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Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett


[Illustration: Logo]






London
William Heinemann, Ltd

First Published       1924
Second Impression May 1924

Printed in England at
The Westminster Press, Harrow Road
London, W.9




_NOTE_


_Lovers of Mr. Hewlett’s work will understand that these Essays have
not been subjected to the severe revision which Mr. Hewlett would
undoubtedly have given them before publication in this book. In one or
two minor points his Executors have felt doubtful about the deletion
or insertion of a passage, but in these cases the decision has always
been the same--that his readers would prefer to have the Essays in Mr.
Hewlett’s original form._

_Thanks are due to the editors of “The Times” and “The Evening
Standard”; “The London Mercury,” “The Cornhill Magazine,” “The
Nineteenth Century,” and other periodicals, for permission to reprint
certain of these Essays._




CONTENTS

                                               PAGE
A Return to the Nest                              1

“And now, O Lord ...”                             7

The Death of the Sheep                           12

The Solitary Reaper                              16

Interiors                                        19

The Plight of Their Graces                       25

The Village                                      30

The Curtains                                     39

Happiness in the Village                         43

Otherwhereness                                   48

The Journey to Cockaigne                         54

Suicide of the Novel                             59

Immortal Works                                   65

Ballad-Origins                                   69

Real and Temporal Creation                       77

Peasant Poets                                    82

Doggerel or Not                                  88

The Iberian’s House                              93

Scandinavian England                             99

Our Blood and State in 1660                     103

“Merrie” England                                109

Endings--I                                      115

   “    II                                      124

Beaumarchais                                    132

The Cardinal de Retz                            148

“L’Abbesse Universelle”: Madame de Maintenon    166

Pierre de L’Estoile                             172

La Bruyère                                      191

Couleur de Rose                                 211

Art and Heart                                   217

A Novel and a Classic                           223

The Other Dorothy                               229

Realism with a Difference                       247

Mr. Pepys His Apple-cart                        253

One of Lamb’s Creditors                         269

Crocus and Primrose                             278

Daffodils                                       285

Windflowers                                     291

Tulips                                          297

Summer                                          304

The Lingering of the Light                      310




A RETURN TO THE NEST


Why it was that my great-grandfather left the village in Somerset in
and on which his forefathers, I believe, had lived from the time of
Domesday, why he forsook agriculture and cider for the law, married
in Shoreditch, settled in Fetter Lane, went back to Somerset to bury
his first child, and returned to London to beget my grandfather, be
ultimately responsible for _me_, and break finally with his family
cradle, I never understood until the other day when, in good company,
I took the road, left the bare hills--how softly contoured, how
familiar, and how dear--of South Wilts, topped the great rock on which
Shaftesbury lifts, dived down into Blackmore Vale, and so entered my
county of origin at its nearest point, namely Wincanton (where I saw,
by the by, a palæolithic man alive and walking the world)--to find
myself in a land of corn and wine and oil, or so it seemed, such a
land as those who love deep loam, handsome women, fine manners and a
glut of apples more than most things in this life (and there are few
things better), would never leave if they could help it. That is a long
sentence with which to begin an essay, but it expresses what I did, and
very much how I did it.

In a word, I left Broadchalke and drove to Yeovil, within ten miles
of which thriving town the family to which I belong itself throve
and cultivated its virtues, if any. My great-grandfather and I were
not acquainted; but I remember my grandfather perfectly well, and
can testify that he had virtues. He was on the tall side of the mean
height, a deep-chested, large-headed old man, with hair snowy white,
a rosy face, and cool, extremely honest blue eyes. He was hasty in
his movements (and in his temper), trundled about rather than walked.
I used to think as a boy that it could not be wholesome, and must be
most inconvenient, to have such clean hands, such dazzling linen, and
such polished pink filberts instead of finger-nails. I never saw him
otherwise dressed than in black broadcloth, with shoes polished like
looking-glasses, and a shirt-collar just so starched that it stood up
enclosing his chin, yet so little that it took on the contours of his
cheeks where they pressed it. He had a deep voice, with a cheer in it.
I remember--for he had little else to say to me--how he used to put
his hand on my head and murmur, as if to himself, “My boy, my boy,” in
such a way that I felt in leaving him, as perhaps Jacob did with Isaac,
that it would be impossible ever to do anything wrong again and betray
such a noble affection. One other thing struck me, even then, young and
ungracious as I was, and that was his extraordinarily fine manners.
Since then, whenever I have considered manners, I have compared them
with his. He is for me the staple of courtesy. They were the manners
which bring a man more than half-way to meet you. He used them to all
the world: to me, to the servants, to the crossing-sweeper, to the
clerks from his office who used to come for papers when he was too old
to go into London. I know now where he got them. They were traditional
West Country manners; and sure enough when I walked the village street
where, if my grandfather never walked, my great-grandfather did,
the first man of whom I asked information met me with just the same
forwardness of service, and seemed to know tentacularly what precisely
lay behind the question which I put him. I had always been proud of my
grandfather; now I was proud of my county. For if manners don’t make a
man, they make a gentleman.

Let me call the village Bindon St. Blaise, to give myself freedom to
say that I don’t remember to have seen one more beautiful than it
looked on that sunny autumn day, drowsing, winking in the heat of noon.
The houses are of stone--and that stone saturated, as it seemed, in
centuries of sunlight. Yes, I have seen Bibury in Gloucestershire,
and Broadway in Worcestershire, Alfriston in Sussex, and Teffont in
Wilts; and Clovelly, and Boscastle, and Ponteland, and many another
haunt of peace; but never yet a place of grey and gold so established,
so decent in age, so recollected, so dignified as Bindon St. Blaise,
which my great-grandfather unwillingly, I am sure, forsook in 1780 or
thereabouts. Nobody could tell me which of its many fair houses he
had forsworn. The fancy could play with them at large. There was a
long-roofed farm with gables many and deep, with two rows of mullioned,
diamonded windows, each with its perfect dripstone, which I should
like to think was once ours, except that it faces north, and therefore
has gathered more moss than we should care about now. Perhaps it _was_
ours, and he left it, seeking the sun. But would he have gone to look
for it in Fetter Lane? No, no. I incline, however, to a smaller house
facing full south, with a walled garden full of apple trees, and a
pear tree reaching to the chimney stack, and a portico--whereover a
room looking straight into the eye of the sun. There was a radiant
eighteenth-century house for a man to have been born in! Could I have
brought myself to leave such a nest? Well, we shall see.

After luncheon at the Boulter Arms (let us call it), and an indication
where we should find “the Great House,” we went instead to see the
house of God, which lay on our road to it, almost within its park.
Like all that I have seen in Somerset, it is a spacious, well-ordered
church, mainly perpendicular, with the square tower and lace-worked
windows which belong to the type. The churchyard was beautifully kept,
planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order,
numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed
as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching
upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with
a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the
great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry
Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce,
in death were sprawled upon by their masters. Hannah Goodbody, for
instance, “for forty years in the service of the Right Hon. John
Charles Ferdinand, sixth Earl Boulter, Viscount and Baron Boulter of
Bindon St. Blaise”--had she not earned _quietus_, and need all that be
remembered against her? Percival Slade, “for twenty years Groom of the
Chambers to Ferdinand Charles John, seventh Earl”; Matilda Swinton,
housekeeper; Peter Wain, gamekeeper; Thomas Duffey, storekeeper--I
began to see what had been the matter with my great-grandfather.

Inside, the church revealed itself as a family vault so encumbered
with the dead that the living must have been incommoded. In the midst
of life they were in death indeed. Earls in effigy slept (like Priam’s
sons in the Iliad) beside their chaste wives--flat in brasses, worn
smooth in basalt, glaringly in plaster, as might be. A side-chapel
was so full of them that the altar was crowded out: and why not? They
were altar and sacrifice and deity in one. They spilled over on to the
floor, splayed out on the walls in tablets as massy as houseleeks; and
on the bosses of the vaulted roof one found the Boulter arms implanted
in the heart of the Mystic Rose. O too much Boulter--but we were not
shut of them yet. Discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies where
the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble
apartment, a withdrawing room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some
club-chairs, and a deeply padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray,
a match-stand--one missed them. There is, no doubt, a comic side to all
this. “J’ai trente mille livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said
the Abbé de Bonport. The same amazement might come upon an entrenched
Earl Boulter at any minute in the midst of his cushioned ease. Neither
coat-armour nor a private stove will ward off the mortal chills.
However, I forgive them their quality, but not their oppression of
other people’s tombstones.

For we too were oppressed, and not diverted. We were seeking our
ancestors, but they were not here. They had fled to Fetter Lane, and I
cannot blame them. The doubt about my great-grandfather is solved. He
left the village of Bindon St. Blaise because he saw no other way of
escape from an Earl on his tomb. He married, his wife bore him a son,
which died young. Moved then by piety, he brought down the innocent
to be buried, secure that upon that unknown life no great name could
intrude. I should have done the same thing, I believe.




“AND NOW, O LORD ...”


“And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was
how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the
midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium,
if better there be.

Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an
interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding
in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares
somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue
he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at
that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered,
dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient,
bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst
two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty
heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for
royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled
a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all
necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was
interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have
given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet
we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we
were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be
stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and
we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow
a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are
inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show
that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same
clay as the children of light.

You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than
they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of
most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron
one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair
and far they were come--but there they were at it, hammer and tongs.
I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but
not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and
avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning
flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The
baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and
with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign
Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had
no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific,
for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water
until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam,
until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth.
Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met
above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and
oared away towards the bridge. I would have given a good deal to see
that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no
end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom
I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that
she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle
standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings.
What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky?

Against that extreme example of the picturesque I could only advance
that I had seen an elm-tree fall on a man in Gray’s Inn and kill him
instantly. Or that, at the corner of Montague Place, I saw a runaway
brewer’s dray barge into a four-wheeler. It missed the cab (on whose
box the driver sat intact), but caught the horse full and knocked him
and the shafts with him down some area steps across the pavement--where
indeed he remained as in his stall until he could be built up from
below. Extreme urgency had hurtled him down the steps, but no
persuasion, fore or aft, would move him up again. So they built him
up with trusses of straw. Nothing quite so good as that ever happened
to me in a four-wheeler; but I haven’t done so badly either. I was
driving once through Paris very early in the morning from the Gare de
Lyon to Saint-Lazare. You are lucky to get a cab at all at such times,
and I thought myself so to have a crazy old victoria and a horse tied
together with string. We did not exactly go, but we got, into the rue
Lafayette, where, without any warning, the victoria parted amidships.
The driver on his box and two wheels went on with the horse; I and my
companion fell forward into the road and the hood of the thing atop of
us. I set up a yell, half-laughter, half-alarm, which caused our man
to look round. When he saw what had happened he pulled up, and very
carefully descended from his perch. Did he come to help us? Not so. He
went directly and deliberately into a cabaret, without any notice taken
of any kind, and we saw him put away a noggin, or whatever it is, of
cognac. Then, with the same meditated method, he came to extricate his
charges. They, however, had by that time extricated themselves, and
considered themselves shut of him.

When a Frenchman begins to drive anything, horse or motor, he seems to
become intoxicated with progress, and content just to drive, not to
guide, and never, at any rate, to stop. I have been the victim also
of that generous ardour. It was in Algiers, ages ago, but not such
ages that there were not tramcars along the sea-front. A baker in his
covered cart was taking us to see some sight or other; and along the
sea-front held his course magnificently indifferent to everything
but the speed and joy of it all--aided not a little thereto by the
fine afternoon, the business of the road, and the café tables hemming
it, dense with customers. For it was the hour of absinthe. The trams
flashed past us, coming or going, but little cared he for that. His
object was to pass them, and he did pass one or two. Presently,
however, at a curve he flogged his horse to pass one, on the wrong
side, and just as he drew level, behold, another bearing swiftly down
upon us! I confess that I blenched--but he did not; rather held on
his way, and not until the last tick of our last minute on earth did
it strike him that he must do something. And what did he do? He gave
a wild shout and turned his horse sharply to the left. On his left
was the overflow of a café--tin tables, bentwood chairs, syphons,
opal-brimmed glasses, citizens in straw hats, with straws to their
mouths, with cigars or newspapers--as thick as a flock of sheep. Into
the midst of this, as once Don Quixote hurled himself, we plunged,
horse, cart and passengers. Tables flew right and left, citizens were
upset, glasses shivered, waiters wrung their hands. You never saw
such a sight. And what did we do? I and my companion sat where we
were, laughing ourselves ill, fighting for breath. Our driver slowly
dismounted and looked round. He disregarded entirely the havoc he
had made, and thought only of his honour. The driver of the tram was
waiting for him. They met, and each lifted a bunched hand, in which all
the finger-tips met and formed a little cage, to within an inch of the
other’s nose. Then began _des injures_, which could only have ended in
one of two ways. The arrival of the gendarmes decided in which of the
two it was to end.




THE DEATH OF THE SHEEP


Alfred de Vigny, it seems, wrote a poem of stoic intention called _La
Mort du Loup_, in which he apostrophised in his eloquent way that
particular among other _sublimes animaux_. I have never read a line of
it myself, but can well understand, when Sainte-Beuve regrets that it
should have been written too much from the standpoint of seeking in
nature at all costs subjects of meditative poetry, that Sainte-Beuve
may have been right. The pathetic fallacy is a stumbling-block to
the egoistic travellers we are. De Vigny on his dead wolf may have
been lifted as far, or nearly as far, as Sterne on his dead donkey.
Personally, I am busking for a short excursion on a dead sheep; but
although there were elements of the high sublime in the climax, and
of the horrid in the anti-climax of the tragedy, it is not on their
account that I wish to relate it; rather because it seemed to me at
the time to be representative, exactly to prefigure the countryside
in which I saw it all done. It may stand up as type, or as symbol, of
the fells and the life lived there; it has in it much of their lonely
grandeur and savagery, of their harshness and plainness, of their
entire absence of amenity; in a word, of their Nordic quality which
does not so much insist as take for granted, in a way disconcerting
to the Southerner, that neither man nor woman, dog nor sheep more or
less makes one straw’s worth of difference to the day’s work, but that
we are all alike rolled round, as Wordsworth said, “with stocks and
stones and trees.” He himself, Nordic to the bone, saw nothing amiss
with it; and no doubt it is all right.

The sheep must have died rather suddenly in the late afternoon. When I
went down the fell-side, at six, to fish in the river there was nothing
but greenness to be seen; when I came up again, round about eight
o’clock, I saw, or thought I saw, a grey rock where had been no rock
before. It was the sheep, and quite cold. She must have felt her time
at hand, withdrawn herself from her companions, and descended the hill
deliberately to be alone with fate. Then, as I see it now, she stood
there, facing down the hill, which in health her kind never does, and
awaited the end of all things. Then, as the chills crept up, she lay
down and put her muzzle flatlings to that rooty earth which in life
she had so diligently sought, and with the scent of it to comfort her
(the best thing she knew) given up what ghost she had. She looked, as I
stood over her, to be asleep--asleep with large, bare eyelids covering
her blank amber eyes--and grandly indifferent to me and the rest of
us. I left her, a warrior taking her rest. There she lay all night;
and in the morning, her former mates feeding all about her, there she
was. A windless silver rain was falling, straight as rods of glass. The
fell was blanched with it, as with hoar frost; but she took no notice
of the rain. A crow or two wheeled about, and bore off in the haze as
soon as I showed myself. I went down to look at the sheep. She lay
easily, her nose to the ground, while others of her nation gazed at
me, foolishly serious, heaving at the side. Whatever had taken place at
that supreme hour of yesterday evening, it had changed this corruptible
into something other than a sheep. Sheep-nature had gone; she had not a
sheep’s face any more. Her dead eyes looked wiselier through their lids
than their empty ones unveiled, and fuller, too, as if charged with
weightier news. Sterner, too, she appeared--with her lips curled back;
the rabbit-look gone.

There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in
death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white
dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail
feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at
it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race,
and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering
as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy
it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on
secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall--much,
I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to
take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at
the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull
out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He
did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then
he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to
where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I
saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down
by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a
dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale.
In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them
from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a
taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had
seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and
went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last
indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her
lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However,
I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped
upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I
went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife.

She said--merely humouring my queasiness--that the remains should
be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of
my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of
sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves
together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over
their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of
dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared
bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the
murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil.




THE SOLITARY REAPER


The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to
harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our
broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He
might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and
there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red
wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar
scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence.
I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all
drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder-high, heavy in ear, bolt upright;
a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes
the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when
petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social,
but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests:
the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy,
thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which
succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it
slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against
the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies--all gone
now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just
begun. One man was reaping it.


     Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
     And sings a melancholy strain:
     O listen! for the vale profound
     Is overflowing with the sound.


It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.

“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said,
munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in
agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing
in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall
celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The
children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is
now a forlorn convention--a mere vestige like the human appendix. For
the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the
bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that
now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles,
as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands--that is all there
is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both
sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the
“solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney
Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage,
and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of
him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears--why,
then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of
automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific
island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears
to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be
realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it
still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it
with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan
the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors.
I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s _automata_ are
not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.




INTERIORS


Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best--interiors
and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth
concentre there, and he is unhappy--a figure for Hans Andersen--who has
not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however
he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing,
through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded
lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am
sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we
dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we
are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be.

Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with
the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set
no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm
of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their
mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one
is looking at them--or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping
Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying.
Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique
in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is
ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead
you through a picture-gallery, so free are the indwellers of their
concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow
window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children--four little
girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over
bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her
they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy--“forty feeding
like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As
they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was
what the French call _cendré_, very glossy and smooth, and curling at
the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I
saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning
a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as
she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding,
no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in
the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her
eyes. And she _had_ been caught, not by the president, but by her elder
sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering.
Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile
as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I
believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You
ask--or I did--How come they to leave _me_ outside in the dark? Don’t
they know that I am one with them all?

I have seen a mother reading to her girls at work, and longed to
know what the book was, whether I had read it. If, as I believed, it
was Miss Alcott, then I was all right. I have seen a boy rigging a
three-masted vessel at a table, and knew by the way he was biting his
tongue how happy he was. And I have seen comedies for Molière. I saw
topers once in a tap-room, and a man in a cut-away coat and a shocking
hat standing up and trying to make good and not succeeding. He did not
belong to their parts--that was evident. I guessed him to be an outlier
from some race-meeting or other. But there he was, inside, warm, and
at least smelling the good cheer, and there he hoped to remain. He was
doing it, or trying it, on his gift--which was tongues. I don’t suppose
that I was thirty seconds passing that window, if so much; yet I could
see decisively that he wanted them to believe in him, and how badly.
They, a plain-faced, weather-seamed row, were not taking any. They were
tired with their day’s work, leaned to the wall, their legs, I am sure,
stretched out at length. Each with one horny hand held his pipe in its
place; one and all they looked down at their feet, and listened, and
judged him for a poor thing. The things you see!

They are not always so pleasant. Sometimes they can be pretty tragic
when you come to work them out. I passed a house once on the outskirts
of a country town, and across a laurel hedge and iron fence, and
between the branches of a monkey-puzzler, could see into a lighted
room. Not much to be seen, you might think. Gas was burning in a
central chandelier behind ground-glass globes. An engraving in a gilt
frame on a green wall; something in a tall glass case before the
window. I did not see the _aspidestris_, which must have been there.
Then, on one side of the fire a man in a black coat, asleep, and on
the other a woman in a white shawl, asleep--and that was all. Yes, but
wait. I remember a trial at some Assizes years ago, where a man was
arraigned for killing his wife. He pleaded not guilty, as of course;
but the evidence was clear. He had killed her with a chopper in the
scullery. He was convicted and sentenced to death, having had nothing
to say. Before his execution, but not long before it, he told the
chaplain of the gaol what he had done, and why. He said that he had
been married to the woman for twenty years; that they did not quarrel,
but had got out of the way of speaking to one another, and, in fact,
practically never did. It had not affected him for some time, he said;
but one evening, suddenly, it did. One evening he was struck with
horror, palsy-struck with the reflection: “Good God! I have sat dumb
before this woman, she dumb before me, for twenty years, and we may
have to sit so for another twenty.” He said that from that moment the
thought never left him, that the horror of the prospect daunted him,
and that by and by his heart failed him. He knew then that he could
not do it. Some wild resentment, some hot inconsiderate grudge wrought
madness in him--to that shocking end. By ordinary we do not use our
imagination, and so escape very likely as much misery as happiness,
glory and the like. But if the picture-making faculty awake of itself,
blaze the future at us, so vividly that we cannot doubt of its
truth--what then? Why, then, as often as not, despondency and madness.
I had no envy of that gas-illumined room, and was contented to be a
stranger to that disgruntled pair.

I have seen other things of sharper savour, where passion clearly was
involved, and, as it seemed, the creatures themselves uncurtained as
well as the room they occupied. Two of them, related long ago, I shall
always remember: the first, seen by chance from a window of the Army
and Navy Stores, which looked out over the purlieus of Westminster
towards the river. That showed me a mean second-floor bedroom just over
the way, and a little maid-servant in it, down at heels, draggled, her
cap awry, dusting and tidying up. All familiar, uninteresting, a matter
of routine, until suddenly I saw her throw her head up--a gesture of
real abandonment--and fall on her knees beside the bed. She buried
her face in her bare arm; and I moved away. That was no place for me.
Startling though, to be jolted out of the smooth apparatus of shopping,
away from obsequious service and the accepted convention, in return for
my half-crowns, that I was a temporary lord of the earth. All a sham,
that; but there across the street, in a frowsy bedroom, was reality--a
soul and its Disposer face to face.

The other was revealed when, as a very young man, I had chambers in Old
Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn. My bedroom there backed upon slums, but was
above them, being almost in the roof of a tall old house. One night,
very late, I was going to bed, and leaned far out of my window to get
air and see the stars. Before, and below me rather, rose a dark wall
of houses, entirely blind but for one lighted window. That revealed a
shabby sitting-room--a table with a sewing-machine and paraffin lamp;
little else. There was a man sitting by the table in his shirt-sleeves;
he was smoking while he read the evening paper. Then a door opened
and a tall, youngish woman came in. She was in white--evidently in
her nightdress--and her loose hair was about her shoulders. She stood
between door and table, resting her hand; I don’t think that she spoke.
The man, aware or unaware, went on reading. But presently he looked
up: their eyes met. He threw down pipe and paper and went to her. He
dropped to his knees, clasped hers, and bent his head to his hands. All
that I had seen before--I knew what I was doing--but I saw no more.
What did it mean? Husband and wife? Sinner and saviour? What do I know?




THE PLIGHT OF THEIR GRACES


The mills of God grind as the poet has declared, and they grind to the
same measure both the illustrious and the obscure. Naturally one hears
more of the sorrows of the great. The wailing of a duke will carry the
length of the realm, and since America is now interested domestically
in that estate it will reverberate in the Western continent also. The
Duke of Bedford has lately exhibited a part of his case to readers of
_The Times_, the Duke of Portland more explicitly his to his friends
and neighbours. Both their graces say in effect that the thing can’t be
done. They do not tell us why not; but we can infer it. To do things
properly, Welbeck and Woburn require some thirty housemaids; and how
are they to find thirty housemaids, or, having found them, as things
now are, pay for them? They do not ask, but the question follows for
the plainer sort, why should a man stand in the ridiculous position of
requiring thirty housemaids?

It so happens that I have just been to Woburn for the first time
in my life, have made the circuit of the great wall, some ten feet
high and, I daresay, ten miles round, have entered at one fine gate
and issued at another after a traverse of the noble spaces of the
park, in which herds of deer, occasional ostriches, lamas, bisons,
remote and solitary buffaloes, and heaven knows what, were to be seen
peacefully feeding, as if no kind of anxiety was fretting the peace
and amplitude of it all. The trees, the boscages, the lake, the great
piled grey house unapproachable of the vulgar, the model villages with
their cottage-fronts all stamped with a crowned B--all these splendid
established things passed by me like an opium-eater’s dream: all so
seeming secure, inevitable and right; all, actually, so shaky, doomed,
and infernally wrong. And with the Lord of Welbeck’s wail in my ears, I
also saw that, truly, it could not be done.

It is not a matter of housemaids alone. It is a matter of gardeners,
of woodmen, of a permanent staff of masons and bricklayers--for with
a wall of ten feet by ten miles there will always be repairs. Other
services in proportion. Where are we then? I avoid arithmetic for
excellent reasons; but I do see that thirty housemaids at £50 a year
apiece plus board come to £3,000 a year, and that the others will
figure out accordingly. How is it to be done? It is not. And why should
it be done? God knows.

Whether their Graces know is another matter. I think that they are
beginning to know--but even so, they are only at the beginning of
the problem. For it is not so easy as it sounds just to drop Welbeck
or Woburn and live _en pension_ at Dieppe. What are you to do with
Welbeck in the meantime? And if you don’t want it yourself, who, do
you suppose, will want it? And let it be remembered that their Graces,
besides Welbeck and Woburn, possess each another house, not made with
hands, an indestructible house. They are dukes for ever after the order
of Melchisedech. Like snails, wherever they go--to Dieppe, to a flat
in the Temple, to a caravan, to the banks of the Susquehanna--they must
carry that blazoned house on their backs. And I cannot imagine a more
inhospitable or superfluous mansion for the life of me.

The only nobility worth talking about is one of birth, and even that
won’t bear talking about very seriously. Lord Chesterfield, the famous
one of the family, had a gallery of ancestors which was a wonder to
behold of completeness and splendour. But he was wise enough to correct
it with two pictures: a scrubby old man, labelled Adam de Stanhope, and
a scrubby old woman, Eve de Stanhope. He had the values straightened
out thus wittily, at any rate for himself. Then there was the
family-tree of the Wynns, or another Welsh house, which had an asterisk
some distance down, with a note attached: “About this time the creation
of the world took place.” This is perhaps all very foolish, but we can
understand it.

We supplemented that intelligible aristocracy in our country, first
with an aristocracy of office, and then with one of rank; and it is
on those in particular that the economic crisis presses. Noble birth
is a matter of tradition and, so to speak, of God’s grace. If you are
nobly born you may black boots, sell matches or beg at a church door.
Hidalgos, grandees of Spain, do these things in their own country, and
remain grandees of Spain. Even ignoble pursuits cannot stultify noble
birth. There it is. Official nobility, too, is very well, while ability
to office persists: but that kind died out because ability to office
refused to be hereditary. The first Earls were governors of earldoms,
that is of counties. The first Viscounts were Vicecomites, Sheriffs.
But Lord Viscount Northcliffe is not a sheriff. If he is an aristocrat
it is by virtue of rank. Now rank is not quite like beauty. Handsome
is as handsome does, we know; but rank is as rank is able to be. You
may make a man a duke, of course, but it is possible that he will
make himself ridiculous; and if he does that, and if he does it often
enough, and if there are enough of him, he will make the Fountain of
Honour itself ridiculous. I don’t know who was the first of our kings
to ennoble, his Quelconques, his “unfortunate females,” as Carlyle used
to say: I think it was Henry VIII; but whoever he was he sowed the
seed of a fungus in the ranks of the peers. One knows what the French
kings did, what Charles II, what the Hanoverians did. Whether, when the
politicians took control of the Fountain of Honour and commercialised
its golden waters, they did any worse, it were hard to say. They made
common what had already become vulgar. The peerage of late years is
only less absurd because it is less conspicuous. That at least is
to the good. Yet there remains this last thing to be said about it.
An aristocracy of birth is self-sufficient, but one of rank demands
self-evidence, quite a different matter. It drives you back upon
wealth, without which it is an absurdity. A grandee of Spain selling
matches will pass--but how about a Caroline or Georgian marquess
driving a taxi, or taking his turn at a music-hall?

M. Henri Lavedan wrote a novel upon that theme, a cynical, witty,
bitter, rattling novel, too, called “Le Bon Temps.” A party of
Parisians, men about town and their ladies, is lunching _al fresco_
at Armenonville or some such on a fine morning in May. A hurdy-gurdy
sounds a familiar air outside, which touches the tender top of some
quill in one of the _convives_. “Let’s have the old chap in,” he moves
the company. “He’s playing the _Blue Danube_, and will renew the youth
for some of us.” They have him in, a tattered, bearded, bright-eyed
_vecchio_, his instrument slung by a greasy strap to one shoulder,
on the other a foolish little troubled monkey in a red velveteen
petticoat. He lifts his old hat and recommences his grinding. One of
the guests covers his eyes, and so remains until the grinder has gone.
Then he lifts his head. “Do you know who that was?” “Not I indeed!”
“That was the Duc d’Epervier.” Then he tells the story of _Le Bon
Temps: Wein, Weib, und Gesang_, a rattling tale with a croak in it.

“Why do the people imagine a vain thing?” This is a case for tags.




THE VILLAGE


The gardener told my housekeeper, and she told me, that the policeman’s
wife had a baby. I said, Splendid! or Good!--it was one or the
other--which will show you that I knew what I was about. To have said
less than that--to have said simply, “Oh,” or “Why not?” would have
been to fail in tact. For in the village we take such a thing as a baby
seriously. We call it Increase, not a baby, in the old fashion, and
disregard the new probability that, while it may be so in one sense,
there are several in which it may well be called Decrease. When a
patriarch’s--or, I should say here, a Druid’s--wife had a baby, both
she and the Druid knew that, barring accidents, it would work for him,
if it was a boy, and in due course bring in a wife of its own, and
Increase of its own--all to work for the Druid until he died. Or, if
it was a girl, he would sell it to a neighbouring Druid for measures
of corn or heads of cattle. Increase then all round, however it turned
out. But it is different now. We have the name without the thing. If
it is a boy, as in fact the policeman’s is, it will be no use to him
until it is fifteen, and not much then. Suppose it gets a job somewhere
handy, it will pay its mother, say, five shillings a week, a bare
subsistence. At twenty, if still living at home, that may be increased
to ten shillings. Clothes and a motor-bike will somehow come out of the
rest. Precious little Increase there. And soon after twenty it will
marry and disappear from the household. But still the village holds
by the old fashion, and calls a boy-baby Increase. I have heard girls
dignified by the same title, though it is not so invariable. Yet there
is more chance of a girl proving useful to her parents than of a boy’s
being so. It depends entirely on the mother, whether as the child grows
up it finds out that she won’t stand any nonsense. There are still such
mothers left--I know two or three; but their numbers diminish with
every additional nonsense that crops up.

Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The
first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten
village law; the other comes about by circumstance, which provides that
whether we like it or not--and, on the whole, I am pretty sure that we
do like it--we are simply a large family. I don’t necessarily mean that
everybody is related to everybody else, though as a matter of fact he
is, but rather that everybody, from the time he was anybody, has always
known everybody else intimately: called him or her by his Christian
name--within limits--known the exact state of his wardrobe, the extent
of his earnings, the state of his pocket; what he had for dinner, or
will have to-morrow, where he has been, what he was doing, whom he is
courting, or by whom he is courted--and so on. I should fail entirely
to make plain the sense in which this extreme and (to a townsman)
extraordinary intimacy must be understood if I had not in reserve one
crowning example of it, beyond which I defy anybody to carry intimacy.
It is, then, the plain and literal fact that everybody in the village
knows, or can find out, exactly the amount, condition, value and period
of recurrence of everybody else’s underwear. There is no exception
to that. It is, it can be, it must be exposed to view and subject to
criticism every Monday afternoon in the garden of every cottage. When
you have a community with such a mutual knowledge among its members,
how can you help their taking each other seriously?

Two of the fundamentals of village life have been expounded, I hope:
Custom, which is the Law, and says that what you did the day before
yesterday is sanction for doing it the day after to-morrow; that, and
exact mutual knowledge of your own and your neighbours’ affairs. There
is a third: common poverty. Everybody is poor--or if he is not, he must
seem so. That is invariable, for where everyone is poor, and everyone’s
affairs known to everyone else, a very jealous eye is kept for any
variation from the standard. Poverty--and by poverty I mean the state
where you never have quite enough for the week’s expenses, are never
more than a week’s pay off “the Parish,” and have to trust to windfalls
for mere necessaries--that kind of poverty is a state which can only
be borne in company. In the village it is the general state, and while
that is so the villagers will put up, it seems, with almost anything.
Custom, which assures them that it was like that for their forefathers,
enables them to accept their continual privations. I daresay there is
nobody in the village, of cottage rank, who has ever known an ordinary
day when he was not hungry after a meal. They say that that is good
for you. My only comment is, Try it, and it won’t seem to be so. They
will stand that; and being cold in bed; and letting the fire out when
you are not cooking something--so that you come home wet and tired to
cold ashes, and must chop kindling before you can be warm or dry; and
working incessantly, as the women do, for almost nothing or literally
nothing; and wearing the same clothes until they fall off you; and
washing at the sink downstairs because you are too tired to take water
upstairs; and having windows that won’t open, and doors that won’t
shut--but why go on? Worse things than any of these are endured in the
slums of great towns. The village makes little of them, provided that
they are shared; but the moment it knows, or has cause to suspect that
any one of its number has had “a stroke of luck,” come into money, had
a useful present made him, or found a well-paid job, then it is at
once dissatisfied with its lot, and the lucky offender hears about it.
It is not that village people are naturally unkind to each other--far
from that, they are kindness itself in times of trouble. But they are
incurably suspicious, and quicker to believe ill than well of each
other. They grudge prosperity to a neighbour less than resent it. It
seems a slight upon themselves. A hot and bitter question surges up,
Why should that good fortune happen to her; and what have I done to be
left out? By some queer jugglery of the mind, the first half of the
question answers the second half; the happy one is so at the expense
of the less favoured. If you engage a girl in the village for some
daily task, her friends, as likely as not, will cut her in the street.
I knew a woman in Norfolk whose husband was killed by a fall from a
straw-stack. Compensation, insurance, club-money, presents from the
benevolent flowed in to the widow, whose neighbours saw her not only
free as air, but comfortably off according to village standards. They
called her “the Lady,” and some of her own family would have nothing to
do with her.

Indiscriminate or heedless present-giving should therefore be
avoided, unless you wish harm to come to the object of your alms.
There was a man in a village over the hill who was doing a turn of
work in the house of a newcomer, a rich young man with the most
friendly intentions. Talking to his labourer one day and noticing his
unconventional leg-covering, it suddenly shot across his mind that he
had lately tried on a new pair of trousers and taken them off again
in a rage because of their cut. “By George,” he thought, “I like this
chap. Now I’ll give him those beastly trousers”--which he did. On
Sunday, then, there shone upon the church-going village young Richard
in the newest pair of trousers it had ever seen, except, of course,
upon the legs of a “gentleman,” where they would have been simply
unremarkable, _hors concours_. But now it was as if a private in a
file should show up there in a cocked hat with feathers. The trousers
were glossy from the iron, they caught the sun. The creases before or
behind would have cut a swathe. In the after-dinner time, when some
favoured corner hums with youth, it hummed to only one tune; and on
Monday the children going to school called out after young Richard,
“Who stole my trousers?” It will now be understood why no village can
be found without its miser. Between hiding and hoarding there is only a
difference of degree. The first is forced upon the villager, for public
opinion is too many for him; he dare not let it be known that he has
anything to put by. The mattress used to be the favourite place for
your economies. If it is not used now it is simply to save the waste
of good ticking which always followed a death. Now it will be a hole
under the hearthstone, or in the thatch, or a _cache_ under the third
gooseberry bush as you go down the garden. Sometimes it is so well
hidden that, if death be sudden, it is never found at all. Sometimes
the hider will forget where he hid his money, and dig up the whole
garden in the middle of the night. Mr. Pepys was in that predicament
and, so feverishly did he hunt, lost quite a number of broad pieces.
But the worst case is where he knows the hiding-place exactly, and
going to recover his treasure, finds that somebody else had known it
too; and so it has gone. Cruel dilemma! He dare not let his loss be
known, nor, should he be able, accuse the thief. His only remedy in
such circumstance is to steal from the stealer. I heard of an old woman
who was robbed of twenty pounds, which she kept in an old beehive, and
who knew perfectly well where the money was. She said nothing at all,
continued her acquaintance, and even used to have the thief to tea with
her. I don’t know how it was done--whether it dawned upon the guilty
that she was suspected, and so compunction came. Anyhow, as I was
told, the money was restored.

It may seem odd that when a villager rises in the world, as they often
do, he ceases to be grudged. I am not sure that he really does; but no
signs of grudging appear, simply because he ceases to be a villager.
Rank is carefully observed--but it is all outside. There is no rank in
the village itself. All are level there--except in one way. And that
exception is not odd, either.

Walking down the street at certain hours of the day you will meet
certain old men, elders of the people. Although they differ in no
respect from any others you may find there, you will notice this about
them that they will be “Mr.” to everyone, and not, as is usual, Jack,
Tom, or Jimmy. What has procured them their title of honour? Not always
age, certainly never riches: as often as not the bearer of a title
will be an old-age pensioner. Or he may be “on the rates.” It doesn’t
matter. Some native worth or resident dignity forbids the use of his
Christian name, which is otherwise of invariable application. That
points to a real aristocracy, an aristocracy of character; the only
one which can hope to be permanent, as founded upon reason and nature;
and the one without which no democracy can expect to be permanent
either. Walking with one of these patricians the other day, I observed
before us a man of near his age. Presently there came towards us an
urchin homing from school, who passing our front rank, a man old enough
to be his great grandfather, lightly acclaimed him with “Afternoon,
George.” But to my companion it was, “Afternoon, Mr. M----.” With the
women--married, of course--the decencies are observed in salutation,
but not in reference. You will hear of one as old Liz Marchant, of
another, always, as Mrs. Catchpole, or whatever her name may be. But,
to each other, married women are strict formalists. Two girls who have
known each other from childhood and been at school together will be
Florry and Bess to the very church-porch. From the wedding day onwards,
if they should live to be a hundred, they will be “Mrs.” to each other.
That would fill me with wonder if I did not know how seriously the
married state is taken in the village, the more so, I don’t doubt,
because the single is more free than is convenient. Marriage, we say,
sets right every irregularity. Perhaps it does; but in these parts it
effectively prevents there being any more.


I have been expounding, it should be seen, what are virtually the
manners and customs of a nation widely different from that of most of
my readers. It is not really an economic, but an historic difference;
for the longer I study it the clearer it becomes that the village does
not differ in any essential respect from its remotest original, the
Neolithic settlements on the tops of these hills. From where I live, a
quarter way up the chalk down, I could conduct the inquirer to three
or four vestiges of communities exactly like this one. I could point
out the holes in which they lived, the track by which they drove their
flocks to and from the watering places, which are still _in situ_ and
still used. I could lay a wreath on the mound which covers their dust,
or I might by a chance of the spade uncover their bones, not dust yet.
There has never been discovered, so far as I am aware, anything to show
that any one man of that nation lorded it over his fellows. Lords and
masters enough there have been since. From the time when the Alpine
race invaded our country the Iberian stock which underlies us all has
never lacked a master. _But they have none now._ They have employers,
hirers, not masters. So far as I can see the West Country village
community is now once more just where it was fifteen hundred years
before Christ, or thirty-five hundred years ago. It is in the valley
instead of on the hill, it is professedly Christian instead of heathen.
But it is still guided by tradition, and governed by common opinion,
and as near a democracy as may be: a democracy tempered by character.




THE CURTAINS


Your pair of muslin curtains, given time and place, may cost you
anything in the region of four, eleven, three, as the shop will tell
you; but if you add to that domestic calm, the amenities and a raw
sconce they soon mount up. That was what they cost a man I know, and
I say that they are not worth it. For, not to dwell for a moment upon
his particular pair, muslin curtains don’t fulfil the whole duty of
curtains, but only a part of it, and the wrong part. They prevent you
from seeing out of the window, which is the last thing you want of
them in the country; they don’t prevent other people from seeing into
it--which is the first thing. Particularly when you have the lamp
alight. For instance, the other evening the whole village was informed
inside of an hour that Mrs. Hobday, a young and pretty woman, had been
trying on a hat with one hand and powdering her nose with the other.
She herself was the last to know it, and the last to be allowed to
forget it.

The Hobdays’ neighbours are the Cosseys, and Mrs. Hobday and Mrs.
Cossey from the first were bosom friends. That was very important if
life were to be what you might call life, for the two front doors are
under one lintel, and, said Mrs. Cossey, “’tis such close living that
if you weren’t one thing you must be t’other.” But they were always
the one thing until the affair of the curtains, though Mrs. Cossey was
large and plain-faced, and Mrs. Hobday pretty and small; though Mrs.
Cossey had two children and Mrs. Hobday was only expecting. However,
from the very first we were told ’twas all as pleasant as pleasant.
They lived in each other’s houses, listened to each other’s tales
of courtship and marriage, admired each other’s washing, and shook
sympathetic heads over the unreasonableness of each other’s husband.
There were no clouds in the sky, nor the makings of them. The Cosseys
had an Axminster, but the Hobdays a new drugget. Mrs. Cossey had a
copper kettle, Mrs. Hobday a silver teapot. Things were “just so,” neck
and neck, and nothing to choose between them, when you came to add
things up. O sweet content! And then, one mild morning, Mrs. Cossey was
offered a seat in a motor-car going into town, and accepted.

It was a fine day; she was elated by her drive. Market-day, too. She
felt like going it, and she went it. Away flew five shillings on a pair
of muslin curtains which were selling like hot cakes at a stall. Mrs.
Cossey bought other things, but nothing to count. The curtains fair set
her up, they did. She felt as though she were treading on air. Wherever
she went about the town that day she had an eye for the windows, and
saw nothing better anywhere. “I’ll make Fred put ’em up after dark,”
she promised herself. “’Twill be a surprise for Mrs. Hobday in the
morning.” It was.

When Mrs. Hobday saw her friend’s front-room window she felt her heart
jump, then stand still. But she knew what was due to herself, and let
not a sigh escape her. Mrs. Cossey found her busy on her knees over
the doorstep, busier certainly than she had ever been before. It became
necessary to call her attention to the curtains, which somehow took the
edge off them. You can’t explain it, but so ’twas. Then, of course,
Mrs. Hobday admired; and when she had admired enough, she was told all
about it; and when she knew all about it she said no more, but excused
herself for being busy, and withdrew. Nor, if you will believe Mrs.
Cossey, was she seen again for two days and nights; never so much as
put her head outside the door. But Mrs. Cossey did not know how she
had wept on Hobday’s shoulder that evening of discovery, how she had
pleaded (as they used to do at Assizes, poor things) her condition, and
how Hobday had said she shouldn’t want for anything, if it cost him ten
shillin’--which it did. She knew nothing of all that; but in two days’
time, when she stood at her front door, and, happening to look at her
neighbour’s window, might, so she said, have been knocked down with a
feather--then indeed she knew all the blackness of Mrs. Hobday’s heart.

Whatever she might have been knocked down with, she herself used a
club, that is to say, most injurious words. The whole village heard
them, at second-hand, from Tom Crewkomb, the sweep, who had been
passing at the time. Warmed by eloquence, it seems, and her growing
sense of triumphant suffering, Mrs. Cossey called Mrs. Hobday a saucy
young piece; whereat Mrs. Hobday, as if whipped, struck out blindly
and said that Mrs. Cossey was no better than she should be. It may
have been true--it is true of most of us; but Mrs. Cossey took it to
heart and, refusing all nourishment, could do nothing but repeat it
to herself over and over again. The pair of cottages, resplendently
curtained as they might be, became a house of lamentation. The
breaking-point was reached when Hobday came home to tea, and being
again wept upon, pushed fiercely into next door and called Mrs. Cossey
to her face an old tantamount--a terrible word, whose implication
no man could possibly know. For end thereof, not despondency but
madness: for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a
tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a
pair of clippers over the ear. Hobday was a light-weight, and did his
best, but he could not get near Cossey; and he went to grass. Mrs.
Hobday had hysterics, and asked for the doctor; and then (such is human
nature at its best) Mrs. Cossey ran in to her, called her a lamb, and
put her to bed.

It is a boy.

Mrs. Cossey and Mrs. Hobday have better things to admire in each other
now. But Mrs. Hobday knows that her curtains cost more. So also does
Hobday.




HAPPINESS IN THE VILLAGE


Not far from me there lives a man with wife and child in a tenement
not much better than a cowshed. It is exactly two rooms of a wooden
building, with no other conveniences of any kind, not so much as
a copper for the washing. It is built into a ledge cut out of the
southern slope of the valley, consequently never looks the sun in the
face. I know that the rain falls through into the bedroom. If one dared
one would have the place condemned, if to do that would not condemn
to the workhouse those who shelter there. Yet I have known those poor
things envied. At a certain hour of the afternoon the wife comes to her
open door, the child in her arms. After five minutes’ watching, she
sets the little creature down to totter up the road, down which comes
a man, homing from his work. He too is on the look-out, and stands to
admire. Then, when they meet, he picks up the baby, sets it on his
shoulder, and back they go together to mother at the door. I have known
that envied, I say, by the childless, by the unhappily mated, and by
those whose days for children are over and done. Life has that in
store for some of us, and I don’t know that it has anything better. An
allegory, that, in its way.

Four years ago, when Agriculture had a Wages Board, and hopes were
high that a _carminis aetas_ was opening for our oldest industry, a
club was formed among the members of the Board for the ventilation of
ideas. It was a gallant adventure, maintained with spirit so long as
the parent Board was suffered to endure. Political exigencies, however,
determined its existence, and with it perished the Agricultural Club.
Now its president and virtual founder, Sir Henry Rew, has published
its remains in “The Story of the Agricultural Club” (P. S. King and
Son), and we are able to judge of the remedies proposed for a sick
profession. It may shortly be said of the club, as of the deceased
board, that its very existence did more service to agriculture than
any of its recommendations, if only because it was solid in Pall Mall
while its remedies were, and largely remain, in the air. In that fine
room of Schomberg House, which happens to have been Gainsborough’s
studio, there met on the eve of every Board-meeting representatives of
the landed interests from all England, squires, tenant-farmers and farm
labourers, on terms of that complete equality which only clubmanship
can guarantee. How extraordinary that was is illustrated by Sir Henry
Rew as follows:


     “A year ago I had occasion to attend a meeting in the market
     town of a typical agricultural district. It purported to be
     a conference between the representatives of farmers and of
     farm-workers with regard to a dispute then in progress. I was
     shown into the conference room, where I found the farmers
     assembled in force round a large table, and I was honoured with a
     seat at the head of the table by the side of the chairman. After
     some discussion among themselves, the chairman announced that they
     were ready to receive the representations of the workers. About
     half a dozen of them entered, and were ranged on a form against
     the wall at the lower end of the room. The Chairman addressed them
     civilly enough, but with much the same air of condescension as
     a magistrate assumes in speaking from the Bench. I am sure that
     no offence was intended or taken. The position seemed perfectly
     natural to both parties. It was the normal and habitual relation
     of master and man in discussion.”


It is fair to conclude, with Sir Henry, that the Wages Board and its
club were “the expression of a new relationship,” not that of “master
and man,” but rather of “man and man”; and it is not difficult to
say what that may imply in latter-day village life. I am prepared by
observation to say that at least it implies a definite heightening
of status for the farm-labourer, of which he is very well aware. But
whether it will work out for village prosperity and (a very different
thing) village happiness, is still a matter of various opinion--opinion
which is reflected in the papers read before the assembled club, and in
the ensuing discussions.

These papers, as one might expect, are mainly practical in purpose.
They deal with education, principally technical; they deal with
cottage-building, not very fruitfully; they offer proposals for
the formation of village-clubs; they touch, but gingerly, upon the
ownership of land. The avowed ends of every proposition are two: how to
keep the labourer in the village, and how to make him happy when he is
there. It seems to me that readers and debaters alike fell into the
common error of confusing prosperity with happiness, and happiness with
pleasure. The mistake is fundamental. If all men of pleasure were happy
men, legislation might accomplish what philosophers have failed to do.
If excitement had no reactions, then let village clubs abound and young
ploughmen dance all night! Bread and circuses are within the discretion
of Parliament, but not prosperity, and not happiness. A man must work
for his happiness “as some men toil after virtue”; and the education
which he must receive in order to attain it is in another technic than
that which has been in the mind of the Club. The young villager must
acquire mental alacrity, he must learn to be temperate, and he must get
charity. Having those, he may pick up happiness like gold off from Tom
Tiddler’s ground, for the world is full of it. All the specifics of the
Agricultural Club are palliatives of his lot, “consolatories writ.” The
elementals remain--to be sought elsewhere.

The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to
deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to
his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow,
and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than
half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who
gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What
is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise
early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did
yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had
it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of
them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming,
is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom
of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the
prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store
of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the
village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in
the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens,
nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste
their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy
than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers
of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others
abide our question, but not those.




OTHERWHERENESS


The man whom I found one day in the reading-room at the Club, searching
the Court Guide to find out his own name, was quite good-tempered
about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to send a telegram, and he
had written it out: when it came to signing it he was beat. I told him
at once what I believed his name to be; he verified it in Boyle. “I
might have had to get a dressing-room,” he said. “It isn’t one of those
things which you can ask the hall-porter.”

The really absent-minded are not irritated by those intrusions
of the supra-liminal self. The sub-liminal so pleasantly employs
them, habitually, that they can afford to put up with the other’s
impertinence. But occasionally he goes too far, as he certainly did
with a dear and vague friend of mine when, horribly involved with a
fishing line and a fly-hook in his sleeve, he hastily put his eye-glass
into his mouth and his cigarette into his eye. Then indeed he broke
into a flood of imprecation, so very unlike himself that one part of
him “which never was heard to speak so free” really shocked the other
part. “Oh, shameful, shameful!” I heard him say, and the profaner part
was silenced. Here, of course, the whole assembled man was no further
away than the whereabouts of the fly-hook, and not at all pleasantly
occupied. Mostly, as Lamb says of his good friend, George Dyer:


     “With G. D., to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to
     speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very
     time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no
     recognition--or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised--at
     that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor--or Parnassus--or
     co-sphered with Plato--or, with Harrington, framing ‘immortal
     commonwealths.’”


If he interrupted those happy sojournings, as he did once, to make
a call in Bedford Square, and on learning that no one was at home,
solemnly to sign his name in the visitors’ book, it is not at all
surprising that, wandering on and on, he should presently find himself
again in Bedford Square, again inquire for his friends, again ask for
the visitors’ book and be brought up short, on the point of signing it
again, by his own name scarcely dry--as if, says Lamb, “a man should
suddenly encounter his own duplicate.” He may have been a little
mortified, I daresay, but--it was worth it. A thing of the same sort
happened to a very delightful lady of my friends--a lady of commanding
presence, but occasional remarkable absences too. She went to call at
a house in Eaton Square, no less, and found herself, when the door was
opened by a footman, totally deprived of the name of the houselady.
What did she? There was a moment of heart-beating and wild surmise;
and then, with a smile of ineffable courtesy and sweetness, she held
out her hand to the wondering man, pressed his own warmly as she said
“_Good_-bye,” and sailed serenely away to resume her commerce with
the infinite. Such commerce, I know, she had. She told me the story
herself, and saw nothing amiss with it. Nor was there anything amiss.
She was one who could do simple things simply--which is a great and
rich possession; but occasionally she presumed upon it--as when she
assured herself of the same virtue in her daughters and expected them
to carry out her simplifications. That, of course, was a very different
thing; but I don’t think she understood it. There is this also to be
said, that women are much less self-conscious than men and do not go in
such terror of being made ridiculous. Tell me of a man who could enter
his drawing-room full of guests, and discovering himself without, say,
his teeth, could laugh in the first face his eye encountered. “Forgive
me--one moment--I must get my teeth”--tell me of such a man. _Mutatis
mutandis_, I have been told of such a woman--and a great lady she was,
too--by somebody who was there. It was not teeth, however.

The best of men--the George Dyers, whom, happily, we have always with
us somewhere or other--are as content as most women with their natural
destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead,
dined, talked, and took his leave. Twenty minutes later the knocker
announced a late-comer. It was G. D. “What is the matter?” asked Hunt.
“I think sir,” said Dyer, in his simpering, apologetic way, “I think
I have left one of my shoes behind me.” He had indeed shuffled it off
under the table, and did not discover his loss until he had gone a
long way. As I read that story, which is Ollier’s (but I get it from
Mr. Lucas), G. D.’s apologetics were directed to Hunt, whose rest he
had disturbed, by no means to himself. A man less sublimely lifted was
one with whom I had been staying in a Scotch country house. We came
away together, and half-way to the station he struck himself on the
forehead, and “Good God!” he said, “I have tipped the same man three
times!” It appeared too true that he had: once in his bedroom, once
in the hall, and once at the carriage door. Now he, if you like, was
excessively mortified, and his reason may well have been that he had
not been better employed, on Helikon or elsewhere, when he might have
been noticing menservants. He was as blind as a bat, poor man, and a
sense of infirmity may have stung him. The otherwhere men have no sense
of infirmity--on the contrary, one of great gain. An ampler æther, a
diviner air is theirs in which to exercise.

But of all divinely preoccupied men the best--unless Dyer be the
best--is Brancas--the Comte de Brancas of whom you may read in
Saint-Simon, in the Correspondence of “Madame,” and in Tallemant des
Réaux. Brancas was to the Paris of the _Grand Siècle_ what Dyer was to
the London of the Regency, or Dr. Spooner to the wits of my younger
days. La Bruyère, summarising him as _Ménalque_, overdid his study, and
made him appear like the clown in a circus who gets horribly involved
in the carpet, or kicks away the hat he stoops to pick up. It may be
perfectly true that Brancas went downstairs, opened his front door,
and shut it again, thinking that he had just come in--that I can
perfectly understand. It is a thing I might have done myself. But to
add to it that he presently discovered his nightcap on his head, his
stockings down about his ankles, and his shirt outside his _chausses_,
is to spoil the story. Never mind, he is out in the street finally,
and walking briskly along, with his mind leagues away. By and by he
is brought up short by a violent blow on the nose. “Who has attacked
me?” he cries. Nobody. He has walked fiercely into the tilt of a
market cart, which he had overtaken in his briskness. Or he goes to
Versailles to pay his court, enters the _appartement_, and passing
under the central chandelier, his perruque is caught and held there;
but he forges along. The company gapes, then bursts into laughter.
Brancas stops, looks inquiringly about, sees the swinging perruque and
is delighted. “Whose is that?” He looks all about him to find the bare
pate and exposed ears. Finally, of course, somebody claps it on his
head. A good story, which may be true.

Two of them, at least, may be, as they are told by Madame in letters
to her friends. Brancas went to church--to the _Salut_: he knelt
down, and feeling in his pocket for his Book of Hours, pulled out a
slipper which he had put there instead of it. Just outside the church,
on leaving, he is accosted by a lackey who, with much deprecation,
asks him if he happens to have taken Monseigneur’s shoe by mistake.
“Monseigneur’s shoe!” It is the fact that he had paid a call upon a
bishop that afternoon. “No, no--certainly not”--then he remembers that
he has, in fact, a slipper in his pocket. His hand goes in, to make
sure that it is there. It is; but so is another slipper--which is
precisely--Monseigneur’s.

The next is even better. Brancas goes to mass at Versailles. He is
late, and bustles up the nave between the kneeling company. He sees, as
he thinks, a _prie-dieu_ facing the altar. Most convenient--just the
thing. He hastens, throws himself upon it. To his amazement it emits a
strangled cry, gives way before him, and he finds himself intricately
struggling on the pavement with a stout lady. His _prie-dieu_ had been
the Queen-Mother.




THE JOURNEY TO COCKAIGNE


I remember being taken ill in a small town on the Marne in 1906,
desperately ill with copper poisoning. I say that I remember, as if
there was a chance that I should ever forget it. The agony, the rigour
and all the rest of it, were accompanied by high fever and delirium,
which lasted all through a burning August night. It happened that a
_fête nationale_ had possession of the town: there were a fair, a steam
roundabout, a horrible organ accompaniment. The grinding, remorseless
tune, the uproar, the slapping of countless feet (though I tried to
count them) on the pavement wove themselves into my racing dreams.
I seemed to be a party to some Witches’ Sabbath; and now, if I ever
try to imagine Hell, it always comes out like that. A dry, crackling,
reiterated business, without rest, without mirth, without hope, without
reason. One suffered incredibly, one was desperately concerned; the
brain was involved in it; the more frivolous it was the more deeply the
mind must work. I knew it was a festivity; all the familiar features
of revel were there--and all horrible. The mind was so tired that you
seemed to hear it wailing for mercy; but it went on jigging after the
organ. The feet of the dancers were burnt by the paving stones, yet
never stayed. Some mocking devil possessed the people, rode them with
spurs. There was no zest, yet no pause; and through it all was the
blare of the organ.

Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months
in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the
same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth
without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised
from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the
ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what
is working in the lees.

Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even
suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like
clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din
that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or
a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind
it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern
attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow
creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them.
It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a
favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four
o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled
skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and
extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much
alike, and all apparently of one age.

Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice.
Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to
know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls
in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera
shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them,
or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little;
they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what
was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to
article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering
about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food--it ought to
have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or
triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new
thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph
and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.

Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the
endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often
seen it before--I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then;
but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races.
A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding
machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered
and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad,
vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated,
silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole
business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with
crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was
that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one
so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you
take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much
more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.

Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated,
and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those
motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs
(you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The
clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and
not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at
the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream,
mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was
repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing
of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers,
or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I
live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are
mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for
their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The
marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the
squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic
use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or
two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there
came upon us a coal strike of three months long--a knock-out blow to
many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and
Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on
tick? The Lord knows.

On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the
scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing
with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales
and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on
London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either
of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor
read about them. _The Westminster Gazette’s_ front page was entirely
filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. _The
Times_--but since _The Times_ has become sprightly I confess it is
too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to
read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that
the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still
murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its
own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from
_The Westminster Gazette_.

The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for
three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges,
and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts
was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not
of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying;
but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a
time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made
love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they
were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious
matter.




SUICIDE OF THE NOVEL


The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break
out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are
children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales
will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most
interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There
was a man--dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....”
So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did
and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events
and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist
and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for
love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious
philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud
with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may
stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes)
“is not Emily.” There is no love in the _Odyssey_, none in _Robinson
Crusoe_, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in _Gil Blas_. The
animalism in _Tom Jones_, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent
for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites,
and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only
for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or
became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of
the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist.
It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray.
Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the
way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys
choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss
them and go home--to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a
flame--if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr.
Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour--but do we believe it, or are we the
less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.

In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry
of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say,
from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of
a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore
began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the
French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to
commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith
and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there
is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy,
with much intensive imagining about it, _non ragioniam di lor_. They
were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on
the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!”
Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will
do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our
novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made
them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex,
passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment
which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they
_were_ the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to
be a redaction of life. For, _pace_ Herr Freud, all life is not sex.
One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was
no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of
lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once
it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself
as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: _Daphnis and
Chloe_, for instance, _Manon Lescaut_. One could not have filled the
old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever
tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form,
and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.

Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an
interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied
novelist wrote _à priori_. Observation ceased to procure novels to
be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action,
observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed
his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life
had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of
life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands
corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels
of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three
of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was
“crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex:
in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn
the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were
episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed,
for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to
a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not
despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.

That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent
memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan,
that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De
Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came
to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered
us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them
that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word,
implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem
effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and
Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent
design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.


     “‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of
     the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only
     chance samples of folk you may see pass your window now, at this
     moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are
     passing--passing--all day long, each with a story. And some little
     thing you see, a meeting, a parting, may make the next hour the
     turning point of existence.... This is a tale made up of trifles.’”


What he made of those stored and treasured-up trifles, with what
humour, with what tenderness, what wisdom he combined and related
them, what in fact was the harvest of his quiet eye, cannot be entered
upon here. De Morgan had been harvesting for sixty-five years when he
began! To me his books seem to be the wisest of our time. I know of
none which, as Matthew Arnold said of Homer, produce the sense in the
reader “of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of
human life presented to him.” They contain--like the _Iliad_ in that,
like _Tom Jones_, like _David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_, and _War
and Peace_--sufficient of the world to create in us a strong illusion
of the whole labouring, blundering, groaning, laughing, praying affair.

But De Morgan is too good for the end of an essay--he who has
inspired so many. And he will write no more of his friendly, wise and
comprehending books. And he is not the point. The point is that the
novelist has bled his art down and out by urging it to make a poem
of itself instead of a digest. I say nothing now of the pamphlet and
the tract. Those things also the novelist has done without leaving
the other undone. He, or his novel, is now dying of exhaustion,
self-induced. Worst sign of all--he is beginning to note his own
symptoms.




IMMORTAL WORKS


An editor--one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the
herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of
him--an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting
me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I
fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he
is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was
to be “What poets since Wordsworth, _especially what living poets_,
and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the
Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk
into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly
getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed
something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or
to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:

“Dear Sir,--I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think
them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so.
It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an
exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among
others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons,
many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden
Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every
poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round
table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub
knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad
things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can
predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he
could.

“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain
reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the
judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this
hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can
think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability
of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by
recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the
existing Golden Treasury? _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, of course;
but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that,
before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another
war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing
from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more
obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is
one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you
were serious.”

So much for the editor of ----. We do not know, indeed, though
we sometimes think and always hope that we do, what makes for
immortality. Shakespeare, you say? Who (except Shakespeare himself)
thought Shakespeare immortal on the day when he was alive and dead?
Who thought Johnson’s Dictionary immortal? Gibbon’s _Decline and
Fall_? Yes, I fancy that any serious reader of that book, when it was
published, knew in his heart that it would live. But take smaller
things. Why, out of all Landor’s verse, was _Rose Aylmer_ taken, and
why were others left, many of them technically as perfect? You don’t
know. Nor do I. Well, then, which out of the beautiful numbers of _A
Shropshire Lad_ will live for six hundred years--as long as Chaucer?
Which out of the quatrains of Fitzgerald’s _Omar_? We may think that we
know. But do we? Really, all that we do know is that among the copious
poets (and Landor was very copious) some produced more perdurable
lyrics than others. We know that Burns did, that Heine did: we don’t
know how or why. Universality we say goes to immortality. It certainly
does: the thing must go home to everybody. So does heart, whatever
that is; the “lyric cry,” the sense of tears. Look at _Auld Robin
Gray_: that is immortal. Look at _The Wife of Usher’s Well_. Those
things might last as long as Homer or the Bible. The exact proportion,
the exquisite admixture of those qualities I have mentioned, with
others--felicity, limpidity, grace, and so on--do make certain poems as
immortal as you please; and the want of them cuts others out. That is
all there is to say.

On the whole, it is a good thing that we don’t know the recipe. It
is one of several things we had better not know. Immortality in this
world, immortality in another! Suppose that we were as certain of the
latter as we are of getting to Paris by the 11 a.m. from Victoria.
Either the world would be emptied by suicide, or--it wouldn’t!
Suppose that immortality for a poem was a matter of formula. Take of
universality so much, of heart so much, of grace so much: add tears,
so much, and simmer gently till done ...! What would be the result?
Everybody’s poems would be immortal. The Golden Treasury would stretch
from here to Easter. It would be as bad as the Order of the British
Empire. Nobody would want to be in it. And the result of that would be
that mortal poems would be the only immortal ones. To be too bad for
the Golden Treasury would be a real title of honour. And somebody would
compile a Platinum Treasury to put you in.




BALLAD-ORIGINS


Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry,
or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned
hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for
granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except
the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for
the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research
is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and
diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab.
Whether Homer was written by Homer, or “by another man of the same
name,” has been, and still is being, debated. Herr Wolff started the
ingenious suggestion that, instead of one or two Homers, there were
dozens of him. The late Mr. Butler put up a woman for author of the
Odyssey, and gave her a name. But Mr. Butler loved two things above
all else in life: little jokes and annoying other people. He must not
be taken seriously. Similarly, the authorship of the ballads has ever
been in debate. The man of our time who knew more about them than any
man who ever lived--Professor Child, to wit--knew so much about them
that he never committed himself to any hypothesis of their origin. That
showed indeed the supreme of knowledge of his subject. But Professor
Kittredge, who followed him, built himself a little bungalow of theory;
and Professor Gummere presently reared a mansion of it; and now comes
Professor Louise Pound from Nebraska with pick and crowbar to level
them with the ground. It is very good fun, as I have admitted, except
perhaps for Professors Kittredge and Gummere.

Professor Gummere gets the worst of it; but then he has put himself
up a mansion of surmise. Professor Kittredge went no further than
to declare a peasant-origin for ballad-poetry. Professor Gummere,
according to his present housebreaker, erected a theory of something
like spontaneous generation--a truly daring conception, one which makes
ballad-poetry unlike any other poetry in the world. Throng-inspiration
does not commend itself to me, knowing something of throngs and of
inspiration. As Professor Pound has no difficulty in establishing,
such a thing never happens now, and never happened to anything else,
unless Horace Walpole’s account of the effect of putting horsehair into
a bottle of water may be accepted. But if it may not, and if it never
happened to any other kind of poetry, why should it have happened to
ballad-poetry? _Queste cose non si fanno._ These things are not done.

However, when Professor Gummere argues that the folk-ballads originated
in folk-dancing he is building his house of theory upon a footing
of rock. _Ballare_ means “to dance”; there’s no escape from that;
and if ballads, or ballets, had nothing to do with dancing, why were
they called ballads or ballets? Then he can put forward the refrains
or burthens which a goodly number of ballads still retain: jingles
like “Bow down,” like “Eh, wow, bonnie,” like “Three, three, and
thirty-three.” The first of those describes an act of dancing; the
second is foolishness unless you dance it; the third, even now, insists
on being danced. If he had left it at that, without piling upon it his
additament of spontaneous generation, I don’t think Professor Pound
could have done any good with her crowbar. But he was too ingenious by
half; he soared--he soared into the inane. So down he comes, and we are
where we were before.

With all respect for the courage and learning of Professor Pound, I
don’t think she has disproved the close connection of song and dance
in my country’s youthful days. But “dance” is a word of special
connotation now, and it is necessary to remember a much wider
application of it in times gone by. It was once a word of ritual
significance, as when “David danced before the Lord,” as now when the
Canons of Seville dance at Easter; and it was once a word of sport.
That, in all probability, is the right connotation of it where ballads
are concerned. In certain phases of the dance as a game drama comes in.
Drama involves dialogue, and may easily involve narration. “Here we go
round the mulberry bush” is both drama, dance, and narration. “Sally,
Sally Waters” is the same. So too “Ring a ring of Roses.” But to say of
such things, as I suppose Professor Gummere says, that the dancing-game
generated the dialogue or narration is to put the cart before the
horse. If, as I have said, the jingle “three, three and thirty-three”
insists on being danced, is it not more reasonable to suppose that in
all cases the jingle, or lilt, or sentiment--“the broom blooms bonnie
and says it is fair”--inspired the dance? Personally, I can conceive
of spontaneous throng-generation of a dance much more readily. Let the
Professor try it, when next he has a throng of children in his garden.
Let him begin to jig up and down, saying repeatedly “three, three, and
thirty-three,” and see what happens.

I am not at all concerned to say that all ballad-poetry originated in
dancing-games, nor concerned to argue against Professor Pound when she
suggests that they began in church. She has there the support of the
fact, for what it is worth, that the earliest ballads we can find are
concerned with religion. That is a fact, though it will not take her as
far as she would like. Unfortunately very few such things can be dated
before the fifteenth century; and the Professor must remember that
preoccupation with religion was by no means confined to the clerical
caste. The thirteenth century was the flowering time of the friars.
They carried religion into corners where no cleric would ever have set
his foot. If religious balladry had a religious origin it would be
Franciscan. She does not insist upon all this, however, and certainly
I do not. All the concern I have with a possible religious origin of
ballad-poetry is with the certainty it affords that, if the friars
had anything to do with the beginning of popular epic-narration, as
they undoubtedly had to do with that of popular drama, their efforts
were addressed to the populace rather than to the court, to the
market-square and village green rather than to the hall.

What does Professor Pound herself believe about this obscure matter?
She quotes, and quarrels with, Andrew Lang, who said that “Ballads
spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age,
from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue
nearest to the natural state of man.... The whole soul of the peasant
class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the
shells cast up from its shores.” That seems to me so obviously true
of most of the ballads that I should require a stronger case than
Professor Pound’s, and a case less weakened by strange oversights,
to cause me to think twice of it. Apparently Professor Pound’s main
belief about ballads is that they were by origin “literary.” Being
literature, that may be supposed by anybody without taking a body very
far. But if she means by that that they were composed by professional
“literary men,” and not by or for the peasants, I have to suggest
to her that there is much in the peasantry and much in the ballads
themselves which she has not brought into account; and that that must
be sought _within_ the peasantry, and _within_ the ballads, rather than
round about them. It is, for instance, a serious error to assume a
courtly origin--courtly poet or courtly auditory--in all ballads which
deal with courtly people--Lord Thomases, Estmere Kings, Child Horns,
Little Musgraves, and so on. Such personages are the stock-in-trade
of romance, from Homer to the _Family Herald_. Reasoning of that kind
will land the Professor in uncharted seas. There is a fallacy in it
comparable to that in “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Not
a doubt of it but Professor Child’s great book contains a number of
courtly ballads--“Chevy Chase” and the like; it needs nothing but a
knowledge of literature and the texts to settle it. I should compute
the number of such in Child to be between a third and a half of the
whole.

To decide upon the remainder, whether they are written by or for the
peasantry (and it does not matter which, because in either case the
traditions of the peasantry would be preserved), one must go to the
ballads themselves. Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore
as you possess--and you cannot have too much--will infallibly detect
the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved
in the very nature of literature. A ballad--any ballad--was either
written _up_ to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a
Burns, a Clare), or written _down_ to the auditory’s capacity, which is
the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. According as you judge
(_a_) apprehensions of fact, (_b_) locutions, (_c_) _parti pris_, you
will put the thing down to the idiosyncrasy and origin of the poet
_or_ to the idiosyncrasy and _milieu_ of the auditory; and you will
nearly always be right. It may not be possible to be sure whether a
peasant-poet wrote, though the probabilities will be high; it will
always be possible to be sure whether a peasant-audience was addressed,
and whether, consequently, by a peasant-audience the ballad was learned
and preserved. Who in particular the poet may have been does not
matter. But it matters very much, to us, that we should have all we
can collect of the nature of our indigenes, though we shall never be
able to get it with the clearness and precision with which Professor
Pound can get at the nature of hers.

As good an example as anyone could want of the truth of the preceding
paragraph is furnished by “The Twa Corbies.” Everybody knows “The Twa
Corbies,” a cynical, romantic, highly literary, and most successful
thing in the Scots manner; assuredly written for the gentry. But
Professor Child juxtaposes to it an English version, called “The
Three Ravens,” and provides an instructive comparison. The earliest
copy he finds of that is of 1611. It is as surely of peasant origin
as the “Twa Corbies” is not. Firstly, it has a rollicking chorus,
neither to be desired nor approved by the gentry; secondly, instead
of being romantic, it is sentimental; thirdly, instead of ending with
a wry mouth, it ends as genially as the circumstances allow. Cynicism
has never “gone down” with the peasantry. I don’t quote it, for
considerations of space. Another interesting comparison can be made by
means of “Thomas Rymer” in Child’s versions A. and C. In each Thomas
takes the Queen of Faëry for her of Heaven, and in each she denies it.
In A. she says:


     “‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,
     ‘That name does not belong to me;
     I am but the Queen of fair Elfland,
     And I’m come to visit thee.’”


But in C. she says:


     “‘I’m no the Queen of Heaven, Thomas;
     I _never carried my head sae hie_;
     For I am but a lady gay,
     Come out to hunt in my follee.’”


The idiom there is quite enough to settle the question for me. But
there is another point. The peasantry will never name the fairies if
they can help it. They call them the “Good People” or the “Little
People,” and go no nearer. Well, observe, and let Professor Pound
observe, how C. version gets round that difficulty.

Lastly, I will touch upon the delicate subject of ballads like
“Sheath and Knife”, “Lizzie Wan”, “The King’s Daughter, Lady Jean”,
and others. The romantic treatment of that subject is very rare in
literature. Ford’s play I believe to be the first case of it in ours;
and after Ford you must travel down to Shelley for another. With a
peasant poet or a peasant auditory there would be no difficulty. For
all sorts of reasons, that class knew a great deal about such matters.
If you are to conceive those particular ballads as written for the
gentry you are adding to fine literature things unknown before the
seventeenth century, and then out of sight until the nineteenth. Let
the Professor perpend. It does not do to be too exclusive in estimating
ballad-origins.




REAL AND TEMPORAL CREATION


A chance remark of mine the other day to the effect that the worth of a
novelist could be best ascertained by the number of souls he had added
to the population has drawn me into more correspondence than I care
for. You don’t look--at least, I don’t--for precision in such _obiter
dicta_, but you must have plausibility, and I do think it plausible.
You read your novel--say, _Emma_, and while you read, Emma and Jane
Fairfax, Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston and all the rest of them live, and
their affairs are your affairs. But when you have shut up the book
and put it back in its place, Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates have not
disappeared with their circle of acquaintance. You feel about them that
they are in history. They have lived in a different way altogether.
They have lived as Charles Lamb lived, or Oliver Goldsmith. You would
know them if you met them; your great-grandfather may have met them.
If you went to Leatherhead (if it _was_ Leatherhead) you would want to
visit their houses. Jane Fairfax is a girl in a book; Miss Bates is a
person.

Surely that is true. Consider other cases. There’s no doubt but that
Falstaff has reality in a way in which Hamlet has not. Hamlet, so to
say, is an _ad hoc_ creation. He lives in the play. Falstaff lived
in Eastcheap. There’s no doubt about “my” Uncle Toby. Certainly he
must have served under Marlborough in Flanders. Neither of Tom Jones
nor Sir Charles Grandison could so much be said. They were nobody’s
Uncle Tom or Uncle Charles, out of their books. Amelia would have been
a delicious aunt, but I doubt if she was one. Well, then, there’s no
doubt about Mrs. Gamp, or Mr. F.’s Aunt, or Betsy Trotwood or Captain
Cuttle. Dickens enriched the population enormously--but not always.
There’s a sense in which Dr. Blimber lived, and Major Bagstock did not.
Generation was capricious, even with Dickens. Squeers never lived,
Creakle did. Micawber lived, Pecksniff didn’t. Trabb’s Boy lived, the
Fat Boy didn’t. Cousin Feenix didn’t, Inspector Buckett didn’t--and
so on. But if you go through Dickens methodically, as I did during a
wakeful two hours in bed the other night, you will find five scores to
one miss--in the minor characters. With leading parts it is another
thing. I shall come to that presently.

Let me go on. The Wife of Bath--certainly a British subject. In
Shakespeare--all the Eastcheap set, and Shallow and Slender; and
Parolles, and Dogberry and Verges, and Bottom, and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek; and Polonius, the only one in _Hamlet_; and Launcelot Gobbo,
the only one in _The Merchant of Venice_. Walter Scott: the Baillie and
Dandie Dinmont; Andrew Fairservice and Dugald Dalgetty. Last we have
Don Quixote and Sancho, much more real to most of us than Philip II or
IV, or Alva or Medina-Sidonia, or, for that matter, Miguel de Cervantes
himself.

Those two last are enough to prove that it is not only eccentrics who
have stepped out of their book-covers and found dusty death in the
real world: though generally, no doubt, it is the few lines which give
life, and provide that the reader shall be one of the parents. You
need bold undercutting, and elaboration is apt to blur the outline.
The second part of the book might have robbed the pair of their
immortality. Yet they live, and have lived, in spite of the Duke and
Duchess and the Island. Falstaff, with the better part of two plays to
his credit, is the only hero of Shakespeare’s whose reality gets out
of the theatre. I can’t admit Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello or Shylock.
At Malvolio I hesitate--but if you make a hero of Malvolio you turn
_Twelfth Night_ into a tragedy. In 1623, the year of Shakespeare’s
death, the play was called _Malvolio_; and King Charles I annotated
the title, _Twelfth Night_, in his folio with the true name in his own
hand. _Tantum religio potuit suadere--bonorum._ So is it with the women
in Shakespeare: the heavy leads are not so persuasive as the small. Of
Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse there can be no doubt whatever. But of
the heroines, I can only put forward Rosalind--but even Rosalind won’t
do. Compare her objectivity with Becky Sharp’s. Who has not felt the
immanence of Becky in Brussels? I am afraid that settles Rosalind.

Neither Scott nor Dickens succeeded with heroes and heroines; but Scott
has a girl to his credit whose reality is historical: Jeannie Deans.
I cannot listen to a doubt about that noble creature. If Scott had
given her a burial-place I should have gone to look for her tomb, and
never doubted of finding her name in the parish register. In that he
beats Dickens, with whom and Shakespeare he must strive for the crown
in this matter of adding to the population. In heroes Dickens has a
slight apparent advantage with David Copperfield. At first blush you
might think he had lived: turn it over and you won’t think so. Even if
you decided for him that would only put Dickens level with Scott and
Shakespeare; for his girls don’t live in the pages of their books, and
have not so much as temporal creation. I would put Colonel Newcome to
Thackeray’s score (with dozens of _minora sidera_: Major Pendennis,
for instance!) and, personally, the handsome Ethel, on whose account
I myself have been to Brighton, and who can bring strong testimony
forward in the horde of maidens she has stood for at the font. Surely
no other heroine of fiction has been so many times a godmother! Guy
Livingstone and Sir Guy Morville, in their day, gave their names pretty
handsomely, but--! I had nearly left out, but must by all means add,
Alexandre Dumas, who devoted three novels to his musketeers, and, in
Porthos, made a living soul. D’Artagnan had been one already, but Dumas
barely added anything for all his pains; and with Athos whom he loved
and Aramis whom he hated failed altogether. It was not, of course,
Dumas’ line to create an illusion by dialogue or description. His was
the historical method; his people lived by incident. But Porthos lived
anyhow, and would have lived without incident if needs were. “‘En
effet,’ fît Porthos, ‘je suis très incrédule.’” The man who said that
was once a breathing giant.

What, then, is requisite to the production of this prolonged illusion?
A relish, on the writer’s part, a sudden glory, a saliency; nothing
which will be a hair’s-breadth out of character, and nothing too much.
On the reader’s part intimacy, relish too, the sort of affection you
feel towards Sir Roger de Coverley, and a faith which is, like that of
a lover, a point of honour. Just as--if I may hazard the comparison--to
millions of simple Christians their Saviour, though dead and risen, is
still a Child, a _bambino_, so it is with them who have accepted Don
Quixote, and have stood by his death-bed. Such a death must have been
died, such a life lived indeed. “Believing where we cannot prove.” The
heart plays queer tricks with us.

Stevenson’s is an odd case. He really spent himself to give reality to
Alan Breck, and failed. He played with Theophilus Godall, the superb
tobacconist, and with the Chevalier Burke, and behold, they lived! He
added those two to the population. He could not go wrong with them, had
them to a tick. It is observable that extravagance of matter is no bar
to illusion. But what is wrong with Alan Breck?




PEASANT POETS


The peasant is a shy bird, by nature wild, by habit as secret as a
creature of the night. If he is ever vocal you and I are the last
to hear of it. He is as nearly inarticulate as anyone living in
civilisation may be. Consequently a peasant sufficiently moved, or when
moved, sufficiently armed with vocables to become a poet, even a bad
poet, has always been rare. When you need to add genius to sensibility
and equipment, as you must to get a good poet, you may judge of the
rarity. Indeed, to put a name to him, _exceptis excipiendis_, I can
only find John Clare. Other names occur, but for various reasons have
to be cut out. There was a postman poet in Devonshire, a policeman poet
in Yorkshire; and there was a footman poet. One of those certainly had
merit, even genius, and any one of them may have been a peasant in
origin. But by the time they began to make poetry they had ceased to
be peasants; and that rules them out, as it does Robert Blomfield and
Thomas Hardy. Then there is Burns. But Burns was not a peasant. We in
England should have called him a yeoman. Besides, his is one of those
cases of transcendent genius where origin goes for nothing, but all
seems the grace of God. At that rate the corn-chandlers might claim
Shakespeare, or the chemists’ assistants Keats.

But there’s no doubt about Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant, son of
peasants, brought up at a dame-school, and at farm labour all his
working life. It is true that he was “discovered” by Taylor and Hessey,
published, sold; that his first book ran into three editions in a year;
that he was lionised, became one of the Lamb-Hazlitt-Haydon circle,
and thus inevitably sophisticated with the speculations not of his own
world. But roughly speaking, from start to close, his merits were the
merits of the peasantry, and his faults as pardonable as theirs. He was
never gross, as they never are; he was never common, as the pick of
them are not; he was deeply rooted, as “The Flitting”, one of his best
poems, will prove; he was exceedingly amorous, but a constant lover;
nothing in nature escaped his eye; and lastly, in his technique he was
a realist out and out. Of his quality take this from “Summer Evening”:


     “In tall grass, by fountain head,
     Weary then he crops to bed.”


“He” is the evening moth.


     “From the haycocks’ moistened heaps
     Startled frogs take sudden leaps;
     And along the shaven mead,
     Jumping travellers, they proceed:
     Quick the dewy grass divides,
     Moistening sweet their speckled sides;
     From the grass or flowret’s cup
     Quick the dew-drop bounces up.
     Now the blue fog creeps along,
     And the bird’s forgot his song:
     Flowers now sleep within their hoods;
     Daisies button into buds;
     From soiling dew the buttercup
     Shuts his golden jewels up;
     And the rose and woodbine they
     Wait again the smiles of day.”


The poem runs to length, as most of Clare’s do, but the amount of
exact, close and loving observation in it may be gauged from my
extract. It is remarkable, and worthy of memory for the sake of what
is to follow. You may say that such microscopic work may be outmatched
by gentle poets; you may tell me of sandblind Tennyson, who missed
nothing, of Cockney Keats and the “Ode to Autumn,” and say that it
is a matter of the passion which drives the poet. There is, I think,
this difference to be noted. Observation induces emotion in the
peasant-poet, whereas the gentle or scholar poet will not observe
intensely, if at all, until he is deeply stirred. I don’t say that that
will account for everybody: it will not dispose of Tennyson, nor of
Wordsworth--but it is true of the great majority.

There is one other quality I should look for in a peasant-poet, and
that is what I can only go on calling “the lyric cry.” It is a thing
unmistakable when you find it, the pure and simple utterance in words
of the passion in the heart. “Had we never lov’d sae kindly”, “Come
away, come away, Death”, “The Sun to the Summer, my Willie to me”,
“Toll for the brave”, “Ariel to Miranda, take”, “I have had playmates”,
“Young Jamie lou’d me weel”,--they crowd upon me. Absolute simplicity,
water-clear sincerity are of the essence of it, and of both qualities
the peasant is possessed; but to them it is requisite to add the fire
of passion and the hue of beauty before they can tremble into music.
These things cannot be told, since private grief is sacred, but I have
had experience of late years in my intercourse with village people: men
bereaved of their sons, girls mourning their lovers. Words, phrases
have broken from them to which a very little more was needed to make
them sound like this:


     “The wind doth blow to-day, my love,
     And a few small drops of rain;
     I never had but one true-love,
     In cold grave she was lain.”


That is a perfect example of what I mean. It comes from Sussex, and
if there could be any doubt of its peasant-origin the weather lore of
the first two lines should settle it. And this from Scotland may be
compared with it:


     “It fell about the Martinmass,
     When nights were lang and mirk,
     The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,
     And their hats were of the birk.

     “It neither grew in dyke nor ditch,
     Nor yet in any sheugh;
     But at the gates o’ Paradise
     That birk grew fair eneugh.”


No gentle poet short of Shakespeare could get the awful simplicity
of that; and Shakespeare, I think, only achieved it when, as for
Ophelia’s faltered songs, he used peasant-rhymes.

It is, to me, a task of absorbing interest to go through Child’s
huge repertorium piece by piece and pick out the folk-ballads which
have the marks of peasant origin. So far as I can tell at present,
certainly one half, and it may be three-fourths of them are peasant
songs--I don’t say necessarily made by peasants, but in any case made
_for_ them. If one could, by such means, form a _Corpus Poeticum
Villanum_ there would be a treasure-house worth plundering by more
students than one. For as nothing moves a people more than poetry,
when it is good poetry, so nothing needs truth for its indispensable
food so much as poetry. If you have what most deeply touched and
stirred a people you have that which was dearest to them, the blood
as it were of their hearts. The _criteria_ are as I have indicated:
minute observation, stark simplicity, the lyric cry, and realism. You
may add to those a preference of sentiment to romance, and a decided
adherence to the law of nature when that is counter to the law of the
Church. Thus incontinence in love is not judged hardly when passion
in the man or kindness in the woman has brought it about; on the
other hand, infidelity to the marriage vow never escapes. Again, that
which the Italians call “assassino per amore” is a matter of course
in peasant-poetry; and another crime, universally condemned, except
by about two of our gentle poets, is freely treated, and--not to say
condoned--freely pitied. Perhaps one of the most curious of all the
ballads is “Little Musgrave,” which is English and of unknown age.
It is quoted in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ of 1611. Little
Musgrave and Lord Barnard’s wife fall in love, and betray his lordship.
He, however, is informed by his page, and rides out to clear his
honour. Musgrave hears something:


     “Methinks I hear the thresel-cock,
     Methinks I hear the jay;
     Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard,
     And I would I were away.”


But she answers him:


     “Lye still, lye still, thou Little Musgrave,
     And huddle me from the cold;
     ’Tis nothing but a shepherd’s boy
     A-driving his sheep to the fold.”


Lord Barnard breaks in and does his affair with the two of them. Then:


     “‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Barnard cryd,
     ‘To put these lovers in;
     But lay my lady on the upper hand,
     For she came of the better kin!’”


Realism indeed: but a poem.




DOGGEREL OR NOT


If Mr. Cecil Sharp, as I hope, is collecting his many and scattered
publications under one roof, so to speak, he will be doing a service
to a number of people besides me. I await his learned leisure, having
now possessed myself of his _English Folk-Songs_, Vols. I and II.
He will not achieve what I want to see done before I die, a _Corpus
Poeticum Villanum_, because, being a musician before all things, he
is only interested in peasant verse of which the music has survived.
He won’t do that, but he will help somebody else towards it with an
indispensable supplement to Child, in an accessible form; and that will
be great gain--goodliness with contentment, in fact.

Valuable variants of many and many a folk-song are to be found in his
first instalment; though such was the phenomenal patience and far-flung
activity of the American that in two volumes of a hundred songs Mr.
Sharp has only been able to find one which is not in the great work.
That is one which would have delighted the Professor--“Bruton Town.”
The _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ contains nothing at all like
“Bruton Town”; yet the theme of it is one of those which was common to
every folk, no doubt, in Europe. Boccaccio gave it its first fame, Hans
Sachs followed him. In England we had to wait for Keats, who, so far as
we are concerned, supplanted the Florentine and the Nuremberger; for
all the Britains know something of Isabella and the Pot of Basil. It
must, however, be noted that the specific note of those masterpieces
is not the real theme, and never could have been. The horrid dealings
with the murdered man’s head are macabre embroidery altogether too
sophisticated for a folk-tale. The real theme is the Squire of Low
Degree. You get it in the “Duchess of Malfy,” and you get it in
“Bruton Town.” There is no instance of the morbid in a peasant-ballad.
Elemental human beings dealt in elemental passions. Love, pride, scorn,
birth, death were concern enough for them. So, in “Bruton Town,” the
theme is the trusty servant, his master’s daughter, the young men’s
reprobation and vindication of their sister’s “honour.” Here is the
opening:


     “In Bruton Town there lived a farmer
     Who had two sons and one daughter dear.
     By day and night they were a-contriving
     To fill their parents’ hearts with fear.

     “One told his secret to none other,
     But to his brother this he said:
     I think our servant courts our sister,
     I think they have a mind to wed.”


Doggerel or not, I don’t see how that could be bettered. Mr. Sharp
thinks something has been lost, but I think not. What could heighten
the note of mystery and dread with which the second quatrain
opens--“One told his secret to none other”? Mr. Sharp has not--he
confesses it--been able to refrain from the temptation which has
always beset the ballad-hunter, from Percy and Sir Walter onwards, of
working on the ore which he finds; but that stroke of art in particular
is unpremeditated and original, I feel sure. It is constant to all the
versions of “Bruton Town” which I have seen.

The hasty whispered plot follows, the preparation of the “day of
hunting,” the murder, and the sister’s discovery of the deed. She rises
early and finds the corpse. Then comes:


     “She took her kerchief from her pocket,
     And wiped his eyes though he was blind;
     ‘Because he was my own true lover,
     My own true lover and friend of mine.’”


That again is constant, and could not be mended: though Mr. Sharp would
mend it if he could, thinking that the hasty shifting of persons,
from third to first, is awkward. It may be awkward, but is very
characteristic and, as I think, evidence of authenticity. One more
verse, which devotes the mourner to a shared grave, ends “Bruton Town”
in pure tragedy; pity, terror, but not disgust. Boccaccio’s additament
is nasty, and Keats did not avoid it, though he was not so nasty as
Boccaccio.

“Bruton Town” comes from Somerset, and is worthy of that songful shire.
It carries in itself its own conviction of peasant origin. No other
race of our people would have conceived the verse last quoted exactly
like that, nor any other audience have accepted it as adequate. “Friend
of mine” is the _pièce de conviction_: the sweetest name a village
girl can give her lover is that of her friend. The pathos of “And wiped
his eyes though he was blind” is the pathos of a wounded bird. It is
beyond the compass of art altogether, one of those strokes of truth
which puts art out of court. It is Nature’s justification before the
schools.

Doggerel, then, or not? There are other things in Mr. Sharp’s volumes
which may help to determine. There is the well-known “Little Sir Hugh,”
where the sacrifice of a Christian child by the Jews is sung. Mr.
Sharp’s version is in parts new. Take this out of it for good doggerel:


     “She set him up in a gilty chair,
     She gave him sugar sweet;
     She laid him out on a dresser board,
     And stabbed him like a sheep.”


Well, without any pretence at _curiosa felicitas_, that does its work.
It is terse, tense, yet easy and colloquial. It is shocking rather
than pitiful; but it means to be so. It might be evidence at the
Assizes, where, term by term, they supply just the kind of thing which
would have given that versifier what he wanted. Mr. Sharp’s “Little
Sir Hugh” in fact is not far from Catnachery, of which he gives some
avowed examples. It has only to be set beside “Bruton Town” to settle
it that if “Sir Hugh” is doggerel, the other is not. Ease, tensity,
colloquialism both have; but then comes the difference. “Sir Hugh”
shocks, “Bruton Town” moves; “Bruton Town” has in it the lyric cry,
“Sir Hugh” has it not.

Take as a last case “The True Lover’s Farewell,” pure doggerel, but
excellent of its kind. Everybody knows it, for a reason:


     “O fare you well, I must be gone
     And leave you for a while;
     But wherever I go I will return,
     If I go ten thousand mile,
                       My dear,
     If I go ten thousand mile.”


Now for the reason. Burns lifted that for his occasions, and hardly
altered it. He took it and fitted it into its place among other verses
on the same model--but this is how he began:


     “O my luve’s like a red, red rose
     That’s newly sprung in June:
     O my luve’s like the melodie
     That’s sweetly played in tune--”


An opening, observe, of three beats; and then, as a kind of chorus, the
emotions quickened up, three four-beat verses of abandonment increasing
in reckless simile, and ending with:


     “And fare thee well, my only luve;
     And fare thee well awhile!
     And I will come again, my luve,
     Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”


That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.




THE IBERIAN’S HOUSE


Not long ago I was on the Downs in pursuit of wild raspberries, which,
as the old phrase goes, are very plenty this year. Although the days
are still those of the dog, there was autumn in the air even then: a
grey sky with a cool stream of wind from the west in which was that
familiar taint of things dying which autumn always brings. The flowers
were of autumn too--scabious, bedstraw and rest-harrow; mushrooms were
to be had for the stooping, which we usually seek in dewy September
dawns. On the other hand, there were the raspberries; the brambles were
in flower, and the corn just tinged with yellow. After a burning May
and June, a dripping July, the times are out of joint--but I filled a
hat full of raspberries.

I found the best of them in a pear-shaped hollow in the ground, a place
rather like a giant’s sauce-boat, in depth perhaps some six feet.
Allowing for the slow accumulation of soil tumbled from the sides, for
growth by vegetation and decay spread over many centuries, it may once
have been another three feet down. Call it, then, nine feet deep. By
outside measurements it was fourteen yards long by nine at the broad
end of the pear, narrowing down to three where the stalk would have
been. To-day the actual floor-space is barely two yards at the broad
end. That is because the sides have fallen in, and made descent a
matter of walking, which originally, no doubt, was contrived by some
sort of a ladder, or by slithering down a tree-trunk. Vegetation
is profuse in there: the turf like a sponge, the scabious as big as
ladies’ watches, the raspberries good enough for Bond Street. Well
they may be, for they are rooted in the bones and household spoil of
more than two thousand years. The place was a house long before Cæsar
knew Britain, before the Belgae were in Wilts, before Wilts was Wilts.
To revert to a convenient term, I picked my raspberries in an Iberian
house.

I considered it that day in the light thrown upon its proportions
for me (all unknown to the author) by a terrible little book, the
more terrible for its dispassionate statement, called “The Woman in
the Little House,” whose author, Mrs. Margaret Eyles, has herself
experienced what she writes of. Her Little House is one of, I daresay,
a million; one of those narrow, flat-faced boxes of brick--“two up and
two down,” as they are expressed--sprawling far and wide over the home
counties about London, in which the artisans and operatives who work
thereabout contrive, as best they may, to bestow themselves. It does
not need--or should not--Mrs. Eyles’s calm and good-tempered account to
realise that such dwellings are bad for health and morals, fatal to the
nerves and ruinous to the purses of their occupants. Yet she mentions
more than one simple truth which proves immediately that the smallest
house at the lowest possible rent may be much more costly than a large
one--for instance, she points out that the smallness of the house and
the want of storage room make purchase of stores in any kind of bulk
out of the question. But I have neither the time nor the knowledge to
develop these questions properly. I have only one criticism to make,
and that is that the sufferings of the small householder cannot all be
laid to size; that the difficulties of the Woman in the Little House
are not only economic. Fecklessness in the Woman must take its share of
blame. It is hard to bring up a family in the fear of God and the use
of soap, where there seems to be neither room for the one nor chance
for the other. It is wearing-down work to be nurse to many small and
fretful children while you are carrying yet another, to keep order in
a household which has neither scope for, nor desire of order, to deal
with drunken husband, grudging landlord, quarrelsome neighbour--and so
on. But Mrs. Eyles knows that these things can be done by the woman who
realises that they must, that they have been done and are being done;
and though both of us may grudge, as we do, the waste of nerve, youth,
beauty, vitality which they involve, yet had we rather preach the
gospel of such heroic dumb endurance, such constancy in adversity, such
piety, _and their reward_, than have the heroines fall back, flounder
in the trough of the wave, or the “sensual sty.” But for their lamps
held up, indeed would “universal darkness cover all.”

I seem to be far from my neolithic dwelling; yet am close to it; for
that itself was not much smaller than the “Little House” of to-day,
and yet is three thousand years older at the very least. To its
successor, the Celtic and early English wattle-and-daub hut this brick
box has succeeded, while here in the village under the Down there
are two-roomed, three-roomed tenements in which may be found man,
wife, and eight or ten children. So far as floor-space, air-space,
headroom, sanitation go, they will be very little better than the hole
in the chalk. So far as intellectual and moral outlook go, so far as
foresight, restraint of members, mental capacity, while tradition
is still the universal guide--a tradition which it is not easy to
distinguish from mere instinct--there is little reason to suppose the
occupants of the one differ materially from those of the other. I am
not to regret it or reprove it, but to state it; and go on to say
that when tradition is modified by character the state of a family
so conditioned may be not only orderly, not only prosperous, but
happy--and by that I don’t mean merely contented, but consciously and
avowedly happy. I know several which are so; and while I see, or hear,
of their well-being I have no reason for being anything but glad of it.
Sir Alfred Mond, to be sure, has had nothing to do with it; but it is
my belief that when it comes to a tug-of-war between character and Sir
Alfred Mond, character will pull the right honourable baronet all over
the place.

I cannot bring myself to be that whole-hearted kind of reformer who
says, my sauce must be your sauce, or there is no health for the world.
If I must provide a villager (as surely I must) with store-room for
his potatoes, I would not give him a bath-room for the purpose. I am
uncomfortable myself if I don’t souse every morning in warm water;
but I know several persons who do nothing of the sort, and are not
in the least uncomfortable, nor (to the senses) unclean. I have been
a guest in a house in Northumberland of the right Iberian kind, which
consisted of one room only. A better-conditioned, more wholesome, more
intelligent family than I found there I don’t expect to find easily
anywhere. Tradition explained, and character made tolerable, such a
dwelling. I have not actually seen, but know the appearance of the
house in Ecclefechan, where Carlyle was reared. I should be surprised
to learn that it was more than “two up and one down,” rather surprised
if it was so much. I don’t put Thomas Carlyle forward as an example of
the modification of circumstance by character: he was much the reverse.
But all that he tells me of his father and mother was written for my
learning. The rule of Saint Use was well kept in Ecclefechan, or I am
the more deceived. If Carlyle’s mother would have exchanged her lot for
that of any woman born she was not the woman he celebrates. And have
we not heard of Margaret Ogilvie, and been the better of it? It is not
the present-day practice to consider our social troubles from the moral
end, and I am sorry for it. The economic end engrosses us altogether;
yet it is not, strictly speaking, the “business-end.” It is little use
abolishing this or that institution while human nature remains as it
always was.

There is one serious subject which Mrs. Eyles has had to deal with,
into which I hesitate to intrude. Iberian women are kind, and their men
clamative. As she has heard it said by many a one of them, the day may
be endured, but not the night. Well, there again character can modify
use-and-wont, either by teaching acquiescence or by inspiring revolt.
And yet I cannot but remember what was said to a friend of mine in a
neighbouring village in the first of our terrible four years of war.
The speaker was a woman, a mother of children, who for the first time
in her life had enough money and her house to herself. “Ah, ma’am,” she
said, “you may depend upon it, this war has made many happy homes.”




SCANDINAVIAN ENGLAND


The valley is narrow, not much more than a hundred and fifty yards
wide, where I am stationed now. Of them some twenty are claimed by
the headlong river and its beaches of flat grey stones, and perhaps
eighty more by small green garths, divided by walls. Then broken ground
of boulders, bent and bracken, and then, immediately, the fells rise
up like walls to a ragged skyline. They stream with water at every
fissure, are quickly clouded, blurred and blotted by rain; then clear,
and shining like glass in the sun. The look of things is not the same
for half an hour at a time. Fleets of cloud come up from the Atlantic,
anchor themselves on the mountain-tops, and descend in floods of rain,
sharp and swift as arrows. Or if the wind drive them they will fleet
across the landscape like white curtains, and whelm the world in blown
water. You don’t “make” your hay in this country, you “win” it if you
can: you steal it, as they say. As for your patches of oats, as likely
as not you will use them for green fodder. Roots would be your crop
if you had room for them among the stones--but in Eskdale you are a
sheep-farmer, with a thousand head of sheep and a thousand acres of
fell to feed them on.

I am new to this corner of our country, where Lancashire and Cumberland
run so much in and out of each other that the people have given up
county categories and call it all indifferently Furness Fells. I don’t
know any other part of England so sparely occupied. The farms are few,
large and far apart; there are practically no villages; and my own
cottage (which was built for a dead and buried mining scheme, and is
the last of its clan) is the only one to be found within miles of empty
country. A plain-faced, plain-dealing, plain-spoken race lives here,
in a countryside where every natural landmark has a Norse name, and
one is recalled to the Sagas at every turn of the valley, and by every
common occupation of man. The economy of life exactly follows that
told of in the Icelandic tales. In the homestead live the farmer and
his thralls, the wife and her maids. There are no married labourers,
and board and lodging is part of every young man’s and young woman’s
hire. Twelve such people live in the farmhouse nearest to me--twelve
people, eleven dogs, an uncertain number of children, and a bottle-fed
black lamb. Not only so, but it is true that the dalesmen and their
servants are Icelandic in favour and way of speech. Dialect is not much
to the point; intonation is a great deal to it. That runs flat, level
and monotonous--unemotionally, like Danish. It makes a kind of muted
speech, so that it is hard to know whether a woman is pleased or angry,
or a man of agreeable or offensive intention.

I never met with a people more innately democratic than the Danes
until I met this year with this people of Eskdale. It is not at all
that they seek to assert their equality: it is that they know it.
The manners depicted in the Sagas are those of men dealing with men.
Neither inflation nor deflation is deemed necessary, neither arrogance
nor condescension. You make a statement, short and unadorned: it is
for the other man to take or leave. Speech is not epigrammatic because
minds move slowly here. But it is very terse--because it may rain
before you have finished. Plainer than speech are manners. They were
that in the Sagas, in more than one of which the starting-point of feud
and vendetta was the persistent and obtuse besetting of a daughter of
one house by the son of another. She was busy, or busied, as in all
primitive societies the women are; but he was not. So he hung about her
house, not attempting speech with her, not explaining or justifying or
extenuating his oppressive behaviour, simply overshadowing the poor
thing, causing her to be talked about, and scandalising her family.
There was but one way of dealing with him in those days, which was
to crack his skull. That was done, and so the drama put on its legs.
Things are better than that now, yet the principle is the same. I
remember the discomfort and alarm of three southern maids whom we once
brought up with us to a farmhouse in Selkirk. At their supper-hour
three strange young men were discovered sitting on a gate in full view
of the kitchen window. Nothing makes an Iberian so uncomfortable as to
be watched at a meal. But nothing would move the young men, not even
the drawing of the curtains. They had no explanation to give, no excuse
to make. One faintly whistled between his teeth, and then said that it
was a free country. So it was, if to make free is to be so.

It is much the same here. The young men of the farm regard every young
woman, of whatever walk in life, as a thing to be whistled in, like
a sheep-dog. They have the Saga knack of declaring the state of their
feelings by imposing themselves upon its object. They beleaguer the
house, shadow the desired, trust to wearing her down, hope to bore her
into love. Or, rather, they don’t care whether she love or not, so long
as they are allowed it. Woman in the Sagas is a chattel, a thing to be
bought or stolen. So she was to the Homeric hero. So she seems to be
here.

The Danes, as we loosely call our Norse invaders, were a more dominant
strain than whatever people they found in Furness. Not only have they
implanted their form, feature and hue upon the Cumbrians, not only
named their rivers and hills for them, or a great many of them, but
they have established their social code. “Whistle and I’ll come to you,
my lad,” is not a sentiment of Southern Britain. It is firmly implanted
in the mind of the young Dalesman, who finds it right and proper.




OUR BLOOD AND STATE IN 1660


I believe that we have always had the good conceit of ourselves which
we have still. We complain freely of our weather, institutions, habits,
manners and customs--but that is a freedom which we arrogate to
ourselves: when foreigners do the same we are merely amused, not for a
moment supposing either that their charges are true or that they really
mean them. Though our grousing can hardly be dated with safety before
Horace Walpole, our complacency is of pretty old standing, and goes
back to the time when we began to look Europe over, to say nothing of
America, and incidentally grew curious about our own country. Leland,
Speed, Camden, Drayton, Coryat, and finally old Thomas Fuller, between
them have fairly summed up what there can have been to say for us when
we had emerged from the Middle Ages and were beginning to shape for
posterity; and of all those Fuller is perhaps the least known and the
best worth a thought, if only because his eyes were upon what he saw
rather than what he knew. The rock upon which most of our eulogists
split was archæology. There Leland foundered, Speed and Camden too.
Drayton had his troubles elsewhere, and plenty of them, as a poet
would. Avoiding Scylla, he barged into Charybdis, where mythopoiesis
lurked for him like a mermaid, and sank him so deep that he never came
up again. He is very nearly unreadable; he invites ridicule and wins
disgust. Over and over his bemused corpus of rime, John Selden, a most
learned spider, spun webs of erudition. It is difficult to read either
of them, but of the two I prefer the poet. The present Laureate puts
the antiquary first. But when you come to Thomas Fuller, D.D., his
_Worthies of England_, that wordy work, encumbered though it be with
texts of divinity, you do at least get your teeth into something upon
which to bite. He did not live to finish it, though, and the piety of
his son John, “the author’s orphan,” as he described himself, erected
it as a monument to his memory in 1672.

Fuller, I think, set out with the intention of belauding the human
products of our realm. He cast all mankind into categories and, with
them for a sieve, shook out the shires to see what he could find.
To that he added matter concerning the natural and manufactured
commodities of England, which forms the best reading in him to-day.
One does not particularly want to know what he had to say about Sir
Walter Raleigh or Cardinal Wolsey; even his opinion of Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson need not detain us long, though he seems to have known
personally the pair of them, and to have considered Jonson considerably
the greater man. Wit was always reckoned above genius in that day.
But he admits Shakespeare as a worthy of Warwickshire, accords him
exactly as much space as Michael Drayton, “a pious poet,” and thinks
that in our greatest man “three eminent poets may seem in some sort
to be compounded”; a sufficiently qualified judgment. Those three
are--“Martial, in the warlike sound of his surname”; Ovid, “the most
natural and witty of all the poets”; and Plautus, “an exact comedian,
yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess
himself.” He goes on, “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.” Not extravagant praise. He
does not know the date of his death, leaves it blank. And so much for
Shakespeare.

It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any
more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing
in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he
does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance,
that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has
no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in
Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and
“oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton,
he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought
thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning
cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit
in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when
learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide
travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest
town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor
spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably
by the entire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is
more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in
themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an
haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon
up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in
some _Manchester-Tickin_, and to fasten them with the _pinns_, or tye
them with the _tape_, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind
them about with _points_ and _laces_, all made in the same place.”
That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same
elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his
daughters and pupils.

He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without
pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair
complections to the women in this county art may save her _pains_
(not to say her _sinnes_) in endeavouring to better them. But let the
females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express
notice be taken of the beauty of many women, _a._ Sarah, _b._ Rebekah,
_c._ Rachel, _e._ Thamar, _f._ Abishaig, _g._ Esther; yet in the New
Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.”
Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection
far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire
are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome, _Ribchester_ was
as rich as any town in Christendom”--that is one; and the other is
that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with
spades and matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground,
and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small
fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so
do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them
be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed
upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed
upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.

Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a
small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him
eels, hares, saffron, and willows--a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops
and _puitts_, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red
deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes,
and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness
they are far short of the Indian”--but there they are. He tops up
a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue
slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes
Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones:
Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”;
Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and _larks_”; slightly
better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent,
“cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it
was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire
mining lead and brewing mild ale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton;
Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in
Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were
doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large
families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for
another hundred years before it came to a head.

But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial
protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time.
He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife,
nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The
historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He
never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to
be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to
reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.




“MERRIE” ENGLAND


The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy
with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost
to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane,
_Pizzaro_ or _Artaxerxes_ would be followed by _Harlequin Dame Trot_,
or _Harlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat_. I am not scholar enough to
say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if
they were I can perceive some intention in _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_,
which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of
Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or,
as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun
in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it
should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows
of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would
have been if Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew’s Fair_ had not been revived the
other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons
who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable
of being pleased with _Gammer Gurion’s Needle_. It is no worse than
Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is
much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There
are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and
of course no Falstaff. But the difference is of degree, not of kind.
_Gammer Gurton_ is written _de haut en bas_, as Shakespeare also wrote
of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever
he was--and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of
Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties--as heartily scorned the peasantry as
William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much
about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from
being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention
will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as
we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should
know in what England’s merriment consisted.

Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she
sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief,
she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her
onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and
upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the
boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters
here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick,
and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great
scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which
ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest;
Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob
her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place
whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The
priest edges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks
his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to
arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives
the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no
doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.

According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English
peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated
only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working
was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the
only intellectual exercise. In _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ there was not
even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.


     “I cannot eate but lytle meate,
       my stomacke is not good;
     But sure I thinke that I can drynke
       with him that weares a hood.
     Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,
       I am nothinge acolde:

     “I stuffe my skyn so full within
       of joly good Ale and olde.
     Back and syde go bare, go bare,
       both foote and hand go colde:
     But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe
       whether it be new or olde”:--


and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings
itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has
piled up, which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton
still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.

But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious
thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of
man. If you named a woman the thing--and you always did--you named a
man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the
accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was
a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat
her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured
each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly
that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable
to-day--but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years
in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to
another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding
link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.

Religion provides the only other expletives there are in _Gammer
Gurton_, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No
earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play
called _Dyccon of Bedlam_ was licensed to be printed in 1562, and one
by the presumed author of _Gammer Gurton_ was acted at Christ’s College
in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences
very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by
the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’s name, Master
Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if
the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:


     “Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;
     Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)
     Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”


Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was
then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that,
the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s
bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys”
(by Jesus); finally this:


     “There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,
     S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,
     That ye shall keepe it secret....”


These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever
way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which
they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the
peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of
conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but
use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the
same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which
remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I
put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one
has been able to go. Certainly _Gammer Gurton_ will take us no further.

Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between
the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village
life in Merrie England. Take this:


     _Gammer_: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.

     _Cocke_: Howe, Gammer?

     _Gammer_: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,
     Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well
     Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,
     Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”


If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it--except
perhaps this:


     “And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”




ENDINGS


I

Not very long ago I took occasion to inquire into the beginnings of
books. I found that the rules were simple, the formulæ few, and the
practice seldom varied until near our own times. If you were an Epic
poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired
her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once
upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began,
in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you
contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists
call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a
musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable
of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. No matter for
that: everything was in your favour: hope was high in your breast, and,
no doubt, in your hearer’s or reader’s. The rules were simple; you laid
out the theme, and off you went.

But the _ending_ of your work is a very different thing. There are
no formulæ for that. You are at the stretch of your tether, either
thankfully or not; you are in your public’s discretion; however you
take it, you are judged already. You may amend all by your ending, or
you may make weariness more weary. In any case, you have somehow to
“get off with it,” and will find that your shifts to make a good end
to your adventure are not easily reduced to rule or comfortably suited
by convention. We don’t hear so many sermons as we did; yet most of us
know by experience that it is one thing for a clergyman to open upon
his text, and quite another for him to turn to the East with credit.
If he have prepared his peroration, and the way to it--what I may call
his _coda_ and _finale_--well or ill, he will let it off. If he have
not, then in addition to his anxious care for what he is to say, he
will have another for what he must by no means say. Let him beware, for
example, of using the hortatory words “And now”; for so surely as he
pronounces them the congregation will rise as one man, and then nothing
for it but the rest of the Ascription. I have known that happen more
than once, and never faced the preacher with nerve enough to reseat the
congregation for one more turn.

The writer and the orator may be compared, since literature, by origin
a spoken word, has never lost the habits it then acquired--or has only
just now lost them. As the ancient bard, Homer or Demodocus, as the
wandering minstrel, trouvère or balladist, faced his assize, somehow or
other he had to get off his platform. What was he to do? He desired a
supper, perhaps a bed: one need not shirk the probability that he was
to send round his hat. Could he be sure of them without some kind of a
bang? Should it be a long or a short bang? Was he to sum up the whole
argument of his poem in its last twenty lines, condense it all into one
compendious epigrammatic sentence? As we shall see, that was the means
of one of our great prose-writers. Then, otherwise, should he perorate,
and, in the musician’s way, recall the theme with which he began? As
poet, perhaps he should--so indeed Tennyson more than once did; but
as epic poet it was not always possible. No better poet than Homer
ever lived, no better ending to an epic was ever made than that to the
Iliad, whose last book shows Achilles, for once, generous, and Priam,
in his simplicity, noble. But the Iliad does not end upon the matter of
its beginning, nor with the hero of it. On the contrary, it ends with
the hero’s chief enemy; and its very last line,


     “So served they the last rites of Hector, tamer of horses,”


is remarkable, because it shows that the interest of poet and hearers
alike had shifted during the progress of the poem. Homer, a Greek,
singing to a Greek audience, finds it necessary to close his poem with
Priam and Hector of Troy!

That shows you how difficult it is to end an epic. The Odyssey shows
it you from another side. Everybody now agrees that what happens in
that after the return of Ulysses, his revenge upon the suitors and
recognition by Penelope, is anti-climax. We are not prepared, at the
end of a long poem, to descend once more into Hades and listen to the
ghosts of the wooers relate their griefs to the ghosts of Agamemnon
and Achilles. We are not prepared for an outbreak of retaliatory war
between the Ithacans and their recovered prince. _Nor were Homer’s
auditors._ Therefore Homer turned to the old stage device of the god
from the machine; he brought an Athené to shut all down. No other means
was open to him, and the knot was worthy.

I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own
conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of
them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of
bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead
bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain
which a book can have is the _Explicit_, or _Colophon_; but I only
know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used
in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I
mean is the _Song of Roland_, which, as we have it now, has neither
beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace
to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne
reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel
Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon--


     “‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’
     Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;


and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:


     “Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”


Clearly, if Turoldus made the _Song of Roland_, he did not put his
colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very
accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff,
devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the
expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man
singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long
story by beginning another. These things are not done.

The ending of the _Divine Comedy_ is original and characteristic at
once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or
trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful
and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the
same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell,
Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and
lamentation of Hell he issues


     “a riveder le stelle”;


after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself


     “Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle”;


the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of
things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe
is Love, and that Love it is which


     “muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”


As I say, there is artifice in that. After it we are not surprised to
learn that the number of cantos in each cantica, the number of verses,
the number of words in each was approximately planned out and very
closely kept. It is much of a question what is gained by such joinery;
but there is no question at all of the starry endings. Philosophically
and poetically they are beautiful and right.

Dante belonged to the scholastic age, and to the Middle Age; but he
stood alone both in his art and his artifice. Poets less serious than
he, poets like Boccaccio and Chaucer, had other cares. As they drew
near the end of their occasionally very light-hearted poems, they began
to think about their own end as well as that of their poesy. Fears of
the Archdeacon and his “Somonour,” fears of a summons still more dread
beset them. The more they had written about pagan antiquity as if
they believed in it, the more necessary it became to make their peace
with Heaven before they had done. _The Canterbury Tales_ were never
finished, so one cannot say whether Chaucer’s wholesale recantation of
the “worldly vanitees” of them, of _Troilus_, and of practically all
that has made him immortal was really designed to fit on to the end of
them or not. It certainly looks as if it was; and one can believe that
The Wife of Bath, mine Host and others of the joyful company may have
required some extenuation before the Recording Angel. So perhaps did
_Troilus and Cresseide_, for which he provides a careful and solemn
ending, following Boccaccio there as elsewhere. He shades off Troilus’
death very artfully by the translation of his “light gooste” to the
eighth sphere of Heaven, from which elevation he was able to look down
at the mourners bewailing his decease. And then the poet is elevated in
his turn and, dropping all his debonair detachment, himself translated,
becomes a pulpiteer of the best. “Such fyn,” he cries:


     “Such fyn hath then this Troilus for love!
     Such fyn hath all his greté worthinesse!”


It is fierce and powerful pulpit eloquence, mounting up and up until he
reaches a height of scorning what he had previously loved, from which
invective may be poured out like lava from Vesuvius:


     “Lo here, of payen’s curséd oldé rights!
     Lo here, what all their Goddés may availe!”


which, considering he began his poem by invoking the help of those same
gods, seems ungrateful, not to say ungracious. The last stanza is quite
simply a doxology:


     “Thou one, and two, and three, eterne in life,
     That reignest aye in three, and two, and one,”


just such an accomplished and charming doxology as might be expected
from Chaucer--but, all the same, a doxology. To such strange uses did
poets lend their muse when they loved paynimry and were horribly afraid
of it too.

Freed from the overshadowing of a wrath to come, Milton was able to
concentrate upon poetic excellence, as indeed he did. You will look far
before you find so serene and beautiful a close to a long poem as that
of _Paradise Lost._ Pity and terror contend in the last paragraph. When
the Archangel with his burning brand, and the attendant Cherubim, faces
in the fire, descend and take possession of Eden, terror holds us; but
then, pity:


     “They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
     Of Paradise so late their happy seat....”


They were mortal, that pair. Mortals have short memories, but long
hopes. So--


     “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
     The world was all before them where to choose
     Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
     They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
     Through Eden took their solitary way.”


The dream was over. Life began its “search for rest.” Beautiful indeed,
and exactly observed.

I must here leave the Muse with barely a glance at the Victorians,
which suffices nevertheless to reveal that they adopted the rhetorical
device of the peroration. Tennyson uses it in _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_,
Browning in _The Ring and the Book_, Swinburne, very finely, in
_Tristram of Lyonesse_, and very characteristically too with his usual
catchword. I don’t know how many considerable poems there may be of
Swinburne’s which do not end with the word “sea,” but believe that the
fingers of one hand would be too many for them. In _Sordello_ Browning
chose the mediæval colophon, the _Ci falt la geste_, when he shut down
his long enigma with


     “Who would has heard Sordello’s story told,”


and laid himself open to the easy retort that it was not at all true.
But the grandest finale of our times remains to be told: Tennyson’s
closing lines of _Idylls of the King_. I do not refer to the Envoy,
which is only a postscript to the Dedication. I mean rather the end of
“The Passing of Arthur”: Sir Bedivere on the shore, “straining his eyes
beneath an arch of hand” to see the barge out of sight, “down that long
water opening on the deep”; to see it go,


     “From less to less and vanish into light--”


Then one more line, one more picture:


     “And the new sun rose bringing the new year.”


Superb! Nothing in the _Idylls_ became Tennyson like the leaving them.
They do not form an epic; but the end is epical.

And now for prose.


II

You cannot end a book of prose as you can a poem, for the simple reason
that prose does not appeal to the emotions directly, as poetry does,
but by way of the reason. By emotion you can carry off anything that
you may have had the passion to begin and continue; but the reason asks
another satisfaction. You may win emotional assent to a proposition
that two and two make three, or five. In the heat of the moment it
will pass. Reason won’t take it in on the mere statement. If some such
result is to be the outcome of your book--and it is that of many and
many a novel--you must be careful how you conclude; and it will be
seen, I think, that so the novelists have been.

The simplest way of ending a story, you might think, would be to say
That’s all, and get off your tub. It was the way, we saw, of the
rough-and-ready intelligence which carved the _Song of Roland_ out of
some huge rhymed chronicle: _Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet_.
It is the way of the colophon. But even the colophon must be meditated
and prepared for; so it is not the real end but only part of it. Sir
Thomas Malory had a long colophon to the _Mort d’Arthur_, including a
bidding prayer on his own account; and then Caxton his printer puts in
a word for himself; but it is led up to by a page which sees Lancelot
and Guinevere dead and buried, the realm of England disposed of, and
the later fortunes of the few knights left alive. It is a deliberate,
not a summary end to a great book--the end “in calm of mind, all
passion spent,” which such a book should have. It is, again, the way
chosen by Gibbon for _The Decline and Fall_. You have a dignified
and sufficient summary of the whole work in a sentence of twelve
co-ordinate clauses, set stately apart by their semicolons. Then comes
a brief reflection of the author’s--“It was among the ruins of the
Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which....” And then,
after that momentary tribute to his personal share in it, he makes a
formal submission of it “to the curiosity and candour of the public.”
Mannerly and contained to the last, the good Gibbon. Nobody ever came
down from a tub with more self-respect; yet Boswell came down pretty
well too:

“Such,” he concludes, “was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents,
acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his
character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present
age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.” He was, at
least, sufficiently moved to forget himself altogether--which is very
much to his credit. Yet he does not satisfy like Gibbon.

Carlyle was tired with _Frederick_, and, may be, out of conceit with
it. His conclusion is short, and his colophon barbarous. “Adieu,
good readers; bad also, adieu,” is rather bravado than bravery. More
courteous, more inclusive, serener and braver is the conclusion of
_The French Revolution_. One sniff there is, at the “Citizen King,
frequently shot at, not yet shot,” recollection of a Teufelsdröckian
prophecy, neither here nor there; and then a paragraph of valediction.
“Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is
done.... Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it
was to hear truly. Farewell.” A beautiful colophon.

Carlyle was a scolding philosopher; Montaigne had been a shrugging one.
His last essai, _De l’Expérience_, is very long, but appropriately the
conclusion of a ripe and profitable book. The end of the matter deals
with what, according to him, is the end of life itself, “de scavoir
jouyr loyallement de son estre.” “So much art thou God,” he continues,
“as thou knowest thyself for man.” His bidding prayer is on behalf
of old age, addressed to the God of Health and Wisdom--“mais gaye et
sociale.” It is very French to lay down in terms at once the nature of
your God and your need of him. Compare with it old Burton’s “corollary
and conclusion” of the _Anatomy_:


     “Be not alone, be not idle”:


then, as he must always be quoting,


     “Hope on, ye wretched,
     Beware, ye fortunate”--


encouragement and warning in one.


The novelist, whose aim has been your entertainment, and who has never
lost the habit of the market-place in which he certainly began, had
his own peculiar cares as the time approached for his last words. If
he had earned applause and assent to heights and moments of his tale,
could he make sure of them by a quiet end? Or must he earn them by a
final shock? Should he burst into a bouquet of stars in the upper air,
like a rocket, or come down like its stick? Each way has been chosen.
_The Mill on the Floss_ ends sublimely in the air, or, strictly, the
water; so in its own way--not at all sublimely--does _Tristram Shandy_;
but the majority of novelists have favoured the gentle decline of the
narrative to the marriage or death-bed, and generally speaking, the
longer the novel the quieter the end. Efforts to endear, however, can
always be discerned. The earliest novel of all shows us an expedient
in practice which has remained in use down to the Victorian age, and
only been discarded by the ultra-moderns even now. Daphnis and Chloe in
Longus’s old tale are married at the end of the book. The last picture
in it shows the lovers in each other’s arms; and the last words of it
are these:

“And Daphnis now profited by Lykainion’s lesson; and Chloe then first
knew that those things that were done in the wood were only the sweet
sports of children.”

The shift is very plain. It is to recall to the memory the most moving
or provocative episodes in your tale, in the hope that the thrill they
afforded him once will revive in the reader and lift you over the
end. It is a sound rhetorical device by no means disdained by high
practitioners in the art. Sir Walter used it in _Waverley_, when, on
the last page, he recovered the _poculum potatorium_ for the Baron of
Bradwardine. He had an affection for the Baron, it is obvious; but
he rightly felt him to have been his strongest card, and relied on
him to win him the last trick. Often the novelist may be mistaken and
table the wrong card, as Dickens certainly was when he ended _Nicholas
Nickleby_ with tears upon Smike’s grave, believing that shadow to have
been a trump. He should have led Mrs. Nickleby. How wisely Jane Austen
played out her hand in _Emma_, whose last paragraph is enjewelled with
reflections of Mrs. Elton’s:

“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!
Selina would stare when she heard of it!”

Jane Austen was incomparable alike in beginnings and endings.


Instead of recalling with insistence your strongest points, you may
make a last effort to carry off what you doubt have been your weakest.
There is much of that in both Dickens and Thackeray. In _Dombey and
Son_, for example, it is evident that Dickens desired to extenuate what
he felt had been an excess of starch in Mr. Dombey. The last page and a
half of the book deglutinates him with a vengeance. The man of buckram
ends up as a weeping goose. Agnes Wickfield in _Copperfield_ had never
been convincing, nor had Estella in _Great Expectations_. The last
pages of those novels are devoted to the service of the pair of ladies;
but the effort is too plain, and the reader withholds assent. So with
Thackeray, who spends his last drop of ink in _Pendennis_ on Laura,
and in _Esmond_ to pulling off the amazing marriage of a man and his
grandmother. In vain! The end of _Vanity Fair_ is tame, because Dobbin
is tame; the true end of _The Newcomes_ is the _Adsum_ of Colonel
Newcome: very beautiful and not to be bettered. The epilogue, with its
trite exhibition of strings and wires, had been better omitted. It is
on all fours with _Don Quixote_, which really ends with the epitaph of
Samson Carrasco upon the Ingenious Gentleman. The ensuing reflections
of Cid Hamet Benengeli are not to the purpose, but, in fact, counter to
it.

I have left almost to the last that conventional ending to novels
best described as the Wedding Bells ending, or, in the consecrated
fairy-tale phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.” I wonder what
is the attitude of the ordinary novelist to that? Fielding, now. Did
he write the end of _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_ with a shrug, or did
he really believe that all was going to be for the best for the two
charming women married to a couple of scamps? Moralist and satirist
as he was to the roots, are those cynical endings? I cannot help
suspecting it. No such doubt afflicts you with Anthony Trollope, who
nearly always tied all his knots at the close. But Trollope worked
in sober tones. His heroes and heroines had few rapturous moments,
but loved temperately, hoped moderately, and if they longed, said
little about it. His fondness for carrying over shows us some of his
young people sedately and reasonably jogging along: Mr. and Mrs.
Frank Gresham, Lord and Lady Lufton, Dr. Thorne and his Dunstable. We
see them seated in the mean, contented if not happy. On the whole, I
commend the cradle rather than the altar as a more hopeful ending. It
is charmingly used by M. Anatole France in the most charming of all his
books. M. France does not often incline to the idyll. The French do
not. Consider the last words of Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de Parme_:

“Les prisons de Parme étaient vides, le comte immensément riche, Ernest
V. adoré de ses sujets, qui comparaient son gouvernement à celui des
grands-ducs de Toscane.”

Well may he have added to that the final address, To the happy few! I
should do him wrong if I did not remark that it is on the last page of
the novel that Stendhal mentions, for the first and only time in it,
the Chartreuse de Parme itself.

The French novelists favour irony at the close. It may be that they owe
it to Voltaire:

“Pangloss used to say sometimes to Candide: All the things that happen
to us are linked one to another in this best of all possible worlds;
for indeed if you had not been driven out of a fine castle by kicks
behind for Cunégonde’s sake, if you had not endured the Inquisition,
traversed America on your two feet, driven your sword through the
Baron’s body, lost all your fine sheep of Eldorado, you would not at
this moment be eating lemon preserve and pistachio nuts. It is well
said, replied Candide; but we must go on digging our garden.”

Flaubert adopted that sort of thing for _l’Education Sentimentale_,
whose last is its best page. It is good to have arrived there, anyhow;
and pleasant to depart on a happy thought.

How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel
to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to
tell the strictly modern reader--who also knows more about it than
I do. Aposiopesis has its points, one of which certainly is that as
anything you please has happened already, it can happen again, and may
as well. But it presumes too much upon the immunity afforded by the
printing-press. If the modern story-teller tried that game upon an
auditorium, and proposed to take himself off with his characters left
sitting, it is long odds that he himself would not have anything worth
talking about left to sit upon. The only requital open to the reader,
unfortunately, is to cease to be one; and that is very much what I
understand him to be doing.




BEAUMARCHAIS


I have often wondered what were the feelings of the growing boy
upon whom it slowly dawned that his sponsors had had him christened
Hyacinth, or Achilles. Was he conscious of inspiration or the reverse?
The discovery must have been frequent in France, where the reign of
Louis XV in particular was a flowering time for names. There was an
Anarcharsis Klootz, there was a Maximilien Robespierre. When to the
unremarkable patronym of Caron there were prefixed the resounding
syllables, Pierre-Augustin, to the wearer of them at least the things
became a trumpet. He shrilled himself upon them into the far corners
of Europe. The Empress Catherine chuckled over him in her Winter
Palace; her august neighbour had him read to her, evenings, in Vienna.
Horace Walpole, while declining his acquaintance, wrote of him with
astonishment to Mme. du Deffand; Voltaire at Ferney thought that there
must be something in him. And there was. First and always, impudence.
He would look anyone in the face, and never be discountenanced himself.
Next, good humour: in his worst hours he bore no grudges, and in his
best so few as make no matter. When he had his enemy face to face,
and was really at grips with him, he could always hold back from the
fray to let off a joke or turn an attack by a compliment. There was
a Madame Goëzman with whom he was badly embroiled in civil process.
When they were before the registrar, and she was asked, Did she
know the plaintiff--“I neither know nor desire ever to know him,”
said she. “Neither have I the honour of Madame’s acquaintance,” said
Pierre-Augustin in his turn; “but having seen her, I am constrained to
a desire exactly the opposite of hers.” A happy gallantry which ought
to have touched the court, but did not.

Morally, he was like an india-rubber ball: the harder you hit him the
higher he leapt. The Goëzman pair, husband and wife, in the legal
broil just referred to, thought to crush him out of hand by scorn of
his degree in the world. They more than hinted that his father had
been a watchmaker, that they themselves were “noble.” Pierre-Augustin
saw his chance and took it. He held up the Mémoire in which those
injudicious nods and winks had appeared. “You open your _chef d’œuvre_
by reproaching me with the fortunes of my ancestry. It is too true,
Madame, that the latest of them added to other branches of industry
some celebrity in the art of watchmaking. Forced as I am to suffer
judgment upon that point, I confess with sorrow that nothing can
cleanse me from your just reproach that I am the son of my father....
But there I pause, for I feel that he is behind me at this moment,
looking at what I write, and laughing while he pats my shoulder.”


     “You,” he goes on, “who think to shame me through my father, have
     little conception of the generosity of his heart. Truly, apart
     altogether from watchmaking, I have never found another for which
     I would exchange it. But I know too well the worth of time,
     which he taught me how to measure, to waste it in picking up such
     trifles. It is not everyone who can say with M. Goëzman:

     ‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:
     Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”


And so he left it.


However high he leapt, his aims were not high. I don’t think he ever
failed of his heart’s desire. He wanted a title of nobility, and
obtained one, or indeed, some. He was “Ecuyer, Conseiller-Secrétaire
du Roi, Lieutenant Général des Chasses, Baillage et Capitainerie de la
Varenne du Louvre, Grande Vénerie et Fauconnerie de France,” which can
hardly mean more, and may mean considerably less than it sounds; and
all that, when he had earned a territorial name by marriage, enabled
him to become Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Next, he wanted
money, and had it, and lost it, many times over. Then he wanted to be
talked about; and for a long time Paris, and for some time Europe,
talked of little else. That was when he was conducting two interminable
lawsuits, one growing out of the other, and not only conducting them
with a vivacity and geniality which nothing could tire, but issuing
from the press bulletins of progress of the kind I have attempted
to sample above. It was those Mémoires which entertained equally
Petersburg and Strawberry Hill. Delightful as they must have been to
read when all the actors were alive and buzzing in the courts or on
the quays, they are difficult to follow now. The original suit, which
was to recover a debt on an estate from an executor, was made complex
by French legal process, but the second (in which the Goëzmans were
involved) was complex in itself. The exceedingly delicate point in it
was that Beaumarchais had attempted to bribe a member of the Court, and
actually got the money as far as his wife, where some of it remained,
though the bulk was restored. To recover by law what was still held it
was necessary for Beaumarchais to reject with vehemence the suggestion
that he had tried to suborn justice, while bringing home the fact that
Madame Goëzman had undoubtedly taken his money. He did not, naturally,
succeed; but he incriminated the Goëzman pair, and with them was
condemned in “infamy and civil degradation.” But in reporting his daily
engagements with them, and his verbal victories, he became simply the
hero of the hour, and ultimately carried his main action against the
Comte de la Blache with damages and costs.

That must be a parenthesis, to show how Beaumarchais climbed to his
point of desire, whatever it was at the moment, serving himself alike
of disaster and success. Many were his affairs of the kind, all pursued
with unflagging _enjouement_--as, a breach of promise in Madrid on
behalf of his sister, a row with the mad Duc de Chaulnes about an
“unfortunate female,” a more than dubious, a not at all dubious, plant
upon Maria-Teresa, underground transactions with the Chevalier d’Eon,
gun-running for the United States of America; and finally that upon
which his present fame rests--two comedies which broke all the records
of the theatre for anticipation and realisation. I would not go so far
as to say that he engineered the repeated delays in their performance
which brought expectation up to hysteria if not delirium, but have no
doubt that he courted them, and deserved, if not earned, the proud
result that more people were crushed to death crowding in to the
_Barbier de Seville_ than had ever been so crushed before, and that it
and its sequel, _Le Mariage de Figaro_, ran longer on end than any such
things had ever done. When they threatened to flag their author was the
man to revive them. He knew as much about advertising as Mr. Selfridge,
and had as little use for modesty as Mr. Bernard Shaw. Like that
salient dramatist, he published his plays, and wrote prefaces to them
which are better reading than the text. The pair still hold the stage,
as they were written, and as opera; and I should not be surprised to
hear that they and their author were as generally known as most of
Molière’s and theirs. After all, the same could be said of Sheridan,
with his pair, at the expense of Shakespeare.


Mr. John Rivers,[1] Beaumarchais’ first English biographer, I believe,
has evidently enjoyed his work, and will be read with enjoyment. He is
right in claiming the Life of his hero as a challenge to fiction. It
is first-rate picaresque, nearly as good as Gil Blas, and much better
than Casanova. But I think he rates him too highly as a dramatist. He
considers that Figaro ranks with “Falstaff or Tartufe.” If he does,
it is thanks to Rossini and Mozart: without their help the claim is
surely preposterous. Luckily, he has taken the trouble to translate
large portions of both plays, and so furnished the best corrective
to exaggerated pretensions that we could wish to have. Taken in such
liberal doses, they don’t march. In their original they are not easy
reading, for Beaumarchais, though a brisk, was not a good writer. One
does not ask for fine writing necessarily of a dramatist, but that he
shall attend to his business. Beaumarchais conceives his to be the
making of points. He is apt to be diffuse in reaching them, and to
clinch them tightly when he has them. In French he is often difficult;
in English he is both dull and difficult. It is like reading bad
handwriting on foreign letter-paper. You never seem to get on with the
thing.

The _Barbier_ is not much more than a Commedia dell’ Arte. It is a play
of manœuvring, intrigue the whole affair. Stock characters will do for
that, and you can manage without humour, if you have a sufficiency
of wit. There is perhaps more effervescence than wit, and what wit
there is not of the best kind. It is not concerned with ludicrous
appositions; rather it is paradox, verbal antithesis, the Gratiano
vein. Here is an example. Figaro is reporting to Rosine that Lindor is
her lover, and asks leave to tell her so:


     “_Rosine_: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.

     “_Figaro_: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on
     cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....

     “_Rosine_: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant
     absolument tranquille.

     “_Figaro_: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme
     cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle
     n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”


Beaumarchais can better that, though it is a fair sample of his
handling. In the second Act, where Bartholo (Pantaloon) has patched up
a reconciliation with Rosine (Columbine), whom he intends to marry, he
closes the scene like this:


     “_Bartholo_: Puisque la paix est faite, mignonne, donne-moi ta
     main. Si tu pouvais m’aimer, ah! comme tu serais heureuse!

     “_Rosine_ (baissant les yeux): Si vous pouviez me plaire, ah!
     comme je vous aimerais!

     “_Bartholo_: Je te plairai, je te plairai; quand je te dis que je
     te plairai! (Il sort.)”


That is very happy, because it has humour as well as wit. Pantaloon and
Columbine have become human beings.

It is not all so good as that, and some of it is not good at all. It
was written originally for an opera libretto, for which it is well
suited. It would do equally well for marionettes. To such things the
spectator can lend himself, because in the former the music, and in the
latter the puppets, take the responsibility off him; nothing of his
own is involved. But in a play the action and the dialogue perform the
resolution of life into art, with the audience as accomplice. Human
nature is implicated; if we allow the cheap, we must cheat ourselves.
If there is any resolution in the _Barbier_, it is into a jig, and
condescension is difficult. Life is only there in so far as some of the
personages wear breeches, and some petticoats. It is a mere trifle that
the scene is laid in Spain, while all the characters are Italian.

The _Mariage de Figaro_ is a more considerable work, if only because
it is much longer and more complicated. Everybody is older, including
Beaumarchais. Since the end of the _Barbier_, Count Almaviva has
pursued hundreds of ladies, Rosina has almost left off being jealous,
Figaro has become a cynic, and is inclined to give lectures. The
romance would seem to have been rubbed off seduction, as you might
expect when you consider that the Count has been at it all his life,
and is now a middle-aged man, old enough to be Ambassador. It has been
said--and Mr. Rivers says it--that Beaumarchais was deliberate in
contriving the effect of satiety, which he certainly obtains--as if
an author would set himself to work to be wearisome! Subversion, Mr.
Rivers thinks, was his aim, moral revolt. He wrote, and it was played,
on the eve of the Revolution. Was the _Mariage_ not, therefore, a
contributory cause?


     “_Figaro_, soliloquising: Parceque vous êtes un grand seigneur,
     vous vous croyez un grand génie!... Noblesse, fortune, un rang,
     des places, tout cela rend si fier! Qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de
     biens? Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus.
     Du reste, homme assez ordinaire; tandis que moi, morbleu! perdu
     dans la foule obscure, il m’a fallu déployer plus de science et de
     calculs pour subsister seulement, qu’on n’en a mis depuis cent ans
     à gouverner toutes les Espagnes: et vous voulez jouter ...!”


Is that contributory to revolution--or revolution contributory to
it? It was surely current coin in 1784. Voltaire and Rousseau had
encouraged cats to look at kings; everybody had made fun of the
nobility. Titles of honour can have held little intimidation since
Louis XIV had had the handling of them, and turned out dukes where
his grandfather made marquises. What little there might be left to do
had been done handsomely by his grandson. It is far more likely that
Beaumarchais was easing grudges of his own, or that in the famous
flight of paradoxes aimed at “la politique” he was recalling recent
experiences in London and Vienna, where he came into collision with the
real thing. Much out of character as it is, it is a good example of
what both Figaro and Beaumarchais had become by 1784:


     “Feindre ignorer ce qu’on sait, de savoir tout ce qu’on ignore;
     d’entendre ce qu’on ne comprend pas, de ne point ouïr ce qu’on
     entend; surtout de pouvoir au delà de ses forces; avoir souvent
     pour grand secret de cachet qu’il n’y en a point; s’enfermer pour
     tailler des plumes, et paraître profond quand on n’est, comme on
     dit, que vide et creux; jouer bien ou mal un personnage; répandre
     des espions et pensionner des traîtres; amollir des cachets,
     intercepter des lettres, et tacher d’ennoblir la pauvreté des
     moyens par l’importance des objets: voilà toute la politique, ou
     je meure!”


Very brisk. But when Count Almaviva shortly comments, “Ah! c’est
l’intrigue que tu définis!” the criticism is final, because it is
completely just. Curious that a playwright should light up his Roman
candle, and damp it down the next moment. Such speeches imperil the
character of Figaro by making him so dominant a personality that there
can be no fun in seeing him dupe his betters. Beaumarchais, I think,
may have felt that objection, and attempted to restore the balance by
having Figaro duped himself in the last act.

The balance is really adjusted in quite another way. Two new characters
are brought in, one of whom, Marceline, a _vieille fille_, designs to
marry Figaro, but presently finds out that she is his long-lost mother!
The other is Chérubin, who saves the play, to my thinking, just as
surely as Polly Peachum saves _The Beggar’s Opera_. Chérubin--“création
exquise et enchanteresse,” says Sainte-Beuve--is the making of the
_Mariage_, partly because he keys it down to its proper pitch, which
is that of children playing grown-ups, and partly because he is truly
observed and poetically presented. I don’t see how the adage, “Si
jeunesse savait,” could be more tenderly exploited. All his scenes are
good--the first with Suzanne, in which the young scamp, after betraying
his occupation with three love affairs at once, snatches his mistress’s
hair-ribbon and dodges behind tables and chairs while the maid pursues
him; the second, with the Countess, where she is dressing him as a
girl, and discovers her ribbon staunching a cut in his arm: in each of
these scenes the delicious distress of his complaint is painted with a
subtlety and sensibility combined which are first-rate art. Delicate
provocation can go no further, or had better not. Beaumarchais’ triumph
is that he knows that, and does not add a touch in excess. The final
touch is that the Countess, instead of feigning a desire for the
restoration of the ribbon (which she did very badly), now really does
desire, and obtains it. Enough said: there is no more. “Tu sais trop
bien, méchante, que je n’ose pas oser,” says the youth to Suzanne. That
is his trouble, and a real one it is.

The imbroglio in this play is a thing of nightmare. “Que diable est-ce
qu’on trompe ici?” The answer is the audience. Everybody deceives
everybody, twice over and all the time. It surprises, if you like, by
“a fine excess.” It is not surprising, anyhow, that the last act was
too much for Sainte-Beuve, has been too much for Mr. Rivers, and is
too much for me. I do not, simply, know what is happening, but I do
know that none of it is very funny. Compare it with _Sganarelle_, and
you will see. In that little masterpiece you have four characters:
Lélie and Clélie, the lovers, Sganarelle the jealous husband, and
Sganarelle’s wife. Clélie lets drop Lélie’s portrait in the street,
Sganarelle’s wife picks it up, and is caught by Sganarelle admiring it.
Presently, when Clélie faints, and is picked up by Sganarelle, it is
his wife’s turn to be jealous. Then Lélie, overcome by his feelings, is
pitied by Madame Sganarelle and helped into her house. The fat is in
the fire. Madame Sganarelle flies at Clélie for carrying on with her
husband; Lélie believes that Sganarelle has married Clélie. Sganarelle
pursues Lélie with a sword, and when he is confronted, pretends that he
brought it out because the weather looked threatening. It is a complete
cat’s cradle of a play, and as easily untied. The action is swift, the
intrigue is easy to follow, the appositions are really comic. But who
believes that Almaviva seriously wants Suzanne, or that Figaro has
really promised Marceline, or that the Countess really loves Chérubin?
The lack of plausibility causes the _Mariage_ to turn unwillingly,
like a mangle. It took four hours and a half to play: I can hardly
believe that Figaro’s inordinate soliloquy in the last act survived
the first night. Figaro himself is overweight; Marceline is a very
bad shot. She has at first a good Polly-and-Lucy slanging match with
Suzanne; but in the discovery scene she grows serious--very serious,
and rightly serious, no doubt, in any other play but this. But to
suspend all the gallantries in progress for the sake of her diatribes
upon gallantry, to shake the head over them, to say “True,” and “Too
true”--and then immediately to resume gallantries, has the effect of
exhibiting neither gallantry nor the reprobation of it as serious;
and as something in a play must be taken seriously, the Comédie
Française, rightly deciding in favour of gallantry, cut out the whole
scene; and it is so marked in my edition of Beaumarchais. It would
have been a pleasant toil for Edward FitzGerald, who loved such work,
to hew and shape this comedy. It has fine moments, but wants both the
speed and the gaiety of the _Barbier_. Mozart gave it them--we owe to
Beaumarchais the most delightful opera in the world.

Mr. Rivers translates the two plays freely, but I don’t think very
successfully. I have said already that Beaumarchais is not a good
writer--too diffuse at one time, too terse at others--but no doubt he
is very difficult. Literal translation is useless. “Miss” is not a
translation of “Mademoiselle.” “Mistress,” or “Young Lady” would be
better--and so on. You cannot get the points sharply enough unless you
translate ideas as well as idiom; and to do that you must take a wide
cast. Rhetoric is rhetoric in whatever language you cast it. It has its
own rules. Dialogue is another matter. There come in the familiarities,
secrets of the toilette, secrets of the bower. How are these things to
be done? I don’t know; but if Andrew Lang could not be natural with the
15th Idyll of Theocritus, it is no shame to Mr. Rivers to have failed
with Beaumarchais.

If he desired to try his hand I wonder why he omitted one of his
liveliest and wittiest sallies--the letter which he addressed to _The
Morning Chronicle_ in 1776, on one of his confidential visits to
London. It is too long to give entire, but I must have a shot at pieces
of it:


     “Mr. Editor,” he says, “I am a stranger, a Frenchman and the soul
     of honour. If this will not completely inform you who I am, it
     will at least tell you, in more senses than one, who I am not; and
     in times likes these, that is not without its importance in London.

     “The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and
     during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak
     of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace.
     I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the
     Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the
     discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr.
     Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in
     order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to
     it.

     “That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have
     the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in
     question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I
     believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as
     of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant
     appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly
     white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the
     prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young,
     very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and
     has a marked taste for dancing.”


He then proceeds to deduce all these charming properties from the
taffetas cloak--some from a single hair which he finds in the hood,
some from minute particles of fluff and fur; others, more carefully,
from measurements; others, again, from the position in which the cloak
was lying--all of which led him to conclude infallibly that “the young
lady was the most alert beauty of England, Scotland and Ireland, and
if I do not add, of America, it is because of late they have become
uncommonly alert in that particular country.” Sherlock Holmes!


     “If I had pushed my inquiries,” he concludes, “it is possible that
     I might have learned from her cloak what was her quality and rank.
     But when one has concluded that a woman is young and handsome, has
     one not in fact learned all that one needs to learn? That at any
     rate was the opinion held in my time in many good towns in France,
     and even in certain villages, such as Marly, Versailles, etc.

     “Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all
     his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of
     the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s
     cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the
     rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of
     Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces,
     the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that
     she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else
     in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as
     light as Atalanta’s own.”

He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried
him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him
again. And he was then only forty-four, and had another twenty years
before him. Impudence and good humour. The first was his shield and
buckler--triple brass. The other enabled him to support it in all
companies without offence. When at long last his suit with La Blache
was ended, and in his favour, the Comte not only restored the estate
without a murmur, but gave him a fine portrait of the testator.
Beaumarchais may have been a bad lot; but he was evidently a good sort.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Figaro: the Life of Beaumarchais,” by John Rivers. Hutchinson. 18s.




THE CARDINAL DE RETZ


No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and
hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that
I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic
significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in
common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they
make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his
heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a
part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher
the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the
paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist.
Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde
made him angry, the _grand siècle_ shocked him. Edification may be
served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the
History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people;
difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did
not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as
Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that
would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things
which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz,
could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign
minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal--not
for all. The Italianisation of manners which began with the last
Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be
reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways of
_Il Talento_.

_Il Talento_ is the Italian description of the state of mind induced by
desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing
type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes, _The
Prince_ of Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely
families--those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie--found it a
kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal
de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and
the source of the best chapters of _Vingt Ans Après_. Here was _Il
Talento_ in fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid
it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read
Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for
the point of view--which you will have no difficulty in doing if you
remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his
ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as
he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.

In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of
common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do
not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French
standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the
son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in
the cradle, and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman
of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a
bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was
shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might
have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself
is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an
odd sound.


     “I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because
     I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat.
     But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point
     of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures
     to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry,
     but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette,
     whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not
     only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with
     them were a mask for mine with her.”


This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St.
Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious,
he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”--quite as near, in fact, as
the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he
thinks is to his credit:


     “A short time after I left college, my governor’s valet, who was
     my humble servant, found living with a wretched pin-maker a niece
     of hers, fourteen years old and of remarkable beauty. After he had
     shown her to me, he bought her for one hundred and fifty pistoles,
     took a little house for her at Issy, and put his sister in to
     look after her. I went there the day after she was installed, and
     found her extremely cast down, but attributing it to her modesty,
     was not at all surprised. She was still more so the next day, a
     fact about her even more remarkable than her good looks, which
     is saying a great deal. She talked with me straightforwardly,
     piously, without extravagance, and cried no more than she could
     possibly help. I saw that she was so much afraid of her aunt that
     I felt truly sorry for her, admired her disposition, and presently
     her virtue. I tested that so far as it could be done, and took
     shame to myself. I waited till it was dark, then put her into my
     coach and took her to my aunt de Meignelais. She put the child
     into a convent of religious, where eight or ten years later she
     died in the odour of sanctity.”


One must not expect too much from a _grand seigneur_ in a cassock. The
story has more implication than he was able to perceive; but at least
it shows that he had pity in him, if not piety.

In time he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of
Paris, with a promise of survivorship, and a fancy title of Archbishop
of Corinth. He tells us that he took six days to consider how he should
regulate his conduct, how restore the credit of the archiepiscopate
(which was very necessary) without losing any of his pleasures. “I
decided to do evil with deliberation--no doubt the most criminal course
in the eyes of God, but no doubt also the most discreet in those of the
world.” In his opinion that was the only way open to him of avoiding
“the most dangerous _absurdity_ which can be met with in the clerical
profession, that of mixing sin and devotion.” “Absurdity” is remarkable.

His first duty as coadjutor was a severe trial to his fortitude. It was
necessary to make a Visitation of the Nuns of the Conception; and as
the convent held eighty young ladies, “of whom several were handsome
and some adventurous,” he had many qualms about exposing his virtue
to such a test. “It had to be done, though; and I preserved it to the
edification of my neighbour. I did not see the face of a single one,
and never spoke to one unless her veil was down. This behaviour, which
lasted six weeks, gave a wonderful lustre to my chastity. I believe,
however, that the lessons which I received every evening from Madame de
Pommereux strengthened it materially against the morrow.”


Such was the Coadjutor-Archbishop of Paris, and such his efforts to
restore the credit of that see. He did not continue them long. Other
things engrossed him, one being to obtain from Mazarin a recommendation
to the Cardinalate, another by all, or any, means to obtain his
benefactor’s disgrace. Before the first could take effect, or the
second be effected, the parliamentary Fronde began, and Retz was in
it to the neck. What he wanted, except to enjoy himself, is not at
all clear. He despised rather than hated Mazarin; he forsook the only
man--Condé--for whom he seems to have had any real regard; he invited
his country’s enemies to Paris; and he got nothing out of it. But I am
sure he enjoyed himself.

His strong card was his popularity with the Parisians. He earned that
partly by hard money--the Barricades, he says, cost him some thirty-six
thousand _écus_--and somewhat on his own account too. After he had
been enthroned as Coadjutor, he gave himself no airs. On the contrary,
“Je donnai la main chez moi à tout le monde; j’accompagnai tout le
monde jusqu’au carrosse.” Then, when he was firmly established as the
most affable seigneur in the city, suddenly he jumped in a claim for
precedence before M. de Guise, and had it adjudged him. It enhanced
his prestige incalculably. “To condescend to the humble is the surest
way of measuring yourself against the great,” is the moral he draws,
but another is that if you aim at popularity, you should stand up to a
great man, and beat him. Retz had courage, and the Parisians loved him
for it. So did the Parisiennes, according to his own account, though
many things were against him. He was an ugly little man, a little
deformed, black man, Tallemant reports him, very nearsighted, badly
made, clumsy with his hands, unable to fasten his clothes or put on
his spurs. No matter. Whatever he could or could not do, there is no
doubt he could give a good account of himself in the world, upstairs
and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. Not only does he say so in
Memoirs, written, as he is careful to say, for the instruction of
Madame de Caumartin’s children, but his enemies allowed it. It may
even be that Mazarin paid him the compliment of being jealous of his
midnight conferences with Anne of Austria; at any rate, Retz seriously
thought of cutting him out. Then he was a good preacher, a ready
debater, and a born lobbyist to whom intrigue was daily bread. Those
were his cards for beggar-my-neighbour with Mazarin, and not bad ones.
The weakness of the hand resided in the player. He had as little heart
as conscience. He cared nothing for his country, for his friends or
for his mistresses when their interests conflicted with what for the
moment were his. If he had an affection for anyone it was for Condé.
Yet he was against him all through, and chose rather to back the poor
creature, Monsieur--to his own undoing, as he must have foreseen if he
had given it a moment’s thought. Gaston simply let in Mazarin again,
through mere poltroonery; and Mazarin once in, Retz must be out. And so
he was.

The Fronde, the first Fronde, began seriously, like our Civil War, on
a question of principle. The Parlement of Paris took advantage of the
Regency to restore its old claim to be more than a Court of Record. It
claimed the right to examine edicts before registering them--in fact,
to be a Parliament. Atop of that came the grievance of the Masters
of Requests, who, having paid heavily for their offices, found their
value substantially reduced by the creation of twelve new ones. The
masters struck, and their offices were sequestrated. Then came the 26th
August 1648, when the Court, exalted by Condé’s victory at Lens, first
celebrated the occasion by _Te Deum_ in Notre Dame, and immediately
afterwards by causing Councillor Broussel, Father of the People, to be
arrested and carried off to Saint-Germain. Retz, the coadjutor, was in
both celebrations, as we can read in _Vingt Ans Après_. It was the day
before the Barricades. Directly the news of the arrest became known the
town, as he says, exploded like a bomb: “the people rose; they ran,
they shouted, they shut up their shops.” Retz went out in rochet and
hood--to watch, no doubt, over the harvest of his 36,000 sown _écus_.
“No sooner was I in the Marché-Neuf than I was encompassed by masses
of people who howled rather than shouted.” He extricated himself by
comfortable words, and made his way to the Pont-Neuf, where he found
the Maréchal de La Meilleraye, with the Guards, enduring as best he
could showers of stones, but far from happy at the look of things. He
urged Retz, who (though he had had an interchange of repartees with
the Queen overnight) did not need much urging, to accompany him to the
Palais-Royal and report. Off they went together, followed by a horde of
people crying, “Broussel! Broussel!”


     “We found the Queen in the great Cabinet with the Duc d’Orléans,
     Cardinal Mazarin, Duc de Longueville.... She received me neither
     well nor ill, being too proud and too hot to be ashamed of what
     she had said the night before. As for the Cardinal, he had
     not the decency to feel anything of that kind. Yet he did seem
     embarrassed, and pronounced to me a sort of rigmarole in which,
     though he did not venture to say so, he would have been relieved
     if I had found some new explanation of what had moved the Queen.
     I pretended to take in all that he was pleased to tell me, and
     answered him simply that I was come to report myself for duty, to
     receive the Queen’s commands, and contribute everything that lay
     in my power towards peace and order. The Queen turned her head
     sharply as if to thank me; but I knew afterwards that she had
     noticed and taken badly my last phrase, innocent as it was and
     very much to the point from the lips of a Coadjutor of Paris.”


Then follows one of his famous Machiavellian aphorisms: “_But it is
very true that with princes it is as dangerous, almost as criminal, to
be able to do good as to wish to do harm._”

Retz might play the innocent, no one better, but neither Queen nor
minister were fools. It is not to be supposed that they had heard
nothing of his distribution of _écus_. Then the Maréchal grew angry,
finding that the rioting was taken lightly, and said what he had seen.
He called for Retz’s testimony, and had it.


     “The Cardinal smiled sourly, the Queen flew into a rage.... ‘There
     is a revolt even in the intention to revolt,’ she said. ‘These are
     the stories of people who desire revolt.’ The Cardinal, who saw
     in my face what I thought of such talk, put in a word, and in a
     soft voice replied to the Queen: ‘Would to God, madame, that all
     the world spoke with the same sincerity as M. le Coadjuteur. He
     fears for his flock, for the city, for your Majesty’s authority. I
     am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he believes; but
     scruple in such a matter is worthy of his religion.’ The Queen,
     understanding this jargon, immediately altered her tone, talked
     civilly, and was answered by me with great respect, and a face so
     smug that La Rivière whispered to Bautru, ... ‘See what it is not
     to spend day and night in a place like this. The Coadjutor is a
     man of the world. He knows what he is about, and takes what she
     says for what it is worth.’”


The whole scene, he says, was comedy. “I played the innocent, which
I by no means was; the Cardinal the confident, though he had no
confidence at all. The Queen pretended to drop honey though she had
never been more choked with gall.” But what comedy there was was not
there very long. The Queen, who had declared that she would strangle
Broussel with her own hands sooner than release him, was to change her
mind. La Meilleraye and Retz were sent out again to report, and La
Meilleraye, losing his head, nearly lost his life. At the head of his
cavalry, he pushed out into the crowd, “sword in hand, crying with all
his might, ‘Vive le Roi! Broussel au large!’” More people, naturally,
saw him than could hear what he said. His sword had an offensive look;
there was a cry to arms, and other swords were out besides his. The
Maréchal killed a man with a pistol-shot, the crowd closed in upon him;
he was saved by Retz, who himself escaped by the use of his wits. An
apothecary’s apprentice, he says, put a musket at his head.


     “Although I did not know him from Adam, I thought it better not
     to let him know that. On the contrary, ‘Ah, my poor lad,’ I said,
     ‘if your father were to see this!’ He thought that I had been
     his father’s best friend, though in fact I had never seen his
     father, and asked me if I was the Coadjutor. When he understood
     that I was, he cried out, ‘Vive le Coadjuteur!’ and they all came
     crowding round me with the same cry.”


La Meilleraye knew very well what he had done. He said to Retz, “I am a
fool, a brute--I have nearly ruined the State, and it is you that have
saved it. Come, we will talk to the Queen like Frenchmen and men of
worth.” So they did, but to no purpose. She believed that Retz was at
the bottom of the whole _émeute_, and was not far wrong. But there was
no stopping it now. The barricades were up at dawn the next morning,
and it was clear that Broussel must be given back. He was. Then came
the flight of the Court, which Dumas tells so admirably.


After the evasion of the royalties, the Fronde became largely comic
opera. Certain of the princes--for reasons of their own--joined the
popular party: Beaufort, le roi des Halles, who wanted the Admiralty;
Bouillon, with claims upon his principality of Sedan; Conti, Elbeuf,
Longueville. Retz had the idea of bringing their, and his, ladies into
it. He himself fetched Mesdames de Longueville and de Bouillon with
their children to the Hôtel de Ville, “avec une espèce de triomphe.”


     “The small-pox had spared Mme. de Longueville all her astounding
     beauty; Mme. de Bouillon’s, though on the wane, was still
     remarkable. Now imagine, I beg you, those two upon the steps of
     the Hôtel de Ville, the handsomer in that they appeared to be in
     undress, though they were not at all so. Each held one of her
     children in her arms, as lovely as its mother. The Grève was full
     of people over the roofs of the houses. The men shouted their joy,
     the women wept for pity. I threw five hundred pistoles out of the
     window of the Hôtel de Ville.”


After their debonair fashion these high people played at revolution.
“Then you might see the blue scarves of ladies mingling with steel
cuirasses, hear violins in the halls of the Hôtel de Ville, and drums
and trumpets in the Place--the sort of thing which you find more of in
romance than elsewhere.” Nothing came of it all; a peace was patched up
with the Parlement, and each of the grandees got something for himself,
which had been his only reason for levying civil war. Beaufort was
assured of his Admiralty, Longueville was made Viceroy of Normandy,
Bouillon compensated for Sedan--and so on. La Rochefoucauld, too, who
had taken up arms for the sake of Mme. de Longueville--


     “Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
     J’ai fait la guerre aux rois; je l’aurais fait aux dieux”--


we must suppose that he also was rewarded. There is an interesting
page in the Memoirs of André d’Ormesson, one of an upright family of
lawyers, which by stating the mere facts lets in the light upon the
Fronde. All he does is to draw up a list of the _grands seigneurs_ of
1648-55, with a statement of how often they changed sides in the seven
years. It should be studied by all who wish to know how not to make
civil war. But Retz too gives the spirit of the thing equally well.
When his quarrel with Condé was coming to a head, and he was preparing,
as he threatened, to push that prince off the pavement, he collected
his friends about him, and among them two light-hearted marquises,
Rouillac and Canillac. But when Canillac saw Rouillac he said to Retz,
“I came to you, sir, to assure you of my services; but it is not
reasonable that the two greatest asses in the kingdom should be on the
same side. So I am off to the Hôtel de Condé.” And, he adds, you are to
observe that he went there!

Retz alone, who, if he had been serious, might have been master of
Paris, had nothing--except, of course, his Cardinal’s hat, which he
would have had anyhow. The Court came back, Mazarin was forced out of
France for a couple of years. But the Queen had him in again; and then
it was _his_ turn. Retz was persuaded into the Louvre, immediately
arrested and carried off to Vincennes. It was a shock to his vanity
that the populace took it calmly. There were no barricades for him.
From Vincennes he was presently removed to Nantes, whence, with the
assistance of his friends--and I cannot but suspect the connivance
of the governor--he escaped to the coast, landed at San Sebastian,
was allowed to cross Spain and re-embark for Italy. He fetched up in
Rome, where he remained for a year or two, taking part in conclaves
and thoroughly enjoying himself. He spent large sums of money, which
he did not possess, but never failed to receive from his friends. The
French Ambassador and all the French clergy steadily cut him--but he
did not take any notice. The Pope did, though, and Retz was given to
understand that he had better remove himself. He went to Germany, to
Switzerland, Holland, England in turn. Mazarin was dead, and Charles II
restored by the time he came here. I don’t think that he did anything
to the purpose with our Court, though no doubt Charles was glad of
him. Neither Evelyn nor Pepys have anything to say about him; and I
fancy that he was only a passing guest. As soon as he could he crept
back to Court, to which he had already surrendered his coadjutorship.
Louis employed him once or twice; but his day was over. He lived mostly
at Commercy, where he tried economy, and made periodical retreats,
as La Rochefoucauld unkindly says, “withdrawing himself from the
Court which was withdrawing itself from him.” He was four million
_livres_ in debt, but managed to pay them off, and even to contemplate
a snug residuary estate which he intended for Mme. de Grignan, Mme.
de Sévigné’s high-stomached daughter. But Mme. de Grignan snubbed him
consistently and severely, and nothing came of it. He died in 1679,
drained of his fiery juices, making a “good end.” The stormy Coadjutor
had become “notre cher Cardinal.”


His Memoirs, taken on end, are wearisome, because endless intrigue,
diamond-cut-diamond and chicanery are wearisome, as well as intricate,
unless some discernible principle can be made out of them. It seems
that Retz did nothing except talk--but, as Michelet points out, that
was what France at large did when the Gascons were let into Paris with
Henri IV. Read desultorily, they are delightful, witty, worldly-wise,
untirably vivacious, thrilling and glittering like broken ice. His
Machiavellisms are worth hunting out:


     “The great inconvenience of civil war is that you must be more
     careful of what you ought not to tell your friends than of what
     you ought to do to your enemies.

     “The most common source of disaster among men is that they are too
     much afraid of the present and not enough of the future.

     “In dealing with princes it is as dangerous, if not as criminal,
     to be able to do good as to wish to do harm.

     “One of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest faults was that he was never
     able to believe that anyone spoke to him with honest intention.”


When the Queen-Regent was working her hardest for Mazarin’s return,
she tried to win Retz over to help her. He told her bluntly that such
a move would mean the ruin of the State. How so, she asked him, if
Monsieur and M. le Prince should agree to it? “Because, Madam,” said
Retz, “Monsieur would never agree to it until the State was already in
danger, and M. le Prince never, except to put it in danger.” Excellent,
and quite true.


After Retz’s death, the Président Hénault, writing about his Memoirs,
asked how one was to believe that a man would have the courage, or the
folly, to say worse things about himself than his greatest enemy could
have said. The answer, of course, is that Retz had no suspicion that
he was saying bad things about himself. He said a great deal that was
not true. Other chronicles of the Fronde give detailed accounts of
such days as that of the Barricades, with not a word of the Coadjutor
in them. But even if it had all been true, it would have seemed a
perfectly simple matter to him. If you have no moral sense, the words
“good” and “bad” have only a relative meaning. It is much harder to
understand why he did the things which he relates, or why, if he did
not do them, he said that he did. What was he trying to get done? Did
he hate Mazarin? There is no evidence that he did anything more than
despise him. La Rochefoucauld, whom he accuses, by the way, of having
tried to assassinate him, explains him and his Memoirs alike by vanity.
“Far from declaring himself Mazarin’s enemy in order to supplant him,
his only aim was to seem formidable, and to indulge the foolish vanity
of opposing him.” If Retz knew of that “portrait”--and he did, because
Mme. de Sévigné sent it him--his own more benevolent one of its author
must be reckoned in his favour. He had written it in his Memoirs, but
allowed it to stand there unaltered except for one little word. He
had originally said that La Rochefoucauld was the most accomplished
courtier and most honest man of his age. He scratched out the honesty.

Personally, I picture a happy _rencontre_ in the Elysian Fields in
or about 1679, when the Cardinal de Retz should have arrived and
greeted his brother in the purple. A lifting of red hats, a pressing
of hands--“Caro Signore, sta sempre bene?” and so on. There had been
bitter war on earth; each was a keen blade, each an Italian. Each
had had his triumphs. Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and
once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had
returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came
back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it
all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered,
fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, _Il Talento_ and the
joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering
like lightning on a summer night. Greek was meeting Greek. Inevitably
that must have been. There was not room for two Italians of that stamp
in France.

But let us always remember that he was mourned by Mme. de Sévigné, who
said that he had been her friend for thirty years. There is the best
thing to be known about him.




“L’ABBESSE UNIVERSELLE”: MADAME DE MAINTENON


Few of the outstanding names in history have received the hard measure
which has been meted out to Madame de Maintenon’s. She has had it, so
to speak, both ways; been blamed for what she did not, and for what
she did. First, she was to be held abominable because she was not the
King’s wife; next, and even more so, because she was. All that falls
to the ground if it can be shown that her life before the marriage
was as irreproachable, morally, as it was after it. Madame Saint-René
Taillandier, in a recent admirable study of the misjudged lady, has
no difficulty in proving that it was so. She proves it positively by
showing of what nature Madame de Maintenon really was, and negatively
by exploring all possible sources of contemporary evidence, and
finding nothing worth consideration. Dull, narrow, bigoted, obstinate,
over-busy about many things, more occupied with to-day than to-morrow,
falling in too readily with Louis’ view of himself and his place in the
universe (a view which she shared with the entire French nation)--these
things she may have been, and done. But she was a good woman, a pious
woman, one who was severely tried, one who did her immediate duty and
gave to the poor. She had a long and unhappy life, and died worn out.
There can be no doubt of all this. All sorts of reasons for hating and
slandering her can be urged: none of them good ones.

The reproaches of the historians are not so summarily to be dismissed.
It is not necessary to go so far as Michelet did when he said that
the price of her marriage with Louis was the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. That’s absurd. Madame de Maintenon neither bargained nor
sold her hand. But it is hard to believe--impossible to believe--that
she was not in consultation with the King, and Louvois, and the
priests about the Revocation, or that, if consulted, she would not
have urged it. Saint-Simon, who is her first accuser here, is writing
after her death, and writing as an historian. I feel sure that he is
right. It is, of course, true that she was a Huguenot by descent, a
grand-daughter of that truculent, serio-comic old Agrippa d’Aubigné,
whose portrait, savagely grinning, is so extraordinarily like those
of his king, _le Béarnais;_ and it is true also that, though she was
converted before she was a grown woman, she never lost her fanatic hold
upon religion, but simply changed its direction. Throughout her life,
says Madame Taillandier, she showed Huguenot characteristics. She could
never take to the devotion of the rosary; she could never find any
enthusiasm for convents; she invoked neither the Virgin nor the Saints;
continued the reading of her Bible. No matter for that: she was hungry
for souls. As Saint-Simon puts it, with evident truth: “Elle eut la
maladie des directions ... elle se croyait l’abbesse universelle....
Elle se figurait être une mère d’église.” She converted whomsoever
she could touch, and as she grew in influence she could touch a many.
Concerned in the Revocation, besides Louis, there were Louvois,
Father le Tellier, Bossuet, her own spiritual director, the Bishop of
Chartres, and all the Jesuits. Everything that we know about her shows
to which side she would incline; and nothing that we know about her
makes it likely that she had any conception what statesmanship meant.
Louis called her “Sa Solidité.” Her solidity showed itself in her
care for detail: nothing was too small for her--she loved to order a
household, knew how many chickens you should get in for a small family,
how much wine for the servants, how many pounds of candles. She could
design the quasi-conventual robes for Saint-Cyr, costumes for ballets
and so on. But the economic or political outcome of the Revocation of
the Edict; the ruin of her country, the humiliation of the King, all
the immediate results of the “affreux complot” were entirely outside
her power of vision. “Four regiments of infantry,” Madame Taillandier
pleasantly says, “two of cavalry were ordered to follow the Duc de
Noailles into Languedoc, and _trample a little_ on the Huguenots.” My
italics! Well, Madame de Maintenon expected to save souls like that. I
don’t think that she can be let off her share in the _dragonnades_, or
in the Revocation.

Never mind. She was more of a saint than a sinner, though she lacked
the severity and suavity, the “sweet reasonableness” of the true
Saints. She was bleak, in herself and in her outlook; her life had
always been, and after her marriage was long to be, cheerless and
unutterably dull. What a life it was, throughout its eighty-three
years! Born in a prison in 1635, and living thereafter on charity,
with one relative or another; hounded from Huguenot pillar to Catholic
post; clinging to the faith in which she had been reared until she
was “converted” almost literally by force; still a pauper, often a
drudge; then at seventeen married to an elderly balladist, crippled by
disease, Paul Scarron, a scribbler of pasquinades and squibs, author
of a travesty of Virgil and what not; married to this incapacitated
rip; living with him in Grub Street on what he could pick up by the
hire of his pen--a libel here, a dedication there, a lampoon elsewhere,
a broadside for the street corner or bridge-end; living so from hand
to mouth, married but not a wife--what a life for a young girl gently
born, grand-daughter of King Henry’s old friend! Nothing is more
pathetic in Madame Taillandier’s account of her than the gallant fight
she put up in her little salon in the Rue Neuve Saint-Louis--polite
conversation in her bed-chamber with her friends, while Paul and his
tore the decencies to shreds below-stairs. And she succeeded, too, in
making good and herself respected. She had valuable friends. Madame
de Sévigné was one, Madame de Coulanges another, Madame de Lafayette
a third. Through them she became acquainted with yet higher persons,
among them with Madame de Montespan, then in league with the highest
of all. By those means she fell under the King’s eye. He did not like,
but he esteemed her, and chose her out of all the Court and all Paris
to govern Madame de Montespan’s children. She did it, by all accounts,
admirably. If she had no other qualities, she had two rare ones: she
did her duty, and held her tongue.

When, by public Act, the children were made Enfants de France, they
were removed from Paris to Saint-Germain; and there was Madame
Scarron in daily intercourse with Louis. That was the beginning of
her astounding ascent. Madame de Montespan was uneasy, and had reason
to be. The _gouvernante’s_ influence was steadily against her. Madame
Scarron disapproved of her and all her kind; and sure enough, from the
hour of her entry into the King’s family, the mistress’s star began
to wane. Finally, what the preachers--Bossuet, Bourdaloue--could not
do the ghastly business of “the Poisons” settled. La Montespan was in
that up to the neck, and Louis knew that she was, and held his peace,
not to save her neck, but to save his face. Montespan was exiled, and
took, as George Meredith said, “to religion and little dogs.” Madame
Scarron remained in charge of the children, and was ennobled with a
fief and a Marquisate. The Court called her “Madame de Maintenant”--but
she had not fully earned that. The Queen died--and Louis almost
immediately married the Marquise. There is not a ghost of a doubt of
it. Saint-Simon gives the date, the hour, and the names of celebrant,
assistants, and witnesses. Everybody knew it--but nothing was said.
From that hour Louis was hardly ever out of her company until the end,
when she was forced to leave him before the breath was out of his body.

What did she gain except unutterable weariness, suspicion, fear,
slander, and unending labour? Read Dangeau’s diary of the dreary,
splendid routine of Versailles, Marly and Fontainebleau; read in
Madame Taillandier a letter from the poor woman describing one of her
days. She had her Saint-Cyr in which she really delighted. She could
play universal Abbess there, and be interested and at peace for a time.
But even there chagrin and disappointment dogged her. She brought in
Madame Guyon, Quietism, and other things taboo. She became involved in
Fénélon’s disgrace; and presently she had to submit to Rome and turn
her beloved “Institution” of ladies into a convent of nuns.

No--she was bleak, and had a narrow mind; but, as she saw her duty, so
she did it. Her duty led her into thorny wastes and desert places; it
led her to be one of the thousand idle parasites yawning and stretching
at Versailles, slowly and endlessly revolving like dead moons round le
Roi Soleil. We may pity Madame de Maintenon for what life made of her,
but not blame her.




PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE


Rich as they are in the possession of the _diverticula amoena_ of
history--and much richer than we are--for all that the French have no
Pepys. “Many an old fool,” said Byron of Coleridge at his lecture,
“but such as this, never.” So it may be put of the French memoirists:
many a burgess of plain habit and shrewd observation, many a rogue
husband too; but the like of one who, being both, turned himself inside
out for the wonder of posterity, never. Indeed, it would be hard to
imagine a Latin Pepys. The French do not discharge their bosoms on
paper without reason; and the reasons which moved Pepys, whatever
they were, would not approve themselves to their minds. Cynicism, or
vanity, might suggest self-exhibition to one or another, as it did to
Casanova the Venetian, but the truth is not served that way. There was
a leaven of puritanism in Pepys such as Huguenotry never deposited
in a Frenchman. That leaven did double work in our man. It seasoned
for him his pleasant vices, and gave also a peculiar thrill to his
confessions, as if his pen, like his hair, was standing on end as he
wrote. No Frenchman needed a relish for his foibles of the kind; and
as for thrills, his nation has always kept faith and works in separate
compartments. We cannot do that.

However, they are rich enough without him. If they have no Pepys, they
have in their Pierre de L’Estoile one whom we cannot match. Imagine
a citizen of London in Elizabeth’s last and James’s first years,
observing, recording each day as it came. We have in John Evelyn, fifty
years later, a diarist of higher quality, who yet, and for that reason,
was of less historical value. He seldom stooped to the detail in which
the Parisian was versed: would that he had! L’Estoile will furnish no
such picture as Evelyn’s of the Gallery at Hampton Court on a specimen
afternoon. On the other hand, in L’Estoile, the brawling, buzzing,
swarming streets of old Paris come before us at every turn of the
leaf--and there at least he was like Pepys. If by happy chance one John
Chamberlain, a private citizen of London, whose letters were published
last year, had kept a diary, and could have kept it out of harm’s way,
he might have given just such a particularised account of his town
as L’Estoile gives of the Paris of the League, the Seize, and _La
Religion_. But he was fearful of the post, and never committed himself.
Nor would he, of course, have had such cataclysmic matter to report,
England in James’s reign was drifting towards the whirlpool: France was
already spinning madly in it.

Pierre de L’Estoile was an official of the Chancellery in Paris.
His title was “Audiencier,” and his duties, as nearly as I can
ascertain, were more like those of one of the Six Clerks of our Court
than of him whom we call Auditor. He was a man of family, of the
_noblesse de Robe_, of landed estate, of education, and of taste.
He had Greek, and Latin, bigotry and virtue; he collected coins and
medals, books, ballads, pamphlets, bibelots of all sorts. He began
to keep a diary on the day when Charles IX died, “enferme, comme un
chien qui enrage”--Whitsunday, 1574; maintained it through the riot
and effrontery, the anarchy and intrigue in which Henry III and the
_mignons_ killed and were killed; through the open war of the League,
and through the Siege of Paris. He saw the entry of Henry IV; judged
while he loved that ribald king; and caught up the flying rumours of
that day which hushed all the city, that day when he was stabbed to the
heart, “au coing de la rue de la Ferronnerie, vis-à-vis d’un notaire
nommé Poutrain,” as he sat in his coach listening to a letter which
Epernon was reading to him. He went on until 1611, and only laid his
pen down because he was about to lay down his life. His last entry is
of the 27th September: on the 8th October he was buried. He had lived
under six kings of France, had three of them die violent deaths, had
been an eyewitness of the Saint-Bartholomew. A seasoned vessel.

As he was never a courtier he could not have witnessed all the great
events which he relates. I think he saw the entry of Henry of Navarre,
if not his shocking exit. But he was out and about, all agog; he had
highly placed friends; and collected for his diary as he did for his
cabinet. I imagine he must be a “source” for such a tragic scene as
the murder of the Duc de Guise, which might have gone bodily into _Les
Quarante-Cinq_ if that fine novel had not stopped a few months short of
it. Everything is there to the hand. As first, the presages: how on the
21st of December (1588),


     “the Archbishop of Lyon, having overheard the proud speeches
     which the Duke had made the King in the gardens of Blois, told
     him that he would have done well to use more respect, and that a
     more modest bearing would have been becoming: whereupon, ‘You are
     wrong,’ the Duke replied: ‘I know him better than you do. You have
     to take him boldly. He is a king who likes to be made frightened.’”


And then another: on the next day,


     “As the Duke went to table, to his dinner, he found a note under
     his napkin wherein was written that he ought to be on his guard,
     because they were on the point of doing him a bad turn. Having
     read it, he wrote upon it these three words, ‘They dare not,’ and
     threw it under the table. The same day he was told by his cousin
     the Duc d’Elbœuf that on the morrow there would be an attempt
     against his life, and answered with a laugh that, plainly, he had
     been searching the almanacs.”


On the 23rd he and his brother the Cardinal attended the Council, on
summons:


     “They found the guard strengthened, and more hardy than usual.
     They demanded money, and asked the Duke to see to it that they
     were paid, using (as it seemed) a new manner of address, less
     respectful than he had been accustomed to hear. Taking no notice,
     they went their ways; and for all that the Duke had had warnings
     from many quarters of what was working against him--nine of them,
     indeed, on that very day, whereof he put the last in his pocket,
     saying aloud, ‘That is the ninth to-day’--nevertheless, so blind
     was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight, he could
     not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an
     ill turn; for God had blindfolded his eyes, as He generally does
     of those whom He designs to chasten. Being then come into the
     Council, in a new coat, grey in colour and very light for the time
     of year, the eye on the scarred side of his face was seen to weep,
     and he to let two or three drops at the nose--on account of which
     he sent a page out for a handkerchief.... Presently the King sent
     Revel, one of the Secretaries of State, for him, who came up just
     as he was shutting down into the silver box he used to carry, the
     plums and raisins which he used for his heart-weakness. He rose
     immediately to attend his Majesty, and just as he came into the
     ante-chamber one of the Guards in there trod upon his toe; and
     though he knew very well what that meant, notwithstanding he made
     no sign, but went on his way to the Chamber, as one who cannot
     avoid his fate. Then, suddenly, he was seized by the arms and legs
     by ten or a dozen of the Quarante-Cinq ambushed behind the arras,
     and by them stabbed and murdered, uttering among other lamentable
     cries this last, which was plainly heard, ‘God! I am dying! My
     sins have found me out. Have mercy on me!’ Over his poor body they
     flung a mean carpet, and there he lay exposed to the gibes and
     indignities of them of the Court, who hailed him ‘fair King of
     Paris’--the King’s name for him.”


Detail like that must have been got at first hand. When he comes to
the Cardinal, he contents himself by saying that he was despatched in
the Capuchin Convent on Christmas Eve. But the account of the Duke
carries conviction. L’Estoile had a friend at Blois--an official of the
Council, or an usher of the door. Though there is pity in his words,
“Sur ce pauvre corps fut jetté un meschant tapis,” his judgment was not
disturbed. His account closes with the stern words,


     “Et ici finist le règne de Nembrot le Lorrain.”


Henry being what he was, and whose son he was, it was plain to him that
the only thing to do with the head, and crownable head, of the League
was to remove it. After the Saint-Bartholomew murder was a recognised
arm of kingship, a sort of _jus regale_, in France. But Catherine de
Médicis, who taught her sons the uses of the dagger and the dark, was
not consenting to this particular use of them. Her worthless son might
be the last of the Valois; but she dreaded the first of the Bourbons
much more than the extinction of her own race; and when Henry was
fool enough to boast, “Now I am the only King,” and (says L’Estoile)
“began immediately to be less of one than ever,” she, sickening of
such inanity, took to her bed, and died in it on the 5th of January
following the _coup d’état_.


A year later the League gave the counterstroke. Henry was murdered
at Blois by its creature, Clément the Jacobin: “poorly and miserably
slain,” says L’Estoile, “in the flower of his age, in the midst of
his garrison, surrounded, as always, by guards; in his chamber, close
to his bed, by a little rapscallion of a monk, with a jerk of his
nasty little knife.” The thing was miraculously simple, a touch-and-go
which just came off. Clément asked for an audience, was refused: Henry
heard of it and insisted on seeing him. The man was let in, found his
victim undressed and at disadvantage, gave him a letter, and while he
was reading, drove a knife into his bowels and left it there. He was
himself killed on the spot, having done what the League intended, and
more than that by a good deal. L’Estoile notes it at the moment: “The
King of Navarre is made King of France by the League.” So he was.

Civil war followed: Paris in the grip of the Seize, with the Duc de
Mayenne as Regent for the League. L’Estoile lost his appointment; for
the Chancery followed the King, and he himself could not. A Court of a
kind was maintained in the city, and he, in order to live, was forced
to serve the Seize, whom he detested and feared. He had good reason for
that. Famine and pestilence were on all sides of him, and treachery
and suspicion--under the bed, at the street corners, in the churches,
wherever people came together--and the gibbet expecting its daily
tribute. When the news came in of Arques or Ivry, of the capitulation
of Chartres or what not, it was as much as your neck was worth to be
seen to smile. Lists of names went about--you might see your own on
it any day. By a letter attached to it you could know your portion.
P. stood for _pendu_, D. for _dagué_, C. for _chassé_. L’Estoile
saw his own, with D. against it. He went in fear, naturally, but I
think he was more scandalised than afraid when they began their new
Saint-Bartholomew by hanging the President of the Council, Brisson,
and two of his fellow members. It took place in prison, and L’Estoile,
though he was not present, reports the manner of it, and the harangues
of the victims. His conclusion is good enough: “Thus, on this day,
a First President of the Court was hanged--by his clerk.” The King,
he hears, “gossant à sa manière accoustoumée,” said that he had no
better servants in all Paris than the Seize, who did his business for
him better than anything they did for their masters, and cost him no
doubloons neither.

Meantime the city was beleaguered, and very soon hungry. Cauldrons
of broth and boiled horse were set up at street-corners, and people
fought each other to get at them; bread was made of oats and bran, and
doled out by pennyweights as long as it lasted. When they had eaten
all the horses they came to the dogs, then to the cats. The siege was
maintained, the people starved. They ate tallow, dog-skin, rat-skin,
cat-skin. They made bread of men’s bones from the cemeteries; they
hunted children--L’Estoile has no doubts; many lay still, awaiting the
mercy of death. “The only things which went cheap in Paris,” he says,
“were sermons, where they served out wind to the famished people,
giving them to understand that it was very pleasing to God to die of
starvation--yea, and far better to kill one’s children than to admit
a heretic as king.” A man, he says, came to his door to beg a crust
of him to save a child’s life. While L’Estoile was fetching the bread
the baby died, in the father’s arms. He himself sent away his wife and
infant son to Corbeil: the leaguer had been raised for that purpose,
and many took advantage of the grace. Unfortunately Corbeil was taken
by the Spaniards, and his people held to ransom. There were fierce
riots; but the Seize knew that their own necks were in peril (as proved
to be true), and held out. Finally, after the farce of conversion
solemnly enacted, Henry entered his good town. As a last resource
the League had ordered the descent and procession of the Châsse of
Ste-Geneviève a few days before. L’Estoile gives the warrant in full,
with this note in addition: “Its virtue was shown forth, five days
afterwards, in the reduction of Paris.” He always girded at the Châsse.
It was brought down in July 1587 to make the rain stop. “She did no
miracle, though liberally assisted. The moon before had been a rainy
one, and they brought her down on the fifth of the new moon when there
was promise of a little fine weather. Nevertheless, it began to rain
harder than ever the next day.” He called Madame Sainte-Geneviève Diana
of the Parisians.

Well, the Béarnois came in, and heard _Te Deum_ at Notre Dame. He
made a torchlight entry, dressed in grey velvet, with a grey hat
and white _panache_. His face was “fort riant”; his hat always in
his hand to the ladies at the windows, particularly to three, “very
handsome, who were in mourning, and at a window high up, opposite
Saint-Denys-de-la-Chartre.” L’Estoile must have seen that, and admired
the ladies. And he certainly saw--he says so--the reception of Mesdames
de Nemours and Montpensier. They were held up by the passing of troops,
and put out of countenance by the insolence of the bystanders, who
“stared them full in the face without any sign of knowing who they
were.” And that to Madame de Montpensier--“Queen-Mother” to Paris
besieged!

Next day Henry played tennis all the afternoon, and hazard all night;
but L’Estoile loved that king without approving of him. His tales tell
for him and against, his esteem rises and falls. He liked his easy
manners, his old clothes, his _Ventre-Saint-Gris_, his cynicisms and
mocking humour. He does not seem to think the monarchy let down by such
_sans façon_. Anyhow, there it is; and two things are made clear by
the diary--first, that Henry was not the good fellow he is generally
reputed, and second, that he was not then thought to be so. He himself,
may be, had been too much knocked about by the world to have any
illusions left him. There was an attempt against his life in 1595. The
people seemed frantic with delight at his escape. L’Estoile relates how
he went in procession to Notre Dame.


     “You never heard,” he says, “such approbation of a king by his
     people as was given that day to our good Prince whenever he showed
     himself. Seeing it, a lord who was close to his Majesty, said to
     him, ‘Remark, sir, how happy are all your subjects at the sight of
     you.’ Shaking his head, the King replied, ‘That is the people all
     over. And if my greatest enemy was where I am now, and they saw
     him go by, they would do as much for him as for me, and shout even
     louder than they are doing now.’”


No, there were no rose-coloured curtains between Henry of Navarre and
this transitory life. He did not even pretend to approve of himself;
and if he was ashamed, as it seems he was, of his amorous entanglements
with the young Princesse de Condé, it is certain that they shocked
L’Estoile to the heart. When it comes to apologies there, there was no
spirit left in the respectable man. For this diarist was as moral as
our John Evelyn, and so far as I can find out on as good a foundation.
He could express himself on such matters with point. For instance:


     “Sunday the 12th February, which was Dimanche des Brandons, Madame
     had a splendid ballet at the Louvre, where nothing was forgotten
     that could possibly be remembered--except God.”


A sharper saying than Evelyn would have allowed himself. But it is
the fact, as I have said, that good King Henry was not found so good
living as dead. Afterwards--under Richelieu, under Mazarin, during
the Fronde, under the Edict of Nantes--by comparison he shone. During
his lifetime he had many more enemies and far fewer friends than was
supposed. The Maréchal D’Ornano, in 1609, told him in so many words
that he was not beloved by his people, and that a very little more on
the taxes would bring back the civil war. The King said that he knew
all that, and was ready for it. D’Ornano then said that he could not
advise rough measures. “I shall freely tell you, sir, that the late
King had more of the _noblesse_ for him than you have for yourself,
and more of the people too than you will have if there be trouble. For
all that, he was obliged to leave Paris and his own house to rebels
and mutineers, and the rest of us thought ourselves lucky to get off
with our heads on our shoulders.” L’Estoile had that from “a brave and
trustworthy gentleman” who was close by at the time. The gentleman said
that the King was at first moved to anger by D’Ornano’s plain speaking,
but thanked him for it afterwards.

Bad stories of King Henry are to be had for the asking; perhaps the
worst in L’Estoile is told in a poem which he picked up, and reports.
A Madame Esther had been the King’s mistress in La Rochelle, and had
borne him a son. The child died, the King tired, and forsook her. She
came to see him at Saint-Denis when he was busy, distracted, seeking
other game: he refused to see her or hear what she had to say. She
was ill, and died in the town where he actually was, and being of the
religion, a grave was denied her. What became of her body is not
known, but “they raised to her memory,” L’Estoile says, “the following
_Tombeau_ (epitaph), which was rehearsed at Saint-Denis and everywhere:


          “TOMBEAU DE MADAME ESTHER

     “Here Esther lies, who from Rochelle,
     Called by the King, her master, came,
     Risking the life of her fair fame
     With him to whom her beauty fell.

     “Faithful she was, and served him well,
     Bore him a son who had no name,
     And died: so then her lover’s flame
     Sought other kindling for a spell.

     “Forsaken, hitherward her steps
     Strayed, and to God she tuned her lips
     For mercy, dying so: but earth

     “Was closed against her. Ah, it’s bad--
     No yard of all his lands and worth
     For her who gave him all she had!”


A touching and simple piece. It should have gone home to a man whose
intentions were always better than his inclinations, yet always gave
way to them. The end of him, sudden and shocking as it was, can have
surprised nobody. He had enemies everywhere, and few friends. The
Catholics had never believed in him, the Protestants had ceased to
believe in him. The day before his last he had had Marie de Médicis
crowned with all the forms, though unwillingly. L’Estoile was there,
and observed two notable facts: “the first was that it had been thought
proper, on account of the subject-matter, to change the gospel of the
day, which is from Mark x--“_And the Pharisees came to him, and asked
him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, tempting him._” That
sounds to me a little too apt to be likely.

“The other was that at the _largesse_ of gold and silver coins, which
is usual at coronations of kings and queens, there was never a cry
_Vive le Roy_, nor yet a _Vive la Reine_--which, it was remarked, had
never happened but at this coronation.” His next entry relates to the
assassination:


     “_Luctus ubique, pavor, et plurima mortis imago_,” is his
     conclusion of it all: “the shops are shut; everyone goes weeping
     or holding up his hands, great and small, young and old; women and
     maids pluck at their hair. The whole town is very quiet: instead
     of running for arms we run to our prayers, and make vows for
     the health and welfare of the new king. The fury of the people,
     contrary to the expectation and intent of the wicked, is turned
     upon the infamous parricide and his accomplices, seeking only to
     ensue vengeance and to have it.”


_De mortuis!_ That is always the way. And distrusting the Queen as he
plainly did, and abhorring Concini, not the first, and not the best,
of the implanted Italians, there is little wonder at the diarist’s
dismay. He goes on, without circumlocution, to lay the crime at the
door of the “Society of Judas,” as he calls a famous companionship,
a society to whose new church the King’s heart had been promised, by
whose means, he as good as says, it was now obtained. Not without
scandal, it was presently conveyed there.

Enormous crowds viewed the king’s body, which lay in state in the
Louvre. The Jesuits were among the first to come; he says:


     “Class them as you please: everybody knows the maxim they preach,
     that it is lawful to kill the king who suffers two religions
     in his realm. Nevertheless (_vultibus compositis ad luctum_)
     they played affliction above everyone. Father Cotton, with an
     exclamation truly smacking of the Court and the Society, ‘Who is
     the villain,’ cries he, ‘to have killed this good prince, this
     pious, this great king? Was it not a Huguenot, then?’ They tell
     him, No, it was a Roman Catholic. ‘Ah, deplorable, if it be so!’
     he says, and signs himself with three great crosses. Someone
     present, who had overheard him, was himself overheard to say, ‘The
     Huguenots don’t play those tricks.’”


But the Society took the heart to Notre-Dame-de-Boulogne.

L’Estoile survived to see the little king in Paris. He watched him
benevolently always, and has tales to tell of him, of which the
prettiest is about Pierrot, a village boy of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
When Louis had been there as Dauphin, Pierrot used to play with him;
and now that he was King, and at the Tuileries, he had the notion of
going to see him.


     “The King was playing down by the lake, with a fine company about
     him; but as soon as he was aware of Pierrot, his old play-fellow
     (who still called him M. le Dauphin, and to those who reproved
     him, swore his round Mordienne that he did not know what else to
     call him), he left them all where they were to go to Pierrot, into
     whose arms he flew, and kissed him in the face of everybody. He
     told M. de Souvrai that they must find clothes for his friend the
     very next day, so that he might stay with him, but Pierrot said he
     could not do that, but must go home for fear of being beaten. His
     father and mother had not been willing to let him go--but he had
     gone for all that, and had brought M. le Dauphin (he called him) a
     present of some sparrows.”


“Simplicité rustique,” L’Estoile calls it, and praises Louis for going
half-way to meet it. He is then very near the end of his record, and of
his earthly tether too.

Misfortunes were gathered thickly about the honest man. He was out of
his employment through age; money was very short with him. He sold
his collections piecemeal, and was glad to make fifty francs or so
here and there. He does not name the most serious of his ailments,
but I fear that it was malignant, and put recovery out of the case.
In September 1610, feeling himself in extremities, he demanded the
Sacrament, and it became a question of confession. Father des Landes,
a Jacobin and a friend of his, was chosen for the office, and demanded
of him a protestation that he would die in the Catholic, Apostolic,
Roman faith. The first two--yes, said L’Estoile; but boggled over the
third. He relates the course of the argument which he held with the
Jacobin. It branched off, as they will, into all sorts of side issues:
invocation of the Saints, Council of Trent, errors of the Popes, and
what not. He comes as near as he ever does here to putting down what
he really did--or at least what he really did not--believe. He was an
eclectic, but desperate of remedy. He would have seen the Reformed
Church Catholic, and the Catholic reformed. But that, he is aware, is a
counsel of perfection. “Three things forbid: lack of charity, lack of
zeal for the glory of God, and stubbornness, which is the last trench
of the ignorant.” And he concludes on the whole matter: “I shall hold
on then to that old stock, rotten as it is, of the Papacy. The Church
is in it, though it is not the Church.” And thereupon he had his
absolution and the Sacrament. Father des Landes was a liberal-minded
Jacobin.

I have fallen into the old easy way of confounding historical persons
and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine.
I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or
with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters
which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not
record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the
Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing
an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to
beat--not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In
London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the
end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and
strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you
were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was
reserved for heresy: for _lèse-majesté_ there was death by horses--four
of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch,
at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes
were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit.
Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in
our country. The _mignons_ quarrelled in companies. That happened when
Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in
the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright;
Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered
for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and
kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had
himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says
L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as
this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the
Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the
League.” No doubt that is true.

Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th,
1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars,
and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André
was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares
nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap,
however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de
rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last
agony.




LA BRUYÈRE


If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is
not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good
word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then
nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue
lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy
summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La
Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me
your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them
to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote,
for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read
too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table.
You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had
better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the
entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always
find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and
it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be
“divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things
as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us
down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not
necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the
rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the
pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no
motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but
inseparable from the aphoristic method.

In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims
with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate.
La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot
call him cynical; he is a _censor morum_. He combines the methods of La
Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first
because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than
the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the
same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his
wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In _Les Caractères_ is but
one paragraph of unstinted praise; the _Historiettes_ is full of them.
Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did.
It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did
if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had
been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and
to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man.
Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by
the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be.
Just in time he cancelled the passage. No--a writer had to be sure of
his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe,
indeed, in praising His Majesty.

His “pleasant” saying of Dangeau, as Saint-Simon calls it, that he was
not a grandee, but “after a grandee,” is typical of him, at once acute
and direct. It says more exactly what Dangeau was than a page. The
page is there too, but the few words shine out of it like an electric
light. It is as if he was talking round about his subject, seeking the
best aspect of it, and then, suddenly, with a pointing finger, you
get “_Pamphilius_ in a word desires to be a great man, and believes
himself to be one; but he is not; he is after a great man.” The rest
of the page goes for little. It is Thackerayan, as we should say.
Whether Thackeray owed anything directly to La Bruyère I am not able to
determine; but he owed a fair amount to Steele, who assuredly did.


If La Bruyère had desired to learn the worst of mankind he could not
have been trained in a better school than that which he found for
himself. He had been one of the Accountants-General in the Bureau
of Finance at Caen for a few years when M. le Prince--le Grand
Condé--called him to Chantilly to be tutor--one of several--to his
grandson the Duc de Bourbon. There, and at Versailles, he remained
for the rest of his life, and at Versailles he died. Of Condé, of
Henri-Jules, his terrible son, and of the grandson, “very considerably
smaller than the smallest of men,” as Saint-Simon declares him, and
very considerably more of a degenerate than most men, this learned,
accurate, all-observant, deeply-meditating man was content to be the
servant and the butt. When his pupil left his hands he stayed on as
“gentleman” to the father, who was in his turn M. le Prince. Prince as
he was, he was also, quite simply, a wild beast, biting mad; and his
son was little better: a pervert and proud of it, crafty, malicious,
tyrannical, and “extremely ferocious.” One does not know how life with
such masters can have been tolerable. La Bruyère was both neglected
and despised. He had nothing to do, for even as “gentleman” he was
a supernumerary--yet he must be there. To understand it you must
accept the _sang royal_ in its fullest implications. His book, which
yielded eight editions in his lifetime, went for nothing at Chantilly,
though the King himself had heard of it, and had his harangue at the
Academy read to him at Marly. Yet one of the inmates of Chantilly
(Valincourt), while admitting that “La Bruyère meditated profoundly
and agreeably, two things which are rarely found together,” went on
to say that “he was a good fellow at bottom, whom, however, the fear
of seeming pedantic had thrown into its ridiculous opposite ... with
the result that during all the time he spent in the household of M.
le Duc, in which he died, he was always held for a figure of fun.”
It seems that he tried to be sprightly, would dance, put on airs and
graces, make jokes, and walk on his toes. We may regard all that
as protective colouring, the instinct of the creature to hide his
continual mortifications. Elsewhere--in Paris, naturally--he had made
himself a personage. His book sold, if not to his profit, very much to
his credit; he had made himself imposing enemies, and had the better
of them at every turn; Bossuet was his friend, Pontchartrain, Racine
and the like. He still held his sinecure office at Caen. Why, then, did
he hang about Chantilly, and lodge in an attic at Versailles when M.
le Prince was there? Who is to say? That particular prince was a human
tiger--but in his service he lived on, and died. I think he ought to
have put himself into his own book--and perhaps he did:


     “I see a man surrounded, and followed--he is in office. I see
     another man whom all the world salutes--he is in favour. Here is
     one caressed and flattered, even by the great--he is rich. There
     is another, observed curiously on all hands--he is learned. Here
     is another whom nobody omits to greet--a dangerous man.”


At any rate, his experiences provided that one of the shrewdest
sections of _Les Caractères_ is that headed “Of the Court.”


     “The Court does not satisfy; it prevents you from satisfaction
     anywhere else.

     “It is like a house built of marble: I mean that it is made up of
     men, very hard, but polished.

     “One goes there very often in order to come away again and be
     therefore respected by one’s country gentry, or the bishop.

     “The most honourable reproach which can be made against a man is
     to say of him that he knows nothing of the Court. In that one
     remark there are no virtues unimputed to him.

     “You speak well of a man at Court for two reasons: the first, that
     he may learn that you have done so; the second that he may so
     speak of you.

     “It is as dangerous at Court to make advances as it is awkward not
     to make them.”


The man who penned those caustic little sentences knew what he was
talking of. Yet La Bruyère’s portrait of himself sets him forth as a
creature apart, pointedly distinguishes him from _Clitiphon_, who has
been too busy to heed him.


     “O man of consequence and many affairs,” he says to _Clitiphon_,
     “when you in your turn have need of my good offices, walk into
     my lonely study. The philosopher is at your service, and will
     not put you off to another day. You will find him there, deep
     in Plato’s dialogues, dealing with the spiritual nature of the
     soul, distinguishing its essence from that of the body; or, pen
     in hand, calculating the distance from us of Jupiter or Saturn.
     I am adoring God in those books of his, seeking by knowledge of
     the truth to conduct my own spiritual part into better ways. Nay,
     come in, the door is open; there is no ante-chamber in which to be
     wearied while you wait. Come straight in, without announcement.
     You are bringing me something more to be desired than gold and
     silver if it is a chance of serving you. Speak then, what do you
     desire me to do for you? Am I to leave my books, studies, work,
     the very line which I am now penning? Happy interruption, which is
     to make me of service to you!”


Overwhelming invitation! The butter, you will agree, is spread too
thick. On another page he quotes the saying of the Roman patriarch,
that he had rather people should inquire why there was no statue to
Cato, than why there was one. But it had perhaps not occurred to Cato
as calculable that he might have to erect a statue to himself.

“Voilà de quoi vous attirer beaucoup de lecteurs, et beaucoup
d’ennemis,” said M. de Malezieu to La Bruyère on perusing _Les
Caractères_. There was no doubt about that. Although he set out with a
translation of Theophrastus, in going on to be a Theophrastus himself
the temptation to draw from nature was obvious, and not resisted.
Theophrastus generalised; he wrote of abstractions, Stupidity,
Brutality, Avarice and what not. If he had had instances in his head,
nobody knew what they were, and nobody cared. But La Bruyère did not
write of qualities: he wrote of things and of people--women, men,
the Court, the sovereign; and by his treatment of them in examples,
in short paragraphs, with italicised names, with anecdotes, snatches
of dialogue and other aids to attention, provided the quidnuncs with
a fascinating game. “Keys” sprang up like mushrooms in a night. The
guess-work was dangerously unanimous. The instances he had chosen
were recent: there could not be much doubt who were _Menalcas_ and
_Pamphilius_, _Clitiphon_ and _Arténice_. Three editions were called
for in 1688, a fourth in 1689, and then one a year until 1694. On the
whole he came off very lightly. The _Mercure Galant_ and its supporters
furiously raged together. But the King had been elaborately flattered,
and no harm came to La Bruyère.

_Les Caractères_ is a book both provocative and diverting, written in
the clear, sinewy, reasonable language of Pascal and Fénélon: by no
means without malice, but with a malice robbed of its virus by the
air of detachment which La Bruyère has been careful to give it. When
he pleases to be severe he uses the dramatic method. The portraits
interspersed with his judgments enable him to move more freely than La
Rochefoucauld. He is better, because livelier, reading, and the effect
is not so depressing. However, his debt cannot be denied. He would be
an acute critic who knew which was which in these:


     “A woman with but one lover believes that she is not a coquette:
     she who has several that she is only that.

     “A woman forgets of the man she no longer loves even the favours
     he has had of her.

     “In her first passion a woman loves her lover. In the others she
     loves love.”


Here is La Rochefoucauld at his best: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which
vice pays to virtue”; and here is La Bruyère when he chooses to sting:
“There is wanting nothing to an old lover from the woman who claims him
except the name of husband; but that is much. If it were not for that
he would be a thousand times lost.” As a rule he is more of a moralist
than the Duke, as here where his reflection flows from his axiom:


     “A woman unfaithful, if the interested party knows it, is just
     faithless; if he believes her true, she is false. This advantage
     at least accrues from a woman’s falsity, that you are cured of
     jealousy.”


The reflection flows, I say--but is it true? It is safe to say that the
man who generalises about women is as often wrong as right. “Women,” he
says, “are always in the extreme, better or worse than men”; and again,
“The generality of women have no principles. Their hearts direct them;
they depend for their conduct upon those they love.” I should say that
there were as many exceptions to those rules as examples of them. Then,
what of this: “It costs a woman very little to say something which she
does not feel; and a man still less to say something which he does”? It
needs La Bruyère himself to determine from that which of the sexes is
the more sentimental; but he leaves it there. I like the following, and
believe it to be entirely true:


     “It is certain that a woman who writes with transport is carried
     away, less so that she is touched. It would seem that a tender
     passion would render her mournful and taciturn; and that the most
     urgent need of a woman whose heart is engaged is less to persuade
     that she loves than to be sure that she is loved.”


The second term of that aphorism is an enlargement of the first. A
woman, he would say, really in love would hide it by instinct. Her need
is rather to be loved.

Try him on another tack. Here is a parallel with La Rochefoucauld.
The Duke says, “Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console
themselves for being no longer able to set bad examples.” La Bruyère’s
is equally sharp:

“A modern writer will generally prove to you that the ancients are
inferior in two ways--by reason and example. The reason will be drawn
from his own taste, and the examples from his own works.” Very neat
both, but I think La Bruyère’s has the more comic turn. If the Duke
had had less prudence, or more bitterness (with as much reason for
it), we might have been able to compare his treatment of _la Cour_.
But he hardly touches it. La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a
favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in
his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open;
if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from
the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I
shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man
can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or
be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a
brute and more of a good fellow.”

There is a note very familiar to us in this:


     “How comes it about that _Alciopus_ bows to me this morning,
     smiles, throws himself half-way out of the carriage window for
     fear of missing my eye? I am not a rich man--and I am on foot. By
     all the rules he ought not to have seen me. Is it not rather so
     that he himself may be seen in the same coach with a lord?”


Thackeray all over; but I don’t think Thackeray had it straight from
_Les Caractères_. The first translation into English was in 1699, and
by “Eustace Budgell, Esq.” There were many others--two, anonymous,
in 1700 and 1702, one by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, one by “H. Gally” in
1725. Was not Budgell one of the _Spectator’s_ men? Steele and Addison
both may have quarried in his version. Here is a specimen _Spectator_
paragraph:


     “_Narcissus_ rises in the morning in order that he may go to bed
     at night. He takes his time for dressing like a woman, and goes
     every day regularly to mass at the _Feuillants_ or the _Minims_.
     He is an affable fellow, who may be counted on in a certain
     quarter of the town to take a _tierce_ or a _cinquième_ at Ombre
     or Reversi. So engaged you will see him in his chair for hours
     on end at _Aricia’s_, where every evening he will lay out his
     five gold pistoles. He reads punctually the _Gazette de Hollande_
     and the _Mercure Galant_; he will have read his Cyrano, his des
     Marete, his Lesclache, Barbin’s story books, assorted poetry. He
     walks abroad with the ladies; he is serious in paying calls. He
     will do to-morrow what he does to-day and did yesterday; and after
     having so lived, so he will die.”


The sting in the tail is perhaps too sharp for Steele, though it is not
for Addison. You will find the former more exactly foreshadowed in
the fable of _Emira_, an insensible beauty of Smyrna, who finds that
she cannot love until she has first been jealous, and finds that out
too late. Style and handling are the very spit of Steele’s. I have not
seen the suggestion anywhere, and put it forward for what it may be
worth, that Budgell’s translation inspired our pair of essayists to hit
off friends and foes under the stock names of _Belinda_, _Sacharissa_,
_Eugenio_ and the like. The “portrait” had been a popular literary
form in France from the days of Richelieu; but it was new to England
when Addison and Steele went into journalism. Are there “keys” to the
_Spectator_ and _Tatler_? I suppose so.

Not all his portraits are malicious, not all of them so simple as
that of Narcissus; but some of them are really malignant. It is
safe to say that a man of whom Saint-Simon had nothing but good to
report, had nothing but good to be reported. Such a man was the Duc
de Beauvilliers. La Bruyère says of him that he was greedy after
office--exactly what he was not. The Comte de Brancas, who figures as
_Menalcas_, is very good fun. Brancas was the George Dyer of Paris and
his day, _distrait_ in ways which a knowledge of his time will excuse.
The best story of him, when he failed to see the Queen Mother using a
certain _prie-dieu_, and knelt on her, has been told. Another shows
him at home, putting down his book to nurse a grandchild; then, when a
visitor was announced, jumping to his feet, and flinging the baby on to
the floor, where he had just flung the book. There are dozens of such
tales, none of them ill-natured. Probably even La Bruyère could not
have been unkind to Brancas.

He is certainly more severe than Tallemant, but that is because he
will always introduce himself into the story, and always to his own
advantage. Tallemant never does that, but uses the historical method
invariably. A good example of La Bruyère’s intrusion is in his dealing
with a Lord Strafford of ours, a peer whom Saint-Simon calls “une
espèce d’imbécile,” and accuses of having 50,000 _livres de rentes_ in
England and spending them in Paris. La Bruyère calls him Philémon, and
strikes the attitude of Diogenes in his regard:


     “Gold, you tell me, glitters upon _Philémon’s_ coat? It glitters
     as keenly at the tailor’s. He is clothed in the finest tissue? Is
     it less well displayed in shop-lengths? But the embroideries, the
     enrichments make him splendid! I praise the needlewoman. But ask
     him the time, and he will pull out a masterpiece of a watch: the
     guard of his sword is of onyx; there is a diamond on his finger
     of a water ...! You have managed to make me curious at last. I
     must see these priceless things. Send me Philémon’s clothes and
     gimcracks. You may keep Philémon.”


That is the better part of it. In the next paragraph he turns to scold
the old lord, and calls him a fool in so many words. That is a mistake
of his. It is not playing the game of satire, but the kind of game
which is played at the street corner. On the same page is Harlay, the
very unepiscopal Archbishop of Paris, but only a part of him. He leaves
the bishop out of the question (as assuredly he was), and gives us the
courtier. Harlay was famous for his manners. _Theognis_, as he calls
him,


     “is careful of his appearance, goeth forth adorned like a woman.
     He is hardly out of doors before he has composed his looks and
     countenance so that he may appear all of a piece when he is in
     public, the same thing to all men. Passers-by are to find him
     graciously smiling upon them; and nobody must miss it. He goes
     into the corridor, turns to the right where everybody is, or to
     the left where there is no one: he will salute those who are
     there, and those who are not. He will embrace the first man he
     comes across and press his head to his bosom; then he will ask
     you who it was he was greeting. Perhaps you have need of him in
     some little business or other, you go to him, ask him to help.
     _Theognis_ lends you a ready ear, is overjoyed to be of use,
     implores you to find him other chances of serving your occasions.
     Then, when you urge your immediate affair, he will tell you that
     he cannot manage that; he will ask you to put yourself in his
     place, judge for yourself. So you take your leave, escorted to the
     door, caressed, and puzzled, but almost gratified to have been
     refused.”


That is excellent, done with a light-hearted malice worth all the
_coquins_, _fats_ and _sots_ in the world. But of all his “portraits”
by far the most agreeable is that of Madame de Boislandry, whom
he calls _Arténice_. It appears as a fragment in the section _Des
Jugements_, but I don’t think really belongs there. There is nothing
else like it; it has a gusto and charm of its own. Steele comes to mind
again, with his Lady Elizabeth Hastings. It must be my last example:


     “ ... He was saying that the mind of that beautiful person was
     like a well-cut diamond; and continuing his talk of her, ‘There
     is,’ he added, ‘a ray of reasonableness and charm in it which
     engages at once the eyes and the hearts of those who converse
     with her. One hardly knows whether one loves or admires: she has
     that in her to make her a perfect friend, and that too which
     might lead you beyond friendship. Too young and too lovely not
     to please, too modest to dream of it, she makes little account
     of men but upon their merits, and looks for no more from them
     than their friendship. Brimming over with life and quick to
     feel, she surprises and attracts; and while perfectly aware of
     the delicate shades and subtleties of the best conversation, she
     is yet capable of happy improvisations which among other charms
     have that of inspiring repartee. Her intercourse is that of one
     who, without learning of her own, is aware of it, and desires to
     inform herself; and yet she listens to you as one who, after all,
     knows a good deal, can appraise the worth of what you say and will
     lose nothing that you may choose to impart. Far from seeking to
     contradict you, she takes up your points, considers them as her
     own, enlarges and enhances them. You find yourself gratified to
     have thought them out so well and to have put them forward better
     than you had supposed....’”


There is more in that strain of intense appreciation, done by a writer
who knows that what he says of you is worth having, even if it be
flattery. La Bruyère had his reasons for flattering _Arténice_: it is
agreed that he was very fond of her. So were many others: she had her
adventures, though he did not share them. Evidently he knew that she
was not for him; for there is no tarnish of jealousy upon his praise.
He was one whom there were few to love, and he found very few to
praise. But he praised and loved Madame de Boislandry.


Although he became a person of consequence from the day his book was
out, he was not chosen to the Academy until 1693, and then not without
several postponements, considerable effort on the side of his friends
and strenuous opposition from Fontenelle and his partisans, whom he had
fustigated as Les Théobaldes in his _Caractères_. When he was in fact
chosen it was a very near thing. A M. de la Loubère, who blocked his
road, retired in his favour and transferred to him the suffrages of his
own supporters. For that generous act La Bruyère paid him a handsome
and a happy compliment in his address of reception:

“A father,” he said, “takes his son to the theatre: a great crowd, the
door besieged. But he is a tall man and a stout. He breaks a way to
the turnstile, and as he is on the point of passing in, puts the lad
before him, who, without that foresight, would either have come in late
or not come in at all.”

A pretty turn to give his gratitude! Apart from that he was
unnecessarily provocative. He went out of his way to praise Racine at
the expense of Corneille, which, seeing that Thomas Corneille was a
brother, and Fontenelle a nephew of the great man, and that both were
present was asking for trouble. Trouble there was--efforts to refuse
him inscription in the archives, a foaming attack in the _Mercure
Galant_, a plot to print and publish separately the address of his
co-nominee, and so on. But the Abbé Bignon stood by him; both addresses
were published together, La Bruyère’s with a fighting preface, and
inscription in the records followed.

In his preface he girds at his critics for not having seen what he
was driving at in _Les Caractères_. They had taken it, he says, for a
collection of aphorisms and sentences loosely assorted under headings,
with portraits here and there of distinguished persons, scandalous or
malicious as might be. They took it, in short, for a nosegay of flowers
of speech, selected more for their pungency than their fragrance,
relieved by foliage luxuriant enough, but beset with thorns. That was
not at all his own idea of it.

“Have they not observed,” he asks, “that of the sixteen chapters
comprised in it, there are fifteen which, applied to the discovery
of what is false and absurd in the objects of the passions and
attachments of mankind, aim only at breaking down the growths which
first enfeeble and presently extinguish the knowledge of God in
men--nothing therefore but preliminary to the sixteenth and last, in
which atheism is attacked, and possibly routed.”

I confess that if the critics had not detected all that in the plan
or content of Sections I-XV, there is much excuse for them. I am in
the same condemnation. It is true that those sections may be said to
attack false gods in general: folly, ostentation, vainglory, evil
concupiscence and such like. It is true that La Bruyère is a _censor
morum_, like many a man before him and since. But it is not at all
obvious that he is clearing a way by his analytic philosophy for a
synthetic which will seat the true God firmly on his throne in the
heart. Nor is the effort to do that conspicuous. “I feel that there
is a God,” he says in his sixteenth section, “and I do not feel that
there is no God. That is enough for me; all the reasoning in the world
is beyond the purpose: I conclude that God is.” Very good; but then,
why all the reasoning in the book? Pascal said the same thing, rather
better. “It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. That is faith:
God sensible to the heart, not to the reason.” It is probably as near
as one can go. But how does La Bruyère make it more pointed by what
has gone before? If you prove to demonstration that the goods of this
world are but vanity, does that of itself imply, first that there is
another world, whose goods (secondly) are not vain? Not at all. My
impression is that La Bruyère had no such large intention when he
began, and that if he had had it, he would have declared it in his
opening observations. He was moralist and satirist both; but as much of
one as the other. Character rather than characteristics attracted him,
as I think, and the sharp sentences he aimed at were more literary than
ethical. As for maxim-drawing, although he drew plenty, he expressly
disavowed it. “I ought to say that I have had no desire to write
maxims. Maxims are the laws of morality, and I own that I have neither
the authority nor the genius which would fit me to legislate.... Those,
in a word, who make maxims desire to be believed. I, on the other hand,
am willing that anyone should say of me that I have not always well
observed, provided that he himself observe better.”

And the last sentence in the book is this: “If these _Caractères_ of
mine are not relished I shall be surprised; and if they are I shall be
equally so.”

There is a pose in that; but it is a literary pose.


He did not live long to enjoy his academic dignity. He made but one
appearance at the table, and then supported the candidature of somebody
whose name was not before the assembly. His proposal was of Dacier
the classic, but he owned that he should prefer to see Madame Dacier
chosen. On the 10th of May 1696, just a month after Madame de Sévigné,
he died of apoplexy at Versailles. He had rooms in the Chateau opening
on to the leads--bedroom, book-closet, and dressing-room. The inventory
of his effects shows him to have been possessed of some three hundred
books. Very few of his letters exist: one to Ménage about Theophrastus,
one to Bussy, thanking him for his vote and sending him the sixth
edition of _Les Caractères_, others to Condé, of earlier date,
about the progress of his grandson. Two letters to him from Jérôme
Phélypeaux, the son of Pontchartrain, survive, which hint at a happy
relationship between the scholar and the young blade. Phélypeaux, who
was just one-and-twenty, chaffs the philosopher; calls him a “fort joli
garçon,” suspects him of being “un des plus rudes joueurs de lansquenet
qui soit au monde.” La Bruyère’s solitary letter to his young friend is
in a light-hearted vein too, chiefly about the weather.

It is so hot, he says, that yesterday he cooked a cake on his leads,
and an excellent cake. To-day it has rained a little. Then he plays the
fool very pleasantly. “Whether it will rain to-morrow, or whether it
won’t, is a thing, sir, which I could not pronounce if the health of
all Europe depended upon it. All the same, I believe, morally speaking,
that there will be a little rain; that when that rain shall have ceased
it will leave off raining, unless indeed it should begin to rain
again.” It is evidence of a sound heart that a learned man can write
so to a young friend; and as it is much better to love a man than not,
I close upon that frivolous, but happy note. La Bruyère was to live a
year more in his attic on the leads. Let us hope that he baked some
more cakes and wrote many more letters to young M. Phélypeaux.




COULEUR DE ROSE


Sainte-Beuve, in one of his early _Lundis_, tells a touching story
of Madame de Pompadour, the frail and pretty lady who was forced by
circumstances rather than native bent into becoming a Minister of
State, and one, at that, who had to measure swords with the great
Frederick of Prussia. At one stage of her career she had hopes of a
match between a daughter of her married state and a natural son of
Louis. There seemed to be the makings of a Duc du Maine in the lad,
of a Duchess consequently for her family. And that was the simple
objective of those of her faction who favoured the scheme. But her
own was simpler still. She spoke her real mind about it to Madame de
Hausset, her lady-in-waiting, from whose Mémoires Sainte-Beuve quotes
it.

“Un brevet de duc pour mon fils,” she said, “c’est bien peu; et c’est à
cause que c’est son fils que je le préfère, ma bonne, à tous les petits
ducs de la Cour. Mes petits enfants participeraient en ressemblance du
grand-père et de la grand’-mère, et ce mélange que j’ai l’espoir de
voir ferait mon bonheur un jour.”

Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame
de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with
the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home,
the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a
Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had a Mademoiselle Poisson
to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing
whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and
the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be
her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained
with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and
her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country,
were so many shifts to arrive--she and Louis together, hand in hand--at
some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so
unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.

Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately:
also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of
some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until
she had them--with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in
fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she was
_trompée_. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed
lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dine
_vis-à-vis_ at home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head
on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy
became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There
is the whole difference between two classes there--between Louis le
Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts--Sentiment and Curiosity;
between two ideals--Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly
all the essential difference that exists between men and women, the
active and the passive principle in human nature.

Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be
all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the
thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a
man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for
a symbol may be a sacrament--and that is a reality. The wedding-ring
is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those
who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need.
To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor
sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme--the Pursuit
of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a
mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued
successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having
caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last
of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if
he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been
well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are
realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing
the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal
to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide
which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed
him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for
her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and
left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned,
broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once
more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for
him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support
her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the
nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough
indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.

I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr.
Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he
has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into
something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We
have had _Science from an Easy-Chair_, and none the worse for being
so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s
_Rose and Rose_ a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and
an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true,
by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up
into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man
whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other
candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the
doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her
husband, without being a prig--he had not enough colour for that--was a
precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had
not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s
education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good
cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay
the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and
honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at
least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at
all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular
seems to have happened--except one thing--Rose I ups and elopes with
the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had
known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had
nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his
teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you
were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear
until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his
teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and
had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received
back with a beating heart his Rose I.

A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair
and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit
of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr.
Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least
resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like
them--which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much
further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous
children to the _Enfants Trouvés_. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon
pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, until
she came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if
you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they
all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It
could not be while women were women.

The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are
against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the
middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many
marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in
the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair,
with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.




ART AND HEART

GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT


Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was
never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in
the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by
Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far
apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the
better man.

Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than
by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist,
the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will
stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He
made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As,
once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the
gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists
and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world
at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the
workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon
them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He
would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their
secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as
a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select
Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not
even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension.
It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an
outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what
your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting
word or _nuance_; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such
was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the
moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France
saw him in 1873:


     “I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour
     hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand
     bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the
     honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal
     councillors of Rouen.”


That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with
George Sand.

And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her
vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked
over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten
Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written
a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand
love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored,
a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a
novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with
her nose; she of _Elle et Lui_, of _Consuelo_ and _Valentine_ and
_François le Champi_--how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of
Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years
to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose?
The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her
capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before.
Affectionately--to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre
enfant” or her “cher vieux”--but she could poke fun at him too. She
used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his
attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire
Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:


     “I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie,
     of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am
     well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance
     for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal
     sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to
     dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who
     squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities,
     Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”


A delicious letter to write and to receive.

With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall
at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.”
_Madame Bovary_ hurt her because it was heartless. She understood
the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless
analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her
references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned,
not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it
was cruel. She thought _L’Education Sentimentale_ a failure; ugly
without being reasonable:


     “All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing,
     except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached
     with ... when people do not understand us it is always our
     fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M.
     Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his
     thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the
     highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one
     attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim
     with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his
     work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”


Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your
heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be
written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a
great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s
history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the
making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.

But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was
diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like
smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was
no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the
senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all _à sa manière_:


     “I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why
     didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not
     consoled! I have no hope!”


And in another letter:


     “Ah! dear and good master, _if you could only hate!_ That is what
     you lack--hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and
     touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”


Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old
priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out,
thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates
and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:


     “What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that
     I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible,
     hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?...
     You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the
     priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier
     a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The
     people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people
     cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of
     apostasy....”


That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem
as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible
than that of 1870:


     “We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much
     as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its
     moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It
     will move very quickly.... _Well, the moral abasement of Germany
     is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to
     return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will
     not give us back her life._”


Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:


     “Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or
     we are lost.”


She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a
sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might
have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will
be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired
her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world
is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear
from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It
served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of
life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George
Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no
doubt at all, though, of her manliness.




A NOVEL AND A CLASSIC

LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES


The first novelist in the world as we know it (I say nothing of the
Greeks and Romans) was, I believe, a Pope--Pius II. It is not what
we have come to expect from the Vatican; but his novel, I ought to
add, was “only a little one.” The second, if I don’t mistake, was
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who did the thing on a large scale. _Artamène,
ou Le Grand Cyrus_ is in twenty volumes; and though men be so strong
(some of them) as to have read it, it is not unkind to say that, for
the general, it is as dead as King Pandion. “Works,” then, won’t secure
more for an author than his name in a dictionary. You must have quality
to do that. The little _Princesse de Clèves_, written by a contemporary
of Mademoiselle’s, all compact in a small octavo of 170 pp., has
quality. First published in 1678, at this hour, says Mr. Ashton, in
his study of its author,[2] “there are preparing simultaneously an art
edition, a critical edition, and an édition de luxe, to say nothing of
the popular edition, which has just appeared.” Here is “that eternity
of fame,” or something like it, hoped for by the poet. I suppose the
nearest we can approach to that would be _Robinson Crusoe_.

The authoress of the little classic was Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La
Vergne, who was born in 1634. She was of _petite noblesse_ on both
sides, but her mother’s remarriage to the Chevalier Renaud de Sévigné
lifted her into high society, and brought her acquainted with the
incomparable Marquise. If it had done nothing else for her, in doing
that it served two delightful women, and the world ever after. But it
did more. It procured for Mlle. de La Vergne her entry to the Hôtel
de Rambouillet; it gave her the wits for her masters; it gave her the
companionship of La Rochefoucauld; and it gave _us_ the Princesse de
Clèves. She married, or was married to, a provincial seigneur of so
little importance that everybody thought he was separated from his wife
some twenty years before he was. When separation did come, it was only
that insisted on by death; and through Mr. Ashton’s diligence we now
know when he died. Nothing about him, however, seems to matter much,
except the bare possibility that the relations between him, his wife,
and La Rochefoucauld, which may have been difficult and must have been
delicate, may also have given Madame de Lafayette the theme of her
novels.

She wrote three novels altogether, and it is a curious thing about them
that they all deal with the same subject--namely, jealousy. Love, of
course, the everlasting French triangular love, is at the bottom of
them: inclination and duty contend for the heroine. But the jealousy
which consumes husband and lover alike is the real theme. Only in
the _Princesse de Clèves_ is the treatment fresh, the subject deeply
plumbed, the _dénoument_ original and unexpected. Those valuable
considerations, and the eloquence with which they are brought to bear,
may account for its instant popularity. It has another quality which
recommends it to readers of to-day--psychology. To a surprising extent,
considering its epoch, it does consider of men and women from within
outwards--not as clothes-props to be decked with rhetoric, but as
reasonable souls in human bodies, and sometimes as unreasonable souls.

Here’s the story. Mademoiselle de Chartres, a high-born young beauty
of the Court of Henri II--is there any other novel in the world the
name of whose heroine is never revealed?--is married by her mother in
the opening pages to the Prince de Clèves, without inclination of her
own, or any marked distaste. The prince, we are told, is “parfaitement
bien fait,” brave, splendid, “with a prudence which is not at all
consistent with youth.” I do not learn that he was, in fact, a youth.
All goes well, nevertheless, until the return to Court of a certain Duc
de Nemours, a renowned breaker of hearts, more brave, more splendid,
more “bien fait,” and much less prudent, certainly, than the Prince de
Clèves. He arrives during a ball at the Louvre; Madame de Clèves nearly
steps into his arms by accident; their eyes meet; his are dazzled, hers
troubled, and the seed is sown. For a space of time she does not know
that she loves, or guess that _he_ does: the necessary discoveries are
provided for by some very good inventions. An accident to Nemours in a
tournament, in the trouble which it causes her, reveals him the truth;
his stealing of her picture, which she happens to witness, reveals it
to her.

Discovery of the state of affairs, naturally, spurs the young man;
but it terrifies the lady. Greatly agitated, she prevails upon her
unsuspecting lord to take her into the country. Nemours follows them,
as she presently learns. Then, when her husband insists on her return
with him to Paris and the daily intercourse with the person she dreads,
driven into a corner, she confesses that she dare not obey him, since
her heart is not her own. Nothing will induce her to say more; and
the prince, disturbed as he is, is greatly touched by the nobility
and candour of her avowal. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to
be touched; for Nemours, who had been on the point of paying a visit
to his enchantress, stands in the ante-room and overhears the whole
conversation. He knew it all before, no doubt--but wait a moment. He is
so exalted by the sense of his mistress’s virtue that, on his way back
to Paris, he casts the whole story into a tale of “a friend” of his,
but with such a spirit of conviction thrilling in his tones, that it is
quite easy for him who receives it to be certain that “the friend” was
Nemours himself. That is really excellent invention, quite unforced,
and as simple as kissing. Naturally the tale is repeated, and puts
husband and wife at cross-purposes, since it makes either suspect the
other of having betrayed the secret. More, it tells the husband the
name of his wife’s lover. Further misunderstandings ensue, and last of
all, the husband dies of it. I confess that that seems to me rather
stiff. Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not the worms of
jealousy.

The end of the book is perfectly original. When her grief and remorse
have worn themselves out, what is to prevent the lovers coming
together? A curious blend in her of piety and prudence, which again
seems to me very reasonable. Madame de Clèves feels that, practically,
Nemours was the death of her husband. He had not meant to be, did not
suspect that he was: she knows that, and allows that time might work
in his favour. “M. de Clèves,” she admits, “has only just expired,
and the melancholy object is too close at hand to allow me to take a
clear view of things.” Leave all that to time, then, by all means. But,
says she, at this moment “I am happy in the certainty of your love;
and though I know that my own will last for ever, can I be so sure of
yours? Do men keep their passion alight in these lifelong unions? Have
I the right to expect a miracle in my favour? Dare I put myself in the
position of seeing the certain end of that passion which constitutes
the whole of my happiness?” M. de Clèves, she goes on, was remarkable
for constancy--a lover throughout his married life. Was it not probable
that that was precisely because she did not at all respond? “You,” she
tells the young man, “have had many affairs of the heart, and will no
doubt have more. I shall not always be your happiness. I shall see you
kneel to some other woman as now you kneel to me.” No--she prefers him
to dangle, “always to be blest!” “I believe,” she owns, with remarkable
frankness, “that as the memory of M. de Clèves would be weakened
were it not kept awake by the interests of my peace of mind, so also
those interests themselves have need to be kept alive in me by the
remembrance of my duty.” This lady would rather be loved than love, it
is clear; but how long M. de Nemours would continue to sigh, being
given so unmistakably to understand that there would be nothing to sigh
for, is not so well established.

He was very much distressed, but she would not budge. “The reasons that
she had for not marrying again appeared to her strong on the score of
duty, insurmountable on that of repose.” So she retired to a convent,
“and her life, which was not a long one, left behind her an example of
inimitable virtues.”

So far as we are concerned to-day, the _Princesse de Clèves_ lives
upon its psychological insight. But for that I don’t see how it could
possibly have survived. It is a recital, in solid blocks of narrative
interspersed with harangues. It is extremely well-written in a terse,
measured style of the best tradition; Love is its only affair; nobody
under the rank of a Duke is referred to; as Horace Walpole said of
Vauxhall in its glory, the floor seems to be of beaten princes. None of
these excellencies are in its favour to-day. Why then does it exist?
Because it exhibits mental process logically and amusingly; and because
it offers a fresh and striking aspect of a situation as old as Abraham.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] _Madame de Lafayette: La vie et ses Œuvres_, par H. Ashton.
Cambridge University Press.




THE OTHER DOROTHY


Two Dorothys in our literature showed themselves worthy of a name
declaratory of so much. Dorothy Osborne was one, Dorothy Wordsworth,
much more famous, was another. If I were teacher of the Sixth Form in
a girls’ school I should take my class methodically through the pair,
satisfied that if I did my duty by them it would have as fair a view
of the moral and mystical philosophy of its sex as needs could ask
or require. The text-books exist; little but appreciation could be
expected from the teacher. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Letters and Journals
fill the better part of three small volumes. They need but little
annotation, save cross-references to her brother’s poems, and to
Coleridge’s. She was the muse of those two, and had perhaps more of
the soul, or substance, of poetry in her than either. They informed
what she taught them, and she taught them through the great years.
Of the two Dorothean voices hers was of the heights. More beautiful
interpretation of nature hardly exists in our tongue. “She tells us
much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she sees
deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not only
that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour and
lovely living; it is to learn that human life can be so lived, and to
conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.” If I quote
from a paragraph of my own about her, it is only to save myself from
saying the same thing in other words. It is the only thing to say of a
woman long enskied and sainted by her lovers.

Dorothy Osborne, whose little budget of seventy-seven letters and a
few scraps more has been exquisitely edited by the late Judge Parry,
did not dwell apart: starry as she was, she was much before her world.
She was daughter of a stout old cavalier, Sir Peter, and shared with
him the troubles of Civil War and sequestration of goods under the
Commonwealth. For six years, also, she was the lover and beloved of
William Temple, whom, until the end of that term, she had little hope
or prospect of marrying. Her father and his had other ideas of the
marriage of their children, and means of carrying them out. Sir Peter
Osborne had lost heavily by his defence of Guernsey for the King, and
sought to re-establish himself in the settlement of Dorothy. Sir John
Temple gave his son an allowance and was not disposed to increase it,
except for a handsome equivalent from the other side. When Sir Peter
died it was no better. Dorothy’s brothers brought up suitor after
suitor, of whom Henry Cromwell, the Protector’s second son, was the
most formidable, and Sir Justinian Isham, an elderly widower, with
four daughters older than herself, the most persistent. She was fairly
beset; and when she made her guardians understand that her heart was
fixed, the truth came out that they disliked and distrusted William
Temple. They doubted his principles, accused him of being sceptical in
religion, and (not without cause) of lukewarmness in politics. Temple
was a prudent youth, and was already on the fence, which he rarely
left all his life. During the Commonwealth he was a good deal abroad,
but whether abroad or at home, neither for the King nor his enemies.
He was moderately educated--Macaulay says that he had no Greek--but it
may have been too much for the Osbornes. Possibly he gave himself airs,
though Dorothy did not think so. However it was, the lovers could only
meet by accident, and must correspond under cover. That correspondence,
a year and a half of it, is all we have of her writing, and good as it
is, the thing it does best of all is to measure the extent of our loss.
Love-letters apart--and there must have been the worth of five years or
more of them lost--she was writing, we hear, at one time weekly to her
bosom-friend, Lady Diana Rich, a beauty of whose mind she had as high
an opinion as of her person. All that has gone. Later, when she had
been many years married, she made another close friend in Queen Mary
II, but the letters which went to her address in what a relative of
Dorothy’s describes as a “constant correspondence,” letters which were
greatly admired for their “fine style, delicate turn of wit and good
sense,” are supposed to have been burnt among her private papers just
before the Queen died. So they have gone too, and with them what chance
we may have had--as I think, a fair chance--of possessing ourselves of
a native Madame de Sévigné. It does not do, and is foolish, to press
might-have-beens too far, if only because you cannot press them home.
How are you to set off seventy-odd letters, for one thing, against
seventeen hundred? There are obvious parallels, however, with Madame
de Sévigné which there is no harm in remarking. She and Dorothy were
almost exactly coevals. Both were born in 1627; Madame died in 1696,
Miladi Temple (as she became) in 1695. Each was well-born, each had
one absorbing attachment, each was handsome. Dorothy, in the portrait
prefixed to the _Wayfarer_ edition, has a calm, grave face, remarkable
for its broad brow, level-gazing, uncompromising eyes, and fine Greek
nose, not at all a “petit nez carré.” She looks, as her letters prove
her to have been, a young woman of character and breeding. She does not
show the enchanting mobility of Madame de Sévigné, nor can she have
had it. At any rate, she was a beautiful woman, whose conversation, as
I judge, would have been distinguished by originality and a “delicate
turn of wit,” as her letters certainly are. Further resemblances, if
there are any, must be sought in the documents, to which I shall now
turn.


We are to read a woman’s love-letters, always “kittle work,” however
long ago the pen has fallen still, whether they are the letters of a
fond mother to her child or of a girl to her sweetheart; yet there is
no reason why we should shrink from the one intrusion and make light
of the other. Indeed, of the two, it is Madame de Sévigné who displays
the pageant of her bleeding heart, and is able more than once to make
the judicious grieve, and even the injudicious uncomfortable. There
was nothing of the “jolie païenne” in Dorothy Osborne. She served no
dangerous idolatry. There is not a phrase in her touching and often
beautiful letters, not even in those where her heart wails within
her and the sound of it enfolds and enhances her words--not there,
even, is there a word or a phrase which imperils her maiden dignity.
She loved, in her own way of speaking, “passionately and nobly.” It
is perfectly true. At all times, under all stresses, her nobility
held her passion bitted and bridled. She rode it on the curb, not, as
was Madame’s delightful weakness, “la bride sur le cou.” Her extreme
tenderness for the man she loved is implicit in every line. Nobody
could mistake; but when, man-like, he seemed to demand of her more and
ever more testimony, she was not to be turned further from her taste in
expression than from “dear” to “dearest.” Towards the end of the long
probation--and in our seventy-seven letters we have, in fact, the last
year and a half of it--a certain quickening of the pulse is discernible
in her writing, a certain breathlessness in the phraseology. “Dear!
Shall we ever be so happy, think you? Ah! I dare not hope it,” she
writes to him in one of the later letters, and cutting short the
formalities, ends very plainly, “Dear, I am yours.” Nothing more ardent
escapes her throughout, yet in that very frugality of utterance,
never was exalted and faithful love made more manifest. When--as did
happen--misunderstandings were magnified by Temple’s jealousy, and
aggravated by her honesty, she was hurt and showed it. Separation then
seemed the only remedy; despair gave her eloquence, and we have for
once a real cry of the heart:

“If you have ever loved me, do not refuse the last request I shall ever
make you; ’tis to preserve yourself from the violence of your passion.
Vent it all upon me; call me and think me what you please; make me,
if it be possible, more wretched than I am. I’ll bear it without the
least murmur. Nay, I deserve it all, for had you never seen me you had
certainly been happy.... I am the most unfortunate woman breathing, but
I was never false. No; I call Heaven to witness that if my life could
satisfy for the least injury my fortune has done you ... I would lay it
down with greater joy than any person ever received a crown; and if I
ever forget what I owe you, or ever entertain a thought of kindness for
any person in the world besides, may I live a long and miserable life.
’Tis the greatest curse I can invent: if there be a greater, may I feel
it. This is all I can say. Tell me if it be possible I can do anything
for you, and tell me how I can deserve your pardon for all the trouble
I have given you. I would not die without it.”

Eloquent, fierce words, indignant, dry with offended honour, but
certainly not lacking in nobility. It is the highest note struck in the
series, and can hurt nobody’s delicacy to read now. Happily the storm
passed over, the sky cleared, and the sun came out. From the sounding
of that wounded note there is a _diminuendo_ to be observed. The very
next letter is lower in tone, though she has some sarcasms for him
which probably did him good. In the next but one: “I will not reproach
you how ill an interpretation you made (of the attentions of Henry
Cromwell), because we’ll have no more quarrels.” Nor did they, though
they were still a year off marriage. So much of the love affair which
called the letters into being I must needs have given. I shall not
refer to it again.

Her head went into her letters as well as her heart; and though love
was naturally the fount of her inspiration, she wrote as much to
entertain and enhearten her lover as to relieve herself. There is
enough literary quality in what we have left to make it a valuable
possession. It is by no means only to be learned from her with what
courage a seven years of star-crossed love may be borne; how gently
the fretting and chafing of a self-conscious man turned; how modesty
can veil passion without hiding it. At her discretion raillery can be
pungent without ceasing to be playful, and the rough and dirty currency
of the world handled without soiling her fingers, with a freedom bred
of innocence of thought. This still and well-bred Dorothy was a critic
of her day, and though she was pious had no fugitive and cloistered
virtue. All about her were living the survivors of a Court not quite so
profligate, perhaps, as that of the first or the third Stuart king, but
profligate enough. It was not the less so for being in hiding. She did
not approve of much that her acquaintance did, but she accepted it and,
as far as might be, excused it. “I am altogether of your mind,” she
writes, “that my Lady Sunderland is not to be followed in her marrying
fashion, and that Mr. Smith never appeared less her servant than in
desiring it. To speak truth, ’twas convenient for neither of them, and
in meaner people had been plain undoing of one another, which I cannot
understand to be kindness of either side. She had lost by it much of
the repute she had gained by keeping herself a widow; it was then
believed that wit and discretion were to be reconciled in her person
that have so seldom been persuaded to meet in anybody else. But we are
all mortal.” From that, which is temperate statement, go on to consider
a passage of temperate argument which is surely notable in a girl of
her age. She was twenty-six when she wrote:

“’Tis strange to see the folly that possesses the young people of this
age, and the liberties they take to themselves. I have the charity to
believe they appear very much worse than they are, and that the want
of a Court to govern themselves by is in great part the cause of their
ruin. Though that was no perfect school of virtue, yet vice there wore
her mask, and appeared so unlike herself that she gave no scandal. Such
as were really as discreet as they seemed to be gave good example, and
the eminency of their condition made others strive to imitate them,
or at least they durst not own a contrary course. All who had good
principles and inclinations were encouraged in them, and such as had
neither were forced to put on a handsome disguise that they might not
be out of countenance at themselves.”

Is that not excellent discourse upon the subject of “young people”
from a girl of six-and-twenty? Dorothy, it will be seen, writes the
modern as opposed to the seventeenth-century English, but does it
in mid-career of the century. Comparison with her contemporary, the
Duchess of Newcastle, is proof enough. “Madam,” writes that very
“blue” lady, “here was the Lord W. N. to visit me, whose discourse, as
you say, is like a pair of bellows to a spark of fire in a chimney,
where are coals or wood, for as this spark would sooner go out than
inkindle the fuel, if it were not blown, so his discourse doth set the
hearer’s brain on a light flame, which heats the wit, and inlightens
the understanding.” And so on--like a wounded snake. Dorothy, I think,
was almost the first to do what Milton never did, and what Dryden
was to make the standard of good prose. James Howell preceded her
slightly in that use, but was not so sure a hand at it. In cogency
and simplicity of expression hers is like good eighteenth-century
letter-writing. She apologises to her lover for “disputing again.” He
had been a churl to find fault with such sagacious reflections.

There is no sign that she was the least bit “blue,” though she read
the books of that _coterie_, and esteemed them, with reservations. She
had the Cléopâtre of Calprenède, the _Grand Cyrus_ of la Scudéri, and
passed them on, volume by volume, to Temple, remarking of “L’amant
non aimé” in the latter that he was an ass. She had Lord Broghill’s
_Parthenissa_ hot from the press. “’Tis handsome language,” she says of
it. “You would know it to be writ by a person of good quality, though
you were not told it; but, on the whole, I am not much taken with
it.” The stories were too much like all the others, she thought--and
certainly they were: “the ladies are so kind they make no sport.” One
thing in _Parthenissa_ made her angry. “I confess I have no patience
for our _faiseurs de Romance_ when they make women court. It will
never enter into my head that ’tis possible any woman can love where
she is not first loved; and much less that if they should do that, they
could have the face to own it.” That is high doctrine, yet inquiry
yields the best sort of support to it.

So far from being a _précieuse_, Dorothy quarrelled with _Parthenissa_
on account of preciosity. “Another fault I find, too, in the
style--’tis affected. _Ambitioned_ is a great word with him, and
_ignore_; _my concern_, or _of great concern_ is, it seems, properer
than _concernment_?” She expects Temple, nevertheless, to fit her
up with the newest town-phrases. “Pray what is meant by _wellness_
and _unwellness_; and why is _to some extreme_ better than _to some
extremity_?” She has her own ideas about style. “All letters, methinks,
should be free and easy as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration,
nor made up of hard words like a charm.” Then she pillories “a
gentleman I knew, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that
‘winter began to salute us.’” She had “no patience with such coxcombs.”
A jolly word of her own is “pleasinger.” I have not met it anywhere
else. “’Twill be pleasinger to you, I am sure, to tell you how fond I
am of your lock.” His “lock” was a lock of hair which he had sent her
on demand before he went to Ireland. For a moment it charmed her out
of her reserve. “Cut no more on’t, I would not have it spoiled for
the world. If you love me be careful on’t.” For once she lets herself
go. “I would not have the rule absolutely true without exceptions
that hard hairs are ill-natured, for then I should be so. But I can
allow that soft hairs are good, and so are you, or I am deceived as
much as you are if you think I do not love you enough. Tell me, my
dearest, am I? You will not be if you think I am yours.” That charming
little outbreak, written _à bride abattue_, concludes a letter which
begins, as all of them do, with the formal “Sir.” In its complete
unaffectedness and spontaneity it is not far behind _Notre Dame des
Rochers_.

To return to Dorothy’s reading, I do not know that, country for
country, she was far behind her contemporary. Novel apart, she is
reading the travels of Mendez Pinto, quotes the action, not the words,
of Shakespeare’s _Richard III_, has Spanish proverbs at command, writes
a note in French, takes a part in _The Lost Lady_, knows Cowley’s
poems, and was a “devote” of Dr. Jeremy Taylor. From that goodly divine
she takes a long argument upon resignation of the will, nearly word for
word, and holds it up for Temple’s admiration. She is more reticent
about her religious opinions than Madame was, having to deal with a
lover suspected of being something of a Gallic instead of a daughter
adept in Descartes. If she was primed with Jeremy Taylor she was in a
good way. Yet I don’t know what that doctor would have said to this:

“We complain of this world,” she says, “and the variety of crosses
and afflictions it abounds in, and for all this, who is weary on’t
(more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of leaving it, or
preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived all the
comforts of life, desire to continue it, and nothing can wean us from
the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and
unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that
are promised with it.”

“Is not this very like preaching?” she asks. It is less like the
preaching of the author of _Holy Dying_ than that of six-and-twenty
in love; but undoubtedly it proceeds from common experience. She was
merciless to bad sermons, able to make such good ones of her own. “God
forgive me, I was as near laughing yesterday where I should not. Would
you believe that I had the grace to go hear a sermon upon a week-day?”
Stephen Marshall was the preacher, a roaring divine of the prevailing
type. “He is so famed that I expected rare things of him, and seriously
I listened to him at first with as much reverence as if he had been
St. Paul; and what do you think he told us? Why, that if there were no
Kings, no Queens, no lords, no ladies, nor gentlemen, nor gentlewomen
in the world, ’twould be no loss at all to God Almighty. This we had
over some forty times, which made me remember it whether I would or
not.... Yet, I’ll say for him, he stood stoutly for tithes, though, in
my opinion, few deserved them less than he; and it may be he would be
better without them.” Marshall should have known better than to try his
levelling doctrine at Chicksands.

To the making of all good letter-writers, all those to whom it is a
natural vent for the emotions, goes quality, that which we call style,
an entire naturalness of expression turned in a manner of one’s own,
an incommunicable something not to be mistaken. All the best have
it; the second-best have something of it. Into literary quality goes,
of course, moral quality, _l’homme même_. Now, Dorothy Osborne has
quality: little as we have, there is enough to show that. She can
be playful, but not sparkle, not ripple like the Marquise nor set a
whole letter twinkling like the sea in a fresh wind; hers is a still
wind. Nor has she such news to impart, to be “le dessus de touts ses
panniers.” Chicksands was not Paris. She has spirit, but not gallantry.
Madame de Sévigné’s chosen defence was always attack. Dorothy is as
quick to see her advantage, but has a more staid manner of execution.
She will be slower to believe herself menaced; and when she discovers
it will reason plainly with the offender, as much for his good as for
her justification. Take this for an example. Temple, who was a fussy
man, a precisian, had been scolding her for fruit-eating. You could
hardly expect a lady to approve lectures upon her digestion from her
lover. She replied:

“In my opinion you do not understand the laws of friendship aright.
’Tis generally believed it owes its birth to an agreement and
conformity of humours, and that it lives no longer than ’tis preserved
by the mutual care of those that bred it.” Is there no style in that?
“’Tis wholly governed by equality, and can there be such a thing in
it as distinction of power? No, sure, if we are friends we must both
command and both obey alike; indeed, a mistress and a servant sounds
otherwise; but that is ceremony and this is truth. Yet what reason had
I to furnish you with a stick to beat myself withal, or desire that
you should command, that do it so severely?” Observe her conduct of the
relative there! “I must eat fruit no longer than I could be content you
should be in a fever; is not that an absolute forbidding of me? It has
frighted me just now from a basket of the most tempting cherries that
e’er I saw, though I know you did not mean that I should eat none. But
if you had I think I should have obeyed you.”

Evidently she had tossed her head over his dictation; but how well in
hand is her temper, how admirable her style! It is very much in the
manner of Madame when her querulous daughter had hurt her feelings; and
entirely in that manner Madame would throw up the sponge at the end
of a successful attack--entirely as Dorothy does here, with her, “If
you had I think I should have obeyed you.” Dorothy is not, however, so
quick to veer from the stormy to the rainy quarter. She can be fierce,
as I have shown, when her feelings are overstrained, but there is no
hysterical passion. Modesty forbade. “Love is a terrible word,” she
says, “and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accused me
on’t.” She could be bold on such occasions; she could be as saucy as
Rosalind, and as tender. When it is a case of his going to Ireland, on
business of his father’s, which may advance their personal affair, she
urges him to be off. But when the hour has come--“You must give Nan
leave to cut off a lock of your hair for me.... Oh, my heart! What a
sigh was there! I will not tell you how many this journey causes, nor
the fears and apprehensions I have for you. No, I long to be rid of
you--am afraid you will not go soon enough. Do not you believe this?
No, my dearest, I know you do not, whate’er you say....” Any good girl
in love would feel like that, but not everyone could let you hear the
quickened breath in a letter three hundred years old.

Sévigné was wise, and so is Dorothy. She read and could criticise,
she read and remembered. With less philosophy, and no fatalism, she
looked her world in the face, and had no illusions about it. But she
was in love, and it was a good world. Cheerfulness kept breaking in.
“What an age we live in, where ’tis a miracle if in ten couples that
are married, two of them live so as not to publish to the world that
they cannot agree.” Yet she thinks that one should follow the Saviour’s
precept, take up the cross and follow. She believes that the trouble is
mostly of the woman’s making, for as for the husband, if he grumbles,
and the wife says nothing, he will stop for lack of nutriment, and
nobody be any the worse. A splenetic husband of her acquaintance had
the trick, when harassed, of rising in the night and banging the table
with a club. His wife provided a stout cushion for the table, and was
not disturbed.

Sévigné is merry, and so is Dorothy, though much more demure. In her
seventy letters you will find no _tours de force_--nothing like the
“prairie” letter, the marriage-of-Mademoiselle, or the “incendie”
letter. She can touch you off a situation in a phrase excellently
well, as when after a quarrel comes a reconciliation between her and
her brother Henry, and she says, “’Tis wonderful to see what curtseys
and legs pass between us; and as before we were thought the kindest
brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental
couple in England”; or, asking “Is it true my Lord Whitelocke goes
Ambassador?” she comments upon him, “He was never meant for a courtier
at home, I believe. Yet ’tis a gracious Prince.” Another Commonwealth
lord, whose title depended upon the standing of the Court of Chancery,
has a flick in the same letter: “’Twill be sad news for my Lord Keble’s
son. He will have nothing left to say when ‘my Lord, my father,’ is
taken from him.” Those are both brisk and pleasant; more ambitious is
her discussion of the “ingredients” of a husband, which opens with
sketches of impossible husbands. He “must not be so much of a country
gentleman as to understand nothing but horses and dogs, and be fonder
of either than his wife”; nor one “whose aim reaches no further than
to be Justice of the Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff”; nor “a
thing that began the world in a free school ... and is at his furthest
when he reaches the Inns of Court.” He must not be “a town gallant
neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,” who “makes court
to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is
laughed at equally”; nor a “travelled Monsieur, whose head is all
feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but dances and
duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes when everybody else dies
of cold to see him.” In fact, “he must love me, and I him, as much as
we are capable of.” Those impersonations might have come as well from
Belmont as from Chicksands.

I said just now that we have no “prairie” letter from Dorothy. We have
something not far from it, though, and I will give as much of it as I
dare. It is of her very best in the way of unforced, happy description;
but after it I must give no more. The date of it is early May, 1653:

“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account
not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to
do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning
reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I
am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows too hot for
me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready, and when that’s done
I go into my father’s chamber, and from thence to dinner, where my
cousin Mollie and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that
would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B.
(a suitor of Dorothy’s, a Mr. Levinus Bennet) comes in question, and
then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and
about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by
the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and
sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their
voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of,
and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as
innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing
to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that
they are so.”

I could go on to empty the whole paragraph on to the page, for it is
all excellent; but will stop with that happily rounded period. Charm,
or the deuce, is in it.

Beyond it I will not go. Too little straw has been allowed to the
making of my brick. With twice as much more--with some of the letters
to Lady Diana or Queen Mary, freed from the preoccupations of a love
affair--who can say that we might not have had something to set off
against the letters to Mesdames de Lafayette, de Coulanges, de Guitant?
We have something very distinctive and charming, at any rate, enough
to certify us that we have missed of a letter-writer of excellence
who need not have feared comparison with our best. She had not the
vivacity, or the opportunities of Lady Mary; but she had what that
lively observer missed of, a heart wherewith to inform her writing. She
had not the wit of Lady Harriet Granville, but she had more humanity.
I would not put her up, in a Court of Claims, to “walk” before Mrs.
Carlyle, or plead her sagacity and tenderness against that unhappy
woman’s brilliancy. Yet who would hesitate in the choice of one of them
for correspondent? Whose book would you sooner have at the bed’s head?
Such questions, however, do not arise. You judge Literature like coins
at the Mint. You are either good or bad. If you ring false--out you go.




REALISM WITH A DIFFERENCE


_Moll Flanders_, which has now received the large octavo honours due
to a classic, was written, Defoe tells us, in 1683. The statement is
almost certainly part of the cheat, for it was published in 1722, two
years after _Robinson Crusoe_; and if it had been true he would have
performed a feat which has never been equalled, that of writing his
first novel with the accomplishment shown in that of his prime. Nothing
in the technique of _Crusoe_ shows any advance upon _Moll Flanders_.
Its greater popularity is, of course, due to its matter: it is more
_simpatico_, more moving, more endearing to youth. The adventures upon
the island are more arbitrary and more surprising. They come from
outside the hero, not from his inside. Anything shocking may happen
upon a desert island, even the greatest shock of all, which is to find
that it is not deserted. _Suave mari magno_ ... the tag holds good when
you are thrilled by a tale in the first person. The flesh creeps; but
it is like being tickled by a kindly hand. The pleasure to be had from
_Moll Flanders_ comes when we know enough of the world to have need of
large allowances. Then it is that we are interested in the liabilities
of character, and love to see the oracle worked out. In _Moll Flanders_
we do. With the single premise that Moll was the abandoned child of a
thief and baggage, cast upon the parish by gypsies, everything that
happens to her follows as inevitably as night the day. She engages
the compassion of a genteel family, and is taken in quasi-adoption.
She grows up with the children of the house, petted by the daughters,
and in due time, naturally, by the sons, one of whom “undoes” her.
But by the time that happens we know something of Moll’s temperament,
and nod sagaciously at what, we say, was bound to be. So it goes on
from stave to stave to make out the promise of the title-page that,
born in Newgate, she was “Twelve Year a _Whore_, five times a _Wife_
(whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a _Thief_, Eight Year a
transported _Felon_ in _Virginia_, at last grew _Rich_, liv’d Honest,
and died a _Penitent_.” It sounds uncommonly like Boccaccio’s tale of
the Princess of Babylon, not at all unlike _Gil Blas_; but the point is
that it is most of all like Life, that the lurid programme is smoothly
and punctually kept, and that we never withhold our assent for a
moment--not even from the added statement that it was “Written from her
own Memorandums.” It is no more necessary to believe that than that it
was written in 1683; but there is no difficulty in believing either.

Defoe, if he began to write novels at fifty-eight, came by his method
as Athené by her ægis; it sprang fully armed from his brain. He never
varied it for a worse, and could not have for a better. It was to
tell his story in plain English without emotion, and to get his facts
right. That is his secret, which nobody since his time has ever worked
so well. The _Police News_ style has often been used, and many a
writer has laboured after his facts. Some have succeeded--very few--in
smothering their feelings, and some, of course, have had no feelings
to smother. Defoe alone accomplishes his ends with consummate mastery.
He is certainly our greatest realist, and there are few in France to
beat him. Perhaps the nearest approach to him was made by the Abbé
Prevost in _Manon Lescaut_ (1731)--but put Zola beside him if you
would judge his method fairly. Zola, who went about his business with
stuffed notebooks, succeeded in various aims of the novelist, but not
in commanding assent. He could not control himself; the poor man had an
itch. Artistically speaking, he did unpardonable things. Some of the
bestiality of _La Terre_ might have happened in a Norman village; a
Norman village _might_ have been called Rognes. To conjoin the two in
a realistic romance is paltry. It absolutely disenchants the reader,
and gives away the writer and his malady with both hands. You may
call a town Eatanswill in a satire; but _La Terre_ is not a satire.
As for _Manon_, astonishingly documented as it is, the conviction
which it carries does not survive perusal, though it revives in every
re-perusal. Its intention, which is rather to suggest than to narrate,
to provoke than to satisfy, is apparent when the book is shut. No such
aims are to be detected in _Moll Flanders_, concerned apparently with
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The triumph of the method, used as Defoe only can use it, remains
to be told. _Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner._ We can all see
round Moll Flanders, behind her as well as before. The current of the
tale, every coil and eddy and backwash of it, is not only exactly
like life, it puts us in a position to appraise life. Conviction of
such a matter, rare as it is, is not so difficult to secure as the
understanding of it. There are, of course, extenuating circumstances
in every guilty course. One finds them for oneself as a neighbour, in
the jury box, on the bench. One finds them or invents them. In _Moll
Flanders_ they steal upon us unawares until, quite suddenly, we find
ourselves with her in a human relationship. Her close shaves, her
near-run things in shop-lifting give us thrills; but when she is rash
enough to steal a horse we are aghast. Mad-woman! how can she dispose
of a horse in a common lodging-house? When she is finally lagged we
agonise with her. Why? We know that she could not help herself. But
there’s more than that. She is never put beyond our moral pale. She
steals from children, but suffers both shame and sorrow. She robs a
poor householder of her valuables in a fire, but cannot forget the
treachery. She picks the pocket of a generous lover when he is drunk,
but repents and confesses. He forgives her, and so do we. All her
normal relations with her fellow-creatures are warm with the milk of
human kindness. For instance, she puts herself, for business purposes,
in the disposition of a “Governess,” that is, an old gentlewoman who
is procuress, midwife, baby-farmer, and receiver of stolen goods. But
the pair are on happy and natural terms. Moll calls her Mother; the
old thing calls Moll Child; and when she is transported as a convicted
thief she entrusts “Mother” with all her little fortune, and is
faithfully served in that and other concerns. The pair of them, rascals
together, are bad lots, if you will--and good sorts too. That’s the
virtue of the realistic method when you are not on the look out for bad
smells.

In her dealings with my sex, certainly she was often and unguardedly
a wife, as well as something else not so proper. Yet kindness was her
only fault. Whatever else she may have been as a wife, she was a good
one, faithful, affectionate, sympathetic, and most responsive. If the
young man who undid her had kept his promises, I daresay she would have
lived to be Mayoress of Colchester and mother to some sixteen children,
without a stain upon her character. As it was, she must have had half
that number. She is never a beast. She never revels, nor wallows, nor
is besotted; she is no slave to appetite. She plays hazard one night
and wins a matter of fifty guineas. She will not play again for fear of
becoming a gamester. She continues a thief for many years, though often
moved to break away. Why does she not break away?


     “Though by this job I was become considerably richer than before,
     yet the resolution I had formerly taken of leaving off this horrid
     trade when I had gotten a little more, did not return, but I
     must still get farther, and more; and the avarice joined so with
     the success, that I had no more thoughts of coming to a timely
     alteration of life, though without it I could expect no safety, no
     tranquillity in the possession of what I had so wickedly gained;
     but a little more, and a little more, was the case still.”


What could be more human, and on our footing more reasonable, than
that? That, in fact, which saved _The Beggar’s Opera_ from being an
immoral, cynical, even a flagrant work, was precisely that which gives
Moll Flanders our sympathy--its large humanity. There is heart in
every average human being, as well as much vice and an amazing amount
of indolence; but to see it there you must have it yourself, and to
exhibit it there you must be a good deal of a genius. We feel for Moll
without esteeming her: we say, “There but for the grace of God....”
What saves us? Well, caution, timidity, the likes of those; but chiefly
the grace of God.




MR. PEPYS HIS APPLE-CART


It is hard to deal fairly by Samuel Pepys, and that because he has
dealt so fairly by himself. You cannot even put that amazing candour of
his down to his credit, for reasons which grow upon you as you read.
If he was candid it was to please himself, and, as one must suppose,
nobody else in the world. Whatever his motive was, it certainly was not
to read a moral lesson to mankind. But that he is all in his Diary, the
whole of him, inside and out, is evident upon any prolonged perusal of
it. He has neither been blind to himself, nor kind; he never excuses
himself, and rarely accuses. He pities himself, when he has been found
out, and hugs himself when he has made a good deal, or played the
fortunate gallant; but he rarely indeed pities anybody else, and if he
hugs other persons, always mentions it. Though we cannot impute his
honesty to righteousness, nevertheless it seems rather hard that he
should have to suffer for it.

Anyhow, his merits would have transpired without a diary. State
papers exist to testify to them; his mounting credit is its own
record. Evelyn liked him, so did the King and his brother, so did
Sir William Coventry. Undoubtedly he was an able Clerk of the Acts,
and by the standard of any times but some which are still modern
history, an honest public servant. Had he lived in the golden age of
the Civil Service, an age which only ended a few years ago, he would
not have taken any commissions at all. As things are now, he took
very few; as they were in his day, what he took was negligible. I
feel sure that the Crown did uncommonly well by him. Then, socially,
he was a brisk, companionable creature, with an infectious laugh, a
taste for languages, the drama, parlour-science and chamber-music.
He had curiosity, which always makes a man good company; he was
both dilettante and connoisseur; he was affable with all sorts and
conditions, gave himself no airs, had vanity, but little conceit. Women
liked him; he had a way with him. And then he liked them. I cannot
imagine Pepys for five minutes in a woman’s company without her knowing
all that she need about him, and about it. Morally, he was a beast,
without pity or scruple, or personal shame, or courage, or honour. He
was depraved, and knew it, and didn’t care so long as no one else knew
it. He was the slave of public opinion, and in moments of apprehension
what that might be, sacrificed his companion in his dealing without a
thought. And yet women liked him, and suffered him. Psychologically, he
is, so far, an unsolved problem. Nobody has found out why on earth he
wrote himself down what he did write down; I have seen no account which
satisfies. To that I should add that no attempt to explain him seems to
have been made since we received all that we ever can receive of his
Diary.

R. L. Stevenson’s exegesis was based upon Minors Bright, who is now
superseded by Wheatley. It is elaborate, and I think fanciful. I doubt
if it could have been accepted upon the then available evidence: it
is clean out of date now. Shortly, it was that Pepys, taking (as he
did) infinite pleasure in the minutiæ of memory, was careful to make a
hoard of such things for his after-needs. But even when that theory was
propounded we knew that Pepys recorded his shames and humiliations, and
it is difficult to allow that he might have looked forward to recalling
those towards his latter end. Now, however, we know the worst that
Pepys could say of himself, and lack nothing but the literal details of
his acts. We know how he glorifies and how he humiliates himself--for
he writes down all his failures along with his triumphs; we can see him
splash in the bagnio, and afterwards get rolled in the gutter. It can
be no question of remembrance. What is it, then? Any man may conceive,
and many will do the things which Pepys did: but not record them,
complacently, with the grin of relish. Why on earth did he do that?
I have a suggestion to make, though I am not certain that it meets
the whole case. My first opinion was that he derived that cerebral
excitation out of his details which it is to be supposed the lad may
who defaces walls with a stump of pencil, or the lover who, writing
about kisses, or craving them as he writes, ends up his letter with
a pullulation of little crosses--paraphrases of his passion. Reading
him again, I see that that is not all. It is part of the truth; it is
true of the middle of the Diary. But it is not the whole truth--not
true of the beginning, not true of the end. I now believe that he
originally intended his entries of delinquency as an act of penance or
humiliation--and that is supported by the accounts he gives of all his
shifts and turns under the screw of jealousy--but that out of that
act he found himself obtaining a perverse pleasure, which overlaid his
first intention and supplanted it. In the earlier diary you will find
him expressing his relief over lapses avoided or temptations withstood;
from 1663 onwards that is exceedingly rare; then, at the very end,
when he has been found out and has lost conceit in his delight,
his reflections are as contrite as you please. For the moment that
explanation satisfies me.


Pepys’s Diary covers ten years of his life, his twenty-seventh to his
thirty-eighth. They would be critical years in the life of any married
man, particularly when, as was the case, they coincided with the
Restoration and the sudden unlocking of all doors. When he began to
record he had been married five years, to a woman seven years younger
than himself, a diligent, handsome, thrifty, responsive little French
girl, whom he ruled, evidently, upon a theory; for he says more than
once that he found it desirable to give way when she showed a knowledge
of what her rights were. Being, as she was, exceedingly alive to them
in one essential matter, so long as those were observed she was easy
about others. Therefore, for the first two recorded years, Pepys had
very much of his own way. He kept her short of money, stinted her in
clothes and fal-lals[3]; and left her much alone while he pursued
business and pleasure abroad. All that she took in good part, until
her eyes were opened to what was going on. She did not, for instance,
mind his going to the theatre three or four times a week, until she
found out what he did when he was there. But when she became aware of
Mrs. Knipp and Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Gwynne, and of relations which were
not scenic, there was great trouble at home. After it she insisted
on going with him, and he hardly dared show his nose in a playhouse
without her. But that was later on: for for the first three years of
the diary, beyond a little kissing, or staying up “playing the fool
with the lass of the house” when he was on a jaunt, there was little
for Mrs. Pepys to worry over. Kissing, indeed, of the ceremonial kind,
she did not mind in the least. It was the English habit, as it still is
in one class of life at least. Pepys himself was advised to put up with
it when his wife was so distinguished. “So to Mrs. Hunt, where I found
a Frenchman, a lodger of hers, at dinner, and just as I came in was
kissing my wife, which I did not like, though there could not be any
hurt in it.” Surely not.

But Pepys himself was not content with kisses of ceremony, nor did he
select proper objects of ceremony for his attentions of the sort--that
is, when once he was fairly on the primrose path. At first it was, “God
forgive me! what a mind I had to her, but did not meddle with her.”
That did not last. In September of that very year--it was 1662--he both
had the mind and the opportunity; he followed his inclination; and
though he recorded his first total lapse with great contrition, he was
past praying for, and with increasing frequency past writing about.
Vivacious man of pleasure as he was, and as his portrait shows him,
he discovers himself to us as voracious too. He cast a wide net, and
took all fish that came, gentle and simple, mistress and maid, mother
and daughter. Not a shop that had a handsome woman in it, not a tavern
with a pretty maid, between Fish Street Hill and Westminster Hall, but
he drew it regularly, like a covert. I am sure he was no worse than his
superiors; I think he may have been a good deal better than most of
them; he was never a corsair, like Rochester, Sedley, Jermyn; he was in
too small a way for that. But we can only guess at the whole of their
malpractice by adding two to two, and we know all about his; therefore
our gorges rise. Even his peculiar depravity was probably not peculiar
at all.


     “Yet to our buzzards overfed
     Virtue was Pandarus to Vice;
     A maiden was a maidenhead,
     A maidenhead a matter of price....”


That was the foible of a hateful age, and it was Pepys’s. He preyed
upon modesty. He must overcome virtue. He could not tire of that, and
wrought in his way incurable mischief. In short, he was a middle-class
Minotaur, a devourer of virgins.

I shall not follow him in his hateful bird-netting except just as far
as may be necessary to relate the manner of his discomfiture. It is
sufficient to say that, given time to spread his lures, he succeeded
often enough. His office and patronage were favourite decoys of his.
So Mrs. Bagwell, who pleased him as “a virtuous modest woman,” became
something else by his leading her to suppose that he would get her
husband a good job, he being a carpenter in Deptford Yard. So it was
with other unfortunate creatures who courted his dispensing of places
to their men. But he had an easier prey, a natural prey nearer home,
in his wife’s maids. It lay among their duties, it seems, to assist
him at his levee and coucher: he certainly had a way with him--so what
were the poor girls to do? They had no chance. It does not appear that
any one of them escaped altogether, though, thanks to his lively fear
of Mrs. Pepys, no one of them found Mrs. Bagwell’s fate. That was not
their fault, poor things; they were mostly as wax under his hands. But
Mercer, Mary Mercer, faced him and got off with nothing worse than a
little fondling. She was a girl with both wit and courage; remained on
friendly terms with the household afterwards, visiting terms; and, when
once she had shown him her mind, was not chased by the destroyer. But
she, who came of good people--“a decayed tradesman’s daughter”--was
an accomplished young woman, with a singing-voice which had been well
trained, and plenty of _savoir faire_. Really, I think, Pepys, taught
by a rebuff, came to respect Mercer. In August 1665 he noted of her in
his jargon that he had his head combed “by my little girle, to whom
I confess que je sum demasiado kind ... mais il faut que je leave it
lest it bring me to alcum major inconvenience.” That was just what it
did lead to. Mercer left the house on the day the Fire of London broke
out, and for the best Pepys could do did not choose to return. The
Fire gave him other and healthier thoughts for a time: presently when
he met her in church, she refused to look at him. So she escaped,
slightly chipped; and afterwards, when, as I say, she came to be on
visiting terms with Mrs. Pepys, there are signs that she came and went
unmolested. But to her succeeded by-and-by Deb Willett, the last victim
of the Minotaur of Axe Yard. It was the addition of this girl to his
harvest which upset his load of Hesperian apples.

He was disposed to her on hearsay, before he saw her; for Mrs. Pepys
had been light-minded enough to declare the engagement of a pretty
girl--the very thing to set him on fire. So presently, on the 27th
September 1667, “while I was busy at the office, my wife sends for me
to come home, and what was it but to see the pretty girl which she is
taking to wait upon her: and though she seems not altogether so great a
beauty as she had before told me, yet indeed she is mighty pretty; and
so pretty that I find I shall be too pleased with it.... She seems, by
her discourse, to be grave beyond her bigness and age, and exceeding
well bred as to her deportment, having been a scholar in a school at
Bow these seven or eight years. To the office again, my head running
on this pretty girl.” It certainly did, if we may trust the Diary. She
kept him awake at night; and when she came, brought by Mr. Batelier, he
was more than smitten with her, he was impressed. “So grave as I never
saw a little thing in my life,” he says. “Indeed, I think her a little
too good for my family, and so well carriaged as I hardly ever saw.”
His next recorded sentiment is, “I wish my wife may use her well.” How
are you to deal with a man like that--except by remembering that all
men are like that?

She accompanied her employers to Brampton and gave satisfaction at
least to one of them. By the middle of October that had been observed
by the other, for he writes of that day that they had been to see “The
Coffee House” at the Duke’s Theatre; and “here, before the play began,
my wife begun to complain of Willett’s confidence in sitting cheek
by jowl by us, which was a poor thing; but I perceive she is already
jealous of my kindness to her, so that I begin to fear this girl is
not likely to stay long with us.” She stayed too long for her comfort,
or for his. On December 22nd Pepys “first did give her a little kiss,
she being a very pretty humoured girle, and so one that I do love
mightily.” In January she is promoted to be “Deb” in the Diary; in
March she is kissed, and more than kissed. Then comes the last volume.

By the time that was reached, Pepys’s weakness had become a mania. His
apple-cart, so to speak, was full to overflowing, Deb Willett, though
he had no suspicion of it, the last fruit he was to add to it. His
work suffered, his mind suffered; there were omens of dirty weather.
June 18th, 1668: “At noon home to dinner, where my wife still in a
melancholy, fusty humour, and crying, and do not tell me plainly what
it is; but I by little words find that she hath heard of my going to
plays, and carrying people abroad every day in her absence; and that
I cannot help [fearing] but the storm will break out, I think, in a
little time.” At night it was no better: “My wife troubled all night,
and about one o’clock goes out of bed to the girl’s bed, which did
trouble me, she crying and sobbing, without telling me the cause.”
That ought to have warned him, if he had not gone too far. But he had.
He pursued his course unabated; and then, October 25th, came the crash.
It was Sunday. He rose, “discoursing with my wife about our house and
the many new things we are doing of”; he went to church, saw Jack Fenn
and his wife, “a pretty black woman”; he dined at home, had his wife
and the boy to read to him; at night “W. Batelier comes and sups with
us”--all well so far. And then--thunder, out of a clear sky, pealing
about his ears. “After supper, to have my head combed by Deb, which
occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,
for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl....”
(_sic_).

A comic scene, but humiliating to all three. “I was,” he says, “at a
wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also, and I endeavoured to put it
off, but my wife was struck mute, and grew angry, and so her voice come
to her, grew quite out of order, and I to say little, but to bed.” To
bed, but not to sleep. At two in the morning the storm which had been
massing itself in the heart and mind of Mrs. Pepys broke over his head,
at first in tears and a secret. That--and it was a shrewd hit--was that
“she was a Roman Catholic, and had received the Holy Sacrament.” Pepys,
who had always been a Puritan at heart, was very much disturbed, yet
dared no reproaches, so that the blow failed of its mark. She went on,
then, “from one thing to another,” until “at last it appears plainly
her trouble was at what she saw.” Yes, but what had she seen? “I did
not know how much she saw, and therefore said nothing to her.” Towards
morning “a little sleep.” If he thought that the end of it, he was
to find it only the beginning. Mrs. Pepys, outraged on her tenderest
side, grew from strength to strength; and as for her deplorable spouse,
for the first time in his Diary, if not in his days, he really felt
something which reads like remorse. His mind, he says of it next day,
“was mightily troubled for the poor girle, whom I fear I have undone by
this, my wife telling me that she would turn her out of doors.” That
threat was not at once executed. Deb was treated with severe clemency
for the better part of a month, allowed to visit her friends and suit
herself with a new situation; made to feel, however, that she was in
disgrace, and definitely cut off from any further assistance at her
master’s toilette. The miserable man hardly dared look at her; not a
word seems to have passed between them, though after a while, forced
to take a line of conduct by his wife’s reiterated attacks, Pepys “did
by a little note ... advise her (Deb) that I did continue to deny that
ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself.” Deb read it and
threw it back again as he bade her; but she could not “govern herself.”
The very next day Mrs. Pepys examined her, and everything came out.
Pepys had to dine alone that night, for his wife kept her room, and
when he went up to see her, blazed out upon him his infidelity and
perjury together. To make it all the worse for him, she then told him
of temptations which had been put in her own way--by Captain Ferrers,
Lord Sandwich and other friends of his. _A la guerre comme à la
guerre._ All which “I did acknowledge, and was troubled for, and wept.”

Without a leg to stand on, he must do as he was told. On the 12th
November, therefore, he must call Deb to his chamber in the presence
of his wife, “and there did, with tears in my eyes, which I could not
help, discharge her, and advise her to be gone as soon as she could,
and never to see me, or let me see her more while she was in the house,
which she took with tears too.” She had found herself a place, and
went to it; and Pepys looked forward now to a peace which he had not
known, he says, for twenty days. He did not get it, because he was both
knave and fool. Which this shows him to be I don’t pretend to decide.
He writes on the very day the girl left: “The truth is, I have a good
mind to have the maidenhead of this girl, which I should not doubt to
have if je could get time para be con her.” The Italians used to call
the compound of inclination and ability _il talento_, a word which our
language lacks. Under the spur of _il talento_ this incurable rascal
hunted London to find Deb’s whereabouts. He had reason for suspecting
Holborn, and quartered that; then Whetstone Park seemed probable, in
the service of one Dr. Allbon. Not known there. In Eagle Court, off the
Strand, he presently found out that “this Dr. Allbon is a kind of poor
broken fellow that dare not show his head, nor to be known where he is
gone.” Nevertheless, he did finally run down his doctor in Fleet Street
or thereby, even met a man in his employ, bribed him to take a message
“to a little gentlewoman, one Mrs. Willett, that is with him,” and
waited in the court of Somerset House for an answer. He did not have
it till after dark. She was well, and he might see her if he would,
“but no more.” That was enough for Pepys. Off he went in a coach, “it
being now dark,” and “she come into the coach to me, and je did baiser
her....” Then the real, the incredible Pepys: “I did nevertheless give
her the best council I could, to have a care of her honour, and to
fear God, and suffer no man para avoir to do con her as je have done,
which she promised.” The advice was sound and, from him, infallible.
To-morrow was to prove that much to him. I must afford myself the
morrow’s entry.

“19th. Up and at the office all the morning, with my heart full of joy
to think in what a safe condition all my matters now stand between
my wife and Deb and me, and at noon, running upstairs to see the
upholsterers, who are at work hanging my best room ... I find my wife
sitting sad in the dining-room; which enquiring into the reason of, she
begun to call me all the false, rotten-hearted rogues in the world,
letting me understand that I was with Deb yesterday, which, thinking it
impossible for her ever to understand, I did a while deny, but at last
did, for the ease of my mind and hers, and for ever to discharge my
heart of this wicked business, I did confess all, and above stairs in
our bed chamber there I did endure the sorrow of her threats and vows
and curses all the afternoon.... So with most perfect confusion of face
and heart, and sorrow and shame, in the greatest agony in the world I
did pass this afternoon, fearing that it will never have an end; but
at last I did call for W. Hewer, who I was forced to make privy now
to all, and the poor fellow did cry like a child, and obtained what I
could not, that she would be pacified upon condition that I would give
it under my hand never to see or speak with Deb while I live, as I had
before with Pierce and Knipp, and which I did also, God knows, promise
for Deb too, but I have the confidence to deny it to the perjury of
myself.”

It is extraordinary that Pepys, who could face with sangfroid
committees of Lords and Commons, marshal his facts and figures and come
off with credit, could be such a poltroon in this domestic inquest as
to deny what was obviously within his wife’s knowledge. But when to
terror you add a sense of guilt, a man will tell you anything. It is
still more incredible that that did not finish the story--but it did
not. The next day, what must he do but send W. Hewer off to Deb, “to
tell her that I had told my wife all of my being with her the other
night, so that if my wife should send she might not make the business
worse by denying it.” The alert Mrs. Pepys made it her business to find
out the whole of that, no doubt from W. Hewer himself; so that when
Pepys came home the whole thing began all over again, and this time
with violence. She “did fall to revile me in the bitterest manner in
the world, and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair, which I
resolved to bear with, and had good reason to bear it.” He was driven
to call in Hewer again as intermediary; but this time the conditions
were terrible. Nothing would suit Mrs. Pepys but a letter conceived
in the most insulting and outrageous terms to the girl, who was not
what it styled her, from Pepys, who had done his best to make her so.
Even he was shocked at it, and once wrote it out without the word. Mrs.
Pepys tore it up. Then, on a wink passing from Hewer, he wrote it down,
and domestic fury was satisfied. It was handed to Hewer to deliver,
with “a sharp message” from Mrs. Pepys. That was the climax. No man
could be more deeply degraded than that; and to do Pepys credit, he
knew it, and could hardly bear himself. Hewer, on his own motion, it
would seem, delivered but half of the letter; the other, the injurious
half, was brought back to the unfortunate sinner. Deb never knew the
worst of him, and, so far as the Diary reveals, never saw him again.

Love will lead a man any lengths, and justify itself, at least to
himself; but not lust. That is a sensitive plant, and shrivels in the
cold. Pepys, it will have been seen, was not prepared to go a yard out
of his prosperous way in pursuit or defence of the favourites of his
whim. If it is to his credit that he reports at length his humiliating
rebuffs, that is all that can be said for him. If he affords a
disagreeable spectacle, luckily it is also exceedingly ridiculous,
and the only thing about it difficult to understand is that he _does_
afford it. To me it is much more interesting to speculate upon the
attitude of his victims towards these amorous advances. Concerned they
must have been; but were they interested, amused, embarrassed, or
bored? Did they take it as all in the day’s work; had they resentment
and feared to show it; or were they, poor children, led to take him
seriously? I am not thinking of the Knipps and Pierces, Betty Lanes
and half-dozen Nells--hardy perennials--but of his fresh young Mercer,
“decayed tradesman’s daughter,” or grave young Deb, carefully educated
at Bow, come also of a good Bristol family, with established aunts and
uncles, and all the rest of it--girls who certainly came new to the
kind of thing. Is it possible that Deb thrilled to a possible romance?
And how did she accept the discovery of what in fact it was? With the
one exception of Mercer, they are almost lay figures in the Diary,
mute and passive under his greedy hands. Some were baggages, no doubt,
or baggages-elect. They cannot all have been baggages. Deb, with her
gravity and measured speech, what was she? There’s no telling. I don’t
commend her for having seen him again, certainly not for sitting with
him in the coach. Then I remember that she was barely twenty years old.
She escaped, however, with some smirches, and one may hope that she
found a good husband. _Bocca baciata non perde ventura._

FOOTNOTE:

[3] In 1665, for instance, he laid out, at one blow, £55 on his own,
and £12 on her clothes.




ONE OF LAMB’S CREDITORS


There are writers upon the roll of whom nobody demands, “How begot,
how nourishéd”--not many, but one or two. Milton, for instance: does
anyone try to derive Milton? Or Cowper? Or Wordsworth? Others, nearly
all the others, abide our question, and no wonder. Is not all creative
effort the agony of recalling? Is not the brain a sponge? Is there
anything new except arrangement? Very well--then Defoe must have been a
borrower, though he seems stark new. We know that Charles Lamb picked
up words, phrases, cadences as a magnet steel-filings; but his latest
and best biographer now goes further and seeks to lay his mental habit
to somebody. He has devoted an essay to deriving his whimsicality, as
he calls it, for want of a more comprehensive term, which shall include
the freakish humour which is peculiarly Lamb’s, and the “unreluctant
egoism” which he thinks Lamb was the first of us to signalise. I could
quarrel with him there, “if I had the mind,” being very sure that Lamb
was not the first egoist in English Literature by a very long way.
If he was, then Mr. Lucas must devote another essay dealing with the
claims of Sterne, Colley Cibber, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Pepys,
and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to name no more. However, let that go.
Lamb’s cast of humour, a glancing, many-faceted thing, as wayward as
the wind, but like the wind, from whatever airt it blow, bringing upon
it the scent of what garden plots, hedgerows, beanfields and thymy
uplands it may have crossed--_that_ Mr. Lucas has been driven, seeing
that he must needs buckle it to his egoism, to obtain from the mild
mock-epic of Cowper, which does seem to me a wide cast to have made,
with a small fry netted for his pains. When I came upon and had read
that essay, in Mr. Lucas’s _Giving and Receiving_, I gazed for a few
minutes thoughtfully into the fire, then got up and took down from the
shelf the second volume of the _Life_ of Charles by the same hand. In a
useful Appendix III, upon “Charles Lamb’s Books,” I found what I wanted.

Before I say what it was I wanted, and what found, I ought to
acknowledge that Mr. Lucas draws a proper distinction between the
Essays of Elia and the Letters of Charles Lamb, one, however, which he
might not have drawn if the Letters of Cowper had not been published
long after Lamb began to write letters. That being the fact, he has
to derive Lamb’s Letters from Cowper’s Poems, and Elia’s Essays from
Cowper’s Letters, rather a _chassez-croisez_ piece of work. Except for
that necessity I think he might have gone as near as Mr. Saintsbury
does (in _A Letter Book_) to fining the difference between Essays and
Letters to one of “full dress” and “undress.” To me the difference is
much greater, is precisely, indeed, the difference between Charles
Lamb and Elia. Lamb’s alias was not (like Sterne’s) a stalking-horse;
it was a mask and domino. With the name he put on the thing signified,
or as much of it as he cared for, gave himself Lincolnshire ancestry,
shifted at ease his own relatives, his early loves, the haunts of his
youth, and used them the more freely for his occasions. Yet he treated
his form with respect, neither let it run down, nor stepped out of
character. Elia sometimes borrowed from Lamb. The “Convict” letter to
Barron Field yielded its bitter-sweet to an essay, but was transformed
in the taking. Not to speak profanely, there was an Assumption of the
Lamb. In the Letters whim is master: Lamb is Will o’ the Wisp. From
essay to essay Elia may change like Harlequin, but each single essay
is ruled by one mood. Elia was evidently, if not avowedly, a debtor.
Whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne, of Addison, Burton, Shakespeare, Montaigne
(or Florio) float up from the page as you read. So they do in Lamb’s
Letters. But there is one very signally in Lamb, not so evident in
Elia, and it was that which I looked for in Mr. Lucas’s Appendix III,
where, sure enough, among Lamb’s books I found:


     Howell (James), _Epistolae Ho-Elianae_, 1645-55.


There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s
whimsicality.

James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the
Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in
Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal
of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different
language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays),
something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never
lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed,
commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain (where he
was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also,
and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat,
who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited
set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its
politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was
idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually
scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical
list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of
them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not.
If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist--for
that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and
pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall
only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a
“small hymn” for Christmas Day:


     “Hail holy Tyde
     Wherein a Bride,
     A Virgin (which is more)
     Brought forth a Son,
     The lyke was done
     Ne’er in this world before--;”


and this is the beginning of an elegy upon the Earl of Dorset,


     “But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,
     And will not all the Elements wear black?”


and this the middle,


     “Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verse
     On this renownéd heroe and his herse,”


and this the end,


     “In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,
     And to my Elegy a period put--”


on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!

He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he
writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married,
divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and
many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet
are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in
their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived
their father except his _Familiar Letters_, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae
which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times
afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with
Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our
private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our
Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it
would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the
time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters
to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even
more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac,
well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as
Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or
Milton. He reports, for example, that the Prince Palatine has got
together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows
his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of
Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It
has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets
found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters
addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the
Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed
to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real
enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye
to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than
treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the
additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of
treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent
letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of
a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long
letter containing many anecdotes _ad hoc_ and a “Gradual Hymn tending
to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his
“frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched
oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb--but I think Howell was the
latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb
desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I
am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson,
of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a
similar reproof. The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones
by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed
his “Father Ben” as follows:


     “You know,

     Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of
     the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a
     commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner,
     as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair
     in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would
     not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal
     architect.”


Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his
pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier
who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had
done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being
made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut
off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.”
And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned
before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the
Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have
done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside.
But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is
turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing
it, that I feel sure Howell _aut diabolus_ must have taught it him:

First, the theme--“I was according to your desire to visit the late
new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never
saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my
life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently
qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a
cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram
petticoat lined with satin.”

Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:


     “I think _Clotho_ had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle
     when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is
     fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance
     if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the
     dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you
     such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the
     Lord deliver you.”


Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.

How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and
debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old
rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of
a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful
with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals
upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and
trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I
must not leave out. In the stress of Civil War he writes to a friend
in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here.
Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully
handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks
like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line
twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting
upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but
now a temple is become a stable.”

Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string
them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long
letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of
them. As thus:


     “Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in
     everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the
     teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and
     having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar
     you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish
     you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a
     bargain.”


He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with
“yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten
it--and I believe he never did.




CROCUS AND PRIMROSE


This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first
primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this
article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in
with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be
snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record
can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment,
and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a
first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an
event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest
any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my
primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the
bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new
growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering--my
_japonicas_ always do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf
twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even
in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like
the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native
primula.

Such things--I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of
such things at all--are events in the garden, red-letter days in its
year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another,
are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different
from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and
is incommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to
me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it
in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there
to see Homer’s [Greek: Stygos hydatos aipa rheethra], a sight, I am
bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over
it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think,
_bulbo-codium_, and a white striped with brown, which I have always
known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is named _biflorus_.
It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is
Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as
some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase
otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy
accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by,
that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the
blue _Imperati_, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly
favoured--I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason,
as much _Imperati_--not as I want, for that could never be, but as
is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then
had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So
have some other species of crocus. _Imperati_ grows very large and,
unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a
purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of
the year crocus _Imperati_ is a theme for poets.

As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should
be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun,
and the bees can get _it_. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London
it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal
from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the
embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in
layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot
and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that,
much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or
two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses,
for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of
field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One
mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.

The primrose is vocal of my childhood and the Kentish woodlands.
There they used to grow marvellously, though now I daresay that Lord
Beaconsfield and his League have made an end of them. Wherever the axe
had been there were they, in sheets, in a galaxy, even to the scent
of milk in the spicy air. I remember now, whenever I see my first
primrose of the year, the almost fainting rapture with which we used
to see, smell, taste, and handle them again--on some still warm April
day--after the waiting through the long winter. For winters really were
long, and wintry, then--or I think so. One used to wake in the morning
and find the water-bottle frozen solid, the sponge like a brick. One
used to learn to skate (for which now we go to Switzerland and catch
influenza in a super-heated hotel), make snowmen, blow on one’s fingers
to fasten one’s shirt-collar. But I have lived in the West of England
this twenty years, and can only remember one snowy Christmas. Ah, and
how many warm Aprils? Perhaps as many.

But the primrose is not common here. You will find it over the hills
in the greensand, and again just over the Dorset border, in Cranborne
Chace: not in this valley. I make it grow, importing it, because I
can’t do without it; and so do the villagers, for the same reason. But
they like it coloured, and have a rooted belief that if you plant a
primrose upside down it will come up with red flowers. I tell them that
it is Cruelty to Primroses. They point me out red-flowering roots which
have been obtained in this way; and I end the inconsequent argument by
saying, Well, anyhow, I don’t want it--village logic.

As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of
wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the
flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about
your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there
was a waterfall, and _ramondia_ growing as it does in the Pyrenees.
That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of
the sort. Anemone _blanda_ has become as common as groundsel; but
_apennina_ refuses to seed. The Widow iris, _tuberosa_, which started
in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a
sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of that growing
in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds
freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like
coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large
families, which can never be too large--and so on. Such are some of my
little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I
was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though
no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing
cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one
fine Spring I did induce _Iris iberica_ to utter its extraordinary
flowers--six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party,
I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her
eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “_I_ had four hundred.” It
may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known
then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at
Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her--so far as high ladies
can be rebuked--by telling her that she could have had four thousand on
such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.

I would not now give twopence for _Iris iberica_ unless it would
increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good
gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly,
I am not with the purists who say--or said--that it is inartistic to
grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in
the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was
plainly of that opinion. It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I
am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet
which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them
grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I
have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather like _Rosa
Willmottia_, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers.
Farrer’s behymned _Viburnun fragrans_ grows apace: its fragrance
has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I
hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which
came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is
unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like
it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump,
and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the
valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering.
Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a
leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to
expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches
of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt
have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the
time they were ready,


     “Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
     And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”


and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot,
and, to pursue _The Sensitive Plant_,


     “Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”


as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has
devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to
admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the
house should be removed.

Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult
things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I
had tried to make the Alpine gentian, _verna_, feel at home, when I
happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me
of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps
of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered,
and also died, here--but it did not spread. It existed, not throve.
Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and
left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things
will--I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and
multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see
it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the
streaming waters--one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event”
for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I
would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a
gravel path.




DAFFODILS


I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been
more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and
gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing
with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because
I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this
article without quoting from _A Winter’s Tale_. It is satisfactory,
at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our
poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about
the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one
which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified
as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old
woman’s cottage garden--just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson
nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking,
the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word
changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows
wild in Ireland--not, I believe, in England--and classical poetry is,
of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to
strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds
of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian
Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never
see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I
remember the Pont du Gard, and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or
Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns
brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth.
It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.

Our own name for the wild daffodil is Lent Lily, a beautiful and
sufficient one, and, to judge by the poets again, the plant has been
well distributed. Shakespeare saw it in Warwickshire, and Herrick in
Devon; Clare in Northamptonshire, and Wordsworth in the Lakes. Mr.
Housman knows it in Salop, and Mr. Masefield in Worcestershire. I
know that it is in Sussex and Cornwall, and on the edges of the New
Forest. It may be in North Wilts, almost certainly is in the upper
Thames Valley; but it is not here, to the best of my belief. I imagine
that it does not care for chalk, for though I make it do, it does not
thrive, that is, spread itself. Rather, it degenerates, as it used in
Kent, where I lived as a boy, and in two or three years turned itself
into the old “greenery-yallery” mophead which, whatever Parkinson may
say, is not a true variety at all but a bad kind of recidivist. Now,
my expert friend, Mr. George Engleheart, who lives across the hills,
but on loam, grows daffodils which are a wonder of the realm; but the
point is that his discards, which he throws into ditches or stuffs into
holes to take their chance, never degenerate into doubles. His ground
is a soapy yellow loam, on which you can grow any mortal thing; and a
visit to his daffodil fields, as it were just now, is an experience
which I have had and promise myself again. All the same, honesty
moves me to say--_miror magis!_ He, of course, is a scientist who has
grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things
whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to
him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and
calyx--such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or
sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such
a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such
as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught
drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park; or such as I had in an orchard in
North Cornwall, where, as it seemed, under a canopy of snow and rose
some god at a picnic had spilled curds and whey all over the sward. The
flowers were so thick together as to be distinguishable only as colour:
they streamed in long rivers of yellow and white down the hill. My
description is less poetical than literal. The things looked eatable,
they were so rich.

If you can get such a thrill on your own ground it is by the grace
of God. Mr. Engleheart does not grow bulbs for the thrills of the
unscientific, though no doubt he has some of his own. But there is
one glory of the unskilled and another of the skilled--indeed, the
latter has two, for as well as the pure delight of having “pulled
off” a delicate bit of cross-breeding, there is added the hope of
gain. Your new daffodil should be a gold-mine, and rightly so, because
it may represent the work, the thought, and the anxieties of seven
years or even more. I heard of a grower once who, at the season of
distribution, had his bulbs out upon his studio table, where they were
being sorted, priced and bestowed. In one heap he had certain triumphs
of science which were worth, I was told, £90 the bulb. From that point
of bliss you could run down through the pounds to the shillings and
bring up finally upon the articles which went out at ten shillings a
hundred, or even less. There then they lay out, “so many and so many
and such glee.” And then, O then--“a whirl blast,” as Wordsworth says,
“from behind the hill” swept in at the open door, lifted all the sheets
of paper and their freight together, and scattered the priced bulbs
higgledy-piggledy on the floor. There was tragic work! Bang went all
your ninety pounders; for a bulb in the hand may be worth a thousand on
the floor.

One of those unaccountable facts in entomology which are always
cropping up in gardening has much exercised my learned friend. Although
he has never imported a bulb, nevertheless into his bulb-farm there has
imported itself the daffodil parasite--out of the blue, or the black.
He showed it me one day, a winged beast somewhere in appearance between
a wasp and a hoverfly. I saw bars upon its body, and short wings which
looked as if they were made of talc. This creature has a _lues_ for
laying its eggs in the daffodil bulb, and to do so pierces it through
and through. Last of all the bulb dies also. There seems to be no
remedy but pursuit, capture and death. Just so have the figs at Tarring
called up the _beccafico_ from Italy. Can these things be, without our
special wonder?

To grow and bring to flower every daffodil you put in the ground is
not what I call gardening. Reasonable treatment will ensure it, for
the flower is in the bulb before you plant it. As well might you buy
from the florist things in full bud, plunge them into your plots, and
call _that_ gardening. Yet it is the gardening of the London parks,
and of certain grandees, who ought to know better. If you are graced
by nature or art to make daffodils feel themselves at home, you are
in the good way. Wisley is so graced; not, I think, Kew. At Wisley
they have acclimatised those two charming narcissi, _bulbocodium_ and
_cyclamineus_, which really carpet the ground. When I was last there
they were all over the paths, in the ditches, and in the grass. I
daresay they required drastic treatment, for Wisley, after all, was
made for man, and not for daffodils. Yet if Wisley were my garden, I
know that I should be so flattered by the confidence of those pretty
Iberians that I should let them do exactly as they pleased. If a plant
chose to make itself a weed, I would as readily allow it as I would
a weed which chose to make itself a plant--within reason. I add that
qualification, that tyrant’s plea, because I have just remembered what
occurred when I was once rash enough to introduce _Mulgedium alpinum_
from Switzerland. There is no shaking off that insatiable succubus. I
was reconciled to giving up a garden on its account, and full of hope
that I should never see it again. But I brought with me a peony and
some phloxes, and _Mulgedium_ was coiled about their vitals like a
tapeworm. It is with me to this hour.

The prettiest thing that a narcissus ever did was done to an old lady
I used to know who lived in a cottage in Sussex. Somebody had given
her half-a-dozen Jonquil bulbs, which she planted and left alone. They
took kindly to her and her cottage garden, and seeded all over it. When
I came to know her, the little patch of ground, the dividing ditch,
the bank beyond it, and some of the arable beyond that were golden
with jonquils; and on days of sun-warmed wind you could smell them
from afar. As, with trifling exceptions, it is the sweetest and most
carrying scent in the garden, that is not surprising. Hawthorn is such
another. Somewhere in Hakluyt’s _Voyages_ is an account of the return
of an embassy from the Court of Boris Godounov. The sailors knew that
they were near Sussex before they could see the white cliffs by the
smell of the may wafted over sea. What a welcome home!




WINDFLOWERS

     “Anemones, which droop their eyes
     Earthward before they dare arise
     To flush the border....”


says the poet, and says truly, for I believe there is no exception to
his general statement. The point is really one in the argument between
the gardeners and the botanists, as to whether you are to reckon
hepaticas as anemones. I shall come to that presently, and here will
only point out that hepaticas do _not_ droop their eyes, or hang their
heads, as I prefer to say. Let that be remembered when the scientist
tries, as he is so fond of doing, to browbeat the mild Arcadian. Except
for that remark I don’t call to mind that the poets have sung about the
windflowers. None of them has likened his young woman to a windflower.
Meleager, indeed, when he is paying a compliment to his Zenophile,
pointedly leaves it out.


     “Now bloom white violets, now the daffodils
     That love the rain, now lilies of the hills,”


he begins; and what lilies those could have been, unless they were
lilies of the valley (which sounds absurd), I don’t know. But how could
he talk about spring flowers in his country and leave anemones out? It
is true, he was a Syrian; but politics don’t interest anemones. No one
is to tell me that Asia Minor is without _Anemone fulgens_.

Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always
seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands--as
of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes
about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate
statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is
commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these
things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined.
The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good
way. Luckily it is easy, for these are kindly plants, seed freely,
flower in their first year, and are not so affected by climate as to
change their habits to suit our calendar. Do not grow them in woods
if you want them early. Our woods, _in quella parte del giovinetto
anno_, are both cold and wet. Put them in the open, in light soil
sloping to the south, and you will have as many as you want. One thing
I have noticed about them is that in England fulgens is constant to
its colour, whereas in Greece there are albinos, pure white and very
beautiful, with black stamens. The pairing of those with the staple has
produced a pink fulgens of great attractions. I have imported it, but
it has not spread, and the seed of it comes up scarlet. Blanda has no
sports, and is so proliferous that if it is much grown in soils that
suit it very probably it will become a naturalised British subject.
Here it is a weed.

Our own pair of windflowers are not nearly so easy to deal with as
those two Aegean tourists. Nemorosa will only grow happily in woods,
and even there does not readily transplant. Pulsatilla is subject to
winter rot, as anything which lies out at nights in a fur coat must
expect to be; and it reacts immediately and adversely to a rich soil.
Now nemorosa grows in the fields in Germany, even in water meadows;
pulsatilla in Switzerland will stand any amount of snow. But the snow
in Switzerland is as dry as salt, and no flower objects to a flood when
it is beginning to grow. The enemy in England is wet at the slack time.
The best way to treat pulsatilla is to grow it on a steep slope, for
that is how it grows itself.

Talking of nemorosa, there is a harebell blue variety of it which I
have seen, but never had, and of course the yellow ranunculoides, to be
met with in Switzerland, though it is not a widespread plant. I found a
broad patch of it under some trees on the edge of Lake Lugano: a clear
buttercup yellow, not a dirty white. I don’t call it an exciting plant,
all the same, and am perfectly happy without it, and to know it the
only truly yellow anemone that exists.

No offence, I hope, to the great sulphur anemone of the Alps, a noble
windflower indeed. I know few things more exhilarating than to round
a bluff and find a host of it in stately dance. And I know few things
less so than to try to dig it up. I have devoted some hours to the
pursuit, notably after a night spent at Simplon Dorf. I rose early and
toiled till breakfast. I had an inefficient trowel, bought in Florence,
and an alpenstock, and with them excavated some two feet of Simplon. At
that depth the root of the sulphur anemone was of the thickness of a
reasonable rattlesnake, and ran like the _coda_ of a sonata, strongly,
and apparently for ever. Something had to give, and it was the
anemone. I coiled up what I had, brought it back with me in a knapsack,
and made a home for it among my poor rocks. Nothing to speak of
happened for two years, except that it let me know that it lived. Then
came a Spring and a miracle. The sulphur anemone burgeoned: that is the
only word for what it did. Since then it has never failed, though more
than once the rocks have been rent asunder. In what goes on underground
this anemone is a tree.

I do not forget--am not likely to forget--Coronaria, which in its (I
must own) somewhat sophisticated form of _Anemone de Caen_ is the glory
of my blood and state in the little hanging garden I now possess. I
own, it seems, the exact spot it likes. It is thoroughly at home, and
proves it by flowering practically all the year round. In the dog-days,
I don’t say. But who cares what happens in August? Except for that
waste month--the only one in the almanac with nothing distinctive to
report--I believe I have hardly failed of a handful of coronaria. Since
Christmas I have not failed of a bowlful, and at this time of writing
it is out in a horde. Wonderful things they are: nine inches high, four
inches across, with a palette ranging from white through the pinks to
red and crimson, through the lilacs to violet and the purple of night.
There are few better garden flowers. Untidy? Yes, they need care. Too
free with their seed? They cannot be for me. I am open to the flattery
of a flower’s confidence as (still) to that of a woman’s. Another thing
to its credit is its attraction for bees, with the range of tint and
tinge which that involves. Your whites will be flushed with auroral
rose, or clouded with violet; you will have flecks and splashes of
sudden colour, the basal ring of white, whence comes its cognomen,
annulata, sometimes invaded. Even the black centre with its stamens is
not constant: I have one with a pale green base and stamens of yellow.
With these fine things fulgens goes usefully and happily. Coronaria
has no such vermilion. A bank of the two together, growing in the sun,
can be seen half a mile away, and won’t look like scarlet geranium if
there is a judicious admixture. To qualify that dreadful sophistication
called “St. Brigid” I shall serve myself of W. S. Gilbert’s useful
locution. “Nobody,” he said, “thinks more highly of So-and-so than I
do; and _I_ think he’s a little beast.”

Apennina, I think, wants a mountain. I should like to try it in some
favoured ghyll in Cumberland, and some day I will. I have it on a
lawn, and have had it for many years. There is no less, but no more,
than there ever was. It does not seed. The two colours, china-blue and
white, are delicious in partnership, though the blue is not so good as
that of blanda, and the white not quite so white as nemorosa’s.

And what am I to say of hepaticas, and how _écraser_ the botanists? Who
am I to deny them with my reason--entirely satisfactory to myself--that
the _feeling_ of the two flowers is distinct and separable? What does
an anemone imply? A spring woodland on a mountain slope. What an
hepatica? A wet cleft in a rock, sodden last year’s leaves, ragged
moss, pockmarked crust of snow--and out of them a pale star raying
gold from blue. The anemone is gregarious, the hepatica solitary; the
anemone is a spring flower, the hepatica a winter flower. And lastly,
as a gardener, I say, the anemone can be moved, and is often much the
better of it; the hepatica should not be, and is always the worse. If
you plant an hepatica root and leave it alone for fifty years, you will
have something worth waiting for--a ring of it as big as a cartwheel. I
have not done it--but it has been done for me.




TULIPS


One day short of St. Valentine’s (when Nature still takes the liberties
which men used to allow themselves) I am able to announce tulips in
bud in the open border, which is as much of a record as my crocuses
were on the 18th of January. I don’t speak of a sheltered or fruitful
valley by any means. What they may be doing with flowers at Wilton and
Wilsford has no more relation to me than their goings-on at Torquay or
Grange-over-Sands. Up this way, for reasons which it would be tedious
to report, the spring comes slowly--as a rule. This year is like no
other that I can remember, as no doubt the reckoning will be.

I know what tulip it is. There is only one which would be so heedlessly
daring. It is that noble wild Tuscan flower which the people of the
Mugello and thereabouts call _Occhio del Sole_, which has a sage
green leaf, a long flower-stalk of maroon, and atop of that a great
chalice of geranium red with yellow base and a black blotch in the
midst. Looking into the depths from above there is the appearance of
a lurid eye. But its real name is _Praecox_, and Parkinson says that
it flowers in January. I don’t believe him. I have had it for years,
and never saw it before mid-March. Parkinson is vague about tulips,
classing them mostly by colour and inordinate names of his own. You
may have the Crimson Prince, or Bracklar; or the Brancion Prince; or
a Duke, “that is more or less faire deep red, with greater or lesser
yellow edges, and a great yellow bottome.” Then there is a Testament
Brancion, or a Brancion Duke; and lastly The King’s Flower, “that is, a
crimson or bloud red, streamed with a gold yellow”--which ought to look
indifferent well at Buckingham Palace. _Praecox_ used to grow freely in
the hill country above Fiesole, always on cultivated ground; and I have
found lots of it in the _poderi_ of Settignano, not so much as of the
ordinary blood red, a smaller and meaner flower altogether; but enough
to make a walk under the olives in very early Spring an enchantment.
Ages ago Mrs. Ross sent me a hamper of them, which has lasted me ever
since; for this tulip increases freely, and is invaluable as the first
of its family.

The next to appear will be the little Persian _violacea_, with its
crinkled wavy leaves flatlings, and the pointed bud, which gives a
rose-coloured flower when open, slightly retroflexed, enough so, at
least, to make it plain that the familiar ornament of Persian and
Rhodian tiles was adapted from it. I always thought its name was
_persica_; but Weathers, I see, makes that a bronze flower, and names
_violacea_ as the earliest of all the Persians, which mine certainly
is. So that, as they say, is that. I find it happiest among rocks, as
all bulbs, except lilies, are if they can get there. How else secure
the baking in summer which is so necessary? A pretty thing it is,
in short, charming to discover for yourself in a corner of a man’s
rock-garden, all the more so as you will make your discovery at a
season when you least expect tulips; but there is nothing of a “sudden
glory” to be had from it. Nobody could be knocked off his æsthetic
perch by a Persian tulip, still less off his moral perch. I have known
that done by one of the Caucasian tulips--it led to swift and stealthy
work with a penknife at Kew. But that was a long time ago, and the
delinquent can never do it again, for a final reason.

The loveliest tulip in the world--I speak only of natural flowers,
not of nurserymen’s monsters--is, in my opinion, the little _Bandiera
di Toscana_, the sword-leaved, sanguine-edged thing with the narrow
bud of red and white, which opens in the sun to be a milky star. It
is the loveliest, alike in colour and in habit, but one of the most
fastidious. Short of lifting it, which the true gardener disdains
to do, there is no certainty that it will spring up again when the
time comes round. Your best chance is on rocks, I daresay; and I
have succeeded with it in a border under a south wall with a pent of
thatch over. It does not like frost, and abominates rain at the wrong
time of year. It clings, in fact, to its Mediterranean habits, which
some things contentedly lose--Iris _stylosa_, for instance, which
flowers here better in November than it does in April. I have my
_clusianas_--for that is their proper name--now in a terraced border,
full south, under clumps of mossy saxifrage, and they do as well as
can be expected. They return with the swallows, and open wide to the
sun; but I am not going to pretend that they ramp. If I could afford
it I would put them in a place where they could take their chance of
the spade; for there is this to be said of all the Florentine tulips
that, although they are not designedly lifted, they grow in a country
where every square yard of ground is cultivated, and consequently are
turned over by the plough of the spade every year--no doubt to their
vast benefit. But you must not mind how many of them you slice, or bury
upside down, or leave above ground at that work--and I _do_ mind.

The truly marvellous _Greigi_ is just showing itself: no increase
there, I am sorry to say. Weathers says that it “reproduces itself
freely.” Not here, O Apollo. I cannot make any Caucasian tulips have
families; they are resolute Malthusians; nevertheless, I shall have
my few bubbles of scarlet as before, and before they have done with
me they will be as large as claret-glasses, on short stems, which are
the best kind of claret-glasses. I could do with a hundred of them,
but I don’t know what to give them that I have not given. They grow on
limestone at home, and I give them limestone. They are never disturbed
in the Caucasus, and I never disturb them. It is my distance from the
equator that beats me. So I must be content with my three or four--only
I shan’t boast of them to ladies from Aix-les-Bains. A tulip, by the
way, which I covet, but have not so far been able to obtain, is called,
I _think_, _saxatilis_. It has rather a sprawly growth, but several
flowers on the stalk, and is sweetly scented. In colour it is faint and
indeterminate; flushes of mauve, white and yellow. Several nurserymen
offer me bulbs by that name, some have induced me to buy them; but
it has never been the right thing. I may be wrong, or they may be: I
must ask an expert. It may be priceless, in which case I shan’t have
it. I bought some Peruvian _pseudo-crocus_ once, of a marvellous blue
indeed--not a gentian, but a kingfisher blue--at seven and sixpence
per bulb, and the mice, mistaking it for a real crocus, ate them all.
“These are my crosses, Mr. Wesley.” But, if we are talking about money,
Mrs. Ross _gave_ me a tulip once which was worth, so she told me,
twenty pounds. Certainly it was very handsome, a tall Darwin of bronze
feathered with gold: called _Buonarroti_. It was prolific, and in no
short time filled the border in which it grew. If its sons had been
worthy of their sire there might have been hundreds of pounds’ worth
of them, all growing naked in the open air. But I observed that they
grew paler year by year; and when I returned to the garden after a
five years’ absence I could not believe that I had ever planted such a
bilious tulip. My grand old _Occhi del Sole_, on the other hand, were
as vivid as ever.

I have never possessed the so-called native English tulip, whose
botanical name is _silvestris_; but I have seen it. I know where it
grows, and blows, and could take you to the place--only I shall not.
My father found it by chance, and brought a flower of it home in high
feather. He found it, truly enough, in a wood, so its name describes
its habits. Now, I inquire, is it an indigenous plant? It is what I
doubt. If it is, it must have existed from all time; the Iberians must
have grown it on their lenches, or found it lower down, in the jungle.
Yet it is unknown to the poets; and the word “tulip,” remark, is a
Turkish word disguised. Parkinson knows nothing of _Tulipa silvestris_.
Far more probably it came from the South, in the maw of some straying
bird--perhaps a hoopoo, or the hold of an adventuring ship. That was
how we became possessed of the wild peony which is, or was, to be
found on an island in the Severn Sea. Who is to say how that happened?
Perhaps Spanish sailors had a peony growing in the after-cabin to Our
Lady of Seven Dolours, and were shipwrecked with her and it on the
strand of Lundy. How did two ilexes come to be growing out of the
Guinigi tower at Lucca? How did a fig-tree find itself in the middle
arch of the bridge at Cordova? There are more ways of accounting for
a wild tulip in Kent than by imagining that God Almighty bade it grow
there.

I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips,
and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently
themselves. There is a Dutch grower who simply wallows in adjectives
about them every year. He photographs his children, smiling like
anything, up to the neck in tulips; he poses with his arms full of them
before his wife, like an Angel of the Annunciation. As for his words,
they come bubbling from him as they used from Mr. Swinburne when he
saw a baby. It is true that, like the talk about them, they get taller
every year. They are less flowers than portents, and the only thing to
do with them is to treat them as so much colour, turning your garden
for the time being into a Regent Street shop-window. Brown wallflower
and _La Rêve_ look well, so do yellow wallflower and _Othello_. Last
year I tried _Clara Butt_ and _Cheiranthus allionii_, and had a show
like Mr. Granville Barker’s _Twelfth Night_. Rose pink and orange is
not everybody’s mixture.

The finest unrehearsed effect I ever had with cottage tulips was when
we had a heavy fall of snow one 30th of April, and I went out and saw
the great red heads swimming in the flood like strong men. They were up
to the neck, and seemed to enjoy it. But they died of the effort; for
at night it froze.




SUMMER


If, like me, you are more interested in seeing things happen than in
seeing them when they have happened, you will not be such an advocate
of Summer as of other, any other, seasons. For Summer is the one time
of year when practically nothing happens outdoors. From about the
middle of May--I speak of the south parts--to the middle of September
Nature sits with her hands in her lap and a pleasantly tired face.
There, my children, she says, I have done my job. I hope you like it.
Most of us, I own, do like it very much, and signify the same in the
usual manner by vigorous ball-exercise and liquid refreshment, much
of it of an explosive and delusive kind. When the Summer is over,
somewhere round about Michaelmas day, Nature rolls up her sleeves and
begins again. Properly speaking, there are only two seasons--Spring and
Summer. The people therefore who, like me, prefer the Spring to the
Summer, have more time in which to exhibit or dissemble their love--and
a good deal of it, I confess, uncommonly beastly in the matter of
weather.

The people who like everything are the people to envy. Children, for
example, love the Winter just as much as the Summer. They whistle as
they jump their feet, or flack their arms across their bodies; and
whistling is one of the sure signs of contented youth. I remember
that we used to think it rare sport to find the sponge a solid globe
of ice, or to be able to get off cleaning our teeth on the ground
that the tooth water was frozen in the bottle. I don’t believe I ever
had cold feet in bed, and am sure that if I did I had something much
more exciting to think about. There might be skating to-morrow, or we
could finish the snow-man, or go tobogganning with the tea-tray; or
it was Christmas; or we were going to the pantomime. All seasons were
alike to us; each had its delights. That of Summer, undoubtedly, was
going to the seaside. We always had a month of that, and then a month
in some country place or other which my father did not know. That was
done for his sake, because the seaside bored him so much that even
his children noticed it. It was nothing to us, of course, as we lived
in the country, and did not, as he did, poor man, spend most days of
the year in London; but equally of course we weren’t _bored_. I never
heard of a child being bored, and can imagine few things more tragic in
a small way. No: it was always interesting to live in someone else’s
house, learn something of their ways, chance upon a family photograph,
or a discarded toy, or a dog’s grave in the shrubbery; or to read their
books and guess what bits they had liked--any little things like that.
And, of course, it was comfortable to know that one’s father wasn’t
always smothering a gape, or trying to escape from nigger-minstrels. As
for the sea--a very different thing from the seaside--I don’t believe
he ever looked at it. I am certain that I never saw him on the sands.
The sands are no place for you unless you had rather be barefoot than
not. Now, it is a fact that I never saw my father’s feet.

At the same time, I don’t know where else one could be in August,
except at the seaside. Really, there is very little to say for the
country in that month. The trees are as near black as makes no matter,
the hills are dust-colour, the rivers are running dry. True, the
harvest is going on; but the harvest is not what it used to be. You
had, indeed, “a field full of folk” (in old Langland’s words) in
former days. All hands were at it, and the women following the men,
building the hiles, as we call them; and the children beside them,
twisting up the straw ties as fast as they could twist. And then the
bread and cheese and cider--or it might be home-brewed beer--in the
shade! But bless me--last year I saw the harvesting of a hundred acre
field--our fields run very big down here; and the whole thing was being
done by one man on a machine! The Solitary Reaper, forsooth! The man
was reaper, tyer and binder all in one; you never saw so desolate a
spectacle. So the harvest is not what it was. It may have attractions
for the farmer, but for nobody else that I can think of. Go north
for your Summer and you may do better. August is wet, generally, in
Scotland, but when you are in Scotland you won’t mind rain, or had
better not. You can catch trout in the rain in Scotland, and with a
fly too: that is the extraordinary part of it. And the Scottish summer
twilights are things to remember. They are overdone in Norway, where
they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill for five
minutes and begin the day before you have thought of going to bed. You
can’t keep that up--but it is exciting enough at first. The great
charm of the Norwegian Summer to me is that it includes what we call
Spring. The other season in that country is Winter, which begins in
September and ends with May. Then, immediately, Summer begins: the
grass grows and is ready for the scythe, the cherries flower and get
ripe and are eaten--all at once. You get those amazing contrasts there
which you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most
vividly crossing the Cevennes from Le Puy to Alais. On the watershed I
was picking daffodils, only just ready to be picked; in the valley of
the Ardeche they were making hay, and roses were dusty in the hedges.
I slid from March into June--in twenty minutes. You will not be so
piqued in England; yet if your taste lies in the way of strawberries
for instance, you can do pretty work even in England. You can begin in
Cornwall, or Scilly, and have your first dish in early May, or late
April, with clotted cream, of course. Then you can eat your way through
the western shires to Hampshire, and make yourself very ill somewhere
about Fareham, in June. When you are able to stand the journey, you can
go on to the Fens and find them ready for you in early July. In August
you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather
permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. After that,
if you are alive, and really care for strawberries, you must leave this
kingdom, and perhaps go to California. I don’t know.

The Summer will give you better berries than the strawberry, in my
opinion. It will give you the _wild_ strawberry, which, if you can
find somebody to pick them for you, and then eat them with sugar and
white wine, is a dish for Olympians, ambrosial food. Then there is the
bilberry, which wants cream and a great deal of tooth-brush afterwards,
and the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above the 2,000 foot mark,
just where the Stagshorn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here
is found on the tops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms.
I declare the wild raspberry to be one of the most delicious fruits
God Almighty ever made. In Norway you will have the cranberry and the
saeter-berry; but in Norway you will want nothing so long as there are
cherries. I know Kent very well--but its cherries are not so good as
those of Norway.

I had no intention, when I began, to talk about eating all the time. It
is a bad sign when one begins that, though as a matter of fact we do
think a great deal of our food in the country--because we are hungry,
and it is so awfully good; and (as I daresay the Londoner thinks)
because we have nothing else to think about. That is a mistake, and
the Summer is the time to correct it, by spending it in the country
and trying to understand us. Let me be bold enough to suggest to the
Londoner who takes the prime of Summer to learn the ways of the country
in it, that he would prove a more teachable disciple if he did not
bring his own ways with him. He is rather apt to do that. He expects,
for example, his golf, and always has his toys with him for the
purpose. Well, he should not. Golf is a suburban game, handy for the
townsman in his off hours. Country people don’t play golf. They have
too much to do. The charabanc is another town-institution, to be used
like a stagecoach. Nothing of the country can be learned by streaming
over moor and mountain in one of them. The Oreads hide from them; Pan
and old Sylvanus treat them as natural process, scourges to be endured,
like snowstorms or foot-and-mouth disease. The country is veiled from
charabancs, partly in dust, partly in disgust. For we don’t understand
hunting in gangs. The herd-instinct which such things involve and imply
is not a country instinct. We are self-sufficient here, still, in spite
of all invitation, individuals.




THE LINGERING OF THE LIGHT


With the West wind blowing down the valley, wet and warm from the
Atlantic, men go home leisurely from their work in the fields, happy
in the last of the light, and enjoying, though they never say so, the
delicate melancholy of the hour. It is a gift you make no account of
when the East wind brings it you, for that Scythian scourge withers
what it touches, and under its whip the light itself seems like a husk
about the day. Old people tell us that it brings the blight, whatever
they mean by that. It brought locusts into Egypt once, and brings
influenza into England. Perhaps they put the two together. It brings
sick thinking too, a cold which has the property of drying up the
springs of the blood. There’s no escape from it. The air seems thinner
that comes from the East; brickwork will not keep it out, nor glazed
windows. One fancies in the black mood of it that the “channering worm”
at his work in the churchyard must feel it, and dive deeper into the
mould.

But now one can enjoy the sweet grave evening and turn the mind
hopefully to the prime of the year that is coming. The blackbird
whistles for it in the leafless elm; a belated white hen on the
hillside, very much at her ease, is still heeling up the turf and
inspecting the result. A cottage wife, having her fire alight and
kettle on the boil, stands for a moment at her open door. To mate the
gentle influence of the evening she has made herself trim in clean
white blouse and blue skirt, and looks what she was intended to be, a
pretty young woman with a pride in herself. A friend, going home, stops
her perambulator for a minute to exchange sentiments about the nights
“drawing out.” Almost as she speaks this one draws in--for at this time
of year twilight is a thing of moments. It will be dark before she is
home. No matter: the wind is warm and balmy; she can take her ease, and
her baby be none the worse. This is the weather that opens the human
buds as well as the snowdrops, and gems the gardens with aconites, and
the hearths with sprawling children. We do not heed Dr. Inge down here.

Here’s the end of January, and the winter, by our calendar, over in
three weeks’ time. Since that calendar was written up we have invented
a new winter. It is more difficult to get through April with safety, at
least to garden buds, than any January we have known for forty years;
but as far as we are concerned ourselves we can stand anything in
April, with May to follow; whereas January can still intimidate, and
a cold spell then will cause twice the sickness of the Spring-winter.
January is to April as Till to Tweed:


     “Till said to Tweed,
     ’Though ye rin wi’ speed,
     An’ I rin slaw,
     Where ye drown ae mon
     I drown twa.”


If you look at the graves in a country churchyard, of the two outside
generations, that is, of old people and young children, nearly all
will have found their “bane” in December and January.

With us in the West, the thing which kills the plants in our gardens
also kills the villagers, very old or very young: excessive wet,
namely, followed by hard frost or murderous wind. The other day we had
a day of warm drenches, drifting sheets of rain, a whole day of them,
the wind in the West. About midnight, the weathercock chopped round to
meet a whirl-blast from the East: the sky cleared, and it froze like
mad. I went round my borders in the morning, quaking at the heart. The
garden was like a battle-field. Nothing can cope with that. The babies
get pneumonia, the veterans bronchitis, the sexton is busy; every
day you hear the passing bell. Yet whether it is because we observe
punctually the Laws of Being, or (as the Dean will have it) in spite
of it, the facts are that the supply of babies never fails, and that
we live to a great age. The oldest gardener I know--I shouldn’t wonder
if he were the oldest gardener in the world--lives in this village.
Eighty-nine.


     “I know a girl--she’s eighty-five”--


That was Lord Houghton’s way of beginning a poem on Mrs. Grote. My
gardener beats her by four years. To and fro, four times a day, he
walks his half-mile--to work and back. I saw him the other day half-way
up a cherry-tree, sawing off a dead branch. Mrs. Grote again:


     “She lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
     And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.”


To look at his sapless limbs, you might think he could saw off one of
them and take no hurt. But not at all. Life is high in him still. His
eye is bright, his step is brisk. We have many octagenarians, but I
believe he is the patriarch of our village. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in
Bath, beats him by a year.

We are stoics, without knowing what that means down here. Whatever our
years tell us we make no account of them, or of ailments, or physical
discomfort; and as for Death, the Antick, however close he stand to
us--the Grizzly One, we call him--we take no notice of him, so long
as we can move about. The end is not long in coming when a man must
keep the house, or his bed. Then, so sure as fate, he will stiffen at
the joints and come out no more to enjoy the lingering of the light.
The chalk, which he has been inhaling and absorbing all his life, will
harden in him, and, he will tell you, “time’s up.” Want of imagination,
that fine indifference to fate, perhaps--but I don’t know. I have never
been able to deny imagination to our country folk. The faculty takes
various forms, and is not to be refused to a man because it finds a
harsh vent and issues contorted. I prefer to put it that tradition,
which is our religion, has put obedience to the Laws of Life above
everything else. One of those laws says, Work. And work we do, until
we drop. There is a noble creature lying now, I fear, under a stroke
which will prevent her doing another hand’s turn of work. Her children
are all about her bed; I saw one of them this morning before she went
there. She confessed, with tears, the anguish it would be to see her
mother lying idle. Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day
without work in her children’s recollection. She had never been in
bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of
course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of
them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken,
and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well
Shakespeare knew that world:


     “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
     Nor the stormy winter’s rages;
     Thou thy earthly course hast run,
     Home hast gone, and ta’en thy wages.”


Nothing for tears, or knocking of the breast. The words ring as
solemnly as the bell. I cannot conceive of earthly thing more beautiful
than such faithful, patient, diligent, ordered lives, rounded off by
such mute and uncomplaining death-bed scenes. The fact that so they
have been lived, so rounded off, for two thousand years makes them
sacred, for me. How often has the good soul whose end I am awaiting now
stood at her cottage door to mark the lingering of the light? May her
passing be as gentle as this day’s has been!




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