With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say

“You have oft, for these two lips

Neglected cassia”.

Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her

reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect

marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his swiftness

to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground not on the sky: suggest by

description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing

Lay a garland on my hearse

Of the dismal yew;

Maidens, willow branches bear;

Say I died true,

he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the

undertakers’ men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can we

compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the

little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual

and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the

separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna

Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the

. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,

. . . driven, I know not whither.

So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our

Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we close

_War and Peace_? Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting the

superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the novelist’s art. Rather

we are made more than ever aware of the inexhaustible richness of human

sensibility. Here, in the play, we recognise the general; here, in the

novel, the particular. Here we gather all our energies into a bunch and

spring. Here we extend and expand and let come slowly in from all

quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so

saturated with sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience,

that far from ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its

inferiority to others we complain that they are still unable to keep

pace with the wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of

what may yet be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the

unexpressed.

Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion we still

read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring in the

land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories of

Liverpool fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any likeness

between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia at Muswell

Hill and the Armenian Duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the

owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to a still-born babe

’mongst women howling. To join those territories and recognise the same

man in different disguises we have to adjust and revise. But make the

necessary alterations in perspective, draw in those filaments of

sensibility which the moderns have so marvellously developed, use

instead the ear and the eye which the moderns have so basely starved,

hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as they are printed in

black letters on the page, see before your eyes the changing faces and

living bodies of men and women, put yourself, in short, into a

different, but not more elementary stage of your reading development and

then the true merits of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The

power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining

genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Theirs is that broad humour based upon the nakedness of the body, which,

however arduously the public spirited may try, is impossible, since the

body is draped. Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some

sort of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence

of the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any

creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet

it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole

literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high

spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to

favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the jungle and

the wilderness the compass still points.

“Lord, Lord, that I were dead!”

they are for ever crying.

O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin

To sweetest slumber——

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

is vanity.

glories

Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams

And shadows soon decaying: on the stage

Of my mortality my youth hath acted

Some scenes of vanity——

To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell

that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment.

All life is but a wandering to find home,

When we’re gone, we’re there.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the

other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of

frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July

flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of

pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most

reckless and abundant, they reply

Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,

No root in comforts; all his power to live

Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve.

It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play

which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of

the Gods.

So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan

drama. So we consort with Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns,

and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy

of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored

too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A

dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering

of one of Tolstoi’s flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and

tedious story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some

sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a

world full of tedium and delight; pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant

laughter, poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what

then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so

persistently that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It

is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some

one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile,

as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to

think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own

darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne,

to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne—the keepers of the keys of solitude.

_Montaigne_

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily,

had painted of himself, and asked, “Why is it not, in like manner,

lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a

crayon?” Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing

could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are

almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task,

the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious,

and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in

drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau

perhaps. The _Religio Medici_ is a coloured glass through which darkly

one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright

polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other

people’s shoulders in the famous biography. But this talking of oneself,

following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and

circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its

imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne. As the

centuries go by, there is always a crowd before that picture, gazing

into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the

longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they

see. New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the

Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes[3] Cotton’s

translation; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the

complete works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to

which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is

not easy.

We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this road

[said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; ’tis a rugged

road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,

as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate

internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble

motions; ’tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us

from the common and most recommended employments of the world.

There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expression. We all

indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it

comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how

little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of

the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and

returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with

a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress

their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid

instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and

ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making

ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of

human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for this

reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such

irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book

was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on

saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write

himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged

road, more than it seems”.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme

difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means

agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what

she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people

say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up their minds that old

invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and edify the rest of us by

the spectacle of their connubial fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said,

on the contrary, that it is in old age that one ought to travel, and

marriage, which, rightly, is very seldom founded on love, is apt to

become, towards the end of life, a formal tie better broken up. Again

with politics, statesmen are always praising the greatness of Empire,

and preaching the moral duty of civilising the savage. But look at the

Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities

levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated . . . and the

richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the

traffic of pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!” And then when the

peasants came and told him that they had found a man dying of wounds and

deserted him for fear lest justice might incriminate them, Montaigne

asked:

What could I have said to these people? ’Tis certain that this office of

humanity would have brought them into trouble. . . . There is nothing so

much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty as the laws.

Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the more palpable

forms of Montaigne’s great bugbears, convention and ceremony. But watch

her as she broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower which,

though detached from the main building, has so wide a view over the

estate. Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from

heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful;

prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic,

pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and

prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little

to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend

his life merely in trying to run her to earth. The pleasure of the

pursuit more than rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon

one’s worldly prospects. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward

independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he

is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip

past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do

because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and

faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness;

dull, callous, and indifferent.

Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to tell us

his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room of our tower

and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they

chase each other up the chimney, and leave the government of the world

to others. Retirement and contemplation—these must be the main elements

of his prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is

impossible to extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling,

half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy,

quizzical expression. The truth is that life in the country, with one’s

books and vegetables and flowers, is often extremely dull. He could

never see that his own green peas were so much better than other

people’s. Paris was the place he loved best in the whole world—“jusques

à ses verrues et à ses tâches”. As for reading, he could seldom read

any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that

he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from one room to another.

Book learning is nothing to be proud of, and as for the achievements of

science, what do they amount to? He had always mixed with clever men,

and his father had a positive veneration for them, but he had observed

that, though they have their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their

visions, the cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe yourself:

one moment you are exalted; the next a broken glass puts your nerves on

edge. All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of

the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the

common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence—yet, it is true, poetry is

delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

It appears, then, that we are to aim at a democratic simplicity. We may

enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious

bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his

father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life

and speak the real language. There is certainly an element of truth in

that. Things are said very finely at the lower end of the table. There

are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant than

among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! “the

mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy. Is it reasonable that

the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their

minds are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They must be told

what it is expedient for them to know. It is not for them to face facts

as they are. The truth can only be known by the well-born soul—“l’âme

bien née”. Who, then, are these well-born souls, whom we would imitate,

if only Montaigne would enlighten us more precisely?

But no. “Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.” After all, how could he

explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply

and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own,

when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him? One

quality or principle there is perhaps—that one must not lay down rules.

The souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Étienne de La Boétie,

for example, are always the supplest. “C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas

vivre, que de se tenir attaché et obligé par nécessité à un seul

train.” The laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with

the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a

convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow

their souls free play. But we, who have a private life and hold it

infinitely the dearest of our possessions, suspect nothing so much as an

attitude. Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay down

laws, we perish. We are living for others, not for ourselves. We must

respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service, load them

with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the inevitable

compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and all offices

that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our

incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of

impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every

second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is

death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat

ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and

follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or

thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.

This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be

controlled. But it is difficult to see what power we are to invoke to

help us, since every restraint of private opinion or public law has been

derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn upon the misery, the

weakness, the vanity of human nature. Perhaps, then, it will be well to

turn to religion to guide us? “Perhaps” is one of his favourite

expressions; “perhaps” and “I think” and all those words which qualify

the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle

up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak outright. For

one does not say everything; there are some things which at present it

is advisable only to hint. One writes for a very few people, who

understand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but

meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor,

an invisible censor within, “un patron au dedans”, whose blame is much

more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is

there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge

to whom we must submit; this is the censor who will help us to achieve

that order which is the grace of a well-born soul. For “C’est une vie

exquise, celle qui se maintient en ordre jusques en son privé”. But he

will act by his own light; by some internal balance will achieve that

precarious and everchanging poise which, while it controls, in no way

impedes the soul’s freedom to explore and experiment. Without other

guide, and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far more difficult to

live well the private life than the public. It is an art which each must

learn separately, though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like

Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas among the ancients, and

Étienne de La Boétie among the moderns, whose example may help us. But

it is an art; and the very material in which it works is variable and

complex and infinitely mysterious—human nature. To human nature we must

keep close. “. . . il faut vivre entre les vivants”. We must dread any

eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off from our fellow-beings.

Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their

sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk

of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate is our chief business;

society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire

knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond

our own time and province. Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons

and undiscovered lands, men with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests,

and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own. Possibly

we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other which is

apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.

Here then, in spite of all contradictions and of all qualifications, is

something definite. These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul.

On this point at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he wants; it

is not that men shall quote him in years to come; he is setting up no

statue in the market-place; he wishes only to communicate his soul.

Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is

happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light

those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing;

to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends

to let them know it.

“. . . car, comme je scay par une trop certaine expérience, il n’est

aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis que celle que nous

aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublié à leur dire et d’avoir eu

avec eux une parfaite et entière communication.”

There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up “se

défendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion.

When they dine they must have the same food they get at home. Every

sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of their own village.

They travel only to return. That is entirely the wrong way to set about

it. We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend

the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.

Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find

before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom

we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has

no relish unless we share it. As for the risks—that we may catch cold

or get a headache—it is always worth while to risk a little illness for

the sake of pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales espèces du

profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for

us. Doctors and wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise

men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men

and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every

one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible;

turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full

before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a

beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days

and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that

deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and

the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own

orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind.

Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two fingers’ breadth from

goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the

end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on

horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers

close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break

us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among

girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him

find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et

populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death;

it is life that matters.

It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not

their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes

more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul,

every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and

winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must

have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice;

carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s

feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s

teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to

one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then

disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it

slip through one’s fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves,

there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the

imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and

shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills

broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by

reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too,

her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and

sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the

sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe.

Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in

youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a

boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father

loved building. In short the soul is all laced about with nerves and

sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no

one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the

smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of

all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest

monster and miracle in the world. “. . . plus je me hante et connois,

plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe,

observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et

sans travail” Montaigne will write.

But there remains one final question which, if we could make him look up

from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to this great

master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short and

broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory statements, we have

heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year

after year through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to

transparency. Here is some one who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise

of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord,

husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and mused for hours

alone over old books. By means of perpetual experiment and observation

of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these

wayward parts that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty

of the world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had

to live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as

we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul

living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure

the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the nature of the

soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with others? Is the

beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some explanation of

the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is

only one more question: “Que scais-je?”

[Footnote 3: _Essays of Montaigne_, translated by Charles Cotton,

5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6: 6s. net]

_The Duchess of Newcastle_[4]

“. . . All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of

Newcastle. And while she lived her wish was granted. Garish in her

dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her

speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing upon herself the

ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. But the last

echoes of that clamour have now all died away; she lives only in the few

splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb; her poems, her

plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses—all those folios

and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was shrined—moulder

in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles

which hold six drops of their profusion. Even the curious student,

inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum,

peers in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting the door.

But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable figure.

Born (it is conjectured) in 1624, Margaret was the youngest child of a

Thomas Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her upbringing was

due to her mother, a lady of remarkable character, of majestic grandeur

and beauty “beyond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in leases,

and setting of lands and court keeping, ordering of stewards, and the

like affairs.” The wealth which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage

portions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out of an opinion

that if she bred us with needy necessity it might chance to create in us

sharking qualities”. Her eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but

reasoned with, finely and gayly dressed, and allowed no conversation

with servants, not because they are servants but because servants “are

for the most part ill-bred as well as meanly born”. The daughters were

taught the usual accomplishments “rather for formality than for

benefit”, it being their mother’s opinion that character, happiness, and

honesty were of greater value to a woman than fiddling and singing, or

“the prating of several languages”.

Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of such indulgence to

gratify certain tastes. Already she liked reading better than

needlework, dressing and “inventing fashions” better than reading, and

writing best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written in

straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought always outdid the

pace of her fingers, testify to the use she made of her mother’s

liberality. The happiness of their home life had other results as well.

They were a devoted family. Long after they were married, Margaret

noted, these handsome brothers and sisters, with their well-proportioned

bodies, their clear complexions, brown hair, sound teeth, “tunable

voices”, and plain way of speaking, kept themselves “in a flock

together”. The presence of strangers silenced them. But when they were

alone, whether they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde Park, or had music,

or supped in barges upon the water, their tongues were loosed and they

made “very merry amongst themselves, . . . judging, condemning,

approving, commending, as they thought good”.

The happy family life had its effect upon Margaret’s character. As a

child, she would walk for hours alone, musing and contemplating and

reasoning with herself of “everything her senses did present”. She took

no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys did not amuse her, and she

could neither learn foreign languages nor dress as other people did. Her

great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which nobody else was

to copy, “for”, she remarks, “I always took delight in a singularity,

even in accoutrements of habits”.

Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free, should have bred a

lettered old maid, glad of her seclusion, and the writer perhaps of some

volume of letters or translations from the classics, which we should

still quote as proof of the cultivation of our ancestresses. But there

was a wild streak in Margaret, a love of finery and extravagance and

fame, which was for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements of nature.

When she heard that the Queen, since the outbreak of the Civil War, had

fewer maids-of-honour than usual, she had “a great desire” to become one

of them. Her mother let her go against the judgement of the rest of the

family, who, knowing that she had never left home and had scarcely been

beyond their sight, justly thought that she might behave at Court to her

disadvantage. “Which indeed I did,” Margaret confessed; “for I was so

bashful when I was out of my mother’s, brothers’, and sisters’ sight

that . . . I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any

way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a natural fool.” The courtiers

laughed at her; and she retaliated in the obvious way. People were

censorious; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected

intellect in their own sex; and what other lady, she might justly ask,

pondered as she walked on the nature of matter and whether snails have

teeth? But the laughter galled her, and she begged her mother to let her

come home. This being refused, wisely as the event turned out, she

stayed on for two years (1643–45), finally going with the Queen to

Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to pay their respects to the

Court, was the Marquis of Newcastle. To the general amazement, the

princely nobleman, who had led the King’s forces to disaster with

indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love with the shy, silent,

strangely dressed maid-of-honour. It was not “amorous love, but honest,

honourable love”, according to Margaret. She was no brilliant match; she

had gained a reputation for prudery and eccentricity. What, then, could

have made so great a nobleman fall at her feet? The onlookers were full

of derision, disparagement, and slander. “I fear”, Margaret wrote to the

Marquis, “others foresee we shall be unfortunate, though we see it not

ourselves, or else there would not be such pains to untie the knot of

our affections.” Again, “Saint Germains is a place of much slander, and

thinks I send too often to you”. “Pray consider”, she warned him, “that

I have enemies.” But the match was evidently perfect. The Duke, with his

love of poetry and music and play-writing, his interest in philosophy,

his belief “that nobody knew or could know the cause of anything”, his

romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn to a woman who

wrote poetry herself, was also a philosopher of the same way of

thinking, and lavished upon him not only the admiration of a

fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive creature who had been

shielded and succoured by his extraordinary magnanimity. “He did

approve”, she wrote, “of those bashful fears which many condemned, . . .

and though I did dread marriage and shunned men’s company as much as I

could, yet I . . . had not the power to refuse him.” She kept him

company during the long years of exile; she entered with sympathy, if

not with understanding, into the conduct and acquirements of those

horses which he trained to such perfection that the Spaniards crossed

themselves and cried “Miraculo!” as they witnessed their corvets,

voltoes, and pirouettes; she believed that the horses even made a

“trampling action” for joy when he came into the stables; she pleaded

his cause in England during the Protectorate; and, when the Restoration

made it possible for them to return to England, they lived together in

the depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and perfect

contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each

other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating doubtless upon

such marvels of the natural world as chance threw their way. They were

laughed at by their contemporaries; Horace Walpole sneered at them. But

there can be no doubt that they were perfectly happy.

For now Margaret could apply herself uninterruptedly to her writing. She

could devise fashions for herself and her servants. She could scribble

more and more furiously with fingers that became less and less able to

form legible letters. She could even achieve the miracle of getting her

plays acted in London and her philosophies humbly perused by men of

learning. There they stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume,

swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity,

the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. No fears

impede her. She has the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of

a Duchess. The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on

their backs. We seem to hear her, as the thoughts boil and bubble,

calling to John, who sat with a pen in his hand next door, to come

quick, “John, John, I conceive!” And down it goes—whatever it may be;

sense or nonsense; some thought on women’s education—“Women live like

Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, . . . the best

bred women are those whose minds are civilest”; some speculation that

had struck her perhaps walking that afternoon alone—why “hogs have the

measles”, why “dogs that rejoice swing their tails”, or what the stars

are made of, or what this chrysalis is that her maid has brought her,

and she keeps warm in a corner of her room. On and on, from subject to

subject she flies, never stopping to correct, “for there is more

pleasure in making than in mending”, talking aloud to herself of all

those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual diversion—of wars,

and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar and morals, of

monsters and the British, whether opium in small quantities is good for

lunatics, why it is that musicians are mad. Looking upwards, she

speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if

the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the

fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of

fairies, “dear to God as we are”; muses whether there are not other

worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a

new one. In short, “we are in utter darkness”. Meanwhile, what a rapture

is thought!

As the vast books appeared from the stately retreat at Welbeck the usual

censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered, despised, or

argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to every work. They

said, among other things, that her books were not her own, because she

used learned terms, and “wrote of many matters outside her ken”. She

flew to her husband for help, and he answered, characteristically, that

the Duchess “had never conversed with any professed scholar in learning

except her brother and myself”. The Duke’s scholarship, moreover, was of

a peculiar nature. “I have lived in the great world a great while, and

have thought of what has been brought to me by the senses, more than was

put into me by learned discourse; for I do not love to be led by the

nose, by authority, and old authors; _ipse dixit_ will not serve my

turn.” And then she takes up the pen and proceeds, with the importunity

and indiscretion of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is

of the finest quality imaginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and

Hobbes, not questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes to dinner,

but he could not come; she often does not listen to a word that is said

to her; she does not know any French, though she lived abroad for five

years; she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley’s account

of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half of his work on Passion; and

of Hobbes only “the little book called _De Cive_”, all of which is

infinitely to the credit of her native wit, so abundant that outside

succour pained it, so honest that it would not accept help from others.

It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her

own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that

was to oust all others. The results were not altogether happy. Under the

pressure of such vast structures, her natural gift, the fresh and

delicate fancy which had led her in her first volume to write charmingly

of Queen Mab and fairyland, was crushed out of existence.

The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells,

Its fabric’s built all of hodmandod shells;

The hangings of a Rainbow made that’s thin,

Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in;

The chambers made of Amber that is clear,

Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;

Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,

And with a butterfly’s wing hung about;

Her sheets are of the skin of Dove’s eyes made

Where on a violet bud her pillow’s laid.

So she could write when she was young. But her fairies, if they survived

at all, grew up into hippopotami. Too generously her prayer was granted:

Give me the free and noble style,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.

She became capable of involutions, and contortions and conceits of which

the following is among the shortest, but not the most terrific:

The human head may be likened to a town:

The mouth when full, begun

Is market day, when empty, market’s done;

The city conduct, where the water flows,

Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.

She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally; the sea became a

meadow, the sailors shepherds, the mast a maypole. The fly was the bird

of summer, trees were senators, houses ships, and even the fairies, whom

she loved better than any earthly thing, except the Duke, are changed

into blunt atoms and sharp atoms, and take part in some of those

horrible manœuvres in which she delighted to marshal the universe.

Truly, “my Lady Sanspareille hath a strange spreading wit”. Worse still,

without an atom of dramatic power, she turned to play-writing. It was a

simple process. The unwieldy thoughts which turned and tumbled within

her were christened Sir Golden Riches, Moll Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman,

and the rest, and sent revolving in tedious debate upon the parts of the

soul, or whether virtue is better than riches, round a wise and learned

lady who answered their questions and corrected their fallacies at

considerable length in tones which we seem to have heard before.

Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad. She would issue out in

her own proper person, dressed in a thousand gems and furbelows, to

visit the houses of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant report

of these excursions. She recorded how Lady C. R. “did beat her husband

in a public assembly”; Sir F. Ο. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued

himself so much below his birth and wealth as to marry his

kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sanctified soul, a spiritual

sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are become

abominable to her, laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to pride—she

asked me what posture I thought was the best to be used in prayer”. Her

answer was probably unacceptable. “I shall not rashly go there again”,

she says of one such “gossip-making”. She was not, we may hazard, a

welcome guest or an altogether hospitable hostess. She had a way of

“bragging of myself” which frightened visitors so that they left, nor

was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck was the best place for

her, and her own company the most congenial, with the amiable Duke

wandering in and out, with his plays and his speculations, always ready

to answer a question or refute a slander. Perhaps it was this solitude

that led her, chaste as she was in conduct, to use language which in

time to come much perturbed Sir Egerton Brydges. She used, he

complained, “expressions and images of extraordinary coarseness as

flowing from a female of high rank brought up in courts”. He forgot that

this particular female had long ceased to frequent the Court; she

consorted chiefly with fairies; and her friends were among the dead.

Naturally, then, her language was coarse. Nevertheless, though her

philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses

mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of

authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and

lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page.

There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as

crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her

intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true

and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of

some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although

“they”, those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever

since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the face

at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all, had the wit

to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw for the

sufferings of the hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk to some

one “of Shakespeare’s fools”. Now, at any rate, the laugh is not all on

their side.

But laugh they did. When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess was

coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the

streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys twice brought him

to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the pressure of the crowd about

her coach was too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in her

silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a velvet cap on her head,

and her hair about her ears. He could only see for a moment between the

white curtains the face of “a very comely woman”, and on she drove

through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse

of that romantic lady, who stands in the picture at Welbeck, with large

melancholy eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing,

touching a table with the tips of long pointed fingers in the calm

assurance of immortal fame.

[Footnote 4: _The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Etc._,

edited by C. H. Firth; _Poems and Fancies_, by the Duchess of Newcastle;

_The World’s Olio; Orations of divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers

Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical Letters_, etc., etc.]

_Rambling Round Evelyn_

Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three

hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary.

Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a

private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only

in the grave. For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or

for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and

justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of

affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail,

volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not

necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business

and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men,

reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the

land.

The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth

anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn,[5] is a case in point. It is

sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar;

but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all

that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm

conscience to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to

read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man we have to

confess, first that diaries are always diaries, books, that is, that we

read in convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death; second, that

this reading, about which so many fine things have been said, is for the

most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book;

watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which

no critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only

the moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an

innocent employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from

trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from

changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy

or the pulpit.

It may be well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn’s book, to

decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his.

Ignorance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his ignorance, and

our comparative erudition. No one can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign

travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in

the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference

between us—that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the

gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with

the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the

alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here

no doubt we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the

house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral’s

head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane person in the twentieth century

would entertain such a project for a second. Individually we may know as

little as Evelyn, but collectively we know so much that there is little

incentive to venture on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia,

not the scissors; and know in two minutes not only more than was known

to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast

that it is scarcely worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant, yet

justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his

private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all

the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with

unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and drew inferences

and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to

the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they say, is so

much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and the

carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of

the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence,

carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen

when a whale came up the Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen.

“That year died Cromwell.” Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate

the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence

and eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods,

and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a

cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s bed the kitten was inevitably gifted

with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an

insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we

draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same things at

different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their ignorance

and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance alters the

nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would have been an

intolerable penance for us to live familiarly with the Elizabethans?

Should we have found it necessary to leave the room because of

Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen Elizabeth’s invitation

to dinner? Perhaps so. For Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement,

and yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to see the lions

fed.

. . . they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small cable, and

one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall about four feet from

the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about five

feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the

room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of

wood under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened

it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him out at

length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a pair of linen

drawers upon his naked body . . .

And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then remarked that “the

spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of

another”, as we might say that the lions growl so loud and the sight of

raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now visit the penguins. Allowing

for his discomfort, there is enough discrepancy between his view of pain

and ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with the same eyes,

marry any woman from the same motives, or judge any conduct by the same

standards. To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked, not to

flinch when the wooden horse was raised higher and the executioner

fetched a horn and poured two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to

suffer this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man denied—all

this seems to put Evelyn in one of those cages where we still mentally

seclude the riff-raff of Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have

somehow got it wrong. If we could maintain that our susceptibility to

suffering and love of justice were proof that all our humane instincts

were as highly developed as these, then we could say that the world

improves, and we with it. But let us get on with the diary.

In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled down unhappily enough,

“all being entirely in the rebels’ hands”, Evelyn returned to England

with his wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian glass and

the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of a country gentleman of

strong Royalist sympathies at Deptford. What with going to church and

going to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden—“I planted

the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon, wind west”—his time was spent

much as ours is. But there was one difference which it is difficult to

illustrate by a single quotation, because the evidence is scattered all

about in little insignificant phrases. The general effect of them is

that he used his eyes. The visible world was always close to him. The

visible world has receded so far from us that to hear all this talk of

buildings and gardens, statues and carving, as if the look of things

assailed one out of doors as well as in, and were not confined to a few

small canvases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt there are a

thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we have been finding excuses for

him. Wherever there was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore,

Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely-built house, a prospect, or a

garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped his coach to look at it, and

opened his diary to record his opinion. On August 27 Evelyn, with Dr.

Wren and others, was in St. Paul’s surveying “the general decay of that

ancient and venerable church”; held with Dr. Wren another judgement from

the rest; and had a mind to build it with “a noble cupola, a form of

church building not as yet known in England but of wonderful grace”, in

which Dr. Wren concurred. Six days later the Fire of London altered

their plans. It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself, chanced to

look in at the window of “a poor solitary thatched house in a field in

our parish”, there saw a young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome

with an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and carried

Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about the sufferings of

worms and sensitive to the dues of servant girls, but how pleasant also

if, with shut eyes, one could call up street after street of beautiful

houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the afternoon sun; a

picture has charm, especially as it displays the character of a

grandfather and dignifies a family descended from such a scowl; but

these are scattered fragments—little relics of beauty in a world that

has grown indescribably drab. To our charge of cruelty Evelyn might well

reply by pointing to Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he

should assert that nothing now has character or conviction, that no

farmer in England sleeps with an open coffin at his bedside to remind

him of death, we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we like the

country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn emerged in full possession

of a variety of accomplishments which in our time of specialists seems

remarkable enough. He was employed on public business; he was Secretary

to the Royal Society; he wrote plays and poems; he was the first

authority upon trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design for

the rebuilding of London; he went into the question of smoke and its

abatement—the lime trees in St. James’s Park being, it is said, the

result of his cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history of the

Dutch war—in short, he completely outdid the Squire of “The Princess”,

whom in many respects he anticipated—

A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,

A quarter sessions chairman abler none.

All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which

Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something

of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising, a little too sure

of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of other people. Or what

is the quality, or absence of quality, that checks our sympathies

partly, perhaps, it is due to some inconsistency which it would be harsh

to call by so strong a name as hypocrisy. Though he deplored the vices

of his age he could never keep away from the centre of them. “The

luxurious dallying and profaneness” of the Court, the sight of “Mrs.

Nelly” looking over her garden wall and holding “very familiar

discourse” with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute

disgust; yet he could never decide to break with the Court and retire to

“my poor but quiet villa”, which was of course the apple of his eye and

one of the show-places in England. Then, though he loved his daughter

Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the

number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her

funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent

that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs.

Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching

biography, “loved to be at funerals” and chose habitually “the dryest

and leanest morsels of meat”, which may be the habits of an angel but do

not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. But it is

Pepys who sums up our case against Evelyn; Pepys who said of him after

a long morning’s entertainment: “In fine a most excellent person he is

and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well

be so, being a man so much above others”. The words exactly hit the

mark, “A most excellent person he was”; but a little conceited.

Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection, inevitable,

unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was no genius. His writing is opaque

rather than transparent; we see no depths through it, nor any very

secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither make us hate a

regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But he writes a diary;

and he writes it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or other the

bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle

of communication, so that without laying stress on anything in

particular, stopping to dream, stopping to laugh, stopping merely to

look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His garden for example—how

delightful is his disparagement of it, and how acid his criticism of the

gardens of others! Then, we may be sure, the hens at Sayes Court laid

the very best eggs in England, and when the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow

through his hedge what a catastrophe it was, and we can guess how Mrs.

Evelyn dusted and polished, and how Evelyn himself grumbled, and how

punctilious and efficient and trustworthy he was, how prone to give

advice, how ready to read his own works aloud, and how affectionate,

withal, lamenting bitterly but not effusively, for the man with the

long-drawn sensitive face was never that, the death of the little

prodigy Richard, and recording how “after evening prayers was my child

buried near the rest of his brothers—my very dear children.” He was not

an artist; no phrases linger in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves

up in memory; but as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s

story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned

again, leading up to crises which never take place, introducing Sir

Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its fascination. All

through his pages good men, bad men, celebrities, nonentities are coming

into the room and going out again. The greater number we scarcely

notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and again

the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure

sitting still in a full light. They have struck no attitude, arranged no

mantle. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they

will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the

old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our

eyes wander from one to the other; our affections settle here or

there—on hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had

a dog that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner, was for

shooting his horse when it fell down a precipice; on Mr. Saladine; on

Mr. Saladine’s beautiful daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva

to make love to Mr. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all,

grown old, walking in his garden at Wotton, his sorrows smoothed out,

his grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his

lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting on

his dahlias too.

[Footnote 5: Written in 1920.]

_Defoe_[6]

The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries lest he should find

himself measuring a diminishing spectre and forced to foretell its

approaching dissolution is not only absent in the case of _Robinson

Crusoe_ but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true that

_Robinson Crusoe_ is two hundred years of age upon the twenty-fifth of

April 1919, but far from raising the familiar speculations as to whether

people now read it and will continue to read it, the effect of the

bi-centenary is to make us marvel that _Robinson Crusoe_, the perennial

and immortal, should have been in existence so short a time as that. The

book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race itself

rather than the effort of a single mind; and as for celebrating its

centenary we should as soon think of celebrating the centenaries of

Stonehenge itself. Something of this we may attribute to the fact that

we have all had _Robinson Crusoe_ read aloud to us as children, and were

thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the

Greeks were in towards Homer. It never occurred to us that there was

such a person as Defoe, and to have been told that _Robinson Crusoe_ was

the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us

unpleasantly or meant nothing at all. The impressions of childhood are

those that last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the name of

Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the title-page of _Robinson

Crusoe_, and if we celebrate the bi-centenary of the book we are making

a slightly unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge, it is

still in existence.

The great fame of the book has done its author some injustice; for while

it has given him a kind of anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that

he was a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were not

read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Editor of the _Christian

World_ in the year 1870 appealed to “the boys and girls of England” to

erect a monument upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of lightning

had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the memory of the author of

_Robinson Crusoe_. No mention was made of _Moll Flanders_. Considering

the topics which are dealt with in that book, and in _Roxana, Captain

Singleton, Colonel Jack_ and the rest, we need not be surprised, though

we may be indignant, at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the

biographer of Defoe, that these “are not works for the drawing-room

table”. But unless we consent to make that useful piece of furniture the

final arbiter of taste, we must deplore the fact that their superficial

coarseness, or the universal celebrity of _Robinson Crusoe_, has led

them to be far less widely famed than they deserve. On any monument

worthy of the name of monument the names of _Moll Flanders_ and

_Roxana_, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe.

They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably

great. The occasion of the bi-centenary of their more famous companion

may well lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has so much

in common with his, may be found to consist.

Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the

predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed to

shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to

labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his

novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived

partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel had

to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a sound

moral. “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most

scandalous crime,” he wrote. “It is a sort of lying that makes a great

hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.”

Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works, therefore, he

takes pains to insist that he has not used his invention at all but has

depended upon facts, and that his purpose has been the highly moral

desire to convert the vicious or to warn the innocent. Happily these

were principles that tallied very well with his natural disposition and

endowments. Facts had been drilled into him by sixty years of varying

fortunes before he turned his experience to account in fiction. “I have

some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life in this distich,” he

wrote:

No man has tasted differing fortunes more,

And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.

He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves,

pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll

Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and

accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the

imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe knew

the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but that

the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to shift for

itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for his art.

In the first pages of each of his great novels he reduces his hero or

heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that their existence must

be a continued struggle, and their survival at all the result of luck

and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate of a criminal

mother; Captain Singleton was stolen as a child and sold to the gipsies;

Colonel Jack, though “born a gentleman, was put ’prentice to a

pickpocket”; Roxana starts under better auspices, but, having married at

fifteen, she sees her husband go bankrupt and is left with five children

in “a condition the most deplorable that words can express”.

Thus each of these boys and girls has the world to begin and the battle

to fight for himself. The situation thus created was entirely to Defoe’s

liking. From her very birth or with half a year’s respite at most, Moll

Flanders, the most notable of them, is goaded by “that worst of devils,

poverty”, forced to earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from

place to place, making no demands upon her creator for the subtle

domestic atmosphere which he was unable to supply, but drawing upon him

for all he knew of strange people and customs. From the outset the

burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her. She has to depend

entirely upon her own wits and judgement, and to deal with each

emergency as it arises by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged

in her own head. The briskness of the story is due partly to the fact

that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has

henceforth the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that

she should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the

peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious

danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll

Flanders was a woman on her own account and not only material for a

succession of adventures. In proof of this she begins, as Roxana also

begins, by falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That she

must rouse herself and marry some one else and look very closely to her

settlements and prospects is no slight upon her passion, but to be laid

to the charge of her birth; and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a person

of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of telling lies when

they serve her purpose, there is something undeniable about her truth

when she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon the refinements of

personal affection; one tear is dropped, one moment of despair allowed,

and then “on with the story”. She has a spirit that loves to breast the

storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers. When she

discovers that the man she has married in Virginia is her own brother

she is violently disgusted; she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as

she sets foot in Bristol, “I took the diversion of going to Bath, for as

I was still far from being old so my humour, which was always gay,

continued so to an extreme”. Heartless she is not, nor can any one

charge her with levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives

has us all in tow. Moreover, her ambition has that slight strain of

imagination in it which puts it in the category of the noble passions.

Shrewd and practical of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for

romance and for the quality which to her perception makes a man a

gentleman. “It was really a true gallant spirit he was of, and it was

the more grievous to me. ’Tis something of relief even to be undone by a

man of honour rather than by a scoundrel,” she writes when she had

misled a highwayman as to the extent of her fortune. It is in keeping

with this temper that she should be proud of her final partner because

he refuses to work when they reach the plantations but prefers hunting,

and that she should take pleasure in buying him wigs and silver-hilted

swords “to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine gentleman”.

Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the passion with which

she kissed the ground that her son had trod on, and her noble tolerance

of every kind of fault so long as it is not “complete baseness of

spirit, imperious, cruel, and relentless when uppermost, abject and

low-spirited when down”. For the rest of the world she has nothing but

good-will.

Since the list of the qualities and graces of this seasoned old sinner

is by no means exhausted we can well understand how it was that Borrow’s

apple-woman on London Bridge called her “blessed Mary” and valued her

book above all the apples on her stall; and that Borrow, taking the book

deep into the booth, read till his eyes ached. But we dwell upon such

signs of character only by way of proof that the creator of Moll

Flanders was not, as he has been accused of being, a mere journalist and

literal recorder of facts with no conception of the nature of

psychology. It is true that his characters take shape and substance of

their own accord, as if in despite of the author and not altogether to

his liking. He never lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or

pathos, but presses on imperturbably as if they came there without his

knowledge. A touch of imagination, such as that when the Prince sits by

his son’s cradle and Roxana observes how “he loved to look at it when it

was asleep”, seems to mean much more to us than to him. After the

curiously modern dissertation upon the need of communicating matters of

importance to a second person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should

talk of it in our sleep, he apologises for his digression. He seems to

have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them

without exactly knowing how; and, like all unconscious artists, he

leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring

to the surface.

The interpretation that we put on his characters might therefore well

have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was careful to

disguise even from himself. Thus it comes about that we admire Moll

Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we believe that Defoe had

made up his mind as to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware

that in considering the lives of the abandoned he raised many deep

questions and hinted, if he did not state, answers quite at variance

with his professions of belief. From the evidence supplied by his essay

upon the “Education of Women” we know that he had thought deeply and

much in advance of his age upon the capacities of women, which he rated

very high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated very harsh.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the

world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we

deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day

with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they the

advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than

ourselves.

The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim

Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear

that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines

upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar

hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy.

Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to

“stand their ground”; and at once gave practical demonstration of the

benefits that would result. Roxana, a lady of the same profession,

argues more subtly against the slavery of marriage. She “had started a

new thing in the world” the merchant told her; “it was a way of arguing

contrary to the general practise”. But Defoe is the last writer to be

guilty of bald preaching. Roxana keeps our attention because she is

blessedly unconscious that she is in any good sense an example to her

sex and is thus at liberty to own that part of her argument is “of an

elevated strain which was really not in my thoughts at first, at all”.

The knowledge of her own frailties and the honest questioning of her own

motives, which that knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping

her fresh and human when the martyrs and pioneers of so many problem

novels have shrunken and shrivelled to the pegs and props of their

respective creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does not rest upon the fact

that he can be shown to have anticipated some of the views of Meredith,

or to have written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs) might have

been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his ideas upon the position of

women, they are an incidental result of his chief virtue, which is that

he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the

passing and trivial. He is often dull. He can imitate the matter-of-fact

precision of a scientific traveller until we wonder that his pen could

trace or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of truth to

soften its dryness. He leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a

large part of human nature. All this we may admit, though we have to

admit defects as grave in many writers whom we call great. But that does

not impair the peculiar merit of what remains. Having at the outset

limited his scope and confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of

insight which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact

which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flanders and her friends

recommended themselves to him not because they were, as we should say,

“picturesque”; nor, as he affirmed, because they were examples of evil

living by which the public might profit. It was their natural veracity,

bred in them by a life of hardship, that excited his interest. For them

there were no excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives. Poverty

was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pronounce more than a judgement of

the lips upon their failings. But their courage and resource and

tenacity delighted him. He found their society full of good talk, and

pleasant stories, and faith in each other, and morality of a home-made

kind. Their fortunes had that infinite variety which he praised and

relished and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men and women,

above all, were free to talk openly of the passions and desires which

have moved men and women since the beginning of time, and thus even now

they keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in everything

that is looked at openly. Even the sordid subject of money, which plays

so large a part in their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when

it stands not for ease and consequence but for honour, honesty and life

itself. You may object that Defoe is humdrum, but never that he is

engrossed with petty things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain writers, whose work

is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistent, though not most

seductive, in human nature. The view of London from Hungerford Bridge,

grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued stir of traffic and

business, prosaic if it were not for the masts of the ships and the

towers and domes of the city, brings him to mind. The tattered girls

with violets in their hands at the street corners, and the old

weather-beaten women patiently displaying their matches and bootlaces

beneath the shelter of arches, seem like characters from his books. He

is of the school of Crabbe, and of Gissing, and not merely a fellow

pupil in the same stern place of learning, but its founder and master.

[Footnote 6: Written in 1919.]

_Addison_[7]

In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opinion that Joseph Addison

had enriched our literature with compositions “that will live as long as

the English language”. But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an opinion it

was not merely an opinion. Even now, at a distance of seventy-six years,

the words seem to issue from the mouth of the chosen representative of

the people. There is an authority about them, a sonority, a sense of

responsibility, which put us in mind of a Prime Minister making a

proclamation on behalf of a great empire rather than of a journalist

writing about a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article upon

Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of the famous essays.

Florid, and at the same time extremely solid, the phrases seem to build

up a monument, at once square and lavishly festooned with ornament,

which should serve Addison for shelter so long as one stone of

Westminster Abbey stands upon another. Yet, though we may have read and

admired this particular essay times out of number (as we say when we

have read anything three times over), it has never occurred to us,

strangely enough, to believe that it is true. That is apt to happen to

the admiring reader of Macaulay’s essays. While delighting in their

richness, force, and variety, and finding every judgement, however

emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to us to connect these

sweeping assertions and undeniable convictions with anything so minute

as a human being. So it is with Addison. “If we wish”, Macaulay writes,

“to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go

either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes”. “We have not the least doubt

that if Addison had written a novel on an extensive plan it would have

been superior to any that we possess.” His essays, again, “fully entitle

him to the rank of a great poet”; and, to complete the edifice, we have

Voltaire proclaimed “the prince of buffoons”, and together with Swift

forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank above them both as a

humorist.

Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament look grotesque enough,

but in their place—such is the persuasive power of design—they are

part of the decoration; they complete the monument. Whether Addison or

another is interred within, it is a very fine tomb. But now that two

centuries have passed since the real body of Addison was laid by night

under the Abbey floor, we are, through no merit of our own, partially

qualified to test the first of the flourishes on that fictitious

tombstone to which, though it may be empty, we have done homage, in a

formal kind of way, these sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison

will live as long as the English language. Since every moment brings

proof that our mother tongue is more lusty and lively than sorts with

complete sedateness or chastity, we need only concern ourselves with the

vitality of Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we should

apply to the present condition of the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. To

take a rough test, it is possible to discover how many people in the

course of a year borrow Addison’s works from the public library, and a

particular instance affords us the not very encouraging information that

during nine years two people yearly take out the first volume of the

_Spectator_. The second volume is less in request than the first. The

inquiry is not a cheerful one. From certain marginal comments and pencil

marks it seems that these rare devotees seek out only the famous

passages and, as their habit is, score what we are bold enough to

consider the least admirable phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is

not in the public libraries. It is in libraries that are markedly

private, secluded, shaded by lilac trees and brown with folios, that he

still draws his faint, regular breath. If any man or woman is going to

solace himself with a page of Addison before the June sun is out of the

sky to-day, it is in some such pleasant retreat as this.

Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones, we may be sure

that there are people engaged in reading Addison, whatever the year or

season. For Addison is very well worth reading. The temptation to read

Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thackeray on Addison, Johnson on

Addison rather than Addison himself is to be resisted, for you will

find, if you study the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, glance at _Cato_,

and run through the remainder of the six moderate-sized volumes, that

Addison is neither Pope’s Addison nor anybody else’s Addison, but a

separate, independent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut

shape of himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and distracted as it

is, of nineteen hundred and nineteen. It is true that the fate of the

lesser shades is always a little precarious. They are so easily obscured

or distorted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go through the

cherishing and humanising process which is necessary to get into touch

with a writer of the second class who may, after all, have little to

give us. The earth is crusted over them; their features are obliterated,

and perhaps it is not a head of the best period that we rub clean in the

end, but only the chip of an old pot. The chief difficulty with the

lesser writers, however, is not only the effort. It is that our

standards have changed. The things that they like are not the things

that we like; and as the charm of their writing depends much more upon

taste than upon conviction, a change of manners is often quite enough to

put us out of touch altogether. That is one of the most troublesome

barriers between ourselves and Addison. He attached great importance to

certain qualities. He had a very precise notion of what we are used to

call “niceness” in man or woman. He was extremely fond of saying that

men ought not to be atheists, and that women ought not to wear large

petticoats. This directly inspires in us not so much a sense of distaste

as a sense of difference. Dutifully, if at all, we strain our

imaginations to conceive the kind of audience to whom these precepts

were addressed. The _Tatler_ was published in 1709; the _Spectator_ a

year or two later. What was the state of England at that particular

moment? Why was Addison so anxious to insist upon the necessity of a

decent and cheerful religious belief? Why did he so constantly, and in

the main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and their reform?

Why was he so deeply impressed with the evils of party government? Any

historian will explain; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in

the services of any historian. A writer should give us direct certainty;

explanations are so much water poured into the wine. As it is, we can

only feel that these counsels are addressed to ladies in hoops and

gentlemen in wigs—a vanished audience which has learnt its lesson and

gone its way and the preacher with it. We can only smile and marvel and

perhaps admire the clothes.

And that is not the way to read. To be thinking that dead people

deserved these censures and admired this morality, judged the eloquence,

which we find so frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so superficial,

profound, to take a collector’s joy in such signs of antiquity, is to

treat literature as if it were a broken jar of undeniable age but

doubtful beauty, to be stood in a cabinet behind glass doors. The charm

which still makes _Cato_ very readable is much of this nature. When

Syphax exclaims,

So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,

Sudden, th’ impetuous hurricanes descend,

Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,

Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away,

The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,

Sees the dry desert all around him rise,

And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,

we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded theatre, the feathers

nodding emphatically on the ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward

to tap their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour how vastly

fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how can we be excited? And so with

Bishop Hurd and his notes—his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully

exact, both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene confidence that

when “the present humour of idolising Shakespeare is over”, the time will

come when _Cato_ is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious

critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of pleasant fancies,

both as to the faded frippery of our ancestors’ minds and the bold

opulence of our own. But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone

that other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us contemporary with

the author, persuades us that his object is our own. Occasionally in

_Cato_ one may pick up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the

most part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unquestionably the

noblest production of Addison’s genius” has become collector’s

literature.

Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with some suspicion as to

the need of condescension in their minds. The question to be asked is

whether Addison, attached as he was to certain standards of gentility,

morality, and taste, has not become one of those people of exemplary

character and charming urbanity who must never be talked to about

anything more exciting than the weather. We have some slight suspicion

that the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ are nothing but talk, couched in

perfect English, about the number of fine days this year compared with

the number of wet the year before. The difficulty of getting on to equal

terms with him is shown by the little fable which he introduces into one

of the early numbers of the _Tatler_, of “a young gentleman, of moderate

understanding, but great vivacity, who . . . had got a little smattering

of knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or a freethinker, but not a

philosopher, or a man of sense”. This young gentleman visits his father

in the country, and proceeds “to enlarge the narrowness of the country

notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler

by his table-talk, and staggered his eldest sister. . . . ’Till one day,

talking of his setting dog . . . said ‘he did not question but Tray was

as immortal as any one of the family’; and in the heat of the argument

told his father, that for his own part, ‘he expected to die like a dog’.

Upon which, the old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out,

‘Then, sirrah, you shall live like one’; and taking his cane in his

hand, cudgelled him out of his system. This had so good an effect upon

him, that he took up from that day, fell to reading good books, and is

now a bencher in the Middle-Temple.” There is a good deal of Addison in

that story: his dislike of “dark and uncomfortable prospects”; his

respect for “principles which are the support, happiness, and glory of

all public societies, as well as private persons”; his solicitude for

the butler; and his conviction that to read good books and become a

bencher in the Middle Temple is the proper end for a very vivacious

young gentleman. This Mr. Addison married a countess, “gave his little

senate laws”, and, sending for young Lord Warwick, made that famous

remark about seeing how a Christian can die which has fallen upon such

evil days that our sympathies are with the foolish, and perhaps fuddled,

young peer rather than with the frigid gentleman, not too far gone for a

last spasm of self-complacency, upon the bed.

Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the

corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity,

and see what, for us in our time, remains. In the first place, there

remains the not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence, of

being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to that; and then, slipped

in on the tide of the smooth, well-turned prose, are little eddies,

diminutive waterfalls, agreeably diversifying the polished surface. We

begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on the part of the

essayist which light up the prim, impeccable countenance of the moralist

and convince us that, however tightly he may have pursed his lips, his

eyes are very bright and not so shallow after all. He is alert to his

finger tips. Little muffs, silver garters, fringed gloves draw his

attention; he observes with a keen, quick glance, not unkindly, and full

rather of amusement than of censure. To be sure, the age was rich in

follies. Here were coffee-houses packed with politicians talking of

Kings and Emperors and letting their own small affairs go to ruin.

Crowds applauded the Italian opera every night without understanding a

word of it. Critics discoursed of the unities. Men gave a thousand

pounds for a handful of tulip roots. As for women—or “the fair sex”, as

Addison liked to call them—their follies were past counting. He did his

best to count them, with a loving particularity which roused the ill

humour of Swift. But he did it very charmingly, with a natural relish

for the task, as the following passage shows:

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned

with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx

shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock,

parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be

searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature

furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is

the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as

for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow

it.

In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense and taste and

civilisation. Of that little fraternity, often so obscure and yet so

indispensable, who in every age keep themselves alive to the importance

of art and letters and music, watching, discriminating, denouncing and

delighting, Addison was one—distinguished and strangely contemporary

with ourselves. It would have been, so one imagines, a great pleasure to

take him a manuscript; a great enlightenment, as well as a great honour,

to have his opinion. In spite of Pope, one fancies that his would have

been criticism of the best order, open-minded and generous to novelty,

and yet, in the final resort, unfaltering in its standards. The boldness

which is a proof of vigour is shown by his defence of “Chevy Chase”. He

had so clear a notion of what he meant by the “very spirit and soul of

fine writing” as to track it down in an old barbarous ballad or

rediscover it in “that divine work” “Paradise Lost”. Moreover, far from

being a connoisseur only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he

was aware of the present; a severe critic of its “Gothic taste”,

vigilant in protecting the rights and honours of the language, and all

in favour of simplicity and quiet. Here we have the Addison of Will’s

and Button’s, who, sitting late into the night and drinking more than

was good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and began to talk.

Then he “chained the attention of every one to him”. “Addison’s

conversation”, said Pope, “had something in it more charming than I have

found in any other man.” One can well believe it, for his essays at

their best preserve the very cadence of easy yet exquisitely modulated

conversation—the smile checked before it has broadened into laughter,

the thought lightly turned from frivolity or abstraction, the ideas

springing, bright, new, various, with the utmost spontaneity. He seems

to speak what comes into his head, and is never at the trouble of

raising his voice. But he has described himself in the character of the

lute better than any one can do it for him.

The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that sounds very

finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its notes are exquisitely

sweet, and very low, easily drowned in a multitude of instruments, and

even lost among a few, unless you give a particular attention to it. A

lute is seldom heard in a company of more than five, whereas a drum will

show itself to advantage in an assembly of 500. The lutanists,

therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon reflection, great

affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a good taste, who are the

only proper judges of so delightful and soft a melody.

Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be less appropriate

than Lord Macaulay’s. To call Addison on the strength of his essays a

great poet, or to prophesy that if he had written a novel on an

extensive plan it would have been “superior to any that we possess”, is

to confuse him with the drums and trumpets; it is not merely to

overpraise his merits, but to overlook them. Dr. Johnson superbly, and,

as his manner is, once and for all has summed up the quality of

Addison’s poetic genius:

His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be confessed that

it has not often those felicities of diction which give lustre to

sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates diction; there is

little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is very rarely the

awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the splendour of elegance. He

thinks justly; but he thinks faintly.

The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which have the most

resemblance, on the surface, to a novel. But their merit consists in the

fact that they do not adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate anything;

they exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To read them as if

they were a first hesitating experiment containing the seed of greatness

to come is to miss the peculiar point of them. They are studies done

from the outside by a quiet spectator. When read together they compose a

portrait of the Squire and his circle all in characteristic

positions—one with his rod, another with his hounds—but each can be

detached from the rest without damage to the design or harm to himself.

In a novel, where each chapter gains from the one before it or adds to

the one that follows it, such separations would be intolerable. The

speed, the intricacy, the design, would be mutilated. These particular

qualities are perhaps lacking, but nevertheless Addison’s method has

great advantages. Each of these essays is very highly finished. The

characters are defined by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes.

Inevitably, where the sphere is so narrow—an essay is only three or

four pages in length—there is not room for great depth or intricate

subtlety. Here, from the _Spectator_, is a good example of the witty and

decisive manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill the

little frame:

Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself obliged in

duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a sudden fit of laughter as

a breach of his baptismal vow. An innocent jest startles him like

blasphemy. Tell him of one who is advanced to a title of honour, he

lifts up his hands and eyes; describe a public ceremony, he shakes his

head; shew him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All the little

ornaments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton, and wit

profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and at childhood

for being playful. He sits at a christening, or at a marriage-feast, as

at a funeral; sighs at the conclusion of a merry story, and grows devout

when the rest of the company grow pleasant. After all Sombrius is a

religious man, and would have behaved himself very properly, had he

lived when Christianity was under a general persecution.

The novel is not a development from that model, for the good reason that

no development along these lines is possible. Of its kind such a

portrait is perfect; and when we find, scattered up and down the

_Spectator_ and the _Tatler_, numbers of such little masterpieces with

fancies and anecdotes in the same style, some doubt as to the narrowness

of such a sphere becomes inevitable. The form of the essay admits of its

own particular perfection; and if anything is perfect the exact

dimensions of its perfection become immaterial. One can scarcely settle

whether, on the whole, one prefers a raindrop to the River Thames. When

we have said all that we can say against them—that many are dull,

others superficial, the allegories faded, the piety conventional, the

morality trite—there still remains the fact that the essays of Addison

are perfect essays. Always at the highest point of any art there comes a

moment when everything seems in a conspiracy to help the artist, and his

achievement becomes a natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to

a later age, half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day after day, essay

after essay, knew instinctively and exactly how to do it. Whether it was

a high thing, or whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more

profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is due to Addison

that prose is now prosaic—the medium which makes it possible for people

of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.

Addison is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable progeny. Pick up

the first weekly journal and the article upon the “Delights of Summer”

or the “Approach of Age” will show his influence. But it will also show,

unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary essayist, is attached

to it, that we have lost the art of writing essays. What with our views

and our virtues, our passions and profundities, the shapely silver drop,

that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions of human life,

is now nothing but a hold—all knobbed with luggage packed in a hurry.

Even so, the essayist will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it,

to write like Addison.

In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more than once amused

himself with speculations as to the fate of his writings. He had a just

idea of their nature and value. “I have new-pointed all the batteries of

ridicule”, he wrote. Yet, because so many of his darts had been directed

against ephemeral follies, “absurd fashions, ridiculous customs, and

affected forms of speech”, the time would come, in a hundred years,

perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would be “like so many pieces of

old plate, where the weight will be regarded, but the fashion lost”. Two

hundred years have passed; the plate is worn smooth; the pattern almost

rubbed out; but the metal is pure silver.

[Footnote 7: Written in 1919.]

_The Lives of the Obscure_

Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this faded,

out-of-date, obsolete library, which with a little help from the rates,

is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and

country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to dust.

In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that look to the sea

and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled

street below, a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local

flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath. The elderly, the

marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper, or sit holding

their heads over back numbers of _The Illustrated London News_ and the

_Wesleyan Chronicle_. No one has spoken aloud here since the room was

opened in 1854. The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each

other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are

flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why

re-open those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over

his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which indeed has become

laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763,

1080, and 606.

I