Sir Poet, ere you crossed the lawn
(If it was wrong to watch you, pardon),
Behind this weeping birch withdrawn,
I watched you saunter round the garden.
I saw you bend beside the phlox,
Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle,
Review my well-ranged hollyhocks
Smile at the fountain's slender spurtle;
You paused beneath the cherry-tree,
Where my marauder thrush was singing,
Peered at the bee-hives curiously,
And narrowly escaped a stinging;
And then--you see, I watched--you passed
Down the espalier walk that reaches
Out to the western wall, and last,
Dropped on the seat before the peaches.
What was your thought? You waited long.
Sublime or graceful,--grave,--satiric?
A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song?
A tender Tennysonian lyric?
Tell me. That garden-seat shall be,
So long as speech renown disperses,
Illustrious as the spot where he--
The gifted Blank--composed his verses.
THE POET
[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]
Madam,--whose uncensorious eye
Grows gracious over certain pages,
Wherein the Jester's maxims lie,
It may be, thicker than the Sage's--
I hear but to obey, and could
Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you,
Some verse as whimsical as Hood,--
As gay as Praed,--should answer to you.
But, though the common voice proclaims
Our only serious vocation
Confined to giving nothings names
And dreams a "local habitation";
Believe me, there are tuneless days,
When neither marble, brass, nor vellum,
Would profit much by any lays
That haunt the poet's cerebellum.
More empty things, I fear, than rhymes,
More idle things than songs, absorb it;
The "finely frenzied" eye, at times,
Reposes mildly in its orbit;
And--painful truth--at times, to him,
Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive,
"A primrose by a river's brim"
Is absolutely unsuggestive.
The fickle Muse! As ladies will,
She sometimes wearies of her wooer;
A goddess, yet a woman still,
She flies the more that we pursue her;
In short, with worst as well as best,
Five months in six, your hapless poet
Is just as prosy as the rest,
But cannot comfortably show it.
You thought, no doubt, the garden scent
Brings back some brief-winged bright sensation
Of love that came and love that went,--
Some fragrance of a lost flirtation,
Born when the cuckoo changes song,
Dead ere the apple's red is on it,
That should have been an epic long,
Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.
Or else you thought,--the murmuring noon
He turns it to a lyric sweeter,
With birds that gossip in the tune,
And windy bough-swing in the metre;
Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms
Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms,
Round singing mouths, and chanted charms,
And mediaeval orchard blossoms,--
Quite _à la mode_. Alas for prose!--
My vagrant fancies only rambled
Back to the red-walled Rectory close,
Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled,
Climbed on the dial, teased the fish,
And chased the kitten round the beeches,
Till widening instincts made me wish
For certain slowly ripening peaches.
Three peaches. Not the Graces three
Had more equality of beauty:
I would not look, yet went to see;
I wrestled with Desire and Duty;
I felt the pangs of those who feel
The laws of Property beset them;
The conflict made my reason reel,
And, half-abstractedly, I ate them;--
Or two of them. Forthwith Despair--
More keen that one of these was rotten--
Moved me to seek some forest lair
Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,
Attired in skins, by berries stained,
Absolved from brushes and ablution;--
But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained,
Fate gave me up to execution.
I saw it all but now. The grin
That gnarled old Gardener Sandy's features;
My father, scholar-like and thin,
Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;
I saw--ah me !--I saw again
My dear and deprecating mother;
And then, remembering the cane,
Regretted--that _I'd left the other._
MACAULAY'S WIT
[Sidenote: _Macaulay_]
I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of
semi-Solomon. He _half_ knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to
him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II.
But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to
run, though not to soar.
... Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad
verses, and Jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of
Lady Millar.
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of
misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great
commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's
wife.
CRANFORD
[Sidenote: _Mrs. Gaskell_]
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the
holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married couple
come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is
either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford
evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his
ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great
neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a
railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not
at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The surgeon has his
round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a
surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a
weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully
at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing at the geese that
occasionally venture into the gardens if the gates are left open; for
deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling
themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear
and correct knowledge of everybody's affairs in the parish; for keeping
their neat maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat
dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other
whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite
sufficient. "A man," as one of them observed to me once, "is _so_ in the
way in the house!" Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's
proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's opinions.
Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity,
pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation;
but, somehow, good-will reigns among them to a considerable degree.
The Cranford ladies have only an occasional little quarrel, spirted out
in a few peppery words and angry jerks of the head; just enough to
prevent the even tenor of their lives from becoming too flat. Their
dress is very independent of fashion; as they observe, "What does it
signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?" And if
they go from home, their reason is equally cogent, "What does it signify
how we dress here, where nobody knows us?" The materials of their
clothes are, in general, good and plain, and most of them are nearly as
scrupulous as Miss Tyler, of cleanly memory; but I will answer for it,
the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England,
was seen at Cranford--and seen without a smile.
I can testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella, under which a
gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to
patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red silk umbrellas in
London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in
Cranford; and the little boys mobbed it, and called it "a stick in
petticoats." It might have been the very red silk one I have described,
held by a strong father over a troop of little ones; the poor little
lady--the survivor of all--could scarcely carry it.
Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they
were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town with
all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a year on
the Tinwald Mount:
"Our friends have sent to inquire how you are after your journey
to-night, my dear" (fifteen miles, in a gentleman's carriage); "they
will give you some rest to-morrow, but the next day, I have no doubt,
they will call; so be at liberty after twelve--from twelve to three are
our calling-hours."
Then, after they had called:
"It is the third day; I dare say your mamma has told you, my dear, never
to let more than three days elapse between receiving a call and
returning it; and also, that you are never to stay longer than a quarter
of an hour."
"But am I to look at my watch? How am I to find out when a quarter of an
hour has passed?"
"You must keep thinking about the time, my dear, and not allow yourself
to forget it in conversation."
As everybody had this rule in their minds, whether they received or
paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We
kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk, and were punctual to
our time.
I imagine that a few of the gentlefolk of Cranford were poor, and had
some difficulty in making both ends meet; but they were like the
Spartans, and concealed their smart under a smiling face. We none of us
spoke of money, because that subject savoured of commerce and trade, and
though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The Cranfordians
had that kindly _esprit de corps_ which made them overlook all
deficiencies in success when some among them tried to conceal their
poverty. When Mrs. Forester, for instance, gave a party in her
baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the ladies on
the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out from
underneath, every one took this novel proceeding as the most natural
thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and ceremonies
as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants' hall,
second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of the once little
charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never have been
strong enough to carry the tray upstairs if she had not been assisted in
private by her mistress, who now sat in state pretending not to know
what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that
we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all
the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.
There were one or two consequences arising from this general but
unacknowledged poverty, and this very much acknowledged gentility, which
were not amiss, and which might be introduced into many circles of
society to their great improvement. For instance, the inhabitants of
Cranford kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens, under
the guidance of a lantern-bearer, about nine o'clock at night; and the
whole town was abed and asleep by half-past ten. Moreover, it was
considered "vulgar" (a tremendous word in Cranford) to give anything
expensive, in the way of eatable or drinkable, at the evening
entertainments. Wafer bread-and-butter and sponge-biscuits were all that
the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson gave; and she was sister-in-law to the late
Earl of Glenmire, although she did practise such "elegant economy."
"Elegant economy!" How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of
Cranford! There, economy was always "elegant," and money-spending always
"vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism which made us very
peaceful and satisfied. I never shall forget the dismay felt when a
certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford and openly spoke about
his being poor--not in a whisper to an intimate friend, the doors and
windows being previously closed, but in the public street! in a loud
military voice! alleging his poverty as a reason for not taking a
particular house. The ladies of Cranford were already rather moaning
over the invasion of their territories by a man and a gentleman. He was
a half-pay captain, and had obtained some situation on a neighbouring
railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned against by the little
town; and if, in addition to his masculine gender, and his connection
with the obnoxious railroad, he was so brazen as to talk of being
poor--why then, indeed, he must be sent to Coventry.... We had tacitly
agreed to ignore that any with whom we associated on terms of visiting
equality could ever be prevented by poverty from doing anything that
they wished. If we walked to or from a party, it was because the night
was so fine, or the air so refreshing, not because sedan-chairs were
expensive. If we wore prints instead of summer silks, it was because we
preferred a washing material; and so on, till we blinded ourselves to
the vulgar fact that we were, all of us, people of very moderate means.
Of course, then, we did not know what to make of a man who could speak
of poverty as if it was not a disgrace. Yet, somehow, Captain Brown made
himself respected in Cranford, and was called upon, in spite of all
resolutions to the contrary. I was surprised to hear his opinions quoted
as authority at a visit which I paid to Cranford about a year after he
had settled in the town. My old friends had been among the bitterest
opponents of any proposal to visit the captain and his daughters, only
twelve months before; and now he was even admitted in the tabooed hours
before twelve. True, it was to discover the cause of a smoking chimney,
before the fire was lighted; but still Captain Brown walked upstairs,
nothing daunted, spoke in a voice too large for the room, and joked
quite in the way of a tame man about the house. He had been blind to all
the small slights, and omissions of trivial ceremonies, with which he
had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies had
been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good faith;
and, with his manly frankness, had overpowered all the shrinking which
met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And, at last, his
excellent masculine common sense and his facility in devising expedients
to overcome domestic dilemmas had gained him an extraordinary place as
authority among the Cranford ladies. He himself went on in his course as
unaware of his popularity as he had been of the reverse; and I am sure
he was startled one day when he found his advice so highly esteemed as
to make some counsel which he had given in jest to be taken in sober,
serious earnest.
It was on this subject: An old lady had an Alderney cow, which she
looked upon as a daughter. You could not pay the short quarter of an
hour call without being told of the wonderful milk or wonderful
intelligence of this animal. The whole town knew and kindly regarded
Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney; therefore great was the sympathy and
regret when, in an unguarded moment, the poor cow tumbled into a
lime-pit. She moaned so loudly that she was soon heard and rescued; but
meanwhile the poor beast had lost most of her hair and came out looking
naked, cold, and miserable, in a bare skin. Everybody pitied the animal,
though a few could not restrain their smiles at her droll appearance.
Miss Betsy Barker absolutely cried with sorrow and dismay; and it was
said she thought of trying a bath of oil. This remedy, perhaps, was
recommended by some one of the number whose advice she asked; but the
proposal, if ever it was made, was knocked on the head by Captain
Brown's decided "Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers, ma'am,
if you wish to keep her alive. But my advice is, kill the poor creature
at once."
Miss Betsy Barker dried her eyes, and thanked the captain heartily. She
set to work, and by and by all the town turned out to see the Alderney
meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel. I have watched
her myself many a time. Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in
London?
Captain Brown had taken a small house on the outskirts of the town,
where he had lived with his two daughters. He must have been upwards of
sixty at the time of the first visit I paid to Cranford after I had left
it as a residence. But he had a wiry, well-trained, elastic figure, a
stiff military throw-back of his head, and a springing step, which made
him appear much younger than he was. His eldest daughter looked almost
as old as himself, and betrayed the fact that his real was more than his
apparent age. Miss Brown must have been forty; she had a sickly, pained,
careworn expression on her face, and looked as if the gaiety of youth
had long faded out of sight. Even when young she must have been plain
and hard-featured. Miss Jessie Brown was ten years younger than her
sister, and twenty shades prettier. Her face was round and dimpled. Miss
Jenkyns once said, in a passion against Captain Brown (the cause of
which I will tell you presently), that "she thought it was time for Miss
Jessie to leave off her dimples, and not always to be trying to look
like a child." It was true there was something childlike in her face;
and there will be, I think, till she dies, though she should live to a
hundred. Her eyes were large, blue, wondering eyes, looking straight at
you; her nose was unformed and snub, and her lips were red and dewy; she
wore her hair, too, in little rows of curls, which heightened this
appearance. I do not know whether she was pretty or not; but I liked her
face, and so did everybody, and I do not think she could help her
dimples. She had something of her father's jauntiness of gait and
manner; and any female observer might detect a slight difference in the
attire of the two sisters--that of Miss Jessie being about two pounds
per annum more expensive than Miss Brown's. Two pounds was a large sum
in Captain Brown's annual disbursements.
Such was the impression made upon me by the Brown family when I first
saw them all together in Cranford Church. The captain I had met
before--on the occasion of the smoky chimney, which he had cured by some
simple alteration in the flue. In church, he held his double eye-glass
to his eyes during the Morning Hymn, and then lifted up his head erect
and sang out loud and joyfully. He made the responses louder than the
clerk--an old man with a piping, feeble voice, who, I think, felt
aggrieved at the captain's sonorous bass, and quavered higher and higher
in consequence.
On coming out of church the brisk captain paid the most gallant
attention to his two daughters. He nodded and smiled to his
acquaintances; but he shook hands with none until he had helped Miss
Brown to unfurl her umbrella, had relieved her of her prayer-book, and
had waited patiently till she, with trembling, nervous hands, had taken
up her gown to walk through the wet roads.
I wondered what the Cranford ladies did with Captain Brown at their
parties. We had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no
gentleman to be attended to, and to find conversation for, at the
card-parties. We had congratulated ourselves upon the snugness of the
evenings; and, in our love for gentility, and distaste of mankind, we
had almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be "vulgar"; so
that when I found my friend and hostess, Miss Jenkyns, was going to have
a party in my honour, and that Captain and the Miss Browns were invited,
I wondered much what could be the course of the evening. Card-tables,
with green-baize tops were set out by daylight, just as usual; it was
the third week in November, so the evening closed in about four.
Candles, and clean packs of cards were arranged in each table. The fire
was made up; the neat maid-servant had received her last directions; and
there we stood, dressed in our best, each with a candle-lighter in our
hands, ready to dart at the candles as soon as the first knock came.
Parties in Cranford were solemn festivities, making the ladies feel
gravely elated as they sat together in their best dresses. As soon as
three had arrived, we sat down to "Preference," I being the unlucky
fourth. The next four comers were put down immediately to another table;
and presently the tea-trays, which I had seen set out in the storeroom
as I passed in the morning, were placed each on the middle of a
card-table. The china was delicate eggshell; the old-fashioned silver
glittered with polishing; but the eatables were of the slightest
description. While the trays were yet on the tables, Captain and the
Miss Browns came in; and I could see that, somehow or other, the captain
was a favourite with all the ladies present. Ruffled brows were
smoothed, sharp voices lowered at his approach. Miss Brown looked ill,
and depressed almost to gloom. Miss Jessie smiled as usual, and seemed
nearly as popular as her father. He immediately and quietly assumed the
man's place in the room; attended to every one's wants, lessened the
pretty maid-servant's labour by waiting on empty cups and
bread-and-butterless ladies; and yet did it all in so dignified a
manner, and so much as if it were a matter of course for the strong to
attend to the weak, that he was a true man throughout. He played for
threepenny points with as grave an interest as if they had been pounds;
and yet, in all his attention to strangers, he had an eye on his
suffering daughter--for suffering I was sure she was, though to many
eyes she might only appear to be irritable. Miss Jessie could not play
cards; but she talked to the sitters-out, who, before her coming, had
been rather inclined to be cross. She sang, too, to an old cracked
piano, which I think had been a spinet in its youth. Miss Jessie sang
"Jock of Hazeldean" a little out of tune; but we were none of us
musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of appearing
to be so.
It was very good of Miss Jenkyns to do this; for I had seen that, a
little before, she had been a good deal annoyed by Miss Jessie Brown's
unguarded admission (apropos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle,
her mother's brother, who was a shopkeeper in Edinburgh. Miss Jenkyns
tried to drown this confession by a terrible cough--for the Honourable
Mrs. Jamieson was sitting at the card-table nearest Miss Jessie, and
what would she say or think if she found out she was in the same room
with a shopkeeper's niece! But Miss Jessie Brown (who had no tact, as we
all agreed the next morning) _would_ repeat the information, and assure
Miss Pole she could easily get her identical Shetland wool required,
"through my uncle, who has the best assortment of Shetland goods of any
one in Edinboro'." It was to take the taste of this out of our mouths,
and the sound of this out of our ears, that Miss Jenkyns proposed music;
so I say again, it was very good of her to beat time to the song.
When the trays reappeared with biscuits and wine, punctually at a
quarter to nine, there was conversation, comparing of cards, talking
over tricks; but by and by Captain Brown sported a bit of literature.
"Have you seen any numbers of _The Pickwick Papers_?" said he. (They
were then publishing in parts.) "Capital thing!"
Now Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford; and, on
the strength of a number of manuscript sermons and a pretty good library
of divinity, considered herself literary, and looked upon any
conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and
said, "Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read them."
"And what do you think of them?" exclaimed Captain Brown. "Aren't they
famously good?"
So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.
"I must say, I don't think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson.
Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows
what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model." This
was evidently too much for Captain Brown to take placidly; and I saw the
words on the tip of his tongue before Miss Jenkyns had finished her
sentence.
"It is quite a different sort of thing, my dear madam," he began.
"I am quite aware of that," returned she. "And I make allowances,
Captain Brown."
"Just allow me to read you a scene out of this month's number," pleaded
he. "I had it only this morning, and I don't think the company can have
read it yet."
"As you please," said she, settling herself with an air of resignation.
He read the account of the "swarry" which Sam Weller gave at Bath. Some
of us laughed heartily. I did not dare, because I was staying in the
house. Miss Jenkyns sat in patient gravity. When it was ended, she
turned to me, and said, with mild dignity:
"Fetch me _Rasselas_, my dear, out of the book-room."