BROTHER COPAS ON THE ANGLO-SAXON.
"You ought to write a play," said Mrs. Simeon.
Mr. Simeon looked up from his dinner and stared at his wife as though
she had suddenly taken leave of her senses. She sat holding a fork
erect and close to her mouth, with a morsel of potato ready to be
popped in as soon as she should finish devouring a paragraph of
_The People_ newspaper, folded beside her plate. In a general way
Mrs. Simeon was not a reader; but on Mondays (washing-days) she
regularly had the loan of a creased copy of _The People_ from a
neighbour who, having but a couple of children, could afford to buy
and peruse it on the day of issue. There is much charity among the
working poor.
"I--I beg your pardon, my dear?" Mr. Simeon murmured, after gently
admonishing his second son (Eustace, aged 11, named after the Master)
for flipping bread pills across the table. "I am afraid I did not
catch--"
"I see there's a man has made forty thousand pounds by writing one.
And he did it in three weeks, after beginning as a clerk in the
stationery. . . . Forty thousand pounds, only think! That's what I
call turning cleverness to account."
"But, my love, I don't happen to be clever," protested Mr. Simeon.
His wife swallowed her morsel of potato. She was a worn-looking
blonde, peevish, not without traces of good looks. She wore the
sleeves of her bodice rolled up to the elbows, and her wrists and
forearms were bleached by her morning's work at the wash-tub.
"Then I'm sure I don't know what else you are!" said she, looking at
him straight.
Mr. Simeon sighed. Ever on Mondays he returned at midday to a house
filled with steam and the dank odour of soap-suds, and to the worst
of the week's meagre meals. A hundred times he had reproached
himself that he did ungratefully to let this affect him, for his wife
(poor soul) had been living in it all day, whereas his morning had
been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the
delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could
not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their
most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after two
days of freedom.
"Where are you going this afternoon?" his wife asked.
"To blow the organ for Windeatt."
Dr. Windeatt (Mus. Doc. Oxon.) was the Cathedral organist.
"Has he offered to pay you?"
"Well--it isn't _pay_ exactly. There was an understanding that if I
blew for him this afternoon--old Brewer being laid up with the
shingles--he would take me through that tenor part in the new
_Venite Exultemus_. It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it
horribly."
"Tc'ht! A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing!
If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much. . . . But you
let yourself be put upon by anybody."
Mr. Simeon was silent. He knew that to defend himself would be to
court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the
children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half
deserved.
"Daddy, why _don't_ you write a play?" demanded the five-year-old
Agatha. "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real
boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss
Dickinson's."
The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral. He was
unhappy; and as he passed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the
sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave
no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of
clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman
builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or
perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had
deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life--hard life and poverty--had
subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had
seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such
creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?" A thousand
thousand such as Mr. Simeon had listened or lifted their voice to its
anthems--had aspired for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at
rest. Where now were all their emotions? He entered by a side-door
of the western porch. The immense, solemn nave, if it did not catch
his thoughts aloft, at least hushed them in awe. To Mr. Simeon
Merchester Cathedral was a passion, nearer, if not dearer, than wife
or children.
He had arrived ten minutes ahead of the appointed time. As he walked
towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and
clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed
it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to
rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at
the coffins above the canopy.
"And is King Alfred really up there?--the one that burnt the cakes?--
and if so, which?" Corona was asking, too eager to think of grammar.
Brother Copas shrugged his shoulders.
"What's left of him is up there somewhere."
'Here are sands, ignoble things
Dropped from the ruined sides of kings.'
"--But the Parliament troopers broke open the coffins and mixed the
dust sadly. The Latin says so. '_In this and the neighbouring
chests_' (or caskets, as you say in America), '_confounded in a time
of Civil Fury, reposes what dust is left of_--' Ah, good afternoon,
Mr. Simeon! This young lady has laid forcible hands on me to give
her an object-lesson in English history. Do you, who know ten times
more of the Cathedral than I, come to my aid."
"If you are looking for King Alfred," answered Mr. Simeon,
beaming on Corona through his glasses, "there's a tradition that his
dust lies in the second chest to the right . . . a tradition only.
No one really knows."
Corona shifted her position some six paces to the right, and tilted
her gaze up at the coffer as though she would crick her neck.
"Aye, missie"--Mr. Simeon still beamed--"they're up there, the royal
ones--Dane and Norman and Angevin; and not one to match the great
Anglo-Saxon that was father of us all."
Brother Copas grunted impatiently.
"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! God forbid
that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of
Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name
and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less
offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades
Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as
Anglo-Saxons. In truth, King Alfred was a noble fellow. No one in
history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete
race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that
both were of the prime."
"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon
one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine
rugged epic of _Beowulf_, to which the historians trace back all that
is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so
early as Alfred's time. That were too extravagant!"
"_Brekekekex, ten brink, ten brink!_" snapped Brother Copas.
"All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat! Fine rugged
fiddlestick--have you ever read _Beowulf_?"
"In translation only."
"You need not be ashamed of labour saved. I once spent a month or
two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they
talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English
critics who ape them. Then I tackled _Beowulf_, and found it to be
what I guessed--no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag
of bookishness. Impulse? Generative impulse?--the thing is wind, I
tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious
Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of
inflating it. I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise. . . .
That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose
to galvanise 'em for a while--a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men,
who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws. And so our
England--wise as Austria in mating--turned to other nuptials and
married William the Norman. Behold then a new breed; the country
covered with sturdy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no
sooner born than they fly to work--hammers going, scaffolds climbing;
cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that
came with some imported workmen from the Provence--"
'Quan la douss' aura venta
Deves vostre pays'--
"And so--pop!--down the wind goes your pricked bladder of a _Beowulf_:
down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and
the best religions come."
Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.
"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of
the sort the other day. He was talking of wine."
"Yes--the best religions and the best wine: they go together.
Could ever an Anglo-Saxon have built _that_, think you?" demanded
Brother Copas with a backward jerk of the head and glance up at the
vaulted roof. "But to my moral.--All this talk of Anglo-Saxons,
Celts, and the rest is rubbish. We are English by chemical action of
a score of interfused bloods. That man is a fool who speaks as
though, at this point of time, they could be separated: had he the
power to put his nonsense into practice he would be a wicked fool.
And so I say, Mr. Simeon, that the Roundheads--no pure Anglo-Saxon,
by the way, ever had a round head--who mixed up the dead dust in the
caskets aloft there, were really leaving us a sound historical
lesson--"
But here Mr. Simeon turned at the sound of a brisk footstep.
Dr. Windeatt had just entered by the western door.
"You'll excuse me? I promised the Doctor to blow the organ for him."
"Do people blow upon organs?" asked Corona, suddenly interested.
"I thought they played upon them the same as pianos, only with little
things that pulled out at the sides."
"Come and see," Mr. Simeon invited her, smiling.
The three went around to the back of the organ loft. By and by when
Mr. Simeon began to pump, and after a minute, a quiet _adagio_,
rising upon a throb of air, stole along the aisles as though an angel
spoke in it, or the very spirit of the building, tears sprang into
the child's eyes and overflowed. She supposed that Mr. Simeon alone
was working this miracle. . . . Blinking more tears away, she stared
at him, meeting his mild, half-quizzical gaze as he stooped and rose
and stooped again over the bellows.
Brother Copas, touching her elbow, signed to her to come away.
She obeyed, very reluctantly. By a small doorway in the southern
aisle she followed him out into the sunshine of the Cathedral Close.
"But how does he do it?" she demanded. "He doesn't look a bit as if
he could do anything like that--not in repose."
Brother Copas eyed her and took snuff. "He and the like of him don't
touch the stops, my dear. He and the like of him do better; they
supply the afflatus."
O ye holy and humble Men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise
Him, and magnify Him for ever!
Mr. Simeon worked mechanically, heaving and pressing upon the bellows
of the great organ. His mind ran upon Master Copas's disparagement
of _Beowulf_ and the Anglo-Saxons. It was ever the trouble that he
remembered an answer for Brother Copas after Brother Copas had gone.
. . . Why had he not bethought him to cite Caedmon, at any rate,
against that sweeping disparagement? How went the story?--
Caedmon was a lay brother, a tender of cattle at the Abbey of
Whitby under the Abbess Hilda who founded it. Until somewhat
spent in years he had never learnt any poems. Therefore at a
feast, when all sang in turn, so soon as he saw the harp coming
near him, he would rise and leave the table and go home.
Once when he had gone thus from the feast to the stables, where
he had night-charge of the beasts, as he yielded himself to
sleep One stood over him and said, greeting him by name,
"Caedmon, sing some song to me." "I cannot sing," he said, "and
for this cause left I the feast." "But you shall sing to me,"
said the Vision. "Lord, what shall I sing?" "Sing the
Creation," said the Vision. Caedmon sang, and in the morning
remembered what he had sung . . .
"If this indeed happened to Caedmon, and late in life" (mused Mr.
Simeon, heaving on the bellows of the great organ), "might not even
some such miracle befall me?"
Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place
where Thine honour dwelleth.
"I might even write a play," thought Mr. Simeon.