Obiter Dicta Part 10

To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's.

WORN-OUT TYPES.

It is now a complaint of quite respectably antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief--it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true--bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A cheerfully-disposed person might perhaps think that, a.s.suming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, 'And how would that matter?'

the position of things becomes serious, and demands a few minutes'

investigation.

As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one--most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows:

'It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike, mere readers--spectators, not actors in the scene and lose all proper personal ident.i.ty. The templar--the wit--the man of pleasure and the man of fas.h.i.+on, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser--Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface--have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of the _haute litterature_--toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.'

Very pretty writing, certainly; {244} nor can it be disputed that uniformity of surroundings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Modern characters, like modern houses, are possibly built too much on the same lines, d.i.c.kens's description of c.o.ketown is not easily forgotten:

'All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.'

And the inhabitants of c.o.ketown are exposed to the same objection as their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls 'the shop' (that is, his lawful calling), and busily pretends to be nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a case. An officer wears his uniform only when obliged. Doctors have long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the British workman, who, all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against the window- pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladys.h.i.+p to a drawing-room; and a West-end clergyman is with difficulty restrained from telling his congregation what he had been told the British workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force--so unusual in such a place; but he had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The pa.s.sion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries--not of State, but of companies--speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to many--indeed, playing a great part among us--but who, for all that, have not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Sh.e.l.ley's west wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity encounter them? Alone amongst the children of men, the pale student of the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the 'high lonely towers' recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over that interminable series, _The Law Reports_, every now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of justice, and, pus.h.i.+ng his way along it, trace the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive interest in such matters.

'Not one except the Attorney was amused-- He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they must be settled by the laws.'

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Ma.s.singer, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks.

Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have--

'Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee, Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Pa.r.s.ee'?

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr.

Jeremiah Builder--Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the _dramatis personae_; of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must.

Genuine comedy--the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity--has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fas.h.i.+ons, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; he _is_ a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly.

Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be 'cross-gartered'; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities--what we call his 'ways'--nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. 'But indeed,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone.'

Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual, not the type; and though the young man in _Locksley Hall_ no doubt observes that the 'individual withers,' we have but to take down George Meredith's novels to find the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio: 'Thou hast hit it; come sit on me.' No doubt the task of the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out- stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize: but what would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities.

If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, 'Why can we not fly, my friends?'

Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe, 'in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings!"' but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar.

CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS.

Why all the English poets, with a barely decent number of exceptions, have been Cambridge men, has always struck me, as did the abstinence of the Greeks from malt Mr. Calverley, 'as extremely curious.' But in this age of detail, one must, however reluctantly, submit to prove one's facts, and I, therefore, propose to inst.i.tute a 'Modest Inquiry' into this subject. Imaginatively, I shall don proctorial robes, and armed with a duster, saunter up and down the library, putting to each poet as I meet him the once dreaded question, 'Sir, are you a member of this University?'

But whilst I am arranging myself for this function, let me utilize the time by making two preliminary observations--the first one being that, as to-day is Sunday, only such free libraries are open as may happen to be attached to public-houses, and I am consequently confined to my own poor shelves, and must be forgiven even though I make some palpable omissions.

The second is that I exclude from my survey living authors. I must do so; their very names would excite controversy about a subject which, when wisely handled, admits of none.

I now pursue my inquiry. That Chaucer was a Cambridge man cannot be proved. It is the better opinion that he was (how else should he have known anything about the Trumpington Road?), but it is only an opinion, and as no one has ever been found reckless enough to a.s.sert that he was an Oxford man, he must be content to 'sit out' this inquiry along with Shakspeare, Webster, Ford, Pope, Cowper, Burns, and Keats, no one of whom ever kept his terms at either University. Spenser is, of course, the glory of the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellows.h.i.+ps of that college made to depend upon pa.s.sing a yearly examination in the _Faerie Queen_, to be conducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubicund walls. Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St.

John's, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Jesus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King's, Herrick was first at St. John's, but migrated to the Hall, where he is still reckoned very pretty reading, even by boating men. Cowley, most precocious of poets, and Suckling were at Trinity, Waller at King's, Francis Quarles was of Christ's. The Herbert family were divided, some going to Oxford and some to Cambridge, George, of course, falling to the lot of Cambridge. John Milton's name alone would deify the University where he pursued his almost sacred studies. Andrew Marvell, a pleasant poet and savage satirist, was of Trinity. The author of _Hudibras_ is frequently attributed to Cambridge, but, on being interrogated, he declined to name his college--always a suspicious circ.u.mstance.

I must not forget Richard Crashaw, of Peterhouse. Willingly would I relieve the intolerable tedium of this dry inquiry by transcribing the few lines of his now beneath my eye. But I forbear, and 'steer right on.'

Of dramatists we find Marlowe (untimelier death than his was never any) at Corpus; Greene (I do not lay much stress on Greene) was both at St.

John's and Clare. Ben Jonson was at St. John's, so was Nash. John Fletcher (whose claims to be considered the senior partner in his well- known firm are simply paramount) was at Corpus. James s.h.i.+rley, the author of _The Maid's Revenge_ and of the beautiful lyric beginning 'The glories of our birth and state,' in the innocence of his heart first went to St. John's College, Oxford, from whence he was speedily sent down, for reasons which the delightful author of _Athenae Oxonienses_ must really be allowed to state for himself. 'At the same time (1612) Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for s.h.i.+rley, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him, but then, having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so.' Thus treated, s.h.i.+rley left Oxford, that 'home of lost causes,' but not apparently of large moles, and came to Cambridge, and entered at St. Catharine's Hall, where, either because the authorities were not amongst those who esteemed a broad or large mole upon the left cheek to be a deformity, or because a mole, more or less, made no sort of difference in the personal appearance of the college, or for other good and sufficient reasons, poor s.h.i.+rley was allowed, without, I trust, being often told of his mole, to proceed to his degree and to Holy Orders.

Starting off again, we find John Dryden, whose very name is a tower of strength (were he to come to life again he would, like Mr. Brown of Calaveras, 'clean out half the town'), at Trinity. In this poet's later life he said he liked Oxford better. His lines on this subject are well known:

'Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own Mother-University.

Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age.'

But idle preferences of this sort are beyond the scope of my present inquiry. After Dryden we find Garth at Peterhouse and charming Matthew Prior at John's. Then comes the great name of Gray. Perhaps I ought not to mention poor Christopher Smart, who was a Fellow of Pembroke; and yet the author of _David_, under happier circ.u.mstances, might have conferred additional poetic l.u.s.tre even upon the college of Spenser. {255}

In the present century, we find Byron and his bear at Trinity, Coleridge at Jesus, and Wordsworth at St. John's. The last-named poet was fully alive to the honour of belonging to the same University as Milton. In language not unworthy of Mr. Trumbull, the well-known auctioneer in _Middlemarch_, he has recorded as follows:

'Among the band of my compeers was one Whom chance had stationed in the very room Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard, Be it confest that for the first time seated Within thy innocent lodge and oratory, One of a festive circle, I poured out Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride And grat.i.tude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour or since.' {256}

I know of no more amiable trait in the character of Cambridge men than their willingness to admit having been drunk _once_.

After the great name of Wordsworth any other must seem small, but I must, before concluding, place on record Praed, Macaulay, Kingsley, and Calverley.

A glorious Roll-call indeed!

'Earth shows to Heaven the names by thousands told That crown her fame.'

So may Cambridge.

Oxford leads off with one I could find it in my heart to grudge her, beautiful as she is--Sir Philip Sidney. Why, I wonder, did he not accompany his friend and future biographer, Fulke Greville, to Cambridge?

As Dr. Johnson once said to Boswell, 'Sir, you _may_ wonder!' Sidney most indisputably was at Christchurch. Old George Chapman, who I suppose was young once, was (I believe) at Oxford, though I have known Cambridge to claim him. Lodge and Peele were at Oxford, so were Francis Beaumont and his brother Sir John. Philip Ma.s.singer, Shakerley Marmion, and John Marston are of Oxford, also Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr.

Brady--but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man.

Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names of which their University may well be proud. But surely, when compared with the Cambridge list, a falling-off must be admitted.

A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose single name--for, after all, poets must be weighed and not counted--would have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim Sh.e.l.ley as her own? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high philosophy. Had Sh.e.l.ley only gone to Trinity in 1810, I feel sure wise and witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser, Milton, and Sh.e.l.ley! What a triad of immortal fames they would have made. As it is, we expect Oxford, with her accustomed composure, will insist upon adding Sh.e.l.ley to her score--but even when she has been allowed to do so, she must own herself beaten both in men and metal.

But this being so--why was it so? It is now my turn to own myself defeated. I cannot for the life of me tell how it happened.

BOOK-BUYING.

The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers' shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy in it, than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place 'all unabashed' now boasts its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term 'second-hand,' which other crafts have 'soiled to all ign.o.ble use.'