Chapter III: Part 3

But this strong language is not the strong language of a man whose breast is a burning fiery furnace; it is the invective of a man who is amused by his opponents and who regards them chiefly as pegs for cunning sentences. His hard words would certainly have broken no bones; and one can even imagine that, in the secrecy of their chambers, the Puritans themselves—at all events, the less ironsided of them—may have shaken their sides over his character-sketch of the man whom they doubtless referred to in public as “our great leader.”

But if such qualities are defects when a man is writing political tracts or attempting the higher flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if he is writing essays. Cowley’s Essays—and his Prefaces are as good—are most delightful, and they have as personal a turn as Lamb’s. They all, virtually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the retired _Urbs in Rure_ text. They speak of the country’s charms in the ex-townsman’s way; they gibe at the turmoil and press of cities in a manner which attests a still lively interest in these contemptible things; they praise the pleasures of horticulture, solitary meditation, and à Kempis’s “little book in a corner.” Their learning is lightly worn; their language natural; their arguments not so serious as to stand in the way of any jest that offers itself; and many passages in them might almost as well have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 1660. These, for instance:

“There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear
often that a man does not know how to pass his Time. ’Twould
have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred
sixty ninth year of his Life.

“I have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam,
and have seen others very much delighted with the fantastical
extravagancie of so many various madnesses, which upon me
wrought so contrary an effect, that I always returned, not only
melancholy, but e’en sick with the sight. My compassion there
was perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand Madmen abroad,
without any perturbation; though, to weigh the matter justly,
the total loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total
depravation of it.

“I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that
without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity
of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no
inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil.
Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfé upon the Banks of
Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might
recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of
the Men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived
quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old
England.

“The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are those whom we
account the most barbarous. There is some moderation and
good Nature in the Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their
Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and Christian Europeans,
like as many Pikes or Sharks prey upon everything we can
swallow.”

The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a certain living writer than like, say, Charles Lamb.

The best of Cowley’s Essays are _Of My Self_ and _Of Greatness_. I have no room to quote them at length. The first—in which he is writing of poetry and of his childhood’s memories—is more full of feeling than is usual with him. The other is one of the most picturesque pieces of light moralizing in the language, full of what we all call the Playful Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences like: “The Ancient Roman Emperours, who had the Riches of the whole world for their Revenue, had wherewithal to live (one would have thought) pretty well at ease, and to have been exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty”; and it describes the pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But somehow, in spite of his assertions, one never quite believes in the genuineness of his middle-aged preference for “Prettiness,” as against “Majestical Beauty.” One suspects the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, a hankering after action, which frequently afflict men who are constitutionally fitted for nothing but looking on and making charming comments. But he had certainly been very badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had faithfully served. The Restoration gave him neither employment nor money. It gave him, however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that his coffin was followed to the Abbey by a hundred noblemen’s coaches and large numbers of wits, bishops, and clergymen.

The Depressed Philanthropist

I do not see why any one but myself should be interested in the mere fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always avoided writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy. But as one’s feelings commonly typify those of some section or other of one’s fellows it may be relevant to one’s purpose. I frequently begin writing something about Mr. Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly feel like abusing him, and am then checked by the thought that after all he is too good a man to go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of very great intelligence. He is a conscientious writer and an acute observer. He has a great respect for truth and a desire to state it at all costs. He detests pettinesses, hypocrisies, and shams. On almost every issue that might arise I am sure I should find myself voting on the same side as he, though perhaps we might differ in our views of the relative importance to be attached to the problem of World Peace and that of the hardships inflicted by mankind on ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his books I feel as if I were in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day.

I have just been reading his new miscellany _The Little Man_. The book does not show his qualities at their best, but it shows his defects at their worst. The principal contents are _The Little Man_ and _Studies in Extravagance_. The first is a short play showing how a German, an American full of altruistic platitudes, and two self-contained and “proper” English people shrink in the most selfish and cowardly way from a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra irony) of typhus. The “studies” are examinations of various “types” such as “The Artist,” “The Plain Man,” “The Housewife,” “The Preceptor,” and “The Latest Thing.” And there is none of them good—no, not one. Mr. Max Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Galsworthy Looking upon Life and Finding it Foul, Life being represented as a fat and ferocious goblin with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a wild boar’s. It was just a little wrong. Mr. Galsworthy’s vision should not have had so much of the positive about it. He does not find Life vigorously diabolical, but meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible. Many great men have been gloomy or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was consistently disgruntled, and the man who would look for _joie de vivre_ in Leopardi would look in vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself—it is a commonplace—it is often the duty of a serious contemporary writer to be horrifying, unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of mankind—to continue the commonplace—is not possible if we hold the view that things may be done that may not be discussed, and that the failings of man and the diseases of society should, as far as possible, be stowed away in the cupboard, where the skeletons are. What is wrong with Mr. Galsworthy is that one cannot quite believe him. One suspects him of cooking the evidence. One does not mind a man presenting a black view of life if (_a_) he is temperamentally inclined to it and can be melancholy with a certain gusto, or (_b_) if, being a professed realist, he appears to have taken cognizance of every aspect that has presented itself to him. But Mr. Galsworthy presents so one-sided a case that we at once suspect his _bona fides_ and react against his views. It would be unfair to classify him with that school of novelists who give their books titles like _Dull Monotony_ and live up to their titles by giving a photographic reproduction of an intolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible by, the households which they themselves afflict. He usually escapes being thoroughly boring partly because of his gift for occasionally happy and incisive phrase and partly because here and there, behind the grey brow of the dejected Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something more exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. But he is often very nearly dull, all the same: for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a caricature which is not amusing. Even in his very well-made plays the characters are not, to my mind, usually interesting in themselves. One does not believe in them as persons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as the old stage figures of melodrama, though they are called charwomen, clerks, magistrates, and company directors instead of being called Irishmen, highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His plays argue cases, but they do not present life as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality about his prose; and, since the unreality takes the form of making mankind look utterly paltry and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a man who has such an opinion of it bothers about it at all.

So in _The Little Man_ and in these studies. All these average people do not get a dog’s chance; we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but we really are not quite so dull, feeble, and silly as all this. Some characteristics—as those of the Plain Man—are very cleverly recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, nor even the most important parts of him. As an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy’s pseudo-realistic method take him on the ground most favourable to him—that of the beef-and-whisky-fed sportsman:

“What led to him was anything that ministered to the coatings
of the stomach and the thickness of the skin ... to be ‘hard’
was his ambition, and he moved through life hitting things,
especially balls—whether they reposed on little inverted tubs
of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost always hit
them, and told people how he did it afterwards. He hit things,
too, at a distance, through a tube, with a certain noise....”

Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate description of a sportsman would put in many things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e. g. some indication that he was a human being, as we know the species), this is not good, though it is superficially plausible description, even so far as it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman played golf and cricket and shot a good deal would convey a better idea of him than this specious circumlocution. To say that a man is smoking a cigarette positively contains a greater measure of suggestion than to say that he is inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper filled with dried herbs. Much of Mr. Galsworthy’s attack upon all kinds of men and women, self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their wives, worldly women who have never found their souls, cultured people who chase the new, and Philistines who run away from the new, has the same sort of defect. It is really “guying” which passes for photography merely because it is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. Galsworthy’s ostensible view of life partly because I don’t believe he takes it, and partly because if he did I should think it an absurdly unjust view. At heart a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell. As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the drains; but after all there are other parts of the edifice.

A Polyphloisboisterous Critic

I remember—that is to say, I wish I remembered, for I have forgotten most of it—a poem that I used to recite at my mother’s knee. Its subject was an antediluvian man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the blood of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous shout; and its claim to attention was a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing to an infant, and indeed to any, tongue. It was of that poem that I was reminded whilst reading _European Dramatists_, by Archibald Henderson.

Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a stranger to the British public. It was he who produced, a few years ago, a biographical study of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy might well have served—were not Mr. Shaw still happily with us—as Mr. Shaw’s tombstone. The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies to a play of Strindberg’s), was “colossal in its incommensurability.” It was the kind of book one had thought could only be produced by a large committee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not lead one to respect the author’s powers of judging the relative importance of his various facts, it at least compelled one to admire his colossal energy and his incommensurable supply of these facts. From _European Dramatists_ one gets precisely the same feeling. Parts of the book have appeared in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, in Stuttgart and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one may be sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to the editors of all these papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge of the modern literature of their respective countries. The actual subjects of his papers are familiar enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Granville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he shows an amazing acquaintance with everybody who has recently written anything in any country. He can refer you to the December 1913 issue of the _Przemysl Review_; he can tell you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, thinks of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He knows all about everything, though one is not quite sure that he knows anything else. But what chiefly pleases one about him is not so much what he says as the charming way he says it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but out there flies a trope. Everything happens with him in metaphors; people are always digging into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing them in vestures. And above all he is polysyllabic and rotund of speech.

He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first married years he observes that they “were undoubtedly happy—certainly in the passional sense, if not in the restful consciousness of hallowed union.” “In 1886,” he proceeds, “Strindberg began to be obsessed with the monomania of animadversion against the female sex.” Later, “goaded by titanic ambition, he cast off the shackles of provinciality for the freedom of cosmopolitanism”—i. e. he travelled. Ibsen and Strindberg were “so antipodal in temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of intuitive perception and searching introspectiveness.” One of Strindberg’s works blurs the vision of the average spectator, “with its kinetoscopic heterogeneity of spiritual films”: Peer Gynt (on the other hand, shall I say?) stood for “the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity.” “Concretizes” and “inscenation” are the kind of words he rejoices in, but perhaps two or three longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of his style:

“To peep into the workshop of the great master’s brain and
assist at the precise balancing of the arguments _pro_ and
_con_, to observe how an idea first finds lodgment in the
brain, and to note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the
fundamental nuclei for the final creation—this is a privilege
that has perhaps [_sic_] never fully been realized by an
observer.

“America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not peopled, we
are confidently assured, with soul-sick tragedians mouthing
their futile protests against the iron vice of environment,
the ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of
circumstance.

“Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal imaginings
of the symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative
talent, not of an authoritative art.”

I don’t think Professor Henderson’s remarks are ever quite meaningless, but I suspect that the most elephantine of them, if reduced to essentials, would be as commonplace as his more comprehensible statements that “Social criticism is the sign manual of the age,” and that “the emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, is on the way”—which last gets a whole paragraph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all; to see “Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips” thus bracketed; to learn that Wilde’s father was also “the father of modern otology,” and to be told that Maeterlinck’s “eternal prayer” is, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt”! That is on page 203; but the effect is somewhat marred by the fact that precisely the same “cry” has been, on page 37, attributed to Strindberg. Personally I plump for Maeterlinck.

“Another Century, and then ...”

There is a certain sort of dull criticism which Dr. Johnson admirably stigmatized when he said that “there is no great merit in telling how many plays have ghosts in them and how this ghost is better than that.” A great deal of American (not to speak of German) academic criticism belongs to this category; and especially those theses which are written by postgraduate students and candidates for the doctor’s degree. These persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputations from well-deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity in inventing original classifications and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But now and again such students manage to produce some enlightening piece of “research” work, and _The French Revolution and the English Novel_ (Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is by Allene Gregory; and as I cannot tell from the name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I shall call him Miss.

“This study in the _tendenz_ novel was begun with the idea of paralleling Dr. Hancock’s book, _The French Revolution and the English Poets_.” That is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly academic flavour about it. The book is a “scientific” treatise; it would not have been written, so to say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an English novelist. If it dealt with the purely literary merits, which are few, of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. But its real purpose is to supply a chapter to the history of ideas, and especially Liberal political and social ideas. Many people talk as though they thought that the novel which canvasses the “problems” of sex, property, and religion were an invention of the last thirty years; and many others are under the impression that Charles Dickens was the first person to use fiction—though not, of course, the first person to employ fictions—for the promotion of legislation. Books about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are occasionally written; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given considerable notice in Mr. Brailsford’s excellent little book in the Home University Library. But, as far as my experience goes, there seem to be very few who know that England produced a century ago a whole group of novelists whose principal aim was not to “tell a straightforward story” or make the flesh creep, but to blow up the foundations of society with the gunpowder in the jam.

Miss Gregory’s book is very comprehensive. Her principal figures are Holcroft, Godwin, and Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. Holcroft, one of the most lovable figures in the history of English democracy, was the sort of man who is regarded as an obscure crank in his lifetime, then forgotten for a time, and ultimately recognized as a person of historical importance. He lived a long life, and harmed nobody in the course of it. As a stable-boy in a racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and Swift (whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must have had a local colour for him); he was afterwards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, novelist, and playwright, one of his plays being _The Road to Ruin_. When the Society for Constitutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was arrested with Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke, and it was alleged against him, as justification for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled moral as against physical force. His associates being acquitted, he was never brought to trial: there comes a point at which even a Government begins to feel it is making an ass of itself. Holcroft’s courage never weakened “when Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had recanted, and Godwin and Paine had fallen silent, and all the world seemed to have forgotten its vision of democracy.” He himself stated in terms: “Whenever I have undertaken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a specific moral purpose.” His best novels are _Hugh Trevor_ and _Anna St. Ives_. In the latter the hero, Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking service rather than self-interest as his guiding principle, remarks:

“Let men look around and deny if they can that the present
wretched system of each providing for himself instead of the
whole for the whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and
hatred. Well, well!—another century, and then....”

Just a century has passed.

Of Godwin’s novels _Caleb Williams_ is the only one that is at all read nowadays. In spite of its impossibilities of character and action, it is a very good tract, especially where it deals with the prison system. Miss Gregory’s extracts from _Caleb Williams_ might have been more profuse; but she gives interesting accounts of _St. Leon_ and _Fleetwood_. In the first of these a gentleman who possesses the philosopher’s stone breaks into long reflections on “gold _versus_ actual wealth”; in the other there are eloquent passages about the horrors of child-slavery in factories which anticipate the factory reports of a generation later, and which were so much in advance of their time that they still hold good in reference to certain of the States of America. Godwin saw the whole thing very clearly: the pale, emaciated child given the free man’s right of selling his labour at his own price in the open market and, as Godwin put it, able to earn salt to his bread at four, but unable to earn bread to his salt at forty. The placid Bage’s novels were admired by Walter Scott. The most original is _Hermsprong, or Man as he is not_, the hero of which—who enters civilized society after being brought up among the Red Indians, and quails at the change—criticizes institutions with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in _An Unsocial Socialist_.

Shelley’s _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_ are only interesting, if interesting at all, because they were written by their author. Miss Gregory ploughs through them, and also through the novels of Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. She has a very interesting chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft and the early Women’s Rights authors. I find most alluring the bare mention made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of whom I had never previously heard, who admired Napoleon enthusiastically. In 1810, according to Crabb Robinson,

“she declared she would welcome him if he invaded England
because he would do away with aristocracy and give the country
a better government.”

Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti-revolutionary novelists, especially George Walker and Charles Lucas, of _The Infernal Quixote_. Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through the medium of novels was a recognized sport then as now; and Lucas instituted an elaborate comparison between political and religious revivalists. A good bibliography rounds off a very laudable compilation which should interest all persons of subversive views and direct the reading of the curious into some very agreeable channels.

Herrick

Mr. F. W. Moorman has edited for the Oxford Press a new edition of Herrick, which should supersede all its predecessors. There is very little editorial matter; Mr. Moorman has already written a _Life_, and his introduction and notes have a purely textual reference. The text, which is as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, is based upon a collation of various divergent copies of the first edition; for Herrick appears to have hung about the printer’s making alterations whilst the sheets were going through the press. And a full list is given of variants which occur in other printed copies of some of the poems and in MSS., of which the editor records several which have not previously been dealt with.

Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisticated warbler pouring forth profuse strains of unpremeditated art may study these variants and correct himself. Mr. Moorman—I suppose he has sufficient reason, though he leaves one to guess what it is—assumes that the versions in MSS. and anthologies, etc., including those published after the _Hesperides_, are all earlier than the versions in the _Hesperides_. Now and then one is sorry that this should be so, as when the presumably earlier

_And night will come when men will swear_
_Time has spilt snow upon your haire,_

is changed into

_And time will come when you shall weare_
_Such frost and snow upon your haire._

But almost invariably the changes are improvements; and they are exceedingly numerous. Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a poem may be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of attempts at a line; and if we had more of Herrick’s original MSS. available, we should no doubt find every poem a mass of trial trips and deletions. He blotted, filed, and pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and he had the most delicate and deliberate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. This rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a craftsman and a connoisseur.

What distinguishes his best—they are so well known that I need not quote them—poems from his second best is usually that the former have some especially taking touch of tenderness. It is never very deep; even in an epitaph he is more concerned with turning it well than with the, often apocryphal, death of the person commemorated. His adorations and griefs are as light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in their way, and it is rather a slight difference in the quality of his emotion than a relative superiority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his most perfect lyrics. His strongest characteristic, one that runs through the whole body of his verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the material world. He was a connoisseur in life as in art. His admired record of the “liquefaction” of Julia’s silks is characteristic of him. “O how that glittering taketh me!” he might have said of a thousand other things. He looked at colours and felt surfaces like a connoisseur; he tasted substances like an epicure tasting wines. He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses and violets, tulips, lilies, marigolds, cherryblossoms, virgins’ skins, jet, ivory, amber, and gums. There is nothing romantic about him, and nothing dim; all things are equally vivid and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than other things. The moon and cream are both white—he will compare his lady’s cheek to either indifferently or to both in a sentence; he relishes the loveliness of each and he drinks each, with exquisite pleasure, out of the same sized liqueur glass. Few other writers give one so keen a contact with the beauties of the physical world. But it is usually their sensuous appeal that is registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal, but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a thoroughgoing pagan.

His capacity for conveying vivid impressions of the physical was not invariably employed upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him compose those offensive epigrams which some bashful editors exclude from their collections. It is not to be supposed that he really wished to vent his spleen against Lungs, Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous, butts; though if his efforts in this direction got about in his Devonshire village and people took them to apply to themselves it is no wonder that the natives behaved towards him, as he complained, like surly savages. “Upon Batt” is one of the mildest of them:

_Batt he gets children, not for love to reare ’em,_
_But out of hope his wife might die to beare ’em._

A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is “Upon Lungs”:

_Lungs (as some say) ne’er sits him down to eate_
_But that his breath do’s Fly-blow all the meate._

He tells—I refrain from the grossest ones—of another gentleman whose eyes were so sticky in the morning that his wife had to lick them open; of another whose raw eyes would supply an angler with a day’s bait; and of another (very parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not astonishing that when the “sprightly Spartanesse” appeared to him in dream she remarked:

_Hence, Remove,_
_Herrick thou art too coorse for love._

But as one goes on through these things one is too amused to be disgusted; one wonders what on earth the man is going to think of next. And that was the idea. He had compressed all the fragrance of the spring into short lyrics—how much concentrated beastliness could he get into a couplet? He had rivalled Horace and Anacreon in one line; could he rival Martial in another? You may picture him making these things—sitting at a table in the sun outside the rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social tankard with his favourite pig, and working and working at these singular concoctions until there came the thrill of the artist who knows he has produced a perfect cameo.

His outlook and methods being such, it is not surprising that when he gave up his “unbaptized Rhimes” and took to “Noble Numbers” he was comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neatness do not go far in religious verse, and the congenital materialism of Herrick’s imagery sometimes produced the most grotesque effects.

_God is all forepart, for we never see_
_Any part backward in the Deitie._

An epigram which might have had some point if applied to a man is merely vapid when applied to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in

_I crawle, I creep; my Christ I come_
_To thee, for curing Balsamum,_

and

_Lord, I confesse, that thou alone are able_
_To purifie this my Augean stable;_
_Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope,_
_Yet if thy Bloud not wash me, there’s no hope._

Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. But it doesn’t much matter what he was not; what he was is one of the greatest small masters in the history of verse.

The Muse in Liquor

In former times men wrote about drinking without the slightest self-consciousness. Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, sang the praises of what nobody in those days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer “bright wine” was as indispensable a commodity as bread: no home could be complete without it. If Anacreon and Horace were rather more sophisticated about it and tasted their liquor with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they still had no idea that there was anything morally questionable about drink. So onwards to mediæval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech laid it down that if a man has fainted from hunger one should

“pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and twitch his
whiskers; when he is better give him some bread broken in wine,”

there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and protest that to inject alcoholic poisons into a debilitated frame was about the worst thing you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably respectable. “The introduction of wine and viticulture,” says Mr. A. L. Simon in his history of the _Wine Trade in England_,

“is coeval with the introduction of the Christian religion. As
the numbers of clergy increased, greater supplies of wine were
required, so vines were planted at home, and a considerable
foreign wine trade came into being.”

The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were largely composed by theological students, and it was (at least I am of that party which maintains that it was) an archdeacon of the English Church who wrote one of the two best lyrics of the kind that this island has produced—that perfect song in which he expresses the hope that he shall meet his latter end in a hostelry and that some one should hold a pottle-pot before his dying eyes:

_Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori_
_“Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”_

Our other great song has also been attributed to an ecclesiastic, Bishop Still.

But if a modern bishop wrote a song about hot whisky, he would get into hot water. Times have changed. When a modern English king wants to do the popular thing, he takes the pledge; when Henry III wanted to, he gave his old wine to the poor—the gift was not so noble as it sounds, for in his day old wine was bad, owing to the lack of glass bottles and well-made casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) about the ale-swallowing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on the safe side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted herself. Her Ministers had a job keeping her supplied with beer. When she was on one of her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote to Lord Burleigh:

“There is not one drop of good drink for her. We were fain to
send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale
was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to
drink it.”

But since that time a question of principle has arisen, and the changed attitude of society towards drink has been accompanied by a corresponding change in the tone of those who write in praise of drink. They used to be natural and expository; they are now self-conscious and on the defensive.

I note the transition in a volume (1862) called _How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion_, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and the Planter’s House, St. Louis. It is an ingenious book and a suitable companion to its shelf-neighbour, _The Maltworm’s Vade-mecum_, a guide to the public-houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a contemporary of his brother connoisseur, it would never have occurred to him to write a preface apologizing for the mere compilation of such a book:

“Whether it is judicious that mankind should continue to
indulge in such things, or whether it would be wiser to abstain
from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province
to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We
simply contend that a relish for ‘social drinks’ is universal;
that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States
than in any other country in the world, and that he, therefore,
who proposes to impart to those drinks not only the most
palatable but the most wholesome characteristics of which they
may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor.”

You see the uneasiness coming in; the devotee is conscious of a disapproving eye. And what was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked to-day, when a considerable percentage of the population looks askance at a man who has been seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our priests and half our politicians denounce fermented drinks as an invention of the Devil. The results of this are seen in the twentieth-century Bacchanal’s writings. He is on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in praise of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, concerned with dispraise of the opponents of drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks as against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon simply would not have understood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in dreamy content. Whenever they take up a pot of beer they have to march out and drink it defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is almost as if they knew they were the champions of a lost, though noble, cause; and felt that at any moment they might be called upon to Die in the Last Tankard.

This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. Chesterton’s volume _Wine, Water, and Song_. Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing abstemious American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and grocers—who, lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have never been known

_To crack a bottle of fish sauce_
_Or stand a man a cheese._

But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the better: for the old material of drinking-songs was getting threadbare. To my thinking, these songs—most of them appeared in _The Flying Inn_, and it was a pity that they were omitted from the volume of collected _Poems_ recently issued—are amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, and some of Mr. Chesterton’s very best work. You can read them aloud to other people and very seldom come across a stilted or obscure phrase which makes you feel sheepish to say it. But, more than that, _Wine and Water_, _The Good Rich Man_, _The Song against Songs_, and the two poems on the English Road are the sort of infectiously musical things that one learns by heart without knowing one has done it.

_Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,_
_He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,_
_And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was
whale,_
_But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
sail,_
_And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,_
_“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”_

Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this or _The Road to Roundabout_ (which is about the best of the lot) he does not automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability, singing it?

£5 Misspent

Any one who is interested in what nobody has yet asked us to call the British language must have felt apprehensive if he read the correspondence recently printed in the _Times_ on the subject of a synonym for the word “Colonial.” It appears that this word is “strongly objected to” in the—er—Dominions, and especially in Canada. The Central Committee of the Overseas Club therefore started a Missing Word Competition. It offered a prize of £5 for the best synonym and “members have been most prolific in their ideas.” The examples given of their fecundity are, however, so malformed as to lead to the hope that in future they will practise an intellectual Malthusianism. The Chairman of the Club says that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, Britonial, Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Empirean, Transmarine (why not Ultramarine?), Away-Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, MacBriton, and Britson. What those which he does not publish were like one can only surmise; but no doubt Ap-Briton, O’Briton, Britidian, Britkinson, Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and Heptathalassian were among them. And so, possibly, was Oversear.

It needs must be that new words should come; and one should not cry woe against those through whom they come. We are constantly inventing or importing words to convey ideas or shades of feeling for which we previously had no exact means of expression. We also necessarily acquire new words for new objects, such as chemicals and machines. When men made the telephone they had to call it something; and the same thing applied to the omnibus. We can frequently trace new words to their inventors. But we may safely say that successful new words are seldom “made up” cold-bloodedly merely for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a word half-accidentally, developing it usually from some word already familiar; or a philosopher or scientist constructs one out of fragments of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin mixed, because he has a new object to describe. The process is going on continually. The rivals “airman” and “aviator” (somebody once asked if you could call a miner a “talpiator”) are at present[2] fighting it out in the Press and on men’s tongues; and if some central authority is in the future established over the heads of the sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word “supernational,” now being bruited about, may come into use to describe it. We may get in time, too, an inclusive word which will imply “citizen of the British Empire,” covering both Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will result from a public competition.

When it comes it will come because some one person starts using it and others take to it. And when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new word as a substitute for an old one in general use, I think it most unlikely that a group of persons such as the Overseas Club could persuade the race to abandon a universally used word like “Colonial” for some £5 prize word merely because hypersensitive people think that the word used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. “Colonial” is very strongly entrenched. One can just understand how the Americans have come to use the abominable word “Britisher” instead of the ancient “Briton”; for it falls more trippingly off the tongue. But “Colonial” is a most liquid, easy, and euphonious word. If it is ever superseded, it will be so because some other word comes in with the larger connotation to which I have referred, a word which is bound to come into being when we cease to think of the Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Colonies on the other, but think of it as a federation of equal and distinct units.

It is a pity that people take so seriously the fact that when the words “Colonies” and “Colonial” were first used by us they had certain associations. For it is evident that to the vast majority of our countrymen they are entirely divested of them. Whatever one’s habits, one automatically thinks when the word “Colonial” is mentioned, not of a humble emigrant who wants shepherding, but of a person who is the very quintessence of independence. Any one who has even the most superficial acquaintance with the language knows that words can lose their old associations utterly. If, for example, I were arrested and charged for alleging, in a public speech, one of our Royal Princes to be “a silly knave,” I should not find the magistrate very sympathetic if I said I was using the words in a Shakespearean (which in this case would be equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I merely meant to call him “a simple boy.” Similarly, where an object changes its form its name changes its connotation. If one could talk of a bottle to a mediæval ancestor, he would think of something made of leather; to-day a bottle is essentially something made of glass. If we always wanted a new term directly a new association was created, there would be no end to the process; we should have to have a Ministry of Constructive Philology always at work. After all, Charleston was named after an English king when the North American plantations were very subordinate indeed; and Melbourne after a member of the British House of Lords, an institution of which few modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, saving the Overseas Club’s reverence, we may as well, for the time being, stick to “Colonial.”

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won.—S. E.

Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore

Handling the Porcupine of Avon is always ticklish work. When Mr. George Moore, after containing himself for years, at last wrote to explain that it was he, and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who discovered the fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were weak because they were written for boy-actors, it was only natural that another correspondent should show that Mr. Moore had been forestalled by an eighteenth-century Frenchman. Mr. Moore’s remark about the boy-actors was, however, merely a passing observation in a lecture in French (published in the _Revue Bleue_ in 1910) which is an important document in the movement against what Mr. Shaw calls Bardolatry.

“He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” Thus Emerson; and a few generations of such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed by a reaction. For a hundred years we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and swallowed him whole; a man has even written a book on _The Messiahship of Shakespeare_. And of all his powers, that of creating an infinite variety of female character has been perhaps more enthusiastically praised than any other. The professors have given us treatises on Shakespeare’s Feminine Types; and the less erudite public has been deluged with Posies from Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls. “O Nature! O Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?” That is typical. Dr. Lewes, one of the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels and adores, and asks women to do the same. “This piece,” he says of _Henry VIII_,

“this piece and its female characters should indeed inspire
women with profound gratitude towards a poet who represents
a queen and a heroine who is above all things an excellent
woman, displaying in the midst of frightful trials all the best
womanly qualities, thus proving that a noble, pure feminine
heart is the home of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and
purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been paid to the sex
than by Shakespeare in his presentation of Catherine of Aragon.”

And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best-known English book on these women. Dare any one apply the epithet “clever” to Portia, “this heavenly compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness”? As for Lady Macbeth, with her “Gothic grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colours,” even she is not to be insulted by comparison with other villainesses. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra had been mentioned, but

“would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel
murderess and unnatural mother with Lady Macbeth? _Lady Macbeth
herself would certainly shrink from the approximation._”

One _has_ sometimes felt that her ladyship was probably president of the local branches of the G.F.S. and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association.

There was nothing of this sort about Mr. George Moore’s lecture. It opened with a strong protest against the “vast clamour” of Shakespeare’s worshippers:

“One might take them for a gathering of negro Methodists in
a chapel, each one straining his lungs to out-bellow his
neighbour, in order to attract the Almighty’s attention. Is it
that the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to them?
At any rate, the madness increases daily, and, if the cult
of Jahveh should happen to decay in England, I should not be
surprised were they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant throne
in the heavens.”

After this engaging beginning he went on to the general contention that neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a real woman. The Renaissance was interested in women only as queens or odalisques, and Shakespeare at most made a few delicious silhouettes of women. His men were another matter. “Hamlet is the secret thought of all men”; and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with Tolstoi, he reaffirmed Tolstoi’s statement that “Falstaff is the most universal and original thing in Shakespeare.” “Hamlet is the hieroglyphic and symbol of the intellect; Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh.” But Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned with “the eternal masculine.”

But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare has no female Hamlet and no female Falstaff; is it not arguable that then the case for the superiority of Shakespeare’s males over his females is very much less strong? It would be absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject; but personally I doubt whether any one who cannot get inside the minds of most (though many would exempt Heine’s “ancient Parisienne” Cleopatra, and one or two more) of Shakespeare’s women will get inside the minds of most of his men either. When Professor Dowden said that he had “edited a whole play for love of Imogen” the remark (if he heard it) may have sounded strange to Mr. Moore; but would he understand, either, any one editing a whole play for love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the Duke of _Twelfth Night_, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or Henry V? It is possible to hold the view that Shakespeare “put himself” into a few characters and observed the others “from the outside,” making them most interesting when they are most markedly what are called “character parts.” Personally, though I should certainly know Hamlet or Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, I don’t think there are many other of Shakespeare’s characters whom I should recognize if I encountered them clothed in other than their traditional garments. But I do not think it is easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, his women are less carefully and sympathetically drawn than his men—Lady Macbeth than Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than Anthony, Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than Orlando—or, still more, that he was not interested in women and regarded them in a casual lazy way as decorations. Shakespeare’s politics were Heaven knows what; and he may not necessarily have drawn Portia as an argument for the admission of women to the Inns of Court. But one would have imagined that if ever there were a writer who treated women and men on a footing of complete equality, and even perhaps elevated women’s moral superiority to an indefensible pitch, it was he. If his female characters are not living human beings it is certainly not because he despised them. He gave them plenty of virtue, wit, courage, and will, and an ample share of the stage; it is, with all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest that he thought of them merely as properties.

The recent correspondence sent me back to Mr. Moore’s paper, and I read it with admiration for the fruits of what he called a month’s rather exhausting liaison with the French language. But something about it—perhaps it was the catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate criticism—seemed familiar. I have tracked it; here also Mr. Moore has been anticipated. It was the late Max O’Rell—it is almost like being anticipated by Charley’s Aunt—who remarked that

“The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most part slaves or
fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a sort of submissive
odalisque, Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose.”

It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about Shakespeare.

Moving a Library