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Title: The Common Reader

Author: Virginia Woolf

Release date: February 4, 2021 [eBook #64457]
                Most recently updated: August 9, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMMON READER ***




_THE_

COMMON READER


BY

VIRGINIA A WOOLF


“. . . I rejoice to concur with the common
reader; for by the common sense of readers,
uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the
refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of
learning, must be generally decided all claim to
poetical honors.”

DR. JOHNSON, _Life of Gray._


_New York_

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.




TO

LYTTON STRACHEY




Some of these papers appeared originally in the _Times Literary
Supplement_ and the _Dial_. I have to thank the Editors for allowing me
to reprint them here; some are based upon articles written for various
newspapers, while others appear now for the first time.




_CONTENTS_

The Common Reader
The Pastons and Chaucer
On Not Knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling Round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison

The Lives of the Obscure
I. The Taylors and the Edgeworths
II. Laetitia Pilkington
III. Miss Ormerod

Jane Austen
Modern Fiction
“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”
George Eliot
The Russian Point of View

Outlines—
I. Miss Mitford
II. Dr. Bentley
III. Lady Dorothy Nevill
IV. Archbishop Thomson

The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How It Strikes a Contemporary




THE COMMON READER




_The Common Reader_


There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be
written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet
full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private
people. “. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the
common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all
the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be
finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their
qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which
devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing
very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and
the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so
generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart
knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by
an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can
come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a
theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up
some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary
satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of
affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,
snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring
where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his
purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too
obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained,
some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps,
it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions
which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a
result.




_The Pastons and Chaucer_[1]


The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and
the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to
fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest
on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six acres of ground,
only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and surmounted by
battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without.
As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor folk” who should,
at this very moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his
parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of their prayers. The place
is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.

Not so very far off lie more ruins—the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where
John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a
mile or so away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles north of
Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the land, even in our time,
inaccessible. Nevertheless the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the
fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory,
and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened. But some of
them with their newly-opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them—the
grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a tombstone. The news
spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been
so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put above John Paston’s
head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay her debts; the eldest son, Sir
John, wasted his property upon women and tournaments, while the younger,
John also, though a man of greater parts, thought more of his hawks than
of his harvests.

The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been
opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but their
news, none the less, was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world.
People said even that they had been bondmen not so very long ago. At any
rate, men still living could remember John’s grandfather Clement tilling
his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William, Clement’s son,
becoming a judge and buying land; and John, William’s son, marrying well
and buying more land and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at
Caister, and all Sir John’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk. People said
that he had forged the old knight’s will. What wonder, then, that he
lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider the character of Sir John
Paston, John’s eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings, and
the relations between himself and his father as the family letters
reveal them, we shall see how difficult it was, and how likely to be
neglected—this business of making his father’s tombstone.

For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at
the present moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone, bathroom,
or drains, arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books,
unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look out upon a few
cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea
on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but
there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big
enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad
bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked,
threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That is what they talk
about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes
horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are
given to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has
worn itself away, simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they
are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.

In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken
suddenly and very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There
rose out of the sand-hills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk
of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but there was no
parade, no lodging houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this
gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one
solitary old gentleman without any children—Sir John Fastolf, who had
fought at Agincourt and acquired great wealth. He had fought at
Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke
ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper was none
the sweeter for it. He was a hot-tempered old man, powerful, embittered
by a sense of grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court he
thought perpetually of Caister, and how, when his duties allowed, he
would settle down on his father’s land and live in a great house of his
own building.

The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so many
miles away when the little Pastons were children. John Paston, the
father, had charge of some part of the business, and the children
listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone and
building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the
twenty-six private chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations,
measurements, and rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work
was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last years at Caister,
they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that was stored
there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes
stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of gold, with hoods and
tippets and beaver hats and leather jackets and velvet doublets; and how
the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and purple silk. There
were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and the bedrooms hung
with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing,
archers shooting, ladies playing on their harps, dallying with ducks, or
a giant “bearing the leg of a bear in his hand”. Such were the fruits of
a well-spent life. To buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these
houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in
the bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent
the greater part of their energies in the same exhausting occupation.
For since the passion to acquire was universal, one could never rest
secure in one’s possessions for long. The outlying parts of one’s
property were in perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet
this manor, the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for
instance that the Pastons were bondmen, gave them the right to seize the
house and batter down the lodges in the owner’s absence. And how could
the owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresham be in five or
six places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and he
must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The
King was mad too, they said; did not know his own child, they said; or
the King was in flight; or there was civil war in the land. Norfolk was
always the most distressed of counties and its country gentlemen the
most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston chosen, she could
have told her children how when she was a young woman a thousand men
with bows and arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon Gresham
and broken the gates and mined the walls of the room where she sat
alone. But much worse things than that had happened to women. She
neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine. The long, long
letters which she wrote so laboriously in her clear cramped hand to her
husband, who was (as usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep
had wasted the hay. Heyden’s and Tuddenham’s men were out. A dyke had
been broken and a bullock stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really
she must have stuff for a dress.

But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.

Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or dictating page
after page, hour after hour, long, long letters, but to interrupt a
parent who writes so laboriously of such important matters would have
been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the nursery or
schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate communications.
For the most part her letters are the letters of an honest bailiff to
his master, explaining, asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts.
There was robbery and manslaughter; it was difficult to get in the
rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with one
thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should
have done, the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well
might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs rather grimly from a
distance, counsel him to contrive it so that “ye may have less to do in
the world; your father said. In little business lieth much rest. This
world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart
therefrom, right nought bear with us but our good deeds and ill.”

The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf,
cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell
fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see
that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his soul might escape the
agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the
monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for ever”. The
soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering,
and the fire that destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal
grates. For ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich, and for
ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of Norwich. There was something
matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception both of life
and of death.

With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course
were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They
must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A mother would
clout her daughter’s head three times a week and break the skin if she
did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth
and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a
softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving
the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would not suffer their
sisters to marry beneath them, and “sell candle and mustard in
Framlingham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers,
fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and
custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their efforts to
keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash acts
on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his
father denounced him. He was a “drone among bees”, the father burst out,
“which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth
naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated his parents with
insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.

But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of
John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to
Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing
torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges were said.
Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread,
and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two
panes were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the
torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set burning on the
grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his father’s
tombstone.

He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The
discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran
away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on
the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had
inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with
so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of
acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed
something of his father’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious
temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to women, liked
society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes,
even, reading books. And so life, now that John Paston was buried,
started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There could be little
outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered
the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the lives of the
elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their
tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the
right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the
Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and
Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full of poor
people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her
son as she had worked for her husband, with this significant change
only, that now, instead of confiding in her husband, she took the advice
of her priest.

But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer
shell had served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and
pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his
brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the business on hand to
crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly
and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the
mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too
glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And I shall always be your herald
both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I come home, which I
hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a hawk was to be
bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk,
prosecuting his suit, flying his hawks, and attending with considerable
energy and not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston
estates.

The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s grave. But still
Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with
the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the
disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money
spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John himself,
and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery
falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at
Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life was a little more
various in its pleasures. They were not quite so sure as the elder
generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret
Paston scented the change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had
marched so stiffly through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her
troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to
defend Caister with her own hands if need be, “though I cannot well
guide nor rule soldiers”, but there was something wrong with the family
since the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in
his service to God; he had been too proud or too lavish in his
expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the poor.
Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as
much money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay
their debts without selling land, wood, or household stuff (“It is a
death to me to think if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them
in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone.
The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and
more tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such
stuff. There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of
Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt,
comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting
their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their
own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.

For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops
or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight,
reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind
lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading
Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it
that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing.
A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like
dashes of rain on the window pane. There was no reason in it as there
had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and
acquire an important position for children who were not born, or if
born, had no right to bear their father’s name. But Lydgate’s poems or
Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew,
but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from
London or piecing out from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of
love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before
him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some
description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it,
or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure
of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the
end of the story.


To learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do
that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the
rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as
it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount
them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of
greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers
like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious
story-tellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the
story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his
story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow
it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us
time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.
Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and
in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never
come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country.
His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for
the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs
peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the
hillside. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature,
how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do
not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her
cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than
the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and
London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral
excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a
retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and
moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact,
in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic
devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds
of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country
was no mere jeweller’s shop, or museum of curious objects to be
described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since
the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace
the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to
little landscapes, to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn
to the life. The wider landscape is lost.

But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether
agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of
their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the
jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite.
Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is
the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we
come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of
the open air.


And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge


—that is enough.

Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces,
or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore,
disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the
hardness and the freshness of an actual presence. Soon, however, we
notice something of greater importance than the gay and picturesque
appearance of the mediaeval world—the solidity which plumps it out, the
conviction which animates the characters. There is immense variety in
the _Canterbury Tales_, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent
type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young
women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know
them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl,
and this is what she looks like:


Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.


Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her
virginity:


I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.


Next he bethinks him how


Discreet she was in answering alway;
And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.


Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they
are parts, one feels, of the same personage, whom he had in mind,
perhaps unconsciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for this
reason, as she goes in and out of the _Canterbury Tales_ bearing
different names, she has a stability which is only to be found where the
poet has made up his mind about young women, of course, but also about
the world they live in, its end, its nature, and his own craft and
technique, so that his mind is free to apply its force fully to its
object. It does not occur to him that his Griselda might be improved or
altered. There is no blur about her, no hesitation; she proves nothing;
she is content to be herself. Upon her, therefore, the mind can rest
with that unconscious ease which allows it, from hints and suggestions,
to endow her with many more qualities than are actually referred to.
Such is the power of conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our day
by Joseph Conrad in his earlier novels, and a gift of supreme
importance, for upon it the whole weight of the building depends. Once
believe in Chaucer’s young men and women and we have no need of
preaching or protest. We know what he finds good, what evil; the less
said the better. Let him get on with his story, paint knights and
squires, good women and bad, cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply
the landscape, give his society its belief, its standing towards life
and death, and make of the journey to Canterbury a spiritual pilgrimage.

This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was easier then than now
in one respect at least, for Chaucer could write frankly where we must
either say nothing or say it slyly. He could sound every note in the
language instead of finding a great many of the best gone dumb from
disuse, and thus, when struck by daring fingers, giving off a loud
discordant jangle out of keeping with the rest. Much of Chaucer—a few
lines perhaps in each of the Tales—is improper and gives us as we read
it the strange sensation of being naked to the air after being muffled
in old clothing. And, as a certain kind of humour depends upon being
able to speak without self-consciousness of the parts and functions of
the body, so with the advent of decency literature lost the use of one
of its limbs. It lost its power to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet’s
nurse, and their recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll
Flanders. Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced into indecency. He
must be witty, not humorous. He must hint instead of speaking outright.
Nor can we believe, with Mr. Joyce’s _Ulysses_ before us, that laughter
of the old kind will ever be heard again.


But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me
Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.
Unto this day it doth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.


The sound of that old woman’s voice is still.

But there is another and more important reason for the surprising
brightness, the still effective merriment of the _Canterbury Tales_.
Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being
lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its
dung, its cocks and its hens is not (we have come to think) a poetic
subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to
require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of
mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright:


Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,
Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle;


or again,


A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute
With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.


He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his
object—an old man’s chin—


With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,
Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;


or an old man’s neck—


The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh
Whyl that he sang;


and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what
they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this
very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without
dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks or the
Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no desire to
wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the
associations of common grocer’s English.

Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is hard to
quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge. He fixed
his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come. He was
little given to abstract contemplation. He deprecated, with peculiar
archness, any competition with the scholars and divines:


The answere of this I lete to divynis,
But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.

What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in the colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye,


he asks, or ponders


O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your worde eterne,
And wryten in the table of athamaunt
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,
What is mankinde more un-to yow holde
Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?


Questions press upon him; he asks questions, but he is too true a poet
to answer them; he leaves them unsolved, uncramped by the solution of
the moment, thus fresh for the generations that come after him. In his
life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a man of this party
or of that, a democrat or an aristocrat. He was a staunch churchman, but
he laughed at priests. He was an able public servant and a courtier, but
his views upon sexual morality were extremely lax. He sympathised with
poverty, but did nothing to improve the lot of the poor. It is safe to
say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another
because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him,
we are of course absorbing morality at every pore. For among writers
there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and
lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed
their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the
world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are among the priests; they give us
text after text to be hung upon the wall, saying after saying to be laid
upon the heart like an amulet against disaster—


Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

He prayeth best that loveth best
All things both great and small


—such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly. But
Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary
people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other.
We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and making love, and come to
feel without a word being said what their standards are and so are
steeped through and through with their morality. There can be no more
forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are
represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray
and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the morality of
ordinary intercourse, the morality of the novel, which parents and
librarians rightly judge to be far more persuasive than the morality of
poetry.

And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being said the
criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking, reading, doing has
been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful
though that is, of having been in good company and got used to the ways
of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned
country-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke or singing
his song and then another, we know that though this world resembles, it
is not in fact our daily world. It is the world of poetry. Everything
happens here more quickly and more intensely, and with better order than
in life or in prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part
of the incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in
advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before
words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with that
heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering in the
mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and its
variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the most
impressive of all—the shaping power, the architect’s power. It is the
peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this
quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation. From most
poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers;
some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very equal, very
even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven lines in the
hope that the quality will be contained in them it has escaped.


My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,
Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,
And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,
But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.


In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to set
beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears
ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most
ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make
each other shine; when separated lose their lustre. Thus the pleasure he
gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us,
because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or
observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens,
millers, old peasant women, flowers—there is a special stimulus in
seeing all these common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry
affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see them out of
doors. There is a pungency in this unfigurative language; a stately and
memorable beauty in the undraped sentences which follow each other like
women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their bodies as they
go—


And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.


And then, as the procession takes its way, tranquilly, beautifully, out
from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, grinning, malicious, in league
with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to mock the pomp and ceremonies of
life—witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad
bottom of English humour.


So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind
blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father’s tombstone unmade.
But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of those
ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one age merges in
another and are not able to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for
buying books cheap; next he was off to France and told his mother, “My
mind is now not most upon books”. In his own house, where his mother
Margaret was perpetually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys
the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was always reason on her
side; she was a brave woman, for whose sake one must put up with the
priest’s insolence and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke
into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou proud Squire” were
bandied angrily about the room. All this, with the discomforts of life
and the weakness of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter
places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after
year, the making of his father’s tombstone.

Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare ground. The
Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave cloth was in tatters, and he
had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud woman like
Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the Pastons’ lack of
piety, and other families she heard, of no greater standing than theirs,
spent money in pious restoration in the very church where her husband
lay unremembered. At last, turning from tournaments and Chaucer and
Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold
which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and might now be sold
to defray the expenses of his tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she
had hoarded it and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair.
She grudged it; but there was no help for it. She sent it him, still
distrusting his intentions or his power to put them into effect. “If you
sell it to any other use,” she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust
you while I live.”

But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in the
course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk
in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of
the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in dirty lodgings,
alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to the end for money,
Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural
daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb
was still unmade.

The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up this
frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all collections
of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the
fortunes of individuals. The family will go on whether Sir John lives or
dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often
dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds
itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day
shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes. It is early morning and
strange men have been whispering among the women as they milk. It is
evening, and there in the churchyard Warne’s wife bursts out against old
Agnes Paston: “All the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is
the autumn in Norfolk and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for
clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that
winter and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your
gift.” There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.

But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the
pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of
endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters since.
Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part, does
Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse. “Men cut
large thongs here out of other men’s leather. . . . We beat the bushes
and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . . which is to my
heart a very spear.” That is her eloquence and that her anguish. Her
sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to their will. They jest
rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like
a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two
directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must
have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far
better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious
solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips
of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short it is easy
to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not _Lear_ or _Romeo
and Juliet_, but the _Canterbury Tales_.

Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his turn.
The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the same as
before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness; of
unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the
draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping
straight over land unmitigated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle
covering with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain-faced
Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth, treading out the roads of
Norfolk, and persisting with an obstinate courage which does them
infinite credit in furnishing the bareness of England.


[Footnote 1: _The Paston Letters_, edited by Dr. James
Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.]




_On Not Knowing Greek_


For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our
ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since
we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to
laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and
ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a
tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that
we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn
back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of
Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight
resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?

It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal
literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from
Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European
chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are
floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives, and
later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a
figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters,
its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal
catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has
been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides
was eaten by dogs; Æschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a
cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that
is all.

But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up any play
by Sophocles, read—


Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of
Agamemnon,


and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes
some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it
imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea.
Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of
England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in
this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the
elements of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here the Manor
house, the farm and the cottages; the church for worship, the club for
meeting, the cricket field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into
its main elements. Each man and woman has his work; each works for the
health or happiness of others. And here, in this little community,
characters become part of the common stock; the eccentricities of the
clergyman are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper; the
blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the loves and matings of the
boys and girls. Here life has cut the same grooves for centuries;
customs have arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops and
solitary trees, and the village has its history, its festivals, and its
rivalries.

It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles
here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists.
We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of
stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and
sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is
instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known
to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street,
not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble;
inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue
peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the
slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy
of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the
lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the
most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses
in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door bandying words like
village women, with a tendency, as one might expect, to rejoice in
language, to split phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory.
The humour of the people was not good natured like that of our postmen
and cabdrivers. The taunts of men lounging at the street corners had
something cruel in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek
tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality: Is not Pentheus,
for example, that highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the
_Bacchæ_ before he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and
Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows
crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking
to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant
southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The
poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be
read for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic,
familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an
audience of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears and eyes eager
and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat
too long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and
naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and
Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund of
emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by each
new poet.

Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but would
at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our weakness and
distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius was of the
extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design which, if it
failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not in the gentle
blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it succeeded, would cut
each stroke to the bone, would stamp each finger-print in marble. His
Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can
only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to
the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints,
repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly
bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of
despair, joy, hate


οἲ ‘γὼ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ὲν ἡμέρᾀ.
παῖσον, εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν.


But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus, with a
thousand differences of degree, that in English literature Jane Austen
shapes a novel. There comes a moment—“I will dance with you,” says
Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in
itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the
whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the
same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures
are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her
modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means
death.

But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of
Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It is
partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns and
twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which,
characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her,
outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet, as she
herself knows (“my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted
and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made to witness
her mother’s vileness and denounce it in loud, almost vulgar,
clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we know in
the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess.
“δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν,” she says—“there is a strange power in
motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes
kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy—“strike
again”. No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight before the
audience on the hillside were alive enough, subtle enough, not mere
figures, or plaster casts of human beings.

Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they
impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and
varied emotions than in the whole of the _Electra_. But in the _Electra_
or in the _Antigone_ we are impressed by something different, by
something perhaps more impressive—by heroism itself, by fidelity
itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws
us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original
human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse
him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some
other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the
way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which
everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily
and more directly than we understand the characters in the _Canterbury
Tales_. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human
species.

It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman,
these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who
stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places,
twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from
impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising
companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of
others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in
Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down
to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment
of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of
the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been
worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song
echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For
the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him.
Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy tawny bodies at
play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on
granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then
suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra,
as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her
any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with
grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem
divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb”.

And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the
insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks
thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek;
we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of
excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of
expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s
character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been
stated and must eternally endure.

Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the particular
to the general must of necessity be, with the actors standing there in
person, with their bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made
use of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare, where there is
more of poetry than of action, are better read than seen, better
understood by leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with
all its associations and movements, visible to the eye. The intolerable
restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could
be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action,
could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is
this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active
part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in
the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to
speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
Always in imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves
and the author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself
felt. For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and
madmen supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always
devising some substitute—Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding
coming out and addressing the world before his curtain rises. So to
grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the utmost importance.
One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and
apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and
commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and
give them their relation to the play as a whole.

We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course is exactly what we
cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities,
must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that
Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the
play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some
place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings
of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love unconquered in fight.
Lovely, lofty, and serene his choruses grow naturally out of his
situations, and change, not the point of view, but the mood. In
Euripides, however, the situations are not contained within themselves;
they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of suggestion, of questioning; but
if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled
rather than instructed. At once in the _Bacchæ_ we are in the world of
psychology and doubt; the world where the mind twists facts and changes
them and makes the familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable.
What is Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s duty to them,
and what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus
makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the
straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it in
order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I have so
much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together two
apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them together,
you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I might have given
you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore suffers less than
Sophocles and less than Æschylus from being read privately in a room,
and not seen on a hillside in the sunshine. He can be acted in the mind;
he can comment upon the questions of the moment; more than the others he
will vary in popularity from age to age.

If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves,
and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions
far flung and unanswered, Æschylus makes these little dramas (the
_Agamemnon_ has 1663 lines; _Lear_ about 2600), tremendous by stretching
every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors,
by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the
scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as
to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap
through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks
of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give
out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey
the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting
them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively
what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other
words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we
cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for
instance—


ὀμμάτων δ ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ’ Ἀφροδίτα.


The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which
in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds
without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by
prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run
up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning
that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.

Æschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that
people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some
mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides
will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a
small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running
use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but
the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing
has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough
to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.

For none of these dramatists had the license which belongs to the
novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of
modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can
only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes
two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the
ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and
however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness
of metaphor could have saved the _Agamemnon_ if either images or
allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the
naked cry


ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ. ὢ ’πολλον, ὢ ’πολλον.


Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.

But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold descended
on the hillside. There must have been some place indoors where men
could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats,
where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their
ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the
life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had
eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy
ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up,
fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly
stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole
company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting
process; to contract painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge
what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the
dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into
truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is virtue
knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless
questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail, even if he
does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better. For as the
argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing
on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of
reaching it. That all can feel—the indomitable honesty, the courage,
the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit
where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest
felicity of which we are capable.

Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of mind of
a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been revealed.
But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is
not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is a winter’s
night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s house; the girl is playing the
flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on sandals; he has stopped in
the hall; he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Socrates has
done; he is bantering Alcibiades; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it
round “this wonderful fellow’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares
not for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can imagine all
external possessions, whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any
other thing for which the multitude felicitates the possessor. He
esteems these things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among
men, making all the objects of their admiration the playthings of his
irony. But I know not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images
which are within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen
them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and
wonderful, that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be
obeyed even like the voice of a God.” All this flows over the arguments
of Plato—laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the
hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising.
Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our
faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the
frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker
found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep
instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the
cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to
turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of
living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things
are permanently more valuable than others.

So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of us.
For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of that,
by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the
atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the
coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and grace, and then
contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting, expands and soars in
that higher air which is generally reached only by the more extreme
measures of poetry—it is this art which plays upon us in so many ways
at once and brings us to an exultation of mind which can only be reached
when all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy to the
whole.

But we must beware. Socrates did not care for “mere beauty”, by which he
meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as much as the
Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or listening to
argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we are to break off
sentences and appreciate them apart from the context. For them there
were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Sayings from George
Eliot. The writer had to think more of the whole and less of the detail.
Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck
them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts.
Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do
the English. There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature
which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of
printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of
the prettiness of detail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to
look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe
for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an
age like our own. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our
emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before
we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only
poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of
Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be
direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being
sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet
being dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die nobly is the
chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot;
for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of
praise that grows not old”. They could march straight up, with their
eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions stand still and
suffer themselves to be looked at.

But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it
was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut on a
tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue of
Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds upon some
tremendous metaphor in the _Agamemnon_ instead of stripping the branch
of its flowers instantly as we do in reading _Lear_—are we not reading
wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading
into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack? Does not the
whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They
admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the
maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a
vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the
young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings;
the grove has only to be called ἄβατον, “untrodden”, and we
imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we
are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the
reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of
a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps
misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole
fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now
dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a
page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals
by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless it is
the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which
perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the
expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek.

πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἕρως
ἅψηται

. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined,
becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love.


Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then,
spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing,
shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves
which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us of our own
emotions, _thalassa, thanatos, anthos, aster_—to take the first that
come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet
fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the depths Greek is
the only expression. It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations.
Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is
necessarily full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says
“wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can
the subtler stress, the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even
by the most skilful of scholars—


. . . thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb


is not


ἅτ’ ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ,
αἰ, δακρύεις.


Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this
important problem—Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a
passage in the _Odyssey_ where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if
Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our
merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though
Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English.
Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we
laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that
burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The
French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so
different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure
that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus
humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when
we turn from Greek to Elizabethan literature it seems, after a long
silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.

These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted
and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the
unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature;
it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no
forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many
men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one.
Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which
permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Æschylus, or Racine, or
Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on
to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means
that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass
the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have
Sappho with her constellations of adjectives, Plato daring extravagant
flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and
contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and
quietly, apparently motionless, and then with a flicker of fins off and
away; while in the _Odyssey_ we have what remains the triumph of
narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of
the fortunes of men and women.

The _Odyssey_ is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive
story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly
in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens
next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty,
subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the
sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little
hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is
true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though
everything is made by hand, are not closely kept at work. They have had
time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an
ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at
once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room;
Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions
seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful,
have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than
children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little
islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in
their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more
aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of
life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own
standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of
existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when
we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and
its consolations, of our own age.




_The Elizabethan Lumber
Room_


These magnificent volumes[2] are not often, perhaps, read through. Part
of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book
as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a
lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments,
huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for
ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the
dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness
to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while
outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.

For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, elephants’ teeth,
wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of
priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of
innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by “apt young men”
from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself.
The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the
river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. “The
Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships
thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mariners they shouted
in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof.” Then, as
the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the
hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his
friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly
England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships
sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and
serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too
was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs
of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their
God against the God of the Turks, who “can speake never a word for
dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . .
But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God
indeed. . .” God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir
Humphrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they
sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the
North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland’s men,
hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight,
licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and
worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and
claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. “Sir
William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son,
until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.”
But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk,
or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold
strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One
expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of
uncounted riches lay only a little further up the coast? What if the
known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When,
after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of
the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands,
startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the
trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or
sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw,
far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on
their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for
the Spanish King.

These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country
to decoy “the apt young men” lounging by the harbour-side to leave their
nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the
bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of
English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it
is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from
which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of
producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have
failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose
crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily consumed by the
gallows”. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by
the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds
of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs,
“without which our life were to be said barbarous”, have all come to
England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the
immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for
the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen
surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they
could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in
the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated
company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter
from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw
the Emperor “sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head,
and a staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the ceremony that
he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English
merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and
stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by
millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these
centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the
glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was
bravely dressed for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of
red cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk”. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were
eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns and lumps of
ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and
“debates” of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into
vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere
off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild
beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board
to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed
profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later
the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to
his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again,
the savages lived together in perfect chastity.

All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the
adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being
acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize
upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate those


frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon


with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys,
for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and
died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some
silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf lay between the spartan
domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the
Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their
time reading histories, or “writing volumes of their own, or translating
of other men’s into our English and Latin tongue”, while the younger
ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the
enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into
existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and
lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse
and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan
literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities,
and references to that America—“O my America! my new-foundland”—which
was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories
of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in
fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.

But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the
sea and the voyages, of the lumber-room crammed with sea beasts and
horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire
the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so
beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep
the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without
these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable
catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich
draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how
exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing
a passage from Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_ with one from Montaigne’s
Essays.


He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent
with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music,
and with a tale (forsooth) he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending
no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue;
even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by
hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste: which if one should
begin to tell them the nature of the _Aloës_ or _Rhubarbarum_ they
should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at
their mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the best
things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they will be to hear
the tales of Hercules. . . .


And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidney’s prose is an
uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid
phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long
accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial,
unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself
flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with
this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers
and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and
crevices which poetry can never reach; of cadences different but no less
beautiful; capable of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose
entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the
ancients met death:


. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs
occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul
propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation
ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais
entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires,
et la musique, et des vers amoureux.


An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared
with the French are as boys compared with men.

But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of
youth have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney
shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and
naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to
perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the
discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of
self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic
passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found.
The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on
the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer
interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.


_Cler_. A box of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man
can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has painted, and
perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes
her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear
it) on the subject. [Page sings]


Still to be neat, still to be drest &c.

_True_. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good dressing
before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate
garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often
counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show
them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand,
discover it often: practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth,
repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.


So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s _Silent Woman_, knocked into shape by
interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into
stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and
the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing
consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the
mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression
and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His
immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists,
autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades
of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men
with men to their lonely life within. “The world that I regard is
myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for
the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my
recreation.” All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked
the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel sometimes a hell within
myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.”
In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. “I am in the
dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.”
The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes
about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the
greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted
all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life
are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot
that the workman has dug out of the field—at the sight and sound of
them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens
before his imagination. “We carry with us the wonders we seek without
us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo of wonder
encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the
flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in
the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed
with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own
qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from
nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself.
“For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a
friendly aspect to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws, the
customs and policies of several states, the names of all the
constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so
sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this
little figure walking that “methinks I do not know so many as when I did
but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than
Cheapside”.

He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the
highest altitudes he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the
details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes
large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes.
He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept
maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the
spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of
the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most
things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when
we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was
a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime
speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man,
whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we
smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile
broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the
astonishing conjectures of the _Religio Medici_. Whatever he writes is
stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of
impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish
colours that, however hard we try, make it difficult to be certain
whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the
presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest
lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with
ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses
full of emerald lights and blue mystery.


[Footnote 2: _Hakluyf’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels,
and Discoveries of the English Nation_, five volumes, 4 to, 1810.]




_Notes on an Elizabethan
Play_


There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in English
literature, and chief among them that jungle, forest, and wilderness
which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to be
examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare who has had the light on
him from his day to ours, Shakespeare who towers highest when looked at
from the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays of the lesser
Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,—to
adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an
upsetting experience which plies him with questions, harries him with
doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For
we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces
of a bygone age how great a power the body of a literature possesses to
impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but
takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles
which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact,
splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield
our ground or stick to our guns.

At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by the
extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and
our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed, is, speaking
roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called Smith, who
succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood importers, timber
merchants and coal exporters, was well known in political, temperance,
and church circles, did much for the poor of Liverpool, and died last
Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell Hill. That
is the world we know. That is the reality which our poets and novelists
have to expound and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan play
that comes to hand and read how


I once did see
In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.


Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool? And the groves of
Elizabethan drama echo “Where?” Exquisite is the delight, sublime the
relief of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the
jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend
their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women,
as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest
profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they fall
imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. But
soon the low, the relentless voice, which if we wish to identify it we
must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English literature, and
French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to stimulate and
enchant these old plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably
dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on the alert
through five acts or thirty-two chapters must somehow be based on Smith,
have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it
pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose that a man
because his name is Smith and he lives at Liverpool is therefore “real”.
We know indeed that this reality is a chameleon, quality, the fantastic
becoming as we grow used to it often the closest to the truth, the sober
the furthest from it, and nothing proving a writer’s greatness more than
his capacity to consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he
touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of gossamer. Our
contention merely is that there is a station, somewhere in mid-air,
whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the
great artist is the man who knows where to place himself above the
shifting scenery; that while he never loses sight of Liverpool he never
sees it in the wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then,
because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to
fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise
above life they soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible
for long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry, and a cloud
landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans
bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to
work.

Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is of a
different quality altogether from the boredom which a nineteenth-century
play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The riot of images,
the violent volubility of language, all that cloys and satiates in the
Elizabethans yet appears to be drawn up with a roar as a feeble fire is
sucked up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an intermittent
bawling vigour which gives us the sense in our quiet arm-chairs of
ostlers and orange-girls catching up the lines, flinging them back,
hissing or stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the Victorian
age is evidently written in a study. It has for audience ticking clocks
and rows of classics bound in half morocco. There is no stamping, no
applause. It does not, as, with all its faults, the Elizabethan audience
did, leaven the mass with fire. Rhetorical and bombastic, the lines are
flung and hurried into existence and reach the same impromptu
felicities, have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness,
which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom in our day the deliberate,
solitary pen. Indeed half the work of the dramatists one feels was done
in the Elizabethan age by the public.

Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the
public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay the
greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us—the plot; the
incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions which
presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public
actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with
the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen; undoubtedly a
play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we have a right to
demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly possible) that
what happens shall have an end in view. It shall agitate great emotions;
bring into existence memorable scenes; stir the actors to say what could
not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can fail to remember the plot
of the _Antigone_, because what happens is so closely bound up with the
emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one
and the same time. But who can tell us what happens in the _White
Devil_, or the _Maid’s Tragedy_, except by remembering the story apart
from the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans,
like Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and
the violence which those plots demand so terrific, that the actors
themselves are obliterated and emotions which, according to our
convention at least, deserve the most careful investigation, the most
delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is
inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no
characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences whom we know so little
that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine
in those early plays—Bellimperia in the _Spanish Tragedy_ will serve as
well as another—and can we honestly say that we care a jot for the
unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill
herself in the end? No more than for an animated broomstick, we must
reply, and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of
broomsticks is a drawback. But the Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude
forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the
formidable framework which greater dramatists could modify, but had to
use. Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert;
Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. “This man”, says Mr.
Havelock Ellis, “writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but
as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy
the fibres of their hearts.”

The play—_’Tis pity she’s a Whore_—upon which this judgement is
chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella spun from pole to
pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First, her brother tells
her that he loves her; next she confesses her love for him; next finds
herself with child by him; next forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is
discovered; next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and
brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings which such crises
and calamities might be expected to breed in a woman of ordinary
sensibility might have filled volumes. A dramatist of course has no
volumes to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can illumine; he
can reveal enough for us to guess the rest. But what is it that we know
without using microscopes and splitting hairs about the character of
Annabella? Gropingly we make out that she is a spirited girl, with her
defiance of her husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian
song, her ready wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we
understand the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches
her conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her.
She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach.
Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood,
nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the
English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she
is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this
we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the
play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been
accumulating because it has accumulated in places where we have not
expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with prose, and the
play, after all, is poetry.

The play is poetry we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to
obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so
far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as
we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences emerge;
the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play; the
emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and
gradually massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion concentrated,
generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what
phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!


O, my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.


or


You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.


With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say


“You have oft, for these two lips
Neglected cassia”.


Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her
reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect
marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his swiftness
to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground not on the sky: suggest by
description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing


Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true,


he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the
undertakers’ men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can we
compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the
little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual
and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the
separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna
Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the


. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,
. . . driven, I know not whither.


So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our
Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we close
_War and Peace_? Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting the
superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the novelist’s art. Rather
we are made more than ever aware of the inexhaustible richness of human
sensibility. Here, in the play, we recognise the general; here, in the
novel, the particular. Here we gather all our energies into a bunch and
spring. Here we extend and expand and let come slowly in from all
quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so
saturated with sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience,
that far from ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its
inferiority to others we complain that they are still unable to keep
pace with the wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of
what may yet be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the
unexpressed.

Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion we still
read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring in the
land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories of
Liverpool fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any likeness
between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia at Muswell
Hill and the Armenian Duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the
owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to a still-born babe
’mongst women howling. To join those territories and recognise the same
man in different disguises we have to adjust and revise. But make the
necessary alterations in perspective, draw in those filaments of
sensibility which the moderns have so marvellously developed, use
instead the ear and the eye which the moderns have so basely starved,
hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as they are printed in
black letters on the page, see before your eyes the changing faces and
living bodies of men and women, put yourself, in short, into a
different, but not more elementary stage of your reading development and
then the true merits of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The
power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining
genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
Theirs is that broad humour based upon the nakedness of the body, which,
however arduously the public spirited may try, is impossible, since the
body is draped. Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some
sort of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence
of the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any
creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet
it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole
literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high
spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to
favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the jungle and
the wilderness the compass still points.


“Lord, Lord, that I were dead!”


they are for ever crying.


O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber——


The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the world
is vanity.


glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying: on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity——


To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell
that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment.


All life is but a wandering to find home,
When we’re gone, we’re there.


Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the
other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of
frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July
flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of
pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most
reckless and abundant, they reply


Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,
No root in comforts; all his power to live
Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve.


It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play
which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of
the Gods.

So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan
drama. So we consort with Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns,
and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy
of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored
too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A
dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering
of one of Tolstoi’s flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and
tedious story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some
sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a
world full of tedium and delight; pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant
laughter, poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what
then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so
persistently that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It
is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some
one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile,
as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to
think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own
darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne,
to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne—the keepers of the keys of solitude.




_Montaigne_


Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily,
had painted of himself, and asked, “Why is it not, in like manner,
lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a
crayon?” Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing
could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are
almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task,
the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious,
and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in
drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau
perhaps. The _Religio Medici_ is a coloured glass through which darkly
one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright
polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other
people’s shoulders in the famous biography. But this talking of oneself,
following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and
circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its
imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne. As the
centuries go by, there is always a crowd before that picture, gazing
into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the
longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they
see. New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the
Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes[3] Cotton’s
translation; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the
complete works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to
which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is
not easy.


We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this road
[said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; ’tis a rugged
road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
motions; ’tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
from the common and most recommended employments of the world.


There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expression. We all
indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it
comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how
little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of
the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and
returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with
a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress
their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid
instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and
ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making
ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of
human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for this
reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such
irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book
was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on
saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write
himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged
road, more than it seems”.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme
difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means
agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what
she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people
say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up their minds that old
invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and edify the rest of us by
the spectacle of their connubial fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said,
on the contrary, that it is in old age that one ought to travel, and
marriage, which, rightly, is very seldom founded on love, is apt to
become, towards the end of life, a formal tie better broken up. Again
with politics, statesmen are always praising the greatness of Empire,
and preaching the moral duty of civilising the savage. But look at the
Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities
levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated . . . and the
richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the
traffic of pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!” And then when the
peasants came and told him that they had found a man dying of wounds and
deserted him for fear lest justice might incriminate them, Montaigne
asked:


What could I have said to these people? ’Tis certain that this office of
humanity would have brought them into trouble. . . . There is nothing so
much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty as the laws.


Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the more palpable
forms of Montaigne’s great bugbears, convention and ceremony. But watch
her as she broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower which,
though detached from the main building, has so wide a view over the
estate. Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from
heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful;
prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic,
pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and
prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little
to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend
his life merely in trying to run her to earth. The pleasure of the
pursuit more than rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon
one’s worldly prospects. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward
independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he
is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip
past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do
because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and
faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness;
dull, callous, and indifferent.

Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to tell us
his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room of our tower
and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they
chase each other up the chimney, and leave the government of the world
to others. Retirement and contemplation—these must be the main elements
of his prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is
impossible to extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling,
half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy,
quizzical expression. The truth is that life in the country, with one’s
books and vegetables and flowers, is often extremely dull. He could
never see that his own green peas were so much better than other
people’s. Paris was the place he loved best in the whole world—“jusques
à ses verrues et à ses tâches”. As for reading, he could seldom read
any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that
he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from one room to another.
Book learning is nothing to be proud of, and as for the achievements of
science, what do they amount to? He had always mixed with clever men,
and his father had a positive veneration for them, but he had observed
that, though they have their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their
visions, the cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe yourself:
one moment you are exalted; the next a broken glass puts your nerves on
edge. All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of
the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the
common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence—yet, it is true, poetry is
delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

It appears, then, that we are to aim at a democratic simplicity. We may
enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious
bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his
father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life
and speak the real language. There is certainly an element of truth in
that. Things are said very finely at the lower end of the table. There
are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant than
among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! “the
mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy. Is it reasonable that
the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their
minds are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They must be told
what it is expedient for them to know. It is not for them to face facts
as they are. The truth can only be known by the well-born soul—“l’âme
bien née”. Who, then, are these well-born souls, whom we would imitate,
if only Montaigne would enlighten us more precisely?

But no. “Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.” After all, how could he
explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply
and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own,
when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him? One
quality or principle there is perhaps—that one must not lay down rules.
The souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Étienne de La Boétie,
for example, are always the supplest. “C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas
vivre, que de se tenir attaché et obligé par nécessité à un seul
train.” The laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with
the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a
convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow
their souls free play. But we, who have a private life and hold it
infinitely the dearest of our possessions, suspect nothing so much as an
attitude. Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay down
laws, we perish. We are living for others, not for ourselves. We must
respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service, load them
with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the inevitable
compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and all offices
that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our
incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of
impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every
second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is
death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat
ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and
follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or
thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.

This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be
controlled. But it is difficult to see what power we are to invoke to
help us, since every restraint of private opinion or public law has been
derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn upon the misery, the
weakness, the vanity of human nature. Perhaps, then, it will be well to
turn to religion to guide us? “Perhaps” is one of his favourite
expressions; “perhaps” and “I think” and all those words which qualify
the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle
up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak outright. For
one does not say everything; there are some things which at present it
is advisable only to hint. One writes for a very few people, who
understand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but
meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor,
an invisible censor within, “un patron au dedans”, whose blame is much
more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is
there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge
to whom we must submit; this is the censor who will help us to achieve
that order which is the grace of a well-born soul. For “C’est une vie
exquise, celle qui se maintient en ordre jusques en son privé”. But he
will act by his own light; by some internal balance will achieve that
precarious and everchanging poise which, while it controls, in no way
impedes the soul’s freedom to explore and experiment. Without other
guide, and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far more difficult to
live well the private life than the public. It is an art which each must
learn separately, though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like
Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas among the ancients, and
Étienne de La Boétie among the moderns, whose example may help us. But
it is an art; and the very material in which it works is variable and
complex and infinitely mysterious—human nature. To human nature we must
keep close. “. . . il faut vivre entre les vivants”. We must dread any
eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off from our fellow-beings.
Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their
sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk
of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate is our chief business;
society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire
knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond
our own time and province. Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons
and undiscovered lands, men with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests,
and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own. Possibly
we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other which is
apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.

Here then, in spite of all contradictions and of all qualifications, is
something definite. These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul.
On this point at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he wants; it
is not that men shall quote him in years to come; he is setting up no
statue in the market-place; he wishes only to communicate his soul.
Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is
happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light
those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing;
to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends
to let them know it.


“. . . car, comme je scay par une trop certaine expérience, il n’est
aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis que celle que nous
aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublié à leur dire et d’avoir eu
avec eux une parfaite et entière communication.”


There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up “se
défendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion.
When they dine they must have the same food they get at home. Every
sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of their own village.
They travel only to return. That is entirely the wrong way to set about
it. We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend
the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.
Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find
before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom
we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has
no relish unless we share it. As for the risks—that we may catch cold
or get a headache—it is always worth while to risk a little illness for
the sake of pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales espèces du
profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for
us. Doctors and wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise
men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men
and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every
one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible;
turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full
before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a
beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days
and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that
deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and
the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own
orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind.
Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two fingers’ breadth from
goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the
end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on
horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers
close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break
us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among
girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him
find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et
populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death;
it is life that matters.

It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not
their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes
more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul,
every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and
winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must
have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice;
carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s
feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s
teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to
one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then
disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it
slip through one’s fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves,
there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the
imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and
shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills
broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by
reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too,
her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and
sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the
sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe.
Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in
youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a
boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father
loved building. In short the soul is all laced about with nerves and
sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no
one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the
smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of
all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest
monster and miracle in the world. “. . . plus je me hante et connois,
plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe,
observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et
sans travail” Montaigne will write.

But there remains one final question which, if we could make him look up
from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to this great
master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short and
broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory statements, we have
heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year
after year through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to
transparency. Here is some one who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise
of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord,
husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and mused for hours
alone over old books. By means of perpetual experiment and observation
of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these
wayward parts that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty
of the world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had
to live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as
we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul
living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure
the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the nature of the
soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with others? Is the
beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some explanation of
the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is
only one more question: “Que scais-je?”


[Footnote 3: _Essays of Montaigne_, translated by Charles Cotton,
5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6: 6s. net]




_The Duchess of Newcastle_[4]


“. . . All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle. And while she lived her wish was granted. Garish in her
dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her
speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing upon herself the
ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. But the last
echoes of that clamour have now all died away; she lives only in the few
splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb; her poems, her
plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses—all those folios
and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was shrined—moulder
in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles
which hold six drops of their profusion. Even the curious student,
inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum,
peers in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting the door.

But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable figure.
Born (it is conjectured) in 1624, Margaret was the youngest child of a
Thomas Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her upbringing was
due to her mother, a lady of remarkable character, of majestic grandeur
and beauty “beyond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in leases,
and setting of lands and court keeping, ordering of stewards, and the
like affairs.” The wealth which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage
portions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out of an opinion
that if she bred us with needy necessity it might chance to create in us
sharking qualities”. Her eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but
reasoned with, finely and gayly dressed, and allowed no conversation
with servants, not because they are servants but because servants “are
for the most part ill-bred as well as meanly born”. The daughters were
taught the usual accomplishments “rather for formality than for
benefit”, it being their mother’s opinion that character, happiness, and
honesty were of greater value to a woman than fiddling and singing, or
“the prating of several languages”.

Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of such indulgence to
gratify certain tastes. Already she liked reading better than
needlework, dressing and “inventing fashions” better than reading, and
writing best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written in
straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought always outdid the
pace of her fingers, testify to the use she made of her mother’s
liberality. The happiness of their home life had other results as well.
They were a devoted family. Long after they were married, Margaret
noted, these handsome brothers and sisters, with their well-proportioned
bodies, their clear complexions, brown hair, sound teeth, “tunable
voices”, and plain way of speaking, kept themselves “in a flock
together”. The presence of strangers silenced them. But when they were
alone, whether they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde Park, or had music,
or supped in barges upon the water, their tongues were loosed and they
made “very merry amongst themselves, . . . judging, condemning,
approving, commending, as they thought good”.

The happy family life had its effect upon Margaret’s character. As a
child, she would walk for hours alone, musing and contemplating and
reasoning with herself of “everything her senses did present”. She took
no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys did not amuse her, and she
could neither learn foreign languages nor dress as other people did. Her
great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which nobody else was
to copy, “for”, she remarks, “I always took delight in a singularity,
even in accoutrements of habits”.

Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free, should have bred a
lettered old maid, glad of her seclusion, and the writer perhaps of some
volume of letters or translations from the classics, which we should
still quote as proof of the cultivation of our ancestresses. But there
was a wild streak in Margaret, a love of finery and extravagance and
fame, which was for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements of nature.
When she heard that the Queen, since the outbreak of the Civil War, had
fewer maids-of-honour than usual, she had “a great desire” to become one
of them. Her mother let her go against the judgement of the rest of the
family, who, knowing that she had never left home and had scarcely been
beyond their sight, justly thought that she might behave at Court to her
disadvantage. “Which indeed I did,” Margaret confessed; “for I was so
bashful when I was out of my mother’s, brothers’, and sisters’ sight
that . . . I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any
way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a natural fool.” The courtiers
laughed at her; and she retaliated in the obvious way. People were
censorious; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected
intellect in their own sex; and what other lady, she might justly ask,
pondered as she walked on the nature of matter and whether snails have
teeth? But the laughter galled her, and she begged her mother to let her
come home. This being refused, wisely as the event turned out, she
stayed on for two years (1643–45), finally going with the Queen to
Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to pay their respects to the
Court, was the Marquis of Newcastle. To the general amazement, the
princely nobleman, who had led the King’s forces to disaster with
indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love with the shy, silent,
strangely dressed maid-of-honour. It was not “amorous love, but honest,
honourable love”, according to Margaret. She was no brilliant match; she
had gained a reputation for prudery and eccentricity. What, then, could
have made so great a nobleman fall at her feet? The onlookers were full
of derision, disparagement, and slander. “I fear”, Margaret wrote to the
Marquis, “others foresee we shall be unfortunate, though we see it not
ourselves, or else there would not be such pains to untie the knot of
our affections.” Again, “Saint Germains is a place of much slander, and
thinks I send too often to you”. “Pray consider”, she warned him, “that
I have enemies.” But the match was evidently perfect. The Duke, with his
love of poetry and music and play-writing, his interest in philosophy,
his belief “that nobody knew or could know the cause of anything”, his
romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn to a woman who
wrote poetry herself, was also a philosopher of the same way of
thinking, and lavished upon him not only the admiration of a
fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive creature who had been
shielded and succoured by his extraordinary magnanimity. “He did
approve”, she wrote, “of those bashful fears which many condemned, . . .
and though I did dread marriage and shunned men’s company as much as I
could, yet I . . . had not the power to refuse him.” She kept him
company during the long years of exile; she entered with sympathy, if
not with understanding, into the conduct and acquirements of those
horses which he trained to such perfection that the Spaniards crossed
themselves and cried “Miraculo!” as they witnessed their corvets,
voltoes, and pirouettes; she believed that the horses even made a
“trampling action” for joy when he came into the stables; she pleaded
his cause in England during the Protectorate; and, when the Restoration
made it possible for them to return to England, they lived together in
the depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and perfect
contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each
other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating doubtless upon
such marvels of the natural world as chance threw their way. They were
laughed at by their contemporaries; Horace Walpole sneered at them. But
there can be no doubt that they were perfectly happy.

For now Margaret could apply herself uninterruptedly to her writing. She
could devise fashions for herself and her servants. She could scribble
more and more furiously with fingers that became less and less able to
form legible letters. She could even achieve the miracle of getting her
plays acted in London and her philosophies humbly perused by men of
learning. There they stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume,
swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity,
the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. No fears
impede her. She has the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of
a Duchess. The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on
their backs. We seem to hear her, as the thoughts boil and bubble,
calling to John, who sat with a pen in his hand next door, to come
quick, “John, John, I conceive!” And down it goes—whatever it may be;
sense or nonsense; some thought on women’s education—“Women live like
Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, . . . the best
bred women are those whose minds are civilest”; some speculation that
had struck her perhaps walking that afternoon alone—why “hogs have the
measles”, why “dogs that rejoice swing their tails”, or what the stars
are made of, or what this chrysalis is that her maid has brought her,
and she keeps warm in a corner of her room. On and on, from subject to
subject she flies, never stopping to correct, “for there is more
pleasure in making than in mending”, talking aloud to herself of all
those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual diversion—of wars,
and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar and morals, of
monsters and the British, whether opium in small quantities is good for
lunatics, why it is that musicians are mad. Looking upwards, she
speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if
the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the
fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of
fairies, “dear to God as we are”; muses whether there are not other
worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a
new one. In short, “we are in utter darkness”. Meanwhile, what a rapture
is thought!

As the vast books appeared from the stately retreat at Welbeck the usual
censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered, despised, or
argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to every work. They
said, among other things, that her books were not her own, because she
used learned terms, and “wrote of many matters outside her ken”. She
flew to her husband for help, and he answered, characteristically, that
the Duchess “had never conversed with any professed scholar in learning
except her brother and myself”. The Duke’s scholarship, moreover, was of
a peculiar nature. “I have lived in the great world a great while, and
have thought of what has been brought to me by the senses, more than was
put into me by learned discourse; for I do not love to be led by the
nose, by authority, and old authors; _ipse dixit_ will not serve my
turn.” And then she takes up the pen and proceeds, with the importunity
and indiscretion of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is
of the finest quality imaginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and
Hobbes, not questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes to dinner,
but he could not come; she often does not listen to a word that is said
to her; she does not know any French, though she lived abroad for five
years; she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley’s account
of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half of his work on Passion; and
of Hobbes only “the little book called _De Cive_”, all of which is
infinitely to the credit of her native wit, so abundant that outside
succour pained it, so honest that it would not accept help from others.
It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her
own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that
was to oust all others. The results were not altogether happy. Under the
pressure of such vast structures, her natural gift, the fresh and
delicate fancy which had led her in her first volume to write charmingly
of Queen Mab and fairyland, was crushed out of existence.


The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells,
Its fabric’s built all of hodmandod shells;
The hangings of a Rainbow made that’s thin,
Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in;
The chambers made of Amber that is clear,
Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;
Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,
And with a butterfly’s wing hung about;
Her sheets are of the skin of Dove’s eyes made
Where on a violet bud her pillow’s laid.


So she could write when she was young. But her fairies, if they survived
at all, grew up into hippopotami. Too generously her prayer was granted:


Give me the free and noble style,
Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.


She became capable of involutions, and contortions and conceits of which
the following is among the shortest, but not the most terrific:


The human head may be likened to a town:
The mouth when full, begun
Is market day, when empty, market’s done;
The city conduct, where the water flows,
Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.


She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally; the sea became a
meadow, the sailors shepherds, the mast a maypole. The fly was the bird
of summer, trees were senators, houses ships, and even the fairies, whom
she loved better than any earthly thing, except the Duke, are changed
into blunt atoms and sharp atoms, and take part in some of those
horrible manœuvres in which she delighted to marshal the universe.
Truly, “my Lady Sanspareille hath a strange spreading wit”. Worse still,
without an atom of dramatic power, she turned to play-writing. It was a
simple process. The unwieldy thoughts which turned and tumbled within
her were christened Sir Golden Riches, Moll Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman,
and the rest, and sent revolving in tedious debate upon the parts of the
soul, or whether virtue is better than riches, round a wise and learned
lady who answered their questions and corrected their fallacies at
considerable length in tones which we seem to have heard before.

Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad. She would issue out in
her own proper person, dressed in a thousand gems and furbelows, to
visit the houses of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant report
of these excursions. She recorded how Lady C. R. “did beat her husband
in a public assembly”; Sir F. Ο. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued
himself so much below his birth and wealth as to marry his
kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sanctified soul, a spiritual
sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are become
abominable to her, laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to pride—she
asked me what posture I thought was the best to be used in prayer”. Her
answer was probably unacceptable. “I shall not rashly go there again”,
she says of one such “gossip-making”. She was not, we may hazard, a
welcome guest or an altogether hospitable hostess. She had a way of
“bragging of myself” which frightened visitors so that they left, nor
was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck was the best place for
her, and her own company the most congenial, with the amiable Duke
wandering in and out, with his plays and his speculations, always ready
to answer a question or refute a slander. Perhaps it was this solitude
that led her, chaste as she was in conduct, to use language which in
time to come much perturbed Sir Egerton Brydges. She used, he
complained, “expressions and images of extraordinary coarseness as
flowing from a female of high rank brought up in courts”. He forgot that
this particular female had long ceased to frequent the Court; she
consorted chiefly with fairies; and her friends were among the dead.
Naturally, then, her language was coarse. Nevertheless, though her
philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses
mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of
authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and
lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page.
There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as
crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her
intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true
and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of
some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although
“they”, those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever
since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the face
at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all, had the wit
to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw for the
sufferings of the hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk to some
one “of Shakespeare’s fools”. Now, at any rate, the laugh is not all on
their side.

But laugh they did. When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess was
coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the
streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys twice brought him
to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the pressure of the crowd about
her coach was too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in her
silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a velvet cap on her head,
and her hair about her ears. He could only see for a moment between the
white curtains the face of “a very comely woman”, and on she drove
through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse
of that romantic lady, who stands in the picture at Welbeck, with large
melancholy eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing,
touching a table with the tips of long pointed fingers in the calm
assurance of immortal fame.


[Footnote 4: _The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Etc._,
edited by C. H. Firth; _Poems and Fancies_, by the Duchess of Newcastle;
_The World’s Olio; Orations of divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers
Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical Letters_, etc., etc.]




_Rambling Round Evelyn_


Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three
hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary.
Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a
private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only
in the grave. For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or
for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and
justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of
affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail,
volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not
necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business
and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men,
reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the
land.

The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth
anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn,[5] is a case in point. It is
sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar;
but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all
that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm
conscience to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to
read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man we have to
confess, first that diaries are always diaries, books, that is, that we
read in convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death; second, that
this reading, about which so many fine things have been said, is for the
most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book;
watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which
no critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only
the moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an
innocent employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from
trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from
changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy
or the pulpit.

It may be well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn’s book, to
decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his.
Ignorance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his ignorance, and
our comparative erudition. No one can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign
travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in
the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference
between us—that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the
gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with
the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the
alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here
no doubt we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the
house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral’s
head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane person in the twentieth century
would entertain such a project for a second. Individually we may know as
little as Evelyn, but collectively we know so much that there is little
incentive to venture on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia,
not the scissors; and know in two minutes not only more than was known
to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast
that it is scarcely worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant, yet
justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his
private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all
the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with
unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and drew inferences
and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to
the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they say, is so
much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and the
carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of
the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence,
carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen
when a whale came up the Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen.
“That year died Cromwell.” Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate
the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence
and eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods,
and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a
cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s bed the kitten was inevitably gifted
with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an
insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we
draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same things at
different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their ignorance
and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance alters the
nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would have been an
intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the Elizabethans?
Should we have found it necessary to leave the room because of
Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen Elizabeth’s invitation
to dinner? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement,
and yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to see the lions
fed.


. . . they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small cable, and
one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about four feet from
the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about five
feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the
room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of
wood under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened
it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at
length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen
drawers upon his naked body . . .


And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that “the
spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of
another”, as we might say that the lions growl so loud and the sight of
raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the penguins. Allowing
for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy between his view of pain
and ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with the same eyes,
marry any woman from the same motives, or judge any conduct by the same
standards. To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked, not to
flinch when the wooden horse was raised higher and the executioner
fetched a horn and poured two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to
suffer this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man denied—all
this seems to put Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally
seclude the riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have
somehow got it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to
suffering and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts
were as highly developed as these, then we could say that the world
improves, and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.

In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily enough,
“all being entirely in the rebels’ hands”, Evelyn returned to England
with his wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian glass and
the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country gentleman of
strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going to church and
going to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden—“I planted
the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind west”—his time was spent
much as ours is. But there was one difference which it is difficult to
illustrate by a single quotation, because the evidence is scattered all
about in little insignificant phrases. The general effect of them is
that he used his eyes. The visible world was always close to him. The
visible world has receded so far from us that to hear all this talk of
buildings and gardens, statues and carving, as if the look of things
assailed one out of doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few
small canvases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a
thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for
him. Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore,
Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely-built house, a prospect, or a
garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and
opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27 Evelyn, with Dr.
Wren and others, was in St. Paul’s surveying “the general decay of that
ancient and venerable church”; held with Dr. Wren another judgement from
the rest; and had a mind to build it with “a noble cupola, a form of
church building not as yet known in England but of wonderful grace”, in
which Dr. Wren concurred. Six days later the Fire of London altered
their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself, chanced to
look in at the window of “a poor solitary thatched house in a field in
our parish”, there saw a young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome
with an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and carried
Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings of
worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant also
if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of beautiful
houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the afternoon sun; a
picture has charm, especially as it displays the character of a
grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such a scowl; but
these are scattered fragments—little relics of beauty in a world that
has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of cruelty Evelyn might well
reply by pointing to Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he
should assert that nothing now has character or conviction, that no
farmer in England sleeps with an open coffin at his bedside to remind
him of death, we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we like the
country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full possession
of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of specialists seems
remarkable enough. He was employed on public business; he was Secretary
to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and poems; he was the first
authority upon trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for
the rebuilding of London; he went into the question of smoke and its
abatement—the lime trees in St. James’s Park being, it is said, the
result of his cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history of the
Dutch war—in short, he completely outdid the Squire of “The Princess”,
whom in many respects he anticipated—


A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter sessions chairman abler none.


All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which
Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something
of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising, a little too sure
of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of other people. Or what
is the quality, or absence of quality, that checks our sympathies
partly, perhaps, it is due to some inconsistency which it would be harsh
to call by so strong a name as hypocrisy. Though he deplored the vices
of his age he could never keep away from the centre of them. “The
luxurious dallying and profaneness” of the Court, the sight of “Mrs.
Nelly” looking over her garden wall and holding “very familiar
discourse” with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute
disgust; yet he could never decide to break with the Court and retire to
“my poor but quiet villa”, which was of course the apple of his eye and
one of the show-places in England. Then, though he loved his daughter
Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the
number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her
funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent
that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs.
Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching
biography, “loved to be at funerals” and chose habitually “the dryest
and leanest morsels of meat”, which may be the habits of an angel but do
not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. But it is
Pepys who sums up our case against Evelyn; Pepys who said of him after
a long morning’s entertainment: “In fine a most excellent person he is
and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well
be so, being a man so much above others”. The words exactly hit the
mark, “A most excellent person he was”; but a little conceited.

Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection, inevitable,
unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was no genius. His writing is opaque
rather than transparent; we see no depths through it, nor any very
secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither make us hate a
regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But he writes a diary;
and he writes it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or other the
bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle
of communication, so that without laying stress on anything in
particular, stopping to dream, stopping to laugh, stopping merely to
look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His garden for example—how
delightful is his disparagement of it, and how acid his criticism of the
gardens of others! Then, we may be sure, the hens at Sayes Court laid
the very best eggs in England, and when the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow
through his hedge what a catastrophe it was, and we can guess how Mrs.
Evelyn dusted and polished, and how Evelyn himself grumbled, and how
punctilious and efficient and trustworthy he was, how prone to give
advice, how ready to read his own works aloud, and how affectionate,
withal, lamenting bitterly but not effusively, for the man with the
long-drawn sensitive face was never that, the death of the little
prodigy Richard, and recording how “after evening prayers was my child
buried near the rest of his brothers—my very dear children.” He was not
an artist; no phrases linger in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves
up in memory; but as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s
story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned
again, leading up to crises which never take place, introducing Sir
Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its fascination. All
through his pages good men, bad men, celebrities, nonentities are coming
into the room and going out again. The greater number we scarcely
notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and again
the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure
sitting still in a full light. They have struck no attitude, arranged no
mantle. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they
will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the
old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our
eyes wander from one to the other; our affections settle here or
there—on hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had
a dog that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner, was for
shooting his horse when it fell down a precipice; on Mr. Saladine; on
Mr. Saladine’s beautiful daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva
to make love to Mr. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all,
grown old, walking in his garden at Wotton, his sorrows smoothed out,
his grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his
lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting on
his dahlias too.


[Footnote 5: Written in 1920.]




_Defoe_[6]


The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find
himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its
approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of _Robinson
Crusoe_ but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that
_Robinson Crusoe_ is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of
April 1919, but far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether
people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the
bi-centenary is to make us marvel that _Robinson Crusoe_, the perennial
and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The
book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race itself
rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its
centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of
Stonehenge itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that
we have all had _Robinson Crusoe_ read aloud to us as children, and were
thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the
Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there was
such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that _Robinson Crusoe_ was
the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us
unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The impressions of childhood are
those that last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the name of
Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the title-page of _Robinson
Crusoe_, and if we celebrate the bi-centenary of the book we are making
a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is
still in existence.

The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for while
it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that
he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were not
read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the _Christian
World_ in the year 1870 appealed to “the boys and girls of England” to
erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of lightning
had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of
_Robinson Crusoe_. No mention was made of _Moll Flanders_. Considering
the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in _Roxana, Captain
Singleton, Colonel Jack_ and the rest, we need not be surprised, though
we may be indignant, at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the
biographer of Defoe, that these “are not works for the drawing-room
table”. But unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the
final arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial
coarseness, or the universal celebrity of _Robinson Crusoe_, has led
them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any monument
worthy of the name of monument the names of _Moll Flanders_ and
_Roxana_, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe.
They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably
great. The occasion of the bi-centenary of their more famous companion
may well lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has so much
in common with his, may be found to consist.

Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the
predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed to
shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to
labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his
novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived
partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel had
to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a sound
moral. “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most
scandalous crime,” he wrote. “It is a sort of lying that makes a great
hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.”
Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works, therefore, he
takes pains to insist that he has not used his invention at all but has
depended upon facts, and that his purpose has been the highly moral
desire to convert the vicious or to warn the innocent. Happily these
were principles that tallied very well with his natural disposition and
endowments. Facts had been drilled into him by sixty years of varying
fortunes before he turned his experience to account in fiction. “I have
some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life in this distich,” he
wrote:


No man has tasted differing fortunes more,
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.


He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves,
pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll
Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and
accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the
imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe knew
the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but that
the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to shift for
itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for his art.
In the first pages of each of his great novels he reduces his hero or
heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that their existence must
be a continued struggle, and their survival at all the result of luck
and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate of a criminal
mother; Captain Singleton was stolen as a child and sold to the gipsies;
Colonel Jack, though “born a gentleman, was put ’prentice to a
pickpocket”; Roxana starts under better auspices, but, having married at
fifteen, she sees her husband go bankrupt and is left with five children
in “a condition the most deplorable that words can express”.

Thus each of these boys and girls has the world to begin and the battle
to fight for himself. The situation thus created was entirely to Defoe’s
liking. From her very birth or with half a year’s respite at most, Moll
Flanders, the most notable of them, is goaded by “that worst of devils,
poverty”, forced to earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from
place to place, making no demands upon her creator for the subtle
domestic atmosphere which he was unable to supply, but drawing upon him
for all he knew of strange people and customs. From the outset the
burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her. She has to depend
entirely upon her own wits and judgement, and to deal with each
emergency as it arises by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged
in her own head. The briskness of the story is due partly to the fact
that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has
henceforth the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that
she should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the
peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious
danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll
Flanders was a woman on her own account and not only material for a
succession of adventures. In proof of this she begins, as Roxana also
begins, by falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That she
must rouse herself and marry some one else and look very closely to her
settlements and prospects is no slight upon her passion, but to be laid
to the charge of her birth; and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a person
of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of telling lies when
they serve her purpose, there is something undeniable about her truth
when she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon the refinements of
personal affection; one tear is dropped, one moment of despair allowed,
and then “on with the story”. She has a spirit that loves to breast the
storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers. When she
discovers that the man she has married in Virginia is her own brother
she is violently disgusted; she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as
she sets foot in Bristol, “I took the diversion of going to Bath, for as
I was still far from being old so my humour, which was always gay,
continued so to an extreme”. Heartless she is not, nor can any one
charge her with levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives
has us all in tow. Moreover, her ambition has that slight strain of
imagination in it which puts it in the category of the noble passions.
Shrewd and practical of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for
romance and for the quality which to her perception makes a man a
gentleman. “It was really a true gallant spirit he was of, and it was
the more grievous to me. ’Tis something of relief even to be undone by a
man of honour rather than by a scoundrel,” she writes when she had
misled a highwayman as to the extent of her fortune. It is in keeping
with this temper that she should be proud of her final partner because
he refuses to work when they reach the plantations but prefers hunting,
and that she should take pleasure in buying him wigs and silver-hilted
swords “to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine gentleman”.
Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the passion with which
she kissed the ground that her son had trod on, and her noble tolerance
of every kind of fault so long as it is not “complete baseness of
spirit, imperious, cruel, and relentless when uppermost, abject and
low-spirited when down”. For the rest of the world she has nothing but
good-will.

Since the list of the qualities and graces of this seasoned old sinner
is by no means exhausted we can well understand how it was that Borrow’s
apple-woman on London Bridge called her “blessed Mary” and valued her
book above all the apples on her stall; and that Borrow, taking the book
deep into the booth, read till his eyes ached. But we dwell upon such
signs of character only by way of proof that the creator of Moll
Flanders was not, as he has been accused of being, a mere journalist and
literal recorder of facts with no conception of the nature of
psychology. It is true that his characters take shape and substance of
their own accord, as if in despite of the author and not altogether to
his liking. He never lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or
pathos, but presses on imperturbably as if they came there without his
knowledge. A touch of imagination, such as that when the Prince sits by
his son’s cradle and Roxana observes how “he loved to look at it when it
was asleep”, seems to mean much more to us than to him. After the
curiously modern dissertation upon the need of communicating matters of
importance to a second person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should
talk of it in our sleep, he apologises for his digression. He seems to
have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them
without exactly knowing how; and, like all unconscious artists, he
leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring
to the surface.

The interpretation that we put on his characters might therefore well
have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was careful to
disguise even from himself. Thus it comes about that we admire Moll
Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we believe that Defoe had
made up his mind as to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware
that in considering the lives of the abandoned he raised many deep
questions and hinted, if he did not state, answers quite at variance
with his professions of belief. From the evidence supplied by his essay
upon the “Education of Women” we know that he had thought deeply and
much in advance of his age upon the capacities of women, which he rated
very high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated very harsh.


I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the
world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we
deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day
with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they the
advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than
ourselves.


The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim
Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear
that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines
upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar
hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy.
Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to
“stand their ground”; and at once gave practical demonstration of the
benefits that would result. Roxana, a lady of the same profession,
argues more subtly against the slavery of marriage. She “had started a
new thing in the world” the merchant told her; “it was a way of arguing
contrary to the general practise”. But Defoe is the last writer to be
guilty of bald preaching. Roxana keeps our attention because she is
blessedly unconscious that she is in any good sense an example to her
sex and is thus at liberty to own that part of her argument is “of an
elevated strain which was really not in my thoughts at first, at all”.
The knowledge of her own frailties and the honest questioning of her own
motives, which that knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping
her fresh and human when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem
novels have shrunken and shrivelled to the pegs and props of their
respective creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the fact
that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of Meredith,
or to have written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs) might have
been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon the position of
women, they are an incidental result of his chief virtue, which is that
he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the
passing and trivial. He is often dull. He can imitate the matter-of-fact
precision of a scientific traveller until we wonder that his pen could
trace or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of truth to
soften its dryness. He leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a
large part of human nature. All this we may admit, though we have to
admit defects as grave in many writers whom we call great. But that does
not impair the peculiar merit of what remains. Having at the outset
limited his scope and confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of
insight which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact
which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends
recommended themselves to him not because they were, as we should say,
“picturesque”; nor, as he affirmed, because they were examples of evil
living by which the public might profit. It was their natural veracity,
bred in them by a life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them
there were no excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty
was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgement of
the lips upon their failings. But their courage and resource and
tenacity delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and
pleasant stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a home-made
kind. Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and
relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women,
above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which
have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now
they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in everything
that is looked at openly. Even the sordid subject of money, which plays
so large a part in their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when
it stands not for ease and consequence but for honour, honesty and life
itself. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is
engrossed with petty things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers, whose work
is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent, though not most
seductive, in human nature. The view of London from Hungerford Bridge,
grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued stir of traffic and
business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of the ships and the
towers and domes of the city, brings him to mind. The tattered girls
with violets in their hands at the street corners, and the old
weather-beaten women patiently displaying their matches and bootlaces
beneath the shelter of arches, seem like characters from his books. He
is of the school of Crabbe, and of Gissing, and not merely a fellow
pupil in the same stern place of learning, but its founder and master.


[Footnote 6: Written in 1919.]




_Addison_[7]


In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph Addison
had enriched our literature with compositions “that will live as long as
the English language”. But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an opinion it
was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of seventy-six years,
the words seem to issue from the mouth of the chosen representative of
the people. There is an authority about them, a sonority, a sense of
responsibility, which put us in mind of a Prime Minister making a
proclamation on behalf of a great empire rather than of a journalist
writing about a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article upon
Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of the famous essays.
Florid, and at the same time extremely solid, the phrases seem to build
up a monument, at once square and lavishly festooned with ornament,
which should serve Addison for shelter so long as one stone of
Westminster Abbey stands upon another. Yet, though we may have read and
admired this particular essay times out of number (as we say when we
have read anything three times over), it has never occurred to us,
strangely enough, to believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to
the admiring reader of Macaulay’s essays. While delighting in their
richness, force, and variety, and finding every judgement, however
emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these
sweeping assertions and undeniable convictions with anything so minute
as a human being. So it is with Addison. “If we wish”, Macaulay writes,
“to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go
either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes”. “We have not the least doubt
that if Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have
been superior to any that we possess.” His essays, again, “fully entitle
him to the rank of a great poet”; and, to complete the edifice, we have
Voltaire proclaimed “the prince of buffoons”, and together with Swift
forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both as a
humorist.

Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament look grotesque enough,
but in their place—such is the persuasive power of design—they are
part of the decoration; they complete the monument. Whether Addison or
another is interred within, it is a very fine tomb. But now that two
centuries have passed since the real body of Addison was laid by night
under the Abbey floor, we are, through no merit of our own, partially
qualified to test the first of the flourishes on that fictitious
tombstone to which, though it may be empty, we have done homage, in a
formal kind of way, these sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison
will live as long as the English language. Since every moment brings
proof that our mother tongue is more lusty and lively than sorts with
complete sedateness or chastity, we need only concern ourselves with the
vitality of Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we should
apply to the present condition of the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. To
take a rough test, it is possible to discover how many people in the
course of a year borrow Addison’s works from the public library, and a
particular instance affords us the not very encouraging information that
during nine years two people yearly take out the first volume of the
_Spectator_. The second volume is less in request than the first. The
inquiry is not a cheerful one. From certain marginal comments and pencil
marks it seems that these rare devotees seek out only the famous
passages and, as their habit is, score what we are bold enough to
consider the least admirable phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is
not in the public libraries. It is in libraries that are markedly
private, secluded, shaded by lilac trees and brown with folios, that he
still draws his faint, regular breath. If any man or woman is going to
solace himself with a page of Addison before the June sun is out of the
sky to-day, it is in some such pleasant retreat as this.

Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones, we may be sure
that there are people engaged in reading Addison, whatever the year or
season. For Addison is very well worth reading. The temptation to read
Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on Addison, Johnson on
Addison rather than Addison himself is to be resisted, for you will
find, if you study the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, glance at _Cato_,
and run through the remainder of the six moderate-sized volumes, that
Addison is neither Pope’s Addison nor anybody else’s Addison, but a
separate, independent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut
shape of himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and distracted as it
is, of nineteen hundred and nineteen. It is true that the fate of the
lesser shades is always a little precarious. They are so easily obscured
or distorted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go through the
cherishing and humanising process which is necessary to get into touch
with a writer of the second class who may, after all, have little to
give us. The earth is crusted over them; their features are obliterated,
and perhaps it is not a head of the best period that we rub clean in the
end, but only the chip of an old pot. The chief difficulty with the
lesser writers, however, is not only the effort. It is that our
standards have changed. The things that they like are not the things
that we like; and as the charm of their writing depends much more upon
taste than upon conviction, a change of manners is often quite enough to
put us out of touch altogether. That is one of the most troublesome
barriers between ourselves and Addison. He attached great importance to
certain qualities. He had a very precise notion of what we are used to
call “niceness” in man or woman. He was extremely fond of saying that
men ought not to be atheists, and that women ought not to wear large
petticoats. This directly inspires in us not so much a sense of distaste
as a sense of difference. Dutifully, if at all, we strain our
imaginations to conceive the kind of audience to whom these precepts
were addressed. The _Tatler_ was published in 1709; the _Spectator_ a
year or two later. What was the state of England at that particular
moment? Why was Addison so anxious to insist upon the necessity of a
decent and cheerful religious belief? Why did he so constantly, and in
the main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and their reform?
Why was he so deeply impressed with the evils of party government? Any
historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in
the services of any historian. A writer should give us direct certainty;
explanations are so much water poured into the wine. As it is, we can
only feel that these counsels are addressed to ladies in hoops and
gentlemen in wigs—a vanished audience which has learnt its lesson and
gone its way and the preacher with it. We can only smile and marvel and
perhaps admire the clothes.

And that is not the way to read. To be thinking that dead people
deserved these censures and admired this morality, judged the eloquence,
which we find so frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so superficial,
profound, to take a collector’s joy in such signs of antiquity, is to
treat literature as if it were a broken jar of undeniable age but
doubtful beauty, to be stood in a cabinet behind glass doors. The charm
which still makes _Cato_ very readable is much of this nature. When
Syphax exclaims,


So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,
Sudden, th’ impetuous hurricanes descend,
Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,
Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away,
The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,
Sees the dry desert all around him rise,
And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,


we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the feathers
nodding emphatically on the ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward
to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour how vastly
fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how can we be excited? And so with
Bishop Hurd and his notes—his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully
exact, both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene confidence that
when “the present humour of idolising Shakespeare is over”, the time will
come when _Cato_ is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious
critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies,
both as to the faded frippery of our ancestors’ minds and the bold
opulence of our own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone
that other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with
the author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in
_Cato_ one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the
most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unquestionably the
noblest production of Addison’s genius” has become collector’s
literature.

Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with some suspicion as to
the need of condescension in their minds. The question to be asked is
whether Addison, attached as he was to certain standards of gentility,
morality, and taste, has not become one of those people of exemplary
character and charming urbanity who must never be talked to about
anything more exciting than the weather. We have some slight suspicion
that the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ are nothing but talk, couched in
perfect English, about the number of fine days this year compared with
the number of wet the year before. The difficulty of getting on to equal
terms with him is shown by the little fable which he introduces into one
of the early numbers of the _Tatler_, of “a young gentleman, of moderate
understanding, but great vivacity, who . . . had got a little smattering
of knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or a freethinker, but not a
philosopher, or a man of sense”. This young gentleman visits his father
in the country, and proceeds “to enlarge the narrowness of the country
notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler
by his table-talk, and staggered his eldest sister. . . . ’Till one day,
talking of his setting dog . . . said ‘he did not question but Tray was
as immortal as any one of the family’; and in the heat of the argument
told his father, that for his own part, ‘he expected to die like a dog’.
Upon which, the old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out,
‘Then, sirrah, you shall live like one’; and taking his cane in his
hand, cudgelled him out of his system. This had so good an effect upon
him, that he took up from that day, fell to reading good books, and is
now a bencher in the Middle-Temple.” There is a good deal of Addison in
that story: his dislike of “dark and uncomfortable prospects”; his
respect for “principles which are the support, happiness, and glory of
all public societies, as well as private persons”; his solicitude for
the butler; and his conviction that to read good books and become a
bencher in the Middle Temple is the proper end for a very vivacious
young gentleman. This Mr. Addison married a countess, “gave his little
senate laws”, and, sending for young Lord Warwick, made that famous
remark about seeing how a Christian can die which has fallen upon such
evil days that our sympathies are with the foolish, and perhaps fuddled,
young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman, not too far gone for a
last spasm of self-complacency, upon the bed.

Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the
corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity,
and see what, for us in our time, remains. In the first place, there
remains the not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence, of
being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to that; and then, slipped
in on the tide of the smooth, well-turned prose, are little eddies,
diminutive waterfalls, agreeably diversifying the polished surface. We
begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on the part of the
essayist which light up the prim, impeccable countenance of the moralist
and convince us that, however tightly he may have pursed his lips, his
eyes are very bright and not so shallow after all. He is alert to his
finger tips. Little muffs, silver garters, fringed gloves draw his
attention; he observes with a keen, quick glance, not unkindly, and full
rather of amusement than of censure. To be sure, the age was rich in
follies. Here were coffee-houses packed with politicians talking of
Kings and Emperors and letting their own small affairs go to ruin.
Crowds applauded the Italian opera every night without understanding a
word of it. Critics discoursed of the unities. Men gave a thousand
pounds for a handful of tulip roots. As for women—or “the fair sex”, as
Addison liked to call them—their follies were past counting. He did his
best to count them, with a loving particularity which roused the ill
humour of Swift. But he did it very charmingly, with a natural relish
for the task, as the following passage shows:


I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned
with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx
shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock,
parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be
searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature
furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is
the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as
for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow
it.


In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense and taste and
civilisation. Of that little fraternity, often so obscure and yet so
indispensable, who in every age keep themselves alive to the importance
of art and letters and music, watching, discriminating, denouncing and
delighting, Addison was one—distinguished and strangely contemporary
with ourselves. It would have been, so one imagines, a great pleasure to
take him a manuscript; a great enlightenment, as well as a great honour,
to have his opinion. In spite of Pope, one fancies that his would have
been criticism of the best order, open-minded and generous to novelty,
and yet, in the final resort, unfaltering in its standards. The boldness
which is a proof of vigour is shown by his defence of “Chevy Chase”. He
had so clear a notion of what he meant by the “very spirit and soul of
fine writing” as to track it down in an old barbarous ballad or
rediscover it in “that divine work” “Paradise Lost”. Moreover, far from
being a connoisseur only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he
was aware of the present; a severe critic of its “Gothic taste”,
vigilant in protecting the rights and honours of the language, and all
in favour of simplicity and quiet. Here we have the Addison of Will’s
and Button’s, who, sitting late into the night and drinking more than
was good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and began to talk.
Then he “chained the attention of every one to him”. “Addison’s
conversation”, said Pope, “had something in it more charming than I have
found in any other man.” One can well believe it, for his essays at
their best preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely modulated
conversation—the smile checked before it has broadened into laughter,
the thought lightly turned from frivolity or abstraction, the ideas
springing, bright, new, various, with the utmost spontaneity. He seems
to speak what comes into his head, and is never at the trouble of
raising his voice. But he has described himself in the character of the
lute better than any one can do it for him.


The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that sounds very
finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its notes are exquisitely
sweet, and very low, easily drowned in a multitude of instruments, and
even lost among a few, unless you give a particular attention to it. A
lute is seldom heard in a company of more than five, whereas a drum will
show itself to advantage in an assembly of 500. The lutanists,
therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon reflection, great
affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a good taste, who are the
only proper judges of so delightful and soft a melody.


Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be less appropriate
than Lord Macaulay’s. To call Addison on the strength of his essays a
great poet, or to prophesy that if he had written a novel on an
extensive plan it would have been “superior to any that we possess”, is
to confuse him with the drums and trumpets; it is not merely to
overpraise his merits, but to overlook them. Dr. Johnson superbly, and,
as his manner is, once and for all has summed up the quality of
Addison’s poetic genius:


His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be confessed that
it has not often those felicities of diction which give lustre to
sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates diction; there is
little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is very rarely the
awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the splendour of elegance. He
thinks justly; but he thinks faintly.


The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which have the most
resemblance, on the surface, to a novel. But their merit consists in the
fact that they do not adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate anything;
they exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To read them as if
they were a first hesitating experiment containing the seed of greatness
to come is to miss the peculiar point of them. They are studies done
from the outside by a quiet spectator. When read together they compose a
portrait of the Squire and his circle all in characteristic
positions—one with his rod, another with his hounds—but each can be
detached from the rest without damage to the design or harm to himself.
In a novel, where each chapter gains from the one before it or adds to
the one that follows it, such separations would be intolerable. The
speed, the intricacy, the design, would be mutilated. These particular
qualities are perhaps lacking, but nevertheless Addison’s method has
great advantages. Each of these essays is very highly finished. The
characters are defined by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes.
Inevitably, where the sphere is so narrow—an essay is only three or
four pages in length—there is not room for great depth or intricate
subtlety. Here, from the _Spectator_, is a good example of the witty and
decisive manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill the
little frame:


Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself obliged in
duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of laughter as
a breach of his baptismal vow. An innocent jest startles him like
blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to a title of honour, he
lifts up his hands and eyes; describe a public ceremony, he shakes his
head; shew him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All the little
ornaments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton, and wit
profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at childhood
for being playful. He sits at a christening, or at a marriage-feast, as
at a funeral; sighs at the conclusion of a merry story, and grows devout
when the rest of the company grow pleasant. After all Sombrius is a
religious man, and would have behaved himself very properly, had he
lived when Christianity was under a general persecution.


The novel is not a development from that model, for the good reason that
no development along these lines is possible. Of its kind such a
portrait is perfect; and when we find, scattered up and down the
_Spectator_ and the _Tatler_, numbers of such little masterpieces with
fancies and anecdotes in the same style, some doubt as to the narrowness
of such a sphere becomes inevitable. The form of the essay admits of its
own particular perfection; and if anything is perfect the exact
dimensions of its perfection become immaterial. One can scarcely settle
whether, on the whole, one prefers a raindrop to the River Thames. When
we have said all that we can say against them—that many are dull,
others superficial, the allegories faded, the piety conventional, the
morality trite—there still remains the fact that the essays of Addison
are perfect essays. Always at the highest point of any art there comes a
moment when everything seems in a conspiracy to help the artist, and his
achievement becomes a natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to
a later age, half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day after day, essay
after essay, knew instinctively and exactly how to do it. Whether it was
a high thing, or whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more
profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is due to Addison
that prose is now prosaic—the medium which makes it possible for people
of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.
Addison is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable progeny. Pick up
the first weekly journal and the article upon the “Delights of Summer”
or the “Approach of Age” will show his influence. But it will also show,
unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary essayist, is attached
to it, that we have lost the art of writing essays. What with our views
and our virtues, our passions and profundities, the shapely silver drop,
that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions of human life,
is now nothing but a hold—all knobbed with luggage packed in a hurry.
Even so, the essayist will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it,
to write like Addison.

In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more than once amused
himself with speculations as to the fate of his writings. He had a just
idea of their nature and value. “I have new-pointed all the batteries of
ridicule”, he wrote. Yet, because so many of his darts had been directed
against ephemeral follies, “absurd fashions, ridiculous customs, and
affected forms of speech”, the time would come, in a hundred years,
perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would be “like so many pieces of
old plate, where the weight will be regarded, but the fashion lost”. Two
hundred years have passed; the plate is worn smooth; the pattern almost
rubbed out; but the metal is pure silver.


[Footnote 7: Written in 1919.]




_The Lives of the Obscure_


Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this faded,
out-of-date, obsolete library, which with a little help from the rates,
is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and
country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to dust.
In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that look to the sea
and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled
street below, a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local
flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath. The elderly, the
marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper, or sit holding
their heads over back numbers of _The Illustrated London News_ and the
_Wesleyan Chronicle_. No one has spoken aloud here since the room was
opened in 1854. The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each
other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are
flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why
re-open those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over
his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which indeed has become
laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763,
1080, and 606.




I

THE TAYLORS AND THE EDGEWORTHS


For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with
lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a
Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—waiting,
appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one
coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to
their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be
theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert—but the contact with life is
instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert may be doing, she is not
thinking about us. Far from it. Colchester, about the year 1800, was for
the young Taylors, as Kensington had been for their mother, “a very
Elysium”. There were the Strutts, the Hills, the Stapletons; there was
poetry, philosophy, engraving. For the young Taylors were brought up to
work hard, and if, after a long day’s toil upon their father’s pictures,
they slipped round to dine with the Strutts they had a right to their
pleasure. Already they had won prizes in Darton and Harvey’s pocketbook.
One of the Strutts knew James Montgomery, and there was talk, at those
gay parties, with the Moorish decorations and all the cats—for old Ben
Strutt was a bit of a character: did not communicate; would not let his
daughters eat meat, so no wonder they died of consumption—there was
talk of printing a joint volume to be called _The Associate Minstrels_,
to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The Stapletons
were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander over the old town wall
at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moonlight. Perhaps there was a little
too much poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking back in the middle of a
prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to lament many broken careers,
much unfulfilled promise. The Stapletons died young, perverted,
miserable; Jacob, with his “dark, scorn-speaking countenance”, who had
vowed that he would spend the night looking for Ann’s lost bracelet in
the street, disappeared, “and I last heard of him vegetating among the
ruins of Rome—himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills, their fate
was worst of all. To submit to public baptism was flighty, but to marry
Captain M.! Anybody could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain
M. Yet off she drove with him in his fine phaeton. For years nothing
more was heard of her. Then one night, when the Taylors had moved to
Ongar and old Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, thinking
how, as it was nine o’clock, and the moon was full, they ought,
according to their promise, to look at it and think of their absent
children, there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open
it. But who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? “Oh, don’t you
remember the Strutts and the Stapletons, and how you warned me against
Captain M.?” cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill—poor Fanny Hill,
all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used to be so sprightly. She
was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge
for her husband’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune,
ruined all her life.

Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently
through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir
writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a
wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on. One thinks
of Colchester in 1800. Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery—so they
begin; the Hills, the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and disappear as
one knew they would; but here, after long years, is Ann still
scribbling, and at last here is the poet Montgomery himself in her very
house, and she begging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just
holding him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bachelor), but
taking her for a walk, and they hear the thunder, and she thinks it the
artillery, and he says in a voice which she will never, never forget:
“Yes! The artillery of Heaven!” It is one of the attractions of the
unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their
identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one
another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving,
and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so that we can
lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance of countless
lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from life to life.
Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is young Mr. Elman
talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither arms nor legs; a
footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his
sister. Then he is in the stage coach on the road to Oxford with Newman.
Newman says nothing. Elman nevertheless reflects that he has known all
the great men of his time. And so back and so forwards, he paces
eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there
he sits in his Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and
making—it is his great consolation—string bags for missionaries. And
then? Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is
exquisitely refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend
trotting along the Strand with her father. They meet a man with very
bright eyes. “Mr. Blake,” says Mr. Frend. It is Mrs. Dyer who pours out
tea for them in Clifford’s Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room.
Mrs. Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him
so. What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently,
beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more
traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the
star dust of innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it, and
we see a wretched little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast in the
middle of the nineteenth-century. There is an unmistakable air of 1840
about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou’westers lurching and
spitting over the sloping decks, yet treating the solitary young woman
who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing, gazing, not without
kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave the deck. She will stand there
till it is quite dark, thank you! “Her great love of the sea . . . drew
this exemplary wife and mother every now and then irresistibly away from
home. No one but her husband knew where she had gone, and her children
learnt only later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly she
disappeared for a few days, she was taking short sea voyages . . .” a
crime which she expiated by months of work among the Midland poor. Then
the craving would come upon her, would be confessed in private to her
husband, and off she stole again—the mother of Sir George Newnes.

One would conclude that human beings were happy, endowed with such
blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their own activities,
were it not for those sudden and astonishing apparitions staring in at
us, all taut and pale in their determination never to be forgotten, men
who have just missed fame, men who have passionately desired
redress—men like Haydon, and Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Blanco White.
And in the whole world there is probably but one person who looks up for
a moment and tries to interpret the menacing face, the furious beckoning
fist, before, in the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces,
echoes of voices, flying coat-tails, and bonnet strings disappearing
down the shrubbery walks, one’s attention is distracted for ever. What
is that enormous wheel, for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in
the eighteenth-century? It runs faster and faster; suddenly a youth
jumps out from within; next moment it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit
and is dashed to smithereens. This is Edgeworth’s doing—Richard Lovell
Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.

For that is the way he has come down to us in his two volumes of
memoirs—Byron’s bore, Day’s friend, Maria’s father, the man who almost
invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting
turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges and lifting their
wheels over obstacles—a man meritorious, industrious, advanced, but
still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore. Nature endowed him
with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed through his veins at least
twenty times faster than the normal rate. His face was red, round,
vivacious. His brain raced. His tongue never stopped talking. He had
married four wives and had nineteen children, including the novelist
Maria. Moreover, he had known every one and done everything. His energy
burst open the most secret doors and penetrated to the most private
apartments. His wife’s grandmother, for instance, disappeared
mysteriously every day. Edgeworth blundered in upon her and found her,
with her white locks flowing and her eyes streaming, in prayer before a
crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic then, but why a penitent? He found
out somehow that her husband had been killed in a duel, and she had
married the man who killed him. “The consolations of religion are fully
equal to its terrors,” Dick Edgeworth reflected as he stumbled out
again. Then there was the beautiful young woman in the castle among the
forests of Dauphiny. Half paralysed, unable to speak above a whisper,
there she lay when Edgeworth broke in and found her reading. Tapestries
flapped on the castle walls; fifty thousand bats—“odious animals whose
stench is uncommonly noisome”—hung in clusters in the caves beneath.
None of the inhabitants understood a word she said. But to the
Englishman she talked for hour after hour about books and politics and
religion. He listened; no doubt he talked. He sat dumbfounded. But what
could one do for her? Alas, one must leave her lying among the tusks,
and the old men, and the cross-bows, reading, reading, reading. For
Edgeworth was employed in turning the Rhone from its course. He must get
back to his job. One reflection he would make. “I determined on steadily
persevering in the cultivation of my understanding.”

He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which he found
himself. Every experience served only to fortify his character. He
reflected, he observed, he improved himself daily. You can improve, Mr.
Edgeworth used to tell his children, every day of your life. “He used to
say that with this power of improving they might in time be anything,
and without it in time they would be nothing.” Imperturbable,
indefatigable, daily increasing in sturdy self-assurance, he has the
gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he bustles and bangs on his way,
the diffident, shrinking figures who would otherwise be drowned in
darkness. The aged lady, whose private penance he disturbed, is only one
of a series of figures who start up on either side of his progress,
mute, astonished, showing us in a way that is even now unmistakable,
their amazement at this well-meaning man who bursts in upon them at
their studies and interrupts their prayers. We see him through their
eyes; we see him as he does not dream of being seen. What a tyrant he
was to his first wife! How intolerably she suffered! But she never
utters a word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells her story in complete
ignorance that he is doing anything of the kind. “It was a singular
trait of character in my wife,” he observes, “who had never shown any
uneasiness at my intimacy with Sir Francis Delaval, that she should take
a strong dislike to Mr. Day. A more dangerous and seductive companion
than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other,
could not be found in England.” It was, indeed, very singular.

For the first Mrs. Edgeworth was a penniless girl, the daughter of a
ruined country gentleman, who sat over his fire picking cinders from the
hearth and throwing them into the grate, while from time to time he
ejaculated “Hein! Heing!” as yet another scheme for making his fortune
came into his head. She had had no education. An itinerant
writing-master had taught her to form a few words. When Dick Edgeworth
was an undergraduate and rode over from Oxford she fell in love with him
and married him in order to escape the poverty and the mystery and the
dirt, and to have a husband and children like other women. But with what
result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with the bricklayer’s son inside
them. Sailing carriages took flight and almost wrecked four stage
coaches. Machines did cut turnips, but not very efficiently. Her little
boy was allowed to roam the country like a poor man’s son, bare-legged,
untaught. And Mr. Day, coming to breakfast and staying to dinner, argued
incessantly about scientific principles and the laws of nature.

But here we encounter one of the pitfalls of this nocturnal rambling
among forgotten worthies. It is so difficult to keep, as we must with
highly authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult
to refrain from making scenes which, if the past could be recalled,
might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy. With a character like Thomas
Day, in particular, whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible,
we find ourselves oozing amazement, like a sponge which has absorbed so
much that it can retain no more but fairly drips. Certain scenes have
the fascination which belongs rather to the abundance of fiction than to
the sobriety of fact. For instance, we conjure up all the drama of poor
Mrs. Edgeworth’s daily life; her bewilderment, her loneliness, her
despair, how she must have wondered whether any one really wanted
machines to climb walls, and assured the gentlemen that turnips were
better cut simply with a knife, and so blundered and floundered and been
snubbed that she dreaded the almost daily arrival of the tall young man
with his pompous, melancholy face, marked by the smallpox, his profusion
of uncombed black hair, and his finical cleanliness of hands and person.
He talked fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time about
philosophy and nature, and M. Rousseau. Yet it was her house; she had to
see to his meals, and, though he ate as though he were half asleep, his
appetite was enormous. But it was no use complaining to her husband.
Edgeworth said, “She lamented about trifles.” He went on to say: “The
lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render home
delightful.” And then, with his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked her
what she had to complain of? Did he ever leave her alone? In the five or
six years of their married life he had slept from home not more than
five or six times. Mr. Day could corroborate that. Mr. Day corroborated
everything that Mr. Edgeworth said. He egged him on with his
experiments. He told him to leave his son without education. He did not
care a rap what the people of Henley said. In short, he was at the
bottom of all the absurdities and extravagances which made Mrs.
Edgeworth’s life a burden to her.

Yet let us choose another scene—one of the last that poor Mrs.
Edgeworth was to behold. She was returning from Lyons, and Mr. Day was
her escort. A more singular figure, as he stood on the deck of the
packet which took them to Dover, very tall, very upright, one finger in
the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow his hair out, dressed
absurdly, though in the height of fashion, wild, romantic, yet at the
same time authoritative and pompous, could scarcely be imagined; and
this strange creature, who loathed women, was in charge of a lady who
was about to become a mother, had adopted two orphan girls, and had set
himself to win the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by standing between
boards for six hours daily in order to learn to dance. Now and again he
pointed his toe with rigid precision; then, waking from the congenial
dream into which the dark clouds, the flying waters, and the shadow of
England upon the horizon had thrown him, he rapped out an order in the
smart, affected tones of a man of the world. The sailors stared, but
they obeyed. There was something sincere about him, something proudly
indifferent to what you thought; yes, something comforting and humane,
too, so that Mrs. Edgeworth for her part was determined never to laugh
at him again. But men were strange; life was difficult, and with a sigh
of bewilderment, perhaps of relief, poor Mrs. Edgeworth landed at Dover,
was brought to bed of a daughter, and died.

Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth Sneyd, of course,
refused him—gave a great cry, people said; exclaimed that she had loved
Day the blackguard, but hated Day the gentleman, and rushed from the
room. And then, they said, a terrible thing happened. Mr. Day, in his
rage, bethought him of the orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom he had bred to
be his wife; visited her at Sutton Coldfield; flew into a passion at the
sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts, poured melted sealing wax
over her arms, and boxed her ears. “No; I could never have done that,”
Mr. Edgeworth used to say, when people described the scene. And whenever
to the end of his life he thought of Thomas Day he fell silent. So
great, so passionate, so inconsistent—his life had been a tragedy, and
in thinking of his friend, the best friend he had ever had, Richard
Edgeworth fell silent.

It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is recorded of him. To
muse, to repent, to contemplate were foreign to his nature. His wife and
friends and children are silhouetted with extreme vividness upon a broad
disc of interminable chatter. Upon no other background could we realise
so clearly the sharp fragment of his first wife, or the shades and
depths which make up the character, at once humane and brutal, advanced
and hidebound of the inconsistent philosopher, Thomas Day. But his power
is not limited to people; landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he
describes them, to split off from him, to be projected away, so that we
are able to run just ahead of him and anticipate his coming. They are
brought out all the more vividly by the extreme incongruity which so
often marks his comment and stamps his presence; they live with a
peculiar beauty, fantastic, solemn, mysterious, in contrast with
Edgeworth, who is none of these things. In particular, he brings before
us a garden in Cheshire, the garden of a parsonage, an ancient but
commodious parsonage.

One pushed through a white gate and found oneself in a grass court,
small but well kept, with roses growing in the hedges and grapes hanging
from the walls. But what, in the name of wonder, were those objects in
the middle of the grass plot? Through the dusk of an autumn evening
there shone out an enormous white globe. Round it at various distances
were others of different sizes—the planets and their satellites, it
seemed. But who could have placed them there, and why? The house was
silent; the windows shut; nobody was stirring. Then, furtively peeping
from behind a curtain, appeared for a second the face of an elderly man,
handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It vanished.

In some mysterious way, human beings inflict their own vagaries upon
nature. Moths and birds must have flitted more silently through the
little garden; over everything must have brooded the same fantastic
peace. Then, red-faced, garrulous, inquisitive, in burst Richard Lovell
Edgeworth. He looked at the globes; he satisfied himself that they were
of “accurate design and workmanlike construction”. He knocked at the
door. He knocked and knocked. No one came. At length, as his impatience
was overcoming him, slowly the latch was undone, gradually the door was
opened; a clergyman, neglected, unkempt, but still a gentleman, stood
before him. Edgeworth named himself, and they retired to a parlour
littered with books and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to
decay. At last, unable to control his curiosity any longer, Edgeworth
asked what were the globes in the garden? Instantly the clergyman
displayed extreme agitation. It was his son who had made them, he
exclaimed; a boy of genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of
virtue and acquirements far beyond his age. But he had died. His wife
had died. Edgeworth tried to turn the conversation, but in vain. The
poor man rushed on passionately, incoherently about his son, his genius,
his death. “It struck me that his grief had injured his understanding,”
said Edgeworth, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable when the
door opened and a girl of fourteen or fifteen, entering with a tea-tray
in her hand, suddenly changed the course of his host’s conversation.
Indeed, she was beautiful; dressed in white; her nose a shade too
prominent, perhaps—but no, her proportions were exquisitely right. “She
is a scholar and an artist!” the clergyman exclaimed as she left the
room. But why did she leave the room? If she was his daughter why did
she not preside at the tea-table? Was she his mistress? Who was she? And
why was the house in this state of litter and decay? Why was the front
door locked? Why was the clergyman apparently a prisoner, and what was
his secret story? Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth’s head as he
sat drinking his tea; but he could only shake his head and make one last
reflection, “I feared that something was not right,” as he shut the
white wicket gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy
house among the planets and their satellites, the mad clergyman and the
lovely girl.




II

LAETITIA PILKINGTON


Let us bother the librarian once again. Let us ask him to reach down,
dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over there, the Memoirs
of Mrs. Pilkington, three volumes bound in one, printed by Peter Hoey in
Dublin, MDCCLXXVI. The deepest obscurity shades her retreat; the dust
lies heavy on her tomb—one board is loose, that is to say, and nobody
has read her since early in the last century when a reader, presumably a
lady, whether disgusted by her obscenity or stricken by the hand of
death, left off in the middle and marked her place with a faded list of
goods and groceries. If ever a woman wanted a champion, it is obviously
Laetitia Pilkington. Who then was she?

Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and
Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a
lady of breeding and refinement? Laetitia Pilkington (1712–1759) was
something of the sort—shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet, like
Thackeray’s daughter, like Miss Mitford, like Madame de Sévigné and
Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued with the old traditions of
her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give pleasure. Throughout her
_Memoirs_, we can never forget that it is her wish to entertain, her
unhappy fate to sob. Dabbing her eyes and controlling her anguish, she
begs us to forgive an odious breach of manners which only the suffering
of a lifetime, the intolerable persecutions of Mr. P——n, the
malignant, she must say the h——h, spite of Lady C——t can excuse.
For who should know better than the Earl of Killmallock’s
great-granddaughter that it is the part of a lady to hide her
sufferings? Thus Laetitia is in the great tradition of English women of
letters. It is her duty to entertain; it is her instinct to conceal.
Still, though her room near the Royal Exchange is threadbare, and the
table is spread with old play-bills instead of a cloth, and the butter
is served in a shoe, and Mr. Worsdale has used the teapot to fetch small
beer that very morning, still she presides, still she entertains. Her
language is a trifle coarse, perhaps. But who taught her English? The
great Doctor Swift.

In all her wanderings, which were many and in her failings, which were
great, she looked back to those early Irish days when Swift had pinched
her into propriety of speech. He had beaten her for fumbling at a
drawer: he had daubed her cheeks with burnt cork to try her temper; he
had bade her pull off her shoes and stockings and stand against the
wainscot and let him measure her. At first she had refused; then she had
yielded. “Why,” said the Dean, “I suspected you had either broken
Stockings or foul toes, and in either case should have delighted to
expose you.” Three feet two inches was all she measured, he declared,
though, as Laetitia complained, the weight of Swift’s hand on her head
had made her shrink to half her size. But she was foolish to complain.
Probably she owed her intimacy to that very fact—she was only three
feet two. Swift had lived, a lifetime among the giants; now there was a
charm in dwarfs. He took the little creature into his library. “‘Well,’
said he, ‘I have brought you here to show you all the Money I got when I
was in the Ministry, but don’t steal any of it.’ ‘I won’t, indeed. Sir,’
said I; so he opened a Cabinet, and showed me a whole parcel of empty
drawers. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘the Money is flown.’” There was a charm
in her surprise; there was a charm in her humility. He could beat her
and bully her, make her shout when he was deaf, force her husband to
drink the lees of the wine, pay their cab fares, stuff guineas into a
piece of gingerbread, and relent surprisingly, as if there were
something grimly pleasing to him in the thought of so foolish a midget
setting up to have a life and a mind of her own. For with Swift she was
herself; it was the effect of his genius. She had to pull off her
stockings if he told her to. So, though his satire terrified her, and
she found it highly unpleasant to dine at the Deanery and see him
watching, in the great glass which hung before him for that purpose, the
butler stealing beer at the sideboard, she knew that it was a privilege
to walk with him in his garden; to hear him talk of Mr. Pope and quote
Hudibras; and then be hustled back in the rain to save coach hire, and
then to sit chatting in the parlour with Mrs. Brent, the housekeeper,
about the Dean’s oddity and charity, and how the sixpence he saved on
the coach he gave to the lame old man who sold gingerbread at the
corner, while the Dean dashed up the front stairs and down the back so
violently that she was afraid he would fall and hurt himself.

But memories of great men are no infallible specific. They fall upon the
race of life like beams from a lighthouse. They flash, they shock, they
reveal, they vanish. To remember Swift was of little avail to Laetitia
when the troubles of life came thick about her. Mr. Pilkington left her
for Widow W—rr—n. Her father—her dear father—died. The sheriff’s
officers insulted her. She was deserted in an empty house with two
children to provide for. The tea chest was secured, the garden gate
locked, and the bills left unpaid. And still she was young and
attractive and gay, with an inordinate passion for scribbling verses and
an incredible hunger for reading books. It was this that was her
undoing. The book was fascinating and the hour late. The gentleman would
not lend it, but would stay till she had finished. They sat in her
bedroom. It was highly indiscreet, she owned. Suddenly twelve watchmen
broke through the kitchen window, and Mr. Pilkington appeared with a
cambric handkerchief tied about his neck. Swords were drawn and heads
broken. As for her excuse, how could one expect Mr. Pilkington and the
twelve watchmen to believe that? Only reading! Only sitting up late to
finish a new book! Mr. Pilkington and the watchmen interpreted the
situation as such men would. But lovers of learning, she is persuaded,
will understand her passion and deplore its consequences.

And now what was she to do? Reading had played her false, but still she
could write. Ever since she could form her letters, indeed, she had
written, with incredible speed and considerable grace, odes, addresses,
apostrophes to Miss Hoadley, to the Recorder of Dublin, to Dr.
Delville’s place in the country. “Hail, happy Delville, blissful seat!”
“Is there a man whose fixed and steady gaze——”—the verses flowed
without the slightest difficulty on the slightest occasion. Now,
therefore, crossing to England, she set up, as her advertisement had it,
to write letters upon any subject, except the law, for twelve pence
ready money, and no trust given. She lodged opposite White’s Chocolate
House, and there, in the evening, as she watered her flowers on the
leads, the noble gentlemen in the window across the road drank her
health, sent her over a bottle of burgundy; and later she heard old
Colonel——crying, “Poke after me, my lord, poke after me,” as he
shepherded the D—— of M—lb—gh up her dark stairs. That lovely
gentleman, who honoured his title by wearing it, kissed her,
complimented her, opened his pocketbook, and left her with a banknote
for fifty pounds upon Sir Francis Child. Such tributes stimulated her
pen to astonishing outbursts of impromptu gratitude. If, on the other
hand, a gentleman refused to buy or a lady hinted impropriety, this same
flowery pen writhed and twisted in agonies of hate and vituperation.
“Had I said that your F——r died Blaspheming the Almighty”, one of her
accusations begins, but the end is unprintable. Great ladies were
accused of every depravity, and the clergy, unless their taste in poetry
was above reproach, suffered an incessant castigation. Mr. Pilkington,
she never forgot, was a clergyman.

Slowly but surely the Earl of Killmallock’s great-granddaughter
descended in the social scale. From St. James’s Street and its noble
benefactors she migrated to Green Street to lodge with Lord Stair’s
_valet de chambre_ and his wife, who washed for persons of distinction.
She, who had dallied with dukes, was glad for company’s sake to take a
hand at quadrille with footmen and laundresses and Grub Street writers,
who, as they drank porter, sipped green tea, and smoked tobacco, told
stories of the utmost scurrility about their masters and mistresses. The
spiciness of their conversation made amends for the vulgarity of their
manners. From them Laetitia picked up those anecdotes of the great which
sprinkled her pages with dashes and served her purpose when subscribers
failed and landladies grew insolent. Indeed, it was a hard life—to
trudge to Chelsea in the snow wearing nothing but a chintz gown and be
put off with a beggarly half-crown by Sir Hans Sloane; next to tramp to
Ormond Street and extract two guineas from the odious Dr. Meade, which,
in her glee, she tossed in the air and lost in a crack of the floor; to
be insulted by footmen; to sit down to a dish of boiling water because
her landlady must not guess that a pinch of tea was beyond her means.
Twice on moonlight nights, with the lime trees in flower, she wandered
in St. James’s Park and contemplated suicide in Rosamond’s Pond. Once,
musing among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the door was locked on her,
and she had to spend the night in the pulpit wrapped in a carpet from
the Communion Table to protect herself from the assaults of rats. “I
long to listen to the young-ey’d cherubims!” she exclaimed. But a very
different fate was in store for her. In spite of Mr. Colley Cibber, and
Mr. Richardson, who supplied her first with gilt-edged notepaper and
then with baby linen, those harpies, her landladies, after drinking her
ale, devouring her lobsters, and failing often for years at a time to
comb their hair, succeeded in driving Swift’s friend, and the Earl’s
great-granddaughter, to be imprisoned with common debtors in the
Marshalsea.

Bitterly she cursed her husband who had made her a lady of adventure
instead of what nature intended, “a harmless household dove”. More and
more wildly she ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scandals,
views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the inflammable character
of the earth—anything that would fill a page and earn her a guinea. She
remembered that she had eaten plovers’ eggs with Swift. “Here, Hussey,”
said he, “is a Plover’s egg. King William used to give crowns apiece for
them. . . .” Swift never laughed, she remembered. He used to suck in his
cheeks instead of laughing. And what else could she remember? A great
many gentlemen, a great many landladies; how the window was thrown up
when her father died, and her sister came downstairs with the
sugar-basin, laughing. All had been bitterness and struggle, except that
she had loved Shakespeare, known Swift, and kept through all the shifts
and shades of an adventurous career a gay spirit, something of a lady’s
breeding, and the gallantry which, at the end of her short life, led her
to crack her joke and enjoy her duck with death at her heart and duns at
her pillow.




III

MISS ORMEROD[8]


The trees stood massively in all their summer foliage spotted and
grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down from the big white house.
There were unmistakable signs of the year 1835 both in the trees and in
the sky, for modern trees are not nearly so voluminous as these ones,
and the sky of those days had a kind of pale diffusion in its texture
which was different from the more concentrated tone of the skies we
know.

Mr. George Ormerod stepped from the drawing-room window of Sedbury
House, Gloucestershire, wearing a tall furry hat and white trousers
strapped under his instep; he was closely, though deferentially,
followed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress over a crinoline, and
behind her, singly and arm in arm, came nine children in nankeen jackets
and long white drawers. They were going to see the water let out of a
pond.

The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale face, rather
elongated features, and black hair, was left by herself in the
drawing-room, a large sallow apartment with pillars, two chandeliers,
for some reason enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal tables
some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite. At one of these
little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a high chair.

“Now, Eleanor,” said her mother, as the party assembled for the
expedition to the pond, “here are some pretty beetles. Don’t touch the
glass. Don’t get down from your chair, and when we come back little
George will tell you all about it.”

So saying, Mrs. Ormerod placed a tumbler of water containing about half
a dozen great water grubs in the middle of the malachite table, at a
safe distance from the child, and followed her husband down the slope of
old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely old-fashioned sheep;
opening, directly she stepped on to the terrace, a tiny parasol of
bottle green silk with a bottle green fringe, though the sky was like
nothing so much as a flock bed covered with a counterpane of white
dimity.

The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and round in the tumbler. So
simple an entertainment must surely soon have ceased to satisfy. Surely
Eleanor would shake the tumbler, upset the grubs, and scramble down from
her chair. Why, even a grown person can hardly watch those grubs
crawling down the glass wall, then floating to the surface, without a
sense of boredom not untinged with disgust. But the child sat perfectly
still. Was it her custom, then, to be entertained by the gyrations of
grubs? Her eyes were reflective, even critical. But they shone with
increasing excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the table.
What was the reason? One of the grubs had ceased to float: he lay at the
bottom; the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to pieces.

“And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?” asked Mr. Ormerod, in
rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a slight air of
heat and of fatigue upon his face.

“Papa,” said Eleanor, almost interrupting her father in her eagerness to
impart her observation, “I saw one of the grubs fall down and the rest
came and ate him!”

“Nonsense, Eleanor,” said Mr. Ormerod. “You are not telling the truth.”
He looked severely at the tumbler in which the beetles were still
gyrating as before.

“Papa, it was true!”

“Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,”
said Mrs. Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her green
parasol with a snap.

“Let this be a lesson,” Mr. Ormerod began, signing to the other children
to approach, when the door opened, and the servant announced,

“Captain Fenton.”

Captain Fenton “was at times thought to be tedious in his recurrence to
the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served at the battle of
Waterloo.”


But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George Hotel in
Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the
mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way! Make way!”
cries the ostler and the vehicle dashes into the courtyard, pulls up
sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off,
and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in
their stead. Upon all this—coachman, horses, coach, and passengers—the
crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through
the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman
settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that
instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow
darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat
swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it
turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one
gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there! there!” before he
was bowled into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the
people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran;
always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a
young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it
alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now
came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By
Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a
professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose
underwinged locust” added the gratifying information that it “was the
first of the kind to be captured so far west.”


And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the
proper person to receive the gift of a locust.

When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meetings and croquet
tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young ladies looked
grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of
nothing but black beetles and earwigs—“Yes, that’s what she likes,
isn’t it queer?—Why, the other day Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane,
who’s under-kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a
beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t die, and swam round and
round, and she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way
to Gloucester to fetch chloroform—all for an insect, my dear!—and she
gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her—and she spends
hours in her bedroom cutting them up—and she climbs trees like a boy to
find wasps’ nests—oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in
the village—for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow, with that great
big nose and those bright little eyes, so like a caterpillar herself, I
always think—but of course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too,
both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the cottagers, and
Eleanor never misses a service—but there she is—that short pale girl
in the large bonnet. Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid,
but you’d find plenty to say—” But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor
William found anything to say—


“. . . probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased
had none of her own sex put in an appearance.”

This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws some
light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the ’fifties.


It being nine o’clock on a February night some time about 1862 all the
Ormerods were in the library; Mr. Ormerod making architectural designs
at a table; Mrs. Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon
grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to serve as a paper
weight; Georgiana making a copy of the font in Tidenham Church; some of
the others examining books with beautiful illustrations; while at
intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case, took down a volume
for instruction or entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.

Mr. Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His word was law,
even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their master, instinctively
obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy there
might be between Mrs. Ormerod and her daughters—

“The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this morning,
Mama—”

“And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because Eleanor
happened to have her ruler with her—”

“—hm—m—m. Dr. Armstrong—Hm—m—m—”

“—Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are at Kinghampton. They
say Mrs. Briscoe’s Newfoundland dog follows her right up to the chancel
rails when she takes the sacrament—”

“And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pulpit.”

—“The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four
weeks”—said Eleanor, thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake
and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.

“Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?” Mr. Ormerod exclaimed
angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which Mrs. Ormerod
half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her
high light, and they remained silent until the servants came in, when
everyone, with the exception of Mrs. Ormerod, fell on their knees. For
she, poor lady, suffered from a chronic complaint and left the family
party forever a year or two later, when the green sofa was moved into
the corner, and the drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But
Mr. Ormerod went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every
night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon the
green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs. Ormerod lay there, but
still looked much the same. “We deeply felt the happiness of ministering
to his welfare,” Miss Ormerod wrote, “for he would not hear of our
leaving him for even twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my
brothers excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not being used
to the gentle ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the
Thursday following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the
mature age of eighty-seven years.” Oh, graves in country
churchyards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., LL.D.,
F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women
are buried with you!


There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious insects! Not, one
would have thought, among God’s most triumphant creations, and yet—if
you see them under a microscope!—the Bot, obese, globular, obscene;
the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered, cadaverous. Next slip under the
glass an innocent grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this
strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps—well, what does
the landscape look like then?

The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in acres of England is
a lump of Paris Green. But English people won’t use microscopes; you
can’t make them use Paris Green either—or if they do, they let it
drip. Dr. Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t take a woman’s
word. And indeed, though for the sake of the Ox Warble one must stretch
a point, there are matters, questions of stock infestation, things one
has to go into—things a lady doesn’t even like to see, much less
discuss, in print—“these, I say, I intend to leave entirely to the
Veterinary surgeons. My brother—oh, he’s dead now—a very good man—for
whom I collected wasps’ nests—lived at Brighton and wrote about
wasps—he, I say, wouldn’t let me learn anatomy, never liked me to do
more than take sections of teeth.”

Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than
Mr. Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive
that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most
emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bos or Warble,
on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if
slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than
when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is excrement; these,
though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative
organs of the male. I’ve proved it.” Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh
most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green.


“If you’re sure I’m not in your way,” said Miss Lipscomb unstrapping her
paint box and planting her tripod firmly in the path, “—I’ll try to get
a picture of those lovely hydrangeas against the sky—What flowers you
have in Penzance!”

The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe, slowly twined a piece
of bass round his finger, looked at the sky, said something about the
sun, also about the prevalence of lady artists, and then, with a nod of
his head, observed sententiously that it was to a lady that he owed
everything he had.

“Ah?” said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already much occupied with her
composition.

“A lady with a queer-sounding name,” said Mr. Pascoe, “but that’s the
lady I’ve called my little girl after—I don’t think there’s such
another in Christendom.”

Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course Miss Lipscomb was the
sister of Miss Ormerod’s family doctor; and so she did no sketching that
morning, but left with a handsome bunch of grapes instead—for every
flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the face—he had written, not
believing one bit what they told him—to the lady with the queer name,
back there came a book “In-ju-ri-ous In-sects,” with the page turned
down, perhaps by her very hand, also a letter which he kept at home
under the clock, but he knew every word by heart, since it was due to
what she said there that he wasn’t a ruined man—and the tears ran down
his face and Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on the lodging-house table,
wrote the whole story to her brother.

“The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems to be dying down,”
said Miss Ormerod when she read it.—“But now,” she sighed rather
heavily, being no longer young and much afflicted with the gout, “now
it’s the sparrows.”

One might have thought that _they_ would have left her alone—innocent
dirt-grey birds, taking more than their share of the breakfast crumbs,
otherwise inoffensive. But once you look through a microscope—once you
see the Hessian and the Bot as they really are—there’s no peace for an
elderly lady pacing her terrace on a fine May morning. For example, why,
when there are crumbs enough for all, do only the sparrows get them? Why
not swallows or martins? Why—oh, here come the servants for prayers—

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against
us. . . . For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, for
ever and ever. Amen—”

“The Times, ma’am—”

“Thank you, Dixon. . . . The Queen’s birthday! We must drink her
Majesty’s health in the old white port, Dixon. Home Rule—tut—tut—tut.
All that madman Gladstone. My father would have thought the world was
coming to an end, and I’m not at all sure that it isn’t. I must talk to
Dr. Lipscomb—”

Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw myriads of sparrows, and
retiring to the study proclaimed in a pamphlet of which 36,000 copies
were gratuitously distributed that the sparrow is a pest.

“When he eats an insect,” she said to her sister Georgians, “which
isn’t often, it’s one of the few insects that one wants to keep—one of
the very few,” she added with a touch of acidity natural to one whose
investigations have all tended to the discredit of the insect race.

“But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,” she
concluded—“Very unpleasant indeed.”

Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled; and Miss
Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast “Her Blessed Majesty.” She
was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a glass
of her father’s old white port. She kept his pigtail, too, in a box.

Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the
sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolises something of the
homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with
deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before her, held
dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E. Walker—denounced her for
her brutality; “God Save the Sparrow!” exclaimed the Animal’s Friend;
and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet
described by Miss Ormerod as “spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate.”

“Well,” said Miss Ormerod to her sister, “it did me no harm before to be
threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other little
attentions.”

“Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable I believe,
to me than to you,” said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died. She had however
finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked
every morning in the dining-room and they were presented to Edinburgh
University. But Eleanor was never the same woman after that.

Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and cheese
flies—beetles—foreign correspondents—eel worms—ladybirds—wheat
midges—resignation from the Royal Agricultural Society—gall
mites—boot beetles—Announcement of honorary degree to be
conferred—feelings of appreciation and anxiety—paper on wasps—last
annual report warnings of serious illness—proposed pension—gradual
loss of strength—Finally Death.

That is life, so they say.


“It does no good to keep people waiting for an answer,” sighed Miss
Ormerod, “though I don’t feel as able as I did since that unlucky
accident at Waterloo. And no one realises what the strain of the work
is—often I’m the only lady in the room, and the gentlemen so learned,
though I’ve always found them most helpful, most generous in every way.
But I’m growing old. Miss Hartwell, that’s what it is. That’s what led
me to be thinking of this difficult matter of flour infestation in the
middle of the road so that I didn’t see the horse until he had poked his
nose into my ear. . . . Then there’s this nonsense about a pension. What
could possess Mr. Barron to think of such a thing? I should feel
inexpressibly lowered if I accepted a pension. Why, I don’t altogether
like writing LL.D. after my name, though Georgie would have liked it.
All I ask is to be let go on in my own quiet way. Now where is Messrs.
Langridge’s sample? We must take that first. ‘Gentlemen, I have examined
your sample and find . . .’”

“If any one deserves a thorough good rest it’s you. Miss Ormerod,” said
Dr. Lipscomb, who had grown a little white over the ears. “I should say
the farmers of England ought to set up a statue to you, bring offerings
of corn and wine—make you a kind of Goddess, eh—what was her name?”

“Not a very shapely figure for a Goddess,” said Miss Ormerod with a
little laugh. “I should enjoy the wine though. You’re not going to cut
me off my one glass of port surely?”

“You must remember,” said Dr. Lipscomb, shaking his head, “how much your
life means to others.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Miss Ormerod, pondering a little.
“To be sure, I’ve chosen my epitaph. ‘She introduced Paris Green into
England,’ and there might be a word or two about the Hessian fly—that,
I do believe, was a good piece of work.”

“No need to think about epitaphs yet,” said Dr. Lipscomb.

“Our lives are in the hands of the Lord,” said Miss Ormerod simply.

Dr. Lipscomb bent his head and looked out of the window. Miss Ormerod
remained silent.

“English entomologists care little or nothing for objects of practical
importance,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Take this question of flour
infestation—I can’t say how many grey hairs that hasn’t grown me.”

“Figuratively speaking. Miss Ormerod,” said Dr. Lipscomb, for her hair
was still raven black.

“Well, I do believe all good work is done in concert,” Miss Ormerod
continued. “It is often a great comfort to me to think that.”

“It’s beginning to rain,” said Dr. Lipscomb. “How will your enemies like
that, Miss Ormerod?”

“Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!” cried Miss Ormerod,
energetically sitting up in bed.


“Old Miss Ormerod is dead,” said Mr. Drummond, opening The Times on
Saturday, July 20th, 1901.

“Old Miss Ormerod?” asked Mrs. Drummond.


[Footnote 8: Founded upon the Life of Eleanor Ormerod, by Robert
Wallace Murray. 1904.]




_Jane Austen_


It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way, we should
have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister
alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if
rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss
Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her
suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars
speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could
gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to
be of interest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a
few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived
its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our
purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very
prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical and affected,”
says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs.
Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest,
silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers”.
Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and]
says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise,
taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that,
until _Pride and Prejudice_ showed what a precious gem was hidden in
that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or
firescreen. . . . The case is very different now,” the good lady goes on;
“she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . .
A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific
indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race
little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her
brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to
her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each
loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his
own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected
to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by
strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by
no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find
ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a
child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of
an astonishing and unchildish story, _Love and Friendship_,[9] which,
incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was
written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the
same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is
neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. There are
jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which
went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies
who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.

Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last
hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief
for the loss of Augustius. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware
of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not
faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker
than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and
Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach
between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the
fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and
the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the
schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than
that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common
parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and
not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for
our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen
was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of
the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil,
and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was
only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the
Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom
upon sheer nonsense,—_Love and Friendship_ is all that, but what is
this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and
penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The
girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps
himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old
Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment
after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is
something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and
women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady
Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent
features of every ball-room. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth
upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her
a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in
the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had
already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over
that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few
illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes
is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage,
but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the
writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the
book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of
anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once
received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely
where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane
Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries.
Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself
in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an
outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have
said, pointing with her stick, end _there_; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and
castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own.
It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of
the first characters in the world,” she called her, “a bewitching
Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only
ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these
words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It
is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontës wrote, not very
much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most
affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and,
incidentally, the authoress of a novel called _Pride and Prejudice_,
which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many
years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another
story, _The Watsons_, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it,
left it unfinished. Unfinished and unsuccessful, it may throw more light
upon its writer’s genius than the polished masterpiece blazing in
universal fame. Her difficulties are more apparent in it, and the method
she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the
stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one
of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first
version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and
atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what
suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would
have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family
life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and
apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed
what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go
through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar
genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting.
Suddenly, she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to
happen. The Edwards’ are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is
passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves
and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrove retreats to a remote corner with
a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and
active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar
intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of
a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an
assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy
being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is
no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is
moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made
to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how
tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown
herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come
inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much
deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to
supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet
is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows
with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.
Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder,
will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrove make their call at
five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the
knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are
accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred,
vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the
tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment,
half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way
as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been
made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in
this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of
Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature.
Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there
remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of
human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with
extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room
scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is
possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a
link which carries the story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise,
and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there
are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most
consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular
chapters of _The Watsons_ prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she
had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself
felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which
the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and
straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the
big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an
occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and
adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part
of the ladies to get tired; a little money supported it, a little
consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class
families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left
outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades
nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells
us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a
comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and
fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute
of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is
describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular,
she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of
her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into
decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are
exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous ladies’
ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is
terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is
silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her
fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collins’, her Sir Walter
Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennetts. She encircles them with the lash of a
whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their
silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them
and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when
she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug
and trying to keep him from the flower beds” eternally. A divine justice
is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by
bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners
in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to
give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is
satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head,
or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her
with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the
heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite,
pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like
that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this
very moment some Lady Bertram finds it almost too trying to keep Pug
from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny, a little
late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just that,
consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of
pettiness, no hint of spite, rouses us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.

That elusive quality is indeed often made up of very different parts,
which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane
Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool,
her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and
sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while
she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an
impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring
heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows
up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among
the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary
Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets
her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten
thousand a year with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again
she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and
at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings
flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From
such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even which are not only
as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In _The
Watsons_ she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why
an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of
meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection.
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull
young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as
they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from
triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of
meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their
lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep,
trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this
drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides
again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural then, with this insight into their profundity, than
that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day
to day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No
“suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or
Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or
intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country house staircase as she
saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads
against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an
incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child
who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to
form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but
for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what
material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with
by a writer, whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions
that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice
could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example,
she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels.
She could not throw herself wholeheartedly into a romantic moment. She
had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its
beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a
beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we
read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night
and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods” the night is at once as
“solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that
it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished
novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink
markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the
age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still
subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s
career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted
with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she
would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider
whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were
marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she
not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning,
in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of
discovery?

Let us take _Persuasion_, the last completed novel, and look by its
light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a
peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in _Persuasion_. The dullness is
that which so often marks the transition stage between two different
periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with
the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an
asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be
amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss
Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so
freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not
altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done
this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do
something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in
_Persuasion_, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and
insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning
to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic
than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of
Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned
romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural
beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of
nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the
spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal
months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered
hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in
it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature
that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She
is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a
woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and
unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to
comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and
more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the
scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy
which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had
loved, but the æsthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so.
Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to
be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed
herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready.
Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame
had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it
would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal
obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all
that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined
out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled,
and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to
feast upon at leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane
Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion,
or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of
publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity.
But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been
shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less
(this is already perceptible in _Persuasion_) to dialogue and more to
reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous
little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we
need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that
shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and
psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a
method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for
conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only
what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from
her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her
satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent
and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of
Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist
among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was
beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.


[Footnote 9: _Love and Friendship_, Chatto and Windus.]




_Modern Fiction_


In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction it
is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the
art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and
primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen
even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their
masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the
analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of
making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is
doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt
much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making
literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to
do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but
with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed
from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we
make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On
the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to
those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear
so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from
whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is
for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now
beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose
fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that
certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem
to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this
perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of
quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy it is partly
that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a
living, breathing, every day imperfection which bids us take what
liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank
them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for
Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr.
Hudson, of _The Purple Land, Green Mansions_, and _Far Away and Long
Ago_. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many
hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely
takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have
done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as
certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the
charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so
large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and
the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should
say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are
concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have
disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English
fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if
only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word
reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells
it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to
our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that
has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr.
Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by
far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid
in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of
critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There
is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a
crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? That
is a risk which the creator of _The Old Wives’ Tale_, George Cannon,
Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have
surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it
remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and
more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five
Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway
carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to
which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an
eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can
scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that
he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too
generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making
things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer
goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have
been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his
ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to
think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet
what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his
Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his
Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish
whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the
generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the
integrity and humanity of Mr. Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in
his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word
materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that
they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the
transitory appear the true and the enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it
difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we
exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it
reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest
of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be
that owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit
seems to make from time to time Mr. Bennett has come down with his
magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong
side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth
while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a
figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as
critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which
afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us
at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than
secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or
reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to
be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.
Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our
two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to
resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of
proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely
labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and
blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained,
not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant
who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy,
love, interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so
impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find
themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion
of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But
sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary
doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”.
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of
the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper
stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define
the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among
whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their
predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more
sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so
they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by
the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more
fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
small. Any one who has read _The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_
or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, _Ulysses_,[10] now
appearing in the _Little Review_, will have hazarded some theory of this
nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment
before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the
intention of the whole there can be no question but that it is of the
utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may
judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have
called materialists Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs
to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its
messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards
with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be
probability, or coherence or any other of these signposts which for
generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when
called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. The scene in
the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its
incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does
undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first
reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we
want life itself here, surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves
fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for
what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we must
take high examples, with _Youth_ or _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. It
fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might
say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little
further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a
bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and
set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the
mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to
the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a
self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or
creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid,
perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of
something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of
such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to
feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a
mistake to stand outside examining “methods”. Any method is right, every
method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are
writers; that brings us closer to the novelist’s intention if we are
readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were
prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of _Ulysses_ suggest
how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a
shock to open _Tristram Shandy_ or even _Pendennis_ and be by them
convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more
important ones into the bargain.

However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we
suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free
to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must
he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest,
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore,
the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something
hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary,
difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one
but a modern, perhaps no one but a Russian, would have felt the interest
of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short story which he
calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is
taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and
some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the
talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and
looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is
laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were
no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to
twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete
the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision
Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together
to compose something new. But it is impossible to say “this is comic”,
or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have
been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is
vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.

The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid
some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned
one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is
waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else
shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own
materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of
birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. “Learn to make yourself
akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it
is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” In
every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint,
if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour
to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit
constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with
a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our
famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian
mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of
the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the
inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no
answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question
which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in
hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be
with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they
see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But
perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of
protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of
another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the
instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural
delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities
of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions
that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far
apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the
infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit
to the horizon, and that nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of
the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper
stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit
is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art
of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly
bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so
her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.


[Footnote 10: Written April 1919.]




_Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights_[11]


Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might
have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly
met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes
innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed
from us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour
of established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been
prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine
some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds
back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the
wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.

These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their
traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his
structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it
reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open _Jane Eyre_
once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of
imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only
preserved by the pious. So we open _Jane Eyre_; and in two pages every
doubt is swept clean from our minds.


Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from
the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of
my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered
a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.


There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor
is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire
volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our
eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves
in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in
Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road,
makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to
forget her.[12] At the end we are steeped through and through with the
genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable
faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon
us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once
she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to
think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again, there is Jane Eyre.
Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white carpets on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with
its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and
fire”—what is all that except Jane Eyre?

The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets
compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect
upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They
move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and
the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we
can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is
more akin to Charlotte Brontë in the power of his personality and the
narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read _Jude
the Obscure_ we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and
drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up
round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which
they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as
they are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace.
She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even
unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more
tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I
hate”, “I suffer”.

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn
little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles
upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is
awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate
integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to
itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of
their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a
swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the
reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the
professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his
language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with
strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,” she
writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written;
but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I
had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the
threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very
hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and
fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of
character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for
comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers
is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably
that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering
personality, who, as we should say in real life, have only to open the
door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity
perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them
desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very
ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way
past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their
more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to
write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both
Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both
feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering
passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a
description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel _Villette_.
“The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe
a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of
the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed
it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those
aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt
or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their
lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a
dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation—they carry on
the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.

The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather
a mood than a particular observation. _Wuthering Heights_ is a more
difficult book to understand than _Jane Eyre_, because Emily was a
greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with
eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her
experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there
is no “I” in _Wuthering Heights_. There are no governesses. There are no
employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily
was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged
her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked
out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the
power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt
throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb
conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which
is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and
“you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished. It is
not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can
make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the
half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and
_he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and
he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I
should not seem part of it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the
dead. “I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel
an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they
have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its
sympathy and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into the
presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other
novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics,
to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and
for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was
novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious
and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences,
grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable
shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who
existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of
emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to
herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor
sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the
grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its
improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing _Wuthering Heights_ with a real farm and Heathcliff with a
real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or
the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what
we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the
brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we
say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence as
his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do
or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know
human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a
gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of
all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few
touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by
speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.


[Footnote 11: Written in 1916.]

[Footnote 12: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of
colour. “. . . we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted
with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver
chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers”
(_Wuthering Heights_). Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and
within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the
windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.]




_George Eliot_


To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows
about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very
creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly
maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded
woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than
herself. At what moment, and by what means her spell was broken it is
difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of
her _Life_. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the
“mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave
point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so
accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for
youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people
who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the
same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert
Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned
all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of
her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her
public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller
always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had
come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the
grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note
in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated
on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without
due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the
memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon
was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the passage of the years.
It had not become picturesque.

Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with
its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped
itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot,
so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately
described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria—


a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features,
somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a
hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in those days commonly
included an immense ostrich feather.


Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:


She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded
lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and
pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with
two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a
friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent
impulse.


A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,”
she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our
lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect
upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine
recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and
suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.

In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in
the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never read
the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or
beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much of
personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her
critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have
resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is
held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming;
she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and
inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing
simplicity of children. One feels that to most people, as to Lady
Ritchie, she was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these portraits more closely we
shall find that they are all the portraits of an elderly celebrated
woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has
been through her struggle and issued from it with a profound desire to
be of use to others, but with no wish for intimacy, save with the little
circle who had known her in the days of her youth. We know very little
about the days of her youth; but we do know that the culture, the
philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very
humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.

The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we
see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable
boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world
and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the assistant
editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the esteemed
companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she reveals them
in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned her to tell the story
of her life. Marked in early youth as one “sure to get something up very
soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to raise funds for
restoring a church by making a chart of ecclesiastical history; and that
was followed by a loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he
refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with the translation of
Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-stupefying” in itself, can scarcely
have been made less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a
household and nursing a dying father, and the distressing conviction, to
one so dependent upon affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she
was forfeiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like an owl,”
she said, “to the great disgust of my brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a
friend who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen
Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly
face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet,
though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages
of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more
beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the
citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was
very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind
it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was
thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read everything. Her
astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but
youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at
the height of her powers, and in the fullness of her freedom, she made
the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters
even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.

The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the fullest
manner to the great liberation which had come to her with personal
happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast. Yet at
the threshold of her literary career one may find in some of the
circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind to the past,
to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of
childish memories and away from herself and the present. We understand
how it was that her first book was _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and not
_Middlemarch_. Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection,
but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also
isolated her. “I wish it to be understood,” she wrote in 1857, “that I
should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the
invitation.” She had been “cut off from what is called the world”, she
said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by
circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to
move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist
was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a
luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her “remotest past”, to speak
of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and
reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in
qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her
life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt
early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her
was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the
everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of
ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that romantic intensity which
is connected with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and
unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the background of the world.
What were the loves and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over
his whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first
books, _Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, is
very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers, the
Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their
surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and blood
and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that
unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to
the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour which she pours
so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another, until the
whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived, has so much in common
with a natural process that it leaves us with little consciousness that
there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel the delicious warmth
and release of spirit which the great creative writers alone procure for
us. As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out,
even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that
we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating
down from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking
abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and
their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish
to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we
consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is,
and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those
of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can only attribute the ease and
pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour
to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their
lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit
of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow
and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large
grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them
loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as
one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free,
but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There
is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy to work her
idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her
laugh in the same place a little too often. But memory, after the book
is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details and
subtleties which some more salient characteristic has prevented us from
noticing at the time. We recollect that her health was not good. There
were occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She was patience
itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and
speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and
find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those
qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.

But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in
the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown itself
broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and
children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or
fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and
carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance
that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of the past. The books
are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence.
But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it
will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws.
It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its
highest in the mature _Middlemarch_, the magnificent book which with all
its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In
real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back
into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early
works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and
baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In _Adam Bede_ there is a
hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely
in Maggie in _The Mill on the Floss_. She is Janet in _Janet’s
Repentance_, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one
scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of
George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and
with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of
her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic,
and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood
you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world
of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In
accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one
recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and
that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself
with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she
preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of
creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she
wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without
the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is
always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said.
She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and
wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for
brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that she was
compelled by the very power of her genius to step forth in person upon
the quiet bucolic scene.

The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the Mill
on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can
strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her lovable so long as
she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with the gipsies or
hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot
knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman on her hands
demanding what neither gipsies nor dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is
capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen
Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness of the other have
often been pointed out; but both, in their weakness and coarseness,
illustrate not so much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of
a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fumbling which shook
her hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in
the first place driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and
forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing
all the summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for
bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of
what she calls “good society” proves.


Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms . . .
gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior clergy
who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need of belief
and emphasis?


There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the
vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin.
But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands
upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the
boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from her
natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the great
emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must be drowned
clasping her brother in her arms. The more one examines the great
emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and
gathering and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our heads at
the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity. It is
partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack;
and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue
from the effort of emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to
talk too much. She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring
taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene
within that. “Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at
the Westons’ ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma; and she
has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we
should have looked out of the window.

Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to the
agricultural world of her “remotest past”, and you not only diminish her
greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here we can have
no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the
principal features, the ruddy light of the early books, the searching
power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and
expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the heroines that we would
cast a final glance. “I have always been finding out my religion since I
was a little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray so much—now
I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself. . . .”
She is speaking for them all. That is their problem. They cannot live
without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are
little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which
makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of
the book—still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no
longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the
ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do
not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness
of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages
dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand
for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps
incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too
strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a
humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the
supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines,
in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their
story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself.
For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not
enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the
strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women
have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance—the
difference of view, the difference of standard—nor accept an
inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure,
inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved,
shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were
satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching
out with “a fastidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could
offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine
aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for
her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect
all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against
her—sex and health and convention—she sought more knowledge and more
freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out,
we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of
laurel and rose.




_The Russian Point of View_


Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand
English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their
enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might
protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by “understand”.
Instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who
have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of
ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken
legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they
understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days
foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of Henry James were
written by a man who had grown-up in the society which he describes, or
that his criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read
Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or three
hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation
from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of
vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of
self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values
which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of
familiar intercourse.

Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but a
much more serious barrier—the difference of language. Of all those who
feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty
years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in
Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who
have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the
language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and
implicitly, upon the work of translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole
literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a
sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a
little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each
other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version
of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men
deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their
clothes, but also of something subtler and more important—their
manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the
English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration, something
very powerful and very impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in
view of these mutilations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute,
to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for
some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity,
startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which
Russian literature, whether it is due to translation, or to some more
profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it
through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. “Learn to
make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make yourself
indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for
it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.”
“From the Russian,” one would say instantly, wherever one chanced on
that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption
that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to
understand our fellow-sufferers, “and not with the mind—for it is easy
with the mind—but with the heart”—this is the cloud which broods above
the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched
brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade—and of
course with disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious;
denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and
simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say “Brother”
with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one
of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of
misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The
English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate”—a very different word, with
something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met
though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus
accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes,
spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money
to prevent poor devils from calling each other “Brother” on the
Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than common happiness,
effort, or desire that produces the sense of brotherhood. It is the
“deep sadness” which Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian
people that creates their literature.

A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some
degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed
profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other
questions arise. It is seen that an “attitude” is not simple; it is
highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a
railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things,
difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and
simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions of
Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of
it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story
after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and
meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what
means they can be free from “this intolerable bondage”.

“‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as though
in a little while the solution would be found and then a new and
splendid life would begin.” That is the end. A postman drives a student
to the station and all the way the student tries to make the postman
talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly,
“It’s against the regulations to take any one with the post.” And he
walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. “With
whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn
nights?” Again, that story ends.

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have
overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the
expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and
proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories
ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the
question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and
the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues
exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong,
but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or
merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov,
we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the
tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.
Probably we have to read a great many stories before we feel, and the
feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that we hold the parts
together, and that Tchekov was not merely rambling disconnectedly, but
struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his
meaning.

We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these
strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov’s own words give us a lead in the
right direction. “. . . such a conversation as this between us”, he
says, “would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did
not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are
restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether
we are right or not.” Our literature of social satire and psychological
finesse both sprang from that restless sleep, that incessant talking;
but after all, there is an enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry
James, between Tchekov and Bernard Shaw. Obviously—but where does it
arise? Tchekov, too, is aware of the evils and injustices of the social
state; the condition of the peasants appals him, but the reformer’s zeal
is not his—that is not the signal for us to stop. The mind interests
him enormously; he is a most subtle and delicate analyst of human
relations. But again, no; the end is not there. Is it that he is
primarily interested not in the soul’s relation with other souls, but
with the soul’s relation to health—with the soul’s relation to
goodness? These stories are always showing us some affectation, pose,
insincerity. Some woman has got into a false relation; some man has been
perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is ill; the
soul is cured; the soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic points in
his stories.

Once the eye is used to these shades, half the “conclusions” of fiction
fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light behind
them—gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last
chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously
trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary
kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together. On
the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual,
inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an
exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging
infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match
save among the Russians themselves. There may be no answer to these
questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so
as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity. This
may not be the way to catch the ear of the public; after all, they are
used to louder music, fiercer measures; but as the tune sounded, so he
has written it. In consequence, as we read these little stories about
nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense
of freedom.

In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word “soul” again and
again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely; “. . . you
are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my
dear boy . . . there’s no strength in it.” Indeed, it is the soul that
is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in
Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is
of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky, liable to violent diseases
and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is
why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read
_The Brothers Karamazov_ or _The Possessed_ a second time. The “soul” is
alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and
no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the
intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of
submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The
novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms,
waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely
and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in,
whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a
giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We
open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the
tutors of Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins and crowds
of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices
about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the
part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or
hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured,
unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess,
to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins
which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our
confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a
soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through
the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in
a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood
before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from
the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we pick it all up—the names
of the people, their relationships, that they are staying in an hotel at
Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the Marquis
de Grieux—but what unimportant matters these are compared with the
soul! It is the soul that matters, its passion, its tumult, its
astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. And if our voices suddenly
rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the most violent
sobbing, what more natural?—it hardly calls for remark. The pace at
which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must rush off our
wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the
elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or
scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but
streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human
mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each other. Men are at the
same time villains and saints; their acts are at once beautiful and
despicable. We love and we hate at the same time. There is none: of that
precise division between good and bad to which we are used. Often those
for whom we feel most affection are the greatest criminals, and the most
abject sinners move us to the strongest admiration as well as love.

Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the stones at
the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel at ease. The
process to which he is accustomed in his own literature is reversed. If
we wished to tell the story of a General’s love affair (and we should
find it very difficult in the first place not to laugh at a General), we
should begin with his house; we should solidify his surroundings. Only
when all was ready should we attempt to deal with the General himself.
Moreover, it is not the samovar but the teapot that rules in England;
time is limited; space crowded; the influence of other points of view,
of other books, even of other ages, makes itself felt. Society is sorted
out into lower, middle, and upper classes, each with its own traditions,
its own manners, and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he
wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist
to recognise these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on
him and some kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to
compassion, to scrutiny of society rather than understanding of
individuals themselves.

No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him
whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you
are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty,
precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers. It
overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple
story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads,
before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law
and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably, and
the postman’s life, and the charwoman’s, and the Princesses’ who lodged
in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s
province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot
restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed,
marvellous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.

There remains the greatest of all novelists—for what else can we call
the author of _War and Peace_? Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien,
difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of vision
which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost our
bearings, keeps us at arm’s length in suspicion and bewilderment? From
his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate—here is a man
who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to
proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards.
Here is a world in which the postman’s knock is heard at eight o’clock,
and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too, who is
no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he has had every sort of
experience. He is one of those born aristocrats who have used their
privileges to the full. He is metropolitan, not suburban. His senses,
his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished. There is
something proud and superb in the attack of such a mind and such a body
upon life. Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him
unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport,
the beauty of horses, and all the fierce desirability of the world to
the senses of a strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks to
his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child’s frock; the way a
horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying
to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his
infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible
brain refers to something hidden in the character so that we know his
people, not only by the way they love and their views on politics and
the immortality of the soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke.
Even in a translation we feel that we have been set on a mountain-top
and had a telescope put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly
clear and absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are exulting,
breathing deep, feeling at once braced and purified, some
detail—perhaps the head of a man—comes at us out of the picture in an
alarming way, as if extruded by the very intensity of its life.
“Suddenly a strange thing happened to me: first I ceased to see what was
around me; then his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes were left,
shining over against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head,
and then all became confused—I could see nothing and was forced to shut
my eyes, in order to break loose from the feeling of pleasure and fear
which his gaze was producing in me. . . .” Again and again we share
Masha’s feelings in _Family Happiness_. One shuts one’s eyes to escape
the feeling of pleasure and fear. Often it is pleasure that is
uppermost. In this very story there are two descriptions, one of a girl
walking in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly married
couple prancing down their drawing-room, which so convey the feeling of
intense happiness that we shut the book to feel it better. But always
there is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha, wish to escape
from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us. Does it arise from the sense,
which in real life might harass us, that such happiness as he describes
is too intense to last, that we are on the edge of disaster? Or is it
not that the very intensity of our pleasure is somehow questionable and
forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the Kreutzer Sonata, “But why
live?” Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is
always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the
flower this scorpion, “Why live?” There is always at the centre of the
book some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all
experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases
to ask even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should
be our aims. It is not the priest who shatters our desires most
effectively; it is the man who has known them, and loved them himself.
When he derides them, the world indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath
our feet. Thus fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great
Russian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels.

But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt,
when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at
a tangent far from the truth.




_Outlines_


I

MISS MITFORD


Speaking truthfully, _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_ is not
a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There
is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss
Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own
that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and
without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the
point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be
called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe
what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent
Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of
telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: “Alresford
was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and
whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the
hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to us ‘the sweet breezes that blow
over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true that
Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that,
we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss
Hill; she was born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in
truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room . . . was a
lofty and spacious apartment.’” So Miss Mitford was born in the
breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the
Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford,
turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of
cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel . . .” That is the way in which
Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her
approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called
historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the
Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning
number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish
harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by
the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights,
from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe,” says Mendacity, “with
what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives
to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor,
though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams
like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the
ladies have left the room,” Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a
pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a
mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence
that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses
invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the
end—to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing
us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place,
Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the
platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very
charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much
in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more
formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an
eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the
florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has
scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be
denied, has its importance.

Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a subject,
than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in literature, the
daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls
heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost its way; several
ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At
Hatfield Peveral twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports
itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave
reason to fear that the French king’s coach has been blocked on the road
to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February, 1808.

Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and
no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little
ashamed of itself, and, picking up _Mary Russell Mitford and Her
Surroundings_, assures us that everything will come right if we possess
ourselves in patience. The French king’s coach was on its way to
Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord
Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once when Mary
Mitford was five years old—sixteen years, that is, before the sheep
were lost and the French king went to Bocking—Mary “threw him into an
agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my
papa”. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat
strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not
wish to quit it without “introducing an incident in connection with them
which took place in the month of February, 1808”. But is Miss Mitford
concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To some
extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords, and
Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with “the
incident” even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had enough of
trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was
not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer
which we are not going to evade.

There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense of the beauty of
nature has never been altogether absent, however much the cow may change
from age to age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the difference
between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very considerable.
_Lyrical Ballads_ was published in 1798; _Our Village_ in 1824. One
being in verse and the other in prose, it is not necessary to labour a
comparison which contains, however, not only the elements of justice,
but the seeds of many volumes. Like her great predecessor, Miss Mitford
much preferred the country to the town; and thus, perhaps, it may not be
inopportune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning,
and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary
Mitford had a Christian name in common, they are further connected by
what can scarcely be called a fact, but may, without hazard, be called a
probability. Miss Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only
fifteen years before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited
Lyme in 1844, and seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning’s
window, asked her to drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they
were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King’s
coach—was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was not;
but there is no doubt, and we are not trifling when we say it, that Mary
Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary Anning, and it is
singularly unfortunate to have to state that she never did. For we have
reached the year 1844; Mary Mitford is fifty-seven years of age, and so
far, thanks to Mendacity and its trifling ways, all we know of her is
that she did not know Mary Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had
not been out in a snowstorm, and had not seen the King of France.

It is time to wring the creature’s neck, and begin again at the very
beginning.

What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to
write _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_? Three emerge from the
rest, and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place. Miss
Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787; and in
the third, the stock of female characters who lend themselves to
biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another,
running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little
is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably
obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George
Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse.
The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that
indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an
atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney,
and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what with one thing
and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left.

There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when we
see the word “surroundings” on the back, of a book. Surroundings, as
they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When we
come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how “as we looked
upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we fancied we saw the
tiny figure jumping from step to step”, it would be the grossest outrage
upon our sensibilities to be told that those steps were Athenian,
Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course, eighteenth-century
steps, leading down from the old panelled room into the shady garden,
where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles, or, if we like to
be bold, where on still summer days we can almost fancy that we hear the
drums of Bonaparte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit of the
imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal
if the imagination took to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with
King John. But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to labour the
point that her place is the eighteenth-century. The other point is more
obscure. One must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like
what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a
lady and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be
done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.

It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on the
side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things off, but
they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups on the
floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have a subject who can
be trusted to live a long life without once raising her voice. Sixteen
years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough to
say, “Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life and here she
got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every
turn of the surrounding shady lanes.” Her loves were vegetable, and her
lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was educated at the school where
Jane Austen and Mrs. Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis,
and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St.
Paul’s, and London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed
from one charming house to another, and several distinguished literary
gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room
ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a
ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing sentences
there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our fault and not
Miss Hill’s; and to do that writer justice, there are not many whole
sentences in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mitford nor
supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.

But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything not
wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the sun?
Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we are
sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to relate, topples a
stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss Mitford had a father. There
is nothing actually improper in that. Many women have had fathers. But
Miss Mitford’s father was kept in a cupboard; that is to say, he was not
a nice father. Miss Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when “an
imposing procession of neighbours and friends” followed him to the
grave, “we cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and
respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect for him”. Severe as
the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did
something to deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if
from your earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated,
first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own, spent your
earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he
has lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters,
if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by selling
everything you have or sponging upon the charity of friends—then even a
lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once.
“It was grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply
of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of
woman.” What language for a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a
teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the page. But
it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has smashed it to smithereens. That
is the worst of writing about ladies; they have fathers as well as
teapots. On the other hand, some pieces of Dr. Mitford’s Wedgwood dinner
service are still in existence, and a copy of Adam’s Geography, which
Mary won as a prize at school, is “in our temporary possession”. If
there is nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be
devoted entirely to them?




II

DR. BENTLEY


As we saunter through those famous courts where Dr. Bentley once reigned
supreme we sometimes catch sight of a figure hurrying on its way to
Chapel or Hall which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts
enthusiastically after it. For that man, we are told, has the whole of
Sophocles at his finger-ends; knows Homer by heart; reads Pindar as we
read the _Times_; and spends his life, save for these short excursions
to eat and pray, wholly in the company of the Greeks. It is true that
the infirmities of our education prevent us from appreciating his
emendations as they deserve; his life’s work is a sealed book to us;
none the less, we treasure up the last flicker of his black gown, and
feel as if a bird of Paradise had flashed by us, so bright is his
spirit’s raiment, and in the murk of a November evening we had been
privileged to see it winging its way to roost in fields of amaranth and
beds of moly. Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the
most august. Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to
their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a
court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives—for example,
the _Life of Dr. Bentley_ by Bishop Monk.

There we shall find much that is odd and little that is reassuring. The
greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as the most expert of
us read English not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and grammar
but with a sensibility so subtle and widespread that he perceived
relations and suggestions of language which enabled him to fetch up from
oblivion lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments that
remained, the man who should have been steeped in beauty (if what they
say of the Classics is true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness
was, on the contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.

“I presume that there are not many examples of an individual who has
been a party in six distinct suits before the Court of King’s Bench
within the space of three years”, his biographer remarks; and adds that
Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his conclusion that though
Dr. Bentley might have been a first-rate lawyer or a great soldier “such
a display suited any character rather than that of a learned and
dignified clergyman”. Not all these disputes, however, sprung from his
love of literature. The charges against which he had to defend himself
were directed against him as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He
was habitually absent from chapel; his expenditure upon building and
upon his household was excessive; he used the college seal at meetings
which did not consist of the statutable number of sixteen, and so on. In
short, the career of the Master of Trinity was one continuous series of
acts of aggression and defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the
Society of Trinity College as a grown man might treat an importunate
rabble of street boys. Did they dare to hint that the staircase at the
Lodge which admitted four persons abreast was quite wide enough?—did
they refuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one? Meeting them in
the Great Court one evening after chapel he proceeded urbanely to
question them. They refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden
alteration of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether “they had
forgotten his rusty sword?” Mr. Michael Hutchinson and some others, upon
whose backs the weight of that weapon would have first descended,
brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for £350 was paid and
their preferment secured. But Bentley did not wait for this act of
submission to finish his staircase.

So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arrogance of his behaviour
always justified by the splendour or utility of the objects he had in
view—the creation of the Backs, the erection of an observatory, the
foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires were gratified with the
same tyranny. Sometimes he wanted coal; sometimes bread and ale; and
then Madame Bentley, sending her servant with a snuff-box in token of
authority, got from the butteries at the expense of the college a great
deal more of these commodities than the college thought that Dr. Bentley
ought to require. Again, when he had four pupils to lodge with him who
paid him handsomely for their board, it was drawn from the College, at
the command of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “delicacy
and good feeling” which the Master might have been expected to observe
(great scholar as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for
nothing. His argument that the “few College loaves” upon which the four
young patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash
windows which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to
convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows
found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely
satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the
Master’s orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in the
Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an insect called the weevil”
had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master demanded.

Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic trifles
at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light upon our
inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and beer,
patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded in the
atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his study the
benign nature of those influences which have been wafted down to us
through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the credit of
the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently, all agree, in
the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris. His temper was
excellent and his learning prodigious. But that triumph was succeeded by
a series of disputes which force upon us the extraordinary spectacle of
men of learning and genius, of authority and divinity, brawling about
Greek and Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the world
like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in a back street. For this
vehemence of temper and virulence of language were not confined to
Bentley alone; they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession as
a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon
him by his brother chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody
preferred, Malela. A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and
wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the
letter _s_ ensued. Hody was worsted, and “there is too much reason to
believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never
afterwards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship.
James Gronovius of Leyden—“homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio
nullo”, as Bentley called him—attacked Bentley for ten years because
Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where he
had failed.

But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the success
of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years spent in
editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe
lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person who has
justly been considered the pest and disgrace of letters”, who, when a
new theory or new edition appeared, banded themselves together to deride
and humiliate the scholar. . . all his writings. Bishop Monk remarks of
de Pauw, “prove him to be devoid of candour, good faith, good manners,
and every gentlemanly feeling: and while he unites all the defects and
bad qualities that were ever found in a critic or commentator, he adds
one peculiar to himself, an incessant propensity to indecent allusions.”
With such tempers and such habits it is not strange that the scholars of
those days sometimes ended lives made intolerable by bitterness,
poverty, and neglect by their own hands, like Johnson, who after a
lifetime spent in the detection of minute errors of construction, went
mad and drowned himself in the meadows near Nottingham. On May 20, 1712,
Trinity College was shocked to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr.
Sike, had hanged himself “some time this evening, before candlelight, in
his sash”. When Kuster died, it was reported that he, too, had killed
himself. And so, in a sense, he had. For when his body was opened “there
was found a cake of sand along the lower region of his belly. This, I
take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly double, and writing on a
very low table, surrounded with three or four circles of books placed on
the ground, which was the situation we usually found him in.” The minds
of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker of the dissenting Academy, who had
had the high gratification of dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge, when
the talk fell upon the use of the word _equidem_, were so distorted by a
lifetime of neglect and study that they went home, collected all uses of
the word _equidem_ which contradicted the Doctor’s opinion, returned to
the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a warm welcome, met the
Doctor issuing to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him
down the street in spite of his indifference and annoyance, and, being
refused even a word of farewell, went home to brood over their injuries
and wait the day of revenge.

But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were magnified,
not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of his own
affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in his early
controversies had worn away. “. . . a course of violent animosities and
the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many years had impaired
both his taste and judgement in controversy”, and he condescended,
though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testament, to call his
antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”, “gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to
refer to the darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his wits
were crazed, which charge he supported by dwelling on the fact that his
brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to his girdle.

Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous. Dr. Bentley survived these storms
and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his degrees and
deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably. Wearing a
broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his eyes, smoking his pipe,
enjoying his port, and expounding to his friends his doctrine of the
digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years which, he said, were long
enough “to read everything which was worth reading”, “Et tunc”, he
added, in his peculiar manner.


Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.


A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the
Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their
Master.

But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written,
and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no
comment. “For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical
taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption.” The task
was to detect every slip of language in _Paradise Lost_, and all
instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously
lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which
Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley
was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept
his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to
scholars, and if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners
and purify the soul—but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his
lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane
speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many, many
years ago.




III

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL


She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal household.
She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings descending in
couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She had,
surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself dusting the
miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her crochet fall
from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world had need of
crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could reach,
gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing themselves in
little woods designed to shed the shade without the severity of forests;
she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the prospect,
and returning a different way from the way it went. And what was her
verdict? “A lunatic asylum.”

It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had
she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to
point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.


My mother never failed to point out the folly of work-women, shop-girls,
and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed
to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.


What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her
advantages she had never learned to spell? that she could not write a
grammatical sentence? that she lived for eighty-seven years and did
nothing but put food into her mouth and slip gold through her fingers?
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is
misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of
congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of
his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in
one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known,
euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace Walpole’s mother was a Miss
Shorter; there is no mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present
volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield the actress, and, to
her credit, Lady Dorothy was “exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she
was not an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather to a
bird-cage than to an asylum; through the bars she saw people walking at
large, and once or twice she made a surprising little flight into the
open air. A gayer, brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe
can seldom have existed; so that one is forced at times to ask whether
what we call living in a cage is not the fate that wise people,
condemned to a single sojourn upon earth, would choose. To be at large
is, after all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulating the
money to buy and the time to enjoy what the Lady Dorothys find
clustering and glowing about their cradles when their eyes first
open—as hers opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley Square.
Horace Walpole had lived there. Her father, Lord Orford, gambled it away
in one night’s play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall, in
Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and there were rare trees
in the garden, and a large and famous lawn. No novelist could wish a
more charming and even romantic environment in which to set the story of
two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded, reading Bossuet with
their governess, and riding out on their ponies at the head of the
tenantry on polling day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author of
the following letter among one’s ancestors would have been a source of
inordinate pride. It is addressed to the Norwich Bible Society, which
had invited Lord Orford to become its president:


I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have lately taken to
the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme. But I have never distributed
religious tracts. All this was known to you and your Society.
Notwithstanding which you think me a fit person to be your president.
God forgive your hypocrisy.


It was not Lord Orford who was in the cage on that occasion. But, alas!
Lord Orford owned another country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire,
and there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mulberry tree, and
later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and we get our first glimpse of the bars.
We do not pretend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes in
general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to look at; but when it
comes to calling people “vandals” who cut them down to build houses, and
to having footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon those
footstools inscriptions which testify that “often and often has King
George III. taken his tea” under this very footstool, then we want to
protest—“Surely you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent
remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy does not mean
Shakespeare. She “warmly appreciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used
to complain “that the county families were too stupid to appreciate his
genius at its proper worth”. George the Third drinking his tea; the
county families failing to appreciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is
undoubtedly behind the bars.

Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which we perceive
hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the outer world than the story of
Charles Darwin and the blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made
a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch with “the great
naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting her to stay with them, remarked with
apparent simplicity that she had heard that people who moved much in
London society were fond of being tossed in blankets. “I am afraid,” her
letter ended, “we should hardly be able to offer you anything of that
sort.” Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy in a
blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or whether Mrs. Darwin
obscurely hinted her sense of some incongruity between her husband and
the lady of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense of two
worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin world that emerges in
fragments. More and more do we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to
perch, picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, indulging in
exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpening her beak against a lump of
sugar in a large, airy, magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cage was
full of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves which had been
macerated to skeletons; now she interested herself in improving the
breed of donkeys; next she took up the cause of silkworms, almost
threatened Australia with a plague of them, and “actually succeeded in
obtaining enough silk to make a dress”; again she was the first to
discover that wood, gone green with decay, can be made, at some expense,
into little boxes; she went into the question of funguses and
established the virtues of the neglected English truffle; she imported
rare fish; spent a great deal of energy in vainly trying to induce
storks and Cornish choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china;
emblazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the tails of
pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an aerial orchestra” when
they flew through the air. To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit
of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy
was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at
luncheon in Charles Street.

But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into
what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned
with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and
amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that
they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and
wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a
flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to
the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how
well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to
spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was
going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame
partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?”
she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is
indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars.” But to our thinking
her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in
the Victoria and Albert Museum:


I do so agree with you, she wrote—though I ought not to say so—that
the upper class are very—I don’t know what to say—but they seem to
take no interest in anything—but golfing, etc. One day I was at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure
they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them—but
what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each
article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, giggling and
looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the higher class
visible: in fact I never heard of any one of them knowing of the place,
and for this we are spending millions—it is all too painful.


It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt, loomed ahead. That
catastrophe she was spared, for who could wish to cut off the head of a
pigeon with a whistle attached to its tail? But if the whole bird-cage
had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent screaming and
fluttering through the air, we can be sure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
told her, that her conduct would have been “a credit to the British
aristocracy”.




IV

ARCHBISHOP THOMSON


The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure. His great-uncle “may
reasonably be supposed” to have been “an ornament to the middle
classes”. His aunt married a gentleman who was present at the murder of
Gustavus III. of Sweden; and his father met his death at the age of
eighty-seven by treading on a cat in the early hours of the morning. The
physical vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in the
Archbishop with powers of intellect which promised success in whatever
profession he adopted. At Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote
himself to philosophy or science. While reading for his degree he found
time to write the _Outlines of the Laws of Thought_, which “immediately
became a recognised text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry,
philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temptations he put such
thoughts aside, or never entertained them, having made up his mind from
the first to dedicate himself to Divine service. The measure of his
success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the following facts:
Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of twenty-three, he became Dean and
Bursar of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of
Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of York in 1862. Thus at
the early age of forty-three he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of
Canterbury himself; and it was commonly though erroneously expected that
he would in the end attain to that dignity also.

It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with
respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a
crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are
ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the
inner—that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an
archbishop the best man of all—you will find the study of the
Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from
poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in virtue. He has
dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual
proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean,
from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of
twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England
the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his
hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the
largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s;
larger than Dickens’; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are
inclined to agree, an “eight full”. Yet he began much as other men
begin. He struck an undergraduate in a fit of temper and was rusticated;
he wrote a text-book of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he
was ordained his diary shows that the specialising process had begun. He
thought a great deal about the state of his soul; about “the monstrous
tumour of Simony”; about Church reform; and about the meaning of
Christianity. “Self-renunciation,” he came to the conclusion, “is the
foundation of Christian Religion and Christian Morals. . . . The highest
wisdom is that which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation.
Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher far than
philosophy.” There is one mention of chemists and capillarity, but
science and philosophy were, even at this early stage, in danger of
being crowded out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He seems,”
says his biographer, “to have had no time for committing his thoughts to
paper”; he records his engagements only, and he dines out almost every
night. Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these parties, described
him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and pleasing”. Perhaps it was his
solidity combined with his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his
blandness as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great people
with the confidence that in him the Church had found a very necessary
champion. His “brawny logic” and massive frame seemed to fit him to
grapple with a task that taxed the strongest—how, that is, to reconcile
the scientific discoveries of the age with religion, and even prove them
“some of its strongest witnesses for the truth”. If any one could do
this Thomson could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mystical or
dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in the conduct of the
business affairs of his College. From Bishop he became almost instantly
Archbishop; and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of England,
Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s College, London, patron of one
hundred and twenty livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland,
and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and Prebends in York
Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was an enormous palace; he was
immediately faced by the “knotty question” of whether to buy all the
furniture—“much of it only poor stuff”—or to furnish the house anew,
which would cost a fortune. Moreover there were seven cows in the park;
but these, perhaps, were counterbalanced by nine children in the
nursery. Then the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and the
Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnishing the Princess’s
apartments. He went up to London and bought eight Moderator lamps, two
Spanish figures holding candles, and reminded himself of the necessity
of buying “soap for Princess”. But meanwhile far more serious matters
claimed every ounce of his strength. Already he had been exhorted to
“wield the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophistries” of
the authors of _Essays and Reviews_, and had responded in a work called
_Aids to Faith_. Near at hand the town of Sheffield, with its large
population of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding ground of
scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop made it his special charge. He
was fond of watching the rolling of armour plate, and constantly
addressed meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihilisms, and
Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenianisms, and Secret Societies—what
do they all mean?” he asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion
of one class against the rest is at the bottom of them all.” There was a
law of nature, he said, by which wages went up and wages went down. “You
must accept the declivity as well as the ascent. . . . If we could only
get people to learn that, then things would go on a great deal better
and smoother.” And the working men of Sheffield responded by giving him
five hundred pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But
presumably there were a certain number of knives among the spoons and
the forks.

Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome than the working men
of Sheffield; and the Ritualists vexed him so persistently that even his
vast strength felt the strain. The questions which were referred to him
for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and annoy even a man of his
bulk and his blandness. Shall a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a
burglar who has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of the
Burial Service? he was asked. The question of lighted candles was “most
difficult”; the wearing of coloured stoles and the administration of the
mixed chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was the Rev.
John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb, biretta and stole “cross-wise”,
lit candles and extinguished them “for no special reason”; filled a
vessel with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of his
congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a figure, image, or stuffed
skin of a dove, in a flying attitude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually
so positive and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled. “Will there ever
come a time when it will be thought a crime to have striven to keep the
Church of England as representing the common sense of the Nation?” he
asked. “I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone through a
good deal, but I do not repent of having done my best.” If, for a
moment, the Archbishop himself could ask such a question, we must
confess to a state of complete bewilderment. What has become of our
superlatively good man? He is harassed and cumbered; spends his time
settling questions about stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes
over eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has time to run
over to Paris and buy his daughter a bonnet; and in the end has to ask
himself whether one of these days his conduct will not be considered a
crime.

Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did he not start out in the
belief that Christianity had something to do with renunciation and was
not entirely a matter of common sense? If honours and obligations, pomps
and possessions, accumulated and encrusted him, how, being an
Archbishop, could he refuse to accept them? Princesses must have their
soap; palaces must have their furniture; children must have their cows.
And, pathetic though it seems, he never completely lost his interest in
science. He wore a pedometer; he was one of the first to use a camera;
he believed in the future of the typewriter; and in his last years he
tried to mend a broken clock. He was a delightful father too; he wrote
witty, terse, sensible letters; his good stories were much to the point;
and he died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but if we
insist upon goodness—is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be
an Archbishop?




_The Patron and the Crocus_


Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible
but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as
shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought
in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds
on these occasions the one thing needful: “And be sure you choose your
patron wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book
is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not
merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the
instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost
importance that he should be a desirable man.

But who, then, is the desirable man—the patron who will cajole the best
out of the writer’s brain and bring to birth the most varied and
vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered
the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly,
chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public. The
eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit and Grub
Street bookseller. In the nineteenth-century the great writers wrote for
the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes. And looking back and
applauding the splendid results of these different alliances, it all
seems enviably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with our own
predicament—for whom should we write? For the present supply of patrons
is of unexampled and bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the
weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public and the American
public; the best-seller public and the worst-seller public; the
high-brow public and the red-blood public; all now organised
self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of
making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus
the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in
Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a
crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is
futile to say, “Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus”, because
writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect
crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and
the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.

Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of
his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public,
accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the
writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it—an
uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel
Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each
despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a
public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession,
gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and
affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would
have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses in consequence are
tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked
about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the
other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we
then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the
flattering proposals which the editors of the _Times_ and the _Daily
News_ may be supposed to make us—“Twenty pounds down for your crocus in
precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every
breakfast table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before nine
o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name attached”?

But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant
yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one’s name attached
to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if
we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very
distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which
pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens about this time of
year. The newspaper crocus is amazing but still a very different plant.
It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow.
It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too,
for let nobody think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the
_Times_ or of Mr. Lynd of the _Daily News_ is an easy one. It is no
despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o’clock in the
morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing
to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits
of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima
donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the
most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and
sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is
unreadable.

The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our
flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it
needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the
pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd,
this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of
authorship. To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of
the modern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer
will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the
book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he
must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there
are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand
in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues
us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish
infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus
of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must
be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so
large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and
fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion
for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work
than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a
craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will
say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too
much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how
many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated,
while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on
the piano, have not appreciably improved upon _Antony and Cleopatra_.
And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the
better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way—elementary and
disputable. The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to
be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so
much—atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and
envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the
very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage
not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a
single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does
not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics,
and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or
assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a
more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the
other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of
literature depends upon their happy alliance—all of which proves, as we
began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest
importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the
questions.




_The Modern Essay_


As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the
history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or
Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more
important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and
while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their
coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter
near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short
or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles
and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little
volumes,[13] containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain
principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short
period under review something like the progress of history.

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least
calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is
simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we
take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an
essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with
its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In
the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of
amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights
of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but
we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its
curtain across the world.

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as
much on the reader’s side as on the writer’s. Habit and lethargy have
dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can
the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake
and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification
of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He
must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may
be as profound as Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay it must be so fused
by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the
surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this
superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in
the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred
text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of
thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not
previously assimilated M. Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who once wrote
a bad book. M. Grün and his book should have been embalmed for our
perpetual delight in amber. But the process is fatiguing; it requires
more time and perhaps more temper than Pattison had at his command. He
served M. Grün up raw, and he remains a crude berry among the cook
meats, upon which our teeth must grate for ever. Something of the sort
applies to Matthew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal
truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of
place in an essay, where everything should be for our good and rather
for eternity than for the March number of the _Fortnightly Review_. But
if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow plot,
there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a
man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague
ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:


Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years and a
half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence
for his wife’s memory and genius—in his own words, “a religion”—was
one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to
appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the
eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and
enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who
gained his fame by his “dry-light” a master, and it is impossible not to
feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill’s career are very sad.


A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two
volumes is indeed the proper depositary; for there, where the licence is
so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the
feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and
stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their
own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps
illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible
sources as he can, must be ruled out here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow
or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the
essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from
dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in
the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because
before setting out to write his essay (“Notes on Leonardo da Vinci”) he
has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man,
but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision,
such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the
writer’s conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where
the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness,
the true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their
own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he
will get shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place
for some of those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by
calling them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have
the courage to embark on the once famous description of Leonardo’s lady
who has


learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary . . .


The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But
when we come unexpectedly upon “the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters”, or upon “full of the refinement of the dead, in sad,
earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones”, we suddenly remember that
we have ears and we have eyes, and that the English language fills a
long array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of
more than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into
these volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But
doubtless our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much
high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing
sobriety and hard-headedness we should be willing to barter the
splendour of Sir Thomas Browne and the vigour of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of
sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its
surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of
ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs
slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter
impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in
frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a
single night, but are dusty and garish the day after. The temptation to
decorate is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there
to interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or
has amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles
in Mr. Sweeting’s shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very
different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes.
Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the
traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot
help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give
out under the craftsman’s fingers. The ingot is so small, the
manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration—


To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where
and what you are—


has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got
to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler
adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to
say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop
window which appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet
suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding
unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of
ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing;
that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits
near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no
one really cares about Æschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes
and some profound reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as
he had been told not to see more in Cheapside than he could get into
twelve pages of the _Universal Review_, he had better stop. And yet
obviously Butler is at least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson;
and to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder
exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet
had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual,
and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its
magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of
culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon
serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as
well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public
which had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once
more in a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated
people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated.
The change was not altogether for the worse. In volume III. we find Mr.
Birrell and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a
reversion to the classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and
something of its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of
Addison and Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell
on Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have
written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between _A Cloud of
Pinafores_, by Max Beerbohm, and _A Cynic’s Apology_, by Leslie Stephen.
But the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions
change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion,
adapts himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if
he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that,
though he has dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is
much more direct and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm
give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more
complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated
on the work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has
haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile
since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers
Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to
Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time in
the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation,
information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by
a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He
was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach
and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and
himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using
the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has
brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but
so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any
relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know
that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The
triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write
that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while
it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist.
Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of the
essayists in Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether
succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial
personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt,
it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over
a bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming,
virtuous, or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she
seems to reiterate, you fulfil her first condition—to know how to
write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not
searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm
periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange
melodies. Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are
momentarily more impressive. But _A Cloud of Pinafores_ had in it that
indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to
life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have
read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part.
Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if
they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find
them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm,
knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and
talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all
writers to public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great
deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie,
with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the
drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns,
drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some
things, of course, are not said.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one
room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the
artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our
age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes
of the present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and
the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an
altar where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from
their own orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the
conditions have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and
perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen
hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much
exceeds the supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes
two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation produces three hundred and
sixty-five. They are very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the
practised essayist will utilise his space—beginning as close to the top
of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn,
and how, without sacrificing a hair’s-breadth of paper, to wheel about
and alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of
skill it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr.
Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to
us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and
thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man
shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. “Little friends,
my readers,” he says in the essay called “An Unknown Country”, and he
goes on to tell us how—


There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the
east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of
horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different
from the eyes of other men. . . . I went with him to hear what he had to
say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.


Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the
inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark
that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of
sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain pen. That is
the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He
must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be
other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the
strength of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead
of a solid sovereign once a year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing
conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may
not be the best of their authors’ work, but, if we except writers like
Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing
accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we
shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their
circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to
write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people
coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know
good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s
way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public,
or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr.
Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common
greyness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the
extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate
candour of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to
battle in a column and a half; and thought, like a brown paper parcel in
a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It
is a kind, tired, apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel
is that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the
essayist’s conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances
and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any
conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he effected the
transition from the private essayist to the public, from the
drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in
size has brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We
have no longer the “I” of Max and of Lamb, but the “we” of public bodies
and other sublime personages. It is “we” who go to hear the _Magic
Flute_; “we” who ought to profit by it; “we”, in some mysterious way,
who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For
music and literature and art must submit to the same generalisation or
they will not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That
the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries
such a distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of
the mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to
us all. But while “we” are gratified, “I”, that unruly partner in the
human fellowship, is reduced to despair. “I” must always think things
for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted
form with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and
women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently
and profit profoundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and
rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way
from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of
1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they
have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them
wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that
they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring
out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is
exact, truthful, and imaginative:


Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were
Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness,
which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting
at their street door, though thereby they offer Age to Scorn . . .


and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and
commonplace:


With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet
virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where
taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses
with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the
sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of
hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . . .


It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor
hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for
backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an
idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and
thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which
included Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and
Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the
farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage
of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with
every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd and Mr.
Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the
contemporary dilemma—that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts
ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the
land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as
all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about
it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that
shuts us in, not out.


[Footnote 13: _Modern English Essays_, edited by Ernest Rhys,
5 vols. (Dent).]




_Joseph Conrad_[14]


Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our
phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or
ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to
take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of
mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable
appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the
country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that
for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors
with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host
that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke
English with a strong foreign accent.

Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our
memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially,
and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later
years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in
England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by
some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people
of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen,
driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed
him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in
process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and
there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously
upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement
is, of course, to be found, where men have at all times found it, in his
beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she
looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could
never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been
gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a
strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather
than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or
insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little
somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then
how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and
majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit
and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this
incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his
critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the
habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of
English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they
complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the
voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as
difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when _Figaro_ is
played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of
sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they
conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of
scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That
beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince
them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and
to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the
bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not
hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride,
its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad,
how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is
concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill
work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little
saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their
power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a
constant quality of Conrad’s prose.

For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a
leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young
people. Until _Nostromo_ was written his characters, as the young were
quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle
the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers,
used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at
peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth
honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in
sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and
austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested
characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in
their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose
praises he was never tired of celebrating:


They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts nor
hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted,
unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent these
men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as going about their
work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew
toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no
desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to
inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the
sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a
fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the
privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and
indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge
of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They
were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.


Such were the characters of the early books—_Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Youth_; and these books, in spite of the
changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among our
classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which the
simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore Cooper, has
no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such
men and such deeds, romantically, wholeheartedly and with the fervour
of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at
once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice.
To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must
be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and
yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very qualities which enable one
to understand them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for
Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that
subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. “A most
discreet, understanding man”, he said of Marlow.

Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in retirement.
Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek
of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and speculating;
sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until all the summer’s
night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a
profound respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he saw the
humour of them. He nosed out and described in masterly fashion those
livid creatures who prey successfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a
flair for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor did Marlow live
entirely wreathed in the smoke of his own cigars. He had a habit of
opening his eyes suddenly and looking—at a rubbish heap, at a port, at
a shop counter—and then complete in its burning ring of light that
thing is flashed bright upon the mysterious background. Introspective
and analytical, Marlow was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power
came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer
murmur “Mon Dieu, how the time passes!”


Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this remark;
but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s
extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull
ears, with dormant thoughts. . . . Nevertheless, there can be but few of
us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we
see, hear, understand, ever so much—everything—in a flash, before we
fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he
spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.


Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background; ships
first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the storm,
ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night; he
painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy brilliancy of
Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and their attitudes. He
was an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that “absolute
loyalty towards his feelings and sensations”, which, Conrad wrote, “an
author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation”. And
very quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words
of epitaph which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before
our eyes, of the darkness of the background.

Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us say that it is Marlow
who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on
dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad tells us,
took place when he had finished the last story in the _Typhoon_
volume—“a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration”—by some
alteration in the relationship of the two old friends. “. . . it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.” It was
Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the creator, who said that, looking back
with sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told; feeling as he
well might that he could never better the storm in _The Nigger of the
“Narcissus_”, or render more faithful tribute to the qualities of
British seamen than he had done already in _Youth_ and _Lord Jim_. It
was then that Marlow, the commentator, reminded him how, in the course
of nature, one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up
sea-faring. But, he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited
their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though
the last word might have been said about Captain Whalley and his
relation to the universe, there remained on shore a number of men and
women whose relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be
worth looking into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of
Henry James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to
bed with him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that
Conrad wrote a very fine essay upon that master.

For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the dominant partner.
_Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold_ represent that stage of the
alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The human
heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has its
storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you wish
to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is man; his
ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will always be a
peculiar fascination in the books where the light of those brilliant
eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon the heart in its
perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Conrad
to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold. For the vision of a
novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his
characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he
relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one
sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction
are strictly limited. So delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After
the middle period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into
perfect relation with their background. He never believed in his later
and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early
seamen. When he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen
world of novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far less
sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single phrase,
“He steered with care”, coming at the end of a storm, carried in it a
whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated world such
terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex men and women of
many interests and relations would not submit to so summary a judgement;
or, if they did, much that was important in them escaped the verdict.
And yet it was very necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and
romantic power, to have some law by which its creations could be tried.
Essentially—such remained his creed—this world of civilised and
self-conscious people is based upon “a few very simple ideas”; but
where, in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are we to find
them? There are no masts in drawing-rooms; the typhoon does not test the
worth of politicians and business men. Seeking and not finding such
supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has about it an involuntary
obscurity, an inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles
and fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and
sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service—beautiful always, but
now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps it was
Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He
had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in
the give and take of conversation; and those “moments of vision”
flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to
illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above all,
perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Conrad was to create, it
was essential first that he should believe.

Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books and
bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most
of us untrodden. It is the earlier books—_Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”_—that we shall read in their entirety. For
when the question is asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the
ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books, with their air of
telling us something very old and perfectly true, which had lain hidden
but is now revealed, will come to mind and make such questions and
comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and still, very chaste and
very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights,
in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another.


[Footnote 14: August, 1924.]




_How It Strikes a
Contemporary_


In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the
fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will
pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on
the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left,
simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could
survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in
agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite
sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when
they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come
to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution
to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was
published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why
they differ.

The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the
reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary
literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether
his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness,
is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters
or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves
with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is
short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have
heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old
twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert
Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere,
and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about them. It
would be much more marvellous, and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a
wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted
masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we
should back their judgement to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are
critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here
will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will
uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.

It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of
contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes
on that, were they to agree—which they show no signs of doing—half a
guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary
enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the
library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the
critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who
yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the
suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with
understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are
agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own
judgement worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and
sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring
forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if
they had been committed against the dead and not against the living,
would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The
only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow
them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any
critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the
masterpieces of the past.

Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always
so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline,
which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now
unknown. That is not to say that the great critic—the Dryden, the
Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold—was an impeccable judge of
contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved
the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes
of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to
be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a
centralising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose,
would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner-table and given to
random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to
seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at
the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that
there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature
closely in view; who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the
moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it
by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame.[15] But
when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and
society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of the modern world, the chase
and eddy of the various currents which compose the society of our time,
could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is
even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Reviewers we
have but no critic; a million competent and incorruptible policemen but
no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are for ever lecturing
the young and celebrating the dead. But the too frequent result of their
able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of
literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find the
downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural
bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous
power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head
the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound
general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the
friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.

And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they
say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how
should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if
they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the
age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded
or destroyed. But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution. There
is no name which dominates the rest. There is no master in whose
workshop the young are proud to serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long
since withdrawn from the arena, and there is something exotic about the
genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not so much an influence as an
idol, honoured and admired, but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though
they are many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative activity,
there is none whose influence can seriously affect his contemporaries,
or penetrate beyond our day to that not very distant future which it
pleases us to call immortality. If we make a century our test, and ask
how much of the work produced in these days in England will be in
existence then, we shall have to answer not merely that we cannot agree
upon the same book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such a
book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few stanzas, a few pages, a
chapter here and there, the beginning of this novel, the end of that,
are equal to the best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity
with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the
whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for
our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully
put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to bear down all
opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we repeat, with much to justify its
poverty; but, frankly, if we pit one century against another the
comparison seems overwhelmingly against us. _Waverley, The Excursion,
Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion_,
and _Prometheus Unbound_ were all published between 1800 and 1821. Our
century has not lacked industry; but if we ask for masterpieces it
appears on the face of it that the pessimists are right. It seems as if
an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and
extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All honour, of course, to
those who have sacrificed their immortality to set the house in order.
But if we ask for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little poetry,
we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies,
by Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness,
but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is
perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages in _Far Away and Long Ago_
will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. _Ulysses_ was a memorable
catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so, picking
and choosing, we select now this, now that, hold it up for display, hear
it defended or derided, and finally have to meet the objection that even
so we are only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable of
sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not seriously to be
compared with the age that went before.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip
service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly
conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. It is a
barren and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back with envy to the
past. Meanwhile it is one of the first fine days of spring. Life is not
altogether lacking in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the most
serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has
a romance of its own. And the random talk of people who have no chance
of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often,
of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which
will weave itself into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk
is about literature. We must try to disentangle the two, and justify the
rash revolt of optimism against the superior plausibility, the finer
distinction, of pessimism.

Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs from the fine day
and the wine and the talk; it springs from the fact that when life
throws up such treasures daily, daily suggests more than the most
voluble can express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer life as
it is. There is something about the present which we would not exchange,
though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern
literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold on us and the
same fascination. It is like a relation whom we snub and scarify daily,
but, after all, cannot do without. It has the same endearing quality of
being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live,
instead of being something, however august, alien to ourselves and
beheld from the outside. Nor has any generation more need than ours to
cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our
predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses
held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom,
alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of
the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking
things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the
differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the
resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed. New books lure us
to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this
rearrangement of our attitude—these scenes, thoughts, and apparently
fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so
keen a sense of novelty—and, as literature does, give it back into our
keeping, whole and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason for
optimism. No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined
to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past
and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. It would be
invidious to mention names, but the most casual reader dipping into
poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by
the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of
our time. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book
leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual
poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not
transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work
has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak
shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and
expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash
is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction. The
irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.

After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacillating from extreme
to extreme, at one moment enthusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable
to come to any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have asked the
critics to help us, but they have deprecated the task. Now, then, is the
time to accept their advice and correct these extremes by consulting the
masterpieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven to them,
impelled not by calm judgement but by some imperious need to anchor our
instability upon their security. But, honestly, the shock of the
comparison between past and present is at first disconcerting.
Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There is an unabashed
tranquillity in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen
which is sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities occur and
they neglect them. Shades and subtleties accumulate and they ignore
them. They seem deliberately to refuse to gratify those senses which are
stimulated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight, of sound, of
touch—above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the
variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in
short. There is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and Scott
and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that sense of security which
gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of
their belief—their conviction, that imposes itself upon us. In
Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious enough. But it is
equally true of the careless Scott, who scribbled masterpieces to build
castles before breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote
furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In both there is the same
natural conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their
judgement of conduct. They know the relations of human beings towards
each other and towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word
to say about the matter outright, but everything depends on it. Only
believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of itself.
Only believe, to take a very simple instance which the recent
publication of _The Watsons_ brings to mind, that a nice girl will
instinctively try to soothe the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed
at a dance, and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestioningly,
you will not only make people a hundred years later feel the same thing,
but you will make them feel it as literature. For certainty of that kind
is the condition which makes it possible to write. To believe that your
impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and
confinement of personality. It is to be free, as Scott was free, to
explore with a vigour which still holds us spell-bound the whole world
of adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that mysterious
process in which Jane Austen was so great an adept. The little grain of
experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be
put precisely in its place, and she was then free to make of it, by a
process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that
complete statement which is literature.

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to
believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that
happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free
of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not
believe the stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on
their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than
on their intellects whose message is obscure. And they have perforce to
deny themselves the use of some of the most powerful and some of the
most exquisite of the weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of
the English language at the back of them, they timidly pass about from
hand to hand and book to book only the meanest copper coins. Set down at
a fresh angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their
notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying gleams, which
light on what? and the transitory splendours, which may, perhaps,
compose nothing whatever. But here the critics interpose, and with some
show of justice.

If this description holds good, they say, and is not, as it may well be,
entirely dependent upon our position at the table and certain purely
personal relationships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks
of judging contemporary work are greater than ever before. There is
every excuse for them if they are wide of the mark; and no doubt it
would be better to retreat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning
ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the past. “We enter on
burning ground,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “as we approach the poetry of
times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth,
of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with
passion,” and this, they remind us, was written in the year 1880.
Beware, they say, of putting under the microscope one inch of a ribbon
which runs many miles; things sort themselves out if you wait;
moderation and a study of the classics are to be recommended. Moreover,
life is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burning question
of the moment is, did he, or did he not, marry his sister? To sum up,
then—if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at
once and it is time to be going—it seems that it would be wise for the
writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating
masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but
notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his
hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he
will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them
because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks
of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature,
as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many
changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will
exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the
little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on
the surface; and continuity and calm are in the depths.

As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement upon the books of
the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often
distasteful, let us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but
sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and
fade, and make the wearers, in six months time, look a little
ridiculous. Let them take a wider, a less personal view of modern
literature, and look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged
upon some vast building, which being built by common effort, the
separate workmen may well remain anonymous. Let them slam the door upon
the cosy company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful, give over,
for a time at least, the discussion of that fascinating topic—whether
Byron married his sister—and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from
the table where we sit chattering, say something interesting about
literature. Let us buttonhole them as they leave, and recall to their
memory that gaunt aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a
milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for
ever scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confidence, for
signs of his approach, and ask them to follow her example; scan the
horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way
for masterpieces to come.


[Footnote 15: How violent these are two quotations will show. “It [Told
by _an Idiot_] should be read as the _Tempest_ should be read, and as
_Gulliver’s Travels_ should be read, for if Miss Macaulay’s poetic gift
happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the _Tempest_,
and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author
of _Gulliver’s Travels_, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than
theirs.”—_The Daily News._

The next day we read: “For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot
had been pleased to write in demotic English _The Waste Land_ might not
have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so
much waste-paper.”—_The Manchester Guardian._]


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