I know ', she went on ' that he sits on the summit of human virtue.' Wherever he sat, he sat tight. The King of Prussia was his immediate objective; he had to wait ayear ormoretoattain that ; but he attained it ; and writes very amusingly as well as informingly of the great man, an account which escaped the careful eye of Carlyle. As usual, Emin had worked his oracles to good purpose. The Duke of Northumberland helped him to the Hague; I.ady Anson gave him a letter to General Yorke ; General Yorke gave him one to a Mr. Mitchell (afterwards Sir Andrew, K.C.B.), who was the British Ambassador at Berlin, and on the point of joining tlie King. Emin, he, and a courier set out in a wagon. ' One morning early, two hours before sunrise, we met the king on horseback, at the head of his army on a march ; who no sooner saw the waggon with two persons in it than he asked Mr. Mitchell in I'Vench, who was the second person with the courier. The ambas- sador said to the author, " His majesty asks who you are?" Emin answered, " I am a man." " What sort of a man ? " said he. " What is your name ? " '• My name", he replied, "is Emin: I am an Armenian." Then the King said, " Is he the man that tlie Duke of Cumberland jjatronizes .' " Being answeretl in the affirmative— "Ask him, Mr. Mitchell", said the king, "if he does not know my orders that a volunteer is not to be adnn'tted into my army ? " He said to Mr. Mitchell, " Yes ; but he hoju-s his Majesty when he graciously considers how many months ( sic] by sea and land he was come to spill his blood in his most glorious majesty's service under the hoof of his horse, lie would have no objection to the boldness of the liberty taken." His Majesty said, "Ma foi, c'est un brave 112 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S garcon, je souhaite qu'il y fut dix mille hommes dc la meme disposition que lui." '^ Emin's equipage particularly pleased the King. It weighed eight pounds, and consisted of half a dozen shirts and a pair of boots. He was bidden to mount the Ambas- sador's led horse, and if we are to believe him, rode tete a iete with the lion of Europe for some nine hours, and so on for three days or more. It was as hopeful as it could be. Frederick took to him, and believed in him, relaxed his rule ; ordered him an allowance of a ducat a day, three horses, a servant, kitchen furniture. And then — it was hard — Mr. Mitchell, the English ambassador, having reported all that, added to it on his own account, that Emin was to leave immediately he had dined, return to the army of Prince Ferdinand in Hanover, and stay there. Emin was cut to the heart, but obeyed. His description of Frederick is so good that I must afford it here : ' I will do my endeavour to describe the King of Prussia's person and his way of living. He is no taller than Emin the Persian, he has a short neck, he has one of the finest made heads ever I saw in my life, with a noble forehead ; he wears a false wigg, he has very hand- some nose. His eyes are grey, sharp and lively, ready to pearce one through and through. He likes a man that looks him in the face when he is talking to him. He is well made everywhere, with a bend back, not stoojjed at all, like many Europeans. His voice is the sweetest and clearest I ever heard. He takes a great quantity of Spanish snuff, from his nose down to the buckles of his shoes or boots is all j)ainted with that confounded stuff. His hands are as red as paint, as if he was a painter, grizy [j-/V] all over. . . . All the satisfaction that I have, which is great enough, that 1 have seen Caesar alive, nay ENTERTAINMENT 113 twenty times greater, he is more like King Solomon, for he rules his nation by wisdom and understanding. . . .' That was in a letter to his ' Magnanimous Queen of the East, Glory of the World', Mrs. Montagu, to whom, after a fruitless campaign in Westphalia, he presently returned, ready now for his main adventure, and more assistance. Once more, he collected funds from his friends — the Duke of Northumb»erland £ 100 a year for three years, Mrs. Montagu twenty guineas, Lord Lyttelton ten guineas — and with some of that in hand, and the rest on paper, he wrote a letter ' To the most splendid, most Christian King Hcraclius of Georgia and Armenia ', announcing himself as ready and able to enter into iiis service, and to carry with him 'men skilful in all things (if you give me en- couragement) to strengthen and polish your kingdom, like the kingdoms of Europe.' That was a liberal offer, of which, however, King Heraclius, probably thinking that the less his kingdom was polished the more likely it was to put II]) with himself, took no notice whatever. It took more than mere inattention to qviench Emin. He went out to Armenia, via Italy and Alexandrctta, reached F-rzeroum, and wrote again to Heraclius, wliom he now discovered to be, not King, but Prince of Georgia, with a father, the titular king, alive and in Russia. He addressed it therefore 'To iiis high Mightiness Prince Heraclius of Georgia, whom God preserve', and called attention to the dangers which he had successfully encoun- tered, in s])ite of the great discouragement his lligliness's silence had caused him. He then reported, with, I must certainly think, a want of tact, ' part of an instruction from my father in P^engal. . . • He says that upon condition you will be graciously pleased H 114 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S to confer upon me the most singular honour of thinking me worthy to be made, by the order of the Church of God, your Highness's son-in-hiw, and will grant a certificate, signed and sealed by your Highness, and attested by two bishops or priests, he orders me to repair to your court ; but if you consent not to this condition, he, my fither Hoosep, has charged me not to venture entering your territories,' I doubt whether, out of a fairy-tale, a young man with £iOO a year for three years (which was the Duke of Northumberland's benefaction) has ever sent such a letter to a reigning prince before — for Heraclius was, in fact, reigning though his father Tahmurus was alive. The Archbishop of Tiflis, however, promised to deliver it, and may have done so. If he did, it is not wonderful that Emin had no better luck with it than with its forerunner ; but that did not prevent him from enjoying himself greatly. 'Emin came hither — (Aleppo) — set out in the depth of winter, went to Armenia, and came back again like a comet, but did no damage in the world ; for finding the Armenians equally few in numbers and reduced thoroughly to slavery, he resolved to go among the Turcoman clans, wild mountaineers about Antioch and Scanderoon, and harangue them into a design to take possession of this city of Alejipo, and then proceed upon farther exploits.' Such is the account of a Dr. Patrick Russell to the Turkey Merchants' Company. ' With immense difficulty and many expostulations ', he was dissuaded, and sent back to England. ' If he had not hearkened to us, the con- sequence of his enterprize would unavoidably have been fatal to all the Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire. ' Not a doubt of it, of course. It was very well for Mrs. ENTERTAINMENT 115 Montagu and the Duke of Northumberland to exalt a comic-opera hero; but Dr. Russell knew what he was doing. Emin was a case for Alexandre Dumas, but not for Christian traders in Turkey, just then. He was back in England in 1761, and 'stayed in London about eight months, very busy all the time to find ways and means for going to Petersburg.' Needless to say he found both. Lord Bath gave him a letter to our ambassador, Mr. Jonas Hanway procured him a passport from Prince Galitzin ; the Duke's benefaction was continued. He wrote his adieux in a hurry to ' the Queen of the Universe ', begged her to write to her ' distracted slave ', and off lie went. In Petersburg he contrived to see and to interest Tahmurus, father of Heraclius, and so-called King of Georgia, in so far as a needy and faded exile living on Russian charity could be interested in anything but money. The legend which accom]ianicd Emin, that he was backed by the Duke of Northumberland with a cool million, no doubt assisted. But Tahmurus, wlio had broken with his son and heir, not only could not help towards an introduction, but also very promptly died. At the same time died the Empress Elizabeth ; so Emin, as he says, ' was left again fatherless anil motherkss' — which is not very kind to Mrs. Montagu and the Duke. But a man like I'lmin took fathers and mothers in his !itridc, and found a new father in Count Worontzoff, and the inklings of a mother in the Duchess of Holstein, who was to become Catherine the Great. With a letter from Worontzoff to the coy Heraclius he set off in midwinter again for Moscow and Ai-trakhan ; and there at last he found his man, to make or mar his foolish fates, as might be. He was to mar them. Greek had met Greek this time. II 2 ii6 AN ARMENIAN KNIGHT'S Heraclius was a ]adcd and cunning Oriental, with no illusions left about his country or himself, too tired to have any at command for anybody else. Nevertheless, a million is a million (the legend had preceded Emin), and he was all smiles until he ascertained — from Emin himself, who concealed nothing — that the hero was unprovided with anything more substantial than unlimitless brass, the heart of a lion, and £ioo a year. That learned, Heraclius saw but one thing to do — by all means or any means to get rid of Emin. It was nothing like so easy as it sounded. Emin sat tight, plotted with Armenians on all hands, embroiled himself with the Persians, and made things most uncomfortable for Heraclius. Imprisonment did little ; Emin went under for a time ; but ladies — ' Armenian angels' and what not — generally rescued him; and he bobbed up somewhere at the head of 1200 Turcomans. I don't suppose any man in Europe before or since his tim.e made £100 a year go as far as Emin did. However, there is an end to all things, and Heraclius did at last shake off his succubus. Emin wandered leisurely back, to Bengal, picking up a wife and begetting a son or sons upon the way. There, finally, he sat down to write the Memoirs from which my extracts are taken. How true they may be 1 have no means of knowing, but if they are as true as they are voluminous, they must be Gospel. I have seldom handled a more immense book of Memoirs. You could lay them for a foundation-stone, or begin to build a bridge with them. But vastly entertaining. Very little happened ; ■ Emin did nothing but amuse himself at other people's expense — but that he should have done any of it and survived it is exceedingly much. Another sparrow from the East, Mile, AVss€ of Circassia, ENTERTAINMENT 117 was similarly cared for by a French providence a few years before we took, charge of our Eniin. But she, you may say, fell upon her feet, when in the open market of Staniboul M. d'Argental bought her, a child of four years old. Emin, on the other hand, had to scramble to his as best he could, and did not find them till he had sounded many deeps of distress. She was beautiful and unhappy ; Emin was as happy as a king, much iiapjiier indeed than Kings Tahmurus and Heraclius. Mademoiselle wrote charming letters, and so did Emin. One of his is addressed 'To the Wisdom of Europe, Sister to the great King of Prussia, excellent Mrs. Montagu '. Mile. Ai'ssfi did not beat that, 1 believe. The Limits of the Readable I DREAMED that I was awaiting some great man or otl)er in a long, well-appointed room. It was all very comfortable and rich : Turkey carpet, deep chairs, sea-coal fire, knee-table, silver ink-pot, flowers, and so on. The whole of one wall was book-case breast-high, and the books were mostly folios in ' crimson morocco extra ', as they say. I think that 1 took the titles for granted, but one of them, I know, was Dobiizhoffer's Account of the Ablpones, a work which I have never read, and never shall, but always had in abhorrence because poor Sara Coleridge was made to translate it, that Hartley might be sent to college. Presently, however, I took down a volume which was as big and looked as hefty as Liddell and Scott ; and it came away quite light, as if it was hollow — which it was. Really it was a box to hold papers, and had nothing inside it but a wire clip. The moral shock of that ' sell ' awoke me, as often happens in dreams. From that point I lay awake, thinking about Lamb's hiblia a-biblla, and ticking off in my idle mind the things which are readable at odd moments and those which are unreadable — whence came some curious reflections. Theo- retically, a fine thing is always readable ; actually, the call wliich is made upon the reader of a great work makes it much otherwise. I am not thinking of The Faerie Queeiie. Tiiat is a serious adventure which comes to a man but once in his life — and that early. (It came to me at nine years old !) You can't thereafter ' pick ' in that. But it THE LIMITS OF THE READABLE 119 is an odd thing that if I were waiting for somebody in a library I could take down Dante or Homer, open anywhere and be occupied ; whereas I would rather sit twiddling my thumbs than read in Paradise Lost. You seem to need ' the consecration and the poet's dream ' for the one, and not for the others. Wiiy is that? I think it is because Dante and Homer have more to say than Milton, and are consequently less occupied than he with the manner of saying it. Shakespeare, too, requires an inspiration in his reader. He will not induce a mood, but must himself be induced by one. I remember John Addington Symonds telling me that he had travelled from London to Florence reading Guicciardini all the way : a marvellous feat of detachment, considering the growing attractiveness of the journey and the increasing gravity of the book. I had a Guicciardini (never read) in a thick, dumpy folio, black letter and close printing. Talk of ' massy divinity '! Not Cornelius I Lapide noi- Bellarmine nor the Seraphic Doctor himself were so massy as that. Each chapter was a solid paragraph, a block of type without one break A man who could read that on a journey to Italy could read Milton on the top of a motor- 'bus. I could pick up 'rhe Lives of the Poets, and browse happily upon it ; but then I could read the Life of the grocer's boy, if it were to be printed. Anybody's life is interesting, or anybody's letters. But I was once in a house in tlie Midlands whose smoking-room contained nothing but the Parish Magazine and a lot of old ' (Juarter- lics '. I read the Parish Magazine. Outdated history is mainly unreadable— Robertson and Hume, for instance. Motley and Prescott survive, because, so far as I am concerned, they are not outdated. Macaulay 120 THE LIMITS OF THE READABLE is good reading still, so Carlyle, so Michelet, though you need not believe a word they say. But you don't read them for the facts, rather for the impression which facts make upon them. 1 could always read Gibbon with pleasure until a friend bade me notice how nearly every sentence in him ended with a possessive case. It is horribly true, and has killed my pleasure in Gibbon. I only look at him now to find out how true it is. And that isn't reading at all, but a dreary game, like Patience, Yet what plums have been pulled out of Gibbon ! FitzGerald pulled out the best of all — so good that I can't resist it here and now. It is in a letter to W. F. Pollock : ' His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged Concubines, and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations : and from the productions which he left behind him it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.' ' Let Empires decline to such a tune', says FitzGerald. Some people have a book by the bed, but I never do. If I can't sleep in a bed I get out of it, holding that it is certainly for use rather than ostentation. If I ever did have a book there it would be of Essays — but not Hazlitt's. Hazlitt is for youth, which can stand his ill-temper, per- haps be stimulated by it. 1 don't want stimulus there. I would have Lamb or a volume of the Taller. Or Bagehot. Bagehot for the elderly. You can pick him up where you will and find him good-humoured. He wears common- sense like a new coat, so glossy and personable it is. And then Montaigne, a perfect lucky-bag. He is difficult, but well worth while. If I wished to try the sortes, not of THE LIMITS OF THE READABLE 121 Fate but of Conduct,- Montaigne would be my oracle. Here is a reflection which should have been tound by un- happy Habbburg or Hohenzollern in 1914: ' C'est le desjeuner d'un petit ver, que le coeur et la vie d'un grand et triomphant Empercur '. God knows what the digestion of that might not have saved us ! The dream- library was all of folios, and so should mine be if I could afford space for them. Bat 1 would have no crimson morocco extra. So far as was decent they should be in their habit as they were born. Who knows what that was, though ? I came across a most distinguished book a few years ago, which was in vile raiment, so vile that I can hardly imagine any one guilty of it but the original ' begetter '. The tale is worth telling for the bang 1 was able to make of my discovery. I was in the North, on a Government inquiry, the guest of a fine house which, beginning as a peel-tower in Edward II 's lime, gradually grew with the fortunes of its owners until it became the kind of mansion it now is. The same family had always had it, and two at least of them were known to have been bookish i>ersons. My hostess, having pronused me an insix-'ction of tlie library, took me into the ante-room of it and left me there while she went for the keys. There were books there, the overflow of the shelves beyond, and many odds and ends with them — cartridges, garden-gloves and baskets, directories, Bradshaws, and things of the kind. I took down at random a tall old book, b.ire-backed, but with faded green sides, opened it, then looked quickly for the title-page and portrait. All were there. When my hostess returned I threw my bomb. 'It I may suggest it,' I said, ' I should have this rejjaired and find a place for it on the shelves. It would easily make the reputation of 122 THE LIMITS OF THE READABLE a library by itself.' She looked politely interested. ' Really ? What have you found ?' 'A book which I believe to be worth some three thousand pounds.' Then her interest ceased to be merely polite. 'Good heavens'! she said, ' what can that be ? ' I replied, 'A ilrst-folio Shakespeare.' That bomb was not a ' dud '. I had no time to examine the contents of the library, but must make it some day. The man w!io had bought that Shakespeare had bought other things. No one knows what may not be there — at present. Some day I sliall find out. ^Da'ily By cad IN my country man goeth forth to his labour until the evening, and goeth forth, too, as often as not at an hour which, to know it, would urge the townsman to dive more deeply into his bed. My man will be putting on his boots at five, if he is a carter, at four, if a cowman. Perhaps, in the pitchy darkness of midwinter, it is no odds what time you turn out if it must anyhow be before eight. But the point is rather that, putting on your boots at four o'clock in the morning, you won't take them off again till some- where about six o'clock at night. You need good boots to stand that for months on end — and good feet ; and it may well be that you have neither. Everything is against them : the squelching mud of half the year, the Hints of springtime laid bare by the winter rains, the chalky dust and slijipery bents of summer. Corns 1 and you may have to slide and lurch over the furrows for days together, and you so lame you cannot cross the lloor without hobbling. But of all country work known to mc (but known, I con- fess, from hearsay only) I think the very limit for a man with bad feet must be the warping of water-meadows on frosty mornings. Frost-bite has come of that ; chilblains must needs come of it. Yet it must be gone through with in the bitter dark, and nobody down here thinks it at all out of the way. Well, you will be out of doors at latest by six ; and before that, if you are a true man, you will have lit the kitchen fire and made your wife a cuj) of tea— though, if 124 DAILY BREAD she is a true woman, she may forestall you. And all these things, and a hundred more of such, you will do every day of the week by the year together for perhaps thirty shil- lings a week, with wife and children to be fed and found and taught the virtues out of it ; and no man will hear you complain, or would understand you if he did. I know such a man now, a cowman, who cannot count upon one day's rest in the week, and has not had one for some six years. Not one clear day off, not one night out of his own house. The hours, for a cowman, depend upon the milk trains. My man's milk train in particular calls him up at 4 a.m. All that, taking the suave mart magna line of reflection, will be read with pleasure by the townsman, who gets down to his work, by train or tram, dry-shod and under electric light, with paper to read and pipe to smoke. What may induce scorn rather than satisfaction in him will be to learn that the cowman is happy and contented in his lot, and asks no better employment. It is not considered so often as it should be by the combative workman of the town, how that may be. Yet among the farm-labourers of the better sort, men, I mean, of settled life and habit, of stake in a country which withholds them ground of their own in which to plant it, in spite of pay which is the lowest of any skilled labourer's, of insanitary, uncomfortable, and often scandalously inadequate lodging ; of ceaseless, irremediable toil ; of an absence of outlook which might well break a young man's heart — the fact is undoubted that it bleaks none here ; the fact remains that our men are contented, like their work, and love their moss-grown hovels under the reeking thatch, just as some heroine of Mr. Archibald Marshall's loves her many-windowed hall. DAILY BREAD 125 the gallantry of its gardens, its ancestral elms, and the broad spaces of the park. How is all that to be explained to the townsman ? In this manner, and not otherwise, that farm-labour is a Way of Life as well as a livelihood, and that no man settled in a way of life which suits him will complain if the amenity is reckoned as part of the hire. That also is how the artist, or the poet, looks at the pence-halfpence he wins for his happy toil. He is cultivating his garden, as Candide found it wise to do ; and if the price he command for his vegetables is scanty, he knows that he is all the growing of them to the good. That talk of gardens reminds me of another thing which the farm-labourer may or may not have found out. I, myself, think that he has, for he is. like all men who don't get their learning out of other men's books, of an observant and absorbent habit. Few things of the kind escape him ; but as for me, I have only recently found out that the less you liavc of a thing the more you \alue it, and the more pleasure you have out of it. Obviously, that is true of ^^uch things as coal and light, of bread and butter : I fmd it equally so of luxuries anil amenities like art and horticulture. I believe that the j)leasure is in an inverse ratio. You have, say, a quarter- mile of clipped yew hedge ; or topiary work in battalions of monsters, as at Levens ; or, as I saw it once in Salop, a chess-board of it set out on black-and-white flagstones : box on one side, yew on the other, and a canal of clear water in between, as a Rubicon between the hosts. It will take three or four gardeners three or four weeks to clip at Midsummer, and as much in Octolx-r again ; and you 126 DAILY BREAD accept it, if you are Mr. Marshall's heroine, as of the order of things — in the large, as you accept a fine morning, or your chief seat at feasts. It does not add specifically to your store of pleasures. But the cottager will have a peacock by his front-door, or a duck on her nest, clip it in odd moments of his day, and take inordinate pride in it, a pride perennial, a pleasure never stale to the eye. There is a man in my village who has two clipped yews of mystical significance and unknown eld. Popularly they are known as the Open and the Shut Umbrella, though Mr. Havelock Ellis would read in them another symbolism, and probably be right. The clipping of such portents is a serious, and in the case of the columnar one a perilous, affair. Yet I have never seen a twig out of place. These things, rightly done, bring their own reward. Men toil after them, ' as some men toil after virtue '. It is difficult, likely impossible, to determine how far the born countryman is susceptible to the beauty of his surroundings — to the cloud-shadows on the hills, the ripple in the red wheat, the sun-gleam on coppice and hedgerow, to the spring's flush of green, or the autumn's fleeting gold ; yet I know that he does note them, have seen his eye gleam as he noted them ; and I know too that it is not possible for one so weather-wise and weather-wary not to value that which he reads so profoundly and studies day by day with ever fresh application. Townspeople are too apt to argue from expression ; but expression is just what the countryman lacks. A thing is felt, pondered, stored up : the thouglit lies too deep for tears, or laughter either ; and certainly is not stuff for minor poetry. ' You injoy talking about it : I injoy letting it soak in ' : as the gypsy-woman said to the tourist about the sunset. The z^nthology in Efiglish^ MANY are called to translate the Greek Anthology, as tempting and baffling a task as the Odes of Horace or Songs of Heine; but few are chosen. I choose for Dr. Leaf who, out of some seven hundred of the Epigrams which he has turned, now publishes a sub- stantial selection. I choose for him because he has been faithful to certain fundamental qualities of his originals which distinguish them from all the other Greek poetry that we have, qualities without which a translation would be nothing, as most translations of them in English verse precisely are. Mr. Mackail's prose version is a beautiful thing, perhaps the least in life too ' precious '. No doubt the Epigrammatists did pick their phrases : they never had the air of it. Most of our verse renderings are stiff, many are pompous — both damning faults ; all of them, so far as I know them all, are in full dress. But Dr. Leaf's is limpid, lively, easy, pointed, and it keeps to the homeli- ness of the Greek. That is the supreme excellence of the Epigrams, that they serve domestic uses, and arc at once exquisitely suitable, and themselves exquisite. They arrest in imperishable form most perishable emotion — and there it is for ever, like frozen breath. Human grief is a fleeting thing, human love and human piety have the defects of their origin. As often as not they arc foolish, ill-directed and ill continued ; but they are always touching ' Utile I'oems from the Creek, hy Waller leaf. Cr.ntil Richards, 1922. 128 THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH when they are truly felt. In the Anthology we have human nature at its most touching and most ephemeral, ensphered in perfect beauty. An epitapli for a tame par- tridge, or a pet dog; for a girl dying on her wedding night ; for a child still-born. Here, in four lines or less, are the tears for these hapless ones in a crystal phial. Or a young man loves a dancing girl, or a poet some pretty creature of an hour. The fragrance of his tributary garland is arrested for ever in an elegiac couplet. A fisherman begs the benevolence of Priapus, a mother-expectant vows to Lucina, a shepherd to Pan. The very simplicity of the prayers they breathed can be read here : it is as if they had been poets themselves. Here is a thing which might be matched in an English churchyard : What joy is there of motherhood. What profit in the womb ? Better not bear a child than weep A child's untimely doom. His mother, I, within this grave My boy Bianor laid, The grave that fitlicr the son Had for his mother made. And here is a sailor's epitaph : Full many a league of sea I sailed. Yet perished here by flame. In harbour, where the native pines Were felled to build my frame. And so the waves that bore me hence Returned me safe again. To find the land that gave me birth More cruel than the main. The bite in those things is not cynical, though it might THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH 129 have been. Just such a thought would be sighed forth by the peasant as is recorded here with point. I read no sting in the wit, nor rebelHon against the fact. The irony in life is recognized — but compare Mr. Hardy's treatment of it ! It is proper to dwell upon the homeliness of the Anthology, for that is its peculiar possession. Even when its poets turned to heroic matter and recorded the dead of Plataea, or the Spartans at Thermopylae, you have nothing of the Pindaric sublime, nothing at all of the lapidary's tragic apparatus. This is Simonides upon Leonidas' men : Go, stranger, tell the Spartans that we rest Hereunder, still obeying their behest — where the turn is blunt and almost terrible in trt nchancy. Then this is how he inscribes the lion over the hero's own tomb : Of beasts am I, of men was he most brave Whose bones I guard, bestriding this his grave. The sharp twist in the argument there is like the tang of wood-smoke in a cottage parlour; homely wit keeping rhetoric at a distance. To quit the sepulchre for the bower is to find the Epigrammatists at their second best — or even third best, for next to their piety to the dead come I think their inscriptions to the Gods. In their amatory epigrams they are graceful, playful, perfectly at ease, but not very much in love. They remind me of the post-Elizabethans, to whom love was rather the food of music — Campion and Herrick, Waller and Lovelace. Dr. Leaf detects a real passion in Meleager which I do not. Rather, I think my I I30 THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH learned friend has Imputed passion to him, a^ in tliis some- what too eloquent flight : To our Lady of Suasion pour, Heliodore ! To Cypris the Queen once more — Heliodore ! To the Goddess of Gracious Word Pour me a third — Heliodore ! Surely that is too eloquent. Meleager, in a couplet, keeps his head. Wit, felicity, hyperbole, all three are tliere. But here is an ecstasy. M-q^kv ayav is a sound rule which I don't think Dr. Leaf has overlooked anywhere else. I suppose it must ha\e been noticed before, though I cannot remember having met with the remark, what a close affinity theic is between the Greek epigrams and the little earthenware figures first found at Tanagra in Boeotia. Both arts are humble, both diminutive, both serve the dead ; each in its own way is perfect in finish and adapta- bility to its office. Neither wins the heights or sounds the dee])s of emotion. Both are the moments' monuments of a quick-witted, quick-hearted people. The anthologists record the home-emotions ; so do the image-makeis. You have girls playing knucklebones or riding pick-a-back, boys at leap-frog or carrying geese to market, matrons reclining, or folded in their reedy cloaks; fluttering dancing-girls, flute-players, and what not. It seems that they were toys, these cliarming things, made of a clay so friable as to break at a careless touch. Their perfection of art is exactly comparable to what you find in the epigrams, made like them to serve a moment's feeling. Nature works like THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH 131 that, making flowers by the thousand million in every pasture — things more lovely than love itself, to be the cud of cows or squelched in the mud by their horny hooves. Dr. Leaf puts stress in his preface on the greater conciseness of English over Greek, a conciseness 1 think more apparent than real. We are more monosyllabic than the Greeks were, but our words don't mean so much as theirs could ; and the fact has to be faced that no such collection of little poems as tlie Greek Anthology could be made from our liteiature. Sonnets galore — but we run to length, and seldom achieve terseness but at the cost of beauty. Consequently the epigram, with us, has confmed itself to wit : Ward has no heart they say, but I deny it : He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it ; •or the Anonymous on Bishop Coplestone, wiio wrote Ward's Life : Than the first martyr Stephen's fate A harder must be owned. That poor young man was stoned to death, But Ward's been Coplestoned. Sucli things, however, we derive from the Latin. Landor wrote one perfect epigram in English, exactly in the Greek manner — ' Rose Aylmer ' ; his epitaph on himself — ' Nature I served ' — is not in the vein. It is too insolent, and lacks pity. Landor could wag his fore- finger at Fate. Simonides never did. So the famous ' Underneath this sable hearse ' is more Latin than Greek in its magniloquence, while Carew's lines on Lady Mary Villiers are the real thing, and Herrick's ' Here she lies a pretty bud ' as nearly so as_ Herrick could ever be. He I 2 132 THE ANTHOLOGY IN ENGLISH repeated, but did not better that for another child. Here is the best of all, after ' Rose Aylmer ' : May ! be thou never braced with birds that sing, Nor Flora's pride ! In thee all flowers and roses spring, Mine only died. 1 have just tried Cowper, whose epitaph on one of iiis hares, and another on Lady Throckmorton's bullfinch promised well. But they are wordy to excess. I must conclude them with one on a little dog, which is in the Greek vein : i Scorn not this grave, nor pinch of dust It covers, nor the tears she shed, Who buried heie both love and trust — Things to make fragrant any dead. Noses in the oytir^ MR. STRACHEY, a vigorous reviewer in the Macaulay-£f//«^«r^/' Revieiv tradition, has so far shown himself such a censorious critic that one has despaired of his comfort. It has been therefore a relief to discover that there arc at least two persons in History whose works and days he can unreservedly admire. It does seem from his essays collected in Books and Charac- ters that he has been able to hit it off with Sir Thomas Browne and Racine, though even there some harsh fate — like the Scythian Artemis at Aulis which compelled the Argives to sacrifice a virgin before the ilcct could sail — has made it necessary for him to rend two of his con- temjjoraries before he can really enjoy himself. So he burns incense before Sir Thomas standing upon the jirostratc form of Mr. Gosse, and wades to the altar of Racine through the Ivapu. ftixn/ni'Ta of Mr. John Bailey. Mr. Go^se can take care of himself, and of Mr. Strachey too ; but Mr. Bailey has been made a vicarious sacrifice ; he is to carry on his back the bad taste of the llnglish people — mine, yours, and that of the rest of us. I'"or he, it seems, does not rate Kacine very highly, places hini, ' not without contumely, among the second rank of writers ', whereas Mr. Strathey, on the contrary, puts him as high as one can go, and thinks Mr. Bailey's 'the average English view of the matter ', which he tiun j)rocecds to ' /foois and Characters, by lylton Str.ncljcy. Cliatlo and Winchis, \ij2i. 134 NOSES IN THE AIR show is by no nieins his own. This is high-snilFing criticism indeed, and can hardly be more exactly character- ized than in Mr. Strachey's closing words on Lady Hester Stanhope, where he says that she lay back, ' inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose in the air '. So, it seems to me, does Mr. Strachey lie back in his superb disdainful ease, having thrown Mr. Bailey into a corner of the room. Well, ])erhaps that is a little too sublime. It sent me back to Racine, at any rate, and will in due course send me on to Mr. Bailey, whose statement of the average English view I have not yet seen : meantime, as I dcn't suppose him likely to be more of an average Englislmian than I am, I feel inclined to put down what has occurred to me on renewing, and bettering, the bowing acquaintance with Racine which I had before. The play in particular shall be Andromaque, though Bajazet, Britan- nicus, and Athalie equally invite me. There is much to say o^ Andromaque which Mr. Strachey has not said ; but before that I think there is one comment to be made on what he has said. It is singular to find him |)raising Racine for the very things which he blames in Voltaire. It was Voltaire's misfortune, he tells us, ' tn be for ever clogged by a tradition of decorous restraint ; so that the effect of his plays is as anomalous as would be — let us say — that of a shilling shocker written by Miss Yonge. His heroines go mad in epigrams, while his heroes commit murders in inversions. Amid the hurly-burly of artificiality, it was all his cleverness could do to keep its iiead to the wind ; and he was only able to keep afloat by throwing overboard liis humour.' That is, probably, Mr. Bailey's view of Racine ; and NOSES IN THE AIR 135 certainly all these griefs could be exhibited against the greater poet. If Mr. Strachey had subjected Anclromaque to the sub-ironic analysis whicii Al-zlre undergoes at his hands, very much the same sorry effect would have been produced. You could extenuate Hamlet, Job, (Ed'ipus on those terms, if it were worth your while. It is, of course, plain that ' decorous restraint ' hampers Racine at every turn. It hampers him, but is at the same time his strength. That is true of all poetic form whatever. Channel your emotion deep enough, it will flow with the greater force. Hence the Sonnet, the Rime Royal, the Sestina, and the rest. Deep enough ; but not so deep that, for the majority of your hearers, it should practically run underground. That is probably what Mr. Bailey fmds, certainly what I and the ' average English taste ' find, in Racine. Tiie declama- tion carries the emotion over our heads, or under our feet — it doesn't matter which. That may be attacked from another side. It may be said that the average English taste is unable to accept a merely rhetorical ex])ression of passion. Verbal eloquence, verbal felicity, can do much, but not all. There comes a moment when Othello must use the pillow, or Polonius be run through the body. As we see the thing, action is the ultimate eloc|ue dicousu if the essayist pleases, and as Montaigne certainly did — that is, if himself is so. It is better thus, for the general, than that it siiould In- crabbed, though i)ersonally 1 like close writing. It may, 140 MONTAIGNE indeed, be both crabbed and desultory ; and that was Montaigne's way ; for however much he might meander he had a serried mind and massed himself upon his points as they turned up. That was by no means in any orderly sequence, as he proves abundantly by thrusting his ten- derest reminiscences of his father into his Essay De rVvrongnerie, with which the worthy man had nothing at all to do. He slips into them by exclaiming, ' C'est merveille des contes que j'ay ouy faire a mon pere de la chastete de son siecle', and breaks them off abruptly with, ' Revenons a nos bouteilles '. That is so desultory as to be casual ; yet the simplicity of handling rids it of offence. He adored his father. The occasion of his writing Essays may account for the form which they took. He began by making extracts from the Classics into a commonplace book. Thereafter, when a subject occurred to him, he looked through his notes, picked his quotations, and there, practically, you were. He picked too many, and used them all. Some of his early essays merely strung them together like beads. But he set the fashion which did not forsake us till the other day (and then for a very good reason) and became a quarry for his disciples, as Burton of the Anatomy also became. Men went to Montaigne, not to follow out his vagaries but to stimulate their own. As he grew more into the work he was doing he improved vastly upon his first attempts. He kept closer to life, dealt less in general ideas. His citations then had point, by ceasing to be the only point. He is at his highest in his third Book, as in ' Sur des Vers de Virgile ', and ' Du Repentir ', and very nearly as good in the twelfth essay of the second Book : ' Apologie de Raimond de Sebonde '. In eacli of those three he has a subject close MONTAIGNE 141 to his heart — Love, Himself, Mankind. There, having something better to do, he makes the classics fetch and carry for him. Nobody who desires to know to what point detachment can be carried without ceasing to be human can afford to neglect the ' Apologie '. It is the best alterative conceivable for what ills an excessive use of Gulliver s Travels may have induced in the reader. ' .I'ay veu en mon tom])s cent artisans, cent laboureurs, plus sages et plus heureux que des Rectcurs de I'Universitd.' And again, ' La pcste do I'homme c'est I'opinion de S9avoir.' And once more, ' Notre bien-estre, ce n' est que la privation d' estre mal. Voyl<^ pourquoy la secte de philosophic qui a le plus faict valoir la volupte encore a-elle rang^e i la seule indolence.' The last is a paradox which I don't admit, except as a masterly reduction of facts to an absurdity. As you read you can see the frosty old eyelids glimmering over it. With those and certain other exceptions, I don't ])retcnd to idolatrous admiration of Montaigne. 1 will play with anybody at anything up and down the world, but must know what game it is we are playing. Montaigne does not. There never was a man who cared less for sum-m- ject and om-m-ject. Though he prefers to handle general notions, he takes them by the handful at a tinu- ; .mil I don't believe you will find a core of idea in an essay of his. Sometimes he will intentl for one anil never reach it. There is an essay ol good length in the Second Book called ' Coustume de lisle de Cea *, in which there is not a word cither of the island or the custom, whatever it was. He had not reached them, I suppose, by the time he was tired. One in the Third Book, ' Des Coches ', o])ens with a discussion of the habit of blessing the sneezer — a 142 MONTAIGNE pretty oblique attack. But one does not go to Montaigne to find a theme stated, or disquisition festooned about a peg. He is one to be opened at liazard ; a good man for the sortes. You will find wisdom on every page : 'Le prix de I'ame ne consiste pas a aller haut, mais ordonnemcnt. Sa grandeur ne s'exerce j)ar de la grandeur, c'est en la ni6diocrite ; ' many a sharp sentence : ' Nos folies ne me font pas rire; c'est nos sapiences'; a pungency, a salt; but you will seldom be touched either to laughter or tears ; and for a kindly old man, as he surely was, he is curiously without charm. He had friends — he tells us so ; but they were few, and in general he held men at arm's length. ' La froideur de ma conversation m'a desrobe avec raison la bienvaillance de plusieurs.' How many friends has he made since his death ? Think of him beside Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Charles Lamb. If the whole of his book had been as the last half of it we might have had a different feeling towards him. If his heart had gone in, ours might have gone out. His writing mellows as it goes on, as no doubt he did himself. Whether it tells us anything is another matter. With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart .... that is, with the sonnet. Can that be said of Montaigne and the Essay ? If the essayist is not personal he is nought, and may as well class himself pamphleteer at once. Personal they have been, one and all, importing their egos into any argument whatsoever, allowing no other staple, considering no appeals. Except lyric poetry, I suppose there is no such fun in the world, given the knack, as essay- writing. You write of what you know best and love best. ' Son plus laborieux et principal estude c'est s'estudier soy ', MONTAIGNE 143 Montaigne reported of his own wit. That is by no means to say that he publishes all his discoveries. Other things besides interest go into the study. Vanity goes in ; prejudice is never out. Humility may be under the table, and modesty have her back to the wall. When you read Montaigne upon le Repentir you may think he has told you everything, so much has he the air of having discharged his bosom. Analyse the essay and you will find that he has indeed been frank about his tower, cliamber, library, and basse-cour, but singularly discreet about himself and his own plenishings. A word or two of his habits — eating, drinking, sleeping : nothing else, and nothing that matters. After studying the subject for forty years, that is not all he had learned. It is what he has thought fit to tell, and I don't think that either modesty or humility IhIcI his hand. For that apparent candour and real secretiveness, I conclude, and not because he was perfectly calm about the St. Bartholomew and the like of that, Michelet could not find a good word to say for him. Certainly, if a man is writing the History of I'rancc he may be pardoned for losing patience with a man or with mankind. Man as he ought not to be was good enough for Montaigne, wiiose historical researches went no further than the fall of the Roman Empire, and could not have discovered him much about tlie French one even if he had been concerned about it. No doubt also that he took more interest in Man than in men. He was ever a solitary. He mentions the Wars of Religion rarely, and mostly as a bore. He reports that he has seen men burnt for religion's sake — ' ces pauvrcs gens' — and has remarked tiieir wild devotions in the mid^t of the fire. By such exercises, he deems, they kept the faith, or rather 144 MONTAIGNE they gave It new direction ; which, he goes on, snys nnicli for their piety, little for their constancy. He is woundily right, as usual, but it is a hard saying. There are not many more references to passing events : the Execution of Mary Stuart is one, and no reprobation for it. He calls Fran9ois II, lier first husband, the greatest king in Christendom, which is a compliment probably to the realm rather than to the little monarch. As for his own beliefs, he professed himself a Catholic, and purposed to live and die in that persuasion — as in fact he did. For all that appears he was what we call a deist. The Paternoster was enough prayer for hmi ; but there is as little about the Saviour in the Essais as there is in hycidas^ nothing of the Madonna, nothing of the hierarchies except a good story of an old woman who was found with two tapers alight before the altar of St. Michael, one for him and one for the dragon. I think Montaigne burnt his candles in duplicate too. He was, and professed to be, the man of common sense, the average concupiscent male who had contrived to temj)er a])petite by maintaining an accurate view of the consequences of indulgence. He positively declined to regret anything he had done. ' Si j'avois a revivre, je revivrais comme j'ay vescu.' That is the saying of a very sincere or very foolish man. Myself, I believe him. I have been led away from the Essa'is to consider tiie Essayist, a vain exercise if I am right in thinking that he purposely spun himself out of sight in them. No matter for that : he has done his work, done it so well that from his day to our own the form has persisted without any material change. If one had to define the Essay it would be as the written, after-dinner monologue of a well-read, well-satisfied man of, at least, five-and-forty. Years don't MONTAIGNE 145 mattt-r : the spirit of years matters very much. You must be mature enougli to pontificate and wise enough to do it tactfully. You must not be long, you should not be difficult ; you may be discursive, but not abrupt. You may eschew eloquence and outrageous fun ; you should subserve the chuckle. You may bedew the eyes, not drown them. You may not take sides, nor improve the occasion. Your teaching must be by the way. ' .le n'cnseigne point,' Montaigne says, ' je raconte '. You will be allusive, of course — all full men are so ; and you will quote freely, often inaccurately. Anecdote should be your salt, but 1 don't think quotation should be your j)epper. It was Montaigne's undoubtedly, and, like his anecdotes, almost entirely of one people and language. It was very well for his auditory of the moment which, with him, spoke Latin at least as well as French — he himself spoke it better. But that implacable people, the Romans, have leceded far from us. Neither Troy nor Rome stands where it did. Our essayists have since discovered other nations. First it was Israel, and you had Abishai and Aholibah, Hophni and Phineas walking familiarly in the page ; next it was Shakespeare ; and now we have more Keats than we really need. liut certainly we are more teni])erate, or more ignorant, than our fathers; and at least we are shoit. So had 1 better be. T>reams No man can command his dreams, though poets have feigned and philosophers pretended it. If we could do that, it may well be that we should ere now have abolished marriage, over-population, — or any, — murder, art, minor poetry, nay, the world itself, 'annihilating all that's made '. But that cannot be ; and although it is very true that dreams may be induced, the period of gestation is not known. I have thought sometimes that those which report themselves in a foreign language follow immediately upon an evening's reading in it, and would go so far as to trace an elephantine or grasshopjier style in them, as the case may be, to previous conversation with Boswell or R. L. Stevenson : but such inductions need careful record, which I have not kept. I don't doubt that ninety-nine failures would smother one successful observation, and remain at present of opinion that the dream-self is not to be cajoled any more than forced into instant service. And a good thing, too, otherwise he would add to our burden of drowsy syrups, as a pair of emotional kniglits have done of late, to the increase of lotophagy and detriment of common sense. It is otherwise witli those visions of semi-consciousness, which are worth cultivating since they are the sure preludes of sleep, I can nearly always bring them about ; and vTry curious, very startling they are, and worthy of record were any means of recording them convenient. Out of a luminous mist, through a drifting rosy cloud, DREAMS 147 a face resolves itself in strong light, sometimes minute, but perfect in every detail, as if it was seen through the small glass of the telescope ; more often of full size ; sometimes growing as it nears the dreamer ; sometimes coming so close as to merge into his face. That may or may not be a pleasant thing ; for beautiful as some of the faces are, others are more hideous than life could endure, some repulsive, ^ome malignant, some bestial, some horribly maimed — one-eyed, hanging-lipped, swollen, broken, sod- den. They change aspect rapidly as you watch them ; from being beautiful beyond expression in words they become frightful in deformity. They are never more than a face, never speak, though they are eloquent of moral quality; tliey are never constant, but always tran'^itional. Well, those you can obtain. Tiie lit clouds must come first, and some amount of liglit, or some recent commerce with light, will make sure of them. Tlie \i>-ions resolve themselves therefrom. Once you have tliem, in my cx])i'rience, sleep is at hand. Such dreams, to call them ili'])tic in his dancing, as you see it in Dervishes in Atiica. One expected him to fall suddenly, to foam at the mouth, lie jerking on the sward. 15ut he survived to be something of a hero among the women, ulu) looked upon him, I think, as af^icted by God,, mil therefore a thing of value. The leader, however, the leader was of the Mediterrancin race, of a stock older than history — a little ilark-skinneil, alert, rapid, humorous nian. I le ])layed on a fiddle as he led his band, and danced doubled-up, witli mucli lifting of the feet, and his knees sometimes near his shar]) elnn. 158 THE MORRIS Our Dane danced because he must ; the Iberian because he loved it. It was an uncouth, really (at our time of day) almost a scandalous performance ; more like the Russian's Sacre du ' Prlntemps thftn you would believe, or might care about. Some of it, like the Sacre, was mere jigging uj) and down, rapid andincessant, punctuated at irregular intervals by leaps in the air. There were country-dances in it too — that is, of course, contre-danses ; looking carefully, one could detect certain revivals : one where two danced face to face, with handkerchiefs in their hands which they flourished at each other and clashed together. That betrayed itself, that it had once been a war-dance. Another, in whicii one man seemed to fly, one to pursue, in which the hunted seemed to invite the hunter, with a swift skirting movement, his feet aslide, and one elbow crooked — that was the eternal invita- tion to pursuit and capture, the love-chase of high antiquity. Whether the complacent matrons, young wives and mothers who were looking on — for the Women's Institute of Longworth was present in force — would have still looked on had they realized what it all meant, or had once meant, I cannot say. They were much amused — that's certain. The Morrisers came from Bampton across the river, where the dance is traditional. The leader, by profession a blacksmith, told me that he had had it from his father and grandfather, taking it by inheritance with the clothes which he wore. All five of them were in white duck jackets and shorts, with white stockings, and knee and elbow knots of many-coloured tapes. Round their shins they had pads of that kind of carpet which village wives make for them- selves of rags. They had wh ite double-breasted waistcoats, and round felt hats with cocks-feathers in them. THE MORRIS 159 It was a strange performance, rather iinplcasing than not. It wanted grace, it wanted (except in the leader) gusto. It did not express the best of the pcojjle, nor the worst of them either ; did not really express anything at ail except a limping ritual only half- remembered. Those who first uttered themselves so had been not far removed from the beasts. The Morris has become a vestige, like the Fyfield elm, or the rudimentary tail. But I am glad to have seen it. Theology and Fine Women I AM far from saying tliat the themes are incompatibles, though personally I have never met with them juxta- posed. Woman, and above all a fine woman, in Count Smorltork's phrase, 'surprises by herself; but how very much more she would surprise if in the pauses of her proper affair she were to repulse your advances as follows : ' Sir, you are an entire stranger to me, and to declare a passion on a few hours' acquaintance, must be either to try my weakness, or because you think a young woman is incapable of relishing anything but such stuff when alone in conversation with a gentleman. I beg then 1 may hear no more of this ; and as I am sure you can talk upon many more lational subjects, request" your favour to give me your opinion on some articles in this Hebrew Bible you see lying open on the table in this room. My father. Sir, among other things, has taken great pains to instruct me . . . and has taught me to read and understand this inspired Hebrew book ; and says we must ascribe primacvity and sacred prerogative to this language. For my part, I have some doubts as to this matter. . . . Tell me, if you please, what you think of the thing.' It is not every lover, arBcnt even as this young lady's was, who would be prepared with reflections and observa- tions upon the Tower of Babel and its far-flung sequel at a moment's — and such a moment's — notice. But the hero of the adventure from which I have quoted was more than equal to it. He discoursed at immense length, then re- newed his attack, and secured the ' illustrious maid ' for his THEOLOGY AND FINE WOMEN i6i own, or very nearly. Unfortunately she died a fortnight before the liapj)y day. She was the first of many to be won in like circumstances, and quick succession. The susceptible and accomplished wooer before the book's end was seven times a widower. His name was John Buncle, Esquire, and I have just been reading his Life and Adventures. It is much easier to believe that John Buncle lived, had seven wives before he was thirty, and travelled for weeks on end in Westmorland over mountains as high as the Himalayas, and rivers as wide as the Ganges than it is to realize that one Thomas Amory invented him. If one thinks of Thomas Amory at all, it is ratlier to suppose him the invention of John Buncle. ' Who is the Potter, jiray?' Everybody's answer would be that John Buncle was he; but really it is not so. Thomas Amory, the fourth of a line of those names, was living in Westminster, with a country cottage at Hounslow, in 1756 when he jiublishcd John Buncle. He lived secluded, 1 have rcail, was a man of 'a \cry peculiar look and aspect, yet', if you plclse, 'with the m.1nners of a gentleman'. 1 am glad to l)elicve that your look and aspect, which you cannot help, do not interfere with your manners, which I tliought you could. He seldom went abroad before dusk, ' like a bat ' ; and he wandered the streets ' in abstract meditation '. The inference intended to be drawn by his biograjiher is that Amory was mad ; but I don't at all agree with that. Still, I am ready to own that he has written the oddest novel in the world. You must not say that a man is mad Ix'cause he likrs odd thing'^, and makes a novel about them. Nor even — ari- tlir tl,ings themselves '■^(VS things for a L i62 THEOLOGY AND FINE WOMEN man to like. Theology is not an odd thing ; fine women are a very delightful thing, and not so odd, either, as you might think ; scenery is not at all odd. The oddness of John Buncle lies in the collocation. Amorous dalliance — ' sweet reluctant amorous delay ' — enhanced by discussion of the homoiousion ; Socinian nunneries in Westmorland valleys ; a Thebaid in Stainmore Forest ; chapters of romance devoted to the theory and practice of Fluxions — these are the features of no ordinary novel. Finally, an art which through s])oil-tips and mountains of pedantry is so contrived as to foster the illusion that you are reading the real memoirs of a seven-times married Unitarian hero is not the work of a madman. John Buncle is a prodigal book, a book of abounding gusto and high spirits. Though it is absurd to say, as Hazlitt does, that Amory was the English Rabelais, John Buncle has the superabundance and ' fine excess ' of Rabelais. If Westmorland is not as he makes it out, if you cannot there travel ' into a vast valley, enclosed by mountains whose toj)S were above the clouds', and so come into ' a country that is wilder than the Cam- pagna of Rome, or the uncultivated vales of the Alps and Apennines' ; if you find not up there a mountain to cross, whose ' air was piercing cold, on account of its great height, and so subtle, that we breatlied with difficulty, and were a little sick' — well, it is a pity. As John Buncle says, 'the scene was prodigiously fine. Sub ped'tbus ventos et rauca ton'itrua calcat.' I don't at all quarrel with Karakoram at Brough under Stainmore, nor will any reader. And who would not desire, in the same Salvator land- scape, to light upon Burcot Lodge, and be welcomed there by Azora, lady superior of a ' little female republic ' .'' THEOLOGY AND FINE WOMEN 163 "' She was attended by ten young women, straight, clean, handsome girls, and surpassed them in tallness. Her countenance was masculine, but not austere ; her fine blue eyes discovered an excellence of temper, while they showed the penetration of her mind. Her hair was brown, bright and ch;irming ; and nature had stami)ed upon her cheek a colour that exceeded the most beautiful led of the finest flower. . . . She was dressed in a fine woollen stuff, made in the manner shepherdesses arc painted, and on her head had a band or iillet like what the ladies now wear, with a bunch of artificial flowers in her hair. She had a very small straw hat on. In her hand she held a long and pretty crook ; and as her coats were short, her feet were seen, in black silk siiocs and the finest white stockings, and appeared vastly pretty.' I should think so. Well, then, if this compleat and dainty shepherdess should in the course of conversation discover 'an amazing collection of the most rational philosodhic ideas'; if she should 'deliver them in the most pleasing dress, with as much ease as she breathed ' ; and do it, mind you, ' after I had feasted upon an excellent supper', all I have to say is that that reader is hard to please who will not take the rough with the smooth, take down the theology like a digestive pill after supjKT, and even be ready for more on the same terms afler breakfast in the morning. John Buncle took theology in his stride from wife to wife. liut he did not marry Azora.» She W.1S vowed to celibacy, and he made the Ix'St of it. Besides, she died Ixfore he could manage. All his wives were lovely creatures, and all Unitarians, prepared to uphold their faith against any adversary. They all had money, which fell to Buncle, and they all died as I. 2 164 THEOLOGY AND FINE WOMEN extremely short notice. This is so much the case that one thinks it must have become a habit ; a habit also which s]iread itself outside matrimony to other divine beings upon whom he looked with an eye to closer relations. Miss Noel, for instance, who at first subdued his ardour with Hebrew disquisitions but later consented to be his, died of the smallpox within a fortnight of making him the happiest of men. Azora, the talented head of the female republic, did not long survive his attentions. As for his wives, no sooner were they become so than the grave gaped for them. ' I laid my Antonia by my Charlotte and my Statia, and then rode off.' In two days' time he is at Harrogate. ' While I was there, it was my for- tune to dance with a lady, who had the head of Aristotle, the heart of a primitive Christian, and the form of the Venus dc Medicis. ... I was not many hours in her company before I became most passionately in love with her.' He obtained her — a Miss Spence of Westmorland — and in six months she died of a malignant fever. On one occasion, however, he gave way prematurely to habit, and buried a wife, Miss Dunk by name, before she was dead. Doctor Stainville exhumed and married her. Buncle did not like it, but he had committed himself by a too impulsive act. It was his only indiscretion of the kind. Hazlitt, in praising this book, calls it a Unitarian romance, but in another j)lace speaks of the vanity of strewing the flowers of poetry round the borders of that spiky creed. Naturally you cannot use poetry, which consists in affirmations, to embellish a theory of the universe made up mainly of negations. But John Buncle is nothing of the sort. Rather it is a romance y^^r Uni- THEOLOGY AND FINE WOMEN 165 tarians. It will conduct them to an island of the blest where ' glorious girls ' or ' angels in human form ' will minister to their passionate part, and yet lay them out St. Athanasius in a spare moment as easily as a piece of crochet work. We are fallen upon lean years. You do not find such beings in Westmorland now. Dedications SACRIFICE, no doubt, has a value strictly relative to the giver. That was the judgement of supreme authority. Yet it had been felt to be a ponderable thing, otherwise Agamemnon would not have offered up his daughter in Tauris. She was a great king's daughter, worth, he would have, argued, many sparrows, or lowlier virgins. So a cathedral beat back greater merit u])on a conqueror than a parish church, and ten masses did more for your soul than one. Here is the old confusion between the big and the great, to which j)atriarchs have lent themselves as well as kings — but I have no wish to be a ram caught in a thicket of theology, though that image reminds me of the sharp rebuke to Abraham's fallacy. I had intended to begin by saying that when you dedicate a book to a man you turn him, for the occasion, into a god. His lap, or his drawing-room table, is an altar, and you on your knees before it, oblation in hand. Your praises of him flow uj)- wards to his nostrils, and the more they tickle them the sweeter will be the ebb of the wave into your own. Also it is actually necessary that you should believe him a valid god, for the moment, or (of course) that he should really be one : otherwise, on the rebound, you may feel that you have made an ass of yourself — which nobody likes to feel. There, to go no further, is reason for the once common practice of dedicating to the sovereign, King's or Queen's most excellent majesty. It may be out of favour now because majesty is so ; but a little while ago kings were demi-divine, and as dispensers of blessings unequivocal. DEDICATIONS 167 One likeness to Olympians they certainly had : no reek of flattery could be too oily for their nostrils. It did not af- front a shrewd and witty great lady to be called ' the most high, mightie and magnificent Empress, renowned for Pietic. Vertuc, and all gratious government ', or to have a poet ' in all humilitie Dedicate, Present and Consecrate these his labours, to live with the Elernitie of her Fame.' She took it as a matter of course ; but Spenser, it is certain, felt the better of it, since it is his emendation of the first dedication of The Faerie Qjteetie, a much more fiugal sacrifice. So true it is that flattery flatters the flatterer. Where a Spenser could stoop, other and smaller men would grovel and feel themselves the warmer for the princely foot. So Coryat, the Odcombian legstrctcher, dedicated ' serenisjiimo principi Henrico, Christiani orbis Tito, id est, humani generis Deliciis', and, not content with that, re- dedicated his Crudities to each member of the royal family in turn— beginning again with the Titus of Cliristendom. Him he now addressed, 'Most scintillant Phosphorus of our British Trinacria', and much more to the same effect ; and having, so to sj^-ak, begun witii minerals, he went on with them and dug up some for everybody. Great James heard himself styled ' most invincible Monarch ot iliis thticc-renowned Albion (not quasi iikftiov, but quasi Al-bc- one, in regard of the happic Union of England and Scotland!) and the refulgent Carbuncle of Christendomc '. It isn't everybody who would like to Ik- called a carbuncle, but .lames seems to have Uiken it in. The ^ueen was ' most resplendent Gem and radiant Aurora of Great Britaitie's spacious Hemisphere ' ; Princess Elizabeth, ' the true attractive Adamant of this famous Hand'; and Charles Duke of York, ' most glittering Chrysolite of our English i68 DEDICATIONS diademe '. After that unhappy exhibition it is comfortable to read the sober and dignified prose in which John Fuller dedicated his father's Worthies of England to Charles II. ' To His Sacred Majesty. ' Most dread Sovereign : the tender of these ensuing collections is made with as much Fear and Reverence, as it was intended with Duty and Devotion by the Author whilest living. The Obligation that lieth upon me to endeavour him all right, forced me into this presumption. It is the first voice I ever uttered in this kind, and I hope it will be neither displeasing to Your Majesty, nor blamed by the World ; whilest (not unlike that of the son of Croesus) it sounds loyalty to my sovereign, and duty to my father.' He ends with a prayer for the happiness of King and people ; and ' so prayeth your Majesty's meanest subject, the Author's orphan, John Fuller '. When you remember that the King was but two years restored to his throne, and John Fuller a clergyman, you will agree with me that as a gentleman, a subject, and a son he distinguishes himself as much as Ciiarles. There is an obverse to all this gold-medalling, and perhaps no man is perfectly himself on his knees to a king. Nor is he., it may be, on his knees to anybody ; yet in the way he turns his compliment, or even in the fact that he makes one at all, you may get an insight into his character. There was sound reason for the fact (as it seems to be) that Carlyle dedicated nothing of his. If that is true, it was because he was Carlyle, the most arrogant of the sons of men, and the most Scotch. Both elements are to be reckoned with. No Scotchman will put himself at a dis- advantage if he can help it ; but Carlyle probably could not. DEDICATIONS 169 bring himself to believe that there was a man living to whom he should bend the knee. Johnson did not dedicate his Dictionary, and I understand him in so far as Lord Chesterfield was concerned. But did not Windham deserve it ? Or him to whom Boswell in sober and becoming terms inscribed the Life — Sir Joshua Reynolds ? ' If a work should be inscribed to one who is master of the subject of it, and whose approbation, therefore, must insure it credit and success, the Life of Dr. Johnson is, with the greatest propriety, dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was the intimate and beloved friend of that great man ; the friend whom he declared to be "the most invulnerable man" he knew ; whom, if he should quarrel with him, he should find the most difficulty how to abuse.' Here is Bozzy like a gentleman. And here is Wordsworth like Wordsworth, a man unable to understand tliat his books were not ot universal imj)ort. How much of Wordsworth and how little of Charles Lamb is here : "Mv DKAK Fkiknd, — When I sent you a few weeks ago, " The 'I'ale of Peter Bell ", you asked ' Wi,y " The Waggoner" was not added?' To say the truth, from the liigher tone of imagination, and the deeper touches of passion arrived at in the former, I apprehended this little |)iece could not accompany it without ilisad vantage. In the year 1806, if I am not mistiken, "The Waggoner" was read lo you in manuscri|)t. . . . Being, tlierefore, in some measure the cause of its jjresent ap|)earancc, you nnist allow me the gratification of inscribing it to you, in acknowleilgnunt of the pleasure I have deri\ed fiom your writings, and the high esteem with which I am very truly yours, William Wokuswokth.' 170 DEDICATIONS It is not saying much to say that that is how not to dedicate a book to a friend. Dedication is, no doubt, a comphment, and is intended to be so : the sound convention, however, is that it is the writer who is comphmented by the opportunity to dedicate. Ben Jonson had used the better way, in putting forth Every Man in his Humour ' to tlic most learned, and my honor'd Friend, Mr. Canibdcn, Clarentiaux '. ' Sir, there are, no doubt, a supeixilious race in the world who will esteem all office done you in this kind an injurie. . . . But my gratitude must not leave to correct their errour, since I am none of those that can suffer the benefits confer'd upon my youth to perish with my age. It is a fraile memory that remembers but present things : and, had the favour of the times so conspir'd with my disposition, as it could have brought forth other, or better, you had had the same proportion, and number of the fruits, the first. Now, I pray you, to accept this, such, wherein neither the confession of my manners shall make you blush, nor of my studies repent you to have been the Instructer: and, for the profession of my thankfulness, I am sure, it will, with good men, find either j)raise, or excuse. Your true lover, Ben Jonson.' That is the way to dedicate a book — with all your heart. And that is how to write measured prose. There is one other way, the way of free companions, the routicr's way. I have had one of these myself, and as such greetings are not so common with me I must be forgiven for closing with it. Here is a writer inscribing to his colleague in adventure ; poet to poet ; as minor as you please — but who cares ? DEDICATIONS 171 Hewlett ! as ship to ship Let us the ensign dip. There may be who despise For dross our merchandise, Our balladries, our bales Of woven tales ; Yet, Hewlett, the glad gales Favonian ! And what spray Our dolphins toss'd in play. Full in old Triton's beard, on Iris' shimmci ing veils ! Tliat is to drink down with gallantry the poppies of oblivion, and to credit another with the same courageous j)hilosoi)hy. yunketings Nenv and Old THE great difference between Christmas past and Christmas present seems to be that it is no longer spent at home ; and that is all the difference in tlic world. If you are revelling publicly, at an hotel or restaurant, you are turning a ft^stivai into a festivity, a holiday into a beano. You will spend a vast deal more money — but that is part of the business, if you have slid, as it is so easy to slide, into the modern superstition that the more money you spend the more pleasure you will get. No doubt some people — ■ Sardanapalus, Nero, Louis XIV, the Prince Regent — held to the same error long before our time ; but my point rather is that Tom, Dick, and Harry hold to it now — and that Mrs. Tom is of their opinion. However, I have no desire to speak, of them, my lines being cast rather with those who have none too much money or credit to spend, the meek who have literally inherited the earth in these days when the proud have filled the hotels and left the country to them. The meek, as always, stay at home for Christmas. They don't go to Brighton, as the nearest they can manage to the Riviera, nor to Hampstead Heath as their equivalent of Murren. For them Christmas is still a children's feast. They are the stocking-staffers, the tree-dressers. If chest- nuts are still to be roasted, it is their fingers that will be burned ; if raisins are still to be hot in the mouth, they will set the snap-dragon bowl ; if blindman's buff is not as dead as Dickens, it is in the revealing windows of mean streets, or behind the lit panes of cottage casements that you must JUNKF.TINOS NEW AND OLD 173 look for it. I can't now speak for Londoners — it is long since I was one ; but for village-j3Cople I can answer, that children rule the roast at Christmas, as indeed they pretty much do at all times of the year. I was thinking when I began to write, of the mighty as well as the rich — for not all of them are rich alike — who, whether rich or not, always made the most show, and still do. But here is another difference in the spirit of their revelry now, that whetlier Christmas be spent at home or not, it is not spent in tlie country. The great houses of to-day are shut uji, some of them because they are shut iloivn^ others because their owners please to be elsewhere. So far as country life is concerned now, we have come to the end of a dispensation, and must prepare ourselves for changes which will be serious, and even tremendous. The ' great house- ' is ceasing to be reckoned with in the country ; soon it will '^imJ)ly cease to be. Hani times, change of habit, it's all one. \\\- must learn to do without his lordship or 'Squire'. What he does with himself at Christmas; whether he dines and jazzes at a London hotel or a Swiss, or at Cannes or in Cairo, we need not inquire. Wc have learned to do without him, are learning slowly to do for ourselves. Since the war we have pickeil up a thing or two ; the gentle uses of clubs, the benefit of an Entertain- ments Committee whose business it is to keep things alive. Nowadays there must be no week witiiout some kind of a show. Dancing is our great discovery ; we have taken kindly to that. I am sure it is pure gain. I'or in dancing women come by their own — and by no means only pretty women : accomplished women too, graceful women, charm- ing women. They must Ix* sought, in dancing. They have favours to bestow, and they are aware of it. Those 174 .lUNKETINGS NEW AND OLD things mark a great advance. Few habits spread so quickly as ceremonial observance. It is essential to the dance ; it is becoming (as it should be) necessary to courtship. Who is to say that it will not swim over the married estate, so that the young man who sought his partner's favours in the dance may not find himself presently striving to deserve them in that longer and more complicated figure which is life in couples ? But I am forgetting Christmas. We don't feast in public in the country, though we dance in that fashion. Our revelling, if we are cottagers, is strictly kept at home. ' A cada puerco viene su San Martin ', said Sancho. The proverb holds in the West of England. St. Martin is a v/ailful season, the air throbs with it ; but one gets used to such things, and besides — one looks forward. On this very day of writing, within five hundred feet of my house, a farmyard has been turned into a shambles. A hecatomb of turkeys have paid the bill for their year of high living. That was no road for one's morning stroll. Heavens ! and yesterday I saw those noble birds like ships in full sail — ' with all their bravery on, and tackle trim. Sails filled, and streamers waving '-^swelling and curvetting in a meadow, as if life was one long round of gallantry and panache. Alas for them ! Cur mundus m'tl'ttat sub vana gloria ? But those slaughtered paladins are for our betters. They will make to groan the tables of the Ritz and the Carlton. We here shall eat our pigs, literally from head to feet, intus et in cute. And for our drink, it will be mead. Metheglin, if you will have it: I prefer the monosyllable. It is a noble liquor, but asks, even demands, moderation. Personally, I take it in a liqueur glass, like cherry brandy, JUNKETINGS NEW AND OLD 175 which, however, it does not at all resemble. There is nothing sweet about good mead ; nothing sticky or viscid. It is a thin, clear, ambL-r-coloured bever, slightly aromatic, very insidious, ruthless to those who exceed. And to exjilain how ruthless, to what exceeding bitter end, I can- not do better than wind up my essay with the story of Farmer Hackbush, Farmer Norton, and Farmer Gell, who met at the house of a friend on the border of this shire last Boxing Day, and re\elled, not wisely, uj)on mead. They revelled long and dcej)ly, until they were conveyed somehow to the stition and heaved into the milk-train of the small hours, consigned to the guard; all for the same destination, and, as it turned out, destiny. For at their wayside station, where they were duly heaved out into the breathless, dewy dark — that intense dark of the hours before dawn — they were convoyed into the yard to the three tax-carts and slumbering boys which awaited them. They were heaved in — Farmer Hackbush, Farmer Norton, Farmer Gell ; mechanically they took and shook the reins, and murmured Cooorrooj) I And each of them, thanks to a sob.T, instructed cob, reached a house, an oj)cn front door, and an aw.iiting matron in a dressinj^-gown. liut none reached his own front door. \'ui I'"armer Hackbush was heaved into the front door and arms of Mrs. Gell, and Farmer Gell into those of Mrs. Norton, and I-'armer Norton into those of Mrs. Hackbush. All at 5 a.m. And what happened next, in each or any case, I don't know. Teufelsdrdckb in Hexameters ONE must not, said Socrates (or Plato for him) lay hands upon one's father ; nor must I, althougli he is in no such relationship to me either through nature or grace, write otherwise of my friend Mr. Gosse than with the respect and gratitude for many a fruitful hour which he has earned. I am too much in his debt (to carry it no further back) for his Causer'ies du dimancbe, since col- lected under the equally happy title of Boohs on the Table, to avoid saying so whenever I have the chance. He is doing what, I suppose, no writer now in Britain could do so well, if at all, when week after week he delivers a ripe and reasoned judgement upon any literary matter of interest wiiich time and chance may throw up to him. It is not only a triumph of range, though his range is astonishing ; nor only a matter of length, though he keeps that excel- lently well ; nor of lightness of touch ; noi' of a needle's point upon the exact place of attack. He has all tiiat, and a great deal more — mastery, ease, and urbanity ; remoteness from the market-square and dust of the bookstalls. It is, in fact, the case of a man who has found the thing to do which exactly suits his present temper, and can do it so as exactly to fit the present need. The judgements of such an one are not lightly to be questioned by the half-generation below him, and certainly not by me. He won't misunderstand me, then, when I say that one of his Causeries sent me back to A. H. Clough, to re-read his poetic remains from cover to cover, and then — it sounds ungrateful — to question a phrase or two which he lets fall TEUFET.SDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS 777 in dif^paiagemcnt of the poet. Admitting, as he does, that Cloiigh is ' still remembered, and in no danger of being for- gotten ', he goes on to say tliat ' he is remembered by his poems, which, althotigh they are amateurish in form and dry in texture, have an element of faint perennial interest.' It is delicately said ; yet is it true ? Mr. Gosse goes on to contradict it almost immediately, and to show^that where the first part of the judgement is true, the second is not, that where the first part is untrue, so again is the second ; for, as he puts it, ' when the body of his verse has been winnowed, not much remains, but there is a handful of golden grains, and they are pnre wheat '. In other words, that part of Clough's poetry which is amateurish in form and dry in texture has neither faint jierennial interest, nor any interest now at all ; but the other part, the handful of pure com which results from your winnowing, is neither amateurish nor dry, and possesses, for those who tackle it fairly, a very strong interest even now. So far as I c an see, so far as Mr. Gosse will take me, that winnowed golden remnant of Clough is I'heliolh'teofTobtr-tui-J'uoHrh. In form that ])Oem is a rough mock-epic written in hexa- meters which, if they clatter and rattle, do their job of stiffening by burlesque homerics the scntimentil fibre of the thing. In substance Thr liolhle is a fervent, even impas- sioned jiiece of work whose ins])iration, as I think, can be dated with ease, but whose passion is as oKl as mankind. It is ratiur remarkable that both Mr. Gosse and the author of his ]')0()k on the Tabic {/Irlhiir Ilu^h Clou^h^ by .lames Insley O'-borm) should have missed the well-spring of such a poem. It is important to remcnilx«r the date of The linlhlf, on every account. It is 1H4S. Well, in 1K47 Clough had M 178 TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS been tutor to a reading-party in the Flighlands which ' settled down ', says Mr. Osborne, ' for some weeks in a large farm-house', at Drumnadrochit. When the party broke up, Clough and a friend made a walking-tour through the Western Highlands, stopping at, among other places, a forester's hut called Toper-na-Fuosich, stopping at an inn at Rannoch, and attending a ball at Glenfinnan given by a chieftain called MacDonald of Glenaladale. ' Some of the incidents of The Both'te^ according to Shairp, happened to them ' while they were on tour. One of my points here is that they certainly did, and in order to make it I have only to cite a fragmentary and undated poem, entitled 6 ^eos /ACTa (Tov : Farewell, my Highland lassie! when the year returns around. Be it Greece, or be it Norway, where my vagrant feet are found, I shall call to mind the place, I shall call to mind the day. The day that 's gone for ever, and tlie glen that 's far away ; I shall see tiiy soft brown eyes dilate to wakening woman- thought. And whiter still the white cheek grow to which the blush was brought ; I shall hear, and see, and feel, in sequence sadly true. Shall repeat the bitter-sweet of the lingering last adieu ; I shall seem as now to leave thee, with the kiss upon the brow. And the fervent benediction of — 6 ^eos /actu, (jov ! Mr. Gosse refers to that poem, to its warmth and depth of regret, but does not apparently see how it bears upon The Both'te. He thinks it was cast aside for the longer poem. I don't think that myself, but rather that the longer TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS 179 poem grew out of the lyric by the need Clough felt both to relate and to justify a real experience. In other words, Elspie of The Bothie lived ; Clough had loved her. Yes, but tliere is more in it than that. Let me return to the date. The Bothie was written and published in 1848. That was a year of revolution in Europe, with every pros- l^ect of being so in England. It was the year of Feargus O'Connor and the great Chartist petition. It was three years after Disraeli's Sybil, one year before Alton Locke and Teast. It was two years before Carlyle broke out with Latter-Day Pamphlets and had everybody by the ears. The year, in fact, was that one in which the cynic's influence on Clough was strongest. If Clougli fell in love with a peasant-girl in 1847 and wrote his best poem in 1848, it is no wonder that it was The Bothie. The hexameters may be due to Longfellow, but the clatter of them is not. The clatter and the burlesque homerics are Clough of Rugby and Oxford trying to cover up his tracks. Artd his tracks are the tracks of Tcufelsdrcickh. That, shortly, is the rationale of The Bothie. Carlyle seems really to have liked Clough. When news of his death in 1 861 was sent him by I'roude he replied with less depreci ition than usual, ' I cjuite agree in what you say of poor Clough. A man more vivid, ingenious, veracious, miklly radiant, I have seldom nut with, and in a character so honest, modest, kindly.' You can generally trust Carlyle for adjectives; but those are odd ones. The Bothie is all those things to this day, getting on for eighty years old though it Ik; — but it is much more. There is passion in it, both moral and physical, which is not smothered in irony ; which smoulders under its ironical garment, bums holes in the airy thing and betrays glowing , M 2 i8o TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXyXMETERS flesh beneath. Carlyle dealt very warily with passion (though bile always had him at its mercy), and Clough never let himself go like that elsewhere : in The Botkie, however, the matter of experience, of the thing felt, is not to be mistaken. The justification too is equally passionate ; and whether it is a case of imagination flaming out of doc- trine or of doctrine kindled and illuminated by sensation does not seem to matter very much. Both are there and both felt. Mr. Osborne calls The Bothie a novel in verse. He can only maintain that by doing violence to novels in general and the poem in particular. A novel, if it is anything, is a reduction of life to the terms of art ; The Bothie is a dramatic piece of special pleading. It has a thesis, a scene afa'tre. It does not proceed from observa- tion of life or of a segment of life : rather, observation (and there is plenty) is used to quicken the plea. Certainly there is a narrative ; but it is used in the epic manner, that is, it depends upon character more than plot, and is told less by action than by oration, both direct and oblique. Story, as such, there is next to none. An Oxford reading-party in the Highlands is discovered, dressing for the yearly dinner of chieftains and clansmen which celebrates the yearly games. The young men and tiieir tutor are touched oft' with a spirit which rarely deserts the poem. They have no other bearing upon the plot than that of throwing it up, and at the end all disappear, except the tutor. He is ' the grave man, nicknamed Adam ', White-tied, clerical, silent, with antique square-cut waistcoat, and almost certainly a portrait. TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS i8i Then the hero — ' Philip Hewson, a poet ', Hewson, a radical hot, hating lords and scorning ladies, Silent mostly, but often reviling in iire and fury Feudal tenures, mercantile lords, competition and bishops, — a very jolly collection of hate-stuff. Mr. Gosse thinks Clough intended Hewson for himself, and could no doubt justify his opinion. There seems to me a good deal ot 1848 in the young man as he is developed — Tear 'em Roebuck, the Corn- Law Rhymer, not forgetting by any means Thomas Carlyle. For Hewson, it is to be observed, had nothing of the aristocrat about his origin. What he says of his youth and people sounds a good deal more like Manchester. The 'foils', on the other hand, are high : Hope, . . . black-tied, white- waistcoated, simple, His Honour — heir to ' the earldom of Hay ' ; Lindsay, . . . the lively, cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay ; Hobbes, . . . the great Hobbes, contemplative, corpulent, witty. Author forgotten and silent of currentest phrases and fancies, Mute and exuberant by turns ; lastly, Airlic, . . . effulgent as God of Olympus ; Blue, perceptibly blue, was the coal that had white-silk facings, Waistcoat blue, coral-buttoned, the white tie finely adjustetl — such are of the reading-])arty, and such L'lough's pscudo- homerics, of which Matthew Arnold went so far as to say that in two things they were more like the Jltad than i82 TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS any other English poem he could call to mind — ' in the rapidity of movement, and the plainness and directness of its style '. He says of The Bothie too that it produces in the reader the sense which Homer also produces — ' the sense of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life presented to him, instead of a small portion '. That is to say that it has universality, and to say the truth. At the dinner, which is told with a gusto, the result of experience, Philip makes a pragmatical speech, remem- bering Bannockburn but working in also Cullodcn, which, while not followed by the 'gentrice', commends itself and its speaker to one in the company, ... a thin man clad as the Saxon, Trouser and cap and jacket of homespun blue, hand- woven, who at the close . . . said with determined accent to Hewson, Touching his arm : Young man, if ye pass through the braes of Lochaber, See by the loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich. That thin man is the blacksmith Mackayc, father of the heroine. The whole of the first stave is machinery, of a sort familiar to readers of Tennyson. The Princess has such an opening — but I consider Clough's the better, because broader, brushwork. As for The Gardener s Daughter — but a word of her presently. The second stave gives the theme, in an outburst of Piiilip's at breakfast, when, discussing the dance which had followed the dinner, and the ' noble ladies and rustic girls, their partners ', the poet and radical declared himself TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS 183 Sick of the very names of your Lady Augustas and Floras ; and in right Carlylese cried out, Oh, if our high-born girls knew only the grace, the attraction Labour, and labour alone, can add to the beauty of women, and much more to the same effect. He caps all with an experience (obviously an experience of Clough's the year before) which plays in The Bothu the precise part occupied by George Fox's leather suit in the philosophy of Teu- felsdrockh : One day sauntering ' long and listless ', as Tennyeon has it. Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbadihoyhood, Chanced it my eye fell aside on a caplcss, bonnetless maiden, Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes. A thing seen. But now — Was it the air ? who can say ? or herself, or the charm of the labour ? But a new thing was in me; and longing delicious possessed me, Longing to take her and lift her, and i)iit her away from her slaving. Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind ? hanl cjuestion ! But a new thing was in me; I, too, was a youth among maidens : Was it the air ? who can say ? but in part 'twas the charm of the labour. Of that one can only say, a tiling felt. It is, however, pure Carlyle. Hear Tcufelsdrotkh : 'Two nun I honour, and no third. I'iist tlie toil- worn craftsm.m that with earth-made implement labori- ously conquers theeaith, and makes her man's. Venerable 184 TIZUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETliRS to me is the hard Hand ; crooked, coarse ; wlierein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as ot the Sceptre of this Planet. . . . For us was tliy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed : thou wert our Conscri])t, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. . , / Illuminate tiiat by sex-instinct, and you light the fire which we call passion. The reasoning is the same, though it is transfigured. The rest of the poem sticks closely to tlie theme. Philip goes to another dance, at Rannoch, and finds a ' golden-haired Katie ' with whom he builds peat-stacks, lights kitchen iires, does odd chores; whom he kisses, and presently leaves. Why so ? He tells his tutor in a letter : What had ended it all, he said, was singular, very — I was walking along some two miles off from the cottage Full of my dreamings — a girl went by in a jjarty witli others ; She had a cloak on, was stepping on c^uickly, for rain was beginning ; But as she passed, from her hood I saw her eyes look at me. So quick a glance, so regardless I, that although I had felt it, You couldn't properly say our eyes met. But they had, thougii ; and it was doom. He left his Katie, no longer his, for she consoled lierself with Airlie — Airlie of the waistcoat — and was next heard of Dancing at Balloch, you say, in the Castle, with Lady Maria ! That was what the tutor was told ; and that leads lis to Book VI, to the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, to the TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS 185 tutor liimself, to David Mackaye the blacksmitli, to Philip and to Elspie — to her ' whose glance at Rannoch Turned me in that mysterious way ; yes, angels conspiring, Slowly drew me, conducted me, home, to herself. . . .' The rest of the poem is concerned with the wooing of Elspeth, and philosophical justification of the stoop on Philip's part, if stoop there were. It is gravely but ardently told with a studied coolness and leisureliness whicii cannot hide the fervour. Indeed, the poem trembles with it, very much as The Angel in the House also trembles. Elspeth is shown as a girl of character as well as sweetness. There is nothing of the valentine sugariness of The Gardeners Daughter, and none of the mere spilth and fume of calt-love. Ah, one rose. One rose, but one, by those fair fingers cull 'd, Were worth a hundred kisses j)ress 'd on lips Less exquisite llian tiiine. We are lucky to be let off with a hundred. When Tennyson was in tliat mood it was generally a million. 'I'hat sort of thing is as false as foolish, as sickly as both ; but the love-making in The Bolhle is a manly, a womanly, affair, gravely told, yet with a latent heat which is justilied less by the philosojjhy of Carlyle than by that of the Creator. Male and female created He them. But if, as I (eel sure, the Carlylean jtiiilosophy was dough's second-string, you will find it sure enough in liook IX, where Philip, in soliloquy, solemnly renounces iiis Lady Maria : Ah, f.iir Lady Maria, God meant you lo live and lu- lovely ; Be so then, and I bless you. . . . 1 86 lEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS That Is magnanimous at least ; but here is the Teufels- drockh vein : But ye, ye spurious ware, wlio Might be ])hiin women, and can be by no possibility better ! — Ye unhappy statuettes, and miserable trinkets. Poor alabaster chimney-piece ornaments under glass cases — Bless me, my mother had them! Come, in God's name, come down ! the very French clock by you Puts you to shame with ticking ; the fire-irons deride you. You, young girl, who have had such advantages, learnt so quickly, Can you not teach I O yes, and she likes Sunday- school extremely, Only it's too soon in the morning. Away I if to teach be your calling. It is no play, but a business : off, go teach and be paid for it. That is right Carlyle ; and this is the end : They are married and gone to New Zealand. Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures. Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand. There he hewed, and dug ; subdued the earth and his spirit ; There he built him a home ; there Elspie bare him his children. There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields ; And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich. TEUFELSDROCKH IN HEXAMETERS 187 The interest of that is not faint. I don't recall, I don't think there exists, a more poetical rendering of what was true in Carlyle's moral teaching. So he taught in his first book, whicii contains, it is not too much to say, the whole of his message to his fellow-creatures. How extremely pertinent it is to the times in which we now find ourselves I need not add. What was pious opinion, counsel of perfection, in 1848 seems plain commonsense after 19 1 4 — but I need not go into that. What 1 should like to point out in closing is that Carlyle's gospel hit other poets besides Clough and moved them to utterance. It moved Tennyson, Patmore, and Kingsley. There is, how- ever, this plain difference between the romantic and the sentimental, that the one breathes the air of which it sings, and the other thinks, still more talks, about breathing it. Compare The Both'te witii The Gardener s Daughter, 'The Lord oj Burleigh and what not, and you will see. Clough, as I have said, breathed in 1848 the air of Teufelsdriickh's Everlasting Yea, and transfigured it. He translated it, if you will, imported sex into it. That was natural and very necessary, since we can't get on without sex. Carlyle had forgotten it. ' T/je Lave o' t ' I OBSERVE that a philanthropist announces the pub- lication of a work of good intent upon ' How to be happy and useful from sixty to ninety'. Sixty is, 1 confess, a matter of momentary interest to me, but I am shrewdly of opinion that tlie best possible way of being both happy and useful at ninety, for ninety people out of a hundred, is not to * be ' at all if you can honourably avoid it. At sixty you might publish an Epic Poem in a number of books, as Milton, I think, did. At seventy you might be Prime Minister, as Loid Balfour may perhaps be once more, or be made a Knight of the Garter, as he actually is. At eighty you might be elected a British Academician, or even a Royal Academician ; or you might marry, as did King Tom of Norfolk, and beget the first of six children, as indeed did he. At eighty-five you miglit find yourself farming fifteen hundred acres of land, which is the occupa- tion of a friend of mine at this moment. At eighty-nine you might be gardener to a clergyman, with every prospect of still being so at ninety. "^I'hat is the assured position of another acquaintance of mine, one of the ten in the hundred whom I carefully provided for. For him, and for the like of Mr. Frederic Harrison, the ' lave ' of this our life may be regarded as a good and thriving concern. So that you have something to hope for, there is always a 'lave o't'. I remember a good tale of Stevenson's about that, of a very old sexton lying on his death-bed. ' Doctor,' said he, ' I hae laid tliree hunner and fower-score in tiiat kirkyaird; an it had been His wull I would liae likit weel to hae made •THE LAVE O'T' 1S9 out the fower hunner.' A hope so pious and so reasonable may stand for as good a ' lave o't ' as that other very natural wish of the nonagenarian, to see his century through. In many of them the desire is strong enough to get itself gratified. But when it comes to beginning another the heart seems to fail them. There is too much ' lave ' to it. They go very soon. When you are hemmed in by circumstances so that you can hardly turn about, it is astonishing and comfortable to know how little 'lave' you can do with. I know a man whose years are fewer than mine, but whom a mortal disease has turned handsomely my elder. Some desperate fault in the heart's action incapacitates him from tlic slightest exertion, and threatens him from. hour to hour. He never knows, when he lies down in his bed, whether he will see the light of another day. He has no ])eople of his own, lives by himself, with what zest for the dreary performance I can only guess. Yet there 's a ' lave o't ' for that patient, stricken man^in his garden. He has a garth before his door, perhaj)S six yards square, in which certain shrubs, bulbs, primrose roots, and lily-clumps periodically undergo their miracle of resurrection and transfiguration. They have always been his sundial : many of their epiphanies go back to the days when he was in full vigour and at work, and had a good wife beside him. Nrssun vur^;^'ior ilolnrr,, you think? Not so. Hi- lives for those yearly wonders ni>w, and lives upon tlu-m too, from si-a^on to reason. I went by the other day, and saw him as near ' whistlin' o'er tiie lave o't ' as a man mortally hurt may do. I le was pondering his Mezercon bush, tfien all one flush of rose-colour. ' A fine sight,' I said, as indeed it was, ' Yes, sir,' he said ; and presently addeii, ' And what I look at is — I've seen it 190 'THE LAVE O' T ' again,' That was his Nunc Dimitt'u for the day ; but that was a month ago. By this tinfe his guelder rose will be promising; then it will be his Weigela. Pippins and cheese to come ! There always are. And yet once more, there used to be a child of nature in my village who went by the name of Happy. Life, which he appeared to despise, which in his person he certainly neglected, was nevertheless full of ' the lave o't '. His hair, which he never cut, hung over his shoulders, like a fakir's ; his beard swept his breast. It was a good thing that it did, since without it, wearing no shirt, he would have looked too decolletl for modern squeamishness. As it was, lie was so remarkably sketchy elsewhere that he would have needed a beard as long as that Kaiser's of Heine, sleeping under the hill, to make him jjresentable. Failing that, women used to turn and run when they saw him on the road. He utterly refused to do any sort of work, and lived, so far as 1 know, on roots. He had a shack over his head, inherited from an old mother, but no furniture at all. He neither cleaned nor repaired it; so by and by it fell in, and another house sheltered him, which is known as the House. When the sun was out that man used to sing like a thrush in a lilac-bush. One could hear him, as Davidson used to hear the larks, 'shouting in the lift' — not, I ought to explain, that cage of ascension which you have in l,ondon, but the ' luft ' — in fact, the blue sky. And Happy, in the House, still justifies his name. He has been barbered and clothed ; he does not now disdain a turn of work. But the ' lave o't' is still his. He doesn't whistle o'er it, however. He sings — shouts, whenever he sees the sun. An odd fish, but very human, I think. colter Egos SOME men write better as somebody else, some write worse ; but every writer loves playing at life, so the practice has grown. A contemporary of mine, who does it himself, thinks it should be checked, like the population (according to some philosojjhers) ; and all there is to say to him is. Well, check it — or even, if one dared make so free, ^^Mf/f it. One knows, of course, what he means. An artificial style certainly argues an arbitrary standpoint. You desire to know a writer's personal opinion, and how are you to have it if you detect him taking a view of the terrain on stilts, or in high-heeled slioes, or in red-heeled shoes ? Or, if a man otherwise respectable assumes the cap and bells before sitting down at his desk, or betrays in his essay the consciousness that he has had a perfumed bath and put on his best coat as a j)rcliminary to it, will any j)leasurc you may have in the performance prevent your thinking him a coxcomb ? It is j)erliaps obvious that an elaborate writer, or even a remarkable writer, will be as exceedingly hated by some as loved by others ; and wliich he will be depends upon the synthesis made of his book between writer and reader — whether his nonsense suits your nonsense. But if there siiould grow the least doubt in tiie reader's minil who in particular it is that he is taking to iiis bosom, he will suffer an immediate chill, which may prove mortal to the book. Now, while an acquaintance with Lamb's Letters will make it impossible to doubt that he and Llia were one person. T92 AT.TER rroos and which person they were, it is not so easy to be sure of Sterne and his Yorick. When Lamb sheltered behind Elia, with submission to Mr. Lucas, he 'adopted a dramatic standpoint ' only so fai" as a name in the bills could be called a standpoint. He projected himself into his stalking-horse, he took the name but not the thing. Elia was literally a mask. Dead or alive, Lamb shot at his familiars behind him, as Teukros in the Iliad sheltered behind the shield of Aias. Elia was a man of straw. If anybody doubts it let him read 'Character of the Late Elia ', done by a pen which never shirked a fact, gloried rather in making it a little sharper than the truth. It is the best character-study of Lamb ever made by any one, and ought to settle it. But Yorick ! That ' fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy ' ! There was a character for Sterne to step into, to realize, to reincarnate, and, in time to inhabit. Not ready-made, of course, for you and me, with Hamlet's tender recollections to go upon, and no more ; but for a man of Sterne's sensibility and vanity the material was irresistible. A witty fellow, beloved of a prince ; a fellow to be wept over, lamented by tlie great. I don't see how he could have needed more than that. It was a case of 'John's John ', according to Wendell Holmes's analysis of man. Into Yorick's shell Sterne cast all that he would fain have believed himself to be, possibly did believe himself to be. Within it, also, he felt it safe to be what he really was, a creature of which, except so graced, the jiublic must never be aware. His success may be gauged by the conclud- ing volume of the Sentimental Journey, done by another hand, a disgusting parody indeed. What sort of a creature, in fact, he was, letters to his private friends occasionally ALTER EGOS 193 exhibit — that one, for instance, in schoolboy Latin : ' Nescio quid est materia cum me, sed sum fatigatus et aegrotus de mea uxore plus quam unquam.' That is Sterne, not Yorick. Sterne was tusked. But Yorick went into Sterne's pulpit, and nodded and winked, smirked and grimaced, wept and blubbered there. His sermons were actually published as 'by Mr. Yorick'. I would not myself go so far as Gray did in criticism of them. It was never Sterne's way to play monkey-tricks; rather, to suggest them. It was incumbent upon him to assure you that he knew what was what better than most peoi)Ie. So much he certainly did in his most famous sermon upon the Levite, which contains an apology for frailty exactly to be matched in the Sentimental Journey. But he could be more decorous when he pleased ; and when it came to a Charity Sermon which was inscribed to the Dean of York, he threw off his alter ego altogether, and wrote the respectful epistle dedicatory of the ordinary obsequious clergyman of his day. Take his extant letters as a whole, they are six of one and half a dozen of the other. To women he was mainly Yorick. In tiiose to his daughter Lydia he is at his best. It was not so much that Sterne was a bad man : I ilare- say he was no worse than the common run. Tliat whicli disturbs us in the midst of his April-writing, of his quick alternations of the tragic and the comic mask, is that, in the person of Yorick, he allows himself to be judged for a much better fellow than he was. Many a man had a lewd side to him : his master, Ralx-lais, had ; Shakespeare had, the master of most. Swift loved sculduddery and cared not who knew it. But we are for ever to exonerate Yorick if Sterne is to succeed ; and if we cannot, or will not, it is N 194 ALTER EGOS not to be Sterne's fault, but Yorick's. Here, then, is an alter ego which is much more than a stalking-horse. Here is an alias. When the Press absorbed the Essay, as it did after Cowley's day, — that is, as soon as it became a necessity of tlie breakfast-table, anonymity tempted men to be other than themselves. They swelled into the editorial ' We ' or out of mere self-respect thought it proper to be Mr. Bickerstaffe or Mr. Spectator. Perhaps it was discretion in Addison which drove him to hide in the shortfaced haunter of the coffee-houses ; but he soon read himself into the part, became a recognizable human creature to his readers, and has become so much so for posterity that three-quarters of the moderns who think of him at all think of him so. But there was no duplicity there. The air of detachment and good-humoured observation, which was the utmost liberty he took with himself, sat well upon him. Nobody could mistake him for other than a gentleman ; nobody desired to measure his face. In reading Yorick you do want to examine Sterne's bumps. There should surely be callosities on the brows. And are not those ears curiously pointed ? oyt Fah^-weather oyTpobgue PEOPLE sometimes ask me what we talk about in the country, and I reply, The weather, meaning, of course, the sun. When they raise their eyebrows, as ever so slightly they always do, I inquire, as the Zoroastrian did, ' Have you ever seen it ? ' Without having seen it, it is impossible to understand what a profound bearing it has upon life and conversation : I don't mean mere talk, but real conversation — as when we say piously that our conver- sation is in Heaven, where no doubt it should be. You may love rain, as I do myself; you may love the West wind ; but you don't love the sun — you worship it. It i<} early morning yet, but already He is over the hill. I set my windows wide ; the light pours in and floods the room ; ashamed, the fire goes out. There 's no doubt about it : ' the hounds of spring are on winter's traces '. The wliole valley is alive : it is like the scene on Brother's Water. The stream doth glitter, the small birds twitter, the green field sleeps — No ! there we part company with Wordsworth. The meadow across the ri\rr, though deeply green, cannot be said to sleep in the sun. It i» criss-crossed all over with runnels of racing blue water. Insatiable ducks are wading in them, gobbling as they wade — gobbling luhat I have no notion, but |)Ossibly mud. ' Forty feeding like one'! — the wonder-working line holds good, at any rate. Such a scene as that, on the threshold of day, invokes happiness ; and would invoke contentment too, if one weren't too happy to be contented. N 2 196 A FAIR-WEATHER APOLOGUE There's the difference, or at least a difference, between those two. One is a state of mind, the other a non-state, an ecHpse of it. A picture of content is before me at this moment, namely an Aylesbury duck excessively white on a green bank, its head flatlings, half-hidden in its long back ; one beady eye open, but entirely vacant, one red leg uphold- ing its bulk. If that is not contentment, I don't know the state. The bird is full to the gullet, the biliary ducts are in running order, Nature the leech is at lier task, and the patient is asleep. Whereas haj)piness — ah, you should have seen the cock-thrush which a minute ago lit upon the garden wall, his beak full of feathers, his mind of affairs. Pippins and cheese to come : that 's happiness. Here the Great Affliir was in process of becoming ; the heart was inditing a good mattei-. He was too happy to be frightened of me ; just showed me what he had found, gave me a hint of what was toward, and away. ' Virgil ', says Bacon, ' did excellently and profoundly couple the knowledge of causes and conquest of fears together as concomltantia. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas Quique metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subiecit pedibus . . ,' Queer state of the world, when happiness lay in mere security ! With the cock-thrush, as with me, happiness lies rather in having things to do. Man never is, but always to be blest. That is not quite right. Man is blest when he reasonably believes that he is to be so. He is capable of high happiness if he is not only contented, but hopeful of still more to come. We live indeed from hour to hour, but more in to-morrow than to-day. So the 1, aureate, when he praises The idle life I lead. A FAIR-WEATHER APOLOGUE 197 and goes on to report that every eve I say Noting my step in bliss, That- 1 have known no day In all my life like this, must be called happy if he has even a moderate certainty that his ' jileasant sleep ' will continue. It is by faith, they say, that we dare put out one foot before another, or rear our bulk upright upon the two leatiier-shod wedges whicli Mr, Beerbohm has compared to glazed ox-tongues. It may be true. Anyhow, it is by hope that we go happily to bed, commit ourselves to forgetfulness and the flood of dark. Hope is a thing which the sanguine only have by nature. Others must toil after it. A virtue indeed it is. Shelley had it, and lifted from the trough of wave after wave of adversity. Byron had it not, and tried to cover his despair in sardonic laughter. Gray never had it cither ; but Gray was a stoic, not a cynic, and very tender of other men's ha])pincss. No one has written wiselier of it than he who could not attain it. I have been reading his LettiTS again lately, very nearly the best in our language, but not those of a happy man. Those, rather, of a man shrugging liis shoulders at himself. His besetting trouble, he said, was ' a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy ', which never suffered him to attain to joy or pleasure, ' yet is a good easy sort of a state • Gallantly borne, witii a grin. 'The only fault of it is insipidity.' Yet nobody knew better than lie what was wanting. 'The whole matter' of iiappiness, lie said, 'is to have always something going (01 ward.' That is what the cock-thrush told mc this morning ; what the stirring water-meadow was saying, ' Happy they who can create 198 A FAIR-WEATHER APOLOGUE a rose-tree, or erect a honeysuckle, that can watch the brood of a hen, or see a fleet of their own ducklings launch into the water.' Felix qui potuit, indeed ! Gray knew better. There was ne\er enough going forward in his cloistered life : Stoke to Cambridge, Cambridge to Stoke, like a rat in two cages. And yet, a little before he wrote that very letter to his friend Wharton, he had had a picture of the thing before him, roses and all — and shied at it ! Tliat I don't understand. It was after he had allowed Horace Walpole to print and publish ' The Bard ' and the rest of his sublimities of the sort that he received an anonymous criticism directed to 'The Reverend Mr. Gray' at Strawberry Hill which excited him not a little. It was nine pages long, expressed witli freedom — he says that the writer was ' very frank and indeed much ruder tlian he meant to be' — and concluded with a hint' that if the poet wanted more of that kind of thing he could get it by writing to the Postmaster at Andover. Gray, who, like all poets, would rather be criticized with freedom than not criticized at all, promptly wrote. The result was this, in a letter to Mason : ' 1 wrote to the man (as you bid me) and had a second criticism ; his name (for I desired to know it) is Butler. He is (he says) of the number of those who live less contented than they ought, in an independent indolence, can just afford himself a horse for airings about Harcwood Forest, half a score new books in the season, and good part of half an acre of garden ground for honeysuckle and roses.' What else could he want, or anybody want ? Contented he may not have bt-en ; happy I must believe him. Content- ment is not an essential of the higher state : you may be A FAIR-WEATHER APOLOGUE 199 happier in discontent, provided that you hope to be contented ' in a minute '. But it seems to me that Butler of Ando\ er had more of the concomitant'ta of hajipiness than Virgil's lucky dog. Those plainly are, that there must be something going forward ; that you must be doing it your- self; that you must not have too much of it ; that you must not have as much as you want of it ; that you must think it the only thing worth doing. All those des'idtranda were within the grasp of Butler, and if insipidity had not turned them sour for poor Gray before his curiosity had got to work upon them, I don't know why he did not pursue the acquaintance ; but I know that he did not. \\ hen he was at Southam])ton in 1764, thinking 'to see Salisbury and to be sure Wilton and Amcsbury and Stonehenge ', he adds the peremptory sentence, ' Say not a word of Andover'. Had the happy solitary made too ixtt ? Or was he too happy for Gray's contemplation ? I don't know tlie answer to these questions, and they don't matter much. If Gray could not hclj) himself, Butler of Andover could not have helped him. Yet consider how Gray must have hel|>ed Butler of Andover. Wind in the Downs THE Avon Valley is handsomely a fortnight ahead of mine, as I have proved over and over again, but from what I saw to-day I should suppose that the Wylye ran througli a warmer soil than any other of the Five Rivers. I saw a tree just outside Wilton covered with golden knops on the point of breaking — and that in a wind which made my heart feel like doing the same thing. I dare swear that in Lord Pembroke's park there will be several in full leaf. Avon will not provide such a sight yet awhile ; and Ebble not for three weeks. You get in this country of ridge and hollow something approaching the sharp contrasts the Soutli of France will give you — something approaching them, and yet, of course, if I can be understood, nothing like them. I remember driving from Le Puy to Pont Saint-Esprit — May the season. Le Puy had been hot enough for any one ; May weather intensified by the crater in which the town cowers and the tufa on which it roasts. From there, and from May, we climbed into March and fields of daffodil ; from March into as bleak a February as you could dread in the Jura, and snow over all the waste ; from that, down a mountain slide, into the valley of the Ardl'che, where the hedgerows were full of dusty roses, and the peasants making hay. You won 't do that in South Wilts., but you may have the Chaike valley with its trees naked and sere, and the slopes of its hills white with winter bents, and over the plain come down into Wilton to find magnolias in flower, and house fronts smothered in Forsythia. Ours is the snuggest valley but poorest soil WIND IN THE DOWNS 201 of any of the five, and our river, being the smallest, has not thrown up a broad bed of silt on either bank in which trees can grow tall and feel running water about their roots. When our Mistral began to blow, which was ten days ago, I went up the drove immediately behind my house, and could hardly find a sign of a cowslip, I did find the leaves of one, but there were no more on a ledge which will be thick witli tliem by and by. No wheatears to be seen, and no March hares in their amorous transports. The grass was as harsh as wire, the moss, disintegrated by the rain and dried by the wind, stood away from the earth like the ribs of a rotten ship. To come presently upon a little cloud of dog-violets was to be moved, as the Ancient Mariner was, by ' a spring of love '. Having blessed them unaware, I did it again, very conscious of the act of worshij). Beyond tliat, further up the hill, one might have been in mid-winter. I struggled to the Race Plain where the wind, straight from Nova Zembia, cut through my clothes like a knife. As usual, I encountered a little scattered fleet of gypsies, tacking into liie jaws of it; a sorry nag straining at a cart full of poles and miscel- laneous junk ; women and young girls encumbered with babies in their shawls, barefoot children padding about on thuir white heels, and one smooth secret- faced man, lord of the tattered seraglio, himself well-clothed and unham- pered. The women were too distressed even to look their usual petitions. I think they felt the wind rattling their bones together. I'nit the sultan hailed me, and we con- versed for a few moments beliind a furze-btish. They were from Sherborne, going to the Forest, into what he called ' summer quarters ', ' They will be glad of them, 202 WIND IN THE DOWNS some of your ladies,' I said, and he gave me a sharp look. ' They are all right,' he said. ' They'll have to wait, like the best of us.' He accepted a fill of his pipe, lit it, turned it downwards, nodded, plunged his hands, and went leisurely after his belongings. Myself, 1 went huddling home to a wood fiie, feeling that he had the better of me in a many ways. For one thing, he kept half a dozen women in order — wliich 1 could not do even if 1 would ; for another, he did not allow the mere wind to interfere with his good pleasure, his lordly ease of mind. I admire, while I cannot esteem, gypsies. Their ways are not our ways. The Race Plain is their highway from the West to their headquarters in the New Forest, as once it was ours to London. Nearly every furze-clump all its length has the lewside blackened by the ruins of a fire. Night or day you will meet them coming or going, or pass a group of them snuggling or sleeping by a drift-wood fire. Very rarely they come to beg or hawk clothes-pegs in the village ; but mostly they keej) to their green road. Great poachers, of course ; but beyond a few stray fowls we don't hear of much thieving. It is strange how little they mix, even now, with our peojile, not strange, therefore, that we know so little of them. That mystery is occasionally the beget- ter of romance. 1 said somewiicre, confirming Borrow, that theirjgirls scorn our young men, and am sure it is true of the main of them. Yet there are half-breeds among them, plainly ; and such generalizations cannot be quite true. I heard of a case only the other day, where some green-eyed waif of theirs cast her spells upon a farm-lad, bewitched and bemused him until, for love of her, he was led into bad courses. He used to meet her at night, and WIND IN THL: downs 203 their shelter in bad weather was a deserted barn in the hill- side, a place locally known as Rats' Castle. From such association he was led on and on, left his home, threw u]) his work, and hid with her in the hollows of the liills. His jjeople thought he had gone for a soldier, and made no more than perfunctory search. Then, by and by, things began to be missed — hens and their eggs, bread out of bakers' carts, milk out of dairies, even clothing from the washing-lines. And then, one fine night, Rats' Castle was discovered to be ablaze. The lad was taken and con- fessed to everything, but the girl was not found. I hope he got over his heart-attack during his term at Devizes, which he served alone. He exonerated her from all blame, took everything on his shoulders ; and as he was found near the burning barn, and she not seen there, there was no evidence against her, though plenty of suspicion. He would not, perhaps could not, name her, but she was well known to the police, and has since been seen at fairs, (jr in the market. She was pointed out to mc in Sarum one Tuesday — quite young, with hair lighter than her tan, with narrowed, sidelong eyes, in a faded red blouse and black skirt. She stood motionless, biting a corner of her apron lx?tween her very white teeth — half vicious, half wild-cat. Then I was told the story, and was much moved to think of what never did, and in thi- nature of things, or of boy, never could have come out at the intpiiry : any hint, namely, of the wild stress of pas^^ion, the lure of the romantic, or of what answers to it, which drew the devoted simpleton to forsake father and mother, industry and honesty, and to cleave to this belle dame tans merci, to thieve for her, and to take all the penalty. That is what he did ; and he was not the first. Beginnings POETRY, which is so much older than the piinting- ])rcss as to be older than writing, still preserves as habit what it once employed as machinery. Rime was a machine, the stanza a machine, rhythm itself, and cer- tainly the exordium. It was found necessary to begin with the bill of fare. When prose, from being oratory, became literature, another necessity was felt — that you must begin at the beginning, that is to saj'^, with the soup. The two were used alternatively or, as we shall see, com- ])0unded, presented together ; but it was reserved to days comparatively recent to introduce the aperitif. To serve our own times I must vary the figure. As you look upon your novel — for what is left to literature now besides the novel ? — as a chronicle or a symphony, so you will invite the reader on your first page — to listen to an overture, or to begin at the beginning. ' There was a man — dwelt by a churchyard ' : nothing could be better than that in the way of opening. It was the old way : ' Hit befel in the days of Uthcr Pendragon when he was Kynge of all England, and so regned, that there was a myglity duke in Cornewaill that helde warre ageynst hym long tyme.' That is how the greatest of all romances begins — at the beginning ; and yet it has in it the germ of the overture ; for it gives you the things upon which romance depends, colour and the theme. It is not the epic manner, remark ; BEGINNINGS 205 there the convention is clear. In epic you begin with the theme. It is not for nothing that tlie Iliad begins with a wrath, and the Odyssey with a man. But romance, which breathes by colour, adds it to the theme, and so it is with the ballad : It fell about the Martinmas time. When the wind blew snell and cauld : there, and in things like it, is tiie theme presented as colour. Some such tiling, no doubt, was in Stevenson's mind wiien he held forth to a correspondent upon the necessity for a novel to 'begin to end badly', or 'well', as may be. He quarrelled with the happy opening of Richard Feverel, if I remember rightly. Well then, with the opening oi the Morte d' Arthur in our heads, here is its lineal descendant of the nineteenth century, in a brisk exordium : ' About thirty years ago. Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, witli only seven thousand pounds, Iiad tlie good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansiit-ld Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome home and large income.' As 1 say, brisk, business-like, crisp, epigrammatic. Colour is watered down to a question of the almanacs ; theme is there, without being forced upon us. Yet it is entirely adequate to the matter in hand. In its way it is an oveiture, if only to a toy-syniphony. It tunes us up. We stand uyon the shore of an unknown sea, ready foi the baronet's lady and all her ser/urlar. Miss Austen is, I consider, one of our Iwst beginners. How admirable is that of Emma ! 2o6 BEGINNINGS Much had happened in the interval between Sir Thomas Malory and her. Among other things Defoe had invented the novel, and therefore, in a way, Miss Austen herself. He saw, however, no better way of doing it than to make a chronicle of it, which had been Sir Thomas's way too ; but there was one vast difference between them. Both began at the beginning ; but Sir Thomas used colour to enhance his tale, and Defoe to lower it. Sir Thomas would enchant you, lift you into ' realms of old ' ; Defoe would sober you down. Both used persuasion — Literature is for ever linked with cookery — but Sir Thomas would have you see reality as a dream, Defoe a dream as a reality. Here is Defoe at his best : 'I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family though not of that county, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. . .' He runs on with his particularities: his mother's name Robinson, his father's Kreutznaer, and so on. That was Defoe's manner, which I suspect to have been derived from Cervantes. He had the same love of verisimilitude, and the same need of it, though more daintiness in its employ : ' In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance- rack, an old buckler, a lean iiack, and a greyhound for coursing.' That is a much more literary, but not more artful, manner than Defoe's, essentially the same. It is carefully com- pressed ; Defoe's, with equal care, is diffuse. Both have BEGINNINGS 207 had their followers. Defoe's has outlasted the greater man's. Meantime another style of narration had been discovered which I hope I shall be forgiven for calling the Cheap-Jack manner. The Cheap- Jack persuades by dazzle, by hypnosis. He has unlimited words at his tongue's end, and bemuses you with the flood of them. Rabelais is answerable for that : 'Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you tiirice- precious profligates (for to you antl none else do I dedi- cate my writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's . . .' and so on, and so on — for ever. And that also is Sterne's way of doing it. True, Tristram Shandy begins at the beginning, and indeed at the very beginning — but with what chirping, with what prattle ! ' I wish either my father or mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me ... ' Tristram does not gcl^ iiimself born at that rate until the beginning of Chapter V, there being so much more of Opinions than of Life in his immortal memoir. With a booTc like that you have neither theme nor colour to prc- disjX)se you to its perusal. You have curiosity, that only. I know people who have tiied to reail Tristram Shandy for the story, to see what happineil. Ami I know what liid hap])cn. ' Fratello, lu non voi esser inteso : io non ti voglio intcnderc — vai con cento diavoli.' That is how an Italian, according to Dean Church, treated i-n 'enigmatic prophet ', before throwing him into the fire. ' My dear 2o8 BEGINNINGS man, you have no desire to be understood, and I no desire to understand you. Go to the deuce.' A good many novel-readers have bidden Sterne to the deuce ; and I don't at all shrink from owning that I have never reached the end of Shandy — or of Gargantua either, for that matter. The Cheap-Jack, in fact, must stand or fall upon his own gifts. If his kind of nonsense suits yours, well and good. Fielding had not the patter for that way of opening. You may call his the arm-chair, port-and-wainuts way, and not be wrong. He had the passion for dissertation ; he loved it for its own sake as well as his own ; he must buttonhole the reader. That made him a bad staiter, though not nearly so bad as Sir Walter Scott ; botii Amelia and Tom Jones begin at Chapter II, Tom Jones hardly there. I think the appetite grew upon him with his' growing facility. In Tom Jones you have an overture to pretty well every chapter, asides and proscenium-a])pear- ances which really hold up the action. Thackeray, deriving very much from him, was nevertheless better at getting away with the thing. Nothing could be better than the openings of Vanity Fair and Pendennis, nothing more sententious and ambagical than the first chapter of The Neivcomes, which, however, is ])Ut into the pen of Pendennis himself, a first-class prig. In Esmond you are, or ought to be, prepared for the easy circumlocutions of Sir Richard Steele — but except you are uncommonly quick on the uptake, you are not so prepared. As a consequence, Esmond succeeds generally on a second perusal, and better and better as you re-read. But comparatively few there be of the ordinary run of readers wiio find it again after the first rebuff. Dickens was an excellent starter, using BEGINNINGS 209 many manners, mostly well. ' The kettle began it ' is not a happy instance. That is a bang on the drum, like a showman's ;it a fair. But what could be better than the beginning of Domhey ? ' Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediatclv in front of the lire, and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.' Allowing for Dickens's weakness for far-fetciied images, that is as good a formula as you could want for the begin- ning of a novel. Theme and colour both there. The next paragraph is quite as good, and the whole chapter keeps it up. What is especially artful about it is that, while it is beginning at the beginning in the good old way, it is also an overture, according to new doctrine. Others followed him hard— Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Walter Bcsant, and the '^mailer fry. 'She went intd the garden to cut a cabbage to make an apple-pie. And while she was there . . . From the genius to whom that opening was revealed come Henry .lames and all the modern novelists, ' so many and so many and such glee,' who begin their books in the middle — Mr. Conrad and a countless host. Mr. .lames did not hit upon the device until the mex-z.o del camm'm of his mortal career, and, as some would have it, at the i-nd of his immortal. The Poitidit of ii I.mly i)egins with a dissertation about tea, very much as lorn Jones witii one about things in general, but later on we come to 'She O 2IO BEGINNINGS went into the garden ', or even to ' So she went into the garden ', which is to take a very high Hne with the reader. I neither accuse nor defend. All that I am concerned to say about it is that, beginning in the middle, he was generally skilful enough to avoid the explicit harking-back which others have not been able to do — to their detriment, I think. For see what happens. If the middle of the story is the beginning of the novel, the beginning of the novel will be the middle of the story ; and what then becomes of Form, which all discuss and none understand ? I don't pretend to admire the formula, anyhow, and have never been tempted to adopt it. You gain very little by it, and inevitably lose much. Mr. James became its bond- slave at the last, wound himself in webs of explication which involved him ever the deeplier. I daresay he did it as well as it could be done — but was it worth doing ? I doubt it. Lastly, you can begin at the end. Mr. de Morgan did that once. His hero, the teller of the tale, is on his death-bed when tlie scene opens. This dismal fact haunted me. The tale was long. ' He'll never last out, poor wretch,' was always at the back of my mind as I read on. But here is enough of novels. Per correr m'lgllor acque^ for a moment. I began with prose, and shall end with it, but wish to say a word about epics while it is in my head. It is quite true that the practice of Homer, to begin strictly with the theme, has been observed in Europe from ApoUonius Rhodius, through Virgil, and the Italian sugar-baker epopoeists — of whose openings Tasso's full-sounding line, Canto I'armi pietose, e 'i capitano, BEGINNINGS 211 is much the best — ; through the mock-epics down to the parlour-epics of Cowper — I sing the Sofa. It has been followed, I take it, for tlie plain reason that there is no better way of beginning a really great piece of work than by telling yourself and the rest of the world just what you are going to do. But the absence of colour, the avoidance of all pretence to an overture, mu^t have some other reason — which I suppose to be this, that the Epic has been and has remained a classical composition, making no* attempt at spheral music, having neither space, time, nor inclination for it, depending wholly on character and plot. Even in modern, romantic times, even when built ujjon romance, as most of the confectionery epics were — Boiardo's, Pulci's, Ariosto's — the rule has held. I am not ready to admit that the Chunsou df Roland is the exception which it seems to be. Tliat, as we have it, is an epic fragment. Nobjdy can be sure how it began, except that it was not as it begins now. The invocation of the muse, another convention of the I'lpic, is a j)iece of piety, archaistic or not, with which I ilon't :it all mind confessing my sympathy. Mock-ej)ics may doubtless be reckoneil by lifties (mostly, I hope, in caves), but at the moment I can only remember two, and have the same fault to lind with each of them. Tassoni begins his Secch'ta Rapilti in the regular way — • Vorrei cantar quel memorando sdegno, Ch* infiammo gia ne' fieri jxrtti umani Un' infelice e vil Secchia di Icgno . . . But what an extraordinary blunder of his, to let down his u 2 212 BEGINNINGS whole comic apj)aratus in the third line of the poem, and (so to speak) kick the bucket before he has begun ! If you wished to pull the thing off I don't see how you could treat the bucket too ceremoniously. It is the pivot of your plot, without which you have nothing. to say. But I don't myself think that Tassoni did pull it off. Pope, on the other hand, certainly did, though he made it more difficult by just the same too early disparagement of his theme : What dire offence from am'rous causes sjjrings, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing. This verse to Caryl, Muse ! is due : This ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view : Slight is the subject, but not so the praise. If She inspire, and He approve my lays. What an ineptitude, when the slightness of the subject was the very opi)ortunity of the poem ! Then we come to Cowper and The Task. The Task is not a mock-epic, though it is a good deal more amusing than either of those I have just looked at. Part of its humour consists in the employment of heavy machinery for a light purpose — as if you should use a Nasmyth hammer for pounding sugar, or a steam-roller for a cider-press ; and it is just possible that his word of extenuation is noticeable. If it is noticeable it is wrong — that 's certain. I must now give the exordium : I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang 'l^ruth, Ho])e, and Ciiarity, and touch'd with awe The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand, Escap'd with pain from that advent'rous flight, Now seek repose upon an humbler theme ; The theme though iiumble, yet august and proud Til' occasion — for the hair commands the song. BEGINNINGS 213 Wliat a gentleman Cowjier was ! There is no other way of appraising the mastery and courtliness of that beginning. The next paragraph is exactly riglit : Time was, when clothing sumptuous or for use, Save their own painted skins, our sires had none. As yet black breeches were not ; satin smooth, Or velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile : The hardy cliief upon the rugged rock Wash'd by the seen the pages of a good book. Thoughts on 'Doric THERE may be readers who cannot see how ' Black- niwore maidens ' differ from ' Blackmore girls ', except in print. They, of course, will get nothing from The primrwose in the sheade do blow, The cowslip in the zun, except a slight sensation of oddness. Barnes wrote like that originally, because, as he said, he could not help it, latterly because he came to adjudge the Dorsetshire vernacular as a ' tongue ' and not a ' corruption '. That was also Mr. Hardy's opinion, from whom I quote it. Personally 1 am not prepared to accept Barnes's judgement, though I think his instinct was right. The question then is, why was it right .'' It is to be observed, first of all, that he composed, as we all do now, for readers of the word, and not hearers only. There is — or was — a very real sense in which poetry could be regarded as the music of the mind ; but directly you cut off music from the hearing ear and approach that organ through the eyes you may be driven to typo- graphic freaks, to a sort of phonetic spelling, if you despair otherwise of carrying your reader with you into your islands of the blest. Barnes evidently did so despair, because, secondly, I observe that he did not write Dorsetshire prose, but only Dorsetshire verse. In short, what he sought to obtain by his Doric was character. I suppose that was what Dickens was after when he transliterated Sam Weller. I might even suppose that it was what Burns was after, THOUGHTS ON DORIC 217 if that were not to involve me in supposing that it was what Mistral was after. William Barnes was born with the nineteenth century (in 1 801), and almost lived it out, dying in 1886. From birth to death I don't thiik that he was ever, for long together, more than forty miles away from where I sit. The speech he heard and used is the speech I hear every day ; the men and women of his commerce are also mine ; the grassy solitudes, open downs, water-meadows, cjuiet clear streams of whicli lie sang are as familiar to me as the tongue in which he sang them. Pentridge, where he was born, is some eiglit miles away ; Came, where he died, not so much as forty. I know Blackmore Vale from end to end. It would be foolish to call this country the oldest part of Britain, yet I may say that there is at least no part ot it where you can be more conscious how old Britain is, or how long ago there were Britons in it. The hills of Pentridge and of Dorchester are thick witii relics of the dead ; here also I have only to walk a mile from my iiouse to find myself standing amid the vestiges of a people who lived in community there before Stonehcnge was raised up on the Plain. It is wonderful to me to consider those dim neolithic men and women, still more to understand that I live among their descendants at this day, and im in all probability descended from them myself, iniieriting who knows what instincts, aptitudes, prejudices, manner of conduct, habit of vision ; helpless resultant of how much passion ; blind traveller througli h(nv much tangled growth ! Something of all this may be reflected in Barnes's manner — that is, in liis Doric ; but there is none of it in his matter. His insensibility to history is remarked uj)on by 2i8 THOUGHTS ON DORIC Coventry Patmore, one of his warmest admirers, and can hardly escape any reader. Yet he was a learned man, and a careful metrist. His verse has qualities which must endear it to all lovers of poetry. It is musical, fluent, facile and accomplished. It is much more artful than it appears to be. His rhythms are fetched from as far as Persia, some of them, and cunningly contrived. He touches tlie emotions readily, being emotional himself; seldom the heart. His emotions, however, are very near the surface. Nothing is significant to him but appearance ; and being of sanguine temperament, he ' sees the world the colour he is ot '. All his maidens are pretty (and certainly Dorsetshire girls are often pretty), and all his young men are true, which is by no means the fact. The sun is mostly shining in his landscapes : he j)refers to sing of the hay-time. He is, in fact, an idyllist. The terrible, the bitter, the desperate, the hopeless things are passed over. He does not, then, present so much a reading as a confection of earth, and to correct your understanding of life in Dersetshire, or anywhere else for that matter, a study of his disciple, Mr. Hardy, must supplement your study of Barnes. Village life resembles all other lives in this at least, that the desire of man is in continual conflict with his means, and generally gets the "worst of it. The favour and the prettiness of Barnes's pictures lose poig- nancy without some hint of that long struggle. It is veiy seldom that he probes so deeply into life as in JVoak Hill: When sycamore leaves wer a-spreadfen, Green-ruddy in hedges, Bezide the red doust o' the ridges, A-dried at Woak Hill ; THOUGHTS ON DORIC 219 I packed up my goods to the hills to hunt a ground hog, Whackfol iloodle all day. You draw your ground hog with a ten-foot pole. So ilid Berry and Kate in the song. Tiien they* Took iiim by the tail and wagged him to a log. And swore, by grab, it's a pretty fine hog. You cat your ground hog, as we do not our i)adger ; and you tan his hide for clothing. I le must be good eating too. 'I'hey put him in a pot, and the chikiren began to smile ; They ate that ground hog before it struck a-boil. 236 KENTUCKY Last came the turn of tlie coloured girl. Up stepped Susie with a snigger and a grin, Ground hog grease all over her chin. That is the eschatology of the ground hog. ' Sourwood Mountain ' is a love-song, melodious, negro half-nonsense, with the love-pain, as always, underneath the foolishness. ' Noah's Ark ' — Down by the graveyard we must walk, See long graves as well as short. Oh, who built the ark ? Oh, Noah, Noah, Noah built the ark, Oh, yes, my Lord — is the kind of thing over which negroes might sing or dance themselves mad. It is too fervent altogether for Americans or English. But there is ' Little Mohee ' which is, I am sure, true to our nations at their best. As I sat a-musing, myself on the grass. Oh, whom should I spy but an Indian lass ? She was the ' little Mohee ' of the title, and her wooing, wliich was very innocent and very ardent at once, was in the fullness of time and the ballad rewarded. For wlicn The girl I had trusted proval untrue to me, I says, I'll turn back my courses over the sea. I'll turn my courses, and backward I'll flee, I'll go spend my days with the little Mohee. That is the way of it, and not only in Kentucky, where maids are kind and young men true and tender — at least in ballads. Eutopia I SEE that the Trade Unionists have turned down the Communist uprising in their midst. Not that way therefore is our salvation to be expected for the moment, nor Utopia to be discerned with the letter before its name which makes all the difference. It is good testimony, as far as it goes, to Communism that nearly all visionary Com- monwealths have been built ujion it, but still better to the greatest of them, that one which is outlined in the New Testament, that it alone reads plausibly. The reason is plain. Men will not willingly forgo the chance of riches in tiiis world unless they can be sure of them in another. The Revealer of the Oos])el, in fact, did not omit human nature from his reckoning, as the Utopiarians have always done. Various, and sometimes comical, have been their shifts to manipulate that uncommonly tough i)roduct. As you read them one after another the same thing hapjK-ns : human nature is always ' breaking in ' to confound them. iSir Tliomas More evaded rather tlian hamlled the dilliculty iiy placing Utopia ' beyond the line etpiinoctial ', somewhere between India and IJrazil. Mr. Wells asked help of Heaven, and procured a Comet whose sanitary exlialations changed mankind from the roots. Civil War «ii(l for William Morris what it has never done yet for anybody else; and according to Edward I'ellaniy, 'the change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ri]ic for it, and the whole mass of people was Ix-hind it.' Thai has a comfortable sound. ' Et de Charon pas un mot ! ' 238 EITTOPIA as Madame lie Sevigne was fond of quoting. Nobody's head punched, nobody's throat cut ! Unfortunately we know better. Alone among the nations of the world Russia has seen the theory of these dreamers put to work. Utopians in Moscow have spread communism by the sword, but human nature has been too strong for the sword, Mos- cow is under the heel of Lenin ; but the peasants hold Russia. The requisites for turning Utopia into Eutopia are religion and a small country. The proposals of the New Testament alone contain the first ; all schemes without exception have the second. Plato's Republic would have been of Athenian dimensions, a territory about the size of Middlesex. Sir Thomas More's island was two hundred miles broad, and had five hundred miles total coast-line ; Morris's Nowhere was, of course, England, apparently with- out Scotland ; Bellamy looked backward to a United States which had shrunk to little more than Massachusetts. Harrington's model for Oceana (which by the way was not Communistic) was Venice. So it lias proved in real life. The happiest countries within experience have been the smallest: Switzerland, the best democracy the world has yet seen ; Denmark, the peasant farmer's paradise ; Holland, Belgium, to name only those. I might pry curiously into the histoiy of my own country, and ask whether, when England was called ' merry ', it was not much of a size with those four ; or I might look forward, rather, to see whether events in Britain are not actually tending that way. Decentralization is certainly going on, very markedly here. The great Dominions are self-sufficient, dominions only in name. India, Egypt, Malta are on the way to Dominion status, or beyond it. Ireland must inevitably be separated ; EUTOPIA ^39 Scotland, Wales, can hardly be denied if they choose for indej)endence. Nationality, far from having been obliterated by war, has been emphasized. There is no fear of our country's being too big for reform. The question is, will it have religion enough to justify reform, or be poor enough to make reform a necessity ? A Socialist and a Fabian wrote the other day that ' we were all communists at heart ', and it is not hard to understand. Money, we see, is a cause of evil and misery. Do away with it, and evil and misery will vanish. It is an engaging fallacy. Or despise the precious minerals, as the Utopians did. Make gold the badge of your bondmen, give diamonds to the children to play with. No sane citizen will covet them then. True ! but he will covet something else comprehended in the tenth Commandment. Money, after all, may be sacks of corn, or women, or white elephants, or white mice. The real reform would be not to want too much money, or (which follows) a monopoly in it. But that is a matter for religion alone — or, of course, for necessity. If men could be persuaded to Christianity in a way and to an e.xtent to which they have never been persuaded yet, evangelical jioverty would come in, and we might snap our fingers, if wc wished to, at evangelical com- munism. For the truth of the matter is tiiat poverty is the essential of happiness, and not communism. But ])ovcrty' by choice is never likely to obtain in our country, though it easily might in Gern)any. No. Tlic poverty which we shall experience before long will Ik- a poverty of necessity. I would r.ither tli.it we had the other ; but either will make for our happiness as a nation. It will nv.in that we must su])port ourselves, and every one of us work for his own living. Since we have 240 EUTOPIA ruined the coal trade we shall have no raw material for export. We may pick up our carrying again ; and if we go properly to work we may have farm and dairy-j)roduce to trade withal. Wool once more — why not ? But manu- facture will leave us when the Capitalists do, and with them inevitably a large section of our artisan population. That will put us in a fair way to become what News from Nowhere reported us, a small })astoral and fishing com- munity. A decently fertile soil and a relatively small population : that is my own idea of Eutopia. It was not William Morris's. He foresaw an upholsterer's paradise somehow or another, but never explained how we remained so rich. How, for instance, did his Golden Dustman provide himself with gold for his adornment ? Whence came the silken tissues, the wine and oil wherewith the neighbours made themselves glad ? These things can only be understood by supposing a liberal state of barter with other countries ; and as we used no money, that all other nations were in the same state of grace. But it doesn't matter. So long as England is England we shall have money, though luckily not very much, and everybody will work for his own hand. Let us not deceive ourselves. Whatever is done in this country in the direction of Eutopia will be done by neces- sity ; for though we excel in practice, we have no theory and distrust those who ])rofess it. Least of all have we any theory about the virtue resident in work. We have never woiked but on compulsion, and assuredly we never shall. Fynes Moryson, a Lincolnshire man, the first of our people who travelled to improve his mind, and who did not know his countrymen the worse for having seen Europe from end to end, put his finger upon our sensitive EUTOPIA 241 part. ' It is a singularity in the n;iture of the English that they are strangely addicted to all kyndes of pleasure above all other nations.' He put it down to idleness, not caring perhaps to go more deeply into the matter. It may be that he went deep enough. We are, indeed, mentally rather than physically idle. That is why we hate theory and are good at practice. Theory involves mental exercise, but practice saves it. Moryson notes also our love of sport, ' No nation followeth these pastimes and exercises on horse- backe and on foote so frequently and paynfully in any measure of comparison. . . . Not only gentlemen but yeo- men frequently hunt the hayre, not only with greyhounds^ but hownds, in keeping whereof for that purpose divers yeomen joyne together; for England wants not Acteons eaten up by their ownc dogs.' A witty and a just observa- tion. But a term has been set to all that. We shall have our Euto])ia malgre nous. The Wisdom of the Simple RELIGION catches our peoi)lc sometimes and renders them capable of strange exaltations. In that state I have known men journey from cottage to cottage in the dark and, gaining an entrance, preach the second coming of the Lord to the occuiiants, who are mostly too ready for bed to pay much heed. And Lord or no Lord, say they, they have to be up before tlie sun in the morning. I have not known many conversions wrought by these Evangelists, but I have heard of no cases where they have been scorned or lidiculed. We treat them rather (and so they do in the East) as God-smitten persons in whom the divine seal must be respected. It is more common to find the enthusiasm which flames so fiercely further West — as in Cornwall — score for itself, with us, an ethical channel in men ; and that is why with societies like the Primitive Methodists tectotalism has become an eleventh Commandment, and would even seem sometimes to be the only Commandment. Ordinarily, so far as I see, religion takes its place as one of the smaller spiritual relaxations in village life, its use not very far removed from that of the tea-drinking which is such a stand-by of the housewife of our day that one cannot imagine what the people were like who knew nothing of it. Religion is really very much that same kind of solace and resource, and its recurrent practice, on Sunday evenings, as punctually observed as the five o'clock daily call. I should very much like to know if it was THU WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE ' 243 ever very different — before the Reformation, for instance, when there were Mass, and miraculous images, and St. Christopher on tlic North wall, and the Doom in lurid red and sepia over the rood. To judge by the ballads and such mysteries as survive, our villagers lent themselves to the Church rather than were dee])ly in its debt. The Celtic strain in us, as you see it in Wales and Cornwall, may have known the raptures of Mariolatry. To be sure it did. But there is no hint of such experiences here. Now, at any rate, to shift my figure, we use religion as an outer garment, a cloak which we can throw on or off" as the weather veers ; but for our daily and intimate wear, to cover our moral nakedness, we have a philosophy. With no notion whatever of Zeno and Cleanthes and Epictetus, we are stoics in our simplicity. ' Lead me, Zeus, an,! thou. Destiny, ivhithersoever ye have appointed me to i^o, and "nay I follow fearlessly. Rut if in an evil mind I he umvilling, still must I folloiu.'' I know a man — not an old man cither as men go here — who has lately found himself in the grip of a mortal disease. His heart, he has been told, is so affected that it may fail him at any moment. Nobody knows it better than he does, yet anybody can learn it in the hushed-doun voice of him and in the patient watchfulness of his eyes. He is a widower, a childless man, has been so for fifteen years, living since his bereavement entirely alone. For fifteen years then he has risen at half-past four — bring a carter by calling — lit his own fire, cooked his own breakfast, and gone forth to his labour. At noon he has cooked his own dinner ; — at five he has been free, and af eight in bed. Now all that is changed, except the Q 2 244 THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE loneliness ; and to that now is added idleness. He dares not walk at all, beyond furnishing, as he must, the simple needs of his house. Those done, he creeps out, if the weather is fair, to his gate and leans upon it, watching the hills and teams at work there, conversing in that still small voice of his with whomsoever will stop for a while. Or he will hoist himself with a stick into the churchyard and potter among the gravestones there, every one of which records a name as familiar to him as his own. A healthy, sane-living, slow, industrious man as he has been, he might have looked for another twenty years' activity : yet here he is marked down by the Grizzly One, and aware of it. You know it by the waiting look in his little bright eyes — clear yellow eyes, he has. What a life is that ! To move, lie down, rise up, see the brave sunlight spread abroad, and be yourself enfolded in a grey shadow, wiiich moves as you move and settles down over you wherever you are. Whenever I pass his way I slop and talk with him. My heart is charged with pity, but I don't think he needs it. He speaks of his symptoms with interest; he realizes that he himself, standing as he is on the brink of the void, is an interesting person. But he is not concerned about it, nor terrified (as I know I should be) at the almost certain prospect of a lonely death. That is not at all on bis mind, which runs wholly in the past. It is curious to notice how his august and constant companionship has added to his moral stature. He talks as if he were the ])atriarch of the village, though he would want nearly thirty years more to be so. He has' acquired the garrulity and particularity of extreme old age ; will talk by the hour together of the place as he has known it, of where the mill used to stand, of old cottages pulled down, of old pastures plowed up ; THE WKSUOM OF THE SIMPLE 245 of how his mother brought up eight children on his father's nine shillings a week. It is not at ail that he is insensible to his treadings ; he knows only too well how things are with him. The least worry or excitement, as he owns, puts him all in a shakement. But lie accepts, he is of Zeno's band. Pauvre et tr'tste humanite ! Yes, but the Stoics make the best show for it. The fact is that birth and death are equally your room- fellows if you live as these people ilo. Any one of us here will have slept with a corpse in the bed ; and there are few women who have been alone there during conline- ment. Such fan)iliarity with natural process has its effect, makes one's own life a natural process, ami the mind acquiescent. Every stroke, you may say, of nature drives tradition the deeper. A favourite tag of the essayist's can be refuted evciy day in the village. Our young men know very well that their turn must come, and have no false delicacy in talking of it. Two years ago, having bouglit a suitable piece of land, I jflanted an orchard. My gardener was interested, but could not understand that I was no less so. ' Why, Sir,' he said, ' look at the time it will be before those trees come into bearing. You'll be liopping off, before you see your money back.' I might be, no doubt, but I jilanted as an amateur. After all I had done nothing comjiared with that famous old Dean of Chichester who, at ninety-three, insisted with his daughter that she should collect and plant for him the seed of a Himalayan rhododendron which he had espieii in a friend's garden. Acquiescence in the inevitable end of us all does not hinder the cry of wounded love when it comes. Men and women cry easily, for each other, even for themselves, and 24^) THE WISDOM OF THE SIMPLE grief will take all forms except that of vocal expression. Emotion seems to seal the fountain of speech witli them, and when it is of sorrow is the worse to see for its petri- faction. It is because it is maimed, as it were, of half its outlet that it takes sometimes strange and terrible shapes. I knew a young woman whose first baby was born with the doom upon it. It was a war-baby, and all the time she was carrying it the mother had been fretting for her husband in France. It flickered for a fortnight, then simply faded out like a candle flame. She would not leave it lying, but had it on her knees all day, in her bed at night. So she spent her grief. When they came to lay it in its little coflin, she kissed it once, but did not follow to the grave. Next morning 'I saw her at her daily work as usual. She would speak of it if needs were, and with few tears, but never forgot it, and never has forgotten. She h;.s others now, but always reckons that first as one of the tale. She will tell you she has four children, as Wordsworth's cottage maid said ' We are seven '. But that reckoning looks before as well as behind. I once asked a boy in Tuscany how many brothers and sisters he had ; ' Momenti siamo sette,' he answered. ' We shall be seven in a minute.' He knew all about it. Village children do. The 'Peasant m Church A letter from Mr. James Ismay upon the vagaries of Anglicanism in The Times led me to consider, not his difficulties, wliich, inasmuch as they could be voiced, were not without balm, but those rather of the voiceless in the villages. What is the attitude of the peasant towards ritual ' How does he relate it to doctrine ? How does either affect his conduct ? Mr. Ismay complained of variation in church ])racticc, and \cry reasonably said that in a village where there is but one church, whatever the practice may be, it must be a matter of plain ' take it or leave it ' for the church-goers. ' It is hard ', he went on, 'for those in small country parishes to adapt tiieir religious views to the convictions of tlie priest or clergy- man ; the average church-goer desires moderation, and dislikes ornate vestments and excessive genuflections." Living as I do in a neighbouring county, I am confulcnt that he s])okc fairly for the villager of the West of England, whose religious ])ractice is determined by tradition and use, and to whom dogma is of small account. In people who rule their lives by habit any religion can be induced if you JK-gin early enough and go on long enough. 'I'iie bieak with Rome, wc should say, has been as summary as any break could be. Yet wherever you find a great Calliolic house you will find small Catholic cottages round about it, whose numl)ers slowly increase as time goes on. liduca- tion and continuity make sure of that ; and to help ihem there is always the apjeal to history which will illumin.ite 248 THE PEASANT IN CHURCH somebody or other as by a ' sudden glory ' — and the rest is easy. The Church of Enghxnd, while it may have gained by its release from the yoke, has missed those great auxiliaries, Doctrine and practice may vary with the incumbent. The 'minister' and the 'priest' are both named in the prayer-book, but the villager will be be- wildered if he have first only the one and next only the other. At lirst bothered by ' excessive genullcctions ', and next irritated, he will presently abstain from church-going. Nothing is more difficult, and few things in history are more interesting, than to conclude what the attitude of the peasant has been towards religion and religious practice. Did he help to build, was it his call which built, the great, aiiy, well-ordered churches, say, of the Fen country ? Was his the hand which laboured, his the eye which desired, the lovely ornament you see in the Cotswold churches ? Did he and his likes claim, or ever fill, the one-and-twenty fine churches of the Avon valley which, in Cobbett's time, existed for the needs of two thousand and eighty ])cople ? My belief is that he both built his church and attended it, in each case because he was bidden. I think that he heard Mass, took the Sacrament, went on pilgrimages, constrained by use and wont ; and that he listened gladly to sermons whenever he could get them. I don't doubt that he kept the fasts as well as the feasts, paid Church-scot and partook Church-ales ; but I believe that he was at all times in strict relation to his priest, seldom a better man, and generally a worse one. What the priest often was, what he sometimes was, we can learn from various scandalized pens as well as from scandalous — from Walter Mapes, Nicholas Bozon, Chaucer, Langland, Wyclif, and the author of Gammer Gurtons Needle. But THE PEASANT IN CHURCH 249 what are we to think of church-goers whose common term for the Sacrament of the altar was ' .Tack-in-the-Box ' ? Gamnur Gurtons Needle is instructive. It can hardly be earher than 1550; yet it shows us a Catholic England. Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found ; Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas !) Than know'th Tom our Clarke wliat the Priest saith at masse is one of many casual references in it, A gross and trivial piece of buffoonery, full of sculduddery, one puts it down with the feeling that its author knew his village and his peasantry, and that they cannot have been better instructed or gentlicr living than he makes them out. What they made of the Elizabethan settlement there 's no telling now. Did they see Madonna go without a tear? If one did not know their vast j)aticnce and their power of silence it would be hard to believe. How did they consider of the Presbytrrian interlude ? Here and there one of them was touched by Quakerism and fed the Inner Light : 'In the beginning of the year 1655, I was at liie plough in the east parts of Yorkshire in OKI England . . . and, as I walked after the |)lough, I was filled with the love and jjresence of the living CJod, which did ravish my heart when I fell it, for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God run through me like a precious ointment giving a pleasant smell, which made me to stand still. . . .' That is Marmaduke Stevenson, hanged in Massachusetts for his opinions in \(^^)^. iCxcej)! for the like of that, Nonconformity diil not toucii thf peasantry until .Folin Wesley took to the road. Then it smote ihcm hip and thigh, 2 50 THli PEASANT IN CHURCH and ran like wildfire through the West. The farm-hands of both sexes used to meet in the open field in the dark. They joined hands in prayer, they sang ; they had their Agapes, their ecstasies of more than one kind. Faith was exemplified ; works did not always respond. Yet who shall say that Fielding's picture of the Seagrim family — Molly was a church-goer, as we know — presents a better state of affairs than Lackington's of the Methodists' pious orgies ; of the ' spiritual dairy-maid ' whom he married, and who died presently ' in enthusiastic rant, surrounded with methodist preachers ' ? ' A moving picture of the Wiltshire poor in the next century is given in Memorials of a Quiet Life, the endearing record furnished of the lives of Augustus and Maria Hare by the adopted son of the latter. Augustus Hare, brother of the redoubtable Julius, was appointed to the living of Alton-Barnes in 1829, and served the cure through the rick-burnings and machine-breakings of 1830, that terrible year. In 1 831 Maiia Hare met one Richard Douse, a Baptist who had been suddenly converted : ' I asked him what caused him to think seriously. "Why, it was one day when I was working for Mr. Pile's father; there were many of us, and we were talking of dying. I said I was not afraid of death, why should I ? I had not been cursing and swearing, nor doing as many did. I always went to church and did nobody any harm. The next day it came over me all at once. ... I was out in the field. I had beat away my wife and mother that I might go and pray, when all of a sudden it did seem to I as if I heard a voice say in my ears, ' The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin ' ; and in that minute it seemed just as if two great hefts of wheat were lifted off my back ".' THE PEASANT IN CHURCH 251 Augustus Hare was 'high churcli ' in his way of 1830. He observed the feasts and fasts, had weekly services in Lent, and so on. But he was not a ritualist, and was, on the other hand, that one thing for sake of which village j>:ople will overlook even ' excessive genuflections '• He was, to wit, a good plain preacher; and good plain preaching is what the villager has always desiderated and too seldom obtained. He gets the best preaching in chajjel ; accord- ingly the best of him is a chapel-goer. He is no sacra- mentalist ; imagination fails him. Least of all has he a sympathetic or an historical imagination. It is rare for him to be touched by the Quod semper, quod ub'ique argument which appeals so directly to the priest. If touched by it at all, he is guided by it Romewards, not to his parish- church ; nor is he at any pains to understand what has inspired the mind and heart of the young man who changes all the ancient ways, puts a confessional in the side-cha))el and an ever-burning lamp in the sanctuary. Rome does it to-day because she did it yesterday. The i)easant under- stands that argument. I'nit iiis young Vicar found it ovit in a book. Tha Letter- Writers TH E judgement of so stored a mind as Mr. Saintsbury's upon any efflorescence of literature is important. He knows the law, the ropes, the lie of tlie ground — ^however you choose to put it. But when he opens upon letter- writing he brings us into an uncharted sea. There is no canon of criticism there : artist or critic, you go as you please. All that you can steer by is your instinct, or your taste. Tliere is a standard of taste for every expression of man's feeling ; and Mr. Saintsbury is so well aware of it that he is entitled to take it or break it as he will. I don't know that there is any elder now pontificating to whom I should more readily defer than to him, unless it be Professor Ker. Professor Ker's prejudices may be the deeplier rooted, but they are (partly on that account) the less swayed by passion. I feel that Mr. Saintsbury is a good hater, but dare affirm he is the better lover for tliat. In his Letter Book^ he has been properly provocative — with a sting on every page ; and what more need one say ? There is no art more apt for personal judgement than that of letter-writing, for there is no other art in itself so personal. What makes it so in particular is that it is privy to two instead of one ; and that sets it off from all other kinds of writing. The reaction of the multitude upon the artist is different in kind as well as in degree from that of the individual. The world at large hears the poet even when he addresses Maecenas or Maria Gisborne, and he is ^ A Letter Book'. Bell and Sons, 1922. THE LETTER-WRITERS* 253 well aware of it. Even if he indite a sonnet to his mistress's eyebrow one of his own is cocked to the passengers abont her. So, too, with ' Discourse upon our Present Dis- contents, in a Letter to a Noble Lord', where his lordship is no more than a stalking-horse. The letter which is written with an eye on the general (even if it be the post- humous general) betrays itself. It takes a forensic spread, cannot avoid the rhetorician's gesture. It is as if a man should write a tragedy for Drury Lane. He frames his periods to the echo. Good letters may have been written on those terms, as good tragedies may have been written for Drury Lane (though their names escape me) ; but they are not in pari materia with private letters, and cannot lie beside them. Three-quarters of his way through life Stevenson discovered that his letters might be copy ; and they were — and good co])y. But they ceased to be such good letters. The community of interest was violated and ])erhaps there was no going back. It has been charged against Walpole (and I see that Mr. Saintsbury suspects him) that his punctiliousness in securing the return of hi'- letters to Mann was to ensure their ])ublication. Personally I don't believe it, because I fail to detect any tarnish upon their naturalness. He was all his long life engaged upon memoirs of his times, and needed them for that purpose. There is no consciousness in tlie letters themselves that any other eye than his correspondent's was upon thini, or to lie so. One of the great charms of the letter as a piece of ait is that double |)ersonaIity involved. Practitioner and patient act and react. Observe how Mme. de S6vign6 attunes iur pen. Always delightful, she reserves the best of her malice for Bussy, of her wit for Mme, de Lafayette, of her heart t 254 THE LETTER-WRITERS for her daughter, of her delicate reserve for M. de Guitaiilt. One would like her letters to the Cardinal de Retz. She loved and, oddly enough, revered that Eminence. The desire to please should have been beautifully evident there. So also Lamb was always at his wildest when writing to Manning, finding something in the sage to egg him on. Wordsworth, not surprisingly, provoked him to irony ; but Coleridge had his heart. It was only to him that Lamb wrote freely of himself. The same thing is noticeable in Gray, never perfectly natural to any one but Thomas Wharton. He wrote to Bonstetten as to a beloved child ; to Mason as from an indulgent uncle ; to Wharton as an equal. Gray comes next to Cowper, I think, in excellence ; but you can read in him the sentences of a man who disapproved of himself. Cowper, who in charm and translucency of wit is the nearest we have to Mme. de Sevigne, is at his most winning in his letters to Lady Hesketh. The situation with her was delicate. She was the sister of his old flame, not far pcriia])s from being herself a new flame. He never overstepped the modesty of liis nature ; yet never said less than he ought. Britain has bred no truer gentleman than Cowper. If Cowper was a true gentleman, Horace Walpole was a fine one, much too fine to betray it. He could snub with severity — witness his extinguishment of Mason when the time was ripe. But he did it, not en grand seigneur, but as a man of common sense. Though Mason had forgotten himself, Walpole did not. Perhaps he could not. For all his republicanism, he was very conscious of his rank, a Wiiig tiirough and tiirough. But I cannot remember any instance of his using his rank to crush a bore or an imperti- nent. Now Byron wrote with intolerable insolence to THE LETTER-WRITERS 255 Murray, and could hardly keep patronage out of his letters to Tom Moore. How he galled the kibe of the unfortunate Hunt the victim has declared. What arc the properties of a good letter-writer, then, genius apart, and a good corresjiondent implied : Leisure and love of the art are of course ; self-esteem and the desire to please, obvious. Esteem of the correspondent follows. No artist has ever succeeded who despised his audience. Byron, it may be said, succeeded, and did despise his audience. But I doubt his success ; at best he was only second-best. He ])roduces restlessness in the reader, dis- ease. The fact is that he was a cabottn in grain, and would have postured before his shoeblack if he c( uld not get another looking-glass. You must be able to depend ujjon your letter-writer to this extent, at least, that he believes what he is telling you at the moment. With Byron you could not. One other requisite of excellence there does seem to be, if only because it was nearly always there, and that is an ache. As a grain of flint to the oyster, so is unhappiness to the poet, or an ache to the letter-writer. Our best have been unliappy or discontented men. Swift comes first. Mr. Sainlsbury calls him ' one of the unhappi- cst lovers in the world '. What sort of a lover he was I cannot say at the moment ; but there can be no doubt of the misery in which he passed liis days. The problem in Swift's touching ' .Journal to Stella * is how he could have had the heart to keep it up, as he drti, while he was ' carrying on * with Vanessa in town. I'nt he did it — and you can feel it trembling underneath, lint to pursue. Cowper despaired, Gray disapproved of himsflf. Mme. »le S6vign