_The Common Reader_
There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be
written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet
full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private
people. “. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the
common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all
the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be
finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their
qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which
devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing
very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.
The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and
the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so
generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart
knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by
an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can
come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a
theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up
some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary
satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of
affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,
snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring
where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his
purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too
obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained,
some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps,
it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions
which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a
result.
_The Pastons and Chaucer_[1]
The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and
the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to
fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest
on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six acres of ground,
only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and surmounted by
battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without.
As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor folk” who should,
at this very moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his
parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of their prayers. The place
is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.
Not so very far off lie more ruins—the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where
John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a
mile or so away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles north of
Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the land, even in our time,
inaccessible. Nevertheless the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the
fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory,
and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened. But some of
them with their newly-opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them—the
grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a tombstone. The news
spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been
so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put above John Paston’s
head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay her debts; the eldest son, Sir
John, wasted his property upon women and tournaments, while the younger,
John also, though a man of greater parts, thought more of his hawks than
of his harvests.
The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been
opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but their
news, none the less, was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world.
People said even that they had been bondmen not so very long ago. At any
rate, men still living could remember John’s grandfather Clement tilling
his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William, Clement’s son,
becoming a judge and buying land; and John, William’s son, marrying well
and buying more land and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at
Caister, and all Sir John’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk. People said
that he had forged the old knight’s will. What wonder, then, that he
lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider the character of Sir John
Paston, John’s eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings, and
the relations between himself and his father as the family letters
reveal them, we shall see how difficult it was, and how likely to be
neglected—this business of making his father’s tombstone.
For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at
the present moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone, bathroom,
or drains, arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books,
unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look out upon a few
cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea
on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but
there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big
enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad
bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked,
threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That is what they talk
about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes
horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are
given to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has
worn itself away, simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they
are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.
In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken
suddenly and very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There
rose out of the sand-hills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk
of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but there was no
parade, no lodging houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this
gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one
solitary old gentleman without any children—Sir John Fastolf, who had
fought at Agincourt and acquired great wealth. He had fought at
Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke
ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper was none
the sweeter for it. He was a hot-tempered old man, powerful, embittered
by a sense of grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court he
thought perpetually of Caister, and how, when his duties allowed, he
would settle down on his father’s land and live in a great house of his
own building.
The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so many
miles away when the little Pastons were children. John Paston, the
father, had charge of some part of the business, and the children
listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone and
building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the
twenty-six private chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations,
measurements, and rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work
was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last years at Caister,
they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that was stored
there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes
stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of gold, with hoods and
tippets and beaver hats and leather jackets and velvet doublets; and how
the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and purple silk. There
were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and the bedrooms hung
with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing,
archers shooting, ladies playing on their harps, dallying with ducks, or
a giant “bearing the leg of a bear in his hand”. Such were the fruits of
a well-spent life. To buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these
houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in
the bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent
the greater part of their energies in the same exhausting occupation.
For since the passion to acquire was universal, one could never rest
secure in one’s possessions for long. The outlying parts of one’s
property were in perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet
this manor, the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for
instance that the Pastons were bondmen, gave them the right to seize the
house and batter down the lodges in the owner’s absence. And how could
the owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresham be in five or
six places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and he
must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The
King was mad too, they said; did not know his own child, they said; or
the King was in flight; or there was civil war in the land. Norfolk was
always the most distressed of counties and its country gentlemen the
most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston chosen, she could
have told her children how when she was a young woman a thousand men
with bows and arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon Gresham
and broken the gates and mined the walls of the room where she sat
alone. But much worse things than that had happened to women. She
neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine. The long, long
letters which she wrote so laboriously in her clear cramped hand to her
husband, who was (as usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep
had wasted the hay. Heyden’s and Tuddenham’s men were out. A dyke had
been broken and a bullock stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really
she must have stuff for a dress.
But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.
Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or dictating page
after page, hour after hour, long, long letters, but to interrupt a
parent who writes so laboriously of such important matters would have
been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the nursery or
schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate communications.
For the most part her letters are the letters of an honest bailiff to
his master, explaining, asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts.
There was robbery and manslaughter; it was difficult to get in the
rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with one
thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should
have done, the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well
might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs rather grimly from a
distance, counsel him to contrive it so that “ye may have less to do in
the world; your father said. In little business lieth much rest. This
world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart
therefrom, right nought bear with us but our good deeds and ill.”
The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf,
cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell
fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see
that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his soul might escape the
agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the
monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for ever”. The
soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering,
and the fire that destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal
grates. For ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich, and for
ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of Norwich. There was something
matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception both of life
and of death.
With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course
were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They
must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A mother would
clout her daughter’s head three times a week and break the skin if she
did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth
and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a
softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving
the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would not suffer their
sisters to marry beneath them, and “sell candle and mustard in
Framlingham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers,
fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and
custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their efforts to
keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash acts
on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his
father denounced him. He was a “drone among bees”, the father burst out,
“which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth
naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated his parents with
insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.
But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of
John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to
Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing
torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges were said.
Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread,
and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two
panes were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the
torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set burning on the
grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his father’s
tombstone.
He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The
discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran
away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on
the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had
inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with
so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of
acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed
something of his father’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious
temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to women, liked
society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes,
even, reading books. And so life, now that John Paston was buried,
started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There could be little
outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered
the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the lives of the
elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their
tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the
right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the
Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and
Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full of poor
people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her
son as she had worked for her husband, with this significant change
only, that now, instead of confiding in her husband, she took the advice
of her priest.
But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer
shell had served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and
pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his
brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the business on hand to
crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly
and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the
mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too
glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And I shall always be your herald
both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I come home, which I
hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a hawk was to be
bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk,
prosecuting his suit, flying his hawks, and attending with considerable
energy and not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston
estates.
The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s grave. But still
Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with
the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the
disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money
spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John himself,
and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery
falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at
Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life was a little more
various in its pleasures. They were not quite so sure as the elder
generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret
Paston scented the change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had
marched so stiffly through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her
troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to
defend Caister with her own hands if need be, “though I cannot well
guide nor rule soldiers”, but there was something wrong with the family
since the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in
his service to God; he had been too proud or too lavish in his
expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the poor.
Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as
much money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay
their debts without selling land, wood, or household stuff (“It is a
death to me to think if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them
in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone.
The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and
more tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such
stuff. There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of
Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt,
comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting
their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their
own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.
For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops
or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight,
reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind
lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading
Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it
that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing.
A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like
dashes of rain on the window pane. There was no reason in it as there
had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and
acquire an important position for children who were not born, or if
born, had no right to bear their father’s name. But Lydgate’s poems or
Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew,
but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from
London or piecing out from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of
love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before
him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some
description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it,
or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure
of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the
end of the story.
To learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do
that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the
rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as
it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount
them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of
greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers
like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious
story-tellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the
story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his
story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow
it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us
time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.
Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and
in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never
come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country.
His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for
the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs
peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the
hillside. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature,
how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do
not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her
cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than
the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and
London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral
excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a
retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and
moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact,
in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic
devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds
of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country
was no mere jeweller’s shop, or museum of curious objects to be
described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since
the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace
the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to
little landscapes, to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn
to the life. The wider landscape is lost.
But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether
agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of
their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the
jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite.
Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is
the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we
come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of
the open air.