Chapter XVIII: Oliver’s Lecture on Wordsworth

The next public appearance which Oliver made was in delivering a lecture on Wordsworth in the town-hall, which was readily lent to any respectable lecturer, native or foreign, who undertook to enlighten or please the townspeople. Courses of lectures were not uncommon in Friarton, though more frequently delivered in winter than at any other season, but no tradesman had ever before stood at the lecturer’s desk improvised for the occasion.

Oliver could bring himself to read a lecture as he could sing a song. He had read prize essays before an audience at once more critical and a good deal more aggressive. Though Friarton did not form an exception to the great rule of a man’s not being a prophet in his own country, he was not likely to be bidden speak out and turn over his leaf by the most sarcastic of his fellow-citizens.

After much reflection, Oliver had come to the conclusion that a lecture from him might be useful and acceptable, and he had wished to give it at once that he might not interfere with the courses of lectures which Mr. Fremantle and others were wont to read to select circles, generally with some distinctly charitable or purely intellectual object in view, from November to February.

Besides, Oliver was reluctant to let the autumn pass without an attempt to rouse those of his neighbours with whom he had cast in his lot to take their share of the wealth which was free to them. After his experience at the annual excursion, and at the Friarton floricultural and horticultural show, where it was evident so much energy was spent on raising Brobdingnag cabbages and roses, he suspected that the book of nature, with all its higher teaching, was closed to his class even beyond other classes. He wished to do what he could to show how much good as well as beauty existed in the world simply for the taking, and how deeply and vitally humanity was interested in the grand and terrible, and fair and sweet framework around it. The pleasant little episode of the discovery he had made in Miss Nancy Barr had influenced him to a certain extent, but there must have been another less purely public-spirited inducement muddling Oliver’s brains, or else, young man of dreams and aspirations as he was—and to such an individual it is hard to say what misconception is too grotesque and outrageous—he could not have gone so wide of the mark as to choose Wordsworth of all writers to fire over the heads of his fellow-tradesmen. He might more judiciously have selected the most difficult question of the most difficult play of Shakespeare, the problem of the madness or non-madness of Hamlet, the theory of the morality of Timon of Athens, and offered it to those excellent people as a nut to crack. And Oliver ought to have known, and did know, in a form of knowledge undigested and unapplied—as it appeared in this instance—that while ballad literature is the first conscious intellectual effort of a people, in genuine old ballads the references to nature are few and simple. It is only when man is unconsciously in a state of nature, or when he is in an advanced stage of culture, that he looks into nature as into a mirror, and sees all humanity and the God of humanity reflected in it.

The truth was, Oliver happened to be a young man in more than in reforming zeal, and when he used Wordsworth as a weapon, he had, whether he knew it or not, a private as well as a public end in his mind, for which he burned to employ the philosophy of the chief of the Lake school.

When Oliver offered himself as lecturer, he was well enough received. Mr. Fremantle and the rest of Oliver’s old patrons were positively gracious in volunteering their support. Possibly, the manner in which they had first taken up and then dropped their former _protégé_ for his fidelity to trade, had left a little compunction in their minds which rendered them all the blander when an opportunity presented itself for patronising him again without compromising their own principles; though such jars occurred, as when Mr. Wright, intending to be complimentary, suggested that Oliver might lecture in his university hood and gown, to which the future lecturer answered bluntly, he saw no good in that, he would as soon show himself in a cap and apron.

The tradespeople, for once, were not offended that one of themselves should do something which all the others could not do, and which they were, therefore, generally pleased to taboo as out of their way. Happily, they regarded Oliver’s purpose as a vindication of their right to do as their customers did, to be as good as they were, nay, a deal better. Because they were the great shopkeeping class with its distinguishing virtues. The tradespeople were at once the thews and sinews and the salt of the nation. They supplied alike its necessaries and luxuries. There was ten times more capital spread over their tills and banking accounts than was to be found in the pockets and cheque-books of their professional brethren.

The shopkeepers were the pillars of the pure dissenting churches. It was largely by the votes of the lower middle-class that members got into Parliament, so that it was by the shopkeepers—as they were tempted to boast, without any idea of being profane—that ‘Kings reigned, and princes dispensed justice.’ The shopkeeping ranks of England, with their vigour, their substance, their stake in the prosperity of the country, their stolid but supreme self-assertion, far excelled in power (let the world be thankful) the brute force of the great unwashed.

The tradespeople of Friarton accepted Oliver as their champion for the time being, and prepared to go _en masse_ to hear him, in order to show he was their lecturer. He was not to have a mere handful of an audience, not even of the out-and-out gentry, but of the shabby-genteel, such as Mr. Fremantle was content to address. Oliver was to air his abilities and their college training, demonstrating that he was as far before a schoolmaster-parson like Fremantle in profane scholarship, as the shopkeepers’ pastor, Mr. Holland, was in advance of the clerk in holy orders in spiritual gifts.

Old Dadd proved nearly the solitary defaulter. ‘I make a point, Mr. Oliver, of attending no lectures save those in the chapel on Sunday evenings,’ he explained. ‘Yes, yes, I understand you perfectly, sir, that you are to speak after shop hours, but that is the very time when I compare my invoices, make myself acquainted with the prices and read anything else I care to see in the papers. Lectures ain’t in my line, and I am too old a boy to take up with new courses, I leave ’em to the young people. Mrs. Dadd—not that she is so much younger, as, like the rest of the ladies, she would have us believe—and my son Jack will represent the family for its credit and yours.’

‘If you care to see me, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Dadd, with her propensity to make herself scarce.

‘Of course he does,’ interrupted Jack; ‘even an old woman counts. You can thump with your umbrellar at the applause. Trust us for crying you up to the skies, Constable,’ was the cheerful assurance of Jack, who had never heard the verb _claquer_, or guessed its effect in metropolitan theatres.

‘If you’ll listen to me—that is all I want,’ said Oliver.

‘Oh! if it’s the independent dodge, and standing on your own merits, you’re after, we can be as quiet as mice,’ said Jack, a little offended at the indifferent reception of his pledge.

‘My dear, we are the most highly favoured of mortals,’ Mrs. Hilliard told Catherine at dinner.

‘Are we?’ asked Catherine, sceptically, looking at the partridge on her plate, as if she lamented its early, piteous fate, and did not know how to eat it.

‘My great-cousin Oliver—his surname should have been Cromwell, not Constable—will deign to hold forth for our benefit in the town-hall on Tuesday evening.’

‘What about?’ enquired Catherine without much interest, still picking at her partridge as if she saw it flying over the stubble.

‘How should I know? On the duty of girls taking bread-sauce and pegging—not picking—at the food on their plates. I don’t know what will become of you, child; you despise bread-sauce, you are too fine for mint-sauce, and as for onion-sauce—to which I am base enough to incline, though I do it in strict privacy, as you will bear me witness, and avoid all respectable company for the rest of the day—I wonder you can sit in the same room with it and me.’

‘I am not fine,’ denied Catherine; then, returning to the charge with a gleam of animation, ‘I should like to know what Oliver Constable is going to lecture upon.’

‘I should say on the model trader, whose biography has been so often written; the poor boy who finds a rusty horse-shoe, sells it for old iron, and dies the possessor of the most perfect racing stud in the kingdom.’

‘That would not suit his views,’ objected Catherine.

‘I dare say I have spoilt the example,’ said Mrs. Hilliard innocently; ‘and when one thinks of it, Oliver would have the boy gathering horse-shoes till he was grey-headed, though in the interval he should find time and opportunity to learn to read, clean himself, and use a knife and fork. Of course he must take to moralising on the first artificer in brass and iron, and find illustrations of the work of his successors in the sword, the plough, and the pen—steel pens would come in so nicely to finish the peroration. I should not be surprised, after all, if the lecturer were to let the model trader alone—I am sure he deserves a little rest—and give us the natural history of a bit of bread, beginning with seed corn, and ending with—it ought not to be a slice of loaf, a macaroon is a much higher and more artistic product of the oven,’ said Mrs. Hilliard gravely, while she inspected carefully through her eye-glass a plate of macaroons on the sideboard. ‘It will be a revelation to Fan, who is said to live under the impression that loaves grow somewhere, out of sight, behind the shop, doubtless, as the bread-fruit tree flourishes in the South Sea Islands. You know she is too good a Christian to fail to be aware that manna only fell from the skies for a time, to the Jews, when Moses was leading them through the wilderness.’

‘I don’t need such enlightenment, and I shall not go,’ said Catherine.

‘What, not to hear Oliver exalt his vocation, and establish satisfactorily that, without bread, we should all be cannibals again soon, I suppose; for what with pleuro-pneumonia and _rinderpest_, there would not be nearly enough animals left for us, and of those which were left, we could not depend upon their wholesomeness and appetising attractions. I should not like to try dogs and rats and mice—not if I went to China to acquire the proper taste.’

‘I don’t care for exaggeration,’ said Catherine, with her customary candour.

‘Neither in sense, nor in nonsense, which means neither in the master baker, nor in me. Well, I did hear Oliver was going to be quite commonplace, and serve up some poet.’

‘Which?’ enquired Catherine, with more curiosity than she had yet displayed.

‘Wordsworth. He is going to let us see what a primrose is when it is more than a yellow primrose by the river’s brim and at the cottage door, when it is in a spring bonnet. Why did Wordsworth not give the last important position? It must have existed in his day, though crewel work had not yet been revived. At present, I am certain our principal considerations in reference to primroses, are how they will look on the borders of table-covers, or on the pockets and bibs of aprons.’

‘Speak for yourself, Louisa,’ said Catherine, roused to indignation as her cousin had meant her to be. ‘Some of us have still the grace to think of primroses wet with dew, beneath green hedgerows, under April skies. But I wish he had not chosen Wordsworth; I think he is a mistake.’

‘The greatest mistake possible, my dear.’ Mrs. Hilliard confirmed the opinion with alacrity. ‘Quite an anachronism. He ought to have been a typical burgher, like those Flemish cloth-workers in the middle ages.’

Catherine stared for a second with wide-open blue eyes. ‘Oh!’ she drew a long breath; ‘I did not mean Oliver Constable, I was speaking of Wordsworth. Of course he wrote some very beautiful things,’ she continued gravely. ‘Surely his greatest opponent would not willingly lose his ’Ode to Immortality.’

‘I cannot dignify myself by calling myself a poet’s greatest opponent, I am such a mere mortal. And I confess I never read the ode; the less loss to me, that I am sure I should not understand a word of it,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, with undisturbed complacency, as she helped herself to grapes.

Catherine was not listening. She was getting more and more into the habit of not attending to a great deal of the conversation around her, and looking as if she were speaking to invisible hearers. ‘I could never speak of Wordsworth as Macaulay and Madame Bunsen wrote,’ she went on in answer to her own thoughts, as if they had been audible remarks. ‘Indeed, I cannot forgive them for it.’

‘Catherine, have you forgotten your catechism?’ remonstrated Mrs. Hilliard; ‘and I dare say poor Macaulay and Madame Bunsen did not understand Wordsworth any more than I should have done.’

Catherine paid no heed to the interruption, and showed that spoken soliloquy is still natural to some people. ‘Yet I believe there is a great deal of truth in the criticism that Wordsworth sacrificed his powers to an intellectual hobby, and brought down poetry to tedious, if rather fine prose, by insisting on idealising the tritest, most wretchedly dull subjects, though I suppose he would have said nothing is either trite or dull when rightly looked at. Upon the whole I prefer Crabbe. There was method in his madness. He was more dramatic, if he idealised less.’

‘I wish there was method in your madness, and that you idealised less. Do you hear, Catherine? Will you have grapes?’

‘Yes, thanks. I am going to take back my word, Louisa; I should like to hear Oliver Constable’s lecture.’

‘Of course you would. All the world, including the great shopkeepers, will be there. I, for one, would not miss the lecture on any account, though I expect no more edification than I shall get from observing Mrs. Fremantle looking suavely over the heads of the Polleys and Dadds, while every rustle of Mrs. Polley’s Sunday gown will deliver the challenge, “I pay my way. I have as good a right to be here as any of you. I can do without your custom if you like to take it away; my word! you will miss me more than I shall miss you. Besides, Oliver Constable is our man.” I say, Catherine, it cannot be that Oliver Constable is flirting with one of those Polley girls? People say so, you know. Now, I can stand a good deal, but one must stop somewhere, and I really could not swallow that. The Constables are my own relations, and Oliver and Fan have been educated like other people. Though they are eccentric, they are presentable, and don’t take advantage of kinship. But imagine what it would be to have Mrs. Polley claiming me for a family connection, when, of course, I should have to admit the claim, while her daughter addressed me as ‘cousin’. That would try my liberal-mindedness.’

Catherine showed herself a little startled when this suggestion was deliberately made to her, but she looked it steadily in the face. ‘Why not,’ she asked quietly a moment afterwards, ‘if the couple suit each other? Oliver Constable must know, so far as it refers to himself. Perhaps the Polleys are not so much worse than other girls.’

In making the last despondent reflection, she was influenced by the recollection of nieces of Mrs. Wright’s, whom Catherine Hilliard had encountered lately, and whom she was accustomed to style to herself ‘low-minded girls,’ after she found that they divided their time pretty equally between dressing, taking their meals, and playing lawn-tennis. ‘Are you liberal-minded, Louisa?’ Catherine began to speculate next.

‘Don’t cross-question me,’ cried Mrs. Hilliard; ‘I won’t have one of my own dining-room chairs converted into a witness-box. There are liberal-mindedness and liberal-mindedness. The French, the wittiest nation in Europe, invented that splendid definition. I am ready to depose solemnly that I never professed to be a chartist or a communist or a red republican—nothing of the kind. I only call myself a friendly easy-going sort of woman, who would not condescend to turn her back on her kindred, and who could not do without her neighbours to laugh with and laugh at. Therefore she was not disposed to weed out her visiting list at Friarton to a few straggling aspirants to gentility. But if Oliver Constable commit a marriage with one of the Miss Polleys, I shall turn my coat and become as exclusive as Mrs. Wright. Her father was actually a fashionable London physician, who drove about in a pill-box and attended peers and aldermen for their gout and fine ladies and citizenesses for their nerves. Think how his daughter has to condescend to us country clodhoppers! By the way, I may as well turn my coat as you take back your word. I am glad, my love, that you do anything so nineteenth century and fallible—so unlike a vestal virgin or a _précieuse ridicule_.’

Oliver was taking one step to which Fan had no objection.

Harry Stanhope, with a curious echo of old and young Dadd, told Oliver: ‘I say, old man, lectures ain’t in my way, as you know, but I’ll see you through yours.’ Agneta also expressed her full intention of being present. But as it happened, when the evening came, no Stanhope put in an appearance. They had been decoyed away by some prospect of greater entertainment elsewhere. Agneta admitted afterwards that she had left the schoolroom too lately to relish lectures, any more than Harry cared for them.

But in spite of the Stanhopes’ desertion, if Oliver’s sole or even principal intention had been to bring together the upper and lower middle classes of Friarton, and unite them superficially, by a common bond of interest for one evening, he might have been satisfied. But unfortunately, his aspirations went far beyond these modest results.

The lecturer began stiffly with involuntary bodily contortions which monopolised much of the attention, and were fruitful in small titters and grins from the ’Mily Polleys and Jack Dadds among the audience. Mrs. Hilliard neither tittered nor grinned. She looked preternaturally sedate, but her grey eyes danced under the great flat expanse of her forehead.

Catherine Hilliard leant back in her chair perfectly unstirred to mirth. Her hands were loosely clasped in her lap. A shade of expectation kindled a little light in the face, which under its warmly tinted hair looked like

That orbèd maiden,
White—fire-laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,

walking in the night, or a flower blossoming in the shade. Yet Catherine was not without a perception of comedy. She could laugh when she could find anything laughable to her; the misfortune was, this occurred seldom. For her sense of the ridiculous had not, by any means, outgrown and dwarfed all her other faculties—a result which may be found not only in old court fools and in many of the village imbeciles of every generation, but also in a large number of men and women who have special pretensions to wisdom and wit.

When Oliver warmed with his subject, his gestures grew less and less awkward, the tendency to grimace disappeared, and something of the natural dignity of the man shone forth from his goodly physique.

But alas! his audience did not warm with him, though the want of sympathy, while it went to his heart, had not the power to damp his enthusiasm so as to rob him of the advantage he derived from it. As Oliver discoursed on the nobility and beauty which underlie all God’s creation and are never utterly absent, however foully or meanly marred in his fearful and wonderful handiwork man; as he bade his listeners recognise the high heroism of a rude old Westmoreland shepherd; the essential refinement of a bareheaded, barefooted, Highland girl; as he urged them to examine and ascertain for themselves the exquisite perfection of much they might be tempted to overlook, or undervalue as trifles light as air, or as possessions too universal to be of the slightest value, gaping impatience and scorn took the place of titters and grins, with few exceptions.

‘Did you ever hear such radical rant—praising them pedlars and leech gatherers and the whole band of wandering vagabonds?’ Mrs. Polley was moved to whisper to the daughter next her, during a pause in the selection of some of the quotations with which the lecture was graced. ‘I would not buy a reel of cotton from the one, or trust a silver spoon within a mile of t’other of them tramps. I would never have evened Oliver Constable to be guilty of this. I declare I begin to be frightened of this here young man. Mark my words, Ann, he’ll not stop where he has begun. It is fair impudence to deliver such a lecture to well-to-do, respectable people. As for his trash about birds’ eggs and daisies, why it is fit only for a parcel of children! He’ll be proposing Polley and me to go a bird-nesting and threading of daisy-chains next.’

‘I would not say it to everybody, because Constable is a personal friend,’ said Jack Dadd with ostentatious loyalty, ‘but I must say I prefer a lecture in the chapel from the Dutchman when he’s sending us all to pot. We mayn’t take the whole in, and it ain’t agreeable—exactly, to be called bad names, though it’s what we bargain for from a parson, but when he comes it strong and hot it is more rousing. If this is what you call poetry, ’Liza, you and Constable may keep it to yourselves and welcome.’

‘But this ain’t what I call poetry,’ protested ’Liza, doubly wounded; ‘I never read anything like it. No poetry I ever heard of, or cared for, could be about common old women and idiot boys. I have read about outlaws and brigands, but they are out of the common as well as knights and troubadours; I must say for myself, I always preferred lords and ladies. As for lovers—and everybody knows most poetry is on the tender passion—’ simpered ’Liza, ‘who would stop to hear how an old married couple—like father and mother for instance, only a great deal worse when you come to low clanjamphrey of weavers and shepherds, get on or fall out? They are married for better, for worse, and must pull together, and there’s an end of them.’

‘Don’t object to father just now,’ said ’Mily, ‘for if he had not fallen asleep—small blame to him—and snored so that I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth to keep myself from laughing right out every time he struck in, I should either have fallen asleep myself, or I could not have sat to the end of the drone. Call this cleverness and the good of a university education! Then I am glad I ain’t clever in the same way and that I have not even been away at a boarding-school, though I used to tease mother to send me from home—just for the name of the thing. I should have hated the learning and snapped my fingers in the schoolmistress’s face, I dare say, before I was done.’

These open objections were the echo of the prevailing sentiments of a large proportion of the audience. With regard to another section there was decorous respect for Wordsworth. Public opinion has changed since the criticism in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ was penned. Mrs. Hilliard was singular in her freedom of speech—most people pretended or tried hard to admire the poet, at least, while they strangled their tell-tale yawns and came to the conclusion that Oliver Constable was casting pearls before swine, the swine being the herd of tradespeople. Such hearers sat through Oliver’s lecture with a commendable appearance of attention. They knew what was due both to him and themselves, not to say to Wordsworth, in their relative positions. Only a fine sprinkling of choice sympathisers—turning up sometimes, like Miss Nancy Barr, when least expected—responded to the lecturer with all their hearts.

But Catherine Hilliard was not in the last slender detachment any more than in the others. She did not go with the multitude. Neither could she be converted in an hour, though she realised that Oliver woke up to his office, burst some of his bonds, and ended by lecturing and speaking well. Certainly her lips fell a little apart in wistful appreciation, and delicate light and colour came into the subdued pallor of her face when he quoted

Lo! five blue eggs lie gleaming there,

and called the daisy

A queen in crown of rubies drest;

but she lacked full humanity, and could not follow him in his fellow-feeling with Betty Foy and Peter Bell. She still thought Wordsworth had made a huge mistake in his vocation, and that Oliver Constable had capped him with a blunder as gross. Even if he would choose Wordsworth, why did he not read from ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle,’ or ‘The White Doe of Rylstone,’ as more fit for a popular assembly than the ‘Ode to Immortality’ could be? No; Macaulay might be deplorably intolerant in recording—were it for his private satisfaction—the judgment he had formed, and Madame Bunsen might be singularly inappreciative where such a woman was concerned, but there was ground for their censure though none for their contempt. And Oliver Constable would have done far better to have selected one of the ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’—even with its classic story and unfamiliar names—for Friarton ears.