Anno 1778
PHILLIPS -ACADEMY
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THE COMMON READER
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE VOYAGE OUT NIGHT AND DAY MONDAY OR TUESDAY JACOB’S ROOM MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN
MRS. DALLOWAY
The
COMMON READER
VIRGINIA 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 subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.” — Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray.
ew York
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY RAHWAY. N. J.
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
PAGE
The Common Reader . 11
The Pasxons and Chaucer . 13
On Not Knowing Greek . 39
The Elizabethan Lumber Room .... 61
Notes on an Elizabethan Play . 73
Montaigne . 87
The Duchess of Newcastle . 101
Rambling Round Evelyn . 113
Defoe . 125
Addison . 137
The Lives of the Obscure
I. The Taylors and the Edgeworths . . 154
II. Laetitia Pilkington . 168
III. Miss Ormerod . 175
Jane Austen . 191
Modern Fiction . 207
“Jane Eyre” and “Wutiiering Heights” . . . 219
. 229
George Eliot
[7]
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Russian Point of View . 243
Outlines —
I. Miss Mitford ....... . 257
II. Dr. Bentley . 266
III. Lady Dorothy Nevill . 274
IV. Archbishop Thomson . 280
The Patron and the Crocus . ■ . . . _ 287
The Modern Essay < . 293
Joseph Conrad ....... 309
How It Strikes a Contemporary .... 319
[8]
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 quali¬ ties; 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 the¬ ory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he
[ii]
THE COMMON READER
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 affec¬ tion, 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 pur¬ pose 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.
[12]
The Pas tons and Chaucer
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, nat¬ urally 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 1 The Paston Letters, edited by Dr. James Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
tombstone. The news spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been so power¬ ful 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 prop¬ erty 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 re¬ member 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 Cais- ter, 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 tombstone4? 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 Eng¬ land known to us at the present moment, a raw, new-
[14]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 out¬ skirts 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 lit¬ tle reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke ill
[15]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 Pas- tons 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
[16]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 Gresh¬ am 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. Pas¬ ton 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
[17]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 writ¬ ing 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
[18]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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, posi¬ tive, 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 breed¬ ing, 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 be¬ neath them, and “sell candle and mustard in Framling- ham”. 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.
[19]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 win¬ dows 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 fa¬ ther’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 enjoy-
[20]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
ment rather than of acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed something of his fa¬ ther’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious temperament took the edge from both. He was attrac¬ tive to women, liked society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes, even, read¬ ing books. And so life, now that John Paston was buried, started afresh upon rather a different founda¬ tion. 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
[21]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 Pas- ton 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 disturb¬ ance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money spent. But perhaps something strange had hap¬ pened 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”,
[22]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 with¬ out 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 Chau¬ cer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt, comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and van¬ ity, distracting their thoughts from business, and lead¬ ing 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 lift¬ ing 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.
[23]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 com¬ pactly, 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-
[24]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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, ail 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 influ¬ ences the poet far more profoundly than the prose writer. To the modem poet, with Birmingham, Man¬ chester, 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 Words¬ worth, 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
[25]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 instinc¬ tively, 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 impor¬ tance than the gay and picturesque appearance of the medieval world — the solidity which plumps it out, the conviction which animates the characters. There is
[26]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
immense variety in the Canterbury Tales , and yet, per¬ sisting 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 dif¬ ferent Tale, but they are parts, one feels, of the same
[27]
THE PAS TONS AND CHAUCER
personage, whom he had in mind, perhaps uncon¬ sciously, 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 preach¬ ing 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 land¬ scape, 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
[28]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 dar¬ ing 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 func¬ tions of the body, so with the advent of decency litera¬ ture 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
[29]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 asso¬ ciations of common grocer’s English.
[30] '
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 depre¬ cated, 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 un¬ solved, 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 aristo¬ crat. 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 im-
l3i]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
prove the lot of the poor. It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon an¬ other 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 be¬ ing 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
[32]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 com¬ mented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful though that is, of having been in good com¬ pany and got used to the ways of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned coun¬ try-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 ele¬ vated dullness which is part of the incantation of po¬ etry; 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 shap¬ ing 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
[33]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers; some pas¬ sage 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, but 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 ordi¬ nary 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 un- figurative 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 —
[34]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
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 per¬ petually 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,
[35]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
year after year, the making of his father’s tombstone.
Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years un¬ der 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 mur¬ mured 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
[36]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb was still unmade.
The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, how¬ ever, 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, be¬ fore 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 Wame’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 mas¬ tership 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
[37]
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
or solemn curse. “Men cut large thongs here out of other men’s leather. ... We beat the brushes and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . . which is to my heart a very spear.” That is her elo¬ quence 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 ac¬ costing 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 un¬ washed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping straight over land unmiti¬ gated 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.
[38]
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
[39]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus 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 sur¬ roundings. 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 clergy¬ man 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
[40]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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
[4i]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 Baccluz before he is de¬ stroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and Prin¬ cesses 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 audi¬ ence of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears and eyes eager and attentive, with bodies whose mus¬ cles would grow stiff if they sat too long without diver¬ sion. 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 ex¬ treme 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
[42]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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, repeti¬ tions, 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
ol ,y,G) , o/Ud/la iv yj^epqc.
7talcfQV, el oOevsig, &L7t/*yjv.
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 fig¬ ures are bound, and restricted to a few definite move¬ ments. 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
[43]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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. “ heuvov t 6 rtlxteLv kd'tiv” she says — “there is a strange power in motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and un¬ redeemed, whom Orestes kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy — “strike again”. No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight be¬ fore 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 feel¬ ings 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 diffi¬ culty 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 calam¬ ity, 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
[44]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 mas¬ tery 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 sun¬ light among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Mu¬ seum. 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 dis-
[45]
1
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
i
traught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem divine — thee; who ever¬ more 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 asso¬ ciations and movements, visible to the eye. The in¬ tolerable 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 undifferen¬ tiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind ; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet
[46]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 c f 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 substi¬ tute — 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 ap¬ parently 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 uncon¬ quered 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, how¬ ever, the situations are not contained within them¬ selves; they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of sug-
[47]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
gestion, of questioning; but if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled rather than in¬ structed. At once in the Baccha 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. Eurip¬ ides therefore suffers less than Sophocles and less than Aeschylus 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 popular¬ ity 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 un¬ answered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; hear about 2600), tre¬ mendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding
[48]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to un¬ derstand Greek as to understand poetry. It is neces¬ sary to take that dangerous leap through the air with¬ out 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. Con¬ necting 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 —
oggatav ev a%y]vicug eppei 7ia<j’ ’ A^po^Ta.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excite¬ ment 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.
Aeschylus 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
[49l
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 sub¬ tlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry
ot'ot'oToZ 7(6710 £. 8d. <j ’tioX^ov, c) ’rtoTJAov.
Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.
But winter fell on these villages, darkness and ex¬ treme cold descended on the hill-side. 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 de-
[50]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
scribes 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 opin¬ ion, 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 com¬ pany 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 dwin¬ dling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensi¬ fies 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 ques¬ tioning 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
[5i]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 Soc- rates has done ; he is bantering Alcibiades ; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it round “this wonderful fel¬ low’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 go¬ ing 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 fri¬ volities 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 clois¬ tered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that
[52]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 perma¬ nently 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 dra¬ matic genius. It is by means of that, by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the atmos¬ phere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the coils of the argument without losing its liveli¬ ness 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 ex¬ treme 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 appre¬ ciate them apart from the context. For them there were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Say¬ ings 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
[53]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 de¬ tail 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
[54]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 Agamem¬ non instead of stripping the branch of its flowers in¬ stantly as we do in reading hear — are we not reading wrongly*? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associa¬ tions? 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 unpol¬ luted, 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 a/fo-roi', “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 imag¬ ined 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, toss¬ ing 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.
[55]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek.
iz a? youv n tnyTTjs yiyvsTai} xav apouao? rd izplv^ ov &v vEpw<; a<prjTai.
. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undis¬ ciplined, 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
St* iv r a<ptp 7t£Tpa(tp} ai , daxpuei?
[56]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 con¬ trol 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 com¬ mon 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 misunder¬ standing, 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
[57]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
Aeschylus, 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 high¬ est 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, con¬ stricted 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 nar¬ rative, the clearest and at the same time the most ro¬ mantic story of the fortunes of men and women.
The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the in¬ stinctive 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 peo¬ ple, 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 rela¬ tion at once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed;
[58]
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
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 at¬ tempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own stand¬ ing 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 consola¬ tions, of our own age.
[59]
The Elizabethan Lumber
Room
These magnificent volumes 1 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 nauti¬ cal 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, ele¬ phants’ teeth, wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of priceless value and com¬ plete worthlessness, were the fruit of innumerable voy¬ ages, 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
1 Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Dis¬ coveries of the English Nation, five volumes, 4to, 1810.
[61]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
gathered, close to the Palace. “The Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mari¬ ners 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 main- yards 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 Cumber¬ land’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 coun-
[62]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
try 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 w.’th 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 Eng¬ land. One expedition might fail, but what if the pas¬ sage 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 ex¬ ploring 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 sav¬ ages 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
[63]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
from which blue dyes are made; above all to make in¬ quiry as to the methods of producing oil, since all at¬ tempts 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 discover¬ ies 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, burn¬ ing 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
[64]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
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 some¬ times, 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 en¬ gendering 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 at¬ tending 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 asso¬ ciate those
frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon
[65]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
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 Pas- ton 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 Eng¬ lish 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 Eliza¬ bethan 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-found- land” — 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
[66]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
no means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep the tumult of their per¬ ceptions in order. But the prose writer, without these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in inter¬ minable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the con¬ volutions of his own rich draperies. How little Eliza¬ bethan prose was fit for its office, how exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by com¬ paring 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 delight¬ ful 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 wicked¬ ness 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 Aloes or Rhubarb arum 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. Sid¬ ney’s prose in an uninterrupted monologue, with sud¬ den flashes of felicity and splendid phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long accumula¬ tions and catalogues, but is never quick, never collo-
[67]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
quial, 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 laschete de leurs occupations accoustumees entre des garses et bons com- paignons ; nul propos de consolation, nulle mention de testa¬ ment, 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 nat¬ urally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to perfection (and Dry den’s prose is very near perfection) only the discipline of the stage was neces¬ sary and the growth of self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic passages of the plays,
[68]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
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 expres¬ sion and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved
[69]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
the way for all psychological novelists, autobiog¬ raphers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curi¬ ous 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 Nor¬ wich. 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
[70]
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own qualities and attain¬ ments. He was charitable and brave and averse from nothing. He was full of feeling for others and mer¬ ciless 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 suf¬ fused 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 specula-
[71]
V
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
tions 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 became conscious of im¬ purities 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.
[72]
Notes on an Elizabethan
There are, it must be admitted, some highly for¬ midable 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 ques¬ tions, 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
[73]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
are overcome by the extraordinary discrepancy be¬ tween 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 Liverpool1? And the groves of Elizabethan drama echo “Where1?” 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
[74]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 Eng¬ lish 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 be¬ coming 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.
[75]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 nineteCnth-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 unexpected¬ ness, 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.
[76]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the public was in many respects de¬ testable. To its door we must lay the greatest inflic¬ tion that Elizabethan drama puts upon us — the plot; the incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible con¬ volutions which presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public actually in the play¬ house, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with the book before him. Undoubtedly something must hap¬ pen; 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 emo¬ tions 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 them¬ selves 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.
[77]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 broom¬ stick, we must reply, and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of broomsticks is a draw¬ back. 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
[78]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 ap¬ proach. Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood, nerves and tem¬ perament, 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 ex¬ pected 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
[79l
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime dif¬ ferences emerge ; the long leisurely accumulated novel ; the little contracted play; the emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and gradu¬ ally massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion concentrated, generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what phrases of aston¬ ishing 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
[80]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 lum¬ bering 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 sensi¬ bility. 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 ex¬ tend and expand and let come slowly in from all quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so saturated with sensibility, language so
[81]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 impa¬ tiently 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 like¬ ness 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 dif¬ ferent 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 dif¬ ferent, 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
[82]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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, how¬ ever arduously the public spirited may try, is impos¬ sible, 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 im¬ plies 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 favour¬ able 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 -
[83]
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell that tolls throughout the drama is death and disen¬ chantment.
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 wil¬ derness 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 nau¬ seated 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
[84]
V
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
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 de¬ light; 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 soli¬ tude. 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 sur¬ faces of others. It turns to Donne, to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne — the keepers of the keys of soli¬ tude.
[85]
Montaigne
Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which Rene, 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 per¬ haps. 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 shoul¬ ders 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.
[87]
MONTAIGNE
New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes 1 Cotton’s translation ; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the com¬ plete 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 pene¬ trate 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 expres¬ sion. 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 char-
1 Essays of Montaigne , translated by Charles Cotton, 5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6 : 6s. net.
[88]
MONTAIGNE
acter 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 com¬ municate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged road, more than it seems”.
For beyond the difficulty of communicating one¬ self, 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 oppo¬ site 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 con¬ trary, 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 Em¬ pire, and preaching the moral duty of civilising the
[89]
MONTAIGNE
savage. But look at the Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities lev¬ elled 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 ordi¬ narily 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. Beally 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
[90]
MONTAIGNE
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 with¬ draw 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 gov¬ ernment of the world to others. Retirement and con¬ templation — 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 ex¬ tremely 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 a ses verrues et a ses taches”. As for read¬ ing, he could seldom read any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that
[91]
MON TAIGN E
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 demo¬ cratic 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
[92]
MONTAIGNE
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 — “Fame bien nee”. 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 Etienne de La Boetie, for example, are always the supplest. “C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas vivre, que de se tenir attache et oblige par necessite a 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 de¬ vised 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
[93]
MONTAIGNE
fly fame, honour, and all offices that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our in¬ calculable 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 fa¬ vourite 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 under¬ stand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor, an invisible censor
[94]
MONTAIGNE
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 prive”. 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 Etienne de La Boetie 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 — hu¬ man 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
[95]
MONTAIGNE
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. Communica¬ tion is health; communication is truth; communica¬ tion 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 experience, il n’est aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis que celle que nous aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublie a leur dire et d’avoir eu avec eux une parfaite et entiere com¬ munication.
There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up “se defendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion. When they dine
[96]
MONTAIGNE
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 re¬ turn. 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 neces¬ sary 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 especes du profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for us. Doctors and wise men may ob¬ ject, but let us leave doctors and wise men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordi¬ nary 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
[97]
MONTAIGNE
— 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
[98]
MONTAIGNE
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 substan¬ tial; 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 du¬ plicity, 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 build¬ ing. 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 knowl¬ edge — 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 difformite 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 occupa-
[99]
MONTAIGNE
tion, 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 contradic¬ tory 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 suc¬ ceeded 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 ex¬ planation of the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is only one more question: “Que scais-je?”
[IOO]
The Duchess of Newcastle
. . All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cav¬ endish, 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 remark-
1 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.
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
able character, of majestic grandeur and beauty “be¬ yond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in leases, and setting of lands and court keeping, order¬ ing of stewards, and the like affairs.” The wealth which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage por¬ tions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out of an opinion that if she bred us with needy neces¬ sity 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 for¬ mality than for benefit”, it being their mother’s opinion that character, happiness, and honesty were of greater value to a woman than fiddling and sing¬ ing, 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 happi¬ ness 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
[102]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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, ap¬ proving, commending, as they thought good”.
The happy family life had its effect upon Mar¬ garet’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 for¬ eign 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 Mar¬ garet, 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
[103]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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,” Mar¬ garet 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 censori¬ ous; 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 re¬ fused, 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
[104]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 per¬ fect. 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 any¬ thing”, his romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn to a woman who wrote poetry her¬ self, was also a philosopher of the same way of think¬ ing, 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 con¬ demned, . . . 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
[105]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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, philoso¬ phies, greeting each other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating doubtless upon such mar¬ vels 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 uninter¬ ruptedly 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 Mu¬ seum, 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 irrespon¬ sibility 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 — what-
[Jo6]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
ever 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 walk¬ ing 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 re¬ treat at Welbeck the usual censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered, despised, or
[107]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 con¬ versed 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 im¬ portunity and indiscretion of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is of the finest quality im¬ aginable. 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 out¬ side 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
[108]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 deli¬ cate 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 hippo¬ potami. 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.
[109]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 manoeuvres 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 consider¬ able length in tones which we seem to have heard be¬ fore.
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. O. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued him¬ self so much below his birth and wealth as to marry his kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sancti¬ fied soul, a spiritual sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are become abominable to her,
[no]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 unac¬ ceptable. “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 hos¬ pitable 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. Per¬ haps 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 vask 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 me¬ anders 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
[in]
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
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 melan¬ choly 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.
[112]
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 bril¬ liance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it man¬ fully, 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,1 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
1 Written in 1920.
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 prob¬ ably done more to prevent human beings from chang¬ ing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy or the pulpit.
It may be well, indeed, before reading much fur¬ ther in Evelyn’s book, to decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his. Igno¬ rance, 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, in¬ stantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here no doubt
[114]
we are
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dis¬ secting 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 encyclopaedia, 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 sin¬ ister 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 ad-
[ns]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
mirers 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 hap¬ piness 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 fa¬ miliarly 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
[n6]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 mo¬ tives, 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 some¬ how 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
[ii 7]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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. Rut there was one difference which it is difficult to illus¬ trate 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 can¬ vases 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.
[nS]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 con¬ viction, 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 accomplish¬ ments which in our time of specialists seems remark¬ able 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
[H9]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for the rebuilding of London ; he went into the ques¬ tion 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 de¬ plored 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
[l20]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 count¬ ing 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 lean¬ est 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 ex¬ cellent 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 trans¬ parent; 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 be¬ yond 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
[121]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 disparage¬ ment of it, and how acid his criticism of the gardens of others! Then, we may be sure, the hens at Saves 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 trust¬ worthy 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.
[122]
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
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 Cap¬ tain 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 preci¬ pice; 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 Wooton, 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.
[123]
Defoe 1
The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its approaching dissolu¬ tion 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 ex¬ istence 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 noth¬ ing at all. The impressions of childhood are those that
1 Written in 1919.
[125]
DEFOE
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 Edi¬ tor of the Christian World in the year 1870 appealed to “the boys and girls of England” to erect a monu¬ ment upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of light¬ ning had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of Robinson Crusoe. No men¬ tion was made of Moll Flanders. Considering the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in Rox¬ ana, 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 coarse¬ ness, 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.
[126]
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 Field¬ ing, 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 ex¬ istence by telling a true story and preaching a sound moral. “This supplying a story by invention is cer¬ tainly 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, there¬ fore, 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 con¬ vert 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 be¬ fore 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:
[127]
DEFOE
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, ex¬ posed 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 un¬ friended misery that their existence must be a con¬ tinued 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 situ¬ ation 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
[128]
DEFOE
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 un¬ able 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 re-
[129]
DEFOE
finements 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
[130]
DEFOE
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
[i3i]
DEFOE
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 im¬ pertinence; 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
[132]
DEFOE
only intended them to speak some very modern doc¬ trines upon the subject, but placed them in circum¬ stances 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 be¬ cause 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 inci¬ dental result of his chief virtue, which is that he deals
[133]
DEFOE
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 scien¬ tific 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 de¬ fects 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 Flan¬ ders 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 pro¬ nounce 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
[134]
DEFOE
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 char¬ acters 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 mas¬ ter.
[135]