"Don't give people nicknames! don't, even in fun,
Call any one 'snuff-colored son of a gun'!"
And they generally wind up with some slyly shrewd piece of worldly
wisdom and wit. Thus, the closing moral to 'The Blasphemer's
Warning' is:--
"To married men this--For the rest of your lives,
Think how your misconduct may act on your wives!
Don't swear then before them, lest haply they faint,
Or--what sometimes occurs--run away with a Saint!"
Often they are broader yet, and intended for the club rather than the
family. Indeed, the tales as a whole are club tales, with an audience of
club-men always in mind; not, be it remembered, bestialities like their
French counterparts, or the later English and American improvements on
the French, not even objectionable for general reading, but full of
exclusively masculine joking, allusions, and winks, unintelligible to
the other sex, and not welcome if they were intelligible.
He has plenty of melody, but it is hardly recognized because of the
doggerel meaning, which swamps the music in the farce. And this applies
to more important things than the melody. The average reader floats on
the surface of this rapid and foamy stream, covered with sticks and
straws and flowers and bonbons, and never realizes its depth and volume.
This light frothy verse is only the vehicle of a solid and laborious
antiquarian scholarship, of an immense knowledge of the world and
society, books and men. He modestly disclaimed having any imagination,
and said he must always have facts to work upon. This was true; but the
same may be said of some great poets, who have lacked invention except
around a skeleton ready furnished. What was true of Keats and Fitzgerald
cannot nullify the merit of Barham. His fancy erected a huge and
consistent superstructure on a very slender foundation. The same
materials lay ready to the hands of thousands of others, who, however,
saw only stupid monkish fables or dull country superstition.
His own explanation of his handling of the church legends tickles a
critic's sense of humor almost as much as the verses themselves. It is
true that while differing utterly in his tone of mind, and his attitude
toward the mediaeval stories, from that of the mediaeval artists and
sculptors,--whose gargoyles and other grotesques were carved without a
thought of travesty on anything religious,--he is at one with them in
combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence
of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion. He burlesques
saints and devils alike, mocks the swarm of miracles of the mediaeval
Church, makes salient all the ludicrous aspects of mediaeval religious
faith in its devout credulity and barbarous gropings; yet he never
sneers at holiness or real aspiration, and through all the riot of fun
in his masques, one feels the sincere Christian and the warm-hearted
man. But he was evidently troubled by the feeling that a clergyman ought
not to ridicule any form in which religious feeling had ever clothed
itself; and he justified himself by professing that he wished to expose
the absurdity of old superstitions and mummeries to help countervail the
effect of the Oxford movement. Ingoldsby as a soldier of Protestantism,
turning monkish stories into rollicking farces in order to show up what
he conceived to be the errors of his opponents, is as truly Ingoldsbian
a figure as any in his own 'Legends.' Yet one need not accuse him of
hypocrisy or falsehood, hardly even of self-deception. He felt that dead
superstitions, and stories not reverenced even by the Church that
developed them, were legitimate material for any use he could make of
them; he felt that in dressing them up with his wit and fancy he was
harming nothing that existed, nor making any one look lightly on the
religion of Christ or the Church of Christ: and that they were the
property of an opposing church body was a happy thought to set his
conscience at rest. He wrote them thenceforth with greater peace of mind
and added satisfaction, and no doubt really believed that he was doing
good in the way he alleged. And if the excuse gave to the world even one
more of the inimitable 'Legends,' it was worth feeling and making.
Barham's nature was not one which felt the problems and tragedies of the
world deeply. He grieved for his friends, he helped the distresses he
saw, but his imagination rested closely in the concrete. He was
incapable of _weltschmerz_; even for things just beyond his personal
ken he had little vision or fancy. His treatment of the perpetual
problem of sex-temptations and lapses is a good example: he never seems
to be conscious of the tragedy they envelop. To him they are always good
jokes, to wink over or smile at or be indulgent to. No one would ever
guess from 'Ingoldsby' the truth he finds even in 'Don Juan,' that
"A heavy price must all pay who thus err,
In some shape."
But we cannot have everything: if Barham had been sensitive to the
tragic side of life, he could not have been the incomparable fun-maker
he was. We do not go to the 'Ingoldsby Legends' to solace our souls when
hurt or remorseful, to brace ourselves for duty, or to feel ourselves
nobler by contact with the expression of nobility. But there must be
play and rest for the senses, as well as work and aspiration; and there
are worse services than relieving the strain of serious endeavor by
enabling us to become jolly pagans once again for a little space, and
care naught for the morrow.