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Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25), by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25)
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #30729]
Language: English
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THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME III
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ ..........
[Illustration: SWANSTON COTTAGE, THE HOME OF R.L.S. FROM 1868 TO 1876]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME THREE
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
PAGE
PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM 5
I. VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES 19
II. SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS 43
III. WALT WHITMAN 77
IV. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 101
V. YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO 129
VI. FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER 142
VII. CHARLES OF ORLEANS 171
VIII. SAMUEL PEPYS 206
IX. JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN 230
THE BODY-SNATCHER 277
FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
TO
THOMAS STEVENSON
CIVIL ENGINEER
BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS
IN EVERY QUARTER OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY
THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE
DEDICATED BY HIS SON
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM
These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the
_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan's_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
Magazine_. To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me
to republish so considerable an amount of copy.
These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
and countries. Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the
very deepest strain of thought in Scotland,--a country far more
essentially different from England than many parts of America; for, in a
sense, the first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its
most essentially national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon
would involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the
author by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties
of art. Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of
something not so much realised as widely sought after among the late
generations of their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice
relation to the society that brought them forth, an author would require
a large habit of life among modern Americans. As for Yoshida, I have
already disclaimed responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.
In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book
led to another, one study to another. The first was published with
trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
commission through the ages: and, having once escaped the perils of the
Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism. Now it is one thing to write with
enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
reading, coloured with recent prejudice; and it is quite another
business to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume. We
are most of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the "natural
affections" of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are
altogether free from paralysing doubts and scruples. For my part, I have
a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure
these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine
interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished
with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end,
under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.
Of these disadvantages a word must here be said. The writer of short
studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall
present a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the
case, all the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative;
and that of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken
in the text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious
glitter. By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his
subject throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice.
Like Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter's neck to get the
proper shadows on the portrait. It is from one side only that he has
time to represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one
most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and
in both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and
sophisticated reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed; the
hero is seen at home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his
work come one after another into notice; and thus something like a true
general impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the
short study, the writer, having seized his "point of view," must keep
his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate
than truly to characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be
sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait; the lights are
heightened, the shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually
forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have at best
something of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be
readable at all and hang together by their own ends, the peculiar
convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a
while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly
introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by
sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two
English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify
its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of
the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much
more poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a
fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading
lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair
to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle
on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel
but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean
bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of
Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral
bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some
significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short
studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in
that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit.
Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new "point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in
the volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But
this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of
shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and
do not, by criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and
less partial critics.
HUGO'S ROMANCES. This is an instance of the "point of view." The five
romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
great contemporary master of workmanship, and indeed of all literary
arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it
is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often
overlooked.
BURNS. I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage.
This half-apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect--that Burns was a bad man, the impure
vehicle of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all
criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's
desperate efforts to do right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it
appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The
complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had
sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to
have stated this more noisily I now see; but that any one should fail to
see it for himself is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of
open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be
called a bad man, I question very much whether I or the writer in the
Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one.
All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is
to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly what every one well
knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results, that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said--I have heard it
with these ears--that drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I did not
think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too
frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the
eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns's
radical badness.
But, second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality
so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you
must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself as attended by
any other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that
Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the
moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had
presumed too far on his strength. One after another the lights of his
life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured
sickbed of the end. And surely, for any one that has a thing to call a
soul, he shines out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic
effort to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died
reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he refrained from "the
wrong that amendeth wrong." But the common, trashy mind of our
generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an
unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read; the tower of Siloam
fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little
Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old Norse
nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was
yet not shaken in its faith.
WALT WHITMAN. This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to
meditate between the author whom he loves and the public who are
certainly indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been
written on this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes,
either to praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to
blindfold our fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by
an excess of unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt.
I was here on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed
myself, with perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so
much in Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that
was unsurpassed in force and fitness,--seeing the true prophet doubled,
as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop,--it appeared best
to steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought
they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers
over what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his
extraordinary poems. That was perhaps the right road; yet I cannot help
feeling that in this attempt to trim my sails between an author whom I
love and honour and a public too averse to recognise his merit, I have
been led into a tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of
Whitman's. But the good and the great man will go on his way not vexed
with my little shafts of merriment. He, first of any one, will
understand how, in the attempt to explain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I
have been led into certain airs of the man of the world, which are
merely ridiculous in me, and were not intentionally discourteous to
himself. But there is a worse side to the question; for in my eagerness
to be all things to all men, I am afraid I may have sinned against
proportion. It will be enough to say here that Whitman's faults are few
and unimportant when they are set beside his surprising merits. I had
written another paper full of gratitude for the help that had been given
me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the intrinsic merit of the poems,
and conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence. The present
study was a rifacimento. From it, with the design already mentioned, and
in a fit of horror at my old excess, the big words and emphatic passages
were ruthlessly excised. But this sort of prudence is frequently its
own punishment; along with the exaggeration, some of the truth is
sacrificed; and the result is cold, constrained, and grudging. In short,
I might almost everywhere have spoken more strongly than I did.
THOREAU. Here is an admirable instance of the "point of view" forced
throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me
this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.
I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it
was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own
explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by
the nature of the case and my own _parti pris_, read even with a certain
violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion
more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study,
indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page),
Thoreau's sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men,
I please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the
difference might have made us enemies instead of making us friends. To
him, who knew the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded
like inversions made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of them
together, and he had understood how I was looking at the man through the
books, while he had long since learned to read the books through the
man, I believe he understood the spirit in which I had been led astray.
On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with
the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism. First, if
Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with
designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense.
Hither came the fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road
to freedom. That shanty in the woods was a station in the great
Underground Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an
ardent worker, soul and body, in that so much more than honourable
movement, which, if atonement were possible for nations, should have
gone far to wipe away the guilt of slavery. But in history sin always
meets with condign punishment; the generation passes, the offence
remains, and the innocent must suffer. No underground railroad could
atone for slavery, even as no bills in Parliament can redeem the ancient
wrongs of Ireland. But here at least is a new light shed on the Walden
episode.
Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once
fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother
were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
"rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his
professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching
insincerity of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory
of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living
critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words,
"This seems nonsense." It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private
bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy
parts of this philosophy of Thoreau's. He was affecting the Spartanism
he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
deceived himself with reasons.
Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he
will find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely
with his doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out. But that
large part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or
sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance,
is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In
some ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true
Thoreau still remains to be depicted.
VILLON. I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of
him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but
artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have
written of the man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the
best. Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to
give it expression.
The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat
Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
surpasses them in a native power. The old author, breaking with an
_éclat de voix_ out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched
on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking
impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it
would be worth doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take
in the author's skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the
baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of
much; it is a piece of experience that has nowhere else been rendered
into literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's plainness
mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the business. I shall
quote here a verse of an old student's song; worth laying side by side
with Villon's startling ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy
mistress, but he did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it
is thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:--
Nunc plango florem
Ætatis teneræ
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire præcipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Cæcos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa.[1]
But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
lamented in his song; and the nameless mediæval vagabond has the best of
the comparison.
There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty. I
regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
author's meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, promising
us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long
looked forward.
CHARLES OF ORLEANS. Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of
the old Duke's verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool.
The period is not sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what
a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle
and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor;
and even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks,
bears witness to a dreary sterile folly,--a twilight of the mind peopled
with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems
quite a lively character.
It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who,
immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the
Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy from the expert to the amateur
only too uncommon in these days.
KNOX. Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies
dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It
remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again
and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I
have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors,
to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I
have touched him in my turn with that "mace of death," which Carlyle has
attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M'Crie. Yet I believe they
are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I
trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two
studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its
composition.
Of the PEPYS I can say nothing; for it has been too recently through my
hands; and I still retain some of the heat of composition. Yet it may
serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I
have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles
of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to
see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions.
Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone;
perhaps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank and mind.
Such at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these
were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not
love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them
and lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
and behold, when I came to write of them, my tongue was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.
R. L. S.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Gaudeamus: Carmina vagorum selecta." Leipsic: Trübner, 1879.
FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS
I
VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES
Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera
un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique,
réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans
Homère.--VICTOR HUGO on "Quentin Durward."
Victor Hugo's romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it
is only in the last romance of all, "Quatrevingt-treize," that this
culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more
justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to
advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That
significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that
of his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and
more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that
carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries his
last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of
any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we
have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be
the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many
others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of
them--of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his
life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by
"Quatrevingt-treize" for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and,
through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here
the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and
hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other
in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have
only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in
literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor
Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of
the main lines of literary tendency.
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
the art--I mean Henry Fielding--we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the
first moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the
tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and
Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
Scotsman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that
the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great
enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a
trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort
of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted
to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into
any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal
with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations
in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards
those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a
moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the
stage almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great
restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors,
and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain
significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of
emotion,--these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It
is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier
and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of
pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic
writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of
his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here
nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main
conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism
by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through
the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in
the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism
as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and
largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of
things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture,
in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these
identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as
compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to
which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for
him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his
power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to
another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the
flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of
country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life
and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally
unable, if he looks at it from one point of view--equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view--to reproduce a colour, a sound,
an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his
readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the
foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the
turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the
stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all
this thrown upon the flat board--all this entering, naturally and
smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire
into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him
otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies
manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's
shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature
of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense
of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality;
that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is
resumed into its place in the constitution of things.
It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions,
first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.
For art precedes philosophy, and even science. People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate
upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the
pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not
why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the
world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner;
and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have
had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there
will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.
Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and
for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If
he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so
lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even
now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are
enabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not
only descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley Novels, but it
is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of
Scott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as
regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in
his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said
before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this production
definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the
deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott
and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as
only successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that
one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation
and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than
Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The
passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the
five great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two
deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and
intellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who
professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not
believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is
too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the
truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,
to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical
result.
The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something as
simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance. The fact is, that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are
able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has
left with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance
that we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is
not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left
with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its
own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of
our philosophical speech.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this
something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this
epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to
throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we
shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that
man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose,
about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of
the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of
his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains
to it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power
of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure
of his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of
the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will
permit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of "Notre
Dame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatality
that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition.
To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do
with the artistic conception; moreover, it is very questionably handled,
while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate
success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever
before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river,
the boat-shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different shores,
and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration
of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of
admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to
conclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:
we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile"
of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us
from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and
already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to
that central building by character after character. It is purely an
effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and
stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit
of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost
offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a
corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency
and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above
all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic
than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen
them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over
the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there
is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the
grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate
contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.
Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story
like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the
book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom
Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here
that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the
romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding
Illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven
deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the
whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?
It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have
come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass
what it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine
(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait
des poignées de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,
p. 181: "Ses pensées étaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tête à
deux mains et tàtchait de l'arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur
le pavé_."
One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "Notre
Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last
hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this
sordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one of
those things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and
they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals without
having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.
We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Misérables." Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest
and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of
this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for such
awakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that we
enjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support the
litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried
forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a
very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million
individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the
bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by the
deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and
the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and
the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something
of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les
Misérables"; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence
with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who
are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of
mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again
and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to
pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There
is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The
terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can
hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels
with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror
incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the
street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern
of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as
when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet
riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice
and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of
oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of
oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of
Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the
throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the
admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a
religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned
that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,
over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,
stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'être le Père éternel"? The pathos
of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of
the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is
nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of
Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our
affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our
profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are
few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much
calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic
coarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. There
is certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the story
itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect of
a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits
again and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube,
serviceable on six faces; things are not so well arranged in life as all
that comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do
nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book
remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of
pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the
first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la
Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of
external force that is brought against him. And here once more the
artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,
indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers
a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces
into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"
in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown
into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that
come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once
the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with
his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out
sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation
is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by
side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art
had learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe
was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead
and utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces,"
that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the
terrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomena
going their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive":
"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things" is against him. There is
not one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for
the hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this
direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another
character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the
two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the
storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;--a
victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say
nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it
will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab
when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its
way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,
indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.
But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all its
eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we
cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that
will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the
storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be
possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any
amount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in
which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way
of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea
was quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of
scene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies
of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in
the "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable), what is to be said
to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that
unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop
disappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one and
the same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better;
we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a
despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the
lie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning
of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if
there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of
France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what
may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"
and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It
is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as
"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.
In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he would
say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;
and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the
two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of
the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl
Dea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those after-thoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic
love; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full
moon over the night of some foul and feverish city.
There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as
much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an
abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in
the drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance.
Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of
this not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at
once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded
already in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is really
indifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some
seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likely
nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or
Scott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse the
march of a whole history--anachronisms enough to overset all
chronology,"[2] the life of their creations, the artistic truth and
accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come
upon a passage like the sinking of the _Ourque_ in this romance, we can
do nothing but cover our face with our hands: the conscientious reader
feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic
falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled
avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above
all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive
in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation
novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he
must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the
_Ourque_ go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was
against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
sincerity in conception or workmanship.
In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if
we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in
the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or
injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we
regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold
statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it
is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them
for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they
are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the
novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an
abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.
And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold
and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward
realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing
with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men
and maidens of customary romance.
The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called "_Sein guéri, coeur saignant_,"
that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be
more delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before
the assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a
woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can
summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they
ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in
which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less
said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have
been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our
ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to
the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is
going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the
stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot
conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.
Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a
certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to
any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in
it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that
Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a
perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed
with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is
informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the
same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be
confused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English
reader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the
moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown
externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral
significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the
organising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Misérables" or
"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the
story had lost its interest and the book was dead.
Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes
of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the
two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,
and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes
they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man
against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "Les
Misérables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in
the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "Les
Misérables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in
"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only
began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter
Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the
whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the
field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large
a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man,
Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a
nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that oppose
and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the
wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual
interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood out
over everything else, and formed as it were the spine of the story,
figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force
among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of
things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer
an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a
being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a
centre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude,
chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in
all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long
way that we have travelled: between such work and the work of Fielding
is there not, indeed, a great gulf of thought and sentiment?
Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently
the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this
generalisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities that
are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the
intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into
Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her
dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of
the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to
these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination
hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is
more nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,
deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of any
of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we
almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit
by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something
that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and
see them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also
to recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,
in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what
other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Prefatory letter to "Peveril of the Peak."
II
SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS
To write with authority about another man we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass
a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect--that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the
critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not
an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of "Holy
Willie's Prayer," Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was
ever written." To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say
painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's
Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The
"Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_--a burly figure in literature, as, from
our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the
other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary
clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt
and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was "the most inconsistent of
men." If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither "Holy Willie," nor the "Beggars," nor the "Ordination," nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?" And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so
greatly thrown away.
It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of
Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life
that demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's nature, for all
its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet's head of gold; may I not be
forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were
of clay?
YOUTH
Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last--the trait is laughably Scottish--by a dialogue of
his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was
exactly represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield
herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or
to sit by her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology--everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up
a popular Scottish type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it
is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old
Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's comprehension by a popular but
unworthy instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and
wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours
who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father,
brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a
book in the other. We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that
of Gilbert need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable
letter for a young man of such slender opportunities. One anecdote marks
the taste of the family. Murdoch brought "Titus Andronicus," and, with
such dominie elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before
this rustic audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora
insults Lavinia, with one voice and "in an agony of distress" they
refused to hear it to an end. In such a father, and with such a home,
Robert had already the making of an excellent education; and what
Murdoch added, although it may not have been much in amount, was in
character the very essence of a literary training. Schools and colleges,
for one great man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong
spirit can do well upon more scanty fare.
Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure,
greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in
his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were
richer or of more consequence than himself"; with all this, he was
emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure
in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his
plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner
round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of
a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out
fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great
Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.
This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows
a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention
and remark. His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early
adopted the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in
his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_. It is plain that
the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in
addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to
spelling number two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the
manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to
follow custom. Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in
conversation. To no other man's have we the same conclusive testimony
from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a
commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk.
Robertson the historian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation
displayed greater vigour"; the Duchess of Gordon declared that he
"carried her off her feet"; and, when he came late to an inn, the
servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days
at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself
feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their
faces, or even perhaps--for the statement of Sillar is not absolute--say
cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church
door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses.
These details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities in the conduct
of his life. He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would
please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined
his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing _Jehan_ for
_Jean_, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois
in a public café with paradox and gasconnade.
A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in
love. _Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut._ His affections were often enough
touched, but perhaps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of
discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy
life without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred. The
circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the
result. For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and
the beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors' Club at Tarbolton
provides that "every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex." The rich, as Burns
himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their "cannie hour at e'en." It was upon love
and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a man
of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
by the way. He was "constantly the victim of some fair enslaver"--at
least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background. Many--or may
we not say most?--of these affairs were entirely artificial. One, he
tells us, he began out of "a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,"
for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they
began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and
he stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively
without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of "battering
himself into a warm affection,"--a debilitating and futile exercise.
Once he had worked himself into the vein, "the agitations of his mind
and body" were an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as
this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature.
He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of
what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of
his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier
vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first
bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up
an acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would
bear down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
assurance--the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another manner
did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great
as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a
passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old
a hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even
string a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch
the hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his
"curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that recommended him for a
second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
assistance and advice of "Rab the Ranter"; and one who was in no way
formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
fame of his associate.
I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough
moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year,
looked upon with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best
talker, the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the
laureate poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He
says he had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can
well believe it. Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an
apparent god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld
should swoop upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company
with seven others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the
stool of repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal
apotheosis in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more
idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman
most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from
nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even
corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
schoolmaster, against the influence and fame of the school's hero?
And now we come to the culminating point of Burns's early period. He
began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread
from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part
from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition
party,--a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit
enough to appreciate the value of the poet's help, and not sufficient
taste to moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their
surprise when "Holy Willie" was put into their hand; like the amorous
lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His
satires began to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the
lawyers, "read him into fame"; he himself was soon welcome in many
houses of a better sort, where his admirable talk, and his manners,
which he had direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a
country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun. We have a
sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman's shoes,
coasting around the carpet as though that were sacred ground. But he
soon grew used to carpets and their owners; and he was still the
superior of all whom he encountered, and ruled the roost in
conversation. Such was the impression made, that a young clergyman,
himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused when he saw
Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. It is not surprising
that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test of some
publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six winter
months the bulk of his more important poems. Here was a young man who,
from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of a
parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in
the world's bookshops.
A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This
strong young ploughman, who feared no competitor with the flail,
suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
God in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he had aspirations
beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and
weaknesses to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a
winter tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a
book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this
service two copies of the "Man of Feeling." With young people in the
field at work he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert
spoke sharply to them--"O man, ye are no' for young folk," he would say,
and give the defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the
men whom he met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his
knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no
truer things said of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters.
Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which
values itself on what it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness
to a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, except in
moments of hypochondria, declared himself content.
THE LOVE-STORIES
On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vote sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner--or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at
large--that "he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as
well as his dog." Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on
Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog;
and the dog, "scouring in long excursion," scampered with four black
paws across the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when
Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any
of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?" It is one of the
misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to
refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like
the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns accepted the
provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl--pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
"battering himself into a warm affection"; and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's serious
issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to
expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest
thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never
have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised
that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere--that
he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in
the pressure of the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as
fixed as fate--staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first,
by heaven, I will not do!--the last, by hell, I will never do!" And then
he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God hold me in my hour of need." They met
accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these
heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of
marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually
false positions--relations of life which are wrong in themselves, and
which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be
glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover
that we can no longer be true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he
came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious
conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How
are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her
"lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his
wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves
in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do
country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous
attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed
by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to
cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the
acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any
violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for
destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the
marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now
publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace
to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been
busy "battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl;
and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the
heart.
He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean's marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding
nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
wandering affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of
a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.
Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment
of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he
was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
wife; now he had "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard
the _Nancy_, Captain Smith"; now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:--
"The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!"
But the great Master Dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to
bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success
of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the
author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh
and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in
these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm
for Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over
his face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when
the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then
learned the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and
left her with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."
Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
was "agog with the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
"Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such
a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the
furrow, wielding "the thresher's weary flingin'-tree"; and his
education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scots
countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.
We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat
and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday
best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his
face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of
thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I
never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though
I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether
they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified,
and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the
social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not
embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he
could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he
dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he,
"remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand,
surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he
was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and he, who had
been so much at his ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to
an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers
a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manners were not
prepossessing--scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if
he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he said the music
was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These
would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy
the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had always "a
turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention
particularly."
The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well
to Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life--socially successful,
intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.
In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we
return to Burns's love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had
seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the
"battering" so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal
two days with this anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of
this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she loves me";
or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate
to profit by it; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to
profit by it again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.
Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting
Jean in his correspondence. "Because"--such is his reason--"because he
does not think he will ever meet so delicious an armful again"; and
then, after a brief excursion into verse, he goes straight on to
describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a
Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these
references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension
of Burns's character and fate. In June we find him back at Mauchline, a
famous man. There, the Armour family greeted him with a "mean, servile
compliance," which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less
compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of
the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted
little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her
weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a
heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some
twenty days after his return--a letter to my mind among the most
degrading in the whole collection--a letter which seems to have been
inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I
have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former
happiness--the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart
no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no paradisiacal evening
interviews." Even the process of "battering" has failed him, you
perceive. Still he had some one in his eye--a lady, if you please, with
a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest
quarters in Europe." "I frequently visited her," he writes, "and after
passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal
bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless
way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her
return to ----, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
remarks farther than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I
had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am
an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back to Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugæ_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.
About the beginning of December (1787) a new period opens in the story
of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read "Werther" with attention. Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
refer to daintily as "her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in
all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a
fancy for each other on the spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited
him to tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tête-à-tête_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth
exchange, when Clarinda writes: "It is really curious so much _fun_
passing between two persons who saw each other only _once_"; but it is
hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms
too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The
exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
"Oh, Clarinda", writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state--some yet
unknown state--of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister
to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics. "I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion," writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their "favourite subject."
"This is Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our favourite
subject. O fy! 'divine Clarinda!'" I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda's friends
were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself had
smart attacks of conscience; but her heart had gone from her control; it
was altogether his, and she "counted all things but loss--heaven
excepted--that she might win and keep him." Burns himself was
transported while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat
rapidly declined during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that,
womanlike, he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that he
could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion; but
that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his
temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, though he
could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease. At the
same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true
expressions, and the love-verses that he wrote upon Clarinda are among
the most moving in the language.
We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale--as
the lasses do at Hallowe'en--'in to mysel'.'" Arrived at Mauchline,
Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour
to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea.... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any
claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim--which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of
the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he
accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.
A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource.[3]
DOWNWARD COURSE
It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. "God
knows," he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's buff." He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that
she "has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him"; that she has
a good figure; that she has a "wood-note wild," "her voice rising with
ease to B natural," no less. The effect on the reader is one of
unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in
his own words) could "enter into his favourite studies or relish his
favourite authors"; this was not even a wife, after the affair of the
marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her
manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long,
she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity
rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now
be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband's heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.
Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging
on to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to
an alarming degree," by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my mind
has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business
he could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty;
but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong,
and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is,
for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.
Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony, oddly
representing the public feeling of the period, that, while "in
everything else he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything
seizable he was no better than any other gauger."
There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which
need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose
from his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotsmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the
English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate
the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we
do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of
Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even
violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his
hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in
life; an open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It
was in the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in
the parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent
snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this
verse:
"Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write;
There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
But them wham the truth wad indite."
Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many
stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
coteries; how he proposed Washington's health as an amendment to Pitt's,
gave as a toast "the last verse of the last chapter of Kings," and
celebrated Dumouriez in a doggerel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
Now his sympathies would inspire him with "Scots wha hae"; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies
and explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns's stomach. Nor was
this the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in
the capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there
was trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly,
however delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey
and to be silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man
must have rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr.
Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent
phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had
been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he
looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
"Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found
in his works, and after having been held forth to public view and to
public estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of
resources within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled
into a paltry exciseman, and slunk out the rest of his insignificant
existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind."
And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living
indignation, to declare his right to a political opinion, and his
willingness to shed his blood for the political birthright of his sons.
Poor, perturbed spirit! he was indeed exercised in vain; those who
share and those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution,
alike understand and sympathise with him in this painful strait; for
poetry and human manhood are lasting like the race, and politics, which
are but a wrongful striving after right, pass and change from year to
year and age to age. "The Twa Dogs" has already outlasted the
constitution of Siéyès and the policy of the Whigs; and Burns is better
known among English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox.
Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him: he
refused to make another volume, for he felt it would be a
disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was
sure it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing;
they were all that he could do; the proposed Scots play, the proposed
series of Scots tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of
pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a
viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these
last and inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation
rises at times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that
he had not written, but only found and published, his immortal "Auld
Lang Syne." In the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist;
he was doing so little, he would fain do that little well; and about two
months before his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his
manuscripts for revisal, saying that he would rather write five songs to
his taste than twice that number otherwise. The battle of his life was
lost; in forlorn efforts to do well, in desperate submissions to evil,
the last years flew by. His temper is dark and explosive, launching
epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jealous of young puppy officers.
He tries to be a good father; he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad,
and jaded, he can refuse no occasion of temporary pleasure, no
opportunity to shine; and he who had once refused the invitations of
lords and ladies is now whistled to the inn by any curious stranger. His
death (July 21, 1796), in his thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly
dispensation. It is the fashion to say he died of drink; many a man has
drunk more and yet lived with reputation, and reached a good age. That
drink and debauchery helped to destroy his constitution, and were the
means of his unconscious suicide, is doubtless true; but he had failed
in life, had lost his power of work, and was already married to the
poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he had shown his inclination to
convivial nights, or at least before that inclination had become
dangerous either to his health or his self-respect. He had trifled with
life, and must pay the penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had
grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid
industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns, and there is
no levity in such a statement of the case; for shall we not, one and
all, deserve a similar epitaph?
WORKS
The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this
paper only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where
correction or amplification seemed desirable, leaves me little
opportunity to speak of the works which have made his name so famous.
Yet, even here, a few observations seem necessary.
At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first success,
his work was remarkable in two ways. For, first, in an age when poetry
had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with
shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifications, he dealt with the actual
circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
be. And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly
stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical
timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit
to give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom
we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once
that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance,
and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of
life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in
sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot
recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as though a writer
should describe a skirmish, and the reader, at the end, be still
uncertain whether it were a charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn
advance of foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is
at the opposite pole from such indefinite and stammering performances;
and a whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a
man further and further from writing the "Address to a Louse." Yet
Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a school and continued a
tradition; only the school and tradition were Scottish, and not English.
While the English language was becoming daily more pedantic and
inflexible, and English letters more colourless and slack, there was
another dialect in the sister country, and a different school of poetry,
tracing its descent, through King James I., from Chaucer. The dialect
alone accounts for much; for it was then written colloquially, which
kept it fresh and supple; and, although not shaped for heroic flights,
it was a direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with social
life. Hence, whenever Scottish poets left their laborious imitations of
bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect, their style
would kindle, and they would write of their convivial and somewhat gross
existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad
Fergusson, there was mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of
saying what they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in the
latter case should have justified great anticipations. Had Burns died at
the same age as Fergusson, he would have left us literally nothing worth
remark. To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very
uncommon degree, not only following their tradition and using their
measures, but directly and avowedly imitating their pieces. The same
tendency to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's foundation, is
notable in Burns from first to last, in the period of song-writing as
well as in that of the early poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of
such deep originality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and
whose work is so greatly distinguished by that character of
"inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to Goethe.
When we remember Burns's obligations to his predecessors, we must never
forget his immense advances on them. They had already "discovered"
nature; but Burns discovered poetry--a higher and more intense way of
thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more
ideal key of words in which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson
excelled at making a popular--or shall we say vulgar?--sort of society
verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a
supper-party waited for its laureate's word; but on the appearance of
Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues,
and learned gravity of thought and natural pathos.
What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style,
and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts. There was
never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we
may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted
to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he
wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which
gives us the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature
is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which
keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and
presents everything, as everything should be presented by the art of
words, in a clear, continuous medium of thought. Principal Shairp, for
instance, gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and
for those who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very
quality they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek. The
contemporaries of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many
celebrated mountains and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to
make a poem. Indeed, it is not for those who have a true command of the
art of words, but for peddling, professional amateurs, that these
pointed occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those who speak
French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may have talked
upon or heard others talk upon before, because they know appropriate
words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a
waterfall, because he has learned the sentiment and knows appropriate
words for it in poetry. But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with
any subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's collie, a
sheep struggling in the snow, the conduct of cowardly soldiers in the
field, the gait and cogitations of a drunken man, or only a village
cock-crow in the morning, he could find language to give it freshness,
body, and relief. He was always ready to borrow the hint of a design, as
though he had a difficulty in commencing--a difficulty, let us say, in
choosing a subject out of a world which seemed all equally living and
significant to him; but once he had the subject chosen, he could cope
with nature single-handed, and make every stroke a triumph. Again, his
absolute mastery in his art enabled him to express each and all of his
different humours, and to pass smoothly and congruously from one to
another. Many men invent a dialect for only one side of their
nature--perhaps their pathos or their humour, or the delicacy of their
senses--and, for lack of a medium, leave all the others unexpressed.
You meet such an one, and find him in conversation full of thought,
feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to employ in his
writings. But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice of the
literary art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into his
work, and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor Johnson, that stilted
and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what should we
have known of him? and how should we have delighted in his acquaintance
as we do? Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we have lost who
did not. But I think they exaggerate their privilege: I think we have
the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his consummate verses.
It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth
and the world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth considering in a
man of letters--that he should write well; and only one damning
fault--that he should write ill. We are little the better for the
reflections of the sailor's parrot in the story. And so, if Burns helped
to change the course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct,
and masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. That
was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He wrote from his own
experience, because it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the
school from which he proceeded was fortunately not opposed to homely
subjects. But to these homely subjects he communicated the rich
commentary of his nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they
interest us not in themselves, but because they have been passed through
the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living
literature; and there was never any more alive than that of Burns.
What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways
hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself;
sometimes speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out
in exultation like a peal of bells! When we compare the "Farmer's
Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie," with the clever and inhumane
production of half a century earlier, "The Auld Man's Mare's dead," we
see in a nut-shell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns. And as
to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in
the "Twa Dogs," describes and enters into the merry-making in the
cottage?
"The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill
Are handed round wi' richt guid will;
The canty auld folks crackin' crouse,
The young anes rantin' through the house--
My heart has been sae fain to see them,
That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."
It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women,
and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last. His humour comes from him
in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of
humorous poets. He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment
or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to
the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who says, happily, that
Burns would have been no Scotsman if he had not loved to moralise;
neither, may we add, would he have been his father's son; but (what is
worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his
own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists. Except in the
"Jolly Beggars," he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has
complained that "Tam o' Shanter" is, from the absence of this quality,
only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the
"Twa Dogs" it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety
that a great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its
existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it
breaks forth on every page; and there is scarce an appropriate remark
either in praise or blame of his own conduct but he has put it himself
into verse. Alas for the tenor of these remarks! They are, indeed, his
own pitiful apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused
and stunted; and they seem to prove for ever how small a part is played
by reason in the conduct of man's affairs. Here was one, at least, who
with unfailing judgment predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could
not avail him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny. Ten
years before the end he had written his epitaph; and neither subsequent
events, nor the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it
to alter. And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last
unanswerable plea?--
"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark--"
One? Alas! I fear every man and woman of us is "greatly dark" to all
their neighbours, from the day of birth until death removes them, in
their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults; and we, who
have been trying to read the character of Burns, may take home the
lesson and be gentle in our thoughts.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] For the love-affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas's
edition under the different dates.
III
WALT WHITMAN
Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied
about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and
ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,
whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could
not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
yet depreciate the choruses in "Samson Agonistes"; but, I think, we may
shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a
literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,
when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here
and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt
Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works
is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a
son upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
should always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not
possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it
represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard
to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet
where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more
incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous--I had almost said,
so dandy--in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just
unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And
when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer
found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the
Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?
I
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was
a theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceived
something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The
reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much
pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous
village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although
sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of
Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society
comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not
fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down
into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still
in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn
out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,
and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle
wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been
early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme
unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" could
have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he
calls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of "Werther" and
Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both
propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be
true enough; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true
enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to
inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and
next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to
give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing,
catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be
equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in
one of his favourite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation of
some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many
contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the
other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of
suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he
pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the
poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making the
poets.
His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly
with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the
metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,
the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer"; he is to find
some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the
moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides
having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some
election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.
Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly
from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments
by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little
activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in
this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates
another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and
great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to
induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all
living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we
coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify
his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and
eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a
superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims
of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily
disown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I am
afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted
Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah
of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in
the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up
such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
life.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent
means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern
wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a
particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that
it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;
like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare
to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The
speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the
mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume
to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal
logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of
Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest
process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all
coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the
question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by
the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them
in man's speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one
side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are
truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,
not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,
for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into
the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these
scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree
grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a
new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he must
do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them
to look over the book and at life with their own eyes.
This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means
when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of
all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on
the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence
of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye,
were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive
process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion than to read the
works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be
said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the
other to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; if
they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an
experimental humour. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and
not like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the
man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking
together? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the
poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any
conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we
perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by
flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It
is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know!" and is, perhaps, half irritated
to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he
is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.
Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of
ideal to the average population of America--to gather their activities
about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
only for the moment--the poet must portray that population as it is.
Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is
possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the
same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence
Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual--he is complete in
himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do
not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his
fellow-countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for
his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true
books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run the risk of
being charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such
books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and
smartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you may
judiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's
disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that
by drawing at first-hand from himself and his neighbours, accepting
without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up
man, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would
make sure of belief, and at the same time encourage people forward by
the means of praise.
II
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de René_, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our
little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there
is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the
cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
against that hidebound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and
they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it,
above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and
build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
indifference.
Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any
help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells
us, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for a
certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave delight
fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducing
his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average
man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of
Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there
perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do
throughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws
them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something
like beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.
"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of
healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
horses, the passion for light and the open air,--all is an old
unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a
residence of the poetic in outdoor people."
There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite
examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said
"the love of healthy men for the female form," he would have said almost
a silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy,
and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, he
tells us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly
in words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many different
authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow
absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener is
to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if
he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
and enjoyable occupation.
Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read;
"among the cooling influences of external nature"; and this
recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who
has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease
and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think
in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great
things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it
is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks
very ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school
outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by
simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep
the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into
professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is
the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and
emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward,
something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings
that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the
works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from
strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the
flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city, into what he himself has
called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge and
thoughtful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may be the
final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the
future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a
specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old.
Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the
youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe
upon his shoulders.
III
Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He
considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars as that
one man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of
his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life is
to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,--one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no
leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
"unregenerate poetry"; and does not mean by nature
"the smooth walks, trimmed edges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
billions of tons."
Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy,
history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the
universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.
He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive
synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after
the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth
to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all
irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is,
and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical,
with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he
wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for
the understanding of the average man. One of his favourite endeavours is
to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of
the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him,
in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and
space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then,
drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of
nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous
suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into
us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has
illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of
the moth for the star.
The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's moth is
mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that
imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
"The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
nearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed,"
says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of a
transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk
and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints;
he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his
disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of
Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of
this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one
than oneself is"; a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.
He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that
the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint
colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being;
so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
place and way; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For
he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No
array of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace
I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas
than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you
will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above
the highest human doubts and trepidations.
But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself,
comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
the word love:--
"The dear love of man for his comrade--the attraction of friend for
friend,
Of the-well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land."
The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he
is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of
her eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so
startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality
with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily
persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And
so sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on
earth; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and
self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his
strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love
for others. To some extent this is taking away with the left hand what
has been so generously given with the right. Morality has been
ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the
window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please; and on the next we
are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are
first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own
right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we
practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in
clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and
complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because
Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and between
friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political
sympathies; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but a
conscientious voter into the bargain.
His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will
remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind by proving that we are
free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to
show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in his big,
plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the
wheel'd universe." Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all
objects, the sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily
and securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for
doubt or discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow the
law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecates
discussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping
sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his
absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If
he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent
to the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it
to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he
would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present
Christianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is
one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to
Whitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but
of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little
to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two
upon the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he
would prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The
great point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this
would be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was
good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-ho," and
mankind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to
another class of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat
cynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out of one who is
unkind by any precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in
natural circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it
would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and
act more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.
So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a
picture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, although
eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if
he is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of
consistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat
comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage,
or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself!" with this
addition, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "I
am large--I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes
largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even
if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to
Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal
evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an
honest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his
optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a
conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end;
that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even "the old
man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse
than gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or
melancholy in the present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst
things that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself
with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal.
And with that murderous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the
best of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, and have been no
more heard of in the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all
allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost
as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the
enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say,
is something obvious to be done. I do not know many better things in
literature than the brief pictures--brief and vivid like things seen by
lightning,--with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon the
side of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic
duty and helpfulness; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instances
of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave
story; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop
our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all
the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a
spirit which I can only call one of ultra Christianity; and however
wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be
said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no
one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his
conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting
welcome.
IV
Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle
of well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own
brave example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense
of humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed
performances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently
in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to
set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one
who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and
respect for the man's character. He practises as he professes; he feels
deeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful
delight in serving others, which he often celebrates in literature with
a doubtful measure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, the
best and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in
"these soil'd and creased little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or
two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a
pin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded
or in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the
formal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part
as he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying
soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter--short,
straightforward to the point, with none of the trappings of composition;
but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one
of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is
an honour to love.
Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future of
These States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them),
made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue,
Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into
premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the
balance. And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its
issues; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured
him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a theatre, it was
a place of education it was like a season of religious revival. He
watched Lincoln going daily to his work; he studied and fraternised with
young soldiery passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals,
reading the Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a
patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read. From one
point of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, they
look like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More
than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the
writer for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify
him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of
style. And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weeping
order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes filled with tears,
of which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way to
characterise a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a
passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
hospital:--
"Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so
good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very
much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him,
and he liked to have me--liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on
my knee--would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more
restless and flighty at night--often fancied himself with his
regiment--by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt
by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely
innocent of--said 'I never in my life was thought capable of such a
thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself talking
as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and
giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the
time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or
idea escaped him. It was remark'd that many a man's conversation in
his senses was not half so good as Frank's delirium.
"He was perfectly willing to die--he had become very weak, and had
suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor boy. I do not
know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any
rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances,
with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved
so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be
surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after serving
his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the
very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy--yet there is a
text, 'God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after due
time, appears to the soul.
"I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your
son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for
I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him."
It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what
are we to say of its profound goodness and tenderness? It is written as
though he had the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in
the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sober
truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking to
make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young
man? Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold; and this reticence
is not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of
a good man. He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank;
and he told her about her Frank as he was.
V
Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence
of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,
and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication
is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;
sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged
and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not
taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected
principally because it was easy to write, although not without
recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our
English Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, "the
time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between
Prose and Poetry ... for the most cogent purposes of those great inland
states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon";--a statement which
is among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls his
verses "recitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
"Easily written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum of
your climax and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can
perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his
work considered as verses is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse,
but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable
merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,
is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary
decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither
afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being
ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless to
follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his
worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted
specimens of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These
come in to most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may
be, to the offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is
certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has
grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out
of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's
translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears
perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you than
a particularly flagrant production by the Poet Close.
A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in taking
for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the
hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of stately
ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show
beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to be
done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
home to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is only
accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid
the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one's right hand by
way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein;
to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no
distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to
prove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by
calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical
apostrophe;--this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the
way to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable
branch of industry, but the word "hatter" cannot be used seriously in
emotional verse; not to understand this is to have no literary tact; and
I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible
expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teems
with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.
A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick
upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have
in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say
Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the
"great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other.
A most incontrovertible sentiment, surely, and one which nobody would
think of controverting, where--and here is the point--where any beauty
has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is
simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled
him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say,
where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a
bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and
indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or
implements, with no more colour or coherence than so many index-words
out of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that it
is a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of it
is, that Whitman must have known better. The man is a great critic, and,
so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it
require to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingering
on a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is
not at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe
he was quite honest with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who
wrote a book for a purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human
magnanimity.
One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon,
however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply,
it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some
plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most
delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and
interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked
upon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his
tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of
fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also
among the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink.
But the Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman had
rather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on
these close privacies of life; that on this subject, as on all others,
he now and then lets fall a pregnant saying. But we are not satisfied.
We feel that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He loses
our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our
attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more
art, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitman
alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously
amused.
VI
Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable
state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of
these deliberate productions?
Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could have
adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he
would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It
was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its
contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What he
has made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at large
in his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of
belief and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some
ways loose and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from the
preface to the "Leaves of Grass" which do pretty well condense his
teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his
spirit.
"This is what you shall do," he says in the one, "love the earth, and
sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or
unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful
uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every
year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul."
"The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other--and the
greatest poet is, of course, himself--"knows that the young man who
composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death."
There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly
Christian. Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and
"dismisses whatever insults his own soul" will find plenty that is
bracing, brightening, and chastening to reward him for a little patience
at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from
so healthy a book as the "Leaves of Grass," which is simply comical
whenever it falls short of nobility; but if there be any such, who
cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass by
without some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as great
difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommending the works of
Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroad
outside of the grounds of a private asylum.
IV
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
I
Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,
conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his
almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in
act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's
heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his
enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but
was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no
profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never
went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he
ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and,
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner
what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negative
superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works
he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the
impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and
there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier,"
says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say _no_ than _yes_;
and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful
accomplishment to be able to say _no_, but surely it is the essence of
amiability to prefer to say _yes_ where it is possible. There is
something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is
constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born
dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not
enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he
was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes
have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live many
lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.
He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had
this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I love
my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay
dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble
to control the pen): "You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_
that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about
it. I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret
nothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the
sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this
world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and
lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from
within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say,
like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude;
for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in
a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the
bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did
not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a
corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain
virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that
his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and
that his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and
early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of
goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my
hands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and
coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this: He
thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the
natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but
see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the
labours of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea;
but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds,
abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and
pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself
into the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which
is more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for a
state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without
it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of
ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and
commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must
separate himself from his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is in
much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same
purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a
man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of
existence.
Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they
were all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on the
darkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an
exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and
gauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he could
perceive the foetor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by at night;
his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste
of wine--or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was
good; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he
could have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of
the plants. In his dealings with animals he was the original of
Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the
tail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels have
been seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a
pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the
palm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He could
make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar,
a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage
a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical
accomplishment; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity
with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the
spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to
do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses,
so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be
changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual
perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he
wrote: "Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the
universe are not indifferent, _but are for ever on the side of the most
sensitive_."
II
Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life
of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures,
but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one,
he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the
threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many
agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery
to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation
without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these
absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the
public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to
put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer
necessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of
the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the
yoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy
in his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to the
interruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I
dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the
italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and
between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is
so busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call.
And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial
and unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical
in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly
progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had
gained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate him
on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done
once." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself.
The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the service
of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried
school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in
proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged
to dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and I
lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my
fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have
tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way
in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil."
Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon
that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of
this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not
warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay
down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did
not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of
this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a
hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest
fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the
figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a
brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and
Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It
was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very
Yankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he
displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted
poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two
ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are
only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at current
opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind
of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure
there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his
system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that
the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect
where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you
have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is
an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt.
"The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will call
life_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true
that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not
only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one
does not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be of
great service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I
do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have
my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain
income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin
for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything
else except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on
two hundred a year.
Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be
master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the
body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to
the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life
among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such
being his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save
off something; he determined to save off his livelihood. "When a man has
attained those things which are necessary to life," he writes, "there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventure
on life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreau
would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary
daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,
his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to
Oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of
self-improvement.
Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against
the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred that
other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had secured
the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents
or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration for
the man "who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance
company, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trust
himself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal more
than we do," says he. "How much is not done by us! or what if we had
been taken sick?" And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the alert, at
night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affected
by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they
profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous
ventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must lose
their wager.
In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have
usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a
capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked
forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in
life. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
characteristic and workmanlike pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;
he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and
sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the
matter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or
some other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than five
years this was all that he required to do for his support, and he had
the winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks
of occupation, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening,
the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we must
rather allow that he had done far better; for the thief himself is
continually and busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a million
will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say,
"What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can." And
how surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that _to maintain
oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime_, if we will live
simply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the
sports of the more artificial_."
When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity
in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done
the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the
story of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own example, and
did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an
experiment, and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is
not his frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was
inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently
constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled
by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of
his view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the position
of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a
livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was
acting on, a truth of universal application. For money enters in two
different characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying
with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each
one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, money
is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we
may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there are
many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful
conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite,
flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to look
round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognised; and
perhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend a
trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the
article of freedom.
III
"To have done anything by which you earned money merely," says Thoreau,
"is to be" (have been, he means) "idle and worse." There are two
passages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which
must be brought together to be rightly understood. So taken, they
contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work
in its relation to something broader than mere livelihood. Here is the
first: "I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night--and for
what? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day; but that wasn't
the final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say:
'Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?' And I shall shudder to
think that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you were
warm?'" Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.
Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to
have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been
serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is
sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should
continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt
in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the
open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish
self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid
toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even
those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some
six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warming
heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the
smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in
body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry
is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
says, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How
admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business
that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for
the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
"absorbing pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest"; but
the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued
effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's
nature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he
will desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of
fatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh,
pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,
braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps
him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests;
it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime.
This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand
apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the
centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his
experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe:
"Spät erklingt was früh erklang;
Glück und Unglück wird Gesang."
Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he had
conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said
well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and
unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he
loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
even make us dangerous to existing institutions--such I call good
books." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he
says, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will
always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour and
generosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily
written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more
than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level
height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet
often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again,
shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a
Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay,
whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student.
For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of
utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English
for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like
poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
Milton's "Areopagitica," and can name no other instance for the moment.
Two things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing
more commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large
library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
will find his work cut out for him.
Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that
"the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He
speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,"
which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another
he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it
drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must
conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything
to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out
of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he
had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness,
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
after a busy and prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy
writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented
with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass
of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were
unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He
who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently
and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in
spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
style. "I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am--that I lay myself
out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explanation:
"Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak
extravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay on
Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we
think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the
time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and
a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,
but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was
writing. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less
a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least
striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain
of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry
night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.
Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature
of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is
a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist,
as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not
suit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the
well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to
exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to
put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half,
you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a
different thought which is not yours.
Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with
an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous,
and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not
care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in
books of a different purport. "Walden, or Life in the Woods"; "A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"; "The Maine Woods,"--such are the
titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical
perception that the true business of literature is with narrative; in
reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages,
and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied
disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,
can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural
impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and
blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect
of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works of
high, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more
edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe
his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he
sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of
experience.
Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call
mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect
of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one
which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The
seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging
strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken
in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It
appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the
facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer
the glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once
thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear
between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle
that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly
net. Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you--to state to
yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains
amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you
are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.
Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you
try, but at 'em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, you
suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter,
reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make
it short." Such was the method, not consistent for a man whose meanings
were to "drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most
successful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to
be found in the passages relating to fish in the "Week." These are
remarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of
language, not frequently surpassed.
Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with
sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,
there is a progression--I cannot call it a progress--in his work towards
a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
"Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not
solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I
must say in passing, that it is not the right materialistic treatment
which delights the world in "Robinson," but the romantic and philosophic
interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in "Colonel Jack," to the management
of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been
influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely
similar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into a detailed
materialistic treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who
should make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had been important
in his own experience, but whatever might have been important in the
experience of anybody else; not only what had affected him, but all that
he saw or heard. His ardour had grown less, or perhaps it was
inconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display such
emotions as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose,
from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the saving
quality of humour. He was not one of those authors who have learned, in
his own words, "to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full
quantity upon the reader in such books as "Cape Cod," or "The Yankee in
Canada." Of the latter he confessed that he had not managed to get much
of himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, we
may hope. "Nothing," he says somewhere, "can shock a brave man but
dulness." Well, there are few spots more shocking to the brave than the
pages of "The Yankee in Canada."
There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:
the "Week," "Walden," and the collected letters. As to his poetry,
Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily
said: "The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as in his
prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote
throughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many
would understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be
exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. "But," as he says,
"the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the
echo; and I know that the nature towards which I launch these sounds is
so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest
strain."
IV
"What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost all hope
for itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infinite
confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?" The question
is an echo and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms
the key-note of his thoughts on friendship. No one else, to my
knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly
relations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons
should come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this
branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him a
clearer insight into the intellectual basis of our warm, mutual
tolerations; and testimony to their worth comes with added force from
one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend remarked,
with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, but I cannot like him."
He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love and
friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of
meditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too
accurate an observer not to have remarked that "there exists already a
natural disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet, he
thought, "friendship is no respecter of sex." Perhaps there is a sense
in which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; and
perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a
foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be
possible without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between persons
of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.
To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and
condition. "We are not what we are," says he, "nor do we treat or esteem
each other for such, but for what we are capable of being." "A friend is
one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtues
from us, and who can appreciate them in us." "The friend asks no return
but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace
his apotheosis of him." "It is the merit and preservation of friendship
that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the
parties would seem to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestal
indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence,
in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries
plain. We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely
we shall find that every such relation reposes on some particular
apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could not
distinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special
reputation to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to
our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek this society to
flatter ourselves with our own good conduct. And hence any falsehood in
the relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even
the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: "Only lovers know
the value of truth." And yet again: "They ask for words and deeds, when
a true relation is word and deed."
But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other
hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his
powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both. "We may
bid farewell sooner than complain," says Thoreau, "for our complaint is
too well grounded to be uttered." "We have not so good a right to hate
any as our friend."
"It were treason to our love
And a sin to God above,
One iota to abate
Of a pure, impartial hate."
Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes, believe me," as the song
says, "Love has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we
feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults,
go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And
herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
knowledge without change.
It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps,
to recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human love
makes it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which it
is most conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He has
no illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more
bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been
presented. He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are
ninety-nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we
are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's
conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is
after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit to
himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively,
"my education cannot dispense with your society." His education! as
though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It
was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "As
for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree!"
As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's,
"nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and
even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some
afterthought of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket
match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too
frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had
they anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be something
else than a society for mutual improvement--indeed, it must only be
that by the way, and to some extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had
been a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he
saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remind
him of his own words about love: "We should have no reserve; we should
give the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have not
imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be
coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading Oriental philosophers. It
is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you
suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible.
Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love
even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
will pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," why
then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.
The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so much
difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
in "Walden"; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly
tabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think,
that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the
French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not
enough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a
parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that
dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved
books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his
fellow-creatures,--a melancholy, lean degeneration of the human
character.
"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Any
comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base
of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. Will you go
to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company
grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the
tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy
still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it
is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to
receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there
is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy
their company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways
dispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own
mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which
seems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheat
yourself out of much life so.... _All fables, indeed, have their morals;
but the innocent enjoy the story._"
V
"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to do
at any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, even
across the way, to ask a neighbour's advice?" "There is a nearer
neighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave.
_But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false, easier
way._" "The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my
soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves"
that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the
wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good
man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and" (mark this) "_our lives are sustained by a nearly equal
expense of virtue of some kind_." Even although he were a prig, it will
be owned he could announce a startling doctrine. "As for doing good," he
writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full.
Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should
not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do
the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from
annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater
steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should ever
be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere
he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If I ever
_did_ a man any good in their sense, of course it was something
exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am
constantly doing by being what I am."
There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this
unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts,
or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity.
This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too
mysterious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I
to grieve who have not ceased to wonder?" But it sprang still more from
constitutional indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy,
composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green
bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself that
he failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ; for while he could
glean more meaning from individual precepts than any score of
Christians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed
it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the
doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed.
He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he was
himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognise the human
intention and essence of that teaching. Hence he complained that Christ
did not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world,
not having conceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; for
things of that character that are sufficiently unacceptable become
positively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall best
appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case of
Whitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other; it
is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls; it
is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference! the same
argument, but used to what a new conclusion! Thoreau had plenty of
humour until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that best
birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to have
been sent into the world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strange
consummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and
claustral. Of these two philosophies, so nearly identical at bottom, the
one pursues Self-improvement--a churlish, mangy dog; the other is up
with the morning, in the best of health, and following the nymph
Happiness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, is not
solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends on
them for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that
are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not
make excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver
dwindles towards the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent
constitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and
appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of
us to live.
In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands some outcome
in the field of action. If nothing were to be done but build a shanty
beside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of these
declarations of independence. That the man wrote some books is nothing
to the purpose, for the same has been done in a suburban villa. That he
kept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it is
disappointing to the reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despises
commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring that
he must take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we will
not be content without some striking act. It was not Thoreau's fault if
he were not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble
ending. As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world's course;
he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs; and a strange
one it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and the
eccentricity of the man. It was forced on him by his calm but radical
opposition to negro slavery. "Voting for the right is doing nothing for
it," he saw; "it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it
should prevail." For his part, he would not "for an instant recognise
that political organisation for _his_ government which is the _slave's_
government also." "I do not hesitate to say," he adds, "that those who
call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their
support, both in person and property, from the government of
Massachusetts." That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to pay the
poll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desirous to be
a good neighbour as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to the
State of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity unto
himself; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, "In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still
make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such
cases." He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design. "Under
a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name--ay, if _one_ HONEST man, in this
State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to
withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county gaol
therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it
matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well
done is done for ever." Such was his theory of civil disobedience.
And the upshot? A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year to
pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested.
It was a _fiasco_, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those who
joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by
this quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may
compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a
hundred voters at some subsequent election; and if Thoreau had possessed
as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had
counted a party however small, if his example had been followed by a
hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would have
greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the
misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses
to the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horror
in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
rather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration,
even the dullest of us will begin to realise them with a quicker pulse.
Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at
Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence.
The committees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature.
"I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to announce that I was
to speak." I have used the word "defence"; in truth he did not seek to
defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he
should die; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have liked
to hear it praised.
Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a
character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own
path of self-improvement for more than half a century, part
gymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in a
subaltern attitude, into the field of political history.
NOTE.--For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention
the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to "Thoreau: His Life and
Aims," by H. A. Page, _i.e._, as is well known, Dr Japp.
V
YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO
The name at the head of this page is probably unknown to the English
reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of
Garibaldi or John Brown. Some day soon, we may expect to hear more fully
the details of Yoshida's history, and the degree of his influence in the
transformation of Japan; even now there must be Englishmen acquainted
with the subject, and perhaps the appearance of this sketch may elicit
something more complete and exact. I wish to say that I am not, rightly
speaking, the author of the present paper: I tell the story on the
authority of an intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who
told it me with an emotion that does honour to his heart; and though I
have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this
can be no more than an imperfect outline.
Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military instructor of the
house of Choshu. The name you are to pronounce with an equality of
accent on the different syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in
Italian, but the consonants in the English manner--except the _j_, which
has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to write it,
the sound of _zh_. Yoshida was very learned in Chinese letters, or, as
we might say, in the classics, and in his father's subject;
fortification was among his favourite studies, and he was a poet from
his boyhood. He was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism; the
condition of Japan was his great concern; and while he projected a
better future, he lost no opportunity of improving his knowledge of her
present state. With this end he was continually travelling in his youth,
going on foot and sometimes with three days' provisions on his back, in
the brave, self-helpful manner of all heroes. He kept a full diary while
he was thus upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes have
been destroyed. If their value were in any respect such as we have
reason to expect from the man's character, this would be a loss not easy
to exaggerate. It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he
contrived to push these explorations; a cultured gentleman of that land
and period would leave a complimentary poem where-ever he had been
hospitably entertained; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a
great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in very
remote regions of Japan.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is
thought necessary; but Yoshida considered otherwise, and he studied the
miseries of his fellow-countrymen with as much attention and research as
though he had been going to write a book, instead of merely to propose a
remedy. To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is no question
but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme. His dissatisfaction
is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of
reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his
task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of
Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country
was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the
visits of big barbarian warships: she was a country beleaguered. Thus
the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated
itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-powerful foreigners,
whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped to introduce; but
a man who follows his own virtuous heart will be always found in the end
to have been fighting for the best. One thing leads naturally to another
in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from effect to
cause. The power and knowledge of these foreigners were things
inseparable; by envying them their military strength, Yoshida came to
envy them their culture; from the desire to equal them in the first,
sprang his desire to share with them in the second; and thus he is found
treating in the same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of
Kioto and of the establishment, in the same city, of a university of
foreign teachers. He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of other lands
without their evil; to enable Japan to profit by the knowledge of the
barbarians, and still keep her inviolate with her own arts and virtues.
But whatever was the precise nature of his hope, the means by which it
was to be accomplished were both difficult and obvious. Some one with
eyes and understanding must break through the official cordon, escape
into the new world, and study this other civilisation on the spot. And
who could be better suited for the business? It was not without danger,
but he was without fear. It needed preparation and insight; and what had
he done since he was a child but prepare himself with the best culture
of Japan, and acquire in his excursions the power and habit of
observing?
He was but twenty-two, and already all this was clear in his mind, when
news reached Choshu that Commodore Perry was lying near to Yeddo. Here,
then, was the patriot's opportunity. Among the Samurai of Choshu, and in
particular among the councillors of the Daimio, his general culture, his
views, which the enlightened were eager to accept, and, above all, the
prophetic charm, the radiant persuasion of the man, had gained him many
and sincere disciples. He had thus a strong influence at the provincial
Court; and so he obtained leave to quit the district, and, by way of a
pretext, a privilege to follow his profession in Yeddo. Thither he
hurried, and arrived in time to be too late: Perry had weighed anchor,
and his sails had vanished from the waters of Japan. But Yoshida, having
put his hand to the plough, was not the man to go back; he had entered
upon this business, and, please God, he would carry it through; and so
he gave up his professional career and remained in Yeddo to be at hand
against the next opportunity. By this behaviour he put himself into an
attitude towards his superior, the Daimio of Choshu, which I cannot
thoroughly explain. Certainly, he became a _Ronyin_, a broken man, a
feudal outlaw; certainly he was liable to be arrested if he set foot
upon his native province; yet I am cautioned that "he did not really
break his allegiance," but only so far separated himself as that the
prince could no longer be held accountable for his late vassal's
conduct. There is some nicety of feudal custom here that escapes my
comprehension.
In Yeddo, with this nondescript political status, and cut off from any
means of livelihood, he was joyfully supported by those who sympathised
with his design. One was Sákuma-Shozan, hereditary retainer of one of
the Shogun's councillors, and from him he got more than money or than
money's worth. A steady, respectable man, with an eye to the world's
opinion, Sákuma was one of those who, if they cannot do great deeds in
their own person, have yet an ardour of admiration for those who can,
that recommends them to the gratitude of history. They aid and abet
greatness more, perhaps, than we imagine. One thinks of them in
connection with Nicodemus, who visited our Lord by night. And Sákuma was
in a position to help Yoshida more practically than by simple
countenance; for he could read Dutch, and was eager to communicate what
he knew.
While the young Ronyin thus lay studying in Yeddo, news came of a
Russian ship at Nangasaki. No time was to be lost. Sákuma contributed "a
long copy of encouraging verses"; and off set Yoshida on foot for
Nangasaki. His way lay through his own province of Choshu; but, as the
high-road to the south lay apart from the capital, he was able to avoid
arrest. He supported himself, like a _trouvère_, by his proficiency in
verse. He carried his works along with him, to serve as an
introduction. When he reached a town he would inquire for the house of
any one celebrated for swordsmanship, or poetry, or some of the other
acknowledged forms of culture; and there, on giving a taste of his
skill, he would be received and entertained, and leave behind him, when
he went away, a compliment in verse. Thus he travelled through the
Middle Ages on his voyage of discovery into the nineteenth century. When
he reached Nangasaki he was once more too late. The Russians were gone.
But he made a profit on his journey in spite of fate, and stayed awhile
to pick up scraps of knowledge from the Dutch interpreters--a low class
of men--but one that had opportunities; and then, still full of purpose,
returned to Yeddo on foot, as he had come.
It was not only his youth and courage that supported him under these
successive disappointments, but the continual affluence of new
disciples. The man had the tenacity of a Bruce or a Columbus, with a
pliability that was all his own. He did not fight for what the world
would call success; but for "the wages of going on." Check him off in a
dozen directions, he would find another outlet and break forth. He
missed one vessel after another, and the main work still halted; but so
long as he had a single Japanese to enlighten and prepare for the better
future, he could still feel that he was working for Japan. Now, he had
scarce returned from Nangasaki, when he was sought out by a new
inquirer, the most promising of all. This was a common soldier, of the
Hemming class, a dyer by birth, who had heard vaguely[4] of Yoshida's
movements, and had become filled with wonder as to their design. This
was a far different inquirer from Sákuma-Shozan, or the councillors of
the Daimio of Choshu. This was no two-sworded gentleman, but the common
stuff of the country, born in low traditions and unimproved by books;
and yet that influence, that radiant persuasion that never failed
Yoshida in any circumstance of his short life, enchanted, enthralled,
and converted the common soldier, as it had done already with the
elegant and learned. The man instantly burned up into a true enthusiasm;
his mind had been only waiting for a teacher; he grasped in a moment the
profit of these new ideas; he, too, would go to foreign, outlandish
parts, and bring back the knowledge that was to strengthen and renew
Japan; and in the meantime, that he might be the better prepared,
Yoshida set himself to teach, and he to learn, the Chinese literature.
It is an episode most honourable to Yoshida, and yet more honourable
still to the soldier, and to the capacity and virtue of the common
people of Japan.
And now, at length, Commodore Perry returned to Simoda. Friends crowded
round Yoshida with help, counsels, and encouragement. One presented him
with a great sword, three feet long and very heavy, which, in the
exultation of the hour, he swore to carry throughout all his wanderings,
and to bring back--a far-travelled weapon--to Japan. A long letter was
prepared in Chinese for the American officers; it was revised and
corrected by Sákuma, and signed by Yoshida, under the name of
Urinaki-Manji, and by the soldier under that of Ichigi-Koda. Yoshida had
supplied himself with a profusion of materials for writing; his dress
was literally stuffed with paper which was to come back again enriched
with his observations, and make a great and happy kingdom of Japan. Thus
equipped, this pair of emigrants set forward on foot from Yeddo, and
reached Simoda about nightfall. At no period within history can travel
have presented to any European creature the same face of awe and terror
as to these courageous Japanese. The descent of Ulysses into hell is a
parallel more near the case than the boldest expedition in the Polar
circles. For their act was unprecedented; it was criminal; and it was to
take them beyond the pale of humanity into a land of devils. It is not
to be wondered at if they were thrilled by the thought of their unusual
situation; and perhaps the soldier gave utterance to the sentiment of
both when he sang, "in Chinese singing" (so that we see he had already
profited by his lessons), these two appropriate verses:
"We do not know where we are to sleep to-night,
In a thousand miles of desert where we can see no human smoke."
In a little temple, hard by the sea-shore, they lay down to repose;
sleep overtook them as they lay; and when they awoke, "the east was
already white" for their last morning in Japan. They seized a
fisherman's boat and rowed out--Perry lying far to sea because of the
two tides. Their very manner of boarding was significant of
determination; for they had no sooner caught hold upon the ship than
they kicked away their boat to make return impossible. And now you would
have thought that all was over. But the Commodore was already in treaty
with the Shogun's Government; it was one of the stipulations that no
Japanese was to be aided in escaping from Japan; and Yoshida and his
followers were handed over as prisoners to the authorities at Simoda.
That night he who had been to explore the secrets of the barbarian,
slept, if he might sleep at all, in a cell too short for lying down at
full length, and too low for standing upright. There are some
disappointments too great for commentary.
Sákuma, implicated by his handwriting, was sent into his own province in
confinement, from which he was soon released. Yoshida and the soldier
suffered a long and miserable period of captivity, and the latter,
indeed, died, while yet in prison, of a skin disease. But such a spirit
as that of Yoshida-Torajiro is not easily made or kept a captive; and
that which cannot be broken by misfortune you shall seek in vain to
confine in a bastille. He was indefatigably active, writing reports to
Government and treatises for dissemination. These latter were
contraband; and yet he found no difficulty in their distribution, for he
always had the jailer on his side. It was in vain that they kept
changing him from one prison to another; Government by that plan only
hastened the spread of new ideas; for Yoshida had only to arrive to make
a convert. Thus, though he himself was laid by the heels, he confirmed
and extended his party in the State.
At last, after many lesser transferences, he was given over from the
prisons of the Shogun to those of his own superior, the Daimio of
Choshu. I conceive it possible that he may then have served out his time
for the attempt to leave Japan, and was now resigned to the provincial
Government on a lesser count, as a Ronyin or feudal rebel. But, however
that may be, the change was of great importance to Yoshida; for by the
influence of his admirers in the Daimio's council, he was allowed the
privilege, underhand, of dwelling in his own house. And there, as well
to keep up communication with his fellow-reformers as to pursue his work
of education, he received boys to teach. It must not be supposed that he
was free; he was too marked a man for that; he was probably assigned to
some small circle, and lived, as we should say, under police
surveillance; but to him, who had done so much from under lock and key,
this would seem a large and profitable liberty.
It was at this period that Mr. Masaki was brought into personal contact
with Yoshida; and hence, through the eyes of a boy of thirteen, we get
one good look at the character and habits of the hero. He was ugly and
laughably disfigured with the small-pox; and while nature had been so
niggardly with him from the first, his personal habits were even
sluttish. His clothes were wretched; when he ate or washed he wiped his
hands upon his sleeves; and as his hair was not tied more than once in
the two months it was often disgusting to behold. With such a picture,
it is easy to believe that he never married. A good teacher, gentle in
act, although violent and abusive in speech, his lessons were apt to go
over the heads of his scholars, and to leave them gaping, or more often
laughing. Such was his passion for study that he even grudged himself
natural repose; and when he grew drowsy over his books he would, if it
was summer, put mosquitoes up his sleeve; and, if it was winter, take
off his shoes and run barefoot on the snow. His handwriting was
exceptionally villainous; poet though he was, he had no taste for what
was elegant; and in a country where to write beautifully was not the
mark of a scrivener but an admired accomplishment for gentlemen, he
suffered his letters to be jolted out of him by the press of matter and
the heat of his convictions. He would not tolerate even the appearance
of a bribe; for bribery lay at the root of much that was evil in Japan,
as well as in countries nearer home; and once when a merchant brought
him his son to educate, and added, as was customary[5], a little private
sweetener, Yoshida dashed the money in the giver's face, and launched
into such an outbreak of indignation as made the matter public in the
school. He was still, when Masaki knew him, much weakened by his
hardships in prison; and the presentation-sword, three feet long, was
too heavy for him to wear without distress; yet he would always gird it
on when he went to dig in his garden. That is a touch which qualifies
the man. A weaker nature would have shrunk from the sight of what only
commemorated a failure. But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can
"make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from
success." He could look back without confusion to his enthusiastic
promise. If events had been contrary, and he found himself unable to
carry out that purpose--well, there was but the more reason to be brave
and constant in another; if he could not carry the sword into barbarian
lands, it should at least be witness to a life spent entirely for Japan.
This is the sight we have of him as he appeared to schoolboys, but not
related in the schoolboy spirit. A man so careless of the graces must be
out of court with boys and women. And, indeed, as we have all been more
or less to school, it will astonish no one that Yoshida was regarded by
his scholars as a laughing-stock. The schoolboy has a keen sense of
humour. Heroes he learns to understand and to admire in books; but he is
not forward to recognise the heroic under the traits of any contemporary
man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher. But
as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to
look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to
understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon
their comic schoolmaster as upon the noblest of mankind.
The last act of this brief and full existence was already near at hand.
Some of his work was done; for already there had been Dutch teachers
admitted into Nangasaki, and the country at large was keen for the new
learning. But though the renaissance had begun, it was impeded and
dangerously threatened by the power of the Shogun. His minister--the
same who was afterwards assassinated in the snow in the very midst of
his bodyguard--not only held back pupils from going to the Dutchmen, but
by spies and detectives, by imprisonment and death, kept thinning out of
Japan the most intelligent and active spirits. It is the old story of a
power upon its last legs--learning to the bastille, and courage to the
block; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys, the State will
have been saved. But a man must not think to cope with a revolution; nor
a minister, however fortified with guards, to hold in check a country
that had given birth to such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower.
The violence of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention
to the illegality of his master's rule; and people began to turn their
allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long-forgotten Mikado in his
seclusion at Kioto. At this juncture, whether in consequence or not, the
relations between these two rulers became strained; and the Shogun's
minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the rightful
sovereign. The circumstance was well fitted to precipitate events. It
was a piece of religion to defend the Mikado; it was a plain piece of
political righteousness to oppose a tyrannical and bloody usurpation. To
Yoshida the moment for action seemed to have arrived. He was himself
still confined in Choshu. Nothing was free but his intelligence; but
with that he sharpened a sword for the Shogun's minister. A party of his
followers were to waylay the tyrant at a village on the Yeddo and Kioto
road, present him with a petition, and put him to the sword. But Yoshida
and his friends were closely observed; and the too great expedition of
two of the conspirators, a boy of eighteen and his brother, wakened the
suspicion of the authorities, and led to a full discovery of the plot
and the arrest of all who were concerned.
In Yeddo, to which he was taken, Yoshida was thrown again into a strict
confinement. But he was not left destitute of sympathy in this last hour
of trial. In the next cell lay one Kusákabé, a reformer from the
southern highlands of Satsuma. They were in prison for different plots,
indeed, but for the same intention; they shared the same beliefs and the
same aspirations for Japan; many and long were the conversations they
held through the prison wall, and dear was the sympathy that soon united
them. It fell first to the lot of Kusákabé to pass before the judges;
and when sentence had been pronounced he was led towards the place of
death below Yoshida's window. To turn the head would have been to
implicate his fellow-prisoner; but he threw him a look from his eye, and
bade him farewell in a loud voice, with these two Chinese verses:--
"It is better to be a crystal and be broken,
Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop."
So Kusákabé, from the highlands of Satsuma, passed out of the theatre of
this world. His death was like an antique worthy's.
A little after, and Yoshida too must appear before the Court. His last
scene was of a piece with his career, and fitly crowned it. He seized on
the opportunity of a public audience, confessed and gloried in his
design, and, reading his auditors a lesson in the history of their
country, told at length the illegality of the Shogun's power and the
crimes by which its exercise was sullied. So, having said his say for
once, he was led forth and executed, thirty-one years old.
A military engineer, a bold traveller (at least in wish), a poet, a
patriot, a schoolmaster, a friend to learning, a martyr to
reform,--there are not many men, dying at seventy, who have served their
country in such various characters. He was not only wise and provident
in thought, but surely one of the fieriest of heroes in execution. It is
hard to say which is the most remarkable--his capacity for command,
which subdued his very jailers; his hot, unflagging zeal; or his
stubborn superiority to defeat. He failed in each particular enterprise
that he attempted; and yet we have only to look at his country to see
how complete has been his general success. His friends and pupils made
the majority of leaders in that final Revolution, now some twelve years
old; and many of them are, or were until the other day, high placed
among the rulers of Japan. And when we see all round us these brisk
intelligent students, with their strange foreign air, we should never
forget how Yoshida marched afoot from Choshu to Yeddo, and from Yeddo to
Nangasaki, and from Nangasaki back again to Yeddo; how he boarded the
American ship, his dress stuffed with writing material; nor how he
languished in prison, and finally gave his death, as he had formerly
given all his life and strength and leisure, to gain for his native
land that very benefit which she now enjoys so largely. It is better to
be Yoshida and perish, than to be only Sákuma and yet save the hide.
Kusákabé, of Satsuma, has said the word: it is better to be a crystal
and be broken.
I must add a word; for I hope the reader will not fail to perceive that
this is as much the story of a heroic people as that of a heroic man. It
is not enough to remember Yoshida; we must not forget the common
soldier, nor Kusákabé, nor the boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose
eagerness betrayed the plot. It is exhilarating to have lived in the
same days with these great-hearted gentlemen. Only a few miles from us,
to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was droning over my
lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be wakeful with the stings of
the mosquito; and while you were grudging a penny income-tax, Kusákabé
was stepping to death with a noble sentence on his lips.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier and
talked with him by the roadside; they then parted, but the soldier
was so much struck by the words he heard, that on Yoshida's return
he sought him out and declared his intention of devoting his life to
the good cause. I venture, in the absence of the writer, to insert
this correction, having been present when the story was told by Mr.
Masaki.--F. J. [Fleeming Jenkin.] And I, there being none to settle
the difference, must reproduce both versions.--R. L. S.
[5] I understood that the merchant was endeavouring surreptitiously to
obtain for his son instruction to which he was not entitled.--F. J.
VI
FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER
Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of
François Villon[6]. His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of
biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will
recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which
he bequeaths his spectacles--with a humorous reservation of the case--to
the hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score. Thus
equipped, let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in
the cemetery of the Innocents! For his own part, the poet can see no
distinction. Much have the dead people made of their advantages. What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished
portly bodies upon cakes and cream! Here they all lie, to be trodden in
the mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue and adroit or
powerful vice, in very much the same condition; and a bishop not to be
distinguished from a lamplighter with even the strongest spectacles.
Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a
fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts, that the stealth of
the private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and
dusty past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.
In the extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is
remembered, when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps
the very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have
been forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous towns,--even in
this extreme let an antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the
name will be recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a
toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what
was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little
while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived
for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance
in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this
projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries
and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of
posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure
of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are not few) who
prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present.
A WILD YOUTH
François de Montcorbier, _alias_ François des Loges, _alias_ François
Villon, _alias_ Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of
Paris, was born in that city in the summer of 1431. It was a memorable
year for France on other and higher considerations. A great-hearted girl
and a poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first
appearance on the public stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th of
May the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2nd
of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
disaffected and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire still ravaged the
open country. On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides
children, made their escape out of the starving capital. The hangman, as
is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was kept
hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone,
sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets.[7] A more confused or
troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in
life. Not even a man's nationality was certain; for the people of Paris
there was no such thing as a Frenchman. The English were the English
indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc
at their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two
years before. Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear
Duke of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to
keep out of their neighbourhood.... At least, and whether he liked it or
not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of
the English crown.
We hear nothing of Villon's father, except that he was poor and of mean
extraction. His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much
in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in
an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average,
and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns. Of this uncle
and his money-box the reader will hear once more. In 1448 Francis became
a student of the University of Paris; in 1450 he took the degree of
Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts. His _bourse_, or the sum
paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous. Now two sous
was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of about
1417; it was the price of half a pound in the worse times of 1419; and
in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems
to have been taken as the average wage for a day's manual labour.[8] In
short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set
lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon's share of
the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary
of referring, must have been slender from the first.
The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
of thinking, somewhat incomplete. Worldly and monkish elements were
presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The
lecture-room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof
with establishments of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order.
The students had extraordinary privileges, which by all accounts they
abused extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an almost
sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered
in the street "with their thumbs in their girdle," passed the night in
riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo
in the romance of "Notre Dame de Paris." Villon tells us himself that he
was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The burlesque
erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no more than the merest
smattering of knowledge; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts
and industries could only have been acquired by early and consistent
impiety and idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern Universities will make their own reflections on
the value of the test. As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard
Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau--if they were really his pupils in any
serious sense--what can we say but God help them! And sure enough, by
his own description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as
was to be looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor.
At some time or other, before or during his University career, the poet
was adopted by Master Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint
Benoît-le-Bétourné, near the Sorbonne. From him he borrowed the surname
by which he is known to posterity. It was most likely from his house,
called the "Porte Rouge," and situated in a garden in the cloister of
St. Benoît, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out
the Angelus while he was finishing his "Small Testament" at
Christmastide in 1456. Towards this benefactor he usually gets credit
for a respectable display of gratitude. But with his trap and pitfall
style of writing, it is easy to make too sure. His sentiments are about
as much to be relied on as those of a professional beggar; and in this,
as in so many other matters, he comes towards us whining and piping the
eye, and goes off again with a whoop and his finger to his nose. Thus,
he calls Guillaume de Villon his "more than father," thanks him with a
great show of sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and
bequeaths him his portion of renown. But the portion of renown which
belonged to a young thief, distinguished (if, at the period when he
wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at all) for having written some
more or less obscene and scurrilous ballads, must have been little
fitted to gratify the self-respect or increase the reputation of a
benevolent ecclesiastic. The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy
of the poet's library, with specification of one work which was plainly
neither decent nor devout. We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma.
If the chaplain was a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to
graft good principles and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted
son, these jesting legacies would obviously cut him to the heart. The
position of an adopted son towards his adoptive father is one full of
delicacy; where a man lends his name he looks for great consideration.
And this legacy of Villon's portion of renown may be taken as the mere
fling of an unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in
his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy
benefactor's feelings. The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this
reading, as a frightful _minus_ quantity. If, on the other hand, those
jests were given and taken in good humour, the whole relation between
the pair degenerates into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old
chaplain and a witty and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house
with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it
may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster,
studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.
It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have
inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoît. Three of the most remarkable
among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he
entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly
resentment; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks. Now
we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to
find that two of the canons of Saint Benoît answered respectively to the
names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a
householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street--the Rue des
Poirées--in the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister. M. Longnon is
almost ready to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre; Regnier as
the nephew of Etienne, and Colin as the son of Nicolas. Without going so
far, it must be owned that the approximation of names is significant. As
we go on to see the part played by each of these persons in the sordid
melodrama of the poet's life, we shall come to regard it as even more
notable. Is it not Clough who has remarked that, after all, everything
lies in juxtaposition? Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing
apparently more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.
Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel--the change is within the limits
of Villon's licence) had plainly delighted in the poet's conversation;
near neighbours or not, they were much together; and Villon made no
secret of his court, and suffered himself to believe that his feeling
was repaid in kind. This may have been an error from the first, or he
may have estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity. One can
easily imagine Villon an impatient wooer. One thing, at least, is sure:
that the affair terminated in a manner bitterly humiliating to Master
Francis. In presence of his lady-love, perhaps under her window, and
certainly with her connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noë
le Joly--beaten, as he says himself, like dirty linen on the
washing-board. It is characteristic that his malice had notably
increased between the time when he wrote the "Small Testament"
immediately on the back of the occurrence, and the time when he wrote
the "Large Testament" five years after. On the latter occasion nothing
is too bad for his "damsel with the twisted nose," as he calls her. She
is spared neither hint nor accusation, and he tells his messenger to
accost her with the vilest insults. Villon, it is thought, was out of
Paris when these amenities escaped his pen; or perhaps the strong arm of
Noë le Joly would have been again in requisition. So ends the
love-story, if love-story it may properly be called. Poets are not
necessarily fortunate in love; but they usually fall among more romantic
circumstances, and bear their disappointment with a better grace.
The neighbourhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux was
probably more influential on his after life than the contempt of
Catherine. For a man who is greedy of all pleasures, and provided with
little money and less dignity of character, we may prophesy a safe and
speedy voyage downward. Humble or even truckling virtue may walk
unspotted in this life. But only those who despise the pleasures can
afford to despise the opinion of the world. A man of a strong, heady
temperament, like Villon, is very differently tempted. His eyes lay hold
on all provocations greedily, and his heart flames up at a look into
imperious desire; he is snared and broached-to by anything and
everything, from a pretty face to a piece of pastry in a cookshop
window; he will drink the rinsing of the wine-cup, stay the latest at
the tavern party; tap at the lit windows, follow the sound of singing,
and beat the whole neighbourhood for another reveller, as he goes
reluctantly homeward; and grudge himself every hour of sleep as a black
empty period in which he cannot follow after pleasure. Such a person is
lost if he have not dignity, or, failing that, at least pride, which is
its shadow and in many ways its substitute. Master Francis, I fancy,
would follow his own eager instincts without much spiritual struggle.
And we soon find him fallen among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and
counting as acquaintances the most disreputable people he could lay his
hands on; fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the
criminal court, and archers of the watch; blackguards who slept at night
under the butchers' stalls, and for whom the aforesaid archers peered
about carefully with lanterns; Regnier de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and
their crew, all bound on a favouring breeze towards the gallows; the
disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went about at fair-time with
soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on the queerest
principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of
stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her
career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her,
alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.[9] Nay,
our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could
string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could
make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of
Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work
and pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses as the "Subjects of
François Villon." He was a good genius to all hungry and unscrupulous
persons; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks
and cheateries. At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too
thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief. But he would
not linger long in this equivocal border-land. He must soon have
complied with his surroundings. He was one who would go where the
cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay; and from supping in the
wolves' den, there is but a step to hunting with the pack. And here, as
I am on the chapter of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say
about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good. Some
charitable critics see no more than a _jeu d'esprit_, a graceful and
trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg
(_Grosse Margot_). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this
polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in
flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction
of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that
we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real
persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if
the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have
gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy
persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man
of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult--
"A place, for which the pained'st fiend
Of hell would not in reputation change."
But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case
springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. Paris now is not so
different from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of
Bohemia are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Mürger. It is
really not at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century,
with a knack of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful
terms. The race of those who do so is not extinct; and some of them to
this day write the prettiest verses imaginable.... After this, it were
impossible for Master Francis to fall lower: to go and steal for himself
would be an admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human.
And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first
appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about
twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we
behold him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice had, as it
were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
rummaging among old deeds, has turned up the negative and printed it off
for our instruction. Villon had been supping--copiously we may
believe--and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoît,
in company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of
Isabeau. It was nine o'clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and
evidently a fine summer's night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a
prudent man, to keep him from the dews (_serain_), and had a sword below
it dangling from his girdle. So these three dallied in front of St.
Benoît, taking their pleasure (_pour soy esbatre_). Suddenly there
arrived upon the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermaise, also
with sword and cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi.
Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go
upon, came up blustering and denying God; as Villon rose to make room
for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place; and
finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should
imagine was a very clumsy stroke. Up to this point, Villon professes to
have been a model of courtesy, even of feebleness: and the brawl, in his
version, reads like the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the
lamb was roused; he drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin,
knocked him on the head with a big stone, and then, leaving him to his
fate, went away to have his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of
Fouquet. In one version he says that Gilles, Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran
away at the first high words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone;
in another, Le Mardi is represented as returning and wresting Villon's
sword from him: the reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up,
lay all that night in the prison of Saint Benoît, where he was examined
by an official of the Châtelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died
on the following Saturday in the Hôtel Dieu.
This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next year
could Villon extract a pardon from the King; but while his hand was in,
he got two. One is for "François des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
Villon"; and the other runs in the name of François de Montcorbier. Nay,
it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the
first of these documents it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon
Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a
theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of
Villon's subsequent irregularities; and that up to that moment he had
been the pink of good behaviour. But the matter has to my eyes a more
dubious air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for
Montcorbier? and these two the same person? and one or both of them
known by the _alias_ of Villon, however honestly come by? and lastly, in
the heat of the moment, a fourth name thrown out with an assured
countenance? A ship is not to be trusted that sails under so many
colours. This is not the simple bearing of innocence. No--the young
master was already treading crooked paths; already, he would start and
blench at a hand upon his shoulder, with the look we know so well in the
face of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice; already, in the blue devils, he would
see Henry Cousin, the executor of high justice, going in dolorous
procession towards Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying
around Paris gibbet.
A GANG OF THIEVES
In spite of the prodigious number of people who managed to get hanged,
the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for criminals. A great
confusion of parties and great dust of fighting favoured the escape of
private housebreakers and quiet fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat.
Prisons were leaky; and as we shall see, a man with a few crowns in his
pocket, and perhaps some acquaintance among the officials, could easily
slip out and become once more a free marauder. There was no want of a
sanctuary where he might harbour until troubles blew by; and accomplices
helped each other with more or less good faith. Clerks, above all, had
remarkable facilities for a criminal way of life; for they were
privileged, except in cases of notorious incorrigibility, to be plucked
from the hands of rude secular justice and tried by a tribunal of their
own. In 1402, a couple of thieves, both clerks of the University, were
condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. As they were taken to
Montfaucon, they kept crying "high and clearly" for their benefit of
clergy, but were none the less pitilessly hanged and gibbeted. Indignant
Alma Mater interfered before the King; and the Provost was deprived of
all royal offices, and condemned to return the bodies and erect a great
stone cross, on the road from Paris to the gibbet, graven with the
effigies of these two holy martyrs.[10] We shall hear more of the
benefit of clergy; for after this the reader will not be surprised to
meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even priests and
monks.
To a knot of such learned pilferers our poet certainly belonged; and by
turning over a few more of M. Longnon's negatives, we shall get a clear
idea of their character and doings. Montigny and De Cayeux are names
already known; Guy Tabary, Petit-Jehan, Dom Nicolas, little Thibault,
who was both clerk and goldsmith, and who made picklocks and melted
plate for himself and his companions--with these the reader has still to
become acquainted. Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux were handy fellows and
enjoyed a useful pre-eminence in honour of their doings with the
picklock. "_Dictus des Cahyeus est fortis operator crochetorum_," says
Tabary's interrogation, "_sed dictus Petit-Jehan, ejus socius, est
forcius operator_." But the flower of the flock was little Thibault; it
was reported that no lock could stand before him; he had a persuasive
hand; let us salute capacity wherever we may find it. Perhaps the term
_gang_ is not quite properly applied to the persons whose fortunes we
are now about to follow; rather they were independent malefactors,
socially intimate, and occasionally joining together for some serious
operation, just as modern stockjobbers form a syndicate for an important
loan. Nor were they at all particular to any branch of misdoing. They
did not scrupulously confine themselves to a single sort of theft, as I
hear is common among modern thieves. They were ready for anything, from
pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. Montigny, for instance, had neglected
neither of these extremes, and we find him accused of cheating at games
of hazard on the one hand, and on the other of the murder of one
Thevenin Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John. If time had
only spared us some particulars, might not this last have furnished us
with the matter of a grisly winter's tale?
At Christmas-time in 1456, readers of Villon will remember that he was
engaged on the "Small Testament." About the same period, _circa festum
nativitatis Domini_, he took part in a memorable supper at the Mule
Tavern, in front of the Church of St. Mathurin. Tabary, who seems to
have been very much Villon's creature, had ordered the supper in the
course of the afternoon. He was a man who had had troubles in his time,
and languished in the Bishop of Paris's prisons on a suspicion of
picking locks; confiding, convivial, not very astute--who had copied out
a whole improper romance with his own right hand. This supper-party was
to be his first introduction to De Cayeux and Petit-Jehan, which was
probably a matter of some concern to the poor man's muddy wits; in the
sequel, at least, he speaks of both with an undisguised respect, based
on professional inferiority in the matter of picklocks. Dom Nicolas, a
Picardy monk, was the fifth and last at table. When supper had been
despatched and fairly washed down, we may suppose, with white Baigneux
or red Beaune, which were favourite wines among the fellowship, Tabary
was solemnly sworn over to secrecy on the night's performances; and the
party left the Mule and proceeded to an unoccupied house belonging to
Robert de Saint-Simon. This, over a low wall, they entered without
difficulty. All but Tabary took off their upper garments; a ladder was
found and applied to the high wall which separated Saint-Simon's house
from the court of the College of Navarre; the four fellows in their
shirt-sleeves (as we might say) clambered over in a twinkling; and
Master Guy Tabary remained alone beside the overcoats. From the court
the burglars made their way into the vestry of the chapel, where they
found a large chest, strengthened with iron bands and closed with four
locks. One of these locks they picked, and then, by levering up the
corner, forced the other three. Inside was a small coffer, of walnut
wood, also barred with iron, but fastened with only three locks, which
were all comfortably picked by way of the keyhole. In the walnut
coffer--a joyous sight by our thieves' lantern--were five hundred crowns
of gold. There was some talk of opening the aumries, where, if they had
only known, a booty eight or nine times greater lay ready to their hand;
but one of the party (I have a humorous suspicion it was Dom Nicolas,
the Picardy monk) hurried them away. It was ten o'clock when they
mounted the ladder; it was about midnight before Tabary beheld them
coming back. To him they gave ten crowns, and promised a share of a
two-crown dinner on the morrow; whereat we may suppose his mouth
watered. In course of time, he got wind of the real amount of their
booty and understood how scurvily he had been used; but he seems to have
borne no malice. How could he, against such superb operators as
Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux; or a person like Villon, who could have made
a new improper romance out of his own head, instead of merely copying an
old one with mechanical right hand?
The rest of the winter was not uneventful for the gang. First they made
a demonstration against the Church of St. Mathurin after chalices, and
were ignominiously chased away by barking dogs. Then Tabary fell out
with Casin Chollet, one of the fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat,
who subsequently became a sergeant of the Châtelet and distinguished
himself by misconduct, followed by imprisonment and public castigation,
during the wars of Louis Eleventh. The quarrel was not conducted with a
proper regard to the King's peace, and the pair publicly belaboured each
other until the police stepped in, and Master Tabary was cast once more
into the prisons of the Bishop. While he still lay in durance, another
job was cleverly executed by the band in broad daylight, at the
Augustine Monastery. Brother Guillaume Coiffier was beguiled by an
accomplice to St. Mathurin to say mass; and during his absence, his
chamber was entered and five or six hundred crowns in money and some
silver plate successfully abstracted. A melancholy man was Coiffier on
his return! Eight crowns from this adventure were forwarded by little
Thibault to the incarcerated Tabary; and with these he bribed the jailer
and reappeared in Paris taverns. Some time before or shortly after this,
Villon set out for Angers, as he had promised in the "Small Testament."
The object of this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his
cruel mistress or the strong arm of Noë le Joly, but to plan a
deliberate robbery on his uncle the monk. As soon as he had properly
studied the ground, the others were to go over in force from
Paris--picklocks and all--and away with my uncle's strongbox! This
throws a comical side-light on his own accusation against his relatives,
that they had "forgotten natural duty" and disowned him because he was
poor. A poor relation is a distasteful circumstance at the best, but a
poor relation who plans deliberate robberies against those of his blood,
and trudges hundreds of weary leagues to put them into execution, is
surely a little on the wrong side of toleration. The uncle at Angers may
have been monstrously undutiful; but the nephew from Paris was upsides
with him.
On the 23rd April, that venerable and discreet person, Master Pierre
Marchand, Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in the diocese of
Chartres, arrived in Paris and put up at the sign of the Three
Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette. Next day, or the day after, as
he was breakfasting at the sign of the Armchair, he fell into talk with
two customers, one of whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary.
The idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past life.
Pierre Marchand, who was an acquaintance of Guillaume Coiffier's and had
sympathised with him over his loss, pricked up his ears at the mention
of picklocks, and led on the transcriber of improper romances from one
thing to another, until they were fast friends. For picklocks the Prior
of Paray professed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon some late alarm,
had thrown all his into the Seine. Let that be no difficulty, however,
for was there not little Thibault, who could make them of all shapes and
sizes, and to whom Tabary, smelling an accomplice, would be only too
glad to introduce his new acquaintance? On the morrow, accordingly, they
met; and Tabary, after having first wet his whistle at the Prior's
expense, led him to Notre Dame and presented him to four or five "young
companions," who were keeping sanctuary in the church. They were all
clerks, recently escaped, like Tabary himself, from the episcopal
prisons. Among these we may notice Thibault, the operator, a little
fellow of twenty-six, wearing long hair behind. The Prior expressed,
through Tabary, his anxiety to become their accomplice and altogether
such as they were (_de leur sorte et de leurs complices_). Mighty polite
they showed themselves, and made him many fine speeches in return. But
for all that, perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps
because it is less easy to wheedle men in a body, they kept obstinately
to generalities and gave him no information as to their exploits, past,
present, or to come. I suppose Tabary groaned under this reserve; for no
sooner were he and the Prior out of the church than he fairly emptied
his heart to him, gave him full details of many hanging matters in the
past, and explained the future intentions of the band. The scheme of the
hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this
the Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, in the
course of two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out.
For a while longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to
Petit-Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of thirty,
with a black beard and a short jacket; an appointment was made and
broken in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the
Prior's charge and leaked out more secrets under the influence of wine
and friendship; and then all of a sudden, on the 17th of May, an alarm
sprang up, the Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the
Châtelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to their heels
and vanished out of Paris and the sight of the police.
Vanish as they like, they all go with a clog about their feet. Sooner or
later, here or there, they will be caught in the fact, and ignominiously
sent home. From our vantage of four centuries afterwards, it is odd and
pitiful to watch the order in which the fugitives are captured and
dragged in.
Montigny was the first. In August of that same year he was laid by the
heels on many grievous counts--sacrilegious robberies, frauds,
incorrigibility, and that bad business about Thevenin Pensete in the
house by the Cemetery of St. John. He was reclaimed by the
ecclesiastical authorities as a clerk; but the claim was rebutted on the
score of incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground; and he was
condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. It was a very rude hour for
Montigny, but hope was not yet over. He was a fellow of some birth; his
father had been king's pantler; his sister, probably married to some one
about the Court, was in the family way, and her health would be
endangered if the execution was proceeded with. So down comes Charles
the Seventh with letters of mercy, commuting the penalty to a year in a
dungeon on bread and water, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James
in Galicia. Alas! the document was incomplete; it did not contain the
full tale of Montigny's enormities; it did not recite that he had been
denied benefit of clergy, and it said nothing about Thevenin Pensete.
Montigny's hour was at hand. Benefit of clergy, honourable descent from
king's pantler, sister in the family way, royal letters of
commutation--all were of no avail. He had been in prison in Rouen, in
Tours, in Bordeaux, and four times already in Paris; and out of all
these he had come scatheless; but now he must make a little excursion as
far as Montfaucon with Henry Cousin, executor of high justice. There let
him swing among the carrion crows.
About a year later, in July 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary.
Before the ecclesiastical commissary he was twice examined, and, on the
latter occasion, put to the question ordinary and extraordinary. What a
dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph
with expert operators and great wits! He is at the lees of life, poor
rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are
now agonisingly stretched upon the rack. We have no sure knowledge, but
we may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion. Tabary, the admirer, would
go the same way as those whom he admired.
The last we hear of is Colin de Gayeux. He was caught in autumn 1460, in
the great Church of St. Leu d'Esserens, which makes so fine a figure in
the pleasant Oise valley between Creil and Beaumont. He was reclaimed by
no less than two bishops; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by
incorrigible Colin. 1460 was an ill-starred year: for justice was making
a clean sweep of "poor and indigent persons, thieves, cheats, and
lock-pickers," in the neighbourhood of Paris;[11] and Colin de Cayeux,
with many others, was condemned to death and hanged.[12]
VILLON AND THE GALLOWS
Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray
sent such a bombshell among his accomplices; and the dates of his return
and arrest remain undiscoverable. M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for
the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and
the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils. We may
suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we may suppose him
competed for between lay and clerical Courts; and we may suppose him
alternately pert and impudent, humble and fawning, in his defence. But
at the end of all supposing, we come upon some nuggets of fact. For
first, he was put to the question by water. He who had tossed off so
many cups of White Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water through linen
folds, until his bowels were flooded and his heart stood still. After so
much raising of the elbow, so much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at
last was enough drinking for a lifetime. Truly, of our pleasant vices,
the gods make whips to scourge us. And secondly he was condemned to be
hanged. A man may have been expecting a catastrophe for years, and yet
find himself unprepared when it arrives. Certainly, Villon found, in
this legitimate issue of his career, a very staggering and grave
consideration. Every beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin.
If everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay, and it
becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as dear as all the rest.
"Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively ballad, "that I had not enough
philosophy under my hood to cry out: 'I appeal'? If I had made any bones
about the matter I should have been planted upright in the fields, by
the St. Denis Road"--Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis. An appeal
to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not
necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commutation; and while the matter
was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position.
Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination. With the aspect of
Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the neighbourhood appears
to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men
and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and
weather. And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new and
startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for
himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of
mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography:--
"La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez à couldre.
Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."
Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that was
spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is
an intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the
transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a
doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in
the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his
eyes.
And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of
banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must carry his woes
without delay. Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a
station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets
seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be
a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the
hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to
be pitied on the conditions of his exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad
ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
Parliament; the _envoi_, like the proverbial postscript of a lady's
letter, containing the pith of his performance in a request for three
days' delay to settle his affairs and bid his friends farewell. He was
probably not followed out of Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular
preacher, another exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes;[13]
but I daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a bottle with him
before they turned. For banished people, in those days, seem to have set
out on their own responsibility, in their own guard, and at their own
expense. It was no joke to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon
alone and penniless in the fifteenth century. Villon says he left a rag
of his tails on every bush. Indeed, he must have had many a weary tramp,
many a slender meal, and many a to-do with blustering captains of the
Ordonnance. But with one of his light fingers, we may fancy that he took
as good as he gave; for every rag of his tail he would manage to
indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France and
Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like
the track of a single human locust. A strange figure he must have cut in
the eyes of the good country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet,
with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street arab,
posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the green fields and
vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness; green
fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis; but
he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic
dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.
How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the _protégé_ of the
Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part,
under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be
referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters
that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas!
he is once more in durance: this time at Méun-sur-Loire, in the prisons
of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a
basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts
and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being
excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a
caricature of his own misery. His eyes were "bandaged with thick
walls." It might blow hurricanes overhead; the lightning might leap in
high heaven; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.
"_Il n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon._" Above all, he was
levered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart
flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault d'Aussigny, walking
the streets in God's sunlight, and blessing people with extended
fingers. So much we find sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast
again into prison--how he had again managed to shave the gallows--this
we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever
likely to learn. But on October 2nd, 1461, or some day immediately
preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into
Méun. Now it was a part of the formality on such occasions for the new
King to liberate certain prisoners; and so the basket was let down into
Villon's pit, and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but once more
a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or never is the time for
verses! Such a happy revolution would turn the head of a
stocking-weaver, and set him jingling rhymes. And so--after a voyage to
Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon
the gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets, "with
their thumbs under their girdles,"--down sits Master Francis to write
his "Large Testament," and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious
ignominy.
THE "LARGE TESTAMENT"
Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style in general,
it is here the place to speak. The "Large Testament" is a hurly-burly of
cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to
friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these, many admirable
ballades both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought
that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and
he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul,
and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his
exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between
the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous
gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter
writer--except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
paralleled from no other language known to me--he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also,
in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great
masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary.
"Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that he has a
handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his
writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in
an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers
could have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a
pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of
Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age
and country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long
ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the
first articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by
priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison
with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we
shall instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche
in glory's temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in
itself, a memorable fact that before 1542, in the very dawn of printing,
and while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran
through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and
through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and
growing inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way
of looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a
more specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other
year, a work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite
scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward
form to the study of our rhyming thief.
The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; people with
patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward;
the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be
seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old
mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.
In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not
long before Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in
the whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet
could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt
all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Méun. In the
moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and
sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face
of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men's
spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is
mumbling crusts and picking vermin.
Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work, its unrivalled insincerity. I can give no
better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he
comes up with a whine and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his
nose. His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen
to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader,
and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy. But when the
thing is studied the illusion fades away: in the transitions, above all,
we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man; and instead of a
flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for
the mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of
the "Large Testament" as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a
merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human
respect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the
gallows. Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will
be found to fall; and rather, as I imagine, towards the last.
There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case,
even threatening sincerity.
The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer than himself.
He was for ever drawing a parallel, already exemplified from his own
words, between the happy life of the well-to-do and the miseries of the
poor. Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all
reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Béranger waited
till he was himself beyond the reach of want before writing the "Old
Vagabond" or "Jacques." Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to
be poor, "was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty" in his ill
days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the
fox burrowing in their vitals. But Villon, who had not the courage to be
poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his
teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl. He envies bitterly, envies
passionately. Poverty, he protests, drives men to steal, as hunger makes
the wolf sally from the forest. The poor, he goes on, will always have a
carping word to say, or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious
thoughts. It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor. Thousands in a
small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through life with
tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of mind as the rich
gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon's covetous
temper. And every morning's sun sees thousands who pass whistling to
their toil. But Villon was the "_mauvais pauvre_" defined by Victor
Hugo, and, in its English expression, so admirably stereotyped by
Dickens. He was the first wicked _sans-culotte_. He is the man of genius
with the moleskin cap. He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the
street, but I would not go down a dark road with him for a large
consideration.
The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common
to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the
transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age
and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an
after-world--these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
none of them will tickle an audience into good humour. "_Tousjours vieil
synge est desplaisant._" It is not the old jester who receives most
recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome,
who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of
this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As
for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their
old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for
me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what
Horace throws out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.
It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration; in the swift and
sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the strange revolution by
which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
churchyard dust; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable
and mighty. It is in this that the mixed texture of his thought enables
him to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enhance pity
with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march. It is in
this also that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art.
So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on
names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no
more than letters and a legend. "Where are the snows of yester year?"
runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review
the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the
golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and
trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world's pageantries and ate
greedily at great folks' tables: all this to the refrain of "So much
carry the winds away!" Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their
bones on Paris gibbet. Alas, and with so pitiful an experience of life,
Villon can offer us nothing but terror and lamentation about death! No
one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one
ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness. This unrepentant thief
can attain neither to Christian confidence nor to the spirit of the
bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early. It is a poor
heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions of life with
some heroic readiness.
* * * * *
The date of the "Large Testament" is the last date in the poet's
biography. After having achieved that admirable and despicable
performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came. How or
when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows,
remains a riddle for foolhardy commentators. It appears his health had
suffered in the pit at Méun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald;
with the notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the
sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of
portraits, that is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps
even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A
sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the
loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual
temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] "Étude Biographique sur François Villon." Paris: H. Menu.
[7] "Bourgeois de Paris," ed. Panthéon, pp. 688, 689.
[8] "Bourgeois," pp. 627, 636, and 725.
[9] "Chronique Scandaleuse," ed. Panthéon, p. 237.
[10] Monstrelet: "Panthéon Littéraire," p. 26.
[11] "Chron. Scand." _ut supra_.
[12] Here and there, principally in the order of events, this article
differs from M. Longnon's own reading of his material. The ground on
which he defers the execution of Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the
date of their trials seems insufficient. There is a law of parsimony
for the construction of historical documents; simplicity is the
first duty of narration; and hanged they were.
[13] "Chron. Scand.," p. 338.
VII
CHARLES OF ORLEANS
For one who was no great politician, nor (as men go) especially wise,
capable, or virtuous, Charles of Orleans is more than usually enviable
to all who love that better sort of fame which consists in being known
not widely, but intimately. "To be content that time to come should know
there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to
subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts," is,
says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition. It is to some more specific
memory that youth looks forward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes
disinterred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay,
the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon
the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great
and beautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, public
curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after
fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not
impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a man would rather
leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face,
_figura animi magis quam corporis_. Of those who have thus survived
themselves most completely, left a sort of personal seduction behind
them in the world, and retained, after death, the art of making friends,
Montaigne and Samuel Johnson certainly stand first. But we have
portraits of all sorts of men, from august Cæsar to the king's dwarf;
and all sorts of portraits, from a Titian treasured in the Louvre to a
profile over the grocer's chimney shelf. And so in a less degree, but
no less truly, than the spirit of Montaigne lives on in the delightful
Essays, that of Charles of Orleans survives in a few old songs and old
account-books; and it is still in the choice of the reader to make this
duke's acquaintance, and, if their humours suit, become his friend.
I
His birth--if we are to argue from a man's parents--was above his merit.
It is not merely that he was the grandson of one king, the father of
another, and the uncle of a third; but something more specious was to be
looked for from the son of his father, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orleans,
brother to the mad king Charles VI., lover of Queen Isabel, and the
leading patron of art and one of the leading politicians in France. And
the poet might have inherited yet higher virtues from his mother,
Valentina of Milan, a very pathetic figure of the age, the faithful wife
of an unfaithful husband, and the friend of a most unhappy king. The
father, beautiful, eloquent, and accomplished, exercised a strange
fascination over his contemporaries; and among those who dip nowadays
into the annals of the time there are not many--and these few are little
to be envied--who can resist the fascination of the mother. All mankind
owe her a debt of gratitude because she brought some comfort into the
life of the poor madman who wore the crown of France.
Born (May 1391) of such a noble stock, Charles was to know from the
first all favours of nature and art. His father's gardens were the
admiration of his contemporaries; his castles were situated in the most
agreeable parts of France, and sumptuously adorned. We have preserved,
in an inventory of 1403, the description of tapestried rooms where
Charles may have played in childhood.[14] "A green room, with the
ceiling full of angels, and the _dossier_ of shepherds and shepherdesses
seeming (_faisant contenance_) to eat nuts and cherries. A room of gold,
silk and worsted, with a device of little children in a river, and the
sky full of birds. A room of green tapestry, showing a knight and lady
at chess in a pavilion. Another green-room, with shepherdesses in a
trellised garden worked in gold and silk. A carpet representing
cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cherries
in a basin." These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might
busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With
our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large
a space in the attention of mediæval men might be occupied by such
figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in
the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of
traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered
vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows
and the walls and floors of palaces. The reader will remember how
Villon's mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty
stock of theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her
as she prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the
chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at
second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of
mankind which we may see paralleled to some extent in the first infant
school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round
the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues.
So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for a time,
to a liberal education in itself.
At Charles's birth an order of knighthood was inaugurated in his honour.
At nine years old he was a squire; at eleven, he had the escort of a
chaplain and a schoolmaster; at twelve, his uncle the king made him a
pension of twelve thousand livres d'or.[15] He saw the most brilliant
and the most learned persons of France in his father's court; and would
not fail to notice that these brilliant and learned persons were one and
all engaged in rhyming. Indeed, if it is difficult to realise the part
played by pictures, it is perhaps even more difficult to realise that
played by verses in the polite and active history of the age. At the
siege of Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over
the walls.[16] If a scandal happened, as in the loathsome thirty-third
story of the "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," all the wits must make rondels
and chansonettes, which they would hand from one to another with an
unmanly sneer. Ladies carried their favourite's ballades in their
girdles.[17] Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already, kissed
Alain Chartier's lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts and golden
sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well known that this princess
was herself the most industrious of poetasters, that she is supposed to
have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes wrote as
many as twelve rondels in the day.[18] It was in rhyme, even, that the
young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all manner of
instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a smack of
ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de la
Bigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the
verses of his father's Maître d'Hôtel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated
of _l'art de dictier et de faire chançons, ballades, virelais et
rondeaux_, along with many other matters worth attention, from the
courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France.[19] At this rate, all
knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We
need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very
well educated person. He could string Latin texts together by the hour,
and make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He
had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken
emperor who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a
great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who
helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies
dance on into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of
dainties and good wine.[20] And when all is said, it was no very helpful
preparation for the battle of life. "I believe Louis XI.," writes
Comines, "would not have saved himself, if he had not been very
differently brought up from such other lords as I have seen educated in
this country; for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes
with finery and fine words."[21] I am afraid Charles took such lessons
to heart, and conceived of life as a season principally for junketing
and war. His view of the whole duty of man, so empty, vain, and
wearisome to us, was yet sincerely and consistently held. When he came
in his ripe years to compare the glory of two kingdoms, England and
France, it was on three points only--pleasures, valour, and
riches,--that he cared to measure them; and in the very outset of that
tract he speaks of the life of the great as passed, "whether in arms, as
in assaults, battles, and sieges, or in jousts and tournaments, in high
and stately festivities and in funeral solemnities."[22]
When he was no more than thirteen, his father had him affianced to
Isabella, virgin-widow of our Richard II. and daughter of his uncle
Charles VI.; and, two years after (June 29, 1406), the cousins were
married at Compiégne, he fifteen, she seventeen years of age. It was in
every way a most desirable match. The bride brought five hundred
thousand francs of dowry. The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence,
Louis of Orleans figuring in crimson velvet, adorned with no less than
seven hundred and ninety-five pearls, gathered together expressly for
this occasion. And no doubt it must have been very gratifying for a
young gentleman of fifteen to play the chief part in a pageant so gaily
put upon the stage. Only, the bridegroom might have been a little older;
and, as ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of
thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as queen,
or the contemptible age of her new husband. _Pleuroit fort ladite
Isabeau_; the said Isabella wept copiously.[23] It is fairly debatable
whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (September
1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death. Short as it was,
however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find
that, in the last decade of his life, and after he had re-married for
perhaps the second time, he had not yet forgotten or forgiven the
violent death of Richard II. _Ce mauvais cas_--that ugly business, he
writes, has yet to be avenged.
The marriage festivity was on the threshold of evil days. The great
rivalry between Louis of Orleans and John the Fearless, Duke of
Burgundy, had been forsworn with the most reverend solemnities. But the
feud was only in abeyance, and John of Burgundy still conspired in
secret. On November 23, 1407--in that black winter when the frost lasted
six-and-sixty days on end--a summons from the King reached Louis of
Orleans at the Hôtel Barbette, where he had been supping with Queen
Isabel. It was seven or eight in the evening, and the inhabitants of the
quarter were abed. He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires
riding on one horse, a page and a few varlets running with torches. As
he rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove. And so riding,
he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain. My lord of Burgundy
set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found some years after on the
bridge of Montereau; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly
by his rival's death. The horror of the other princes seems to have
perturbed himself; he avowed his guilt in the council, tried to brazen
it out, finally lost heart and fled at full gallop, cutting bridges
behind him, towards Bapaume and Lille. And so there we have the head of
one faction, who had just made himself the most formidable man in
France, engaged in a remarkably hurried journey, with black care on the
pillion. And meantime, on the other side, the widowed duchess came to
Paris, in appropriate mourning, to demand justice for her husband's
death. Charles VI., who was then in a lucid interval, did probably all
that he could, when he raised up the kneeling suppliant with kisses and
smooth words. Things were at a dead-lock. The criminal might be in the
sorriest fright, but he was still the greatest of vassals. Justice was
easy to ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed was
another question. No one in France was strong enough to punish John of
Burgundy; and perhaps no one, except the widow, very sincere in wishing
to punish him.
She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her eagerness
wore her out; and she died about a year after the murder, of grief and
indignation, unrequited love and unsatisfied resentment. It was during
the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing
the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain
natural son of her husband's, destined to become famous in the sequel as
the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. "_You were stolen from
me_," she said; "it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are
not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a
saying over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That the
child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her body
was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression of
this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance,
in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear
only on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history--where
we see things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is
brought before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very
vague and pompous words, and strained through many men's minds of
everything personal or precise--this speech of the widowed duchess
startles a reader, somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A
human voice breaks in upon the silence of the study, and the student is
aware of a fellow-creature in his world of documents. With such a clue
in hand, one may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and
exasperate the resentment of her children, and what would be the last
words of counsel and command she left behind her.
With these instancies of his dying mother--almost a voice from the
tomb--still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of
Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously
similar to that of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The times were out of joint;
here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here,
in both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters
right. Valentina's commendation of Dunois involved a judgment on
Charles, and that judgment was exactly correct. Whoever might be,
Charles was not the man to avenge his father. Like Hamlet, this son of a
dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart. Like Hamlet, too,
he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter
to the King, complaining that what was denied to him would not be denied
"to the lowest born and poorest man on earth." Even in his private
hours he strove to preserve a lively recollection of his injury, and
keep up the native hue of resolution. He had gems engraved with
appropriate legends, hortatory or threatening: "_Dieu le scet_", God
knows it; or "_Souvenez-vous de_--" Remember![24] It is only towards the
end that the two stories begin to differ; and in some points the
historical version is the more tragic. Hamlet only stabbed a silly old
councillor behind the arras; Charles of Orleans trampled France for five
years under the hoofs of his banditti. The miscarriage of Hamlet's
vengeance was confined, at widest, to the palace; the ruin wrought by
Charles of Orleans was as broad as France.
Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of honourable mention.
Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts; and there is a story extant, to
illustrate how lightly he himself regarded these commercial obligations.
It appears that Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunderstorm,
had a smart access of penitence, and announced he would pay his debts on
the following Sunday. More than eight hundred creditors presented
themselves, but by that time the devil was well again, and they were
shown the door with more gaiety than politeness. A time when such
cynical dishonesty was possible for a man of culture is not, it will be
granted, a fortunate epoch for creditors. When the original debtor was
so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the incumbrances of
his inheritance. On the death of Philip the Forward, father of that John
the Fearless whom we have seen at work, the widow went through the
ceremony of a public renunciation of goods; taking off her purse and
girdle, she left them on the grave, and thus, by one notable act,
cancelled her husband's debts and defamed his honour. The conduct of
young Charles of Orleans was very different. To meet the joint
liabilities of his father and mother (for Valentina also was lavish), he
had to sell or pledge a quantity of jewels; and yet he would not take
advantage of a pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount.
Thus, one Godefroi Lefèvre, having disbursed many odd sums for the late
duke, and received or kept no vouchers, Charles ordered that he should
be believed upon his oath.[25] To a modern mind this seems as honourable
to his father's memory as if John the Fearless had been hanged as high
as Haman. And as things fell out, except a recantation from the
University of Paris, which had justified the murder out of party
feeling, and various other purely paper reparations, this was about the
outside of what Charles was to effect in that direction. He lived five
years, and grew up from sixteen to twenty-one, in the midst of the most
horrible civil war, or series of civil wars, that ever devastated
France; and from first to last his wars were ill-starred, or else his
victories useless. Two years after the murder (March 1409), John the
Fearless having the upper hand for the moment, a shameful and useless
reconciliation took place, by the King's command, in the Church of Our
Lady at Chartres. The advocate of the Duke of Burgundy stated that Louis
of Orleans had been killed "for the good of the King's person and
realm." Charles and his brothers, with tears of shame, under protest,
_pour ne pas desobéir au roi_, forgave their father's murderer and swore
peace upon the missal. It was, as I say, a shameful and useless
ceremony; the very greffier, entering it in his register, wrote in the
margin, "_Pax, pax, inquit Propheta, et non est pax._"[26] Charles was
soon after allied with the abominable Bernard d'Armagnac, even betrothed
or married to a daughter of his, called by a name that sounds like a
contradiction in terms, Bonne d'Armagnac. From that time forth,
throughout all this monstrous period--a very nightmare in the history of
France--he is no more than a stalking-horse for the ambitious Gascon.
Sometimes the smoke lifts, and you can see him for the twinkling of an
eye, a very pale figure; at one moment there is a rumour he will be
crowned king; at another, when the uproar has subsided, he will be heard
still crying out for justice; and the next (1412), he is showing himself
to the applauding populace on the same horse with John of Burgundy. But
these are exceptional seasons, and for the most part he merely rides at
the Gascon's bridle over devastated France. His very party go, not by
the name of Orleans, but by the name of Armagnac. Paris is in the hands
of the butchers: the peasants have taken to the woods. Alliances are
made and broken as if in a country dance; the English called in, now by
this one, now by the other. Poor people sing in church, with white faces
and lamentable music: "_Domine Jesu, parce populo tuo, dirige in viam
pacis principes._" And the end and upshot of the whole affair for
Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless. France is
once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin; he may ride home
again to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he
had got engraved in the early days of his resentment, "_Souvenez-vous
de--_" Remember! He has killed Polonius, to be sure; but the King is
never a penny the worse.
II
From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of
Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in
the play of _Henry V._; and it is at least odd that we can trace a
resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I
have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may
very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle;
and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene
would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life
capping verses with his courtiers. Certainly, Charles was in the great
battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
was made prisoner as he led the van. According to one story, some ragged
English archer shot him down; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting
ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of
bodies and retailed him to our King Henry. He was the most important
capture of the day, and used with all consideration. On the way to
Calais, Henry sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will
remember, was an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles
would neither eat nor drink. Thereupon Henry came to visit him in his
quarters. "Noble cousin," said he, "how are you?" Charles replied that
he was well. "Why then do you neither eat nor drink?" And then with some
asperity, as I imagine, the young duke told him that "truly he had no
inclination for food." And our Henry improved the occasion with
something of a snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought
against the French on account of their manifold sins and transgressions.
Upon this there supervened the agonies of a rough sea-passage; and many
French lords, Charles certainly among the number, declared they would
rather endure such another defeat than such another sore trial on
shipboard. Charles, indeed, never forgot his sufferings. Long
afterwards, he declared his hatred to a seafaring life, and willingly
yielded to England the empire of the seas, "because there is danger and
loss of life, and God knows what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness
is for many people hard to bear; and the rough life that must be led is
little suitable for the nobility":[27] which, of all babyish utterances
that ever fell from any public man, may surely bear the bell. Scarcely
disembarked, he followed his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy,
through the streets of holiday London. And then the doors closed upon
his last day of garish life for more than a quarter of a century. After
a boyhood passed in the dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp
of war, his ears still stunned and his cheeks still burning from his
enemies' jubilations; out of all this ringing of English bells and
singing of English anthems, from among all these shouting citizens in
scarlet cloaks, and beautiful virgins attired in white, he passed into
the silence and solitude of a political prison.[28]
His captivity was not without alleviations. He was allowed to go
hawking, and he found England an admirable country for the sport; he was
a favourite with English ladies, and admired their beauty; and he did
not lack for money, wine, or books; he was honourably imprisoned in the
strongholds of great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.
But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years. For
five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he
liked, or speak with any but his jailers. We may talk very wisely of
alleviations; there is only one alleviation for which the man would
thank you: he would thank you to open the door. With what regret
Scottish James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of
the time when he rose "as early as the day." What would he not have
given to wet his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his
vagrant fancy among the meadows? The only alleviation to the misery of
constraint lies in the disposition of the prisoner. To each one this
place of discipline brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron
Trenck into heroic action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable
spirits. Béranger tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours
and long evenings, both pleasant and profitable. The "Pilgrim's
Progress" and "Don Quixote" were begun in prison. It was after they were
become (to use the words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment--the
dungeon of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well
for the profit of mankind. In the year 1415 Henry V. had two
distinguished prisoners, French Charles of Orleans and Scottish James
I., who whiled away the hours of their captivity with rhyming. Indeed,
there can be no better pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical
exercise of verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel, with the
recurrence first of the whole, then of half the burthen, in thirteen
verses, seem to have been invented for the prison and the sick-bed. The
common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he
must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on
all the song-books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to
the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs."
It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently
and gingerly. It keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so
intently as to be distressing; for anything like strain is against the
very nature of the craft. Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall
into their place as if of their own accord, and it becomes something of
the nature of an intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the
rhymes will go, just as you must strike your ball as your adversary
played it. So that these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to
make verses than for those who wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on
the other hand, difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man's head,
and fugitive words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the
same time the deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and
the ardour of the chase. He may have been sitting all day long in prison
with folded hands; but when he goes to bed the retrospect will seem
animated and eventful.
Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles
acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He was perpetually
reminded of the change that had befallen him. He found the climate of
England cold and "prejudicial to the human frame"; he had a great
contempt for English fruit and English beer; even the coal fires were
unpleasing in his eyes.[29] He was rooted up from among his friends and
customs and the places that had known him. And so in this strange land
he began to learn the love of his own. Sad people all the world over are
like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter. So Burns
preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his mistress; so
the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it might carry
a kiss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we find Charles singing of
the "pleasant wind that comes from France."[30] One day, at
"Dover-on-the-Sea," he looked across the straits, and saw the sandhills
about Calais. And it happened to him, he tells us in a ballade, to
remember his happiness over there in the past; and he was both sad and
merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of gazing on the
shores of France.[31] Although guilty of unpatriotic acts, he had never
been exactly unpatriotic in feeling. But his sojourn in England gave,
for the time at least, some consistency to what had been a very weak and
ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the influence of more
than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded to turn Henry's
puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and reproach France,
and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony, idleness, unbridled
covetousness, and sensuality.[32] For the moment, he must really have
been thinking more of France than of Charles of Orleans.
And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be released in case of
peace begins to think upon the disadvantages of war. "Pray for peace,"
is his refrain: a strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard
d'Armagnac.[33] But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one side
in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and he did not
hesitate to explain it in so many words. "Everybody," he writes--I
translate roughly--"everybody should be much inclined to peace, for
everybody has a deal to gain by it."[34]
Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity.[35] He was
for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received fourteen
shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses; and from the fact that
Suffolk afterwards visited Charles in France while he was negotiating
the marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman's
impeachment, we may believe there was some not unkindly intercourse
between the prisoner and his jailer: a fact of considerable interest
when we remember that Suffolk's wife was the grand-daughter of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer.[36] Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates and
places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles's
captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew
on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against the
growth of such a feeling. One after another of his fellow-prisoners was
ransomed and went home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit
France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more
eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land.
Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a
man is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no
more attains to a settled frame of resolution than his eye would grow
familiar with a night of thunder and lightning. Years after, when he was
speaking at the trial of that Duke of Alençon who began life so
hopefully as the boyish favourite of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove
that captivity was a harder punishment than death. "For I have had
experience myself," he said; "and in my prison of England, for the
weariness, danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I have many a
time wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me."[37] This
is a flourish, if you will, but it is something more. His spirit would
sometimes rise up in a fine anger against the petty desires and
contrarieties of life. He would compare his own condition with the quiet
and dignified estate of the dead; and aspire to lie among his comrades
on the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to have the wings of a
dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. But such high thoughts
came to Charles only in a flash.
John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge of
Montereau so far back as 1419. His son, Philip the Good--partly to
extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a popular action, and
partly, in view of his ambitious schemes, to detach another great vassal
from the throne of France--had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans,
and negotiated diligently for his release. In 1433 a Burgundian embassy
was admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the presence of
Suffolk. Charles shook hands most affectionately with the ambassadors.
They asked after his health. "I am well enough in body," he replied,
"but far from well in mind. I am dying of grief at having to pass the
best days of my life in prison, with none to sympathise." The talk
falling on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he were
not sincere and constant in his endeavours to bring it about. "If peace
depended on me," he said, "I should procure it gladly, were it to cost
me my life seven days after." We may take this as showing what a large
price he set, not so much on peace, as on seven days of freedom. Seven
days!--he would make them seven years in the employment. Finally, he
assured the ambassadors of his good-will to Philip of Burgundy;
squeezed one of them by the hand and nipped him twice in the arm to
signify things unspeakable before Suffolk; and two days after sent them
Suffolk's barber, one Jean Carnet, a native of Lille, to testify more
freely of his sentiments. "As I speak French," said this emissary, "the
Duke of Orleans is more familiar with me than any other of the
household; and I can bear witness he never said anything against Duke
Philip."[38] It will be remembered that this person, with whom he was so
anxious to stand well, was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son
of his father's murderer. But the honest fellow bore no malice,
indeed--not he. He began exchanging ballades with Philip, whom he
apostrophises as his companion, his cousin, and his brother. He assures
him that, soul and body, he is altogether Burgundian; and protests that
he has given his heart in pledge to him. Regarded as the history of a
vendetta, it must be owned that Charles's life has points of some
originality. And yet there is an engaging frankness about these ballades
which disarms criticism.[39] You see Charles throwing himself
head-foremost into the trap; you hear Burgundy, in his answers, begin to
inspire him with his own prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the
misgovernment of France. But Charles's own spirits are so high and so
amiable, and he is so thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fellow,
that one's scruples are carried away in the torrent of his happiness and
gratitude. And his would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at
the consummation (Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the
Sacrament that he would never again bear arms against England, and
pledged himself body and soul to the unpatriotic faction in his own
country, set out from London with a light heart and a damaged integrity.
In the magnificent copy of Charles's poems, given by our Henry VII. to
Elizabeth of York on the occasion of their marriage, a large
illumination figures at the head of one of the pages, which, in
chronological perspective, is almost a history of his imprisonment. It
gives a view of London with all its spires, the river passing through
the old bridge and busy with boats. One side of the white Tower has been
taken out, and we can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved room
where the duke sits writing. He occupies a high-backed bench in front of
a great chimney; red and black ink are before him; and the upper end of
the apartment is guarded by many halberdiers, with the red cross of
England on their breast. On the next side of the tower he appears again,
leaning out of window and gazing on the river; doubtless there blows
just then "a pleasant wind from out the land of France," and some ship
comes up the river: "the ship of good news." At the door we find him yet
again; this time embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding
two saddled horses. And yet farther to the left, a cavalcade defiles out
of the tower; the duke is on his way at last towards "the sunshine of
France."
III
During the five-and-twenty years of his captivity Charles had not lost
in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen. For so young a man, the head of
so great a house and so numerous a party, to be taken prisoner as he
rode in the vanguard of France, and stereotyped for all men in this
heroic attitude, was to taste untimeously the honours of the grave. Of
him, as of the dead, it would be ungenerous to speak evil; what little
energy he had displayed would be remembered with piety, when all that he
had done amiss was courteously forgotten. As English folk looked for
Arthur; as Danes awaited the coming of Ogier; as Somersetshire peasants
or sergeants of the Old Guard expected the return of Monmouth or
Napoleon; the countrymen of Charles of Orleans looked over the straits
towards his English prison with desire and confidence. Events had so
fallen out while he was rhyming ballades, that he had become the type of
all that was most truly patriotic. The remnants of his old party had
been the chief defenders of the unity of France. His enemies of Burgundy
had been notoriously favourers and furtherers of English domination.
People forgot that his brother still lay by the heels for an unpatriotic
treaty with England, because Charles himself had been taken prisoner
patriotically fighting against it. That Henry V. had left special orders
against his liberation served to increase the wistful pity with which he
was regarded. And when, in defiance of all contemporary virtue, and
against express pledges, the English carried war into their prisoner's
fief, not only France, but all thinking men in Christendom, were roused
to indignation against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim. It
was little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the imagination
of the best of those at home. Charles le Boutteillier, when (as the
story goes) he slew Clarence at Beaugé, was only seeking an exchange for
Charles of Orleans.[40] It was one of Joan of Arc's declared intentions
to deliver the captive duke. If there was no other way, she meant to
cross the seas and bring him home by force. And she professed before her
judges a sure knowledge that Charles of Orleans was beloved of God.[41]
Alas! it was not at all as a deliverer that Charles returned to France.
He was nearly fifty years old. Many changes had been accomplished since,
at twenty-three, he was taken on the field of Agincourt. But of all
these he was profoundly ignorant, or had only heard of them in the
discoloured reports of Philip of Burgundy. He had the ideas of a former
generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a factious
party. With such qualifications he came back eager for the domination,
the pleasures, and the display that befitted his princely birth. A long
disuse of all political activity combined with the flatteries of his new
friends to fill him with an overweening conceit of his own capacity and
influence. If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed quite
natural men should look to him for its redress. Was not King Arthur come
again?
The Duke of Burgundy received him with politic honours. He took his
guest by his foible for pageantry, all the easier as it was a foible of
his own; and Charles walked right out of prison into much the same
atmosphere of trumpeting and bell-ringing as he had left behind when he
went in. Fifteen days after his deliverance he was married to Mary of
Cleves, at St. Omer. The marriage was celebrated with the usual pomp of
the Burgundian court; there were joustings, and illuminations, and
animals that spouted wine; and many nobles dined together, _comme en
brigade_, and were served abundantly with many rich and curious
dishes.[42] It must have reminded Charles not a little of his first
marriage at Compiègne; only then he was two years the junior of his
bride, and this time he was five-and-thirty years her senior. It will be
a fine question which marriage promises more: for a boy of fifteen to
lead off with a lass of seventeen, or a man of fifty to make a match of
it with a child of fifteen. But there was something bitter in both. The
lamentations of Isabella will not have been forgotten. As for Mary, she
took up with one Jaquet de la Lain, a sort of muscular Methody of the
period, with a huge appetite for tournaments, and a habit of confessing
himself the last thing before he went to bed.[43] With such a hero, the
young duchess's amours were most likely innocent; and in all other ways
she was a suitable partner for the duke, and well fitted to enter into
his pleasures.
When the festivities at Saint Omer had come to an end, Charles and his
wife set forth by Ghent and Tournay. The towns gave him offerings of
money as he passed through, to help in the payment of his ransom. From
all sides, ladies and gentlemen thronged to offer him their services;
some gave him their sons for pages, some archers for a bodyguard; and by
the time he reached Tournay, he had a following of 300 horse. Everywhere
he was received as though he had been the king of France.[44] If he did
not come to imagine himself something of the sort, he certainly forgot
the existence of any one with a better claim to the title. He conducted
himself on the hypothesis that Charles VII. was another Charles VI. He
signed with enthusiasm that treaty of Arras, which left France almost at
the discretion of Burgundy. On December 18 he was still no further than
Bruges, where he entered into a private treaty with Philip; and it was
not until January 14, ten weeks after he disembarked in France, and
attended by a ruck of Burgundian gentlemen, that he arrived in Paris and
offered to present himself before Charles VII. The King sent word that
he might come, if he would, with a small retinue, but not with his
present following; and the duke, who was mightily on his high horse
after all the ovations he had received, took the King's attitude amiss,
and turned aside into Touraine, to receive more welcome and more
presents, and be convoyed by torchlight into faithful cities.
And so you see here was King Arthur home again, and matters nowise
mended in consequence. The best we can say is, that this last stage of
Charles's public life was of no long duration. His confidence was soon
knocked out of him in the contact with others. He began to find he was
an earthen vessel among many vessels of brass; he began to be shrewdly
aware that he was no King Arthur. In 1442, at Limoges, he made himself
the spokesman of the malcontent nobility. The King showed himself
humiliatingly indifferent to his counsels, and humiliatingly generous
towards his necessities. And there, with some blushes, he may be said to
have taken farewell of the political stage. A feeble attempt on the
county of Asti is scarce worth the name of exception. Thenceforward let
Ambition wile whom she may into the turmoil of events, our duke will
walk cannily in his well-ordered garden, or sit by the fire to touch the
slender reed.[45]
IV
If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever he pleased
in time or space, with all the ages and all the countries of the world
to choose from, there would be quite an instructive diversity of taste.
A certain sedentary majority would prefer to remain where they were.
Many would choose the Renaissance; many some stately and simple period
of Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years wandering
among the villages of Palestine with an inspired conductor. For some of
our quaintly vicious contemporaries, we have the decline of the Roman
Empire and the reign of Henry III. of France. But there are others not
quite so vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect
gravity, who have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and
have more taste for what is comfortable than for what is magnanimous and
high; and I can imagine some of these casting their lot in the court of
Blois during the last twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans.
The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and the
high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois on a visit,
formed a society for killing time and perfecting each other in various
elegant accomplishments, such as we might imagine for an ideal
watering-place in the Delectable Mountains. The company hunted and went
on pleasure-parties; they played chess, tables, and many other games.
What we now call the history of the period passed, I imagine, over the
heads of these good people much as it passes over our own. News reached
them, indeed, of great and joyful import. William Peel received eight
livres and five sous from the duchess when he brought the first tidings
that Rouen was recaptured from the English.[46] A little later and the
duke sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne and
Normandy.[47] They were liberal of rhymes and largesse, and welcomed the
prosperity of their country much as they welcomed the coming of spring,
and with no more thought of collaborating towards the event. Religion
was not forgotten in the court of Blois. Pilgrimages were agreeable and
picturesque excursions. In those days a well-served chapel was something
like a good vinery in our own,--an opportunity for display and the
source of mild enjoyments. There was probably something of his rooted
delight in pageantry, as well as a good deal of gentle piety, in the
feelings with which Charles gave dinner every Friday to thirteen poor
people, served them himself, and washed their feet with his own
hands.[48] Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his courtiers from
their trivial side. The duke perhaps cared less for the deliverance of
Guyenne and Normandy than for his own verses on the occasion; just as
Dr. Russell's correspondence in _The Times_ was among the most material
parts of the Crimean War for that talented correspondent. And I think it
scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as patriotism was
principally cultivated as a means of filling up the day.
It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the
destiny of nations who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any
man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and
something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson
like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay.
They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It
might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it might be
three high English minstrels; or the two men, players of ghitterns, from
the kingdom of Scotland, who sang the destruction of the Turks; or again
Jehan Rognelet, player of instruments of music, who played and danced
with his wife and two children; they would each be called into the
castle to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke.[49]
Sometimes the performance was of a more personal interest, and produced
much the same sensations as are felt on an English green on the arrival
of a professional cricketer, or round an English billiard-table during a
match between Roberts and Cook. This was when Jehan Nègre, the Lombard,
came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won
much money from my lord and his intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of
Chalons made ballades before all these ballade-makers.[50]
It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of
ballades and rondels. To write verses for May-day seems to have been as
much a matter of course as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to
gather hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and
the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as
in a literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our friend
Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the
funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of
nouns or the moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in
similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating
episodes. If Frédet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to
upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Frédet would excuse himself.
Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the
same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of
the poetasters were heavy enough; others were not wanting in address;
and the duchess herself was among those who most excelled. On one
occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge"
(Je meurs de soif emprès de la fontaine).
These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention
rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in
itself. It purports to be the work of François Villon; and so far as a
foreigner can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be
his. Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the
great _tabula rasa_, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the
biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon
a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons,
found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell
nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would
not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as
would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of
kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of
the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy
with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter
from Villon's dungeon at Méun; yet each in his own degree had been tried
in prison. Each in his own way also loved the good things of this life
and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf that separated Burns
from his Edinburgh patrons would separate the singer of Bohemia from the
rhyming duke. And it is hard to imagine that Villon's training amongst
thieves, loose women, and vagabond students had fitted him to move in a
society of any dignity and courtliness. Ballades are very admirable
things; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting visitor. But among
the courtiers of Charles there would be considerable regard for the
proprieties of etiquette; and even a duke will sometimes have an eye to
his teaspoons. Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have
disappointed expectation. It need surprise nobody if Villon's ballade on
the theme,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge,"
was but a poor performance. He would make better verses on the lee-side
of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin, than in a cushioned settle
in the halls of Blois.
Charles liked change of place. He was often not so much travelling as
making a progress; now to join the King for some great tournament; now
to visit King René, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw
all manner of interesting things--Oriental curios, King René painting
birds, and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester,
whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange.[51] Sometimes the journeys
were set about on horseback in a large party, with the _fourriers_ sent
forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage. We find almost
Gargantuan details of the provision made by these officers against the
duke's arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and
chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red.[52]
Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a
friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before
the wind.[53] Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the
Crinan Canal; and when Charles threw in money they would dive and bring
it up.[54] As he looked on their exploits, I wonder whether that room of
gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the device of
little children in the river, and the sky full of birds?
He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angoulême
in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when
Bedford put it up for sale in London.[55] The duchess had a library of
her own; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in attendance
on the blue-stocking Margaret of Scotland.[56] Not only were books
collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois. The widow
of one Jean Fougère, a book-binder, seems to have done a number of odd
commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three
vellum skins to bind the duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed
to prepare parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was
who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles's own
poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan,
with the text in one column, and Astesan's Latin version in the
other.[57]
Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of
many others. We find in Charles's verse much semi-ironical regret for
other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been
"nourished in the schools of love" now sees nothing either to please or
displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means
to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life. He
had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant
little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone
with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his animal strength
has so much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of
the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life,
he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from
grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
talking, and singing.[58]
While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of
which he was the outcome and ornament, was growing old along with him.
The semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the
past; and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king
reigned in France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI.
had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were
inconceivable, to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able
enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous
spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable
phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend
René's in Provence, would soon be made impossible: interference was the
order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what
was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily
in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South
Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the
islanders will not be much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of
Orleans at the policy of the Eleventh Louis. There was one thing, I seem
to apprehend, that had always particularly moved him; and that was, any
proposal to punish a person of his acquaintance. No matter what treason
he may have made or meddled with, an Alençon or an Armagnac was sure to
find Charles reappear from private life and do his best to get him
pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels with them. They
were charming people in every way. There must certainly be some mistake.
Had not he himself made anti-national treaties almost before he was out
of his nonage? And for the matter of that, had not every one else done
the like? Such are some of the thoughts by which he might explain to
himself his aversion to such extremities; but it was on a deeper basis
that the feeling probably reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to
be impressed at the thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of
those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those
who had everything to make life valuable were deprived of life itself
And it was shocking to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should
be hurried before their Judge without a fitting interval for penitence
and satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor,
purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with "the
universal spider," Louis XI. He took up the defence of the Duke of
Brittany at Tours. But Louis was then in no humour to hear Charles's
texts and Latin sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of
France was at stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his
path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of
Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was
monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke
never recovered the indignity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened,
and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of
his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious
rondels to the end of time.
V
The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece throughout. He
never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure, and at the
cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical
to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking-horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
following years he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alençon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alençon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; "yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year,
and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of
Louis XI. if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political
deliberation.
This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and
narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of
the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he
failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we
might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in
his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors
whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has
perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the
fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special
vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises,
and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something
in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they
are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put
it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles
literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved
bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating
truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to
challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against
himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from
intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less
autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald and
uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had
been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart.
And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again we learn that Charles
of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole
gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of
passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the
matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were
indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had never
seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any one of
these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was
she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction? The old English translator mentions grey eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_,
while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the
world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man
going to order dinner.
Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a
prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and
how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all
pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have
come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.
Théodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now
nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in
his happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans.
I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
duke, not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because
they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse--and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade--he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of
thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed
natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to
Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself.
But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is
illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has
been retained of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a
well-played bass; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and
restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the
imitation. But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of
other days, when it seems as if men walked by twilight, seeing little,
and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and
spectral fluid circulated in their veins. They might gird themselves for
battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within, and those
processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we
feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make
it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or
took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in
their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a
sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been
strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably
trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal
des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much of our
florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so
different; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring
editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and
nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not
wonderful if we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to
authors who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation.
Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to find a small
man without the buskin, and obvious sentiments stated without
affectation. If the sentiments are obvious, there is all the more chance
we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may
find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys
and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there
is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt,
and sing themselves to music of their own.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles d'Orlèans," p. 348.
[15] D'Héricault's admirable "Memoir," prefixed to his edition of
Charles's works, vol. i. p. xi.
[16] Vallet de Viriville, "Charles VII. et son Époque," ii. 428,
note 2.
[17] _See_ Lecoy de la Marche, "Le Roi René," i. 167.
[18] Vallet, "Charles VII.," ii. 85, 86, note 2.
[19] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 193-198.
[20] Champollion-Figeac, p. 209.
[21] The student will see that there are facts cited, and expressions
borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period extending over almost the
whole of Charles's life, instead of being confined entirely to his
boyhood. As I do not believe there was any change, so I do not
believe there is any anachronism involved.
[22] "The Debate between the Heralds of France and England,"
translated and admirably edited by Mr. Henry Pyne. For the
attribution of this tract to Charles, the reader is referred to Mr.
Pyne's conclusive argument.
[23] Des Ursins.
[24] Michelet, iv. App. 179, p. 337.
[25] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 279-82.
[26] Michelet, iv. pp. 123-24.
[27] "Debate between the Heralds."
[28] Sir H. Nicholas, "Agincourt."
[29] "Debate between the Heralds."
[30] Works (ed. d'Héricault), i. 43.
[31] _Ibid._ i. 143.
[32] _Ibid._ i. 190.
[33] _Ibid._ i. 144.
[34] Works (ed. d'Héricault), i. 158.
[35] M. Champollion-Figeac gives many in his editions of Charles's
works, most (as I should think) of very doubtful authenticity, or
worse.
[36] Rymer, x. 564; D'Héricault's "Memoir," p. xli.; Gairdner's
"Paston Letters," i. 27, 99.
[37] Champollion-Figeac, p. 377.
[38] Dom Plancher, iv. 178-9.
[39] Works, i. 157-63.
[40] Vallet's "Charles VII.," i. 251.
[41] "Procès de Jeanne d'Arc," i. 133-55.
[42] Monstrelet.
[43] Vallet's "Charles VII.," iii. chap. i. But see the chronicle that
bears Jaquet's name; a lean and dreary book.
[44] Monstrelet.
[45] D'Héricault's "Memoir," xl. xli.; Vallet, "Charles VII.," ii. 435.
[46] Champollion-Figeac, p. 368.
[47] Works, i. 115.
[48] D'Héricault's "Memoir," xlv.
[49] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 361, 381.
[50] _Ibid._, pp. 359, 361.
[51] Lecoy de la Marche, "Roi René," ii. 155, 177.
[52] Champollion-Figeac, chaps, v. and vi.
[53] _Ibid._, p. 364; Works, i. 172.
[54] Champollion-Figeac, p. 364: "Jeter de l'argent aux petis enfans
qui estoient au long de Bourbon, pour les faire nonner en l'eau et
aller querre l'argent au fond."
[55] Champollion-Figeac, p. 387.
[56] "Nouvelle Biographie Didot," art. "Marie de Clèves"; Vallet,
"Charles VII.," iii. 85, note 1.
[57] Champollion-Figeac, pp. 383-386.
[58] Works, ii. 57, 258.
VIII
SAMUEL PEPYS
In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and
position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new
transcription of the Diary, increasing it in bulk by near a third,
correcting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the man in some
curious and important points. We can only regret that he has taken
liberties with the author and the public. It is no part of the duties of
the editor of an established classic to decide what may or may not be
"tedious to the reader." The book is either an historical document or
not, and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As
for the time-honoured phrase, "unfit for publication," without being
cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or less
commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we
purchase six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled
to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children.
But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we complain, we are still
grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together,
clearly and with no lost words, a body of illustrative material.[59]
Sometimes we might ask a little more; never, I think, less. And as a
matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's volume might be
transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to the margin of the text, for
it is precisely what the reader wants.
In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our
author. Between them they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may
be, many years. Now, if ever, we should be able to form some notion of
that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind--unparalleled for
three good reasons: first, because he was a man known to his
contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote
descendants with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade;
second, because he has outstripped all competitors in the art or virtue
of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, third, because, being in many
ways a very ordinary person, he has yet placed himself before the public
eye with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be
envied by a genius like Montaigne. Not then for his own sake only, but
as a character in a unique position, endowed with a unique talent, and
shedding a unique light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he is
surely worthy of prolonged and patient study.
THE DIARY
That there should be such a book as Pepys's Diary is incomparably
strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public
employments, toiling hard and keeping his honour bright. Much of the
little good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to
Pepys; and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate.
To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of
England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this
dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood
well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and
respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was
President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of
his conduct in that solemn hour--thinking it needless to say more--that
it was answerable to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in
dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks,
subalterns bowing before his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts
they were suitable to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we
find him writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the late
Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the repulse of
the Great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder at the backwardness of my
thanks for the present you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect
of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it, when I have told
you that the sight of it hath led me to such reflections on my
particular interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to that
miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to
have who found his face in Michael Angelo's hell. The same should serve
me also in excuse for my silence in celebrating your mastery shown in
the design and draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge
me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture of our House of
Lords changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's
designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper of that
age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative than, I
fear, he doth in ours his judgments."
This is a letter honourable to the writer, where the meaning rather than
the words is eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his
contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language:
giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to
the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter,
blaming the "madness of the House of Commons" and "the base proceedings,
just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House
of Lords"; and then, without the least transition, this is how our
diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there bought
an idle, rogueish French book, 'L'escholle des Filles,' which I have
bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound,
because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may
not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it
should be found." Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more
clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but
what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the
shame in the pages of his daily journal?
We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and
acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another,
as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to
Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in
this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with
his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to
march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
the "disgrace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
the tell-tale document; and then--you disbelieve your eyes--down goes
the whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It
seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a
private book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of
some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's
thought the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to
edify; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often
follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are
of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in
Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of
which he alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal
nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief
and often engage the sympathies.
Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the
spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
twelve. In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house
sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his
old walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I
had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company,
discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes
about weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich under water,
and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in,
in Captain Holland's time"; and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now
changed into the _Charles_, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to
myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that
he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive
such gratitude for their assistance, that for years, and after he had
begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that
family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor
Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times
they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them
this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the
"Confessions," or Hazlitt, who wrote the "Liber Amoris," and loaded his
essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied
egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is
the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing.
But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was--if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise
myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them
now, and not be moved one tittle--which shows that I have comparatively
failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we
can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when
he explains that his candle is going out, "which makes me write thus
slobberingly"; or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study,
where I only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this *, and so
out again"; or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance: "I staid up
till the bellman came by with his bell under my window, as _I was
writing of this very line_, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a
cold, frosty, windy morning.'" Such passages are not to be
misunderstood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable.
He desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman keenly to realise his
predecessor; to remember why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall
(let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the
early, windy morning, and the very line his own romantic self was
scribing at the moment. The man, you will perceive, was making
reminiscences--a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in
distress, and turns some others into sentimental libertines: and the
whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work
of art to Pepys's own address.
Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
throughout his Diary, to that unflinching--I had almost said, that
unintelligent--sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He
was not unconscious of his errors--far from it; he was often startled
into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But
whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still
that entrancing _ego_ of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of
his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and
the writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said,
or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of
his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or
than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his
Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or
deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will
neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act
mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his
adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part
of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write
such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
account of our daily fortunes and behaviour, we too often weave a tissue
of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
clearly and set down unsparingly.
It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he
must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that someone might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an
ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
the gun-cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let
some contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged for
ever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his
terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth,
he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy;
but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his
tongue out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one
so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts
I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not
acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of
capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second--that he
took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish"
passages--proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other
reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the
"greatness of his behaviour" at the approach of death, he may have had a
twinkling hope of immortality. _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his
chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and
foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind
him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable
of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness
of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also;
and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity
with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this
thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor
his deepest; it did not colour one word that he wrote; and the Diary,
for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private
pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all
his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn
words, when he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself
to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the
grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being
blind, the good God prepare me."
A LIBERAL GENIUS
Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own
to be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the
Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his
portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition,
is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping
him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was
preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the
essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the
Diary by the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the
number of those who can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have
a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet
apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and
altogether a most fleshy, melting countenance. The face is attractive by
its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word _greedy_, but the
reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred
one of _hungry_, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better
things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face
of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_--kindly, pleased and
pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the
shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly
to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may
balance and control another.
The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida.
Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation;
whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An
insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets
of knowledge filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported
him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never
happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in
Holland he was "with child" to see any strange thing. Meeting some
friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails
him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven
of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous
executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced
"with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of
it." He learned to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to
sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which is
now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the
flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his
intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned
to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music
not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a
bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an
angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back
with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the
Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing
when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin
grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of
Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before
it had received the name. Boyle's "Hydrostatics" was "of infinite
delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible
concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and
Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the
measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing
cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships
from a model; and "looking and informing himself of the (naval) stores
with"--hark to the fellow!--"great delight." His familiar spirit of
delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him
through life! He is only copying something, and behold, he "takes great
pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote with red
ink"; he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold,
"it do please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he
loves." He cannot ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must
exclaim, with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is
bound for a supper-party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he
has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear
carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times."
To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other
birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here
laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the
nightingales, I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again
"with great pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to
Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled
tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty
moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the
time by playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in
the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest
women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile
the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets
of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to
be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures,
etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage.
He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy
story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved
to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought
himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how
to eat alone"; pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and
ear must be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He
had no zest in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street
and in a periwig-maker's house"; and a collation was spoiled for him by
indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's
service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he
mentions that he went to bed "weary, _which I seldom am_"; and already
over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it
is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career,
as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so
wholly, and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is
just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his
right to fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a
solecism in his wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was
always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily"
after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his
remedy in care was the same as his delight in prosperity: it was with
pleasure, and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow;
and, whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he
would equally take refuge in a theatre. There, if the house be full and
the company noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the
play diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private
self-adorer, will speedily be healed of his distresses.
Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the
fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the
beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his
fellow-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist.
Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude
of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbours. And
perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to
begin at home. It does not matter what quality a person has: Pepys can
appreciate and love him for it. He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of
Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her
for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, he will walk
miles to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance
spat upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed
that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs.
Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a poor,
religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty,
and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken
with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the
sterling worth of Coventry. He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but
listens with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the
story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a
critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an
evening at Vauxhall with "Killigrew and young Newport--loose company,"
says he, "but worth a man's being in for once, to know the nature of it,
and their manner of talk and lives." And when a rag-boy lights him home,
he examines him about his business and other ways of livelihood for
destitute children. This is almost half-way to the beginning of
philanthropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys
had perhaps been a man famous for good deeds. And it is through this
quality that he rises, at times, superior to his surprising egotism; his
interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is
filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by
sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes;
and it is not untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt
presentment, that he loved his maid Jane because she was in love with
his man Tom.
Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W. Hewer and I
walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most
pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a
shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of
people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did
with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty
pretty; and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and
talked with him. He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's
reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old
patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of
the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after. We took
notice of his woolen knit stockings of two colours mixed, and of his
shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in
the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of
them, 'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes, you see, are full of
stones, and we are faine to shoe ourselves thus; and these,' says he,
'will make the stones fly till they ring before me.' I did give the poor
man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast
stones with his horne crooke. He values his dog mightily, that would
turn a sheep any way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them;
told me there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he
hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them; and Mrs.
Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the prettiest
nosegays that ever I saw in my life."
And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring; with
cups of milk, and glowworms, and people walking at sundown with their
wives and children, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming "of the
old age of the world" and the early innocence of man. This was how he
walked through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you will
observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the
manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a
lingering glamour of romance.
It was "two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the
pages of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some
reflection. It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank
at the bottom of the scale of merit. But a style which is indefatigably
lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday
experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is
rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars,
and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the
narrative,--such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it
may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The
first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed
throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly
awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his
unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily
after all these years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to
return to that half-whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not
one of degree; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true
prose of poetry--prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and
earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a
passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's
mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the
thing fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you
would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's,
or a favoured reminiscence of your own.
There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The
tang was in the family; while he was writing the journal for our
enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his
cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the
country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments,
and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is
not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to
understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage
may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He
certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be" by
heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it
to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear
to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the
heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave
Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his
sublime theorbo. "To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler"--"Beauty
retire, thou dost my pity move"--"It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O
Rome";--open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid, spirit that
selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on Swans," I know no more
than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well. It was,
however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr.
Berkenshaw--as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young
ladies' seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil. The
amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world
still clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the
man who taught him composition. In relation to the stage, which he so
warmly loved and understood, he was not only more hearty but more
generous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a man," says
he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for
it." And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid
piece, "Glad we were," he writes, "that Betterton had no part in it." It
is by such a zeal and loyalty to those who labour for his delight that
the amateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind
that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognise his
betters. There was not one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted
egotist.
RESPECTABILITY
When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded
meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay
pipes and beer-cellars; and their performances are thought to hail from
the _Owl's Nest_ of the comedy. They have something more, however, in
their eye than the dulness of a round million dinner-parties that sit
down yearly in Old England. For to do anything because others do it, and
not because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is
to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go
post-haste to the devil with the greater number. We smile over the
ascendancy of priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they
call the leaders of society. No life can better than that of Pepys
illustrate the dangers of this respectable theory of living. For what
can be more untoward than the occurrence, at a critical period, and
while the habits are still pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as
the return of Charles the Second? Round went the whole fleet of England
on the other tack; and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still
sailed a lonely course by the stars and their own private compass, the
cock-boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among "the stupid
starers and the loud huzzas."
The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a
positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the
more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves
him, by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was
quite strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
positive qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct; and
in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the
footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he
lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more
keenly than a meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was
found out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by
the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he
could rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you
said. All that matter in religion which has been nicknamed
other-worldliness was strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that
should make a man rudely virtuous, following right in good report and
ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling-block to Pepys. He was much
thrown across the Friends; and nothing can be more instructive than his
attitude towards these most interesting people of that age. I have
mentioned how he conversed with one as he rode; when he saw some brought
from a meeting under arrest, "I would to God," said he, "they would
either conform, or be more wise and not be catched"; and to a Quaker in
his own office he extended a timid though effectual protection.
Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him that beautiful nature,
William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop; odd, though
natural enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of
him with his wife. But the cream of the story is when Pen publishes his
"Sandy Foundation Shaken," and Pepys has it read aloud by his wife. "I
find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it is too good for him
ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of book, and _not fit for
everybody to read_." Nothing is more galling to the merely respectable
than to be brought in contact with religious ardour. Pepys had his own
foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from practical considerations,
and he would read the book with true uneasiness of spirit; for conceive
the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert him! It
was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profitable for himself
and others. "A good sermon of Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye
first the kingdom of heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good and
moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer
moral way of being rich than sin and villainy." It is thus that
respectable people desire to have their Greathearts address them,
telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and
be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection;
and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of
worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the successful merchant.
The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth
except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but
appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has
seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought
liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously
ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have
been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely
suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous
periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, not
foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age.
For long he durst not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would
have been improper; but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune,
when the impropriety has shifted to the other side, and he is "ashamed
to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being "a Quaker or some
very melancholy thing"; for my part, I can imagine nothing so
melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be concerned about
such problems. But such respectability and the duties of society haunt
and burden their poor devotees; and what seems at first the very
primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And
the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respectable, when he must
not only order his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to
the public pattern of the age. There was some juggling among officials
to avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing
ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with £1000; but
finding none to set him an example, "nobody of our ablest merchants"
with this moderate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent"; he
feared it would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather than appear
singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One able merchant's countenance,
and Pepys had dared to do an honest act! Had he found one brave spirit,
properly recognised by society, he might have gone far as a disciple.
Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make
him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison
pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry
can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with
Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for
office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he, "to
buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And
again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful
country shall have dismissed them from the field of public service;
Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in, "it may
be, to read a chapter of Seneca."
Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued
zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be
"bribed to be unjust," he says, though he was "not so squeamish as to
refuse a present after," suppose the King to have received no wrong. His
new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he tells us with honest
complacency, will save the King a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred
pounds a year--a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age's
enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too
high. It was an unending struggle for the man to stick to his business
in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his
oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of
admiration that the contempt it has received.
Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's influence, we find him
losing scruples and daily complying further with the age. When he began
the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be
sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his
acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season
with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things
that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where
there was "tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he
felt "ashamed, and went away"; and when he slept in church he prayed God
forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an
obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
looking about him, with a perspective-glass, on all the pretty women.
His favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed
in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63;
after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with
here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal.
He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's
mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668.
That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
a powder-magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
not the constant lover, of his wife,--for a man, besides, who was so
greatly careful of appearances,--the revelation of his infidelities was
a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he
endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly
incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent,
threatening him with the tongs; she was careless of his honour, driving
him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to
discard; worst of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent in word and
thought and deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming
forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well;
he had wearied her with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he
had grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon
himself; he had abused her in words; he had bent his fist at her in
anger; he had once blacked her eye; and it is one of the oddest
particulars in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred
to once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of
the blow. But now, when he is in the wrong, nothing can exceed the
long-suffering affection of this impatient husband. While he was still
sinning and still undiscovered, he seems not to have known a touch of
penitence stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the
theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress by way of
compensation. Once found out, however, and he seems to himself to have
lost all claim to decent usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of
his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may
groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left
but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have
respected him more had he not given way so utterly--above all, had he
refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his
unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe we like him
better as he was.
The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the
impression of this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his
long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how
little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his correspondence; but
what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what
with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputation, it
seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys;
and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honoured and
agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir
Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least, the poetical counsellor of
Dryden. Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret
memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had
been religiously preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to
have provided for its destruction. So we may conceive him faithful to
the end to all his dear and early memories; still mindful of Mrs. Hely
in the woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness
to the dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much
disturbed him, thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him
to his wife.
FOOTNOTE:
[59] H. R. Wheatley, "Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in." 1880.
IX
JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN
THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT FEMALE RULE
When first the idea became widely spread among men that the Word of God,
instead of being truly the foundation of all existing institutions, was
rather a stone which the builders had rejected, it was but natural that
the consequent havoc among received opinions should be accompanied by
the generation of many new and lively hopes for the future. Somewhat as
in the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an
immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up
to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was
now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body
politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to
put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to
realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities
would surely pass away. Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year
1523, the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his wits for
help, to whom his doctor recommends Lutheran specifics.[60]
The Reformers themselves had set their affections in a different world,
and professed to look for the finished result of their endeavours on the
other side of death. They took no interest in politics as such; they
even condemned political action as Antichristian: notably, Luther in the
case of the Peasants' War. And yet, as the purely religious question
was inseparably complicated with political difficulties, and they had to
make opposition, from day to day, against principalities and powers,
they were led, one after another, and again and again, to leave the
sphere which was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil,
with the affairs of State. Not much was to be expected from interference
in such a spirit. Whenever a minister found himself galled or hindered,
he would be inclined to suppose some contravention of the Bible.
Whenever Christian liberty was restrained (and Christian liberty for
each individual would be about co-extensive with what he wished to do),
it was obvious that the State was Antichristian. The great thing, and
the one thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformer's own
interpretation of it. Whatever helped was good; whatever hindered was
evil; and if this simple classification proved inapplicable over the
whole field, it was no business of his to stop and reconcile
incongruities. He had more pressing concerns on hand; he had to save
souls; he had to be about his Father's business. This short-sighted view
resulted in a doctrine that was actually Jesuitical in application. They
had no serious ideas upon politics, and they were ready, nay, they
seemed almost bound, to adopt and support whichever ensured for the
moment the greatest benefit to the souls of their fellow-men. They were
dishonest in all sincerity. Thus Labitte, in the introduction to a
book[61] in which he exposes the hypocritical democracy of the Catholics
under the League, steps aside for a moment to stigmatise the
hypocritical democracy of the Protestants. And nowhere was this
expediency in political questions more apparent than about the question
of female sovereignty. So much was this the case that one James
Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little paper[62] about the religious
partialities of those who took part in the controversy, in which some
of these learned disputants cut a very sorry figure.
Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated; and it is somewhat
characteristic of his luck that he figures here in the very forefront of
the list of partial scribes who trimmed their doctrine with the wind in
all good conscience, and were political weathercocks out of conviction.
Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his
article on the Scottish Reformer. This is a little less than fair. If
any one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious
political sense than another, it was assuredly Knox; and even in this
very matter of female rule, although I do not suppose anyone nowadays
will feel inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great
allowance for his conduct. The controversy, besides, has an interest of
its own, in view of later controversies.
John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his
congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The
coincidence was tempting; here were many abuses centring about one
abuse; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one
anomalous power. He had not far to go to find the idea that female
government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable
and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European
history; and yet their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here
and there a wise man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the
great bulk of their contemporaries. It was defended as an anomaly. It,
and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single
exception; and no one thought of reasoning down from queens and
extending their privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know,
had the privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise
forbidden to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus,
Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one,
seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de
Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the
world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity.
Thus, too, we have Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné writing to his daughters
about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in
conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
middling station, and should be reserved for princesses.[63] And once
more, if we desire to see the same principle carried to ludicrous
extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God, the Abbot of
Brantôme, claiming, on the authority of some lord of his acquaintance, a
privilege, or rather a duty, of free love for great princesses, and
carefully excluding other ladies from the same gallant dispensation.[64]
One sees the spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and kings that
made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder, how Catherine de
Medici would "laugh her fill just like another" over the humours of
pantaloons and zanies. And such servility was, of all things, what would
touch most nearly the republican spirit of Knox. It was not difficult
for him to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of his
analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable light; but he had
the virtue, at least, to carry it into many places of fictitious
holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity that hedged kings
and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could put the proposition
in the form already mentioned: there was Christ's Gospel persecuted in
the two kingdoms by one anomalous power; plainly, then, the "regiment of
women" was Antichristian. Early in 1558 he communicated this discovery
to the world, by publishing at Geneva his notorious book--"The First
Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women."[65]
As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is usual with
Knox, is both interesting and morally fine. Knox was not one of those
who are humble in the hour of triumph; he was aggressive even when
things were at their worst. He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather
in his mission; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at
least sure that he was one set apart to do great things. And he judged
simply that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from
persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish
and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not
fail to be of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world. There may be
something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that tends more
and more to withdraw a man's personality from the lessons he inculcates
or the cause that he has espoused; but there is a loss herewith of
wholesome responsibility; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in
the Epistles of Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting
and anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in pledge
for the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of
delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not
unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light,
otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were
initiated and carried forward. Knox's personal revelations are always
interesting; and, in the case of the "First Blast," as I have said,
there is no exception to the rule. He begins by stating the solemn
responsibility of all who are watchmen over God's flock; and all are
watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that
characterises him even when, as here, he shows himself most narrow), all
are watchmen "whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he
pricketh to admonish the ungodly." And with the full consciousness of
this great duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of
timorous or worldly-minded people. How can a man repent, he asks, unless
the nature of his transgression is made plain to him? "And therefore I
say," he continues, "that of necessity it is that this monstriferous
empire of women (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon
the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly
and plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and
be saved." To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be
expected to amend those princes whom it would dispossess if once
accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest.
After having instanced how the rumour of Christ's censures found its way
to Herod in his own court, "even so," he continues, "may the sound of
our weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south,
or blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the
chief offenders. _But whether it do or not, yet dare we not cease to
blow as God will give strength. For we are debtors to more than to
princes, to wit, to the great multitude of our brethren_, of whom, no
doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and ignorance."
It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly hope that
his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will
submissively discrown themselves at his appeal; what he does hope, in
plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion; and we shall see,
before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly
as I can put it for him. This he sees to be a matter of much hazard; he
is not "altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his
account what the finishing of the work may cost." He knows that he will
find many adversaries, since "to the most part of men, lawful and godly
appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received." He looks for opposition,
"not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and
quiet spirits of the earth." He will be called foolish, curious,
despiteful, and a sower of sedition; and one day, perhaps, for all he is
now nameless, he may be attainted of treason. Yet he has "determined to
obey God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat." Finally,
he makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first
instalment: it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter,
if God so permit; twice he intends to do it without name; but at the
last blast to take the odium upon himself, that all others may be
purged.
Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a secondary
title: "The First Blast to awake Women degenerate." We are in the land
of assertion without delay. That a woman should bear rule, superiority,
dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is
repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.
Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish. God has denied to
woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable
to a commonwealth. Women have been very lightly esteemed; they have been
denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable
sway of their husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme
over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own
fireside. He appeals to the Bible; but though he makes much of the first
transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul's Epistles,
he does not appeal with entire success. The cases of Deborah and Huldah
can be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis. Indeed, I may
say that, logically, he left his bones there; and that it is but the
phantom of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end. Well
was it for Knox that he succeeded no better; it is under this very
ambiguity about Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter
before he is done with the regiment of women. After having thus
exhausted Scripture, and formulated its teaching in the somewhat
blasphemous maxim that the man is placed above the woman, even as God
above the angels, he goes on triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of
Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and
having gathered this little cloud of witnesses about him, like
pursuivants about a herald, he solemnly proclaims all reigning women to
be traitoresses and rebels against God; discharges all men thenceforward
from holding any office under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon
all the lieges with one consent to _"study to repress the inordinate
pride and tyranny" of queens_. If this is not treasonable teaching, one
would be glad to know what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not made
the case plain enough against himself, he goes on to deduce the
startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance must be incontinently
broken. If it was sin thus to have sworn even in ignorance, it were
obstinate sin to continue to respect them after fuller knowledge. Then
comes the peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of
that cursed Jezebel of England--that horrible monster Jezebel of
England; and after having predicted sudden destruction to her rule and
to the rule of all crowned women, and warned all men that if they
presume to defend the same when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to
vindicate the liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish
themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish:
"And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE
BLOWN."
The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some
such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want
of passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it
is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic
canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained
metaphor of a hostile proclamation. It is curious, by the way, to note
how favourite an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to
it again and again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to
him what a ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he
had begun the world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is
surely characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before
various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he
appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding
hopefully to the front for some rough enterprise. And as his voice had
something of the trumpet's hardness, it had something also of the
trumpet's warlike inspiration. So Randolph, possibly fresh from the
sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your
honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is
able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets
continually blustering in our ears."[66]
Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the
echoes of Europe. What success might have attended it, had the question
decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say. As it
was, it was to stand or fall not by logic, but by political needs and
sympathies. Thus, in France, his doctrine was to have some future,
because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no future
anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the
prosperity of Queen Elizabeth. This stumbling-block lay at the very
threshold of the matter; and Knox, in the text of the "First Blast," had
set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He
finds occasion to regret "the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley." But
Lady Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would-be
traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own expressions. If,
therefore, political and religious sympathy led Knox himself into so
grave a partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples? If the
trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare himself
for the battle? The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an innocent
martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny
had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind;
and it was not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox's readers concluded
that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree of the
sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation. He
should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as he
must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dishonesty of his
fellow-reformers in political matters. He had already, in 1556 or 1557,
talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in "a private
conversation"; and the interview[67] must have been truly distasteful to
both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and
owned that the "government of women was a deviation from the original
and proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among
the punishments consequent upon the fall of man." But, in practice,
their two roads separated. For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties in the
way of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and Huldah, and in
the prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the
Church. And as the Bible was not decisive, he thought the subject should
be let alone, because, "by custom and public consent and long practice,
it has been established that realms and principalities may descend to
females by hereditary right, and it would not be lawful to unsettle
governments which are ordained by the peculiar providence of God." I
imagine Knox's ears must have burned during this interview. Think of him
listening dutifully to all this--how it would not do to meddle with
anointed kings--how there was a peculiar providence in these great
affairs; and then think of his own peroration, and the "noble heart"
whom he looks for "to vindicate the liberty of his country"; or his
answer to Queen Mary, when she asked him who he was, to interfere in the
affairs of Scotland: "Madame, a subject born within the same!" Indeed,
the two doctors who differed at this private conversation represented,
at the moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent
history of Europe. In Calvin we have represented that passive obedience,
that toleration of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the
hand from political affairs as from something unclean, which lost
France, if we are to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation; a spirit
necessarily fatal in the long-run to the existence of any sect that may
profess it; a suicidal doctrine that survives among us to this day in
narrow views of personal duty, and the low political morality of many
virtuous men. In Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshadowed the whole
Puritan Revolution and the scaffold of Charles I.
There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what caused
Knox to print his book without a name.[68] It was a dangerous thing to
contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely, when one had had
the advantage of correction from him in a private conversation; and Knox
had his little flock of English refugees to consider. If they had fallen
into bad odour at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to? It was
printed, as I said, in 1558; and, by a singular _mal-à-propos_, in that
same year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England.
And just as the accession of Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female
rule in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth
justified it in the eyes of his colleagues. Female rule ceases to be an
anomaly, not because Elizabeth can "reply to eight ambassadors in one
day in their different languages," but because she represents for the
moment the political future of the Reformation. The exiles troop back to
England with songs of praise in their mouths. The bright occidental
star, of which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen
over the darkness of Europe. There is a thrill of hope through the
persecuted Churches of the Continent. Calvin writes to Cecil, washing
his hands of Knox and his political heresies. The sale of the "First
Blast" is prohibited in Geneva; and along with it the bold book of
Knox's colleague, Goodman--a book dear to Milton--where female rule was
briefly characterised as a "monster in nature and disorder among
men."[69] Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a moment led away
by Knox or Goodman, or their own wicked imaginations, are now more than
convinced. They have seen the occidental star. Aylmer, with his eye set
greedily on a possible bishopric, and "the better to obtain the favour
of the new Queen,"[70] sharpens his pen to confound Knox by logic. What
need? He has been confounded by facts. "Thus what had been to the
refugees of Geneva as the very word of God, no sooner were they back in
England than, behold! it was the word of the devil."[71]
Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal subjects of Elizabeth?
They professed a holy horror for Knox's position: let us see if their
own would please a modern audience any better, or was, in substance,
greatly different.
John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer to Knox,
under the title of "An Harbour for Faithful and true Subjects against
the late Blown Blast concerning the government of Women."[72] And
certainly he was a thought more acute, a thought less precipitate and
simple, than his adversary. He is not to be led away by such captious
terms as _natural_ and _unnatural_. It is obvious to him that a woman's
disability to rule is not natural in the same sense in which it is
natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn. He is doubtful, on the
whole, whether this disability be natural at all; nay, when he is laying
it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some elementary
conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
"The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that they cannot
have the necessary qualifications, "for they are not brought up in
learning in schools, nor trained in disputation." And even so, he can
ask, "Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and
wisdom could tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any
Sir John there?" For all that, his advocacy is weak. If women's rule is
not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither
so convenient nor so profitable as the government of men. He holds
England to be specially suitable for the government of women, because
there the governor is more limited and restrained by the other members
of the constitution than in other places; and this argument has kept his
book from being altogether forgotten. It is only in hereditary
monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly. "If rulers
were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that any women should
stand in the election, but men only." The law of succession of crowns
was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to
Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in
a spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to
be more wise than He who made them.[73] If God has put a female child
into the direct line of inheritance, it is God's affair. His strength
will be perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the
objectors in this not very flattering vein: "I, that could make Daniel,
a sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast
to reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the
great clerks of the world--cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over
you?" This is the last word of his reasoning. Although he was not
altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says
of the incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of
things than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up
for them this clerical champion. His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox. "Thy knee shall bow," he
says, "thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy
sovereign." For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent. Nothing
can stay the issue of his eloquent adulation. Again and again, "the
remembrance of Elizabeth's virtues" carries him away; and he has to hark
back again to find the scent of his argument. He is repressing his
vehement adoration throughout, until when the end comes, and he feels
his business at an end, he can indulge himself to his heart's content in
indiscriminate laudation of his royal mistress. It is humorous to think
that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many other
excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the "marvellous
meekness of her stomach," threatened him, years after, in no very meek
terms, for a sermon against female vanity in dress, which she held as a
reflection on herself.[74]
Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally, there was no
want of respect for the Queen; and one cannot very greatly wonder if
these devoted servants looked askance, not upon Knox only, but on his
little flock, as they came back to England tainted with disloyal
doctrine. For them, as for him, the occidental star rose somewhat red
and angry. As for poor Knox, his position was the saddest of all. For
the juncture seemed to him of the highest importance; it was the nick of
time, the flood-water of opportunity. Not only was there an opening for
him in Scotland, a smouldering brand of civil liberty and religious
enthusiasm which it should be for him to kindle into flame with his
powerful breath; but he had his eye seemingly on an object of even
higher worth. For now, when religious sympathy ran so high that it could
be set against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion together
of England and Scotland, and to begin it at the sore place. If once the
open wound were closed at the Border, the work would be half done.
Ministers placed at Berwick and such places might seek their converts
equally on either side of the march; old enemies would sit together to
hear the gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many
generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith; or--let us say
better--a common heresy. For people are not most conscious of
brotherhood when they continue languidly together in one creed, but
when, with some doubt, with some danger perhaps, and certainly not
without some reluctance, they violently break with the tradition of the
past, and go forth from the sanctuary of their fathers to worship under
the bare heaven. A new creed, like a new country, is an unhomely place
of sojourn; but it makes men lean on one another and join hands. It was
on this that Knox relied to begin the union of the English and the
Scottish. And he had, perhaps, better means of judging than any even of
his contemporaries. He knew the temper of both nations; and already
during his two years' chaplaincy at Berwick, he had seen his scheme put
to the proof. But whether practicable or not, the proposal does him much
honour. That he should thus have sought to make a love-match of it
between the two peoples, and tried to win their inclination towards a
union instead of simply transferring them, like so many sheep, by a
marriage, or testament, or private treaty, is thoroughly characteristic
of what is best in the man. Nor was this all. He had, besides, to assure
himself of English support, secret or avowed, for the Reformation party
in Scotland; a delicate affair, trenching upon treason. And so he had
plenty to say to Cecil, plenty that he did not care to "commit to paper
neither yet to the knowledge of many." But his miserable publication had
shut the doors of England in his face. Summoned to Edinburgh by the
confederate lords, he waited at Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to
journey through England. The most dispiriting tidings reached him. His
messengers, coming from so obnoxious a quarter, narrowly escape
imprisonment. His old congregation are coldly received, and even begin
to look back again to their place of exile with regret. "My First
Blast," he writes ruefully, "has blown from me all my friends of
England." And then he adds, with a snarl, "The Second Blast, I fear,
shall sound somewhat more sharp, except men be more moderate than I hear
they are."[75] But the threat is empty; there will never be a second
blast--he has had enough of that trumpet. Nay, he begins to feel
uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the rest of his
life, unless he is to lose his right arm and go about his great work
maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace with
England and the indignant Queen. The letter just quoted was written on
the 6th of April, 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his heels
for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether,
and writes a letter of capitulation to Cecil. In this letter,[76] which
he kept back until the 22nd, still hoping that things would come right
of themselves, he censures the great secretary for having "followed the
world in the way of perdition," characterises him as "worthy of hell,"
and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere, and fervent in
the cause of Christ's gospel, that he shall "taste of the same cup that
politic heads have drunken in before him." This is all, I take it, out
of respect for the Reformer's own position; if he is going to be
humiliated, let others be humiliated first; like a child who will not
take his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink of it
before him. "But I have, say you, written a treasonable book against the
regiment and empire of women.... The writing of that book I will not
deny; but prove it treasonable I think it shall be hard.... It is hinted
that my book shall be written against. If so be, sir, I greatly doubt
they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the matter." And here come the
terms of capitulation; for he does not surrender unconditionally, even
in this sore strait: "And yet if any," he goes on, "think me enemy to
the person, or yet to the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted,
they are utterly deceived in me, _for the miraculous work of God,
comforting His afflicted by means of an infirm vessel, I do acknowledge,
and the power of his most potent hand I will obey. More plainly to
speak, if Queen Elizabeth shall confess, that the extraordinary
dispensation of God's great mercy maketh that lawful unto her which both
nature and God's law do deny to all women_, then shall none in England
be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I shall be. But if
(God's wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God forbid) the justness
of her title upon consuetude, laws, or ordinances of men, then"--Then
Knox will denounce her? Not so; he is more politic nowadays--then, he
"greatly fears" that her ingratitude to God will not go long without
punishment.
His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a mere
amplification of the sentences quoted above. She must base her title
entirely upon the extraordinary providence of God; but if she does this,
"if thus, in God's presence, she humbles herself, so will he with tongue
and pen justify her authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the
same in Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel."[77] And so, you see,
his consistency is preserved; he is merely applying the doctrine of the
"First Blast." The argument goes thus: The regiment of women is, as
before noted in our work, repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a
subversion of good order. It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up,
as exceptions to this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth
Tudor--whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate.
There is no evidence as to how the Reformer's explanations were
received, and indeed it is most probable that the letter was never shown
to Elizabeth at all. For it was sent under cover of another to Cecil,
and as it was not of a very courtly conception throughout, and was, of
all things, what would most excite the Queen's uneasy jealousy about her
title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his discretion (he
had Knox's leave in this case, and did not always wait for that, it is
reputed) to put the letter harmlessly away beside other valueless or
unpresentable State Papers. I wonder very much if he did the same with
another,[78] written two years later, after Mary had come into Scotland,
in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an accomplice with him in
the matter of the "First Blast." The Queen of Scotland is going to have
that work refuted, he tells her; and "though it were but foolishness in
him to prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done," he would yet
remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own security,
nor so generously interested in Elizabeth's, "that she would take such
pains, _unless her crafty counsel in so doing shot at a further mark_."
There is something really ingenious in this letter; it showed Knox in
the double capacity of the author of the "First Blast" and the faithful
friend of Elizabeth; and he combines them there so naturally, that one
would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous.
Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate publication to
another queen--his own queen, Mary Stuart. This was on the first of
those three interviews which he has preserved for us with so much
dramatic vigour in the picturesque pages of his History. After he had
avowed the authorship in his usual haughty style, Mary asked: "You
think, then, that I have no just authority?" The question was evaded.
"Please your Majesty," he answered, "that learned men in all ages have
had their judgments free, and most commonly disagreeing from the common
judgment of the world; such also have they published by pen and tongue;
and yet notwithstanding they themselves have lived in the common society
with others, and have borne patiently with the errors and imperfections
which they could not amend." Thus did "Plato the philosopher": thus will
do John Knox. "I have communicated my judgment to the world: if the
realm finds no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which
they approve shall I not further disallow than within my own breast; but
shall be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live
under Nero. And my hope is, that so long as ye defile not your hands
with the blood of the saints of God, neither I nor my book shall hurt
either you or your authority." All this is admirable in wisdom and
moderation, and, except that he might have hit upon a comparison less
offensive than that with Paul and Nero, hardly to be bettered. Having
said thus much, he feels he needs say no more; and so, when he is
further pressed, he closes that part of the discussion with an
astonishing sally. If he has been content to let this matter sleep, he
would recommend her Grace to follow his example with thankfulness of
heart; it is grimly to be understood which of them has most to fear if
the question should be reawakened. So the talk wandered to other
subjects. Only, when the Queen was summoned at last to dinner ("for it
was afternoon") Knox made his salutation in this form of words: "I pray
God, Madam, that you may be as much blessed within the Commonwealth of
Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever Deborah was in the
Commonwealth of Israel."[79] Deborah again.
But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own "First Blast." In
1571, when he was already near his end, the old controversy was taken up
in one of a series of anonymous libels against the Reformer, affixed,
Sunday after Sunday, to the church door. The dilemma was fairly enough
stated. Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a "false
doctor" and seditious; or, if it be true, why does he "avow and approve
the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen of England's person;
which he avoweth and approveth, not only praying for the maintenance of
her estate, but also procuring her aid and support against his own
native country?" Knox answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday,
from the pulpit. He justified the "First Blast" with all the old
arrogance; there is no drawing back there. The regiment of women is
repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order,
as before. When he prays for the maintenance of Elizabeth's estate, he
is only following the example of those prophets of God who warned and
comforted the wicked kings of Israel; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews
pray for the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar. As for the Queen's aid, there
is no harm in that: _quia_ (these are his own words) _quia omnia munda
mundis_: because to the pure all things are pure. One thing, in
conclusion, he "may not pretermit"; to give the lie in the throat to his
accuser, where he charges him with seeking support against his native
country. "What I have been to my country," said the old Reformer, "What
I have been to my country, albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet
the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth. And
thus I cease, requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against
me, that he may (they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself
and all my doings manifest to the world. For to me it seemeth a thing
unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to
fight against shadows, and howlets that dare not abide the light."[80]
Now, in this, which may be called his "Last Blast," there is as sharp
speaking as any in the "First Blast" itself. He is of the same opinion
to the end, you see, although he has been obliged to cloak and garble
that opinion for political ends. He has been tacking indeed, and he has
indeed been seeking the favour of a queen; but what man ever sought a
queen's favour with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little courtly
policy? The question of consistency is delicate, and must be made plain.
Knox never changed his opinion about female rule, but lived to regret
that he had published that opinion. Doubtless he had many thoughts so
far out of the range of public sympathy, that he could only keep them to
himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the errors and
imperfections that he could not amend. For example, I make no doubt
myself that, in his own heart, he did hold the shocking dogma attributed
to him by more than one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe,
had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would
have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of
hereditary--"elective as in the days of paganism," as one Thevet says in
holy horror.[81] And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no hint
of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the regiment of women was
another matter that he should have kept to himself; right or wrong, his
opinion did not fit the moment; right or wrong, as Aylmer puts it, "the
'Blast' was blown out of season." And this it was that he began to
perceive after the accession of Elizabeth: not that he had been wrong,
and that female rule was a good thing, for he had said from the first
that "the felicity of some women in their empires" could not change the
law of God and the nature of created things; not this, but that the
regiment of women was one of those imperfections of society which must
be borne with because yet they cannot be remedied. The thing had seemed
so obvious to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority,
and in his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and
common consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise
and shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself wrong, and he
showed that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the
spirit of true compromise. He came round to Calvin's position, in fact,
but by a different way. And it derogates nothing from the merit of this
wise attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest. We
are all taught by interest; and if the interest be not merely selfish,
there is no wiser preceptor under heaven, and perhaps no sterner.
Such is the history of John Knox's connection with the controversy about
female rule. In itself, this is obviously an incomplete study; not fully
to be understood, without a knowledge of his private relations with the
other sex, and what he thought of their position in domestic life. This
shall be dealt with in another paper.
PRIVATE LIFE
To those who know Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter of this
paper will be somewhat astonishing. For the hard energy of the man in
all public matters has possessed the imagination of the world; he
remains for posterity in certain traditional phrases, browbeating Queen
Mary, or breaking beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that
had long smoked themselves out and were no more than sorry ruins, while
he was still quietly teaching children in a country gentleman's family.
It does not consist with the common acceptation of his character to
fancy him much moved, except with anger. And yet the language of passion
came to his pen as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation
against some of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of
yearning for the society of an absent friend. He was vehement in
affection, as in doctrine. I will not deny that there may have been,
along with his vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only;
that, like many men, and many Scotsmen, he saw the world and his own
heart, not so much under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme
flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not true in the long-run.
There does seem to me to be something of this traceable in the
Reformer's utterances: precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and
action somewhat circumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a
heroic light and to place a ready belief in the disposition of the
moment. Withal he had considerable confidence in himself, and in the
uprightness of his own disciplined emotions, underlying much sincere
aspiration after spiritual humility. And it is this confidence that
makes his intercourse with women so interesting to a modern. It would be
easy, of course, to make fun of the whole affair, to picture him
strutting vaingloriously among these inferior creatures, or compare a
religious friendship in the sixteenth century with what was called, I
think, a literary friendship in the eighteenth. But it is more just and
profitable to recognise what there is sterling and human underneath all
his theoretical affectations of superiority. Women, he has said in his
"First Blast," are "weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish"; and
yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other
men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient,
feeble, and foolish creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather
more dependent than most.
Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more
or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We
should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a
wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate
need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association--not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each
other happy--by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
about them--down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that he
had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and
positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
lives under foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished his life;
and we find him preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women
friends; a man of some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready
to comfort weeping women, and to weep along with them.
Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that
environ written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape
of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that
is not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly
of women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is
really significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a
true man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in
spite of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in
a certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came
to her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts
and minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result
from all changes in the world's way of thinking; and those whom he had
thus helped became dear to him, and were made the chosen companions of
his leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter
if they were afar.
It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in
the communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director,
so that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship
so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference.
The trick of the country and the age steps in even between the mother
and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and
says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter
of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it
is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social
atmosphere in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and
trusted each other. To the man who had been their priest, and was now
their minister, women would be able to speak with a confidence quite
impossible in these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and
the man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should
be no less scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could
come back to earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly
fashions. This, then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many
women friends. The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth,
of interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist
of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry
relationship of penitent and confessor.
It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to
Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age.
At the same time it is just possible that some of a little group at
Edinburgh, with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have
been friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his
female correspondents, the least personally favoured. He treats them
throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have
been a little wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former
letters, "which I trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our
sisters, for to me ye are all equal in Christ."[82] Another letter is a
gem in this way. "Albeit," it begins, "albeit I have no particular
matter to write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance of you.
True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal remembrance before God
with you, to whom at present I write nothing, either for that I esteem
them stronger than you, and therefore they need the less my rude
labours, or else because they have not provoked me by their writing to
recompense their remembrance."[83] His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
evidently to "provoke" his attention pretty constantly; nearly all his
letters are, on the face of them, answers to questions, and the answers
are given with a certain crudity that I do not find repeated when he
writes to those he really cares for. So when they consult him about
women's apparel (a subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctly
imagined by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to
anticipate some of the most offensive matter of the "First Blast" in a
style of real brutality.[84] It is not merely that he tells them "the
garments of women do declare their weakness and inability to execute the
office of man," though that in itself is neither very wise nor very
opportune in such a correspondence, one would think; but if the reader
will take the trouble to wade through the long, tedious sermon for
himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved, nor very
deeply respected, the women he was then addressing. In very truth, I
believe these Edinburgh sisters simply bored him. He had a certain
interest in them as his children in the Lord; they were continually
"provoking him by their writing"; and, if they handed his letters about,
writing to them was as good a form of publication as was then open to
him in Scotland. There is one letter, however, in this budget, addressed
to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil, which is worthy of some further
mention. The Clerk-Register had not opened his heart, it would appear,
to the preaching of the Gospel, and Mrs. Mackgil has written seeking
the Reformer's prayers in his behalf. "Your husband," he answers, "is
dear to me for that he is a man indued with some good gifts, but more
dear for that he is your husband. Charity moveth me to thirst his
illumination, both for his comfort and for the trouble which you sustain
by his coldness, which justly may be called infidelity." He wishes her,
however, not to hope too much; he can promise that his prayers will be
earnest, but not that they will be effectual; it is possible that this
is to be her "cross" in life; that "her head, appointed by God for her
comfort, should be her enemy." And if this be so--well, there is nothing
for it; "with patience she must abide God's merciful deliverance,"
taking heed only that she does not "obey manifest iniquity for the
pleasure of any mortal man."[85] I conceive this epistle would have
given a very modified sort of pleasure to the Clerk-Register, had it
chanced to fall into his hands. Compare its tenor--the dry resignation
not without a hope of merciful deliverance therein recommended--with
these words from another letter, written but the year before to two
married women of London: "Call first for grace by Jesus, and thereafter
communicate with your faithful husbands, and then shall God, I doubt
not, conduct your footsteps, and direct your counsels to His glory."[86]
Here the husbands are put in a very high place; we can recognise here
the same hand that has written for our instruction how the man is set
above the woman, even as God above the angels. But the point of the
distinction is plain. For Clerk-Register Mackgil was not a faithful
husband; displayed, indeed, towards religion, a "coldness which justly
might be called infidelity." We shall see in more notable instances how
much Knox's conception of the duty of wives varies according to the zeal
and orthodoxy of the husband.
As I have said, he may possibly have made the acquaintance of Mrs.
Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these Edinburgh friends
while he was still Douglas of Longniddry's private tutor. But our
certain knowledge begins in 1549. He was then but newly escaped from his
captivity in France, after pulling an oar for nineteen months on the
benches of the galley _Nostre Dame_; now up the rivers, holding stealthy
intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of Rouen; now
out in the North Sea, raising his sick head to catch a glimpse of the
far-off steeples of St. Andrews. And now he was sent down by the English
Privy Council as a preacher to Berwick-upon-Tweed; somewhat shaken in
health by all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by
gravel, that sorrow of great men; altogether, what with his romantic
story, his weak health, and his great faculty of eloquence, a very
natural object for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture
he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard
Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She
was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and
scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom
she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox
preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after
of his society.[87] Nor was Knox unresponsive. "I have always delighted
in your company," he writes, "and when labours would permit, you know I
have not spared hours to talk and commune with you." Often when they had
met in depression he reminds her, "God hath sent great comfort unto
both."[88] We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close
and continuous was their intercourse. "I think it best you remain till
to-morrow," he writes once, "and so shall we commune at large at
afternoon. This day you know to be the day of my study and prayer unto
God; yet if your trouble be intolerable, or if you think my presence may
release your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you.... Your messenger
found me in bed, after a sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so
dolour may complain to dolour when we two meet.... And this is more
plain than ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion in
trouble."[89] Once we have the curtain raised for a moment, and can look
at the two together for the length of a phrase. "After the writing of
this preceding," writes Knox, "your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe,
did advertise me by writing, that your adversary (the devil) took
occasion to trouble you because that _I did start back from you
rehearsing your infirmities. I remember myself so to have done, and that
is my common consuetude when anything pierceth or toucheth my heart.
Call to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick_. In
very deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was; and when
I heard proceed from your mouth the very same words that he troubles me
with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing
in myself the dolour thereof."[90] Now intercourse of so very close a
description, whether it be religious intercourse or not, is apt to
displease and disquiet a husband; and we know incidentally from Knox
himself that there was some little scandal about his intimacy with Mrs.
Bowes. "The slander and fear of men," he writes, "has impeded me to
exercise my pen so oft as I would; _yea, very shame hath holden me from
your company, when I was most surely persuaded that God had appointed me
at that time to comfort and feed your hungry and afflicted soul. God in
His infinite mercy_," he goes on, "_remove not only from me all fear
that tendeth not to godliness, but from others suspicion to judge of me
otherwise than it becometh one member to judge of another_."[91] And the
scandal, such as it was, would not be allayed by the dissension in which
Mrs. Bowes seems to have lived with her family upon the matter of
religion, and the countenance shown by Knox to her resistance. Talking
of these conflicts, and her courage against "her own flesh and most
inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural friends" he
writes it, "to the praise of God, he has wondered at the bold constancy
which he has found in her when his own heart was faint."[92]
Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out of a desire
to bind the much-loved evangelist nearer to her in the only manner
possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme of marrying him to her fifth
daughter, Marjorie; and the Reformer seems to have fallen in with it
readily enough. It seems to have been believed in the family that the
whole matter had been originally made up between these two, with no very
spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride.[93] Knox's idea of
marriage, as I have said, was not the same for all men; but on the
whole, it was not lofty. We have a curious letter of his, written at the
request of Queen Mary, to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household
matters; which, as he tells us, "was not well accepted of the said
Earl."[94] We may suppose, however, that his own home was regulated in a
similar spirit. I can fancy that for such a man, emotional, and with a
need, now and again, to exercise parsimony in emotions not strictly
needful, something a little mechanical, something hard and fast and
clearly understood, would enter into his ideal of a home. There were
storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside
even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So, from a wife, of all women,
he would not ask much. One letter to her which has come down to us is, I
had almost said, conspicuous for coldness.[95] He calls her, as he
called other female correspondents, "dearly beloved sister"; the epistle
is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case,
but upon that of her mother. However, we know what Heine wrote in his
wife's album; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to
intimate some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly
opposite construction. "I think," he says, "I _think_ this be the first
letter I ever wrote to you." This, if we are to take it literally, may
pair off with the "two _or three_ children" whom Montaigne mentions
having lost at nurse; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in
a parent. Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his
troubled wooing than might have been expected. The whole Bowes family,
angry enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother,
set their faces obdurately against the match. And I daresay the
opposition quickened his inclination. I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes
that she need not further trouble herself about the marriage; it should
now be his business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his life
"for the comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all
earthly creatures laid aside."[96] This is a wonderfully chivalrous
utterance for a Reformer forty-eight years old; and it compares well
with the leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this
and that into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M.
Bungener calls "an honourable and Christian difficulty" of choice, in
frigid indecisions and insincere proposals. But Knox's next letter is in
a humbler tone; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied;
he despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
England,--regards not "what country consumes his wicked carcass." "You
shall understand," he says, "that this sixth of November, I spoke with
Sir Robert Bowes" (the head of the family, his bride's uncle) "in the
matter you know, according to your request; whose disdainful, yea,
despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.
I bear a good countenance with a sore-troubled heart, because he that
ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a
despiser, but also a taunter of God's messengers--God be merciful unto
him! Amongst others his most unpleasing words, while that I was about to
have declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, 'Away with your
rhetorical reasons! for I will not be persuaded with them.' God knows I
did use no rhetoric nor coloured speech; but would have spoken the
truth, and that in most simple manner. I am not a good orator in my own
cause; but what he would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare
to him one day to his displeasure, unless he repent."[97] Poor Knox, you
see, is quite commoved. It has been a very unpleasant interview. And as
it is the only sample that we have of how things went with him during
his courtship, we may infer that the period was not as agreeable for
Knox as it has been for some others.
However, when once they were married, I imagine he and Marjorie Bowes
hit it off together comfortably enough. The little we know of it may be
brought together in a very short space. She bore him two sons. He seems
to have kept her pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his
work; so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into
disorder.[98] Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in
this capacity, he calls her "his left hand."[99] In June, 1559, at the
headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the
absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, "whose presence" (this is the
not very grammatical form of his lament) "whose presence I more thirst,
than she that is my own flesh."[100] And this, considering the source
and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender
sentiment. He tells us himself in his History, on the occasion of a
certain meeting at the Kirk of Field, that he was in no small heaviness
by reason of the late death of his "dear bedfellow, Marjorie
Bowes."[101] Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as "a wife whose
like is not to be found everywhere" (that is very like Calvin), and
again, as "the most delightful of wives." We know what Calvin thought
desirable in a wife, "good humour, chastity, thrift, patience, and
solicitude for her husband's health," and so we may suppose that the
first Mrs. Knox fell not far short of this ideal.
The actual date of the marriage is uncertain; but by the summer of 1554,
at the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with his wife. There
is no fear either that he will be dull; even if the chaste, thrifty,
patient Marjorie should not altogether occupy his mind, he need not go
out of the house to seek more female sympathy; for behold! Mrs. Bowes is
duly domesticated with the young couple. Dr. M'Crie imagined that
Richard Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free to live
where she would; and where could she go more naturally than to the house
of a married daughter? This, however, is not the case. Richard Bowes did
not die till at least two years later. It is impossible to believe that
he approved of his wife's desertion, after so many years of marriage,
after twelve children had been born to them; and accordingly we find in
his will, dated 1558, no mention either of her or of Knox's wife.[102]
This is plain sailing. It is easy enough to understand the anger of
Bowes against this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married
the daughter in spite of the father's opposition, alienated the wife
from the husband and the husband's religion, supported her in a long
course of resistance and rebellion, and, after years of intimacy,
already too close and tender for any jealous spirit to behold without
resentment, carried her away with him at last into a foreign land. But
it is not quite easy to understand how, except out of sheer weariness
and disgust, he was ever brought to agree to the arrangement. Nor is it
easy to square the Reformer's conduct with his public teaching. We have,
for instance, a letter addressed by him, Craig, and Spottiswood, to the
Archbishops of Canterbury and York, anent "a wicked and rebellious
woman," one Anne Good, spouse to "John Barron, a minister of Christ
Jesus, his evangel," who, "after great rebellion shown unto him, and
divers admonitions given, as well by himself as by others in his name,
that she should in no wise depart from this realm, nor from his house
without his licence, hath not the less stubbornly and rebelliously
departed, separated herself from his society, left his house, and
withdrawn herself from this realm."[103] Perhaps some sort of licence
was extorted, as I have said, from Richard Bowes, weary with years of
domestic dissension; but setting that aside, the words employed with so
much righteous indignation by Knox, Craig, and Spottiswood, to describe
the conduct of that wicked and rebellious woman, Mrs. Barron, would
describe nearly as exactly the conduct of the religious Mrs. Bowes. It
is a little bewildering, until we recollect the distinction between
faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was "a minister of Christ
Jesus, his evangel," while Richard Bowes, besides being own brother to a
despiser and taunter of God's messengers, is shrewdly suspected to have
been "a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catholic faith," or, as Knox
himself would have expressed it, "a rotten Papist."
You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with
female society. But we are not yet at the end of the roll. The last year
of his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he
was resident as one of the chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he
boasts, although a stranger, he had, by God's grace, found favour before
many.[104] The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once he
writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with
three, and he and the three women were all in tears.[105] Out of all,
however, he had chosen two. "_God_," he writes to them, "_brought us in
such familiar acquaintance, that your hearts were incensed and kindled
with a special care over me, as a mother useth to be over her natural
child_; and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be
more plain than ever I was to any."[106] And out of the two even he had
chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to
Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the address runs. If one may venture
to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.
I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character.
She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to;
she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by
some passages of Mrs. Bowes's letter, which the Reformer opened, and
read aloud to them before they went. "O would to God," cried this
impressionable matron, "would to God that I might speak with that
person, for I perceive there are more tempted than I."[107] This _may_
have been Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it were, we must not
conclude from this one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes. All
the evidence tends the other way. She was a woman of understanding,
plainly, who followed political events with interest, and to whom Knox
thought it worth while to write, in detail, the history of his trials
and successes. She was religious, but without that morbid perversity of
spirit that made religion so heavy a burden for the poor-hearted Mrs.
Bowes. More of her I do not find, save testimony to the profound
affection that united her to the Reformer. So we find him writing to her
from Geneva, in such terms as these:--"You write that your desire is
earnest to see me. _Dear sister, if I should express the thirst and
languor which I have had for your presence, I should appear to pass
measure.... Yea, I weep and rejoice in remembrance of you_; but that
would evanish by the comfort of your presence, which I assure you is so
dear to me, that if the charge of this little flock here, gathered
together in Christ's name, did not impede me, my coming should prevent
my letter."[108] I say that this was written from Geneva; and yet you
will observe that it is no consideration for his wife or mother-in-law,
only the charge of his little flock, that keeps him from setting out
forthwith for London, to comfort himself with the dear presence of Mrs.
Locke. Remember that was a certain plausible enough pretext for Mrs.
Locke to come to Geneva--"the most perfect school of Christ that ever
was on earth since the days of the Apostles"--for we are now under the
reign of that "horrible monster Jezebel of England," when a lady of good
orthodox sentiments was better out of London. It was doubtful, however,
whether this was to be. She was detained in England, partly by
circumstances unknown, "partly by empire of her head," Mr. Harry Locke,
the Cheapside merchant. It is somewhat humorous to see Knox struggling
for resignation, now that he has to do with a faithful husband (for Mr.
Harry Locke was faithful). Had it been otherwise, "in my heart," he
says, "I could have wished--yea," here he breaks out, "yea, and cannot
cease to wish--that God would guide you to this place."[109] And after
all, he had not long to wait, for whether Mr. Harry Locke died in the
interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving permission, five months
after the date of the letter last quoted, "Mrs. Anne Locke, Harry her
son, and Anne her daughter, and Katharine her maid," arrived in that
perfect school of Christ, the Presbyterian paradise, Geneva. So now, and
for the next two years, the cup of Knox's happiness was surely full. Of
an afternoon, when the bells rang out for the sermon, the shops closed,
and the good folk gathered to the churches, psalm-book in hand, we can
imagine him drawing near to the English chapel in quite patriarchal
fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke, James his
servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of children and maids.
He might be alone at work all morning in his study, for he wrote much
during these two years; but at night, you may be sure there was a circle
of admiring women, eager to hear the new paragraph, and not sparing of
applause. And what work, among others, was he elaborating at this time,
but the notorious "First Blast"? So that he may have rolled out in his
big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail, impatient, feeble,
foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel,
and how men were above them, even as God is above the angels, in the
ears of his own wife, and the two dearest friends on earth. But he had
lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to despise in theory the
sex he honoured so much in practice, of whom he chose his most intimate
associates, and whose courage he was compelled to wonder at, when his
own heart was faint.
We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and so, as he
would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his
fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited. Called into
Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his
best claim to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
mother-in-law. The wife soon died. The death of her daughter did not
altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and
gone between his house and England. In 1562, however, we find him
characterised as "a sole man by reason of the absence of his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes," and a passport is got for her, her man, a
maid, and "three horses, whereof two shall return," as well as liberty
to take all her own money with her into Scotland. This looks like a
definite arrangement; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to
England yet again, I cannot find. With that great family of hers, unless
in leaving her husband she had quarrelled with them all, there must have
been frequent occasion for her presence, one would think. Knox at least
survived her; and we possess his epigraph to their long intimacy, given
to the world by him in an appendix to his latest publication. I have
said in a former paper that Knox was not shy of personal revelations in
his published works. And the trick seems to have grown on him. To this
last tract, a controversial onslaught on a Scottish Jesuit, he prefixed
a prayer, not very pertinent to the matter in hand, and containing
references to his family which were the occasion of some wit in his
adversary's answer; and appended what seems equally irrelevant, one of
his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with an explanatory preface. To say
truth, I believe he had always felt uneasily that the circumstances of
this intimacy were very capable of misconstruction; and now, when he was
an old man, taking "his good-night of all the faithful in both realms,"
and only desirous "that without any notable sclander to the evangel of
Jesus Christ, he might end his battle; for as the world was weary of
him, so was he of it";--in such a spirit it was not, perhaps, unnatural
that he should return to this old story, and seek to put it right in the
eyes of all men, ere he died. "Because that God," he says, "because that
God now in His mercy hath put an end to the battle of my dear mother,
Mistress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an end to my wretched life,
I could not cease but declare to the world what was the cause of our
great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was neither flesh nor
blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which never suffered her
to rest but when she was in the company of the faithful, of whom (from
the first hearing of the word at my mouth) she judged me to be one....
Her company to me was comfortable (yea, honourable and profitable, for
she was to me and mine a mother), but yet it was not without some cross;
for besides trouble and fashery of body sustained for her, my mind was
seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the comfort of her troubled
conscience."[110] He had written to her years before from his first
exile in Dieppe, that "only God's hand" could withhold him from once
more speaking with her face to face; and now, when God's hand has indeed
interposed, when there lies between them, instead of the voyageable
straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass, this is the spirit
in which he can look back upon their long acquaintance. She was a
religious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not without some cross and
fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to tend. He might have
given a truer character of their friendship had he thought less of his
own standing in public estimation, and more of the dead woman. But he
was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that ever memorable
passage, a public creature. He wished that even into this private place
of his affections posterity should follow him with a complete approval;
and he was willing, in order that this might be so, to exhibit the
defects of his lost friend, and tell the world what weariness he had
sustained through her unhappy disposition. There is something here that
reminds one of Rousseau.
I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left Geneva; but his
correspondence with her continued for three years. It may have continued
longer, of course, but I think the last letters we possess read like the
last that would be written. Perhaps Mrs. Locke was then re-married, for
there is much obscurity over her subsequent history. For as long as
their intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in the
Reformer's life. Here is one passage, for example, the most likable
utterance of Knox's that I can quote:--Mrs. Locke has been upbraiding
him as a bad correspondent. "My remembrance of you," he answers, "is not
so dead, but I trust it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by
no outward token for one year. _Of nature, I am churlish; yet one thing
I ashame not to affirm, that familiarity once thoroughly contracted was
never yet broken on my default. The cause may be that I have rather need
of all, than that any have need of me._ However it (_that_) be, it
cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can
quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which
half a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and confirm.
And therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have
you in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the
faithful."[111] This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can
remember to have seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer's
collected works: It is no small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection
for her should have brought home to him this unwonted feeling of
dependence upon others. Everything else in the course of the
correspondence testifies to a good, sound, downright sort of friendship
between the two, less ecstatic than it was at first, perhaps, but
serviceable and very equal. He gives her ample details as to the
progress of the work of reformation; sends her the sheets of the
"Confession of Faith," "in quairs," as he calls it; asks her to assist
him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause in Scotland,
and to send him books for himself--books by Calvin especially, one on
Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the "Institutes." "I must be bold
on your liberality," he writes, "not only in that, but in greater things
as I shall need."[112] On her part she applies to him for spiritual
advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more
positive spirit,--advice as to practical points, advice as to the Church
of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
"mingle-mangle."[113] Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him "a
token, without writing." "I understand your impediment," he answers,
"and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of
my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat."[114]
One letter more, and then silence.
And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence.
It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description
of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come
to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a
widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred
apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the
altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January, 1563, Randolph writes
to Cecil: "Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall
write unto you that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the
Duke's, a Lord's daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of
age."[115] He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
mad a story. And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret
Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen,
was duly united to John Knox, Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh,
aged fifty-nine,--to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride,
and I would fain hope of many others for more humane considerations. "In
this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had done otherwise." The Consistory
of Geneva, "that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth
since the days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering
whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now
and again, of this good custom of his religious metropolis, as he
thought of the two-and-forty years that separated him from his poor
bride. Fitly enough, we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she
appears at her husband's deathbed, eight years after. She bore him three
daughters in the interval; and I suppose the poor child's martyrdom was
made as easy for her as might be. She was "extremely attentive to him"
at the end, we read; and he seems to have spoken to her with some
confidence. Moreover, and this is very characteristic, he had copied out
for her use a little volume of his own devotional letters to other
women.
This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had
delighted much in his company "by reason that she had a troubled
conscience," and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the
pages of his history.[116]
And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox's intercourse with
women was quite of the highest sort. It is characteristic that we find
him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the
women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self
in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never
condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not
anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so
renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they
were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were
about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because
a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong
and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as
these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters
full of their "earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over
a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are "incensed and kindled with a special care," as it
were over their natural children. In the strong quiet patience of all
his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of
the fascination he possessed for these religious women. Here was one
whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated
it was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you
were so depressed it was plain God had cast you off for ever; and he
would read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an
answer in the most reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into
heads--who knows?--like a treatise on divinity. And then, those easy
tears of his. There are some women who like to see men crying; and here
was this great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the
solid pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous
denunciations to the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in
their parlours by the hour, and weep with them over their manifold
trials and temptations. Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea
with all these penitents.... It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will
do, if we look into it too closely. We could not let these great folk of
old into our drawing-rooms. Queen Elizabeth would positively not be
eligible for a housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking
from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited the
glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his way of thinking,
any one he could strike hands with and talk to freely and without
offence, save perhaps the porter at the end of the street, or the
fellow with his elbows out who loafs all day before the public-house. So
that this little note of vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it
is to be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old
intimacies; so that we may only remember Knox as one who was very
long-suffering with women, kind to them in his own way, loving them in
his own way--and that not the worst way, if it was not the best--and
once at least, if not twice, moved to his heart of hearts by a woman,
and giving expression to the yearning he had for her society in words
that none of us need be ashamed to borrow.
And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this
essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and
already broken in bodily health: it has been the story of an old man's
friendships. This it is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past
forty, he had then before him five-and-twenty years of splendid and
influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon
degree of power, lived in his own country as a sort of king, and did
what he would with the sound of his voice out of the pulpit. And besides
all this, such a following of faithful women! One would take the first
forty-two years gladly, if one could be sure of the last twenty-five.
Most of us, even if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of grey
hairs, we retain some degree of public respect in the latter days of our
existence, will find a falling away of friends, and a solitude making
itself round about us day by day, until we are left alone with the hired
sick-nurse. For the attraction of a man's character is apt to be
outlived, like the attraction of his body; and the power to love grows
feeble in its turn, as well as the power to inspire love in others. It
is only with a few rare natures that friendship is added to friendship,
love to love, and the man keeps growing richer in affection--richer, I
mean, as a bank maybe said to grow richer, both giving and receiving
more--after his head is white and his back weary, and he prepares to go
down into the dust of death.
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Gaberel's "Église de Genève," i. 88.
[61] "La Démocratie chez les Prédicateurs de la Ligue."
[62] "Historia affectuum se immiscentium controversiæ de
gynæcocratia." It is in his collected prefaces; Leipsic, 1683.
[63] "OEuvres de d'Aubigné," i. 449.
[64] "Dames Illustres," pp. 358-360.
[65] Works of John Knox, iv. 349.
[66] M'Crie's "Life of Knox," ii. 41.
[67] Described by Calvin in a letter to Cecil, Knox's Works, vol. iv.
[68] It was anonymously published, but no one seems to have been in
doubt about its authorship; he might as well have set his name to
it, for all the good he got by holding it back.
[69] Knox's Works, iv. 358.
[70] Strype's "Aylmer," p. 16.
[71] It may interest the reader to know that these (so says Thomasius)
are the "ipsissima verba Schlusselburgii."
[72] I am indebted for a sight of this book to the kindness of Mr.
David Laing, the editor of Knox's Works.
[73] "Social Statics," p. 64, etc.
[74] Hallam's "Const. Hist. of England," i. 225, note ^m.
[75] Knox to Mrs. Locke, 6th April, 1559.--Works, vi. 14.
[76] Knox to Sir William Cecil, 10th April, 1559.--Works, ii. 16, or
vi. 15.
[77] Knox to Queen Elizabeth, July 20th, 1559.--Works, vi. 47, or ii.
26.
[78] _Ibid._, August 6th, 1561.--Works, vi. 126.
[79] Knox's Works, ii. 278-280.
[80] Calderwood's "History of the Kirk of Scotland," edition of the
Wodrow Society, iii. 51-54.
[81] Bayle's "Historical Dictionary," art. KNOX, remark G.
[82] Works, iv. 244.
[83] Works, iv. 246.
[84] _Ibid._, iv. 225.
[85] Works, iv. 245.
[86] _Ibid._ iv. 221.
[87] Works, vi. 514.
[88] _Ibid._ iii. 334.
[89] Works, iii. 352, 353.
[90] _Ibid._ iii. 350.
[91] _Ibid._ iii. 390, 391.
[92] Works, iii. 142.
[93] _Ibid._ iii. 378.
[94] _Ibid._ ii. 379.
[95] _Ibid._ iii. 394.
[96] Works, iii. 376.
[97] Works, iii. 378.
[98] _Ibid._ vi. 104.
[99] _Ibid._ v. 5.
[100] _Ibid._ vi. 27.
[101] _Ibid._ ii. 138.
[102] Mr. Laing's preface to the sixth volume of Knox's Works, p. lxii.
[103] Works, vi. 534.
[104] _Ibid._ iv. 220.
[105] _Ibid._ iii. 380.
[106] _Ibid._ iv. 220.
[107] Works, iii. 380.
[108] _Ibid._ iv. 238.
[109] Works, iv. 240.
[110] Works, vi. 513, 514.
[111] Works, vi. 11.
[112] Works, vi. 21, 101, 108, 130.
[113] _Ibid._ vi. 83.
[114] _Ibid._ vi. 129.
[115] _Ibid._ vi. 532.
[116] Works, i. 246.
THE BODY-SNATCHER
THE BODY-SNATCHER
Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the
George at Debenham--the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and
myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come
rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own
particular armchair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of
education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in
idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a
mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue
camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in
the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous,
disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some
vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would
now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the
table. He drank rum--five glasses regularly every evening; and for the
greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass
in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We
called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special
knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a
fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars,
we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.
One dark winter night--it had struck nine some time before the landlord
joined us--there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring
proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament;
and the great man's still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to
his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in
Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all
proportionately moved by the occurrence.
"He's come," said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his
pipe.
"He?" said I. "Who?--not the doctor?"
"Himself," replied our host.
"What is his name?"
"Doctor Macfarlane," said the landlord.
Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding
over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to
awaken, and repeated the name "Macfarlane" twice, quietly enough the
first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.
"Yes," said the landlord, "that's his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane."
Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear,
loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all
startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I am afraid I have not been paying much
attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?" And then, when he
had heard the landlord out, "It cannot be, it cannot be," he added; "and
yet I would like well to see him face to face."
"Do you know him, Doctor?" asked the undertaker, with a gasp.
"God forbid!" was the reply. "And yet the name is a strange one; it were
too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?"
"Well," said the host, "he's not a young man, to be sure, and his hair
is white; but he looks younger than you."
"He is older, though; years older. But," with a slap upon the table,
"it's the rum you see in my face--rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may
have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me
speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would
you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if
he'd stood in my shoes; but the brains"--with a rattling fillip on his
bald head--"the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no
deductions."
"If you know this doctor," I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful
pause, "I should gather that you do not share the landlord's good
opinion."
Fettes paid no regard to me.
"Yes," he said, with sudden decision, "I must see him face to face."
There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on
the first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.
"That's the doctor," cried the landlord. "Look sharp, and you can catch
him."
It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old
George Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there
was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the
last round of the descent; but this little space was every evening
brilliantly lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great
signal lamp below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room
window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the
cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were
hanging behind, beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it,
face to face. Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set
off his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly
dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a
great gold watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious
material. He wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and
he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no
doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and
consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour
sot--bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak--confront
him at the bottom of the stairs.
"Macfarlane!" he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.
The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the
familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.
"Toddy Macfarlane!" repeated Fettes.
The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds
at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then
in a startled whisper, "Fettes!" he said, "you!"
"Ay," said the other, "me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so
easy shut of our acquaintance."
"Hush, hush!" exclaimed the doctor. "Hush, hush! this meeting is so
unexpected--I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at
first; but I am overjoyed--overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the
present it must be how-d'ye-do and good-bye in one, for my fly is
waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall--let me
see--yes--you shall give me your address, and you can count on early
news of me. We must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at
elbows; but we must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at
suppers."
"Money!" cried Fettes; "money from you! The money that I had from you is
lying where I cast it in the rain."
Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and
confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into
his first confusion.
A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable
countenance. "My dear fellow," he said, "be it as you please; my last
thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my
address, however--"
"I do not wish it--I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,"
interrupted the other. "I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I
wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is
none. Begone!"
He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway;
and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to
step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of
this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his
spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that
the driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual
scene and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the
parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many
witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on
the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But
his tribulation was not entirely at an end, for even as he was passing
Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper, and
yet painfully distinct, "Have you seen it again?"
The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling
cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands
over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had
occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling
toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had
left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the
fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we
were all standing breathless by the bar-room window, and Fettes at our
side, sober, pale, and resolute in look.
"God protect us, Mr. Fettes!" said the landlord, coming first into
possession of his customary senses. "What in the universe is all this?
These are strange things you have been saying."
Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face.
"See if you can hold your tongues," said he. "That man Macfarlane is
not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too
late."
And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting
for the other two, he bade us good-bye and went forth, under the lamp of
the hotel, into the black night.
We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and
four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed, the first
chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat
late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each
man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and
none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the
past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared
with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was
a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the
George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to
you the following foul and unnatural events.
In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh.
He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears
and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was
civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They
soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well;
nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those
days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that
period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here
designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The
man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise,
while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for
the blood of his employer. But Mr. K---- was then at the top of his
vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address,
partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The
students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and
was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he
acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K---- was a
_bon vivant_ as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion
no less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed
and deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he
held the half-regular position of second demonstrator, or sub-assistant
in his class.
In this capacity the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in
particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of
the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of
his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was
with a view to this last--at that time very delicate--affair that he was
lodged by Mr. K---- in the same wynd, and at last in the same building,
with the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures,
his hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would
be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the
unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open
the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help
them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain
alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From
such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber,
to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours
of the day.
Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life
thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against
all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and
fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions.
Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of
prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient
drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of
consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no
desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made
it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after
day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K----. For
his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring,
blackguardly enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ
that he called his conscience declared itself content.
The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his
master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomist
kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary
was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences
to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K---- to ask no
questions in his dealings with the trade. "They bring the body, and we
pay the price," he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration--"_quid pro
quo_." And, again, and somewhat profanely, "Ask no questions," he would
tell his assistants, "for conscience' sake." There was no understanding
that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea
been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the
lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an
offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he
dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the
singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by
the hangdog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the
dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he
perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the
unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to
have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to
avert the eye from any evidence of crime.
One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test.
He had been awake all night with a racking toothache--pacing his room
like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed--and had
fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows
on a night of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry
repetition of the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine;
it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened,
but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the
day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than
usually eager to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them
upstairs. He heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as
they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with
his shoulder propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find
the men their money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He
started; he took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.
"God Almighty!" he cried. "That is Jane Galbraith!"
The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.
"I know her, I tell you," he continued. "She was alive and hearty
yesterday. It's impossible she can be dead; it's impossible you should
have got this body fairly."
"Sure, sir, you're mistaken entirely," said one of the men.
But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money
on the spot.
It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger.
The lad's heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the
sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than
he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he
identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with
horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic
seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at
length over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the
bearing of Mr. K----'s instructions and the danger to himself of
interference in so serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity,
determined to wait for the advice of his immediate superior, the class
assistant.
This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all
the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last
degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable
and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the
ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity,
and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a
strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed,
their relative positions called for some community of life; and when
subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in
Macfarlane's gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return
before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.
On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his
wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story,
and showed him the cause of his alarm, Macfarlane examined the marks on
her body.
"Yes," he said, with a nod, "it looks fishy."
"Well, what should I do?" asked Fettes.
"Do?" repeated the other. "Do you want to do anything? Least said
soonest mended, I should say."
"Some one else might recognise her," objected Fettes. "She was as well
known as the Castle Rock."
"We'll hope not," said Macfarlane, "and if anybody does--well, you
didn't, don't you see, and there's an end. The fact is, this has been
going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you'll get K---- into the most
unholy trouble; you'll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you
come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or
what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian
witness-box. For me, you know there's one thing certain--that,
practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered."
"Macfarlane!" cried Fettes.
"Come now!" sneered the other. "As if you hadn't suspected it yourself!"
"Suspecting is one thing----"
"And proof another. Yes, I know; and I'm as sorry as you are this should
have come here," tapping the body with his cane. "The next best thing
for me is not to recognise it; and," he added coolly, "I don't. You may,
if you please. I don't dictate, but I think a man of the world would do
as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K---- would look for at our
hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants? And
I answer, Because he didn't want old wives."
This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes.
He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was
duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.
One afternoon, when his day's work was over, Fettes dropped into a
popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a
small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his
features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly
realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance,
coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable
control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became
inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the
servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a
fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him
with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he
confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad's
vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.
"I'm a pretty bad fellow myself," the stranger remarked, "but Macfarlane
is the boy--Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend
another glass." Or it might be, "Toddy, you jump up and shut the door."
"Toddy hates me," he said again. "Oh, yes, Toddy, you do!"
"Don't you call me that confounded name," growled Macfarlane.
"Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do
that all over my body," remarked the stranger.
"We medicals have a better way than that," said Fettes. "When we dislike
a dead friend of ours, we dissect him."
Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his
mind.
The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger's name, invited
Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the
tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded
Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the
man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed
the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he
had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his
head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in
abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes
smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray
from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he
posted from place to place in quest of his last night's companions. He
could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went
early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.
At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal.
Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find
Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly
packages with which he was so well acquainted.
"What?" he cried. "Have you been out alone? How did you manage?"
But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When
they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made
at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to
hesitate; and then, "You had better look at the face," said he, in tones
of some constraint. "You had better," he repeated, as Fettes only stared
at him in wonder.
"But where, and how, and when did you come by it?" cried the other.
"Look at the face," was the only answer.
Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the
young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he
did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his
eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of
death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had
left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern,
awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the
conscience. It was a _cras tibi_ which re-echoed in his soul, that two
whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet
these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe.
Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his
comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words
nor voice at his command.
It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly
behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other's shoulder.
"Richardson," said he, "may have the head."
Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion
of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer
resumed: "Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see,
must tally."
Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: "Pay you!" he cried. "Pay
you for that?"
"Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible
account, you must," returned the other. "I dare not give it for nothing,
you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is
another case like Jane Galbraith's. The more things are wrong the more
we must act as if all were right. Where does old K---- keep his money?"
"There," answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the corner.
"Give me the key, then," said the other calmly, holding out his hand.
There was an instant's hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane
could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an
immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the
cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one
compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to
the occasion.
"Now, look here," he said, "there is the payment made--first proof of
your good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it
by a second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part
may defy the devil."
The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in
balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any
future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present
quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been
carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the
nature, and the amount of the transaction.
"And now," said Macfarlane, "it's only fair that you should pocket the
lucre. I've had my share already. By-the-bye, when a man of the world
falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket--I'm
ashamed to speak of it, but there's a rule of conduct in the case. No
treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old
debts; borrow, don't lend."
"Macfarlane," began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, "I have put my neck
in a halter to oblige you."
"To oblige me?" cried Wolfe. "Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see
the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got
into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows
clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith.
You can't begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning;
that's the truth. No rest for the wicked."
A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon
the soul of the unhappy student.
"My God!" he cried, "but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be
made a class assistant--in the name of reason, where's the harm in that?
Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would _he_ have
been where _I_ am now!"
"My dear fellow," said Macfarlane, "what a boy you are! What harm _has_
come to you? What harm _can_ come to you if you hold your tongue? Why,
man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us--the
lions and the lambs. If you're a lamb, you'll come to lie upon these
tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you're a lion, you'll live and
drive a horse like me, like K----, like all the world with any wit or
courage. You're staggered at the first. But look at K----! My dear
fellow, you're clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K---- likes you.
You were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my
experience of life, three days from now you'll laugh at all these
scarecrows like a High School boy at a farce."
And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd
in his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left
alone with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood
involved. He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to
his weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen
from the arbiter of Macfarlane's destiny to his paid and helpless
accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver
at the time, but it did not occur to him that he might still be brave.
The secret of Jane Galbraith and the cursed entry in the day-book closed
his mouth.
Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray
were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark.
Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom
rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had
already gone toward safety.
For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful
process of disguise.
On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he
said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed
the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable
assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the
demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal
already in his grasp.
Before the week was out Macfarlane's prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes
had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to
plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his
mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of
his accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business
of the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K----. At
times they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first
to last particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided
any reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to
him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and forsworn the lambs,
he only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.
At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer
union. Mr. K---- was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it
was a part of this teacher's pretensions to be always well supplied. At
the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of
Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood then,
as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and buried
fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the sheep
upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly
singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond,
the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in
seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor,
were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church.
The Resurrection Man--to use a by-name of the period--was not to be
deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his
trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs,
the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the
offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic
neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where
some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish,
the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was
attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been
laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there
came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and
mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy
relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless
byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class
of gaping boys.
Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and
Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet
resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty
years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly
conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried,
dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with
her Sunday's best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the
crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed
to that last curiosity of the anatomist.
Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and
furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission--a cold,
dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these
sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and
silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening.
They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from
the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher's Tryst, to have a toast
before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of
ale. When they reached their journey's end the gig was housed, the horse
was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat
down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The
lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold,
incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of
the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane
handed a little pile of gold to his companion.
"A compliment," he said. "Between friends these little d----d
accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights."
Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. "You
are a philosopher," he cried. "I was an ass till I knew you. You and
K---- between you, by the Lord Harry! but you'll make a man of me."
"Of course we shall," applauded Macfarlane. "A man? I tell you, it
required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big,
brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look
of the d----d thing; but not you--you kept your head. I watched you."
"Well, and why not?" Fettes thus vaunted himself. "It was no affair of
mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on
the other I could count on your gratitude, don't you see?" And he
slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.
Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant
words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so
successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily
continued in this boastful strain:--
"The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don't
want to hang--that's practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born
with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the
old gallery of curiosities--they may frighten boys, but men of the
world, like you and me, despise them. Here's to the memory of Gray!"
It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order,
was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the
young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that
they were bound for Peebles, and drove in that direction till they were
clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps,
returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse.
There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant,
strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white
gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across
the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost
groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to
their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse
the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them,
and it became necessary to kindle a match and re-illumine one of the
lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by
huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed
labours.
They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade;
and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were
rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment,
Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above
his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders,
was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp
had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a
tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the
stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of
broken glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing
announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional
collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its
descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then
silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing
to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now
marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.
They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it
wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken
open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to
the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the
horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the
wider road by the Fisher's Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy,
which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good
pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.
They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now,
as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped
between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every
repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the
greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell
upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured
jest about the farmer's wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and
was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from
side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon
their shoulders, and now the drenching sackcloth would flap icily about
their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He
peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All
over the country-side, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs
accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew
upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that
some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear
of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.
"For God's sake," said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech,
"for God's sake, let's have a light!"
Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he
made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion,
got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that
time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain
still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy
matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last
the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to
expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the
gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the
thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking
to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the
trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and
human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.
For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A
nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and
tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was
meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain.
Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade
forestalled him.
"That is not a woman," said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.
"It was a woman when we put her in," whispered Fettes.
"Hold that lamp," said the other. "I must see her face."
And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the
sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear
upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too
familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men.
A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into
the roadway: the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse,
terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went oft toward
Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig,
the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.
END OF VOL. III
PRINTED BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.
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