but I suspect that the most elephantine of them, if reduced to
essentials, would be as commonplace as his more comprehensible statements
that “Social criticism is the sign manual of the age,” and that “the
emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, is on the way”—which last
gets a whole paragraph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all; to
see “Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips” thus bracketed; to learn that Wilde’s
father was also “the father of modern otology,” and to be told that
Maeterlinck’s “eternal prayer” is, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh
would melt”! That is on page 203; but the effect is somewhat marred by
the fact that precisely the same “cry” has been, on page 37, attributed
to Strindberg. Personally I plump for Maeterlinck.
“Another Century, and then ...”
There is a certain sort of dull criticism which Dr. Johnson admirably
stigmatized when he said that “there is no great merit in telling
how many plays have ghosts in them and how this ghost is better than
that.” A great deal of American (not to speak of German) academic
criticism belongs to this category; and especially those theses which
are written by postgraduate students and candidates for the doctor’s
degree. These persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputations
from well-deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity in inventing
original classifications and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But
now and again such students manage to produce some enlightening piece
of “research” work, and _The French Revolution and the English Novel_
(Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is by Allene Gregory; and as
I cannot tell from the name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I shall
call him Miss.
“This study in the _tendenz_ novel was begun with the idea of paralleling
Dr. Hancock’s book, _The French Revolution and the English Poets_.” That
is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly academic
flavour about it. The book is a “scientific” treatise; it would not
have been written, so to say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an
English novelist. If it dealt with the purely literary merits, which are
few, of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. But its real
purpose is to supply a chapter to the history of ideas, and especially
Liberal political and social ideas. Many people talk as though they
thought that the novel which canvasses the “problems” of sex, property,
and religion were an invention of the last thirty years; and many others
are under the impression that Charles Dickens was the first person to use
fiction—though not, of course, the first person to employ fictions—for
the promotion of legislation. Books about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
are occasionally written; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the
chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given considerable notice in
Mr. Brailsford’s excellent little book in the Home University Library.
But, as far as my experience goes, there seem to be very few who know
that England produced a century ago a whole group of novelists whose
principal aim was not to “tell a straightforward story” or make the flesh
creep, but to blow up the foundations of society with the gunpowder in
the jam.
Miss Gregory’s book is very comprehensive. Her principal figures are
Holcroft, Godwin, and Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their
novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. Holcroft, one of
the most lovable figures in the history of English democracy, was the
sort of man who is regarded as an obscure crank in his lifetime, then
forgotten for a time, and ultimately recognized as a person of historical
importance. He lived a long life, and harmed nobody in the course of it.
As a stable-boy in a racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and Swift
(whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must have had a local colour for him);
he was afterwards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, novelist,
and playwright, one of his plays being _The Road to Ruin_. When the
Society for Constitutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was arrested
with Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke, and it was alleged against him, as
justification for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled moral
as against physical force. His associates being acquitted, he was never
brought to trial: there comes a point at which even a Government begins
to feel it is making an ass of itself. Holcroft’s courage never weakened
“when Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had recanted, and
Godwin and Paine had fallen silent, and all the world seemed to have
forgotten its vision of democracy.” He himself stated in terms: “Whenever
I have undertaken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a specific
moral purpose.” His best novels are _Hugh Trevor_ and _Anna St. Ives_.
In the latter the hero, Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking
service rather than self-interest as his guiding principle, remarks:
“Let men look around and deny if they can that the present
wretched system of each providing for himself instead of the
whole for the whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and
hatred. Well, well!—another century, and then....”
Just a century has passed.
Of Godwin’s novels _Caleb Williams_ is the only one that is at all read
nowadays. In spite of its impossibilities of character and action, it is
a very good tract, especially where it deals with the prison system. Miss
Gregory’s extracts from _Caleb Williams_ might have been more profuse;
but she gives interesting accounts of _St. Leon_ and _Fleetwood_. In
the first of these a gentleman who possesses the philosopher’s stone
breaks into long reflections on “gold _versus_ actual wealth”; in the
other there are eloquent passages about the horrors of child-slavery in
factories which anticipate the factory reports of a generation later,
and which were so much in advance of their time that they still hold
good in reference to certain of the States of America. Godwin saw the
whole thing very clearly: the pale, emaciated child given the free man’s
right of selling his labour at his own price in the open market and, as
Godwin put it, able to earn salt to his bread at four, but unable to
earn bread to his salt at forty. The placid Bage’s novels were admired
by Walter Scott. The most original is _Hermsprong, or Man as he is not_,
the hero of which—who enters civilized society after being brought up
among the Red Indians, and quails at the change—criticizes institutions
with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in _An Unsocial
Socialist_.
Shelley’s _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_ are only interesting, if
interesting at all, because they were written by their author. Miss
Gregory ploughs through them, and also through the novels of Charlotte
Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. She has a very interesting chapter
on Mary Wollstonecraft and the early Women’s Rights authors. I find most
alluring the bare mention made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of
whom I had never previously heard, who admired Napoleon enthusiastically.
In 1810, according to Crabb Robinson,
“she declared she would welcome him if he invaded England
because he would do away with aristocracy and give the country
a better government.”
Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti-revolutionary novelists,
especially George Walker and Charles Lucas, of _The Infernal Quixote_.
Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through the medium of novels
was a recognized sport then as now; and Lucas instituted an elaborate
comparison between political and religious revivalists. A good
bibliography rounds off a very laudable compilation which should interest
all persons of subversive views and direct the reading of the curious
into some very agreeable channels.
Herrick
Mr. F. W. Moorman has edited for the Oxford Press a new edition of
Herrick, which should supersede all its predecessors. There is very
little editorial matter; Mr. Moorman has already written a _Life_, and
his introduction and notes have a purely textual reference. The text,
which is as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, is based upon a
collation of various divergent copies of the first edition; for Herrick
appears to have hung about the printer’s making alterations whilst the
sheets were going through the press. And a full list is given of variants
which occur in other printed copies of some of the poems and in MSS., of
which the editor records several which have not previously been dealt
with.
Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisticated warbler pouring forth
profuse strains of unpremeditated art may study these variants and
correct himself. Mr. Moorman—I suppose he has sufficient reason, though
he leaves one to guess what it is—assumes that the versions in MSS. and
anthologies, etc., including those published after the _Hesperides_, are
all earlier than the versions in the _Hesperides_. Now and then one is
sorry that this should be so, as when the presumably earlier
_And night will come when men will swear_
_Time has spilt snow upon your haire,_
is changed into
_And time will come when you shall weare_
_Such frost and snow upon your haire._
But almost invariably the changes are improvements; and they are
exceedingly numerous. Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a
poem may be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of attempts at a
line; and if we had more of Herrick’s original MSS. available, we should
no doubt find every poem a mass of trial trips and deletions. He blotted,
filed, and pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and he had the most
delicate and deliberate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. This
rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a craftsman and a connoisseur.
What distinguishes his best—they are so well known that I need not quote
them—poems from his second best is usually that the former have some
especially taking touch of tenderness. It is never very deep; even in an
epitaph he is more concerned with turning it well than with the, often
apocryphal, death of the person commemorated. His adorations and griefs
are as light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in their way, and it is
rather a slight difference in the quality of his emotion than a relative
superiority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his most perfect lyrics.
His strongest characteristic, one that runs through the whole body of his
verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the material world. He was
a connoisseur in life as in art. His admired record of the “liquefaction”
of Julia’s silks is characteristic of him. “O how that glittering taketh
me!” he might have said of a thousand other things. He looked at colours
and felt surfaces like a connoisseur; he tasted substances like an
epicure tasting wines. He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours
out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses and violets, tulips,
lilies, marigolds, cherryblossoms, virgins’ skins, jet, ivory, amber, and
gums. There is nothing romantic about him, and nothing dim; all things
are equally vivid and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than other
things. The moon and cream are both white—he will compare his lady’s
cheek to either indifferently or to both in a sentence; he relishes the
loveliness of each and he drinks each, with exquisite pleasure, out
of the same sized liqueur glass. Few other writers give one so keen a
contact with the beauties of the physical world. But it is usually their
sensuous appeal that is registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal,
but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a thoroughgoing pagan.
His capacity for conveying vivid impressions of the physical was not
invariably employed upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and
maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him compose those offensive epigrams
which some bashful editors exclude from their collections. It is not
to be supposed that he really wished to vent his spleen against Lungs,
Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous,
butts; though if his efforts in this direction got about in his
Devonshire village and people took them to apply to themselves it is no
wonder that the natives behaved towards him, as he complained, like surly
savages. “Upon Batt” is one of the mildest of them:
_Batt he gets children, not for love to reare ’em,_
_But out of hope his wife might die to beare ’em._
A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is “Upon Lungs”:
_Lungs (as some say) ne’er sits him down to eate_
_But that his breath do’s Fly-blow all the meate._
He tells—I refrain from the grossest ones—of another gentleman whose eyes
were so sticky in the morning that his wife had to lick them open; of
another whose raw eyes would supply an angler with a day’s bait; and of
another (very parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in
boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not astonishing that when the
“sprightly Spartanesse” appeared to him in dream she remarked:
_Hence, Remove,_
_Herrick thou art too coorse for love._
But as one goes on through these things one is too amused to be
disgusted; one wonders what on earth the man is going to think of next.
And that was the idea. He had compressed all the fragrance of the spring
into short lyrics—how much concentrated beastliness could he get into a
couplet? He had rivalled Horace and Anacreon in one line; could he rival
Martial in another? You may picture him making these things—sitting at a
table in the sun outside the rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social
tankard with his favourite pig, and working and working at these singular
concoctions until there came the thrill of the artist who knows he has
produced a perfect cameo.
His outlook and methods being such, it is not surprising that when he
gave up his “unbaptized Rhimes” and took to “Noble Numbers” he was
comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neatness do not go far in
religious verse, and the congenital materialism of Herrick’s imagery
sometimes produced the most grotesque effects.
_God is all forepart, for we never see_
_Any part backward in the Deitie._
An epigram which might have had some point if applied to a man is merely
vapid when applied to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in
_I crawle, I creep; my Christ I come_
_To thee, for curing Balsamum,_
and
_Lord, I confesse, that thou alone are able_
_To purifie this my Augean stable;_
_Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope,_
_Yet if thy Bloud not wash me, there’s no hope._
Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. But it doesn’t much matter
what he was not; what he was is one of the greatest small masters in the
history of verse.
The Muse in Liquor
In former times men wrote about drinking without the slightest
self-consciousness. Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from
Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, sang the praises of
what nobody in those days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the
praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer “bright wine” was as
indispensable a commodity as bread: no home could be complete without it.
If Anacreon and Horace were rather more sophisticated about it and tasted
their liquor with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they still had no
idea that there was anything morally questionable about drink. So onwards
to mediæval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech laid it down that if a man
has fainted from hunger one should
“pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and twitch his
whiskers; when he is better give him some bread broken in wine,”
there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and protest that to
inject alcoholic poisons into a debilitated frame was about the worst
thing you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably
respectable. “The introduction of wine and viticulture,” says Mr. A. L.
Simon in his history of the _Wine Trade in England_,
“is coeval with the introduction of the Christian religion. As
the numbers of clergy increased, greater supplies of wine were
required, so vines were planted at home, and a considerable
foreign wine trade came into being.”
The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were largely composed by
theological students, and it was (at least I am of that party which
maintains that it was) an archdeacon of the English Church who wrote one
of the two best lyrics of the kind that this island has produced—that
perfect song in which he expresses the hope that he shall meet his latter
end in a hostelry and that some one should hold a pottle-pot before his
dying eyes:
_Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori_
_“Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”_
Our other great song has also been attributed to an ecclesiastic, Bishop
Still.
But if a modern bishop wrote a song about hot whisky, he would get into
hot water. Times have changed. When a modern English king wants to do
the popular thing, he takes the pledge; when Henry III wanted to, he
gave his old wine to the poor—the gift was not so noble as it sounds,
for in his day old wine was bad, owing to the lack of glass bottles and
well-made casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) about the
ale-swallowing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on the safe
side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted herself. Her
Ministers had a job keeping her supplied with beer. When she was on one
of her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote to Lord Burleigh:
“There is not one drop of good drink for her. We were fain to
send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale
was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to
drink it.”
But since that time a question of principle has arisen, and the changed
attitude of society towards drink has been accompanied by a corresponding
change in the tone of those who write in praise of drink. They used to be
natural and expository; they are now self-conscious and on the defensive.
I note the transition in a volume (1862) called _How to Mix Drinks,
or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion_, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal
bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and the Planter’s
House, St. Louis. It is an ingenious book and a suitable companion
to its shelf-neighbour, _The Maltworm’s Vade-mecum_, a guide to the
public-houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a
contemporary of his brother connoisseur, it would never have occurred to
him to write a preface apologizing for the mere compilation of such a
book:
“Whether it is judicious that mankind should continue to
indulge in such things, or whether it would be wiser to abstain
from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province
to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We
simply contend that a relish for ‘social drinks’ is universal;
that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States
than in any other country in the world, and that he, therefore,
who proposes to impart to those drinks not only the most
palatable but the most wholesome characteristics of which they
may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor.”
You see the uneasiness coming in; the devotee is conscious of a
disapproving eye. And what was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked
to-day, when a considerable percentage of the population looks askance at
a man who has been seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our priests
and half our politicians denounce fermented drinks as an invention of the
Devil. The results of this are seen in the twentieth-century Bacchanal’s
writings. He is on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in praise
of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, concerned with dispraise of
the opponents of drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks
as against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon simply would not
have understood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in dreamy content.
Whenever they take up a pot of beer they have to march out and drink it
defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is almost as if they knew they
were the champions of a lost, though noble, cause; and felt that at any
moment they might be called upon to Die in the Last Tankard.
This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. Chesterton’s volume _Wine, Water,
and Song_. Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing abstemious
American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and
grocers—who, lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have never
been known
_To crack a bottle of fish sauce_
_Or stand a man a cheese._
But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the better: for the old
material of drinking-songs was getting threadbare. To my thinking, these
songs—most of them appeared in _The Flying Inn_, and it was a pity
that they were omitted from the volume of collected _Poems_ recently
issued—are amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, and some of
Mr. Chesterton’s very best work. You can read them aloud to other people
and very seldom come across a stilted or obscure phrase which makes you
feel sheepish to say it. But, more than that, _Wine and Water_, _The Good
Rich Man_, _The Song against Songs_, and the two poems on the English
Road are the sort of infectiously musical things that one learns by heart
without knowing one has done it.
_Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,_
_He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,_
_And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was
whale,_
_But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
sail,_
_And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,_
_“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”_
Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this or
_The Road to Roundabout_ (which is about the best of the lot) he does not
automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability,
singing it?
£5 Misspent
Any one who is interested in what nobody has yet asked us to call
the British language must have felt apprehensive if he read the
correspondence recently printed in the _Times_ on the subject of a
synonym for the word “Colonial.” It appears that this word is “strongly
objected to” in the—er—Dominions, and especially in Canada. The Central
Committee of the Overseas Club therefore started a Missing Word
Competition. It offered a prize of £5 for the best synonym and “members
have been most prolific in their ideas.” The examples given of their
fecundity are, however, so malformed as to lead to the hope that in
future they will practise an intellectual Malthusianism. The Chairman of
the Club says that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, Britonial,
Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian
Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Empirean, Transmarine (why not
Ultramarine?), Away-Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, MacBriton,
and Britson. What those which he does not publish were like one can
only surmise; but no doubt Ap-Briton, O’Briton, Britidian, Britkinson,
Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and Heptathalassian were among
them. And so, possibly, was Oversear.