Richard Carlile, as honourable a man as most, and between whose religious opinions and (let us say) Lord Palmerston’s there was probably no difference worth mentioning, spent nine out of the fifty-two years of his life in prison. Attorney-Generals, and, indeed, every degree of prosecuting counsel have abused this kind of free-thinker, not merely with professional impunity, but amidst popular applause. Judges, speaking with emotion, have exhibited the utmost horror of atheistical opinions, and have railed in good set terms at the wretch who has been dragged before them, and have then, at the rising of the court, proceeded to their club and played cards till dinner-time with a first-class free-thinker for partner.
This is natural and easily accounted for, but we need not be surprised if, in the biographies of second-class freethinkers, bitterness is occasionally exhibited towards the well-to-do brethren who decline what Dr. Bentley, in his Boyle Lectures, called ‘the public odium and resentment of the magistrate.’
Mr. Bradlaugh was a freethinker of the second class. His father was a solicitor’s clerk on a salary which never exceeded L2 2s. a week; his mother had been a nursery-maid; and he himself was born in 1833 in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton. At seven he went to a national school, but at eleven his school education ended, and he became an office-boy. At fourteen he was a wharf-clerk and cashier to a coal-merchant. His parents were not much addicted to church-going, but Charles was from the first a serious boy, and became at a somewhat early age a Sunday-school teacher at St. Peter’s, Hackney Road. The incumbent, in order to prepare him for Confirmation, set him to work to extract the Thirty-nine Articles out of the four Gospels. Unhappy task, worthy to be described by the pen of the biographer of John Sterling. The youthful wharfinger could not find the Articles in the Gospels, and informed the Rev. J.G. Packer of the fact. His letter conveying this intelligence is not forthcoming, and probably enough contained offensive matter, for Mr. Packer seems at once to have denounced young Bradlaugh as one engaged in atheistical inquiries, to have suspended him from the Sunday-school, to have made it very disagreeable for him at home and with his employer, and to have wound up by giving him three days to change his views or to lose his place.
Mr. Packer has been well abused, but it has never been the fashion to treat youthful atheists with much respect. When Coleridge confided to the Rev. James Boyer that he (S.T. Coleridge) was inclined to atheism, the reverend gentleman had him stripped and flogged. Mr. Packer, however, does seem to have been too hasty, for Bradlaugh did not formally abandon his beliefs until some months after his suspension. He retired for a short season, and studied Hebrew under Mr. James Savage, of Circus Street, Marylebone. He emerged an unbeliever, aged sixteen. Expelled from his wharf, he sold coal on commission, but his principal, if not his only customer, the wife of a baker, discovering that he was an infidel, gave him no more orders, being afraid, so she said, that her bread would smell of brimstone.
In 1850 Bradlaugh published his first pamphlet, _A Few Words on the Christian Creed_, and dedicated it to the unhappy Mr. Packer. But starvation stared him in the face, and in the same year he enlisted in the 7th Dragoon Guards, and spent the next three years in Ireland, where he earned a good character, and on more occasions than one showed that adroitness for which he was afterwards remarkable.
In October, 1853, his mother and sister with great difficulty raised the L30 necessary to buy his discharge, and Bradlaugh returned to London, not only full grown, but well fed. Had he not taken the Queen’s shilling he never would have lived to fight the battle he did.
He became a solicitor’s clerk on a miserably small pay, and took to lecturing as ‘Iconoclast.’ In 1855 he was married at St. Philip’s Church, Stepney. His lectures and discussions began to assume great proportions, and covered more than twenty years of his life. Terribly hard work they were. Profits there were none, or next to none. Few men have endured greater hardships.
In 1860 the _National Reformer_ was started, and his warfare in the courts began. In 1868 he first stood for Northampton, which he unsuccessfully contested three times. In April, 1880, he was returned to Parliament, and then began the famous struggle with which the constitutional historian will have to deal. After this date the facts are well known. Bradlaugh died on January 30, 1891.
His life was a hard one from beginning to end. He had no advantages. Nobody really helped him or influenced him or mollified him. He had never either money or repose; he had no time to travel, except as a propagandist, no time to acquire knowledge for its own sake; he was often abused but seldom criticised. In a single sentence, he was never taught the extent of his own ignorance.
His attitude towards the Christian religion and the Bible was a perfectly fair one, and ought not to have brought down upon him any abuse whatever. There are more ways than one of dealing with religion. It may be approached as a mystery or as a series of events supported by testimony. If the evidence is trustworthy, if the witnesses are irreproachable, if they submit successfully to examination and cross-examination, then, however remarkable or out of the way may be the facts to which they depose, they are entitled to be believed. This is a mode of treatment with which we are all familiar, whether as applied to the Bible or to the authority of the Church. Nobody is expected to believe in the authority of the Church until satisfied by the exercise of his reason that the Church in question possesses ‘the notes’ of a true Church. This was the aspect of the question which engaged Bradlaugh’s attention. He was critical, legal. He took objections, insisted on discrepancies, cross-examined as to credibility, and came to the conclusion that the case for the supernatural was not made out. And this he did not after the first-class fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street. His audiences were not Mr. Mudie’s subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages. The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated. It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans. He was bitter and aggressive, but the treatment he was then experiencing accounted for this. As an avowed atheist he received no quarter, and he might fairly say with Wilfred Osbaldistone, ‘It’s hard I should get raps over the costard, and only pay you back in make-believes.’
It was not what Bradlaugh said, but the people he said it to, that drew down upon him the censure of the magistrate, and (unkindest cut of all) the condemnation of the House of Commons.
Of all the evils from which the lovers of religion do well to pray that their faith may be delivered, the worst is that it should ever come to be discussed across the floor of the House of Commons. The self-elected champions of the Christian faith who then ride into the lists are of a kind well calculated to make Piety hide her head for very shame. Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics who maintain religion as another fence round their property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrive, with a score or two of bigots thrown in, to make a carnival of folly, a veritable devil’s dance of blasphemy. The debates on Bradlaugh’s oath-taking extended over four years, and will make melancholy reading for posterity. Two figures, and two figures only, stand out in solitary grandeur, those of a Quaker and an Anglican–Bright and Gladstone.
The conclusion which an attentive reading of Mr. Bradlaugh’s biography forces upon me is that in all probability he was the last freethinker who will be exposed, for many a long day (it would be more than usually rash to write ‘ever’), to pains and penalties for uttering his unbelief. It is true the Blasphemy Laws are not yet repealed; it may be true for all I know that Christianity is still part and parcel of the common law; it is possibly an indictable offence to lend _Literature and Dogma_ and _God and the Bible_ to a friend; but, however these things may be, Mr. Bradlaugh’s stock-in-trade is now free of the market-place, where just at present, at all events, its price is low. It has become pretty plain that neither the Fortress of Holy Scripture nor the Rock of Church Authority is likely to be taken by storm. The Mystery of Creation, the unsolvable problem of matter, continue to press upon us more heavily than ever. Neither by Paleys nor by Bradlaughs will religion be either bolstered up or pulled down. Sceptics and Sacramentarians must be content to put up with one another’s vagaries for some time to come. Indeed, the new socialists, though at present but poor theologians (one hasty reading of _Lux Mundi_ does not make a theologian), are casting favourable eyes upon Sacramentarianism, deeming it to have a distinct flavour of Collectivism. Calvinism, on the other hand, is considered repulsively individualistic, being based upon the notion that it is the duty of each man to secure his own salvation.
But whether Bradlaugh was the last of his race or not, he was a brave man whose life well deserves an honourable place amongst the biographies of those Radicals who have suffered in the cause of Free-thought, and into the fruits of whose labours others have entered.
DISRAELI _EX RELATIONE_ SIR WILLIAM FRASER
The late Sir William Fraser was not, I have been told, a popular person in that society about which he thought so much, and his book, _Disraeli and His Day_, did not succeed in attracting much of the notice of the general reader, and failed, so I, at least, have been made to understand, to win a verdict of approval from the really well informed.
I consider the book a very good one, in the sense of being valuable. Whatever your mood may be, that of the moralist, cynic, satirist, humourist, whether you love, pity, or despise your fellow-man, here is grist for your mill. It feeds the mind.
Although in form the book is but a stringing together of stories, incidents, and aphorisms, still the whole produces a distinct effect. To state what that effect is would be, I suppose, the higher criticism. It is not altogether disagreeable; it is decidedly amusing; it is clever and somewhat contemptible. Sir William Fraser was a baronet who thought well of his order. He desiderated a tribunal to determine the right to the title, and he opined that the courtesy prefix of ‘Honourable,’ which once, it appears, belonged to baronets, should be restored to them. Apart from these opinions, ridiculous and peculiar, Sir William Fraser stands revealed in this volume as cast in a familiar mould. The words ‘gentleman,’ ‘White’s,’ ‘Society,’ often flow from his pen, and we may be sure were engraven on his heart. He had seen a world wrecked. When he was young, so he tells his readers, the world consisted of at least three, and certainly not more than five, hundred persons who were accustomed night after night during the season to make their appearance at a certain number of houses, which are affectionately enumerated. A new face at any one of these gatherings immediately attracted attention, as, indeed, it is easy to believe it would. ‘Anything for a change,’ as somebody observes in _Pickwick_.
This is the atmosphere of the book, and Sir William breathes in it very pleasantly. Endowed by Nature with a retentive memory and a literary taste, active if singular, he may be discovered in his own pages moving up and down, in and out of society, supplying and correcting quotations, and gratifying the vanity of distinguished authors by remembering their own writings better than they did themselves. The book makes one clearly comprehend what a monstrous clever fellow the rank and file of the Tory party must have felt Sir William Fraser to be. This, however, is only background. In the front of the picture we have the mysterious outlines, the strange personality, struggling between the bizarre and the romantic, of ‘the Jew,’ as big George Bentinck was ever accustomed to denominate his leader. Sir William Fraser’s Disraeli is a very different figure from Sir Stafford Northcote’s. The myth about the pocket Sophocles is rudely exploded. Sir William is certain that Disraeli could not have construed a chapter of the Greek Testament. He found such mythology as he required where many an honest fellow has found it before him–in Lempriere’s Dictionary. His French accent, as Sir William records it, was most satisfactory, and a conclusive proof of his _bona-fides_. Disraeli, it is clear, cared as little for literature as he did for art. He admired Gray, as every man with a sense for epithet must; he studied Junius, whose style, so Sir William Fraser believes, he surpassed in his ‘Runnymede’ letters. Sir William Fraser kindly explains the etymology of this strange word ‘Runnymede,’ as he also does that of ‘Parliament,’ which he says is ‘_Parliamo mente_’ (Let us speak our minds). Sir William clearly possessed the learning denied to his chief.
Beyond apparently imposing upon Sir Stafford Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, puffed the prostitute away, and carried his very saleable wares to another market, where his efforts were crowned with prodigious success. Sir William Fraser introduces his great man to us as observing, in reply to a question, that revenge was the passion which gives pleasure the latest. A man, he continued, will enjoy that when even avarice has ceased to please. As a matter of fact, Disraeli himself was neither avaricious nor revengeful, and, as far as one can judge, was never tempted to be either. This is the fatal defect of almost all Disraeli’s aphorisms: they are dead words, whilst the words of a true aphorism have veins filled with the life of their utterer. Nothing of this sort ever escaped the lips of our modern Sphinx. If he had any faiths, any deep convictions, any rooted principles, he held his tongue about them. He was, Sir William tells us, an indolent man. It is doubtful whether he ever did, apart from the preparation and delivery of his speeches, what would be called by a professional man a hard day’s work in his life. He had courage, wit, insight, instinct, prevision, and a thorough persuasion that he perfectly understood the materials he had to work upon and the tools within his reach. Perhaps no man ever gauged more accurately or more profoundly despised that ‘world’ Sir William Fraser so pathetically laments. For folly, egotism, vanity, conceit, and stupidity, he had an amazing eye. He could not, owing to his short sight, read men’s faces across the floor of the House, but he did not require the aid of any optic nerve to see the petty secrets of their souls. His best sayings have men’s weaknesses for their text. Sir William’s book gives many excellent examples. One laughs throughout.
Sir William would have us believe that in later life Disraeli clung affectionately to dulness–to gentle dulness. He did not want to be surrounded by wits. He had been one himself in his youth, and he questioned their sincerity. It would almost appear from passages in the book that Disraeli found even Sir William Fraser too pungent for him. Once, we are told, the impenetrable Prime Minister quailed before Sir William’s reproachful oratory. The story is not of a cock and a bull, but of a question put in the House of Commons by Sir William, who was snubbed by the Home Secretary, who was cheered by Disraeli. This was intolerable, and accordingly next day, being, as good luck would have it, a Friday, when, as all men and members know, ‘it is in the power of any member to bring forward any topic he may choose,’ Sir William naturally chose the topic nearest to his heart, and ‘said a few words on my wrongs.’
‘During my performance I watched Disraeli narrowly. I could not see his face, but I noticed that whenever I became in any way disagreeable–in short, whenever my words really bit–they were invariably followed by one movement. Sitting as he always did with his right knee over his left, whenever the words touched him he moved the pendant leg twice or three times, then curved his foot upwards. I could observe no other sign of emotion, but this was distinct. Some years afterwards, on a somewhat more important occasion at the Conference at Berlin, a great German philosopher, Herr —-, went to Berlin on purpose to study Disraeli’s character. He said afterwards that he was most struck by the more than Indian stoicism which Disraeli showed. To this there was one exception. “Like all men of his race, he has one sign of emotion which never fails to show itself–the movement of the leg that is crossed over the other, and of the foot!” The person who told me this had never heard me hint, nor had anyone, that I had observed this peculiar symptom on the earlier occasion to which I have referred.’
Statesmen of Jewish descent, with a reputation for stoicism to preserve, would do well to learn from this story not to swing their crossed leg when tired. The great want about Mr. Disraeli is something to hang the countless anecdotes about him upon. Most remarkable men have some predominant feature of character round which you can build your general conception of them, or, at all events, there has been some great incident in their lives for ever connected with their names, and your imagination mixes the man and the event together. Who can think of Peel without remembering the Corn Laws and the reverberating sentence: ‘I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, for less honourable motives, clamours for Protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good-will in the abode of those whose lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread with the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened with a sense of injustice.’ But round what are our memories of Disraeli to cluster? Sir William Fraser speaks rapturously of his wondrous mind and of his intellect, but where is posterity to look for evidences of either? Certainly not in Sir William’s book, which shows us a wearied wit and nothing more. Carlyle once asked, ‘How long will John Bull permit this absurd monkey’–meaning Mr. Disraeli–‘to dance upon his stomach?’ The question was coarsely put, but there is nothing in Sir William’s book to make one wonder it should have been asked. Mr. Disraeli lived to offer Carlyle the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and that, in Sir William’s opinion, is enough to dispose of Carlyle’s vituperation; but, after all, the Grand Cross is no answer to anything except an application for it.
A great many other people are made to cross Sir William Fraser’s stage. His comments upon them are lively, independent, and original. He liked Cobden and hated Bright. The reason for this he makes quite plain. He thinks he detected in Cobden a deprecatory manner–a recognition of the sublime truth that he, Richard Cobden, had not been half so well educated as the mob of Tories he was addressing. Bright, on the other band, was fat and rude, and thought that most country gentlemen and town-bred wits were either fools or fribbles. This was intolerable. Here was a man who not only could not have belonged to the ‘world,’ but honestly did not wish to, and was persuaded–the gross fellow–that he and his world were better in every respect than the exclusive circles which listened to Sir William Fraser’s _bon mots_ and tags from the poets. Certainly there was nothing deprecatory about John Bright. He could be quite as insolent in his way as any aristocrat in his. He had a habit, we are told, of slowly getting up and walking out of the House in the middle of Mr. Disraeli’s speeches, and just when that ingenious orator was leading up to a carefully prepared point, and then immediately returning behind the Speaker’s chair. If this is true, it was perhaps rude, but nobody can deny that it is a Tory dodge of indicating disdain. What was really irritating about Mr. Bright was that his disdain was genuine. He did think very little of the Tory party, and he did not care one straw for the opinion of society. He positively would not have cared to have been made a baronet. Sir William Fraser seems to have been really fond of Disraeli, and the very last time he met his great man in the Carlton Club he told him a story too broad to be printed. The great man pronounced it admirable, and passed on his weary way.
A CONNOISSEUR
It must always be rash to speak positively about human nature, whose various types of character are singularly tough, and endure, if not for ever, for a very long time; yet some types do seem to show signs of wearing out. The connoisseur, for example, here in England is hardly what he was. He has specialized, and behind him there is now the bottomless purse of the multi-millionaire, who buys as he is bidden, and has no sense of prices. If the multi-millionaire wants a thing, why should he not have it? The gaping mob, penniless but appreciative, looks on and cheers his pluck.
Mr. Frederick Locker, about whom I wish to write a few lines, was an old-world connoisseur, the shy recesses of whose soul Addison might have penetrated in the page of a _Spectator_–and a delicate operation it would have been.
My father-in-law was only once in the witness-box. I had the felicity to see him there. It was a dispute about the price of a picture, and in the course of his very short evidence he hazarded the opinion that the grouping of the figures (they were portraits) was in bad taste. The Judge, the late Mr. Justice Cave, an excellent lawyer of the old school, snarled out, ‘Do you think you could explain to _me_ what is taste?’ Mr. Locker surveyed the Judge through the eye-glass which seemed almost part of his being, with a glance modest, deferential, deprecatory, as if suggesting ‘Who am _I_ to explain anything to _you_?’ but at the same time critical, ironical, and humorous. It was but for one brief moment; the eyeglass dropped, and there came the mournful answer, as from a man baffled at all points: ‘No, my lord; I should find it impossible!’ The Judge grunted a ready, almost a cheerful, assent.
Properly to describe Mr. Locker, you ought to be able to explain both to judge and jury what you mean by taste. He sometimes seemed to me to be _all_ taste. Whatever subject he approached–was it the mystery of religion, or the moralities of life, a poem or a print, a bit of old china or a human being–whatever it might be, it was along the avenue of taste that he gently made his way up to it. His favourite word of commendation was _pleasing_, and if he ever brought himself to say (and he was not a man who scattered his judgments, rather was he extremely reticent of them) of a man, and still more of a woman, that he or she was _unpleasing_, you almost shuddered at the fierceness of the condemnation, knowing, as all Locker’s intimate friends could not help doing, what the word meant to him. ‘Attractive’ was another of his critical instruments. He meets Lord Palmerston, and does not find him ‘attractive’ (_My Confidences_, p. 155).
This is a temperament which when cultivated, as it was in Mr. Locker’s case, by a life-long familiarity with beautiful things in all the arts and crafts, is apt to make its owner very susceptible to what some stirring folk may not unjustly consider the trifles of life. Sometimes Locker might seem to overlook the dominant features, the main object of the existence, either of a man or of some piece of man’s work, in his sensitively keen perception of the beauty, or the lapse from beauty, of some trait of character or bit of workmanship. This may have been so. Mr. Locker was more at home, more entirely his own delightful self, when he was calling your attention to some humorous touch in one of Bewick’s tail-pieces, or to some plump figure in a group by his favourite Stothard than when handling a Michael Angelo drawing or an amazing Blake. Yet, had it been his humour, he could have played the showman to Michael Angelo and Blake at least as well as to Bewick, Stothard, or Chodowiecki. But a modesty, marvellously mingled with irony, was of the very essence of his nature. No man expatiated less. He never expounded anything in his born days; he very soon wearied of those he called ‘strong’ talkers. His critical method was in a conversational manner to direct your attention to something in a poem or a picture, to make a brief suggestion or two, perhaps to apply an epithet, and it was all over, but your eyes were opened. Rapture he never professed, his tones were never loud enough to express enthusiasm, but his enjoyment of what he considered good, wherever he found it–and he was regardless of the set judgments of the critics–was most intense and intimate. His feeling for anything he liked was fibrous: he clung to it. For all his rare books and prints, if he liked a thing he was very tolerant of its _format_. He would cut a drawing out of a newspaper, frame it, hang it up, and be just as tender towards it as if it were an impression with the unique _remarque_.
Mr. Locker had probably inherited his virtuoso’s whim from his ancestors. His great-grandfather was certified by Johnson in his life of Addison to be a gentleman ’eminent for curiosity and literature,’ and though his grandfather, the Commodore, who lives for ever in our history as the man who taught Nelson the lesson that saved an Empire–‘Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him’–was no collector, his father, Edward Hawke Locker, though also a naval man, was not only the friend of Sir Walter Scott, but a most judicious buyer of pictures, prints, and old furniture.
Frederick Locker was born in 1821, in Greenwich Hospital, where Edward Hawke Locker was Civil Commissioner. His mother was the daughter of one of the greatest book-buyers of his time, a man whose library it took nine days to disperse–the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, the friend and opponent of George Washington, an ecclesiastic who might have been first Bishop of Edinburgh, but who died a better thing, the Vicar of Epsom.
Frederick Locker grew up among pretty things in the famous hospital. Water-colours by Lawrence, Prout, Girtin, Turner, Chinnery, Paul Sandby, Cipriani, and other masters; casts after Canova; mezzotints after Sir Joshua; Hogarth’s famous picture of David Garrick and his wife, now well hung in Windsor Castle, were about him, and early attracted his observant eye. Yet the same things were about his elder brother Arthur, an exceedingly clever fellow, who remained quite curiously impervious to the impressiveness of pretty things all his days.
Locker began collecting on his own account after his marriage, in 1850, to a daughter of Lord Byron’s enemy, the Lord Elgin, who brought the marbles from Athens to Bloomsbury. His first object, at least so he thought, was to make his rooms pretty. From the beginning of his life as a connoisseur he spared himself no pains, often trudging miles, when not wanted at the Admiralty Office, in search of his prey. If any mercantile-minded friend ever inquired what anything had cost, he would be answered with a rueful smile, ‘Much shoe leather.’ He began with old furniture, china, and bric-a-brac, which ere long somewhat inconveniently filled his small rooms. Prices rose, and means in those days were as small as the rooms. No more purchases of Louis Seize and blue majolica and Palissy ware could be made. Drawings by the old masters and small pictures were the next objects of the chase. Here again the long purses were soon on his track, and the pursuit had to be abandoned, but not till many treasures had been garnered. Last of all he became a book-hunter, beginning with little volumes of poetry and the drama from 1590 to 1610; and as time went on the boundaries expanded, but never so as to include black letter.
I dare not say Mr. Locker had all the characteristics of a great collector, or that he was entirely free from the whimsicalities of the tribe of connoisseurs, but he was certainly endowed with the chief qualifications for the pursuit of rarities, and remained clear of the unpleasant vices that so often mar men’s most innocent avocations. Mr. Locker always knew what he wanted and what he did not want, and never could be persuaded to take the one for the other; he did not grow excited in the presence of the quarry; he had patience to wait, and to go on waiting, and he seldom lacked courage to buy.
He rode his own hobby-horse, never employing experts as buyers. For quantity he had no stomach. He shrank from numbers. He was not a Bodleian man; he had not the sinews to grapple with libraries. He was the connoisseur throughout. Of the huge acquisitiveness of a Heber or a Huth he had not a trace. He hated a crowd, of whatsoever it was composed. He was apt to apologize for his possessions, and to depreciate his tastes. As for boasting of a treasure, he could as easily have eaten beef at breakfast.
So delicate a spirit, armed as it was for purposes of defence with a rare gift of irony and a very shrewd insight into the weaknesses and noisy falsettos of life, was sure to be misunderstood. The dull and coarse witted found Locker hard to make out. He struck them as artificial and elaborate, perhaps as frivolous, and yet they felt uneasy in his company lest there should be a lurking ridicule behind his quiet, humble demeanour. There was, indeed, always an element of mockery in Locker’s humility.
An exceedingly spiteful account of him, in which it is asserted that ‘most of his rarest books are miserable copies’ (how book-collectors can hate one another!), ends with the reluctant admission: ‘He was eminently a gentleman, however, and his manners were even courtly, yet virile.’ Such extorted praise is valuable.
I can see him now before me, with a nicely graduated foot-rule in his delicate hand, measuring with grave precision the height to a hair of his copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719), for the purpose of ascertaining whether it was taller or shorter than one being vaunted for sale in a bookseller’s catalogue just to hand. His face, one of much refinement, was a study, exhibiting alike a fixed determination to discover the exact truth about the copy and a humorous realization of the inherent triviality of the whole business. Locker was a philosopher as well as a connoisseur.
The Rowfant Library has disappeared. Great possessions are great cares. ‘But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats, water-thieves, and land-thieves–I mean pirates; and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks.’ To this list the nervous owner of rare books must add fire, that dread enemy of all the arts. It is often difficult to provide stabling for dead men’s hobby-horses. It were perhaps absurd in a world like this to grow sentimental over a parcel of old books. Death, the great unbinder, must always make a difference.
Mr. Locker’s poetry now forms a volume of the _Golden Treasury Series_. The _London Lyrics_ are what they are. They have been well praised by good critics, and have themselves been made the subject of good verse.
‘Apollo made one April day
A new thing in the rhyming way; Its turn was neat, its wit was clear, It wavered ‘twixt a smile and tear. Then Momus gave a touch satiric,
And it became a _London Lyric_.’ AUSTIN DOBSON.
In another copy of verses Mr. Dobson adds:
‘Or where discern a verse so neat, So well-bred and so witty–
So finished in its least conceit, So mixed of mirth and pity?’
‘Pope taught him rhythm, Prior ease, Praed buoyancy and banter;
What modern bard would learn from these? Ah, _tempora mutantur_!’
Nothing can usefully be added to criticism so just, so searching, and so happily expressed.
Some of the _London Lyrics_ have, I think, achieved what we poor mortals call immortality–a strange word to apply to the piping of so slender a reed, to so slight a strain–yet
‘In small proportions we just beauties see.’
It is the simplest strain that lodges longest in the heart. Mr. Locker’s strains are never precisely _simple_. The gay enchantment of the world and the sense of its bitter disappointments murmur through all of them, and are fatal to their being simple, but the unpretentiousness of a _London Lyric_ is akin to simplicity.
His relation to his own poetry was somewhat peculiar. A critic in every fibre, he judged his own verses with a severity he would have shrunk from applying to those of any other rhyming man. He was deeply dissatisfied, almost on bad terms, with himself, yet for all that he was convinced that he had written some very good verses indeed. His poetry meant a great deal to him, and he stood in need of sympathy and of allies against his own despondency. He did not get much sympathy, being a man hard to praise, for unless he agreed with your praise it gave him more pain than pleasure.
I am not sure that Mr. Dobson agrees with me, but I am very fond of Locker’s paraphrase of one of Clement Marot’s _Epigrammes_; and as the lines are redolent of his delicate connoisseurship, I will quote both the original (dated 1544) and the paraphrase:
‘DU RYS DE MADAME D’ALLEBRET
‘Elle a tres bien ceste gorge d’albastre, Ce doulx parler, ce cler tainct, ces beaux yeulx: Mais en effect, ce petit rys follastre, C’est a mon gre ce qui lui sied le mieulx; Elle en pourroit les chemins et les lieux Ou elle passe a plaisir inciter;
Et si ennuy me venoit contrister Tant que par mort fust ma vie abbatue, Il me fauldroit pour me resusciter Que ce rys la duguel elle me tue.’
‘How fair those locks which now the light wind stirs! What eyes she has, and what a perfect arm! And yet methinks that little laugh of hers– That little laugh–is still her crowning charm. Where’er she passes, countryside or town, The streets make festa and the fields rejoice. Should sorrow come, as ’twill, to cast me down, Or Death, as come he must, to hush my voice, Her laugh would wake me just as now it thrills me– That little, giddy laugh wherewith she kills me.’
‘Tis the very laugh of Millamant in _The Way of the World_! ‘I would rather,’ cried Hazlitt, ‘have seen Mrs. Abington’s Millamant than any Rosalind that ever appeared on the stage.’ Such wishes are idle. Hazlitt never saw Mrs. Abington’s Millamant. I have seen Miss Ethel Irving’s Millamant, _dulce ridentem_, and it was that little giddy laugh of hers that reminded me of Marot’s Epigram and of Frederick Locker’s paraphrase. So do womanly charms endure from generation to generation, and it is one of the duties of poets to record them.
In 1867 Mr. Locker published his _Lyra Elegantiarun. A Collection of Some of the Best Specimens of Vers de Societe and Vers d’Occasion in the English Languages by Deceased Authors_. In his preface Locker gave what may now be fairly called the ‘classical’ definition of the verses he was collecting. ‘_Vers de societe_ and _vers d’occasion_ should’ (so he wrote) ‘be short, elegant, refined and fanciful, not seldom distinguished by heightened sentiment, and often playful. The tone should not be pitched high; it should be idiomatic and rather in the conversational key; the rhythm should be crisp and sparkling, and the rhyme frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish and completeness; for however trivial the subject-matter may be–indeed, rather in proportion to its triviality, subordination to the rules of composition and perfection of execution should be strictly enforced. The definition may be further illustrated by a few examples of pieces, which, from the absence of some of the foregoing qualities, or from the excess of others, cannot be properly regarded as _vers de societe_, though they may bear a certain generic resemblance to that species of poetry. The ballad of “John Gilpin,” for example, is too broadly and simply ludicrous; Swift’s “Lines on the Death of Marlborough,” and Byron’s “Windsor Poetics,” are too savage and truculent; Cowper’s “My Mary” is far too pathetic; Herrick’s lyrics to “Blossoms” and “Daffodils” are too elevated; “Sally in our Alley” is too homely and too entirely simple and natural; while the “Rape of the Lock,” which would otherwise be one of the finest specimens of _vers de societe_ in any language, must be excluded on account of its length, which renders it much too important.’
I have made this long quotation because it is an excellent example of Mr. Locker’s way of talking about poets and poetry, and of his intimate, searching, and unaffected criticism.
_Lyra Elegantiarum_ is a real, not a bookseller’s collection. Mr. Locker was a great student of verse. There was hardly a stanza of any English poet, unless it was Spenser, for whom he had no great affection, which he had not pondered over and clearly considered as does a lawyer his cases. He delighted in a complete success, and grieved over any lapse from the fold of metrical virtue, over any ill-sounding rhyme or unhappy expression. The circulation of _Lyra Elegantiarum_ was somewhat interfered with by a ‘copyright’ question. Mr. Locker had a great admiration for Landor’s short poems, and included no less than forty-one of them, which he chose with the utmost care. Publishers are slow to perceive that the best chance of getting rid of their poetical wares (and Landor was not popular) is to have attention called to the artificer who produced them. The Landorian publisher objected, and the _Lyra_ had to be ‘suppressed’–a fine word full of hidden meanings. The second-hand booksellers, a wily race, were quick to perceive the significance of this, and have for more than thirty years obtained inflated prices for their early copies, being able to vend them as possessing the _Suppressed Verses_. There is a great deal of Locker in this collection. To turn its pages is to renew intercourse with its editor.
In 1879 another little volume instinct with his personality came into existence and made friends for itself. He called it _Patchwork_, and to have given it any other name would have severely taxed his inventiveness. It is a collection of stories, of _ana_, of quotations in verse and prose, of original matter, of character-sketches, of small adventures, of table-talk, and of other things besides, if other things, indeed, there be. If you know _Patchwork_ by heart you are well equipped. It is intensely original throughout, and never more original than when its matter is borrowed. Readers of _Patchwork_ had heard of Mr. Creevey long before Sir Herbert Maxwell once again let that politician loose upon an unlettered society.
The book had no great sale, but copies evidently fell into the hands of the more judicious of the pressmen, who kept it by their sides, and every now and again
‘Waled a portion with judicious care’
for quotation in their columns. The _Patchwork_ stories thus got into circulation one by one. Kind friends of Mr. Locker’s, who had been told, or had discovered for themselves, that he was somewhat of a wag, would frequently regale him with bits of his own _Patchwork_, introducing them to his notice as something they had just heard, which they thought he would like–murdering his own stories to give him pleasure. His countenance on such occasions was a _rendezvous_ of contending emotions, a battlefield of rival forces. Politeness ever prevailed, but it took all his irony and sad philosophy to hide his pain. _Patchwork_ is such a good collection of the kind of story he liked best that it was really difficult to avoid telling him a story that was _not_ in it. I made the blunder once myself with a Voltairean anecdote. Here it is as told in _Patchwork_: ‘Voltaire was one day listening to a dramatic author reading his comedy, and who said, “Ici le chevalier rit!” He exclaimed: “Le chevalier est _bien_ heureux!”‘ I hope I told it fairly well. He smiled sadly, and said nothing, not even _Et tu, Brute_!
In 1886 Mr. Locker printed for presentation a catalogue of his printed books, manuscripts, autograph letters, drawings, and pictures. Nothing of his own figures in this catalogue, and yet in a very real sense the whole is his. Most of the books are dispersed, but the catalogue remains, not merely as a record of rareties and bibliographical details dear to the collector’s heart, but as a token of taste. Just as there is, so Wordsworth reminds us, ‘a spirit in the woods,’ so is there still, brooding over and haunting the pages of the ‘Rowfant Catalogue,’ the spirit of true connoisseurship. In the slender lists of Locker’s ‘Works’ this book must always have a place.
Frederick Locker died at Rowfant on May 30, 1895, leaving behind him, carefully prepared for the press, a volume he had christened _My Confidences: An Autographical Sketch addressed to My Descendants_.
In due course the book appeared, and was misunderstood at first by many. It cut a strange, outlandish figure among the crowd of casual reminiscences it externally resembled. Glancing over the pages of _My Confidences_, the careless library subscriber encountered the usual number of names of well-known personages, whose appearance is supposed by publishers to add sufficient zest to reminiscences to secure for them a sale large enough, at any rate, to recoup the cost of publication. Yet, despite these names, Mr. Locker’s book is completely unlike the modern memoir. Beneath a carefully-constructed, and perhaps slightly artificially maintained, frivolity of tone, the book is written in deadly earnest. Not for nothing did its author choose as one of the mottoes for its title-page, ‘Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’ecrie; c’est moy.’ It may be said of this book, as of Senancour’s _Oberman_:
‘A fever in these pages burns;
Beneath the calm they feign, A wounded human spirit turns
Here on its bed of pain.’
The still small voice of its author whispers through _My Confidences_. Like Montaigne’s _Essays_, the book is one of entire good faith, and strangely uncovers a personality.
As a tiny child Locker was thought by his parents to be very like Sir Joshua Reynolds’ picture of Puck, an engraving of which was in the home at Greenwich Hospital, and certainly Locker carried to his grave more than a suspicion of what is called Puckishness. In _My Confidences_ there are traces of this quality.
Clearly enough the author of _London Lyrics_, the editor of _Lyra Elegantiarum_, of _Patchwork_, and the whimsical but sincere compiler of _My Confidences_ was more than a mere connoisseur, however much connoisseurship entered into a character in which taste played so dominant a part.
Stronger even than taste was his almost laborious love of kindness. He really took too much pains about it, exposing himself to rebuffs and misunderstandings; but he was not without his rewards. All down-hearted folk, sorrowful, disappointed people, the unlucky, the ill-considered, the _mesestimes_–those who found themselves condemned to discharge uncongenial duties in unsympathetic society, turned instinctively to Mr. Locker for a consolation, so softly administered that it was hard to say it was intended. He had friends everywhere, in all ranks of life, who found in him an infinity of solace, and for his friends there was nothing he would not do. It seemed as if he could not spare himself. I remember his calling at my chambers one hot day in July, when he happened to have with him some presents he was in course of delivering. Among them I noticed a bust of Voltaire and an unusually lively tortoise, generally half-way out of a paper bag. Wherever he went he found occasion for kindness, and his whimsical adventures would fill a volume. I sometimes thought it would really be worth while to leave off the struggle for existence, and gently to subside into one of Lord Rowton’s homes in order to have the pleasure of receiving in my new quarters a first visit from Mr. Locker. How pleasantly would he have mounted the stair, laden with who knows what small gifts?–a box of mignonette for the window-sill, an old book or two, as likely as not a live kitten, for indeed there was never an end to the variety or ingenuity of his offerings! How felicitous would have been his greeting! How cordial his compliments! How abiding the sense of his unpatronizing friendliness! But it was not to be. One can seldom choose one’s pleasures.
In his _Patchwork_ Mr. Locker quotes Gibbon’s encomium on Charles James Fox. Anyone less like Fox than Frederick Locker it might be hard to discover, but fine qualities are alike wherever they are found lodged; and if Fox was as much entitled as Locker to the full benefit of Gibbon’s praise, he was indeed a good fellow.
‘In his tour to Switzerland Mr. Fox gave me two days of free and private society. He seemed to feel and even to envy the happiness of my situation, while I admired the powers of a superior man as they are blended in his character with the softness and simplicity of a child. _Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempted from the taint of malevolence, vanity, and falsehood._’
OUR GREAT MIDDLE CLASS
The republication of Mr. Arnold’s _Friendship’s Garland_ after an interval of twenty-seven years may well set us all a-thinking. Here it is, in startling facsimile–the white covers, destined too soon to become black, the gilt device, the familiar motto. As we gazed upon it, we found ourselves exclaiming, so vividly did it recall the past:
‘It is we, it is we, who have changed.’
_Friendship’s Garland_ was a very good joke seven-and-twenty years ago, and though some of its once luminous paint has been rubbed off, and a few of its jests have ceased to effervesce, it is a good joke still. Mr. Bottle’s mind, qua mind; the rowdy Philistine Adolescens Leo, Esq.; Dr. Russell, of the _Times_, mounting his war-horse; the tale of how Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall got their degrees at Oxford; and many another ironic thrust which made the reader laugh ‘while the hair was yet brown on his head,’ may well make him laugh still, ‘though his scalp is almost hairless, and his figure’s grown convex.’ Since 1871 we have learnt the answer to the sombre lesson, ‘What is it to grow old?’ But, thank God! we can laugh even yet.
The humour and high spirits of _Friendship’s Garland_ were, however, but the gilding of a pill, the artificial sweetening of a nauseous draught. In reality, and joking apart, the book is an indictment at the bar of _Geist_ of the English people as represented by its middle class and by its full-voiced organ, the daily press. Mr. Arnold invented Arminius to be the mouthpiece of this indictment, the traducer of our ‘imperial race,’ because such blasphemies could not artistically have been attributed to one of the number. He made Arminius a Prussian because in those far-off days Prussia stood for Von Humboldt and education and culture, and all the things Sir Thomas Bazley and Mr. Miall were supposed to be without. Around the central figure of Arminius the essentially playful fancy of Mr. Arnold grouped other figures, including his own. What an old equity draughtsman would call ‘the charging parts’ of the book consist in the allegations that the Government of England had been taken out of the hands of an aristocracy grown barren of ideas and stupid beyond words, and entrusted to a middle class without noble traditions, wretchedly educated, full of _Ungeist_, with a passion for clap-trap, only wanting to be left alone to push trade and make money; so ignorant as to believe that feudalism can be abated without any heroic Stein, by providing that in one insignificant case out of a hundred thousand, land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; without a single vital idea or sentiment or feeling for beauty or appropriateness; well persuaded that if more trade is done in England than anywhere else, if personal independence is without a check, and newspaper publicity unbounded, that is, by the nature of things, to be great; misled every morning by the magnificent _Times_ or the ‘rowdy’ _Telegraph_; desperately prone to preaching to other nations, proud of being able to say what it likes, whilst wholly indifferent to the fact that it has nothing whatever to say.
Such, in brief, is the substance of this most agreeable volume. Its message was lightly treated by the grave and reverend seigniors of the State. The magnificent _Times_, the rowdy _Telegraph_, continued to preach their gospels as before; but for all that Mr. Arnold found an audience fit, though few, and, of course, he found it among the people he abused. The barbarians, as he called the aristocracy, were not likely to pay heed to a professor of poetry. Our working classes were not readers of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ or purchasers of four-and-sixpenny tracts bound in white cloth. No; it was the middle class, to whom Mr. Arnold himself belonged, who took him to honest hearts, stuck his photograph upon their writing-tables, and sounded his praises so loudly that his fame even reached the United States of America, where he was promptly invited to lecture, an invitation he accepted. But for the middle classes Mr. Arnold would have had but a poor time of it. They did not mind being insulted; they overlooked exaggeration; they pardoned ignorance–in a word, they proved teachable. Yet, though meek in spirit, they have not yet inherited the earth; indeed, there are those who assert that their chances are gone, their sceptre for ever buried. It is all over with the middle-class. Tuck up its muddled head! Tie up its chin!
A rabble of bad writers may now be noticed pushing their vulgar way along, who, though born and bred in the middle classes, and disfigured by many of the very faults Mr. Arnold deplored, yet make it a test of their membership, an ‘open sesame’ to their dull orgies, that all decent, sober-minded folk, who love virtue, and, on the whole, prefer delicate humour to sickly lubricity, should be labelled ‘middle class.’
Politically, it cannot but be noticed that, for good or for ill, the old middle-class audience no longer exists in its integrity. The crowds that flocked to hear Cobden and Bright, that abhorred slavery, that cheered Kossuth, that hated the income-tax, are now watered down by a huge population who do not know, and do not want to know, what the income-tax is, but who do want to know what the Government is going to do for them in the matter of shorter hours, better wages, and constant employment. Will the rabble, we wonder, prove as teachable as the middle class? Will they consent to be told their faults as meekly? Will they buy the photograph of their physician, or heave half a brick at him? It remains to be seen. In the meantime it would be a mistake to assume that the middle class counts for nothing, even at an election. As to ideas, have we got any new ones since 1871? ‘To be consequent and powerful,’ says Arminius, ‘men must be bottomed on some vital idea or sentiment which lends strength and certainty to their action.’ There are those who tell us that we have at last found this vital idea in those conceptions of the British Empire which Mr. Chamberlain so vigorously trumpets. To trumpet a conception is hardly a happy phrase, but, as Mr. Chamberlain plays no other instrument, it is forced upon me. Would that we could revive Arminius, to tell us what he thinks of our new Ariel girdling the earth with twenty Prime Ministers, each the choicest product of a self-governing and deeply-involved colony. Is it a vital or a vulgar idea? Is it merely a big theory or really a great one? Is it the ornate beginning of a Time, or but the tawdry ending of a period? At all events, it is an idea unknown to Arminius von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, and we ought to be, and many are, thankful for it.
TAR AND WHITEWASH
I am, I confess it, hard to please. If a round dozen of Bad Women, all made in England too, does not satisfy me, what will? What ails the fellow at them? Yet was I at first dissatisfied, and am, therefore, glad to notice that whilst I was demurring and splitting hairs the great, generous public was buying the _Lives of Twelve Bad Women_, by Arthur Vincent, and putting it into a second edition. This is as it should be. When the excellent Dean Burgon dubbed his dozen biographies _Twelve Good Men_, it probably never occurred to him that the title suggested three companion volumes; but so it did, and two of them, _Twelve Bad Men_ and _Twelve Bad Women_, have made their appearance. I still await, with great patience, _Twelve Good Women_. Twelve was the number of the Apostles. Had it not been, one might be tempted to ask, Why twelve? But as there must be some limit to bookmaking, there is no need to quarrel with an arithmetical limit.
My criticism upon the Dean’s dozen was that they were not by any means, all of them, conspicuously good men; for, to name one only, who would call old Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, a particularly good man? In a sense, all Presidents, Provosts, Principals, and Masters of Colleges are good men–in fact, they must be so by the statutes–but to few of them are given the special notes of goodness. Dr. Routh was a remarkable man, a learned man, perhaps a pious man–undeniably, when he came to die, an old man–but he was no better than his colleagues. This weakness of classification has run all through the series, and it is my real quarrel with it. I do not understand the principle of selection. I did not understand the Dean’s test of goodness, nor do I understand Mr. Seccombe’s or Mr. Vincent’s test of badness. What do we mean by a good man or a bad one, a good woman or a bad one? Most people, like the young man in the song, are ‘not very good, nor yet very bad.’ We move about the pastures of life in huge herds, and all do the same things, at the same times, and for the same reasons. ‘Forty feeding like one.’ Are we mean? Well, we have done some mean things in our time. Are we generous? Occasionally we are. Were we good sons or dutiful daughters? We have both honoured and dishonoured our parents, who, in their turn, had done the same by theirs. Do we melt at the sight of misery? Indeed we do. Do we forget all about it when we have turned the corner? Frequently that is so. Do we expect to be put to open shame at the Great Day of Judgment? We should be terribly frightened of this did we not cling to the hope that amidst the shocking revelations then for the first time made public our little affairs may fail to attract much notice. Judged by the standards of humanity, few people are either good or bad. ‘I have not been a great sinner,’ said the dying Nelson; nor had he–he had only been made a great fool of by a woman. Mankind is all tarred with the same brush, though some who chance to be operated upon when the brush is fresh from the barrel get more than their share of the tar. The biography of a celebrated man usually reminds me of the outside of a coastguardsman’s cottage–all tar and whitewash. These are the two condiments of human life–tar and whitewash–the faults and the excuses for the faults, the passions and pettinesses that make us occasionally drop on all fours, and the generous aspirations that at times enable us, if not to stand upright, at least to adopt the attitude of the kangaroo. It is rather tiresome, this perpetual game of French and English going on inside one. True goodness and real badness escape it altogether. A good man does not spend his life wrestling with the Powers of Darkness. He is victor in the fray, and the most he is called upon to do is every now and again to hit his prostrate foe a blow over the costard just to keep him in his place. Thus rid of a perpetual anxiety, the good man has time to grow in goodness, to expand pleasantly, to take his ease on Zion. You can see in his face that he is at peace with himself–that he is no longer at war with his elements. His society, if you are fond of goodness, is both agreeable and medicinal; but if you are a bad man it is hateful, and you cry out with Mr. Love-lust in Bunyan’s Vanity Fair: ‘Away with him. I cannot endure him; he is for ever condemning my way.’
Not many of Dean Burgon’s biographies reached this standard. The explanation, perhaps, is that the Dean chiefly moved in clerical circles where excellence is more frequently to be met with than goodness.
In the same way a really bad man is one who has frankly said, ‘Evil, be thou my good.’ Like the good man, though for a very different reason, the bad one has ceased to make war with the devil. Finding a conspiracy against goodness going on, the bad man joins it, and thus, like the good man, is at peace with himself. The bad man is bent upon his own way, to get what he wants, no matter at what cost. Human lives! What do they matter? A woman’s honour! What does that matter? Truth and fidelity! What are they? To know what you want, and not to mind what you pay for it, is the straight path to fame, fortune, and hell-fire. Careers, of course, vary; to dominate a continent or to open a corner shop as a pork-butcher’s, plenty of devilry may go to either ambition. Also, genius is a rare gift. It by no means follows that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate. It casts a little doubt upon a man’s badness if he does not, at least, make a little money. It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret. That was one of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe’s Twelve Bad Men. Most of them came to violent ends. They were all failures.
But I have kept these twelve ladies waiting a most unconscionable time. Who are they? There are amongst them four courtesans: Alice Perrers, one of King Edward III.’s misses; Barbara Villiers, one of King Charles II.’s; Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, who had to be content with a royal Duke; and Mrs. Con Phillips. Six members of the criminal class: Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston. Of these twelve bad women one-third were executed, Alice Arden being burnt at Canterbury, Jenny Diver and Elizabeth Brownrigg being hung at Tyburn, and Mary Bateman suffering the same fate at Leeds. Elizabeth Canning was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and, indeed, if their biographers are to be believed, all the other ladies made miserable ends. There is nothing triumphant about their badness. Even from the point of view of this world they had better have been good. In fact, squalor is the badge of the whole tribe. Some of them, probably–Elizabeth Brownrigg, for example–were mad. This last-named poor creature bore sixteen children to a house-painter and plasterer, and then became a parish mid-wife, and only finally a baby-farmer. Her cruelty to her apprentices had madness in every detail. To include her in this volume was wholly unnecessary. She lives but in George Canning’s famous parody on Southey’s sonnet to the regicide Marten.
With those sentimentalists who maintain that all bad people are mad I will have no dealings. It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all remind us it is sheer nonsense. Some of our greatest men have been infernal scoundrels–pre-eminently bad men–with nothing mad about them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about in it.
_Twelve Bad Women_ contains much interesting matter, but, on the whole, it is depressing. It seems very dull to be bad. Perhaps the editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded. Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these courtesans and criminals put together. The note of jollity is entirely absent. It was no primrose path these unhappy women traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were unchristian to doubt. The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is in a third, for it has a moral tendency.
ITINERARIES
Anyone who is teased by the notion that it would be pleasant to be remembered, in the sense of being read, after death, cannot do better to secure that end than compose an Itinerary and leave it behind him in manuscript, with his name legibly inscribed thereon. If an honest bit of work, noting distances, detailing expenses, naming landmarks, moors, mountains, harbours, docks, buildings–indeed, anything which, as lawyers say, savours of realty–and but scantily interspersed with reflections, and with no quotations, why, then, such a piece of work, however long publication may be delayed–and a century or two will not matter in the least–cannot fail, whenever it is printed, to attract attention, to excite general interest and secure a permanent hold in every decent library in the kingdom.
Time cannot stale an Itinerary. _Iter, Via, Actus_ are words of pith and moment. Stage-coaches, express trains, motor-cars, have written, or are now writing, their eventful histories over the face of these islands; but, whatever changes they have made or are destined to make, they have left untouched the mystery of the road, although for the moment the latest comer may seem injuriously to have affected its majesty.
The Itinerist alone among authors is always sure of an audience. No matter where, no matter when, he has but to tell us how he footed it and what he saw by the wayside, and we must listen. How can we help it? Two hundred years ago, it may be, this Itinerist came through our village, passed by the wall of our homestead, climbed our familiar hill, and went on his way; it is perhaps but two lines and a half he can afford to give us, but what lines they are! How different with sermons, poems, and novels! On each of these is the stamp of the author’s age; sentiments, fashions, thoughts, faiths, phraseology, all worn out–cold, dirty grate, where once there was a blazing fire. Cheerlessness personified! Leland’s anti-Papal treatise in forty-five chapters remains in learned custody–a manuscript; a publisher it will never find. We still have Papists and anti-Papists; in this case the fire still blazes, but the grates are of an entirely different construction. Leland’s treatise is out of date. But his _Itinerary_ in nine volumes, a favourite book throughout the eighteenth century, which has graced many a bookseller’s catalogue for the last hundred years, and seldom without eliciting a purchaser–Leland’s _Itinerary_ is to-day being reprinted under the most able editorship. The charm of the road is irresistible. The _Vicar of Wakefield_ is a delightful book, with a great tradition behind it and a future still before it; but it has not escaped the ravages of time, and I would, now, at all events, gladly exchange it for Oliver Goldsmith’s _Itinerary through Germany with a Flute_!
Vain authors, publisher’s men, may write as they like about _Shakespeare’s_ country, or _Scott’s_ country, or _Carlyle’s_ country, or _Crockett’s_ country, but–
‘Oh, good gigantic smile of the brown old earth!’
the land laughs at the delusions of the men who hurriedly cross its surface.
‘Rydal and Fairfield are there,– In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead. So it is, so it will be for aye,
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely, a mortal is dead.’
These reflections, which by themselves would be enough to sink even an Itinerary, seemed forced upon me by the publication of _A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland by Joseph Taylor, Late of the Inner Temple, Esquire_. This journey was made two hundred years ago in the Long Vacation of 1705, but has just been printed from the original manuscript, under the editorship of Mr. William Cowan, by the well-known Edinburgh bookseller, Mr. Brown, of Princes Street, to whom all lovers of things Scottish already owe much.
Nobody can hope to be less known than this our latest Itinerist, for not only is he not in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, but it is at present impossible to say which of two Joseph Taylors he was. The House of the Winged Horse has ever had Taylors on its roll, the sign of the Middle Temple, a very fleecy sheep, being perhaps unattractive to the clan, and in 1705 it so happened that not only were there two Taylors, but two Joseph Taylors, entitled to write themselves ‘of the Inner Temple, Esquire.’ Which was the Itinerist? Mr. Cowan, going by age, thinks that the Itinerist can hardly have been the Joseph Taylor who was admitted to the Inn in 1663, as in that case he must have been at least fifty-eight when he travelled to Edinburgh. For my part, I see nothing in the _Itinerary_ to preclude the possibility of its author having attained that age at the date of its composition. I observe in the _Itinerary_ references which point to the Itinerist being a Kentish man, and he mentions more than once his ‘Cousin D’aeth.’ Research among the papers of the D’aeths of Knowlton Court, near Dover, might result in the discovery which of these two Taylors really was the Itinerist. As nothing else is at present known about either, the investigation could probably be made without passion or party or even religious bias. It might be best begun by Mr. Cowan telling us in whose custody he found the manuscript, and how it came there. These statements should always be made when old manuscripts are first printed.
The journey began on August 2, 1705. The party consisted of Mr. Taylor and his two friends, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Sloman. They travelled on horseback, and often had difficulties with the poor beast that carried their luggage. They reached Edinburgh in the evening of August 31, and left it on their return journey on September 8, and got home on the 25th of the same month. The _Itinerary_ concludes as follows:
‘Thus we spent almost 2 months in a Journy of many 100 miles, sometimes thro’ very charming Countryes, and at other times over desolate and Barren Mountaines, and yet met with no particular misfortune in all the Time.’
I may say at once of these three Itinerists–Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman–that they appear to have been thoroughly commonplace, well behaved, occasionally hilarious Englishmen, ready to endure whatever befell them, if unavoidable; accustomed to take their ease in their inn and to turn round and look at any pretty woman they might chance to meet on their travels. Their first experience of what the Itinerist calls ‘the prodigies of Nature,’ ‘at once an occasion both of Horrour and Admiration,’ was in the Peak Country ‘described in poetry by the ingenious Mr. Cotton.’ This part of the world they ‘did’ with something of the earnestness of the modern tourist. But I hardly think they enjoyed themselves. The ‘prodigious’ caverns and strange petrifactions shocked them; ‘nothing can be more terrible or shocking to Nature.’ Mam Tor, with its 1,710 feet, proved very impressive, ‘a vast high mountain reaching to the very clouds.’ This gloom of the Derbyshire hills and stony valleys was partially dispelled for our travellers by a certain ‘fair Gloriana’ they met at Buxton, with whom they had great fun, ‘so much the greater, because we never expected such heavenly enjoyments in so desolate a country.’ If it be on susceptibilities of this nature that Mr. Cowan rests his case for thinking that the Itinerist can hardly have attained ‘the blasted antiquity’ of fifty-eight, we must think Mr. Cowan a trifle hasty, or a very young man, perhaps under forty, which is young for an editor.
After describing, somewhat too much like an auctioneer, the splendours of Chatsworth, ‘a Paradise in the deserts of Arabia,’ the Itinerist proceeds on his way north through Nottingham to Belvoir Castle, where ‘my Lord Rosses Gentleman (to whom Mr. Harrison was recommended) entertained us by his Lordship’s command with good wine and the best of malt liquors which the cellar abounds with’; the pictures in the Long Gallery were shown them by ‘my Lord himself.’ At Doncaster, ‘a neat market-town which consists only in one long street,’ they had some superlative salmon just taken out of the river. By Knaresborough Spaw, where they drank the waters and had icy cold baths, and dined at the ordinary with a parson whose conversation startled the propriety of the Templar, the travellers made their way to York, and for the first and last time a few pages of _Guide Book_ are improperly introduced. Then on to Scarborough.
‘The next morning early we left Scarborough and travelled through a dismall road, particularly near Robins Hood Bay; we were obliged to lead our horses, and had much ado to get down a vast craggy mountain which lyes within a quarter of a mile of it. The Bay is about a mile broad, and inhabited by poor fishermen. We stopt to taste some of their liquor and discourse with them. They told us the French privateers came into the Very Bay and took 2 of their Vessels but the day before, which were ransom’d for L25 a piece. We saw a great many vessels lying upon the Shore, the masters not daring to venture out to sea for fear of undergoing the same fate.’
We boast too readily of our inviolate shores.
A curious description is given of the Duke of Buckingham’s alum works near Whitby. The travellers then procured a guide, and traversed ‘the vast moors which lye between Whitby and Gisborough.’ The civic magnificence of Newcastle greatly struck our travellers, who, happier than their modern successors, were able to see the town miles off. The Itinerist quotes with gusto the civic proverb that the men of Newcastle pay nothing for the Way, the Word, or the Water, ‘for the Ministers of Religion are maintained, the streets paved, and the Conduits kept up at the publick charge.’ A disagreeable account is given of the brutishness of the people employed in the salt works at Tynemouth. At Berwick the travellers got into trouble with the sentry, but the mistake was rectified with the captain of the guard over ‘2 bowles of punch, there being no wine in the town.’
Scotland was now in sight, and the travellers became grave, as befitted the occasion. They were told that the journey that lay before them was extremely dangerous, that ‘twould be difficult to escape with their lives, much less (ominous words) without ‘the distemper of the country.’ But Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman were as brave as Mr. Pickwick, and they would on. ‘Yet notwithstanding all these sad representations, we resolv’d to proceed and stand by one another to the last.’
What the Itinerists thought of Scotland when they got there is not for me to say. I was once a Scottish member.
They arrived in Edinburgh at a great crisis in Scottish history. They saw the Duke of Argyll, as Queen Anne’s Lord High Commissioner, go to the Parliament House in this manner:
‘First a coach and six Horses for his Gentlemen, then a Trumpet, then his own coach with six white horses, which were very fine, being those presented by King William to the Duke of Queensbury, and by him sold to the Duke of Argyle for L300; next goes a troop of Horse Guards, cloathed like my Lord of Oxford’s Regiment, but the horses are of several colours; and the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State, and the Lord Chief Justice Clerk, and other officers of State close the cavalcade in coaches and six horses. Thus the Commissioner goes and returns every day.’
The Itinerists followed the Duke and his procession into the Parliament House, and heard debated the great question–the greatest of all possible questions for Scotland–whether this magnificence should cease, whether there should be an end of an auld sang–in short, whether the proposed Act of Union should be proceeded with. By special favour, our Itinerists had leave to stand upon the steps of the throne, and witnessed a famous fiery and prolonged debate, the Duke once turning to them and saying, _sotto voce_, ‘It is now deciding whether England and Scotland shall go together by the ears.’ How it was decided we all know, and that it was wisely decided no one doubts; yet, when we read our Itinerist’s account of the Duke’s coach and horses, and the cavalcade that followed him, and remember that this was what happened every day during the sitting of the Parliament, and must not be confounded with the greater glories of the first day of a Parliament, when every member, be he peer, knight of the shire, or burgh member, had to ride on horseback in the procession, it is impossible not to feel the force of Miss Grisel Dalmahoy’s appeal in the _Heart of Midlothian_, she being an ancient sempstress, to Mr. Saddletree, the harness-maker:
‘And as for the Lords of States ye suld mind the riding o’ the Parliament in the gude auld time before the Union. A year’s rent o’ mony a gude estate gaed for horse-graith and harnessing, forby broidered robes and foot-mantles that wad hae stude by their lane with gold and brocade, and that were muckle in my ain line.’
The graphic account of a famous debate given by, Taylor is worth comparing with the _Lockhart Papers_ and Hill Burton. The date is a little troublesome. According to our Itinerist, he heard the discussion as to whether the Queen or the Scottish Parliament should nominate the Commissioners. Now, according to the histories, this all-important discussion began and ended on September 1, but our Itinerist had only arrived in Edinburgh the night before the first, and gives us to understand that he owed his invitation to be present to the fact that whilst in Edinburgh he and his friends had had the honour to have several lords and members of Parliament to dine, and that these guests informed him ‘of the grand day when the Act was to be passed or rejected.’ The Itinerist’s account is too particular–for he gives the result of the voting–to admit of any possibility of a mistake, and he describes how several of the members came afterwards to his lodgings, and, so he writes, ’embraced us with all the outward marks of love and kindness, and seemed mightily pleased at what was done, and told us we should now be no more English and Scotch, but Brittons.’ In the matter of nomenclature, at all events, the promises of the Union have not been carried out.
After September 1 the Parliament did not meet till the 4th, when an Address was passed to the Queen, but apparently without any repetition of debate. So it really is a little difficult to reconcile the dates. Perhaps Itinerists are best advised to keep off public events.
How our travellers escaped the ‘national distemper’ and journeyed home by Ecclefechan, Carlisle, Shap Fell, Liverpool, Chester, Coventry, and Warwick must be read in the _Journey_ itself, which, though it only occupies 182 small pages, is full of matter and even merriment; in fact, it is an excellent itinerary.
EPITAPHS
Epitaphs, if in rhyme, are the real literature of the masses. They need no commendation and are beyond all criticism. A Cambridge don, a London bus-driver, will own their charm in equal measure. Strange indeed is the fascination of rhyme. A commonplace hitched into verse instantly takes rank with Holy Scripture. This passion for poetry, as it is sometimes called, is manifested on every side; even tradesmen share it, and as the advertisements in our newspapers show, are willing to pay small sums to poets who commend their wares in verse. The widow bereft of her life’s companion, the mother bending over an empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as memorials of their pleasure or their pain.
‘Hark! how chimes the passing bell– There’s no music to a knell;
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter and but cheat our ear.’
So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever wearies of Martial’s ‘Erotion’?–
‘Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra, Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems. Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli Manibus exiguis annua justa dato.
Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua’–
so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:
‘Underneath this greedy stone
Lies little sweet Erotion,
Whom the Fates with hearts as cold Nipped away at six years old.
Those, whoever thou may’st be, That hast this small field after me, Let the yearly rites be paid
To her little slender shade;
So shall no disease or jar
Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar, But this tomb be here alone
The only melancholy stone.’
Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards–‘uncouth rhymes,’ as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which–to use a clumsy phrase–besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:
‘I’ll stay and read my sermon here, And skulls and bones shall be my text.
* * * *
Here learn that glory and disgrace, Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space, That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love and all we hate, That all we hope and all we fear, Each mood of mind, each turn of fate, Must end in dust and silence here.’
The best epitaphs are the grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once, and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death and, it may be, judgment to come.
Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting _Selection of English Epigrams and Epitaphs_, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country. The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean. It is admirably suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four:
‘When the Archangel’s trump shall blow And souls to bodies join,
Many will wish their lives below Had been as short as mine.’
It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.
Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is arrested by Pope’s well-known lines from his magnificent ‘Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,’ which are often to be found on tombstones:
‘So peaceful rests without a stone and name What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. How loved, how honoured once avails thee not, To whom related or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee; ‘Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.’
I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope’s claim to be a poet no worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was denied them–the ear of the public.
Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which remind the passer-by of his transitory estate. In different parts of the country–in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray–are to be found lines more or less resembling the following:
‘Man’s life is like unto a winter’s day, Some break their fast and so depart away, Others stay dinner then depart full fed, The longest age but sups and goes to bed. O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.’
The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has become a proverb. Pope’s famous epitaph on Newton:
‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night, God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.’
is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the preference given to prose Latinity.
The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:
‘UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.
Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood; Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir The earth that lightly covers her.’
Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called _The Epigrammatists_, published in Bohn’s Standard Library, calls these lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson’s beautiful epitaph on S.P., a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel, beginning,
‘Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed Death’s self is sorry,’
is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay’s, for example:
‘Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it.’
But _does_ he know it? Ay, there’s the rub! The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways. Coleridge’s epitaph for himself is a striking exception:
‘Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he. O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C, That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise–to be forgiven for fame, He ask’d and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.’
‘HANSARD’
‘Men are we, and must mourn when e’en the shade of that which once was great has passed away.’ This quotation–which, in obedience to the prevailing taste, I print as prose–was forced upon me by reading in the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of _Hansard’s Parliamentary History and Debates_ were exposed for sale, and, it must be added, to ridicule. Yet ‘Hansard’ was once a name to conjure with. To be in it was an ambition–costly, troublesome, but animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship. No wonder that unimaginative men still believed that _Hansard_ was a property with money in it. Is it not the counterpart of Parliament, its dark and majestic shadow thrown across the page of history? As the pious Catholic studies his _Acta Sanctorum_, so should the constitutionalist love to pore over the _ipsissima verba_ of Parliamentary gladiators, and read their resolutions and their motions. Where else save in the pages of _Hansard_ can we make ourselves fully acquainted with the history of the Mother of Free Institutions? It is, no doubt, dull, but with the soberminded a large and spacious dulness like that of _Hansard’s Debates_ is better than the incongruous chirpings of the new ‘humourists.’ Besides, its dulness is exaggerated. If a reader cannot extract amusement from it the fault is his, not _Hansard’s_. But, indeed, this perpetual talk of dulness and amusement ought not to pass unchallenged. Since when has it become a crime to be dull? Our fathers were not ashamed to be dull in a good cause. We are ashamed, but without ceasing to be dull.
[Footnote A: March 8, 1902.]
But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. ‘Things are what they are,’ said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. ‘Why, then, should we desire to be deceived?’ The test of truth remains undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried by this test, it is plain that _Hansard_ has fallen upon evil days. The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray’s _Elegy_, or _Peregrine Pickle_, is worth more than, or nearly as much as, the 458 volumes of _Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_. Three complete sets were sold last Tuesday; one brought L110, the other two but L70 each. And yet it is not long ago since a _Hansard_ was worth three times as much. Where were our young politicians? There are serious men on both sides of the House. Men of their stamp twenty years ago would not have been happy without a _Hansard_ to clothe their shelves with dignity and their minds with quotations. But these young men were not bidders.
As the sale proceeded, the discredit of _Hansard_ became plainer and plainer. For the copyright, including, of course, the goodwill of the name–the right to call yourself ‘Hansard’ for years to come–not a penny was offered, and yet, as the auctioneer feelingly observed, only eighteen months ago it was valued at L60,000. The cold douche of the auction mart may brace the mind, but is apt to lower the price of commodities of this kind. Then came incomplete and unbound sets, with doleful results. For forty copies of the ‘Indian Debates’ for 1889 only a penny a copy was offered. It was rumoured that the bidder intended, had he been successful, to circulate the copies amongst the supporters of a National Council for India; but his purpose was frustrated by the auctioneer, who, mindful of the honour of the Empire, sorrowfully but firmly withdrew the lot, and proceeded to the next, amidst the jeers of a thoroughly demoralized audience. But this subject why pursue? It is, for the reason already cited at the beginning, a painful one. The glory of _Hansard_ has departed for ever. Like a new-fangled and sham religion, it began in pride and ended in a police-court, instead of beginning in a police-court and ending in pride, which is the now well-defined course of true religion.
The fact that nobody wants _Hansard_ is not necessarily a rebuff to Parliamentary eloquence, yet these low prices jump with the times and undoubtedly indicate an impatience of oratory. We talk more than our ancestors, but we prove our good faith by doing it very badly. We have no Erskines at the Bar, but trials last longer than ever. There are not half a dozen men in the House of Commons who can make a speech, properly so called, but the session is none the shorter on that account. _Hansard’s Debates_ are said to be dull to read, but there is a sterner fate than reading a dull debate: you may be called upon to listen to one. The statesmen of the time must be impervious to dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well. Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous politician of the future.
CONTEMPT OF COURT
The late Mr. Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he, with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew, and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with the sinner on the bench, ‘Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, what are you about taking my life like that?’ usually exhibits signs of great depression, and meekly allows himself to be conducted to his cell, from whence in due course he is taken and throttled according to law.
This situation described by Carlyle is doubtless mighty full of humour; but, none the less, were any prisoner at the bar to adopt Craigenputtock’s suggestion, he would only add to the peccadillo of murder the grave offence of contempt of court, which has been defined ‘as a disobedience to the court, an opposing or despising the authority, justice, and dignity thereof.’
The whole subject of Contempt is an interesting and picturesque one, and has been treated after an interesting and picturesque yet accurate and learned fashion by a well-known lawyer, in a treatise[A] which well deserves to be read not merely by the legal practitioner, but by the student of constitutional law and the nice observer of our manners and customs.
[Footnote A: _Contempt of Court, etc._ By J.F. Oswald, Q.C. London: William Clowes and Sons, Limited.]
An ill-disposed person may exhibit contempt of court in divers ways–for example, he may scandalize the the court itself, which may be done not merely by the extreme measure of hurling missiles at the presiding judge, or loudly contemning his learning or authority, but by ostentatiously reading a newspaper in his presence, or laughing uproariously at a joke made by somebody else. Such contempts, committed as they are _in facie curiae_, are criminal offences, and may be punished summarily by immediate imprisonment without the right of appeal. It speaks well both for the great good sense of the judges and for the deep-rooted legal instincts of our people that such offences are seldom heard of. It would be impossible nicely to define what measure of freedom of manners should be allowed in a court of justice, which, as we know, is neither a church nor a theatre, but, as a matter of practice, the happy mean between an awe-struck and unmanly silence and free-and-easy conversation is well preserved. The practising advocate, to avoid contempt and obtain, if instructed so to do, a hearing, must obey certain sumptuary laws, for not only must he don the horsehair wig, the gown, and bands of his profession, but his upper clothing must be black, nor should his nether garment be otherwise than of sober hue. Mr. Oswald reports Mr. Justice Byles as having once observed to the late Lord Coleridge whilst at the Bar: ‘I always listen with little pleasure to the arguments of counsel whose legs are encased in light gray trousers.’ The junior Bar is growing somewhat lax in these matters. Dark gray coats are not unknown, and it was only the other day I observed a barrister duly robed sitting in court in a white waistcoat, apparently oblivious of the fact that whilst thus attired no judge could possibly have heard a word he said. However, as he had nothing to say, the question did not arise. It is doubtless the increasing Chamber practice of the judges which has occasioned this regrettable laxity. In Chambers a judge cannot summarily commit for contempt, nor is it necessary or customary for counsel to appear before him in robes. Some judges object to fancy waistcoats in Chambers, but others do not. The late Sir James Bacon, who was a great stickler for forensic propriety, and who, sitting in court, would not have allowed a counsel in a white waistcoat to say a word, habitually wore one himself when sitting as vacation judge in the summer.
It must not be supposed that there can be no contempt out of court. There can. To use bad language on being served with legal process is to treat the court from whence such process issued with contempt. None the less, considerable latitude of language on such occasions is allowed. How necessary it is to protect the humble officers of the law who serve writs and subpoenas is proved by the case of one Johns, who was very rightly committed to the Fleet in 1772, it appearing by affidavit that he had compelled the poor wretch who sought to serve him with a subpoena to devour both the parchment and the wax seal of the court, and had then, after kicking him so savagely as to make him insensible, ordered his body to be cast into the river. No amount of irritation could justify such conduct. It is no contempt to tear up the writ or subpoena in the presence of the officer of the court, because, the service once lawfully effected, the court is indifferent to the treatment of its stationery; but such behaviour, though lawful, is childish. To obstruct a witness on his way to give evidence, or to threaten him if he does give evidence, or to tamper with the jury, are all serious contempts. In short, there is a divinity which hedges a court of justice, and anybody who, by action or inaction, renders the course of justice more difficult or dilatory than it otherwise would be, incurs the penalty of contempt. Consider, for example, the case of documents and letters. Prior to the issue of a writ, the owner of documents and letters may destroy them, if he pleases–the fact of his having done so, if litigation should ensue on the subject to which the destroyed documents related, being only matter for comment–but the moment a writ is issued the destruction by a defendant of any document in his possession relating to the action is a grave contempt, for which a duchess was lately sent to prison. There is something majestic about this. No sooner is the aid of a court of law invoked than it assumes a seizin of every scrap of writing which will assist it in its investigation of the matter at issue between the parties, and to destroy any such paper is to obstruct the court in its holy task, and therefore a contempt.
To disobey a specific order of the court is, of course, contempt. The old Court of Chancery had a great experience in this aspect of the question. It was accustomed to issue many peremptory commands; it forbade manufacturers to foul rivers, builders so to build as to obstruct ancient lights, suitors to seek the hand in matrimony of its female wards, Dissenting ministers from attempting to occupy the pulpits from which their congregations had by vote ejected them, and so on through almost all the business of this mortal life. It was more ready to forbid than to command; but it would do either if justice required it. And if you persisted in doing what the Court of Chancery told you not to do, you were committed; whilst if you refused to do what it had ordered you to do, you were attached; and the difference between committal and attachment need not concern the lay mind.
To pursue the subject further would be to plunge into the morasses of the law where there is no footing for the plain man; but just a word or two may be added on the subject of punishment for contempt. In old days persons who were guilty of contempt _in facie curiae_ had their right hands cut off, and Mr. Oswald prints as an appendix to his book certain clauses of an Act of Parliament of Henry VIII. which provide for the execution of this barbarous sentence, and also (it must be admitted) for the kindly after-treatment of the victim, who was to have a surgeon at hand to sear the stump, a sergeant of the poultry with a cock ready for the surgeon to wrap about the stump, a sergeant of the pantry with bread to eat, and a sergeant of the cellar with a pot of red wine to drink.
Nowadays the penalty for most contempts is costs. The guilty party in order to purge his contempt has to pay all the costs of a motion to commit and attach. The amount is not always inconsiderable, and when it is paid it would be idle to apply to the other side for a pot of red wine. They would only laugh at you. Our ancestors had a way of mitigating their atrocities which robs the latter of more than half their barbarity. Costs are an unmitigable atrocity.
5 EDWARD VII., CHAPTER 12
The appearance of this undebated Act of Parliament in the attenuated volume of the Statutes of 1905 almost forces upon sensitive minds an unwelcome inquiry as to what is the attitude proper to be assumed by an emancipated but trained intelligence towards a decision of the House of Lords, sitting judicially as the highest (because the last) Court of Appeal.
So far as the _parties_ to the litigation are concerned, the decision, if of a final character, puts an end to the _lis_. Litigation must, so at least it has always been assumed, end somewhere, and in these realms it ends with the House of Lords. Higher you cannot go, however litigiously minded.
In the vast majority of appeal cases a final appeal not only ends the _lis_, but determines once for all the rights of the parties to the subject-matter. The successful litigant leaves the House of Lords quieted in his possession or restored to what he now knows to be his own, conscious of a victory, final and complete; whilst the unsuccessful litigant goes away exceeding sorrowful, knowing that his only possible revenge is to file his petition in bankruptcy.
This, however, is not always so.
In August, 1904, the House of Lords decided in a properly constituted _lis_ that a particular ecclesiastical body in Scotland, somewhat reduced in numbers, but existent and militant, was entitled to certain property held in trust for the use and behoof of the Free Church of Scotland. There is no other way of holding property than by a legal title. Sometimes that title has been created by an Act of Parliament, and sometimes it is a title recognised by the general laws and customs of the realm, but a legal title it has got to be. Titles are never matters of rhetoric, nor are they _jure divino_, or conferred in answer to prayer; they are strictly legal matters, and it is the very particular business of courts of law, when properly invoked, to recognise and enforce them.
In the case I have in mind there were two claimants to the subject-matter–the Free Church and the United Free Church–and the House of Lords, after a great argle-bargle, decided that the property in question belonged to the Free Church.
Thereupon the expected happened. A hubbub arose in Scotland and elsewhere, and in consequence of the hubbub an Act of Parliament has somewhat coyly made its appearance in the Statute Book (5 Edward VII., chapter 12) appointing and authorizing Commissioners to take away from the successful litigant a certain portion of the property just declared to be his, and to give it to the unsuccessful litigant.
The reasons alleged for taking away by statute from the Free Church some of the property that belongs to it are that the Free Church is not big enough to administer satisfactorily all the property it possesses; and that the State may reasonably refuse to allow a religious body to have more property than it can in the opinion of State-appointed Commissioners usefully employ in the propagation of its religion. Let the reasons be well noted. They have made their appearance before in history. These were the reasons alleged by Henry VIII. for the suppression of the smaller monasteries. The State, having made up its mind to take away from the Free Church so much of its property as the Commissioners may think it cannot usefully administer, then proceeds, by this undebated Act of Parliament, to give the overplus to the unsuccessful litigant, the United Free Church. Why to them? It will never do to answer this question by saying because it is always desirable to return lost property to its true owner, since so to reply would be to give the lie direct to a decision of the Final Court of Appeal on a question of property.
In the eye–I must not write the blind eye–of the law, this parliamentary gift to the United Free Church is not a _giving back_ but an _original free gift_ from the State by way of endowment to a particular denomination of Presbyterian dissenters. In theory the State could have done what it liked with so much of the property of the Free Church as that body is not big enough to spend upon itself. It might, for example, have divided it between Presbyterians generally, or it might have left it to the Free Church to say who was to be the disponee of its property.
As a matter of hard fact, the State had no choice in the matter. It could not select, or let the Free Church select, the object of its bounty. The public sense (a vague term) demanded that the United Free Church should not be required to abide by the decision of the House of Lords, but should have given to it whatever property could, under any decent pretext of public policy and by Act of Parliament, be taken away from the Free Church. If the pretext of the inability of the Free Church to administer its own estate had not been forthcoming, some other pretext must and would have been discovered.
Having regard, then, to 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, how ought one to feel towards the decision of the House of Lords in the Scottish Churches case? In public life you can usually huddle up anything, if only all parties, for reasons, however diverse, of their own, are agreed upon what is to be done. Like many another Act of Parliament, 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, was bought with a sum of money. Nobody, not even Lord Robertson, really wanted to debate or discuss it, least of all to discover the philosophy of it. But in an essay you can huddle up nothing. At all hazards, you must go on. This is why so many essayists have been burnt alive.
_First_.–Was the decision wrong? ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ If it was right–
_Second_.–Was the law, in pursuance of which the decision was given, so manifestly unjust as to demand, not the alteration of the law for the future, but the passage through Parliament, _ex post facto_, of an Act to prevent the decision from taking effect between the parties according to its tenour?
_Third_.–Supposing the decision to be right, and the law it expounded just and reasonable in general, was there anything in the peculiar circumstances of the successful litigant, and in the sources from which a considerable portion of the property was derived, to justify Parliamentary interference and the provisions of 5 Edward VII., chapter 12?
_Number Three_, being the easiest way out of the difficulty, has been adopted. The _decision_ remains untouched, the _law_ it expounds remains unaltered–nothing has gone, except the _order_ of the Final Court giving effect to the untouched decision and to the unaltered law. _That_ has been tampered with for the reasons suggested in _Number Three_.
John Locke was fond of referring questions to something he called ‘the bulk of mankind’–an undefinable, undignified, unsalaried body, of small account at the beginning of controversies, but all-powerful at their close.
My own belief is that eventually ‘the bulk of mankind’ will say bluntly that the House of Lords went wrong in these cases, and that the Act of Parliament was hastily patched up to avert wrong, and to do substantial justice between the parties.
If asked, What can ‘the bulk of mankind’ know about law? I reply, with great cheerfulness, ‘Very little indeed.’ But suppose that the application of law to a particular _lis_ requires precise and full knowledge of all that happened during an ecclesiastical contest, and, in addition, demands a grasp of the philosophy of religion, and the ascertainment of true views as to the innate authority of a church and the development of doctrine, would there be anything very surprising if half a dozen eminent authorities in our Courts of Law and Equity were to go wrong?
Between a frank admission of an incomplete consideration of a complicated and badly presented case and such blunt _ex post facto_ legislation as 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, I should have preferred the former. The Act is what would once have been called a dangerous precedent. To-day precedents, good or bad, are not much considered. If we want to do a thing, we do it, precedent or no precedent. So far we have done so very little that the question has hardly arisen. If our Legislature ever reassumes activity under new conditions, and in obedience to new impulses, it may be discovered whether bad precedents are dangerous or not.
THE END