Masques & Phases Part 7

The alarming progress of ritualism in the 'eighties disturbed her considerably, though it inspired some of her more weighty verses. They should be favourites with Dr. Clifford and Canon Hensley Henson:--

Some men in our days cover over A body deformed with their sin: A cross worked in various colours, Forgetting that G.o.d looks within.

Alas! in our churches at present Simplicity seems quite despised; To represent things far above us Are heathenish customs revived.

This evil is spreading among us, And where will it end, can you tell?

Join not with the misled around us, Take warning, my readers . . .

The veneration of the Blessed Virgin goaded her into composition of stanzas unparalleled in the whole literature of Protestantism:--

My readers, can you nowhere see A parallel to Israel's sin?

The House of G.o.d, at home, abroad: _Idols are there_--that house within.

Who incense burns? are strange cakes made?

What woman's chapel, decked with gold, Stands full of unchecked wors.h.i.+ppers Like those idolaters of old?

The Blessed Virgin--blest she is That does not make her Heaven's Queen!

Yet some are taught to wors.h.i.+p her; What else does all this teaching mean?

What she denied to the Mother of G.o.d she accorded (rather daringly, I opine) to one Harriet, whose death and future are recorded in the following lines:--

Declining like the setting sun After a course divinely run, I saw a maiden pa.s.sing fair Reposing on an easy chair.

A Bridegroom of celestial mien Came forth and claimed her for His Queen; One with His Father on His throne She lives entirely His own.

Harrietolatry, I thought, was confined to the members of the defunct Sh.e.l.ley Society. But every reader will feel the poignant truth of Mrs.

Farrer's view of the Church of England--truer to-day than it could have been in the 'eighties:--

The Church of England--grand old s.h.i.+p-- Toss'd is on a troubled sea!

Her sails are rent, her decks are foul'd, Mutiny on board must be.

The winds of discord howl around, Wild disputers throw up foam, From high to low she's beat about; Frighten'd some who love her roam.

I do not know if the last word is intended for a pun, but I scarcely think it is likely.

I would like to reconstruct Mrs. Farrer's home, with its stiff Victorian chairs, its threaded antimaca.s.sars, its pictorial paper-weights, its wax flowers under gla.s.s shades, and the charming household porcelain from the Derby and Worcester furnaces. There must have been a sabbatic air of comfort about the dining-room which was soothing. I can see the engravings after Landseer: 'The Stag at Bay,' 'Dignity and Impudence'; or those after Martin: 'The Plains of Heaven,' and 'The Great Day of His Wrath'; and 'Blucher meeting Wellington,' after Maclise. I can see on each side of the mirror examples of the art of Daguerre, which have already begun to produce in us the same sentiment that we get from the early Tuscans; and on the mantelpiece a photograph of Harriet in a plush frame, the one touch of modernity in a room which was otherwise severely 1845. Then, on a bookshelf which hung above the old tea-caddy and cut- gla.s.s sugar-bowl, Georgiana's library--'Line upon Line,' 'Precept upon Precept,' 'Jane the Cottager,' 'Pinnock's Scripture History,' and a few costly works bound in the style of the Albert Memorial. The drawing-room, just a trifle damp, must have contained Mr. Hunt's 'Light of the World,' which Mrs. Farrer never quite learned to love, though it was a present from a missionary, and rendered fire and artificial light unnecessary during the winter months. Would that Mrs. Farrer's home-life had come under the magic lens of Mr. Edmund Gosse, for it would now be cla.s.sic, like the household of Sir Thomas More.

Whatever its attractions, Mrs. Farrer was at times induced to go abroad, visiting, I imagine, only the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. She stayed, however, in Paris, which she apostrophises with Sibyllic candour:--

O city of pleasure, what did I see When pa.s.sing through or staying in thee.

Bright shone the sun above, blue was the sky, Everywhere music heard, none seemed to sigh.

Beautiful carriages in Champs Elysee Filled with fair maidens on cus.h.i.+ons easy.

Such was the outer side; what was within?

Most I was often told revelled in sin.

Sad its fate since I left, sadder 'twill be If they go on in sin as seen by me.

Let us hope, ere too late, warned by the past, They may seek pleasures more likely to last, Or, like to Babylon, it must decline, And o'er its ruins its lovers repine.

But London hardly fares much better, in spite of Mrs. Farrer's own residence, at Campden Hill, if I may hazard the locality:--

To the tomb they must go, Rich and poor all in woe, Strange motley throng.

Wealth in its splendour weeps, Poverty silence keeps; None last here long. . . .

So much for thee, London.

Except in a spiritual sense, her existence was not an eventful one. It was, I think, the loss of some neighbour's child which suggested:--

Nellarina, forced exotic, Born to bloom in region fair, Thou wert to me a narcotic, Hope I did thy lot to share.

Any near personal sorrow she does not seem to have experienced, I am glad to say, else she might have regarded it as a grievance the consequences of which one dares not contemplate; you feel that _Some One_ would have heard of it in no measured terms. Certainty and content are, indeed, the dominating notes of her poetry rather than mere commonplace hope:--

I am bound for the land of Beulah, There all the guests sing Hallelujah.

No longer time here let us squander, But on the good things promised ponder.

It would be futile to discuss the exact position on Parna.s.sus of a lady whose throne was secured on a more celestial mountain, even more difficult of access. But I think we may claim for her an honourable place in that new Oxford school of poetry of which Professor Mackail officially knows little, and of which Dr. Warren (the President of Magdalen) is the distinguished living protagonist. With all her acrid Evangelicalism she was a good soul, for she was fond of animals and children, and kind to them both in her own way; so I am sure some of her dreams have been realised, even if there has reached her nostrils just a whiff of those tolerating purgatorial fires which, spelt differently, she believed to be _permanently_ prepared for the vast majority of her contemporaries.

_To_ MRS. CAREW.

GOING UP TOP.

During the closing years of the last century certain critics contracted a rather depressing habit of numbering men of letters, especially poets, as though they were overcoats in a cloak-room, or boys competing in an examination set by themselves. 'It requires very little discernment,'

wrote the late Churton Collins, A.D. 1891, 'to foresee that among the English poets of the present century the first place will _ultimately_ be a.s.signed to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Sh.e.l.ley.'

Matthew Arnold, I fear, was the first to make these unsafe Zadkielian prognostications. He, if I remember correctly, gave Byron the first place and Wordsworth the second; but Swinburne, with his usual discernment, observed that English taste in that eventuality would be in the same state as it was at the end of the seventeenth century, which firmly believed that Fletcher and Jonson were the best of its poets.

But when is Ultimately? Obviously not the present moment. Byron does not hold the rank awarded him by the distinguished critic in 1891. The cruel test of the auctioneer's hammer has recently shown that Keats and Sh.e.l.ley are regarded as far more important by those unprejudiced judges, the book-dealers. Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets'

poets, and the _Spectator_, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet reached the harbour of Ultimately. His repellent personality has blinded a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of criticism, however, may I be there to see. I shall certainly vote for him if I am one of the examiners--or one of the cloak-room attendants.

It was against such kind of criticism that Whistler hurled his impatient epigram about pigeon-holes. And if it is absurd in regard to painting, how much more absurd is it in regard to the more various and less friable substances of literature. By the old ten-o'clock rule (I do not refer to Whistler's lecture), once observed in Board schools, no scripture could be taught after that hour. Once a teacher asked his cla.s.s who was the wisest man. 'Solomon,' said a little boy. 'Right; go up top,' said the teacher. But there was a small pedant who, while never paying much attention to the lessons, and being usually at the bottom of the form in consequence, knew the regulations by heart. He interrupted with a shrill voice (for the clock had pa.s.sed the hour), 'No, sir, please, sir; past ten o'clock, sir . . . Solon.' Thus it is, I fear, with critics of every generation, though they try very hard to make the time pa.s.s as slowly as possible.

But if invidious distinctions between great men are inexact and tiresome, I opine that it is ungenerous and ign.o.ble to declare that when a great man has just died, we really cannot judge of him or his work because we have been his contemporaries. The caution of obituary notices seems to me cowardly, and the reviews of books are cowardly too. We have become Laodiceans. We are even fearful of exposing imposture in current literature lest we get into hot water with a publisher.

During a New Year week I was invited by Lord and Lady Lyonesse to a very diverting house-party. This peer, it will be remembered, is the well- known radical philanthropist who owed his t.i.tle to a lifelong interest in the submerged tenth. Their house, Ivanhoe, is an exquisite gothic structure not unjustly regarded as the masterpiece of the late Sir Gilbert Scott: it overlooks the Ouse. Including our hosts we numbered forty persons, and the personnel, including valets, chauffeurs, and ladies'-maids brought by the guests, numbered sixty. In all, we were a hundred souls, a.s.suming immortality for the chauffeurs and the five Scotch gardeners. On January 2nd somebody produced after dinner a copy of the _Pet.i.t Parisien_ relating the plebiscite for the greatest Frenchman of the nineteenth century; another guest capped him with the _Evening News_ list. The famous _Pall Mall Gazette_ Academy of Forty was recalled with indifferent accuracy. Conversation was flagging; our hostess looked relieved; very soon we were all playing a variation of that most charming game, _suck-pencil_.

At first we decided to ignore the nineteenth century. The ten greatest living Englishmen were to be named by our votes. Bridge and billiard players were dragged to the polling-station in the green drawing-room.

Lord Lyonesse and myself were the tellers. I s.h.i.+vered with excitement.

One of the Ultimatelies of Churton Collins seemed to have arrived: it was Gotterdammerung--the Twilight of the Idols. And here is the result of the ballot, which I think every one will admit possesses extraordinary interest:

Hall Caine.

Marie Corelli.

Rudyard Kipling.

Lord Northcliffe.

Sir Thomas Lipton.