for which I instantly seemed to discover a parallel--to wit:
"Sthreelin' oft his golden stockings" (the sun again, evening).
2. "Jus' rags tore off the Divil's ould shirt" (=witches' charms, or
spells).
There will be a very good witch in this poem, I promise you: look out!
----[2] are sounding me about "The Doctor";... They would try to make it
a popular book. The others tried to make it a drawing-room book, with
the result that the few purchasers thereof hid it somewhere behind their
book-shelves, and even there trembled for the morals of the
housemaids....
* * * * *
We went into the church, and sat at a long service. The curate preached
on Judas Iscariot; the vicar conducted a service in the churchyard.
"Judas did this, Judas thought that"; then from the churchyard, in
stentorian chorus, "Crown Him! crown Him! crown Him! crown Him Lord of
all." Thus, you see, there was an element of the comic; but how, how sad
it was to me, how incomprehensible! Verily, I am left behind; I can't,
after all these years, adjust myself to the dimensions of such a change.
The people behaved better than they used to do in our time; but the
numbers! the systematisation! the total absence of the native
population! the show atmosphere! the "Walk up, gentlemen" style of
thing! Over all this Vanity Fair the dear old bells rang out precisely
as of old....
* * * * *
Yesterday, at the Kerroo-Kiel, I met a delightfully bright and witty
man. He soon got to know who I was, and we had the most glorious talk.
The mischief of it is that these worthies are only too glad to get into
a _coosh_ with you, and they would talk all day, leaving a spade, or
forsaking plough and horses to lean over a hedge, leaning on something
at any rate, and talking away. Their talk is bright, aimless, rambling,
not without dives into the depths, and pokes into your personality,
above all, _engouement_ the most absolute, and desire of
intercommunication the most insatiable. And you are up on the
mountain-side at the farther limit of plough-range, and the wind
whistles just the right sort of accompaniment to such talk.
I think I must have a sail here. But, do you know? the Manx seamen and
fishermen tend to become self-conscious: the "strangers" are spoiling
them. Not so the farmer; of course no one can make him understand that
the visitors do him any good by raising the prices of his produce, so he
cares very little about them, and in no way guides himself according to
them or their fashions. So far as the outer world comes to him, it is by
the channel of the newspapers. He has all the boundless curiosity, the
thirst for knowledge miscellaneous, pulpy, and piquant, which
characterise those that dwell remote. When he gets hold of you he flies
at you, hugs you, gets every blessed thing he can out of you.
"Favourable specimen," you will say. That is true; but, as regards the
independence and primitive state of mind, what I say applies to almost
all. You see, you must get down beneath the gentleman or would-be
gentleman-farmer, down to the man who never conceived the idea of
ruffling it with gentlefolk. Also, you must not go down to the mere
labourer. But they are desperate gossips--gossips not so much in matters
local and insular, as in matters universal. The gossiping tone does
proceed into the universal, does it not? The hilarity with which they
will range the far horizons of thought is so childlike (you know how
children are about that); a chatter that sparkles on the surface like
their own _divers_, and then, with an "Aw bless me sowl," or "Aye, man,
aye," down into the deepest soundings of the spirit....
* * * * *
A charming Hibernian called on me the other day. Portentous! alarming!
He had been sent from Douglas by some evil-disposed friends of mine
there, to consult me as the supreme authority on matters Manx. Now of
this language I am, if not wholly, yet at least grammatically ignorant.
He was a tall, stalwart fellow; black-bearded, not handsome, but with a
tremendously Irish face, eyes of fire, nose of peremptory interrogation.
Flourishing a wretched grammar in one hand, he proceeded rapidly to
demonstrate its ineptness, and sternly to demand my explanation. As my
weak-kneedness grew more painfully evident--
So scented the grim feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into the murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry--
he almost shouted with exultation. All the Manx scholars had completely
failed--here was another. "Glory be to God! I'll smite him hip and
thigh." He was a splendid Irishman, and, of course, kind and generous.
He didn't spare me, _destructed_ me utterly; but speedily constructed me
upon new lines, and told me a lot about Celtic difficulties and how to
overcome them. He spoke Irish like a bird, and, after about
three-quarters of an hour, he rushed forth to catch the train, hairy,
immense, with some wild wirrasthru of farewell. Imagine a very learned
and linguistic Mulligan of Ballymulligan!...
* * * * *
O Wallaston, the delight of this leisure! I read, I write, I play. Good
gracious! I shouldn't wonder if my music came to something yet. I have
actually gone back to singing, a vice of my youth. Don't mention it at
Clifton! I always think the sea the great challenger and promoter of
song. Even the mountain is not the same thing. There may always be some
d----d fool or another behind a rock. But the sea is open, and you can
tell when you are alone, and the dear old chap is so confidential: I
will trust him with my secret.
How about Devon! was it good? Did you all bathe and "rux" yourselves
well about in the brine? I have not done much in that way: the storms
have been so furious--unkind of them, eh? Well, I fancy it is like the
boisterous welcome of some great dog--at least I take it in that sense.
And the old boy is so strong, and he doesn't know, he thinks I am what I
used to be. But I'm not: and every now and then he remembers that, and
creeps to my feet so fawningly....
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
At a great prayer-meeting requests were being made that divers souls,
supposed to be in evil case, should be interceded for. One arose and
asked the prayers of the meeting for a little town on the east coast of
Scotland, which was "wholly given to idolatry." Such was the expression.
A little city, with many schools, also the seat of a University. Having
thus mysteriously indicated the place, the excellent individual plainly
felt that no mortal could possibly guess what place he meant; and,
putting his hand over his mouth, he said to his friends on the platform,
in a hoarse whisper distinctly heard over the entire hall, "St.
Andrews!" Isn't that consummate? Isn't it Scotland?...
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
Walters did an extremely kind thing the other day. Two old things going
about with an _entertainment_ (!) of Recitations (really old, for I
heard them "at it" thirty-five years ago), took a letter with them from
me to Walters. It was the merest chance, I thought, but I suggested
that just possibly Walters might give them an evening at the College.
By Jove! sir, he did give them an evening, and gave them a substantial
fee, and filled their poor trembling cup of Auld lang syne with joy and
thanksgiving, and dismissed them with honour, almost reeling with the
intoxication of so unwonted a success, the boys giving them a mighty
three-times-three which shook the welkin, and stirred amazingly the
pulsation of two hearts that have long desisted from the exercise of
hope....
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
I heard one or two good stories at Braddan when I preached there (last
Sunday). One was of a child at the Sunday-school. "What ought you to do
on Sunday?" "Go to church." "What ought you to do next?" "Go to chapel."
Was it not precisely the story for a vicar to tell? You feel the
atmosphere--what?...
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
We sat down in some cottages. Some of the people were magnificent,
throwing themselves upon you with such vigour of accent, such warmth and
fun, and endless receptivity, bright, well pulled together, sonorous,
that I nearly staggered under it--not chaff--good heavens! no--but
would have been chaff, only it wasn't, for they can't chaff.
Kitty Kermode, _alias_ Kinvig, was the best. She said a very sweet and
profound thing (but I can't phrase it as I ought) about the value of
friendship, as compared with that of love. A little happy creature of
some seventeen giggled in a dark corner, but I let her giggle; the old
woman pierced me through and through. Oh _fortunati_--Oh indeed! And
these dear things seemed to know that their lot was a happy one. _Quod
faustum!_ Unutterably precious to me is the woman, the native of the
hills, almost my own age, or a little younger, whose spirit is set upon
the finest springs, and her sympathies have an almost masculine depth,
and a length of reflection that wins your confidence and stays your
sinking heart.
The lady can't do it. This class, of what I suppose you would call
peasant women (I won't have the word), seems made for the purpose of
rectifying everything, and redressing the balance, inspiring us with
that awe which the immediate presence of absolute womanhood creates in
us. The plain, practical woman, with the outspoken throat and the
eternal eyes. Oh, mince me, madam, mince me your pretty mincings!
Deliberate your dainty reticences! Balbutient loveliness, avaunt! Here
is a woman that talks like a bugle, and, in everything, sees God.
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
... The wreck of the _Drummond Castle_ is much in my mind. What lovely
creatures those French are! The women and children, carrying their poor
drowned sisters! that little baby in its coffin decked with roses! Don't
you yearn towards those dear souls? What are Agincourt and Waterloo in
the presence of such sweetness? Well, I love them anyway, and shall
brood over them and pray for them while I live....
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
I am generally rather a happy "sort" of man, but your letter makes me
very happy. How kind you are! Up in the morning betimes to catch people
still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their
sympathies before they had "faded into the light of common day," and to
collect all their "loving" words for me. That was a good and faithful
act; and I am deeply grateful.
Yes, the man was right. I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right,
I have it from my father. He had a way of taking for granted, not only
the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned
respectability. He, at least, never questioned it. The effect was
twofold.
Some of the "weak brethren" felt uncomfortable at being met on those
terms of equality. My father might have been practising on them the most
dreadful irony; and they were "that shy" and confused. But it was not
irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for
the poor "sowls," well--respect, that's it, respect for all human
beings; _his_ respect made _them_ respectable. Wasn't it grand? To
others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room
with him was enough. To be conscious that he was there, that he didn't
fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of "scowlin'" them, that
they were treated as gentlemen. Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the
interval of repose! Extraordinary, though, was it not? To think of a
_Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as
parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate,
_theirs_. Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking.
My father would have considered he was "taking a liberty" if he had
confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far.
But don't suppose for a moment that the "weak brethren" thought he was
conniving at their weakness. Not they--they saw the delicacy of his
conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of
appreciating _delicacy_? God only knows how far down into their depths
of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It
haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the
bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a noble innocence, a
_respect_ for our fellow creatures--glib phrases, but how little
understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was
a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying,
and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth,
and modesty. It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the
others could not fail to be present. Was he far wrong? Yet how many
people would have thought him stern!
One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind. We called him U.T., that is
Uncle Tom. He was not our uncle--we never had one--but the uncle of our
predecessors at Kirk Braddan. And almost every Sunday evening he spent
at the Vicarage--poor old thing! He was quite silent. One thing, though,
he would say, as "regglar as clockwork." My mother occasionally
apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great
singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: "I'm
passionately fond of music." This, to us children, was highly ludicrous.
Indeed, my mother was amused--she had no Manx blood in her--but my
father accepted U.T.'s assurance with the utmost confidence. His
chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness,
or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (_Anglicè_--humbug; oh
those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately."
_Passion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes
wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the
bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have
considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence
of passion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the
passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at
home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being
"scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of
"passion," even so ethereal a passion as that of music. How blessed
those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it
never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no
idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not
appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Saturday; and into
the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.
Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my
reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help
extending the portrait a little.
And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let's
feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'"
Do write again. You will do me so much good.
VISIONS
[Sidenote: _Calverley_]
In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag,
The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag;
And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker,
As broadening casements light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.
It is, in brief, the evening--that pure and pleasant time
When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme;
When in the glass of Memory the forms of loved ones shine--
And when, of course, Miss Goodchild's is prominent in mine.
Miss Goodchild!--Julia Goodchild!--how graciously you smiled
Upon my childish passion once, yourself a fair-haired child:
When I was (no doubt) profiting by Dr. Crabb's instruction,
And sent those streaky lollipops home for your fairy suction!
"She wore" her natural "roses, the night when first we met"--
Her golden hair was gleaming 'neath the coercive net:
"Her brow was like the snawdrift," her step was like Queen Mab's,
And gone was instantly the heart of every boy at Crabb's.
The parlour boarder _chasséed_ tow'rds her on graceful limb;
The onyx deck'd his bosom--but her smiles were not for him:
With _me_ she danced--till drowsily her eyes "began to blink,"
And _I_ brought raisin wine, and said, "Drink, pretty creature,
drink!"
And evermore, when winter comes in his garb of snows,
And the returning schoolboy is told how fast he grows;
Shall I--with that soft hand in mine--enact ideal Lancers,
And dream I hear demure remarks, and make impassioned answers:--
I know that never, never may her love for me return--
At night I muse upon the fact with undisguised concern--
But ever shall I bless that day: I don't bless as a rule,
The days I spent at "Dr. Crabb's Preparatory School."
And yet we two _may_ meet again--(be still, my throbbing heart!)--
Now rolling years have weaned us from jam and raspberry-tart.
One night I saw a vision--'twas when musk-roses bloom,
I stood--_we_ stood--upon a rug, in a sumptuous dining-room:
One hand clasped hers--one easily reposed upon my hip--
And "Bless ye!" burst abruptly from Mr. Goodchild's lip:
I raised my brimming eye, and saw in hers an answering gleam--
My heart beat wildly--and I woke, and lo! it was a dream.
"BOSWELL AND JOHNSON"
[Sidenote: _Macaulay_]
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no
second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not
worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human
intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men
that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest
men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who
knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not
having been alive when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk used his
name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of
the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater
part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some
eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was
always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a
crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited
himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription
of "Corsican Boswell." In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that
at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile
and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with
family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common
butt in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was
talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we
have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most
childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the
office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and
sword,--such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be.
Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the
publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was
matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind.
What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one
place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how
at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the
prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went
to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred
pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at
Johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and
how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how
tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment
annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and
with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel
Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his
father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his
fooleries--all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they
had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the
caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his
hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a
cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a
fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the
whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he
has used nobody so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world
is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted
themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has
indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come
in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary
eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of
his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have
been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest
and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness,
the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility
to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was
a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own
curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation
of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense
enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he
was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has,
in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such
writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is
not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we
do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he
is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a
retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and
virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him
conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,
they have made him immortal.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his
face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his
blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation
of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the
posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his
insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood....
From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his
moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings
who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his
hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted with
the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in
society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the
last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was,
undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find
that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part,
failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He
ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate
as it was natural that a man should eat who, during a great part of his
life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for
the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear
privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He
could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a
famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead and the
perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine; but,
when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These
were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged
with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected
from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by
the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes,
by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the
derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which
is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most
toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.
Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had
struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in
the exercise of his power, he should be _eo immitior, quia toleraverat_;
that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his
demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief; but for
the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had
no pity, for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely
conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl
from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd
of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all
their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the
pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt
sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had
seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was not affected by paltry
vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much
hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for
complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust
on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase,
"foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a
world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because _The
Good-natured Man_ had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own
health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him
very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might
weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a
plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle
of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such
grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A
washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have
sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental
grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others
in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a
sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My dear
doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call
him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the
worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well
defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not
because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared
smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live
for fourpence halfpenny a day....
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and
enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of
all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the
Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into
the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered
Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the
happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror which the
sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and
dancing bears excited his contempt. To the arguments urged by some very
worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and
spirit, "Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the
lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and
tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will
not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Yet he was himself
under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or
Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical
dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with
Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once
committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he
thought it was his duty to pass several months without joining in
public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been
ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours
was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man.
I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years,
but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he
has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious
robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a
Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked
in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled
villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man
who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated
must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could
easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat
as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends
of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have
overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of
mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!...
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in
Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been
quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in
manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible
and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write
for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books
are written in a learned language; in a language which nobody hears from
his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or
drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever
thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in
which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication he did
his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the
Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the
"Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation; and it is amusing to
compare the two versions. "When we were taken upstairs," says he in one
of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of
us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows:
"Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our
entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson
translated aloud. "_The Rehearsal_" he said, very unjustly, "has not wit
enough to keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality
enough to preserve it from putrefaction."
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the
manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be
willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a
mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been
adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant
effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our
readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost
superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use
than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long
after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the King's English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets,
till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical
forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no
opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little
things, his hard inversions, so widely different from those graceful and
easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the
expression of our great old writers--all these peculiarities have been
imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants till the public
has become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to
write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little
fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for
personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a
disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or
a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.
His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him
under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the
poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her
reception at the country-house of her relations in such terms as these:
"I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find,
instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always
promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused
wilderness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every
face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla
informs us that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the
flattery of courtship and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round
of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the congratulations of
applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the
sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of
love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans,
"I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under
her muffler."
We had something more to say; but our article is already too long, and
we must close it. We would fain part in good-humour from the hero, from
the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed
his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced
us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent and the lemons
for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the
canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall, thin
form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of
Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in
his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up--the
gigantic body, the huge, massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the
scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see
the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why,
sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't
see your way through the question, sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be
regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To
receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius
have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately
known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case,
the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably
expected to be immortal is every day fading, while those peculiarities
of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably
thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the
English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
THE SUPPER
[Sidenote: _Sterne_]
A shoe coming loose from the fore-foot of the thill-horse, at the
beginning of the ascent of Mount Taurira, the postillion dismounted,
twisted the shoe off, and put it in his pocket. As the ascent was of
five or six miles, and that horse our main dependence, I made a point of
having the shoe fastened on again as well as we could; but the
postillion had thrown away the nails, and the hammer in the chaise box
being of no great use without them, I submitted to go on.
He had not mounted half a mile higher when, coming to a flinty piece of
road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other
fore-foot; I then got out of the chaise in good earnest, and, seeing a
house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to
do, I prevailed upon the postillion to turn up to it. The look of the
house, and of everything about it, as we drew nearer, soon reconciled me
to the disaster. It was a little farm-house, surrounded with about
twenty acres of vineyard, about as much corn, and close to the house, on
one side, was a _potagerie_ of an acre and a half, full of everything
which could make plenty in a French peasant's house; and, on the other
side, was a little wood, which furnished wherewithal to dress it. It was
about eight in the evening when I got to the house, so I left the
postillion to manage his point as he could; and, for mine, I walked
directly into the house.
The family consisted of an old grey-bearded man and his wife, with five
or six sons and sons-in-law, and their several wives, and a joyous
genealogy out of them.
They were all sitting down together to their lentil-soup, a large
wheaten loaf was in the middle of the table, and a flagon of wine at
each end of it promised joy through the stages of the repast; 'twas a
feast of love.
The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would
have me sit down at the table; my heart was set down the moment I
entered the room; so I sat down at once, like a son of the family; and,
to invest myself in the character as speedily as I could, I instantly
borrowed the old man's knife, and, taking up the loaf, cut myself a
hearty luncheon; and, as I did it, I saw a testimony in every eye, not
only of an honest welcome, but of a welcome mixed with thanks that I had
not seemed to doubt it.
Was it this? or tell me, Nature, what else it was that made this morsel
so sweet; and to what magic I owe it, that the draught I took of their
flagon was so delicious with it, that they remain upon my palate to this
hour.
If the supper was to my taste, the grace which followed it was much more
so.
THE GRACE
[Sidenote: _Sterne_]
When supper was over the old man gave a knock upon the table with the
haft of his knife, to bid them prepare for the dance. The moment the
signal was given, the women and girls ran off together into a back
apartment to tie up their hair, and the young men to the door to wash
their faces and change their _sabots_; and in three minutes every soul
was ready upon a little esplanade before the house to begin. The old man
and his wife came out last, and, placing me betwixt them, sat down upon
a sofa of turf by the door.
The old man had, some fifty years ago, been no mean performer upon the
_vielle_; and at the age he was then of, touched it well enough for the
purpose. His wife sang now and then a little to the tune, then
intermitted and joined her old man again, as their children and
grandchildren danced before them.
It was not till the middle of the second dance, when, for some pauses in
the movements wherein they all seemed to look up, I fancied I could
distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which is the
cause of the effect of simple jollity. In a word, I thought I beheld
religion mixing in the dance; but, as I had never seen her so engaged, I
should have looked upon it now as one of the illusions of an imagination
which is eternally misleading me, had not the old man, as soon as the
dance ended, said that this was their constant way; and that all his
life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his
family to dance and rejoice; "believing," he said, "that a cheerful and
contented mind was the best sort of thanks to Heaven that an illiterate
peasant could pay"--
"Or a learned prelate either," said I.
HINTS FOR AN HISTORICAL PLAY; TO BE CALLED WILLIAM RUFUS; OR, THE RED
ROVER
[Sidenote: _Ingoldsby_]
_Act_ 1
Walter Tyrrel, the son of a Norman papa,
Has, somehow or other, a Saxon mama:
Though humble, yet far above mere vulgar loons,
He's a sort of a sub in the Rufus dragoons;
Has travelled, but comes home abruptly, the rather
That some unknown rascal has murder'd his father;
And scarce has he picked out, and stuck in his quiver,
The arrow that pierced the old gentleman's liver,
When he finds, as misfortunes come rarely alone,
That his sweetheart has bolted--with whom is not known.
But, as murder will out, he at last finds the lady
At court with her character grown rather shady:
This gives him the "blues," and impairs the delight
He'd have otherwise felt when they dub him a Knight
For giving a runaway stallion a check,
And preventing his breaking King Rufus's neck.
_Act 2_
Sir Walter has dress'd himself up like a Ghost,
And frightens a soldier away from his post;
Then, discarding his helmet, he pulls his cloak higher,
Draws it over his ears and pretends he's a Friar.
This gains him access to his sweetheart, Miss Faucit;
But, the King coming in, he hides up in her closet;
Where, oddly enough, among some of her things,
He discovers some arrows he's sure are the King's,
Of the very same pattern with that which he found
Sticking into his father when dead on the ground!
Forgetting his funk, he bursts open the door,
Bounces into the drawing-room, stamps on the floor,
With an oath on his tongue, and revenge in his eye,
And blows up King William the Second sky-high;
Swears, storms, shakes his fist, and exhibits such airs,
That his Majesty bids his men kick him downstairs.
_Act 3_
King Rufus is cross when he comes to reflect,
That, as King, he's been treated with gross disrespect;
So he pens a short note to a holy physician,
And gives him a rather unholy commission,
Viz., to mix up some arsenic and ale in a cup,
Which the chances are Tyrrel may find and drink up.
Sure enough, on the very next morning, Sir Walter
Perceives, in his walks, this same cup on the altar.
As he feels rather thirsty, he's just about drinking,
When Miss Faucit, in tears, comes in running like winking;
He pauses, of course, and, as she's thirsty too,
Says, very politely, "Miss, I after you!"
The young lady curtsies, and, being so dry,
Raises somehow her fair little finger so high,
That there's not a drop left him to "wet t'other eye";
While the dose is so strong, to his grief and surprise,
She merely says, "Thankee, Sir Walter," and dies.
At that moment the King, who is riding to cover,
Pops in _en passant_ on the desperate lover,
Who has vow'd, not five minutes before, to transfix him--
So he does--he just pulls out his arrow and sticks him.
From the strength of his arm, and the force of his blows,
The Red-bearded Rover falls flat on his nose;
And Sir Walter, thus having concluded the quarrel,
Walks down to the footlights, and draws this fine moral:
"Ladies and gentlemen, lead sober lives:
Don't meddle with other folks' sweethearts or wives!--
When you go out a-sporting take care of your gun,
And--never shoot elderly people in fun!"
IN A VISITOR'S BOOK
[Sidenote: _J.K. Stephen._]
Within the bounds of this Hotel,
Which bears the name of Pen-y-Gwryd,
A black and yellow hound doth dwell,
By which my friend and I were worried.
Our object is not to imply
That he assaulted, bit, or tore us;
In fact he never ventured nigh
Except when food was set before us.
But when the scent of ham and eggs
Announced the breakage of our fast,
He came and twined about our legs,
And interrupted our repast.
We drove him from us through the door;
He reappeared; we tried the casement;
He seemed to rise out of the floor,
And importuned us as before,
To our unspeakable amazement.
But timely succour Fortune brought us;
One word of Welsh we chanced to know,
And that a fellow-guest had taught us;
It meant "Unpleasant creature, go!"
Stranger! If you should chance to meet him,
Oh do not pull, or kick, or push,
Or execrate, or bribe, or beat him,
But make a sound resembling "Cwsh"!
LETTERS OF FITZ
[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]
Mazzinghi tells me that November weather breeds blue devils--so that
there is a French proverb, "In October de Englishman shoot de pheasant;
in November he shoot himself." This, I suppose, is the case with me: so
away with November, as soon as may be....
Have you got in your "Christian Poet" a poem by Sir H. Wotton--"How
happy is he born or taught, that serveth not another's will"? It is very
beautiful, and fit for a Paradise of any kind. Here are some lines from
old Lily, which your ear will put in the proper metre. It gives a fine
description of a fellow walking in spring, and looking here and there,
and pricking up his ears, as different birds sing: "What bird so sings,
but doth so wail? Oh! 'tis the ravished nightingale: 'Jug, jug, jug,
jug, terue,' she cries, and still her woes at midnight rise. Brave
prick-song! who is't now we hear? It is the lark so shrill and clear:
against heaven's gate he claps his wings, the morn not waking till he
sings. Hark, too, with what a pretty note poor Robin Redbreast tunes his
throat: Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing, 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the
spring: 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring.'" This is very English, and
pleasant, I think: and so I hope you will. I could have sent you many a
more sentimental thing, but nothing better. I admit nothing into my
Paradise, but such as breathe content, and virtue....
The Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving: not for the sake of
the unclean beasts that almost filled it, and probably made most noise
and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality, that was as
much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without....
[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]
Some one from this house is going to London: and I will try and write
you some lines now in half an hour before dinner. 'I am going out for
the evening to my old lady, who teaches me the names of the stars, and
other chaste information. You see, Master John Allen, that if I do not
come to London (and I have no thought of going yet) and you will not
write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not, by the
way, that I am never to go to London again; but not just yet. Here I
live with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive
at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call
perfect happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I
read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the
garden, a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun
manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this, Nero, and the delicacy
of spring, all very human however. Then at half-past one lunch on
Cambridge cream cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up
some weeds from the grass: and then, coming in, I sit down to write to
you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the
most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs
the world away. You think I live in Epicurean ease; but this happens to
be a jolly day: one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is
not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant
atrocity. But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end
of it....
Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street.
... I am living (did I tell you this before?) at a little cottage close
by the lawn gates, where I have my books, a barrel of beer, which I tap
myself (can you tap a barrel of beer?), and an old woman to do for me. I
have also just concocted two gallons of tar-water under the directions
of Bishop Berkeley: it is to be bottled off this very day after a
careful skimming, and then drunk by those who can and will. It is to be
tried first on my old woman; if she survives, I am to begin; and it will
then gradually spread into the parish, through England, Europe, etc.,
"as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake."
... Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a
house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into
some scene-behind-scene world on the other side, as harlequins do? A
steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it
ironically tempts one to outrage it. One feels it would close again over
the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of
Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor
cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it could, I feel sure,
discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at
such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied
that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I
occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead. We
find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things:
you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead
rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of
Geneva. We have great laughing over this. The forehead is at present in
Pembrokeshire, I believe; or Glamorganshire; or Monmouthshire: it is
hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there....
[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]
I wish you would write me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I
suppose, at Cambridge, and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a
shame!) here; so that I hear of nobody--except that Spedding and I abuse
each other about Shakespeare occasionally, a subject on which you must
know that he has lost his conscience, if he ever had any. For what did
Dr. Allen ... say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his bumps
were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety--then what
would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q.E.D.
Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of
conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also
where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes,
the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly
compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that
of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book--"The Second
Funeral of Napoleon"? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy
it, as each copy sold puts 7-1/2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty
just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done.
What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last
Review! The last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe
but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The
electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth
fires away about the Odes of Pindar, and Donne is very æsthetic about
Mr. Hallam's book. What is the meaning of "exegetical"? Till I know
that, how can I understand the Review?
Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates
as I knew in the days before they "assumed the purple." I am reading
Gibbon, and see nothing but this d----d colour before my eyes. It
changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial
colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (_vide_ Coleridge and
Eastlake's "Goethe")--even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are
antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same
(_vide_ Coleridge, etc.). Is this æsthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad
I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and
begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to
this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay,
with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted
to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover--requiring, however, a summer
fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year,
etc." This is not an unpleasing style on agricultural subjects--nor an
uncommon one....
* * * * *
You know my way of life so well that I need not describe it to you, as
it has undergone no change since I saw you. I read of mornings--the same
old books over and over again, having no command of new ones; walk with
my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open
windows, up to which China-roses climb, with my pipe, while the
blackbirds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the
nightingale to have the neighbourhood to herself. We have had such a
spring (bating the last ten days) as would have satisfied even you with
warmth. And such verdure! white clouds moving over the new-fledged tops
of oak-trees, and acres of grass striving with buttercups. How old to
tell of, how new to see! I believe that Leslie's "Life of Constable" (a
very charming book) has given me a fresh love of spring. Constable loved
it above all seasons: he hated autumn. When Sir G. Beaumont, who was of
the old classical taste, asked him if he did not find it difficult to
place _his brown tree_ in his pictures, "Not at all," said C, "I never
put one in at all." And when Sir George was crying up the tone of the
old masters' landscapes, and quoting an _old violin_ as the proper tone
of colour for a picture, Constable got up, took an old Cremona, and laid
it down on the sunshiny grass. You would like the book. In defiance of
all this, I have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles
indeed; but I agree with Sir George and Constable both. I like pictures
that are not like nature. I can have nature better than any picture by
looking out of my window. Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to
the freshness of earth and sky. Constable did not wholly achieve what he
tried at: and perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things
as more within the compass of lead paint. To paint dew with lead!...
* * * * *
It is now the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate east wind,
all razors; a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London,
with 365 blades all drawn and pointed. The wheat is all sown; the
fallows cannot be ploughed. What are all the poor folks to do during the
winter? And they persist in having the same enormous families they used
to do; a woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children! What
farmers are to employ all these? What landlord can find room for them?
The law of Generation must be repealed....
DEAR CARLYLE,
[Sidenote: _Edward FitzGerald_]
I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or
worth putting you to the trouble of answering me. About twice in a year,
however, I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered,
how you and Mrs. Carlyle are? And yet, perhaps, it is not so easy for
you to tell me so much about yourself: for your "well-being" comprises a
good deal! That you are not carried off by the cholera I take for
granted, since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy
with Doctor Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in
Westminster Abbey, by the side of Wilberforce perhaps! Besides, a short
note from Thackeray a few weeks ago told me you had been to see him. I
conclude also from this that you have not been a summer excursion of any
distance.
I address from the Rectory (_Vicarage_it ought to be) of Crabbe, the
"Radiator," whose mind is now greatly exercised with Dr. Whewell's
"Plurality of Worlds." Crabbe, who is a good deal in the secrets of
Providence, admires the work beyond measure, but most indignantly
rejects the doctrine as unworthy of God. I have not read the book,
contented to hear Crabbe's commentaries. I have been staying with him
off and on for two months, and, as I say, give his address because any
letter thither directed will find me sooner or later in my little
wanderings. I am at present staying with a farmer in a very pleasant
house near Woodbridge, inhabiting such a room as even you, I think,
would sleep composedly in; my host a taciturn, cautious, honest, active
man whom I have known all my life. He and his wife, a capital housewife,
and his son, who would carry me on his shoulders to Ipswich, and a
maid-servant, who, as she curtsies of a morning, lets fall the teapot,
etc., constitute the household. Farming greatly prospers, farming
materials fetching an exorbitant price at the Michaelmas auctions--all
in defiance of Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who got returned for Suffolk on the
strength of denouncing Corn Law Repeal as the ruin of the country. He
has bought a fine house near Ipswich, with great gilded gates before it,
and, by dint of good dinners and soft sawder, finally draws the country
gentry to him....
Please to look at the September Number of Fraser's Magazine, where there
are some prose translations of Hafiz by Cowell which may interest you a
little. I think Cowell (as he is apt to do) gives Hafiz rather too much
credit for a mystical wine-cup, and cup-bearer; I mean, taking him on
the whole. The few odes he quotes have certainly a deep and pious
feeling, such as the Man of Mirth will feel at times: none perhaps more
strongly.
Some one by chance read out to me the other day at the seaside your
account of poor old Naseby village from "Cromwell," quoted in Knight's
"Half-Hours," etc. It is now twelve years ago, at this very season, I
was ransacking for you; you promising to come down, and never coming. I
hope very much you are soon going to give us something: else Jerrold and
Tupper carry all before them.
TO "LYDIA LANGUISH"
[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]
"Il me faut des emotions"--_Blanche Amory_
You ask me, Lydia, "whether I,
If you refuse my suit, shall die."
(Now pray don't let this hurt you!)
Although the time be out of joint,
I should not think a bodkin's point
The sole resource of virtue;
Nor shall I, though your mood endure,
Attempt a final Water-cure
Except against my wishes;
For I respectfully decline
To dignify the Serpentine,
And make _hors-d'oeuvres_ for fishes;
But if you ask me whether I
Composedly can go,
Without a look, without a sigh,
Why, then I answer--No.
"You are assured," you sadly say
(If in this most considerate way
To treat my suit your will is),
That I shall "quickly find as fair
Some new Neæra's tangled hair--
Some easier Amaryllis."
I cannot promise to be cold
If smiles are kind as yours of old
On lips of later beauties;
Nor can I, if I would, forget
The homage that is Nature's debt,
While man has social duties;
But if you ask shall I prefer
To you I honour so,
A somewhat visionary Her,
I answer truly--No.
You fear, you frankly add, "to find
In me too late the altered mind
That altering Time estranges."
To this I make response that we
(As physiologists agree)
Must have septennial changes;
This is a thing beyond control,
And it were best upon the whole
To try and find out whether
We could not, by some means, arrange
This not-to-be-avoided change
So as to change together:
But had you asked me to allow
That you could ever grow
Less amiable than you are now,--
Emphatically--No.
But--to be serious--if you care
To know how I shall really bear
This much-discussed rejection,
I answer you. As feeling men
Behave, in best romances, when
You outrage their affection;--
With that gesticulatory woe,
By which, as melodramas show,
Despair is indicated;
Enforced by all the liquid grief
Which hugest pocket-handkerchief
Has ever simulated;
And when, arrived so far, you say
In tragic accents, "Go,"
Then, Lydia, then ... I still shall stay,
And firmly answer--No.
MARK'S BABY
[Sidenote: _Mark Twain_]
"Mark, one day, was found at home, in his library, dandling upon his
knee, with every appearance of fond 'parientness,' the young Twain--so
young as not yet to be able to 'walk upright and make bargains.' Mrs.
Twain, on showing the visitor into the sanctum, and finding her spouse
thus engaged, said:
"'Now, Mark, you _know_ you love that baby--don't you?'
"'Well,' replied Mark, in his slow, drawling kind of way,
'I--can't--exactly--say--I--love it,--_but--I--respect--it!_'"
THE WISDOM OF G.K.C.
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes
it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not
joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you
know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go
nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a
humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing
worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base
equality and an evil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his
hands. And in the high altar of Christianity stands another figure in
whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink," he says, "for the whole
world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and wrath of
God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this is the
stirrup-cup. Drink, for this is My blood of the New Testament that is
shed for you. Drink, for I know whence you come and why. Drink, for I
know when you go and where."--"Heretics."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon
obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly
irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat
and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine
carelessness; but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in
a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a child's rocking-horse
for a joke; but we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of
it unglued for a joke.--"Heretics."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the
train before.--"Tremendous Trifles."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old
woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat-race. But in her
grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that there
was a Boat-race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had
heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had
heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her
simple trust. And by and by, in God's good time, it was discovered that
this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her
so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, "Virtue is its own
reward."--"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."
In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how
perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes,
and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is
proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the
lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a
room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.--"The Napoleon
of Notting Hill."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time
to preach his own heresy.--"George Bernard Shaw."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called
weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English
landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have
this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of
their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint
portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather
posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English
painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and
fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible
protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas
and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a
grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be
burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look
like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and
secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A
bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its
brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the
larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost
red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.
Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless:
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of
existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and
promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to
some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or
breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the
indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather
on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us
of the morning.--"Daily News."
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesteron_]