THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF COALCHESTER
I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town. I did not
mean to imply that there were no M.A.'s there. In fact, there were quite
a number. You may be sure that if spiritual and intellectual life had
its representatives, as we have seen, spiritual and intellectual death
had its representatives, too--by which I don't mean either to imply that
the M.A.'s were dead M.A.'s, dead and buried with Latin over them in the
old brassed and effigied church, which was so old and large that it was
hardly less conceited than a cathedral. Spiritual and intellectual death
in Coalchester, as elsewhere, was officially represented by the Literary
and Philosophical Society, which still unblushingly went on retaining
its adjectives, even in the face of its "Transactions," which seemed
mainly composed of treasurer's reports, with an occasional paper
on fossils.
Indeed the one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real
interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead
it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze
at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature
with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter
some of these mild old gentlemen were genuinely learned. Not that they
hadn't read the great poets, even in the original Greek, Latin, and
Italian. Poets in dead and foreign languages were a form of fossils, and
English poets--with that divine bloom upon them!--they had a way of
fossilising by spectacles, so that they never read them alive. Thus they
had never read Shakespeare even in the original.
Once, long ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a
little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and
art,--men, so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and
old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so
far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops
Percy; and such lavender is the true love of anything that their
memories still hung about the walls of the old Lyceum along with their
portraits; while so necessary are great names for little towns to boast
of, that the compiler of the local gazetteer implied that Coalchester
glowed at night with quite a lustre from their names. Besides, they
proved very useful in damping young men. And yet you wouldn't know their
names if I were to write them--as I would rather like to do.
The learned Dr. Sibley, he wrote a pleasant little essay on "Taste," you
know, with a few additional notes on chiaroscuro; and then there was
the learned Dr. Ambrose, who wrote quite a pretty little treatise on
Song-writing.
No! Of course you won't know any of them. Yet they were all once, and
are still, "The Learned." You'll never hear Theophilus Londonderry
spoken of as that, I'm afraid.
As it is the property of fame to grow with time, and the way of a great
name to begin with brains and end with lords, a great man's descendants
are not unnaturally found persons of much greater consequence than the
original great one. In like manner the dignity and importance of the
members of the Literary and Philosophical Society had grown, in direct
ratio to their distance from the original founders of it; and the
learned Doctors Sibley and Ambrose, who really did know something about
art and poetry and certainly loved them, can never have been persons of
such consequence as one or two of their descendants who are nameless,
and who certainly knew nothing about either.
One of the real objects of this sad little Society was passionately to
ignore what they contemptuously called local talent. It is true that
there was not much to ignore, and, after all, it has now to be recorded
to their credit that they did unreservedly give Theophilus Londonderry
his chance. By what quaintness of accident he could not imagine, he
suddenly found himself invited to lecture before them. The invitation
read something like a command, and there seemed to be an implication
that if all were satisfactory, he might thus earn the right of
acknowledging the patronage of the Literary and Philosophical Society of
Coalchester.
Theophilus Londonderry's subject, therefore, was "Walt Whitman,"--a name
which conveyed no offence to the Committee, for the simple reason that
it conveyed nothing. It was a strange and humorous thing for the young
man to think of, that his was to be the first human voice that had
spoken that name of the future aloud in Coalchester. As he rose to give
his paper, he pronounced its title slowly, with his full carrying voice,
and allowed the strange new name to roll away in menacing echoes through
the old Lyceum: "W-a-l-t W-h-i-t-m-a-n."
Even yet no one saw the coming doom, heard not the voice that tolled a
funeral bell through all Lyceums and other haunted houses of dead
learning. The Canon in the chair smiled benignantly, with an expression
that I can only compare to buttered rolls. He was just three hundred
years old that very day, and the audience (a scanty fifty or so) ran
from a hundred and fifty upwards. The only young men present besides the
lecturer were two friends of his I have yet to introduce,--Rob
Clitheroe, a fiery young poet and pamphleteer of many ambitions, and
James Whalley (little James Whalley he was always called) a gentle lover
of letters, with perhaps the most delicate taste in the whole little
coterie; _and_ Mr. Moggridge,--not entirely comfortable, it having been
by some mysterious atmospheric effect conveyed to him that he was a
tradesman and a dissenter, in which latter capacity he felt a certain
traditional resentment towards his complacent fellow listeners. A quite
recent ancestor had refused to pay tithes. That ancestor was in his
blood to-night.
Jenny was not there. Ladies were not admitted to the meetings of the
Society, there being a sort of implication that masonries of learning,
occult sciences of the brain, were practised at their meetings,--matters
which never came out in the "Transactions."
The lecture was a straightforward and eloquent account of Whitman's
writings and doctrines, with extracts from "The Leaves of Grass;" and
from beginning to end you might have heard a pin drop, particularly
during one or two of the quotations. When it was ended the buttered-roll
expression had faded from the Canon's face, and his "our young friend"
expression was ready for the chairman's remarks. Londonderry's sitting
down awakened a few sad echoes that were no doubt hand-clappings, but
seemed like the napping of the wings of night-birds frightened by a
light. But the Lit-and-Phils were not frightened; they were entirely
bewildered and rather indignant, that was all. It was characteristic of
their incapacity to grasp the humanity of any subject, even when it was
dangerous, that the criticism which followed was directed almost
entirely against Whitman's metrical vagaries. This was not poetry! Had
not their revered founder, the learned Dr. Ambrose ...
The Canon kindly said, showing his pastoral interest in the local
newspaper, that the verses which their young friend Mr. Rob Clitheroe,
who was present with them that evening, occasionally contributed to the
Coalchester "Argus" were in his opinion better poetry than anything Walt
Whitman had written, though he confessed that his acquaintance with
Walt Whitman was of the slightest. This disastrous compliment sent the
blood to young Clitheroe's cheeks, and he felt surer than ever that he
would never be a real poet,--though, as a matter of fact, he had written
some quite pretty lines.
It was an occasion that of course only the Lit-and-Phils could take
seriously, and the way home to New Zion was a laughter of four beneath
the stars,--Mr. Moggridge's deep guffaws coming every now and again,
like the bay of some distant watch-dog, at the young minister's
brilliant mimicry of the ancient men they had left behind.
Then the gentle voice of little James Whalley took advantage of a
silence: "Isn't it high time that we brought the Renaissance to
Coalchester?"
"Capital!" cried Londonderry; "come in for a bit of supper, all of you,
and let us talk over the plan of campaign."