we have still. We complain freely of our weather, institutions, habits,
manners and customs--but that is a freedom which we arrogate to
ourselves: when foreigners do the same we are merely amused, not for a
moment supposing either that their charges are true or that they really
mean them. Though our grousing can hardly be dated with safety before
Horace Walpole, our complacency is of pretty old standing, and goes
back to the time when we began to look Europe over, to say nothing of
America, and incidentally grew curious about our own country. Leland,
Speed, Camden, Drayton, Coryat, and finally old Thomas Fuller, between
them have fairly summed up what there can have been to say for us when
we had emerged from the Middle Ages and were beginning to shape for
posterity; and of all those Fuller is perhaps the least known and the
best worth a thought, if only because his eyes were upon what he saw
rather than what he knew. The rock upon which most of our eulogists
split was archæology. There Leland foundered, Speed and Camden too.
Drayton had his troubles elsewhere, and plenty of them, as a poet
would. Avoiding Scylla, he barged into Charybdis, where mythopoiesis
lurked for him like a mermaid, and sank him so deep that he never came
up again. He is very nearly unreadable; he invites ridicule and wins
disgust. Over and over his bemused corpus of rime, John Selden, a most
learned spider, spun webs of erudition. It is difficult to read either
of them, but of the two I prefer the poet. The present Laureate puts
the antiquary first. But when you come to Thomas Fuller, D.D., his
_Worthies of England_, that wordy work, encumbered though it be with
texts of divinity, you do at least get your teeth into something upon
which to bite. He did not live to finish it, though, and the piety of
his son John, “the author’s orphan,” as he described himself, erected
it as a monument to his memory in 1672.
Fuller, I think, set out with the intention of belauding the human
products of our realm. He cast all mankind into categories and, with
them for a sieve, shook out the shires to see what he could find.
To that he added matter concerning the natural and manufactured
commodities of England, which forms the best reading in him to-day.
One does not particularly want to know what he had to say about Sir
Walter Raleigh or Cardinal Wolsey; even his opinion of Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson need not detain us long, though he seems to have known
personally the pair of them, and to have considered Jonson considerably
the greater man. Wit was always reckoned above genius in that day.
But he admits Shakespeare as a worthy of Warwickshire, accords him
exactly as much space as Michael Drayton, “a pious poet,” and thinks
that in our greatest man “three eminent poets may seem in some sort
to be compounded”; a sufficiently qualified judgment. Those three
are--“Martial, in the warlike sound of his surname”; Ovid, “the most
natural and witty of all the poets”; and Plautus, “an exact comedian,
yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess
himself.” He goes on, “Add to all these, that though his genius
generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could
(when so disposed) be solemn and serious.” Not extravagant praise. He
does not know the date of his death, leaves it blank. And so much for
Shakespeare.
It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any
more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing
in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he
does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance,
that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has
no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in
Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and
“oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton,
he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought
thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning
cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit
in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when
learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide
travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest
town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor
spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably
by the entire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is
more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in
themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an
haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon
up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in
some _Manchester-Tickin_, and to fasten them with the _pinns_, or tye
them with the _tape_, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind
them about with _points_ and _laces_, all made in the same place.”
That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same
elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his
daughters and pupils.
He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without
pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair
complections to the women in this county art may save her _pains_
(not to say her _sinnes_) in endeavouring to better them. But let the
females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express
notice be taken of the beauty of many women, _a._ Sarah, _b._ Rebekah,
_c._ Rachel, _e._ Thamar, _f._ Abishaig, _g._ Esther; yet in the New
Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.”
Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection
far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire
are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome, _Ribchester_ was
as rich as any town in Christendom”--that is one; and the other is
that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with
spades and matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground,
and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small
fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so
do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them
be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed
upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed
upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.
Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a
small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him
eels, hares, saffron, and willows--a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops
and _puitts_, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red
deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes,
and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness
they are far short of the Indian”--but there they are. He tops up
a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue
slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes
Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones:
Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”;
Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and _larks_”; slightly
better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent,
“cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it
was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire
mining lead and brewing mild ale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton;
Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in
Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were
doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large
families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for
another hundred years before it came to a head.
But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial
protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time.
He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife,
nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The
historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He
never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to
be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to
reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.
“MERRIE” ENGLAND
The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy
with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost
to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane,
_Pizzaro_ or _Artaxerxes_ would be followed by _Harlequin Dame Trot_,
or _Harlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat_. I am not scholar enough to
say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if
they were I can perceive some intention in _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_,
which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of
Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or,
as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun
in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it
should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows
of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would
have been if Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew’s Fair_ had not been revived the
other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons
who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable
of being pleased with _Gammer Gurion’s Needle_. It is no worse than
Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is
much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There
are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and
of course no Falstaff. But the difference is of degree, not of kind.
_Gammer Gurton_ is written _de haut en bas_, as Shakespeare also wrote
of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever
he was--and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of
Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties--as heartily scorned the peasantry as
William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much
about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from
being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention
will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as
we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should
know in what England’s merriment consisted.
Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she
sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief,
she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her
onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and
upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the
boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters
here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick,
and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great
scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which
ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest;
Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob
her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place
whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The
priest edges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks
his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to
arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives
the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no
doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.
According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English
peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated
only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working
was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the
only intellectual exercise. In _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ there was not
even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.
“I cannot eate but lytle meate,
my stomacke is not good;
But sure I thinke that I can drynke
with him that weares a hood.
Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,
I am nothinge acolde:
“I stuffe my skyn so full within
of joly good Ale and olde.
Back and syde go bare, go bare,
both foote and hand go colde:
But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe
whether it be new or olde”:--
and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings
itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has
piled up, which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton
still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.
But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious
thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of
man. If you named a woman the thing--and you always did--you named a
man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the
accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was
a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat
her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured
each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly
that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable
to-day--but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years
in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to
another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding
link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.
Religion provides the only other expletives there are in _Gammer
Gurton_, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No
earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play
called _Dyccon of Bedlam_ was licensed to be printed in 1562, and one
by the presumed author of _Gammer Gurton_ was acted at Christ’s College
in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences
very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by
the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’s name, Master
Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if
the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:
“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;
Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)
Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”
Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was
then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that,
the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s
bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys”
(by Jesus); finally this:
“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,
S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,
That ye shall keepe it secret....”
These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever
way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which
they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the
peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of
conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but
use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the
same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which
remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I
put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one
has been able to go. Certainly _Gammer Gurton_ will take us no further.
Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between
the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village
life in Merrie England. Take this:
_Gammer_: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.
_Cocke_: Howe, Gammer?
_Gammer_: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,
Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well
Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,
Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”
If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it--except
perhaps this:
“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”
ENDINGS
I
Not very long ago I took occasion to inquire into the beginnings of
books. I found that the rules were simple, the formulæ few, and the
practice seldom varied until near our own times. If you were an Epic
poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired
her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once
upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began,
in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you
contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists
call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a
musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable
of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. No matter for
that: everything was in your favour: hope was high in your breast, and,
no doubt, in your hearer’s or reader’s. The rules were simple; you laid
out the theme, and off you went.
But the _ending_ of your work is a very different thing. There are
no formulæ for that. You are at the stretch of your tether, either
thankfully or not; you are in your public’s discretion; however you
take it, you are judged already. You may amend all by your ending, or
you may make weariness more weary. In any case, you have somehow to
“get off with it,” and will find that your shifts to make a good end
to your adventure are not easily reduced to rule or comfortably suited
by convention. We don’t hear so many sermons as we did; yet most of us
know by experience that it is one thing for a clergyman to open upon
his text, and quite another for him to turn to the East with credit.
If he have prepared his peroration, and the way to it--what I may call
his _coda_ and _finale_--well or ill, he will let it off. If he have
not, then in addition to his anxious care for what he is to say, he
will have another for what he must by no means say. Let him beware, for
example, of using the hortatory words “And now”; for so surely as he
pronounces them the congregation will rise as one man, and then nothing
for it but the rest of the Ascription. I have known that happen more
than once, and never faced the preacher with nerve enough to reseat the
congregation for one more turn.
The writer and the orator may be compared, since literature, by origin
a spoken word, has never lost the habits it then acquired--or has only
just now lost them. As the ancient bard, Homer or Demodocus, as the
wandering minstrel, trouvère or balladist, faced his assize, somehow or
other he had to get off his platform. What was he to do? He desired a
supper, perhaps a bed: one need not shirk the probability that he was
to send round his hat. Could he be sure of them without some kind of a
bang? Should it be a long or a short bang? Was he to sum up the whole
argument of his poem in its last twenty lines, condense it all into one
compendious epigrammatic sentence? As we shall see, that was the means
of one of our great prose-writers. Then, otherwise, should he perorate,
and, in the musician’s way, recall the theme with which he began? As
poet, perhaps he should--so indeed Tennyson more than once did; but
as epic poet it was not always possible. No better poet than Homer
ever lived, no better ending to an epic was ever made than that to the
Iliad, whose last book shows Achilles, for once, generous, and Priam,
in his simplicity, noble. But the Iliad does not end upon the matter of
its beginning, nor with the hero of it. On the contrary, it ends with
the hero’s chief enemy; and its very last line,
“So served they the last rites of Hector, tamer of horses,”
is remarkable, because it shows that the interest of poet and hearers
alike had shifted during the progress of the poem. Homer, a Greek,
singing to a Greek audience, finds it necessary to close his poem with
Priam and Hector of Troy!
That shows you how difficult it is to end an epic. The Odyssey shows
it you from another side. Everybody now agrees that what happens in
that after the return of Ulysses, his revenge upon the suitors and
recognition by Penelope, is anti-climax. We are not prepared, at the
end of a long poem, to descend once more into Hades and listen to the
ghosts of the wooers relate their griefs to the ghosts of Agamemnon
and Achilles. We are not prepared for an outbreak of retaliatory war
between the Ithacans and their recovered prince. _Nor were Homer’s
auditors._ Therefore Homer turned to the old stage device of the god
from the machine; he brought an Athené to shut all down. No other means
was open to him, and the knot was worthy.
I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own
conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of
them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of
bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead
bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain
which a book can have is the _Explicit_, or _Colophon_; but I only
know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used
in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I
mean is the _Song of Roland_, which, as we have it now, has neither
beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace
to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne
reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel
Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon--
“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’
Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;
and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:
“Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”
Clearly, if Turoldus made the _Song of Roland_, he did not put his
colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very
accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff,
devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the
expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man
singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long
story by beginning another. These things are not done.
The ending of the _Divine Comedy_ is original and characteristic at
once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or
trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful
and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the
same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell,
Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and
lamentation of Hell he issues
“a riveder le stelle”;
after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself
“Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle”;
the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of
things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe
is Love, and that Love it is which
“muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”
As I say, there is artifice in that. After it we are not surprised to
learn that the number of cantos in each cantica, the number of verses,
the number of words in each was approximately planned out and very
closely kept. It is much of a question what is gained by such joinery;
but there is no question at all of the starry endings. Philosophically
and poetically they are beautiful and right.