‘Focas, a sea bull, fighteth ever with his wife till she be dead; then
he casteth her out of his place, and seeketh another.’ Mulus is small of
body and ‘only a meat for ‘gentils’ (gentle-folk); of this fish there
are many kinds, but the best have two beards under the mouth.’ Nereydes
are ‘monsters all rough of body, and when any dyeth, then the other
weepeth.’ When the Pecten is moved or stirred, ‘he winketh,’ and the
Pike is ‘engendered with a westerne wynde.’
But the Sturgeon is our author’s masterpiece. This wretched creature
leads what Touchstone would call ‘a spare life’--it is the anchorite of
the finny tribes. The pleasures of the deep are not many, and surely
good victuals at regular hours, must be counted upon. Yet the poor
Sturgeon, according to our friend Laurens, has no mouth, and therefore
cannot eat at all. So it lives upon the winds, waxing fat on an east
wind, and sickening upon a northerly one.
Notwithstanding the large array of creatures that do at least bear some
resemblance to fishes at his command, Master Andrewe does not stop here.
Of him, it can be said truly that all is ‘fisshe’ that comes to his net.
We meet several old friends who are gravely described at some length.
There is Scylla, a monster in the sea between Italy and Sicily, which is
a great enemy to man. It is faced and handed like a gentlewoman, but
hath a wide mouth and fearful teeth. Like most of the other
sea-monsters, it is musical, and heareth singing gladly. Then there is
the Mermayde, bringing the same old wondrous story (and tail) with her.
She is a deadly beast that bringeth a man gladly to death, and she
singeth a sweet song, and therewith deceiveth many a good mariner; for
when they hear it they fall on sleep, and then she cometh and draweth
them out of the ship, and teareth them asunder.
And then there is a quaint story from Arabye of some serpentis called
sirens, and other delectable matter; but alas!--our learned friend must
return to the shades. So we will bid him Godspeed!--and, as one
naturally falls into Elia’s manner in praising an old author, I will
say: ‘Blessings on thee! Master Laurens Andrewe. I believe thou knowest
no more of fishes than I do, but what do we care for piscatory lore.
Thou hast devised most entertaining matter, and written a worthy book.
So may the earth press lightly on thy old bones!’
ON NOT MEETING AUTHORS
If you who read this have one or two favourite authors among the living,
take care that you do not meet them; above all, do not seek them out. If
you think Mr. Horace Tendency’s _Bones and Bottles_ the greatest novel
of the age, if you have concluded that Mr. Gadfly, essayist and critic,
has more wit and wisdom than any man now living, write and tell them so
if you like, but do not go any further. Be satisfied with exchanging a
letter of admiration for a badly executed autograph, or you will court
disaster. If you should want more, remember that we have a literary
press that makes a business of publishing photographs or paragraphs or
both. Do not imagine that you have heard the last of your favourites; I
know for a fact that Mr. Tendency has a novel in the press that is even
greater than _Bones and Bottles_, and I have heard that Mr. Gadfly has
just signed an agreement to combine wit and wisdom in a perfectly
astonishing manner.
There are several gentlemen now earning a fair living by feeding public
curiosity and battening on the fame of its darlings. They do it by
seeking out a celebrity and retailing his unconsidered trifles of talk
at a good market price. When they do it maliciously, as some do by
making merry with the great man’s moustache or sneering at his wife,
they are really doing the literary public a service, for they act as a
warning and, indeed, point a moral. They and their works say to the
enthusiast: If you would be happy, avoid the company of your favourite
authors or you will be speedily disillusioned, and either preserve a
cynical silence for the rest of your time or make capital out of your
misery by falling into our unsavoury practices. It is possible, of
course, to meet a few authors without wishing to do so. A good many of
them go out a great deal nowadays, and some move in very decent society,
so that there is no knowing when and where one may meet an author or
two. At any moment, one or other of us may be faced with what appears to
be a pair of overfed, pompous merchants or manufacturers, only to learn,
on being introduced, that while one of them, Mr. Dash of Dot & Dash,
Leadenhall Street, is the real thing, his companion is no other than Mr.
Blank, the mystical poet. But to encounter authors in this way is no
great matter; there is no need to reveal the fact that one knows
anything about them. If they happen to be men whose work is good, some
disappointment may attend the encounter, but it will only be slight, for
we can afford to be amused when the meeting is accidental and we have
not deliberately asked to be disillusioned. But if we are decoyed by a
naive enthusiasm into seeking out our men, it is almost certain that we
shall be grievously disappointed, and it is more than likely that our
admiration for their work will soon be on the wane. Knowing the men, we
may pretend to admire them more than ever; most of us do; but it hardly
deceives anybody, and certainly not ourselves, who are left with the
unpleasant thought that we have thus cut down our own pleasures.
But why, some innocent may ask, should there be any disillusionment;
surely a man must be better than his books? He may be in the sight of a
god, but not necessarily in the sight of a fellow mortal. A man--any
man, let alone an author--is not so tractable as a book; we are rarely
in a position to choose him so that he can minister to a mood; he will
not wait upon our convenience like our patient volumes. A book may be a
vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs
to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must
discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been
unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad
author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An
encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise
few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. It is
far otherwise with the great craftsmen, those fine fellows that you and
I admire and sometimes long to meet. A good author is his own worst
book. We go to him in the hope of catching again that rounded utterance
which moved us in this volume or persuaded us in the other; we go--to
put the matter shortly--expecting fine talk, and completely overlook the
fact that we have already had the best of the man to wait upon us. Our
hopes running so high, small wonder that we discover such a falling-off;
the best of our author’s talk is but a slovenly paraphrase of his most
successful things, or a rehash of his rejected manuscripts; and the
worst is probably far below what we have to endure in the smoke-room or
the railway carriage. Moreover, along with this decline in matter and
style, we have to put up with unexpected and totally unwelcome
mannerisms, irritating tricks of voice and gesture, and we know not what
fumbling and mouthing, all of them acquired during the making of books
but all kept outside the covers. And nowadays, very few writers
cultivate the picturesque in their appearance or try to look the part,
so that our favourites never resemble our private images of them, and
inevitably they always look worse, being dingier or shorter or fatter.
Can this squat, fussy nonentity be our great novelist, we cry, when we
see him for the first time. Probably all of us read and admire the
exquisite lyrics of W., who seems to live all his days among lovely
unsubstantial things, fleeting shadows and strangely significant
silences; but whereas you think of him as a tall, rather fragile man
with dreamy eyes and a silky beard, I who have actually met him can only
call up a very different image, that of a solid, blue-chinned fellow
with an arrogant, almost sinister profile, suggesting an unscrupulous
lawyer or money-lender rather than a singer of exquisite songs. Count
D’Orsay, you will remember, discovered Byron in a faded nankeen jacket
and green spectacles--a notable anti-climax!
We could perhaps overlook appearance and manners if only we got what we
principally looked for--fine talk. We are disappointed, of course, and
it is our own fault. Even if we had never reasoned the matter out, we
ought to have had the sense to put away such expectations, or take care
that they were never tested by reality. History shows us great writers
and great talkers, but we rarely find the two combined in one figure. It
is true that there was nobody more celebrated in his day as a talker
than Coleridge, but he did his best literary work before he had this
reputation, and the more he talked, the less he wrote. His contemporary,
Mackintosh, was a great talker, but who reads Mackintosh now! Do not let
us deceive ourselves by thinking that memoirs and biographies of
literary men will help us; do not let us imagine that reading them is
the same thing as actually meeting authors. Memoirs and biographies are
books, with all the virtues of books; they can be put aside, skipped, or
disbelieved, if necessary; they are art, and very good art too, some of
them. Johnson as he appears in Boswell is good enough for me, for there
I can enjoy that very unpleasantness which must have made an actual
encounter such a risky business. As for those enthusiasts who are always
telling us what they would give to spend an evening with this or the
other demi-god of letters, most of them do not realise what they are
saying. They would barter we know not what for one evening with
Shakespeare at the Mermaid, as if they expected to find him mouthing
over his liquor alternately in the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff. I, for
one, would not be surprised if all Shakespeare’s talk at the Mermaid was
not worth a rush; he probably never did more than exchange a few
commonplaces and listen smilingly to the others before he emptied his
flagon and went home. The epithets that contemporaries bestowed so
grudgingly upon him, ‘gentle’ and ‘civil’ and the like, suggest a quiet
man and good listener. I warrant that Jonson was the better talker. Even
with Lamb, who is usually the next to be singled out, an encounter might
not be entirely successful. Among his intimates, he could stammer out
some wonderful things, but he was apt to prove an odd, sometimes
unpleasant companion for others. The hapless Distributor of Stamps who
called on Wordsworth at Haydon’s, whom Lamb baited so unmercifully,
would be very unwilling to subscribe to the popular opinion of ‘gentle
Elia.’ As for Milton and Wordsworth, I have no doubt that they were
insufferable. And if any man argues the charm of Shelley’s society from
his verse, let him go into the first fanatical group he can find, single
out the young man who has the greatest number of half-digested notions
and talks incessantly in a high-pitched voice, and by listening to such
a one for a few hours, let him test the truth of his idea that a day
with Shelley would be unmixed delight. But enough--reason and experience
both tell us to avoid meeting good authors, though they say nothing of
bad ones. It only remains for us to decide which are good and which are
bad, and we cannot begin too soon.
THE ETERNAL CHEAP JACK
The war has not changed him. But then all the tumults and long wars of
centuries have not changed him. Like the pedant, the demagogue, or the
place-hunter, the cheap-jack is an ever-enduring figure. Boccaccio’s
Frate Cipolla and Chaucer’s Pardoner were his first cousins; from
Shakespeare to O. Henry (to adopt the popular termini), he has chaffered
and cozened his way through literature. And he is with us yet in the
flesh, for I saw him only last week. I was visiting the weekly fair in a
pleasant little town, and had joined the crowd of country folks drifting
about the stalls in the market square, when, suddenly, a mighty voice
burst forth from the centre of a group of persons huddled in a far
corner. In the country, where the long days are filled with the sight
and sound of the lower creatures, there is no resisting this eruptive
clamour of a human voice for an audience, and, along with others, I
hurried to join the thickening press of folk in the corner. There, after
many years, I found him, as of old.
There was the same indefinable air of something like bravado about his
whole figure. His hard face still bore that curious trace of the Jew,
mingled with something a great deal worse than the Jew. His clothes,
which were new and smart, still seemed to proclaim that they had been
made for someone else; and the various trinkets about his person still
confessed their inability to inspire confidence. In front was the same
old stall, laden with innumerable, mysterious packages, all thickly
wrapped in tissue paper; and by the side of the stall stood the
inevitable assistant, silent, dejected, unshaven, looking like a rough
and shabbier copy of his master, or perhaps a poor relation. Nothing had
changed. The great man still flourished the sign of his office, a wooden
mallet with a ponderous head, with which he hammered upon the stall from
time to time as a sort of dramatic punctuation.
Best of all, his voice, that one talent which removed him from common
men, was there in all its pristine fullness. He spoke in the manner of
his kind; in that accent which owns no shire, city, or clan, and yet is
heard in all the market places in the land. His very whispered
confidences were enough to stir the old bones in the neighbouring
churchyard. The crowd, trying to appear sophisticated, was held and
mastered by the voice that was trumpeting, cajoling, mocking, within the
space of one mighty breath, and yet still went sounding on, dropping
manna by the way. Unknowingly he was a passionate votary of the art that
has now nearly forsaken the pulpit and the council chamber. We, his
audience, stifled all doubts, and waited, promise-crammed.
There was little or no alteration in his methods. Whether they have been
designed, once for all, by some Master Psychologist of cheap-jacks, or
are the result of accumulated experience, a secret tradition passed from
generation to generation of genial tricksters, I cannot say; but these
methods, like the human nature on which they are based, do not change
much. As before, he had not come among us to make money. With passionate
emphasis, he declared that he was not a profiteer (a new note, this),
but had been sent down here by the well-known firm of Mumble-Mumble to
smash profiteering. He would teach us the meaning of the word
Lib-er-al-ity--that is how he mouthed it, with splendid significance.
And then he proceeded in the time-old fashion.
From some half-a-dozen persons nearest the stall, he borrowed a few
coppers, promising to return the loan with the addition of a ‘small
present.’ These people, becoming sharers in the business, naturally do
not care to go away, and thus, by this simple trick, whatever may happen
he has about him at least the nucleus of a crowd. Then, flourishing
several mysterious packages before our eyes, he asked us to bid for
them. ‘Any gentleman got the pluck,’ he demanded, with the dispassionate
earnestness of a god, ‘any gentleman got the courage to offer me a
Silver Shilling for this?’ Any gentleman showing the necessary public
spirit was given the article in question, and his money, his Silver
Shilling, was handed back to him. Nor did our friend spoil his acts of
munificence by the manner of giving; every package was divested of its
numerous wrappings before it was handed over to the lucky man; the
contents were exposed to the public view, and described in a style that
‘Ouida’ would have envied. Our minds reeled before this riotous
splendour of gold and jewels. Sometimes, in a frenzy of reckless
generosity, he would pile up a heap of articles, and, with a magnificent
sense of the dramatic, would cry: ‘Here’s number One! And here’s number
Two! And here’s another one, making number Three! And another one,
making number Four!’--working up to a climax that left us gasping. Then,
after being extraordinarily bountiful to one person, he would pretend to
answer a perfectly imaginary charge of confederacy from some member of
the crowd, looking all the while very sternly at no one in particular.
‘One of a click (_i.e._ clique) is ‘e?’ he would roar. ‘One of the
click! Do I know yer, Mister? Never seen yer before. I’ll show yer
whether ‘e’s one of the click! I’ll show yer!’ And being apparently
stung by this vile taunt, he would lash himself into a fury, and proceed
to squander his glittering wares even still more wildly. I left him with
the sweat running down his face, his hair all rumpled and his collar a
wreck; yet he was still undaunted, giving away gold watches with the
magnificent air of an Eastern Emperor.
I, for one, welcome the cheap-jack because his presence in our midst
proves that there is still a little poetry left in the race. For all his
machinations are based on a certain notion which the experience of this
world proves to be a fallacy, and which is yet as old as the hills and
as little to be despised. It is the fine old notion that it is possible,
somehow or other, to get something for nothing; and it was not born of
this world. When we have entirely forsaken the idea, then we are lost
indeed, for it comes from the depths of our primal innocence, and has
about it the last lingering scent of the Garden of Eden.
HOLIDAY NOTES FROM THE COAST OF BOHEMIA
A friend of mine, who is a great traveller, has just put into my hands a
letter that should be interesting to those who have not yet decided
where to go for their holidays and are looking for fresh fields. This
letter came from an old acquaintance of his, one Autolycus, an amusing
fellow, who boasts that he has been a courtier and in his time worn
‘three-pile’ velvet. As a correspondent he is not to be taken too
seriously, but the substance of his letter is engaging, and can be given
here. He says that he can remember the time when the coast of Bohemia,
his adopted land, was nothing but a desert country, but now, under the
genial sway of Prince Florizel and his lovely Perdita, all is changed:
the place is blossoming into a sea-bound garden; the sunlit woods and
sands, the sweet air, and the good company to be found there are
attracting visitors from countries near and far; and villas and hostels
are springing up everywhere to lodge the host of new residents and
guests. The coming season promises well, and our correspondent, himself
the owner now of a large hostel, admits that he is thriving, and well on
his way to ‘three-pile’ again.
Being an arrant gossip, Autolycus soon learns all the news of the place,
and any scraps that he misses his friend and barber, Figaro, can usually
supply to him. He makes it plain that there is no lack of good company,
for he mentions scores of familiar names, of which only a few can find a
place here. Some of the visitors who spent last winter there have now
left the district: a lively talkative couple from Padua, Benedick and
Beatrice, have departed for the country house of their friends Katherina
and Petruchio; a certain Major Pendennis has now returned to London,
where, we understand, he is a notable figure; Senor Gil Blas has gone to
relate his adventures elsewhere; and Master Touchstone, a friend of
Autolycus and a fellow of some wit, has now left for the Forest of
Arden, where he intends to pass an idle summer with his patrons, now Sir
Orlando and Lady Rosalind de Boys. Such visitors as these, with others
who have gone, will no doubt be missed, but the loss is more than made
up by the crowd of new arrivals.
Prince Florizel has now opened his new Summer Palace, and is
entertaining a great company. Almost the first group of guests to arrive
was a gay party from Illyria, including the Duke and his Duchess Viola,
Sebastian and Olivia, and that witty fellow Feste, whose strange songs
are now heard throughout the land. Sir Toby and his friend, Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, are not staying with the party at the palace, but are lodging
with Autolycus, where there are cakes and ale and catches in plenty. A
new tutor has been engaged for the Royal children, but little is known
of him; he is thought to be a Scotsman, and has been heard muttering
‘Prodeegious’ on his infrequent walks abroad. Next month there comes to
the palace a famous Spanish knight, who is said to have suffered
strangely from the persecutions of enchanters. Some will have it that
his squire, one Sancho Panza, is better worth a hearing than the knight
himself.
Here and there along the coast the sea has been steadily encroaching
upon the land, and the Prince has decided to fortify these places by the
building of embankments and other devices. The work has now begun,
under the direction of two experts, Captain Toby Shandy and the Baron of
Bradwardine. Another famous martial figure has been added to the list by
the arrival of Captain Dugald Dalgetty, who now commands the Bohemian
Marine Horse, in the place of Bobadil--lately cashiered.
There is certainly no lack of amusements now that the season has begun,
for there are dances and pageants in the open air and indoor
entertainments for the occasional rainy evenings. Next month will see
the opening of the new Royal Theatre, which will be under the management
of that renowned impresario Mr. Vincent Crummles. There, a professional
company--including, I believe, the ‘infant phenomenon’--will perform.
But this is not the only dramatic enterprise, for an Artisan’s Amateur
Dramatic Society has just been formed. The leading spirit in this
venture is a recent settler on these shores, one Bottom, a weaver, who
is said to have had long and valuable experience as an amateur
performer. Nor should it be hard to please those who prefer graver and
more edifying diversion. It appears that, only two weeks ago, a lecture
on the ‘Golden Cadence of Poesy’ was given by Holofernes, the
schoolmaster, and was well received. Unfortunately, according to report,
the audience was a very small one, there being only seven people
present, and that is including Master Slender, who fell asleep almost at
the beginning. Some contribution will certainly be made to solid
learning at the debate, upon some antiquarian question, between Jonathan
Oldbuck, Esquire, and Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, P.P.C. This takes place
early next month, and Justice Shallow will be in the chair. The prospect
of hearing this debate alone is surely enough to draw any right-minded
man, who is free to travel, across half the world.
There have been so many English visitors, of late, to this part of the
kingdom that special arrangements have been made for the benefit of
their bodies and souls; a small English church and a large English
tavern have been built within a short distance of the sea. This year
there are two pastors doing duty at the church, the Rev. Dr. Primrose
and Parson Adams, both of whom have been fervent in denouncing from the
pulpit the evils of the world; indeed, Dr. Primrose caused quite a stir
with his ‘Folly of Cosmogony.’ The tavern has been named the New Boar’s
Head, and the hostess is Mistress Quickly, late of Eastcheap, London.
Autolycus writes that it is a rowdy house, but this can be set down to
professional jealousy and his ignorance of the persons concerned. The
best room is now occupied by Sir John Falstaff, who is reported to be a
man of some substance; and the house is becoming renowned for good talk
and the drinking of ‘healths five fathoms deep.’
It is unfortunate that one of Sir John’s followers has got himself into
trouble with the constables. The latter were recently appointed by the
Prince to look after the watch, and are from Messina, where everyone
knows Dogberry and Verges. So far, they have only made one arrest, and
that was of Pistol, Sir John’s Ancient. It seems that he, Ancient
Pistol, being full of sack, encountered the constables and expressed
himself in Cambyses’ vein, calling Dogberry a ‘dung-hill cur,’ and
Verges ‘a recreant coward base.’ This led to his arrest and confinement,
where he will remain for the time being, unless the justices are willing
to accept Bardolph as security....