acknowledge that Mr. Lucas draws a proper distinction between the
Essays of Elia and the Letters of Charles Lamb, one, however, which he
might not have drawn if the Letters of Cowper had not been published
long after Lamb began to write letters. That being the fact, he has
to derive Lamb’s Letters from Cowper’s Poems, and Elia’s Essays from
Cowper’s Letters, rather a _chassez-croisez_ piece of work. Except for
that necessity I think he might have gone as near as Mr. Saintsbury
does (in _A Letter Book_) to fining the difference between Essays and
Letters to one of “full dress” and “undress.” To me the difference is
much greater, is precisely, indeed, the difference between Charles
Lamb and Elia. Lamb’s alias was not (like Sterne’s) a stalking-horse;
it was a mask and domino. With the name he put on the thing signified,
or as much of it as he cared for, gave himself Lincolnshire ancestry,
shifted at ease his own relatives, his early loves, the haunts of his
youth, and used them the more freely for his occasions. Yet he treated
his form with respect, neither let it run down, nor stepped out of
character. Elia sometimes borrowed from Lamb. The “Convict” letter to
Barron Field yielded its bitter-sweet to an essay, but was transformed
in the taking. Not to speak profanely, there was an Assumption of the
Lamb. In the Letters whim is master: Lamb is Will o’ the Wisp. From
essay to essay Elia may change like Harlequin, but each single essay
is ruled by one mood. Elia was evidently, if not avowedly, a debtor.
Whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne, of Addison, Burton, Shakespeare, Montaigne
(or Florio) float up from the page as you read. So they do in Lamb’s
Letters. But there is one very signally in Lamb, not so evident in
Elia, and it was that which I looked for in Mr. Lucas’s Appendix III,
where, sure enough, among Lamb’s books I found:
Howell (James), _Epistolae Ho-Elianae_, 1645-55.
There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s
whimsicality.
James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the
Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in
Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal
of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different
language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays),
something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never
lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed,
commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain (where he
was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also,
and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat,
who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited
set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its
politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was
idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually
scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical
list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of
them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not.
If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist--for
that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and
pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall
only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a
“small hymn” for Christmas Day:
“Hail holy Tyde
Wherein a Bride,
A Virgin (which is more)
Brought forth a Son,
The lyke was done
Ne’er in this world before--;”
and this is the beginning of an elegy upon the Earl of Dorset,
“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack,
And will not all the Elements wear black?”
and this the middle,
“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verse
On this renownéd heroe and his herse,”
and this the end,
“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut,
And to my Elegy a period put--”
on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!
He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he
writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married,
divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and
many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet
are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in
their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived
their father except his _Familiar Letters_, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae
which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times
afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with
Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our
private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our
Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it
would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the
time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters
to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even
more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac,
well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as
Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or
Milton. He reports, for example, that the Prince Palatine has got
together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows
his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of
Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It
has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets
found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters
addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the
Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed
to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real
enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye
to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than
treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the
additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of
treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent
letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of
a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long
letter containing many anecdotes _ad hoc_ and a “Gradual Hymn tending
to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his
“frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched
oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb--but I think Howell was the
latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb
desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I
am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson,
of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a
similar reproof. The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones
by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed
his “Father Ben” as follows:
“You know,
Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of
the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a
commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner,
as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair
in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would
not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal
architect.”
Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his
pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier
who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had
done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being
made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut
off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.”
And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned
before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the
Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have
done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside.
But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is
turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing
it, that I feel sure Howell _aut diabolus_ must have taught it him:
First, the theme--“I was according to your desire to visit the late
new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never
saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my
life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently
qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a
cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram
petticoat lined with satin.”
Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:
“I think _Clotho_ had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle
when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is
fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance
if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the
dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you
such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the
Lord deliver you.”
Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.
How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and
debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old
rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of
a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful
with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals
upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and
trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I
must not leave out. In the stress of Civil War he writes to a friend
in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here.
Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully
handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks
like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line
twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting
upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but
now a temple is become a stable.”
Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string
them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long
letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of
them. As thus:
“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in
everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the
teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and
having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar
you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish
you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a
bargain.”
He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with
“yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten
it--and I believe he never did.
CROCUS AND PRIMROSE
This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first
primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this
article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in
with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be
snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record
can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment,
and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a
first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an
event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest
any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my
primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the
bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new
growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering--my
_japonicas_ always do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf
twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even
in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like
the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native
primula.
Such things--I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of
such things at all--are events in the garden, red-letter days in its
year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another,
are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different
from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and
is incommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to
me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it
in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there
to see Homer’s [Greek: Stygos hydatos aipa rheethra], a sight, I am
bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over
it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think,
_bulbo-codium_, and a white striped with brown, which I have always
known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is named _biflorus_.
It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is
Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as
some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase
otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy
accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by,
that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the
blue _Imperati_, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly
favoured--I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason,
as much _Imperati_--not as I want, for that could never be, but as
is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then
had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So
have some other species of crocus. _Imperati_ grows very large and,
unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a
purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of
the year crocus _Imperati_ is a theme for poets.
As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should
be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun,
and the bees can get _it_. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London
it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal
from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the
embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in
layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot
and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that,
much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or
two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses,
for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of
field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One
mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.
The primrose is vocal of my childhood and the Kentish woodlands.
There they used to grow marvellously, though now I daresay that Lord
Beaconsfield and his League have made an end of them. Wherever the axe
had been there were they, in sheets, in a galaxy, even to the scent
of milk in the spicy air. I remember now, whenever I see my first
primrose of the year, the almost fainting rapture with which we used
to see, smell, taste, and handle them again--on some still warm April
day--after the waiting through the long winter. For winters really were
long, and wintry, then--or I think so. One used to wake in the morning
and find the water-bottle frozen solid, the sponge like a brick. One
used to learn to skate (for which now we go to Switzerland and catch
influenza in a super-heated hotel), make snowmen, blow on one’s fingers
to fasten one’s shirt-collar. But I have lived in the West of England
this twenty years, and can only remember one snowy Christmas. Ah, and
how many warm Aprils? Perhaps as many.
But the primrose is not common here. You will find it over the hills
in the greensand, and again just over the Dorset border, in Cranborne
Chace: not in this valley. I make it grow, importing it, because I
can’t do without it; and so do the villagers, for the same reason. But
they like it coloured, and have a rooted belief that if you plant a
primrose upside down it will come up with red flowers. I tell them that
it is Cruelty to Primroses. They point me out red-flowering roots which
have been obtained in this way; and I end the inconsequent argument by
saying, Well, anyhow, I don’t want it--village logic.
As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of
wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the
flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about
your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there
was a waterfall, and _ramondia_ growing as it does in the Pyrenees.
That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of
the sort. Anemone _blanda_ has become as common as groundsel; but
_apennina_ refuses to seed. The Widow iris, _tuberosa_, which started
in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a
sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of that growing
in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds
freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like
coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large
families, which can never be too large--and so on. Such are some of my
little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I
was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though
no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing
cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one
fine Spring I did induce _Iris iberica_ to utter its extraordinary
flowers--six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party,
I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her
eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “_I_ had four hundred.” It
may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known
then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at
Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her--so far as high ladies
can be rebuked--by telling her that she could have had four thousand on
such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.
I would not now give twopence for _Iris iberica_ unless it would
increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good
gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly,
I am not with the purists who say--or said--that it is inartistic to
grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in
the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was
plainly of that opinion. It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I
am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet
which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them
grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I
have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather like _Rosa
Willmottia_, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers.
Farrer’s behymned _Viburnun fragrans_ grows apace: its fragrance
has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I
hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which
came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is
unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like
it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump,
and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the
valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering.
Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a
leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to
expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches
of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt
have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the
time they were ready,
“Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”
and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot,
and, to pursue _The Sensitive Plant_,
“Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”
as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has
devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to
admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the
house should be removed.
Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult
things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I
had tried to make the Alpine gentian, _verna_, feel at home, when I
happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me
of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps
of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered,
and also died, here--but it did not spread. It existed, not throve.
Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and
left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things
will--I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and
multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see
it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the
streaming waters--one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event”
for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I
would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a
gravel path.
DAFFODILS
I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been
more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and
gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing
with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because
I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this
article without quoting from _A Winter’s Tale_. It is satisfactory,
at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our
poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about
the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one
which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified
as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old
woman’s cottage garden--just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson
nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking,
the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word
changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows
wild in Ireland--not, I believe, in England--and classical poetry is,
of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to
strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds
of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian
Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never
see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I
remember the Pont du Gard, and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or
Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns
brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth.
It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.