By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects

‘A sporting parson, good at whist,A preaching sportsman, good at gateways;’

and, again:

‘A lady who once wrote a book,And one of whom a book’s been written…One blonde whose fortune is her face,And one whose face caught her a fortune.’

As for the daily round:

‘We dance, we flirt, we shoot, we ride,Our host’s a veritable Nimrod:We fish the river’s silver tide,’

and so on. There are, of course, the county balls, and the fancy balls, and the private theatricals, and what not, all of them celebrated by the inevitable Praed. It was at the county ball that he saw ‘the belle of the ballroom’:

‘There, when the sounds of flute and fiddleGave signal sweet in that old hallOf hands across and down the middle.’

It was to the county ball, as well as to the theatricals at Fustian Hall, that Praed’s ‘Clarence’ was so prettily invited. As for fancy balls:

‘Oh, a fancy ball’s a strange affair!Made up of silks and leathers,Light heads, light heels, false hearts, false hair,Pins, paint, and ostrich feathers.’

Of inland watering-places, Bath and Cheltenham have been perhaps most often poetized. Bath found its vates sacer in the author of the ‘New Bath Guide’; it has rarely found one since; its glories have virtually departed. It was at Cheltenham —

‘Where one drinks one’s fillOf folly and cold water’ —

that Praed met his ‘Partner.’ And C. S. Calverley has told us how

‘Year by year do Beauty’s daughtersIn the sweetest gloves and shawlsTroop to taste the Chattenham waters,And adorn the Chattenham balls.‘Nulla non donanda lauruIs that city: you could not,Placing England’s map before you,Light on a more favoured spot.’

Praed has a poem called ‘Arrivals at a Watering-Place,’ but it is not one of the most successful of his efforts. Nor have seaside places in general been made the subject of very excellent verse. Brighton is the one exception. Of that ‘favoured spot,’ James Smith, of ‘Rejected Addresses’ fame, was, perhaps, the first to write flatteringly. ‘Long,’ he declared —

‘Long shalt thou laugh thy enemies to scorn,Proud as Phœnicia, queen of watering-places!Boys yet unbreech’d, and virgins yet unborn,On thy bleak downs shall tan their blooming faces.’

The prophecy, one need not say, has been amply fulfilled. And the poets still conspire to sing the praises of ‘Old Ocean’s bauble, glittering Brighton.’ Everybody remembers the stirring exhortation of Mortimer Collins:

‘If you approve of flirtations, good dinners,Seascapes divine, which the merry winds whiten;Nice little saints, and still nicer young sinners,Winter at Brighton!’

Nor has Mr. Ashby-Sterry proved himself at all less enthusiastic. Brighton in November, he says, ‘is what one should remember’:

‘If spirits you would lighten,Consult good Doctor Brighton,And swallow his prescriptions and abide by his decree;If nerves be weak or shaken,Just try a week with Bacon;His physic soon is taken at our London-by-the-Sea.’

Something might be said of the delights of foreign sojourn in the Recess; but space fails me. Reference may, however, be made to Mr. Locker’s graceful ‘Invitation to Rome’ and ‘The Reply’ to it, from which I take this typical tribute to the Italian capital:

‘Some girls, who love to ride and race,And live for dancing, like the Bruens,Confess that Rome’s a charming place —In spite of all the stupid ruins!’

JAQUES IN LOVE

What Jaques is in Shakespeare’s pages most people know. In the very first reference made to him he is described as ‘melancholy,’ and as ‘weeping and commenting’ upon a stricken deer. He has ‘sullen fits,’ we read. He himself tells us he ‘can suck melancholy out of a song.’ He protests that the banished Duke is ‘too disputable’ for him – that he (Jaques) thinks of as many matters, but makes no boast of them. The Duke, on his side, speaks of Jaques as ‘compact of jars’ (made up of discords), and when Jaques offers to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world,’ retorts on him that it would be a case of ‘most mischievous foul sin chiding sin,’ Jaques having been himself a notorious evil liver. To Orlando Jaques suggests that they should rail at the world and their misery, while to Rosalind he confesses that he loves melancholy better than laughing. ‘’Tis good to be sad and say nothing.’ He has, he says, a melancholy of his own, the result of his experience and reflection, which wraps him in a most humorous sadness. Jaques, in fact, is a rake turned cynical philosopher. He regards man and nature as only so much material for observation and for moralizing.

Such is the Jaques of ‘As You Like It’ – a purely original creation, embodying a familiar type of humanity, but nevertheless not good enough for certain of Shakespeare’s successors in the dramatic art. Jaques has more than once been revised and edited, in common with other characters in the sylvan comedy. He did not quite satisfy the fastidious taste of Mr. Charles Johnson, the ingenious author of ‘The Country Lasses’ and other pieces, who, as was said with more point than truth, was ‘famous for writing a play every year and being at Button’s coffee-house every day.’ Still less did Shakespeare’s Jaques commend himself to the ‘J. C.’ who was so kind as not merely to adapt ‘As You Like It,’ but to elaborate and paraphrase it. Nor did the ‘melancholy’ one prove acceptable even to the judgment of Georges Sand, when that intellectual lady set to work to ‘arrange’ the play for the French stage. Shakespeare, it appeared to all these writers, had perpetrated an unaccountable mistake. He had failed to make Jaques pair off with Celia. That charming maiden is handed over to the converted Oliver, while Jaques goes off to study the humours of the repentant Duke. Happy thought! Transform Jaques and Celia into a species of minor Benedick and Beatrice, and marry them in the end!

Mr. Charles Johnson adopted this idea almost literally. His ‘Love in a Forest’ – brought out at Drury Lane in 1723 – is ‘As You Like it’ cut down and altered, with scraps from ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ and other Shakespearean pieces, introduced at various points, the whole welded together by means of wondrous emanations from the compiler’s fancy. To Jaques are assigned a number of lines spoken elsewhere by Benedick or by Biron. We have the well-known gibing scene between Jaques and Orlando up to a certain stage, when, commenting on Jaques’ questions about Rosalind, Orlando says: ‘But why are you so curious? – you who are an obstinate heretic in the despight of beauty and the whole female world?’ Then Jaques replies to this speech, which belongs to Don Pedro in ‘Much Ado,’ in the familiar words of Benedick in that play, asserting that he will ‘live a bachelor,’ and that if ever he breaks that vow his friends may put round his neck the legend, ‘Here you may see Jaques, the married man.’ At this juncture Rosalind and Celia appear, and, while Rosalind as Ganymede has her first colloquy with Orlando, ‘Jaques talks with Celia – they walk in another glade of the forest.’ When they return it is at once evident that Jaques’ celibate intentions have already been shaken. He calls the lady ‘destructively handsome,’ and says his heart ‘gallops away in her praise most dangerously.’ She avers he will be in love if he does not take heed, and he says, ‘I doubt so – yet I hope not.’ A moment or two after, encouraged and fired by her words, he asks her plump to marry him, and she promises so to do, ‘two years hence, if my brother Ganymede consents.’ Then he admits, in soliloquy, that he is ‘in love, horribly in love,’ his spirits ‘caught at last by a pair of bugle eyeballs and a cheek of cream.’ And then come more quotations from Benedick, as well as an annexation of Touchstone’s remark about the honourableness of the forehead of a married man. Celia by-and-by confesses to Rosalind that ‘her heart doth incline a little to the philosopher,’ whose love, she allows, ‘does not sit easy upon him,’ but whose words are ‘full of sincerity.’ Still later Jaques comes to Rosalind for her approval of the match, speaking this time in language used by Biron. She, however, refuses, declaring that he cannot be polished into a modern husband; and he retires disconsolate. But with Orlando he is more successful. He is promised that Ganymede shall give way, and that his wedding shall take place to-morrow. And so all ends happily.

The ‘J. C.’ who, in 1739, published ‘The Modern Receipt, or a Cure for Love,’ as ‘altered from Shakespeare,’ went much farther than Johnson in the way of embellishing the unhappy poet. He used his lines occasionally, but in general either turned them into prose or expanded them beyond all recognition. Virtually he supplies a comedy based, only, on ‘As You Like It.’ Even the names of the characters are changed. Jaques now figures as Marcellus, ‘a sullen, morose lord, a great woman-hater, but at length in love with Julia’ – the Julia being, of course, Celia. He is described by a shepherd as ‘a melancholy sort of fellow,’ who ‘reads much, thinks more, eats little, sleeps little, and speaks least of all. And if he sees a woman he runs away, shuts himself up in his cave, and prays for an hour or two after.’ Julia, hearing this, cries: ‘Oh, the brute! I’m resolved to take a revenge upon him in behalf of the whole sex.’ Jaques, on his part, is struck by Julia’s charms as soon as he beholds them – ‘What can this mean? I’m wondrous ill o’ the sudden’ – and is fain to sit down, lest he should fall. In the scene which follows there is a great war of words. The lady talks, purposely, at an agonizing speed, and the gentleman roundly tells her that he would rather have her room than her company. At last the wrangle is interrupted, and Julia, as a parting shot, calls Marcellus ‘a bear in breeches.’ He himself is inclined, after all, to think her ‘something more than the rest of her detested sex – some being, perhaps, of a superior order.’ He praises her gay innocence and noble simplicity. Julia, on her side, ‘prays Heaven that she is not in love with the brute,’ but is afraid she must be. Then there is a scene in which, by way of drawing him on, she pretends to love him, but afterwards says that she was mocking him, and so covers him with confusion. Nevertheless, he is not cured. He is still her slave, and, as he says, what is love ‘but an epidemic disease, and what all the world has, at one time or other, been troubled with as well as myself? Why should I endeavour to curb a passion the greatest heroes have with pride indulged? No… He alone is wise who nobly loves.’ So he returns to the charge, makes the lady admit the soft impeachment, and obtains the Duke’s consent to their union. He says, in the end, that he is afraid he makes but an odd sort of figure – that he has acted a little out of character, and a great deal below the dignity of a philosopher. But, having the aforesaid disease, he has sought the remedy, and has found it; for, in his view, ‘Marriage is the surest cure of love.’

Georges Sand, in her ‘Comme il Vous Plaira’ – a comedy in three acts, ‘tirée de Shakespeare, et arrangée’ – diverges still further from the original text. Her work is, even more markedly than ‘The Modern Receipt,’ founded, only, on ‘As You Like It.’ ‘In dealing with this uncurbed genius, which owned no restraint,’ she thought herself justified in ‘condensing, abstracting, and modifying’ his work. But, as a matter of fact, her play is indebted to Shakespeare only in idea. Jaques is introduced early in the piece as sent by the banished Duke with a message to Rosalind. Of course, he meets Celia, and at first is brusquerie itself. But in the second act he comes to think there is something in her name ‘qui résonne autrement que dans tout nature. Est-ce une douceur qui charme l’oreille?’ Celia for a long time plays with him, but in the end they arrive at a mutual declaration of affection. ‘I have always tenderly loved Jaques,’ says Georges Sand in her preface, and ‘I have taken the great liberty of bringing him back to love. Here is my own romance inserted in that of Shakespeare, and, although romantic, it is not more improbable than the sudden conversion of Oliver.’ That may be; and yet one might have thought that Georges Sand, of all people, would not have set herself the interesting but somewhat futile task of improving upon ‘As You Like It.’

MOCKING AT MATRIMONY

The world has reason to be grateful to the writer who lately demonstrated the possibility of being happy ‘though married.’ Some exposition of the sort was sadly needed. Hitherto the estate of matrimony has met with a long succession of jibes and sneers. It has had its apologists, even its prophets and eulogists; but it has had many more detractors. There is, indeed, no subject on which the satirists of the world, both great and small, have so largely and so persistently made merry. It has been a stock subject with them. It is as if they had said to themselves, ‘When at a loss, revile the connubial condition.’ Married life has been the sport of every wit, and, sorrowful to relate, society has been well content to join in the pastime. There is nothing so common as sarcasm on matrimony, and nothing, apparently, so welcome, even to the married.

The banter in question has been of all sorts – sometimes vague, sometimes particular, in its import. A few censors have confined themselves to simple condemnation. ‘A fellow that’s married’s a felo-de-se,’ wrote the late Shirley Brooks; and he had been anticipated in the stricture. An anonymous satirist had written:

‘“Wedlock’s the end of life,” one cried;“Too true, alas!” said Jack, and sigh’d —“’Twill be the end of mine.”’

And if matrimony was not suicide, it was ruin. Old Sir Thomas More had said of a student who had married that ‘in knitting of himself so fast, himself he had undone.’ And a later rhymer, contrasting wedding with hanging, had come to the conclusion that

‘Hanging is better of the twain —Sooner done and shorter pain.’

To the suggestion that a youth should not marry till he has more wisdom, the Italian epigrammatist replies that if he waits till he has sense he will not wed at all. Marriage, said the famous Marshal Saxe, in effect, is a state of penance; Rome declares there are seven sacraments, but there are really only six, because penance and matrimony are one.

Hymen, says Chamfort, comes after love, like smoke after flame. It is the high sea, observes Heine, for which no compass has yet been invented. Its melancholy uncertainty is illustrated by the remark of Samuel Rogers, that it does not matter whom you marry – she will be quite another woman the next day. It was Rogers, too, who, when he heard of a certain person’s nuptials, declared that if his friends were pleased his enemies were delighted. Selden’s complaint against marriage was that it is ‘a desperate thing,’ out of which it is impossible to extract one’s self; but then he lived before the era of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. And the utmost that the conventional detractor will admit is, that the institution gives to man two happy hours. ‘Cursed be the hour I first became your wife,’ cries the lady in the well-known quotation; to which her spouse replies that – ‘That’s too bad; you’ve cursed the only happy hour we’ve had.’ But Palladas, the Greek, as translated by Mr. J. H. Merivale, goes a little farther than this, declaring that

‘All wives are bad; yet two blest hours they give:When first they wed, and when they cease to live.’

A favourite notion with the satirists is that marriage is a state of mutual recrimination. John Heywood has the couplet:

‘“Wife, I perceive thy tongue was made at Edgware.”“Yes, sir, and your’s made at Rayly, hard by there.”’

And this is typical of many another utterance; for example, this:

‘Know ye not all, the Scripture saith,That man and wife are one till death?But Peter and his scolding wifeWage such an endless war of strife,You’d swear, on passing Peter’s door,That man and wife at least were four.’

Doctor Johnson, too, draws attention to the fact – if it be one – that all the reasons which a man and a woman have for remaining in the estate of matrimony, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together. Or, as Mr. William Allingham has, of recent years, more pithily put it:

‘If any two can live together well,’Tis (and yet such things are) a miracle!’

If we are to believe the aforesaid satirists, this is all the fault of the wives. Now and again one comes across a jest in which the lady has the better of the gentleman, as in the following:

‘“Wife, from all evil, when shalt thou delivered be?”“Sir, when I” (said she) “shall be delivered from thee.”’

But such things are rare. Usually the laugh is on the other side. As the Frenchman wrote:

‘While Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:Strange! his first sleep should be his last repose!’

Everybody knows the epitaph which Dryden intended for his wife; and side by side with it may be placed the lines by an anonymous author:

‘God has to me sufficiently been kind,To take my wife, and leave me here behind.’

So again:

‘Brutus unmoved heard how his Portia fell;Should Jack’s wife die, he would behave as well.’

The story of the man who, at his spouse’s funeral, deprecated hurry, on the ground that one should not make a toil of a pleasure, need only be alluded to.

The chief charge against the wives is that they will insist upon being the heads of the households. That is the refrain of many a flout hurled against them. To marry – such is the moral of some lines by Samuel Bishop – is to lose your liberty. The lady will have everything her way:

‘For ne’er heard I of woman, good or ill,But always lovèd best her own sweet will.’

So says a seventeenth-century writer; and the complaint is general.

‘Men, dying, make their wills – why cannot wives?Because wives have their wills during their lives.’

‘Here,’ wrote Burns – ‘here lies a man a woman ruled; the Devil ruled the woman.’ And Landor makes someone say to a scholar about to marry:

‘So wise thou art that I foreseeA wife will make a fool of thee.’

That wives are talkative is a venerable commonplace. The historic husband thought that the fact of his spouse’s likeness not being a ‘speaking’ one was its principal merit. And Lessing makes a man excuse himself for marrying a deaf woman on the ground that she was also dumb. We all remember Hood’s particular trouble:

‘A wife who preaches in her gown,And lectures in her night-dress.’

And so with those who are more than merely talkative – who are positively scolds; while sometimes the conventional helpmeet is as active with her fists as with her tongue – as in the case of the lady whose picture, her husband thought, would soon ‘strike’ him, it was so exceedingly like her.

It is, however, unnecessary to carry the tale further. This mocking at matrimony has always been a feature of life and literature, and probably will always remain so – partly because it is so easy of achievement; partly because it is not less easy of comprehension; and also, perhaps, because humanity has ever been inclined to chasten that which it loves. It rails against marriage, but it marries all the same. Or is it that it recognises the wedded life as a necessity, which cannot be put away, but which it is a pleasure to ridicule? Perhaps that is the best explanation one can offer. All this satire may be mankind’s way of revenging itself upon one of the laws of nature.

PARSON POETS

The publication of a memoir of Archbishop Trench has sufficed to recall prominently to the public mind the virtues, endowments, and achievements of one of the most notable of latter-day divines. Richard Chenevix Trench was one of the most versatile of writers. He discoursed with equal knowledge and effect on Biblical and philological topics, and his prose work will always be respectfully regarded by the students alike of divinity and of language. But though, on these subjects, his pronouncements may in time grow stale or require correction, he will ever hold an honourable place in English literature as one of the most thoughtful and vigorous of those parson poets of whom this country has always had so large and valuable a supply.

There is, indeed, a natural connection between parsons and poetry. It is precisely in the ranks of the clerical body in all civilized countries that one would look for successful cultivators of the art of verse. For what is, above all things, necessary for such cultivation? In the first place, polite learning; in the second, sufficient leisure. It is in the atmosphere of culture that good verse, as apart from high poetry, takes its rise. There are probably few educated men who have not at one time or another essayed to pen a stanza. The busy city clergyman may nowadays have no time for such elegant diversions, but at all periods the lettered country parson has been inclined to occupy some of his spare moments in wooing the Muse of Song. There are other things than learning and leisure which impel him to the task. There is the nature of his profession, with the experience it brings him and the reflections it induces. The most unliterary pastor cannot but be a meditative man. The literary pastor cannot but be disposed to turn his meditations into verse, often finding in that ‘mechanic exercise’ the means of ‘numbing pain.’

Other things being equal, the modern cleric would take serious subjects for his verse, and it is characteristic of the whole race of parson poets that the first poetic effort in English literature should be the Scriptural paraphrases supplied by Caedmon, monk of Whitby. But it was not in the sphere of Bible history that the immediate successors of Caedmon, monks (or friars) like himself, sought to disport themselves most largely. Our early clerical versifiers set themselves rather to give rhythmical renderings to the romances and chronicles of their time. They were the secular as well as sacred teachers of the day; and so we find the names of Wace, Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert of Brunne, Archdeacon Barbour, Andrew of Wyntoun, and John Lydgate, all associated with the recital of the deeds of ancient or modern heroes. Not that the claims of religion or morality were forgotten: they were remembered by Richard Rolle in his ‘Prick of Conscience,’ and indirectly recognised by Barclay in his ‘Ship of Fools.’ The interests of the poor were served by Langland in his ‘Piers the Plowman,’ and poetry, pure and simple, had its devotees in the persons of the Bishop of Dunkeld and the Franciscan friar who produced respectively ‘The Palace of Honour’ and ‘The Golden Terge.’

When we come down to more recent times, we find even greater variety than this in the writings of the parson poets. But the serious element prevails. There have been clerical wits and humorists, but they have been, of necessity, in the minority. A large proportion of the verse composed by clergymen has been, as one would naturally expect, of a distinctly didactic, not to say depressing, tendency. One thinks at once of the ‘Temple’ of George Herbert, the ‘Epigrammata Sacra’ of Richard Crashaw, the ‘Night Thoughts’ of Young, the ‘Grave’ of Blair, the ‘Sabbath’ of Grahame, the ‘Course of Time’ of Pollok, the ‘Christian Year’ of Keble; the hymns of Wesley, Alford, and Stanley; the ‘Dream of Gerontius’ of Newman, and a dozen others, differing very much indeed in all the qualities of poetry, but alike in the earnestness of their intention. Even Herrick, ‘jocund’ though his muse was, left behind him some ‘Noble Numbers.’ And though clerical satire, as furnished by men like John Bramston, Charles Churchill, Samuel Bishop, John Wolcot, and Francis Mahoney, has frequently been flippant both in form and phrase, it has at other times – and especially in the works of Bishop Hall, of Norwich – been very vivid and uncompromising. Hall, indeed, was the Juvenal of his century, filled with the spirit of righteous indignation.

From Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, downwards, the clerical singers who have not been markedly professional in their outcome have exhibited an agreeable freedom from monotony. In Donne himself we see the sad perfection of the metaphysic method, mitigated, however, by a few lapses into the lucid and the simple. Pomfret gave us in ‘The Choice’ the typical poem of the country parson, sounding the praises of rural scenes and lettered ease. In Parnell we have a sample of the pleasing versifier, touching nothing which he does not adorn, but making no very particular impression. Bishop Percy is less celebrated for the ballads which he wrote than for those which he collected. Logan is remembered only by his verses on ‘The Cuckoo.’ To the reverend brothers Warton we owe respectively ‘The Pleasure of Melancholy’ and some lines ‘To Fancy’; while of Thomas Blacklock, alas! the most remarkable feature was his blindness. One would like to have forgotten Robert Montgomery, of Satanic fame, but Macaulay will not let us do so. Blanco White lives on the strength of one good sonnet, Lisle Bowles on that of many good ones; and there is no need nowadays to distinguish the work of Crabbe, of Moultrie, of John Sterling, and of Charles Kingsley, much as they differed from each other. One of the latest additions to this choir of voices is Mr. Stopford Brooke, and there are other living lyrists, belonging to one or other of the Churches, who might be named if there were no fear of making invidious selection.