Chapter VII: Part 7

First we have two charming characters in the Bishop and the Warden. Bishop Grantley is an aged man, a gentleman in the truest sense of the word; but a prelate who had never perhaps in his life been particularly energetic, and was passing his later days in dignified ease. He is a little lonely, as very old men often are; and he does not comprehend the new age in which men have to fight to maintain their position and privileges; so he fails to understand his energetic son, who has married the Warden’s daughter. His one friend is the Warden, a man, younger than himself, though elderly. The Warden holds one of those anomalous positions not uncommon in the church at that time. He is head of a hospital for old men, in receipt of a very comfortable income of £800 ($4000); and he is also the precentor, that is, leader of the music in the cathedral. He is a modest retiring man, an exquisite musician, and a kindly friend to the old men under his charge. Very different is the Bishop’s son, Archdeacon Grantley. The Archdeacon is a strong man, determined to stand up for his rights, and what he believes to be the rights of his church. He is thoroughly efficient, a vigorous administrator, a capable ruler of the rich parish over which he presides. He cannot understand his father’s allowing things to drift, nor the placid piety of his father-in-law, the Warden. The two old men are terribly worried, and when they dine together they plot feebly how to resist the Archdeacon, but give way whenever he appears on the scene. But at last the crisis comes. The newspapers discover that the Warden is overpaid for his nominal work at the hospital, the old men, who are well lodged, fed, and cared for, are told that they ought to share in his stipend. A busy lawyer in the cathedral city takes up the case and the great London paper, the _Thunderer_, has leading articles denouncing the abuses of the church in general and the Warden’s position in particular. Finally a novel appears with a thinly veiled attack on the administration of the Barchester Hospital for old men. Then the Warden shows himself to have all the firmness of a man, gentle by nature, but of the highest principles. He retires to a life of poverty rather than bear the reproach of being in a false position. The Archdeacon storms, accuses his father-in-law of culpable weakness in deserting his post, and the Bishop for allowing him to do so. And then the old Bishop rallies to his friend’s support. Terribly afraid of his masterful son, he will not allow the Warden to be bullied out of doing what he thinks right. So the Warden leaves his comfortable house and takes apartments in the city, the Bishop gives him a tiny parish; and Mr. Harding, for that is the Warden’s name, lives in honourable poverty, directing the cathedral music as precentor and ministering in his little church in the old city; and he and his old friend, the Bishop, have peace in their latter days. Thus we pass from “The Warden” to “Barchester Towers,” and find old Dr. Grantley dying peacefully and his son, the Archdeacon, hoping to succeed his father. Another man is, however, given the bishopric, and Trollope introduces his greatest characters, Bishop and Mrs. Proudie. The new Bishop is a fairly easy-going man, but his wife is determined to bring things in Barchester into order. Her régime has for its watchword efficiency. In it there is no room for kindly bishops and retiring scholars, like Mr. Harding. What is required is awakening preachers, zealous reformers, capable administrators. The old sleepy cathedral must become a centre of vigorous life and action, in which even clergy like Archdeacon Grantley, with their aristocratic notions, could have no place. Mrs. Proudie is herself a lady of high birth; but vulgar people have a good deal of influence over her, because they flatter her vanity. Accordingly she takes up with a clergyman named Slope, who lets her in for a good deal of trouble by his officiousness and want of judgment and good feeling. But who am I, that in a brief lecture I should attempt to describe Mrs. Proudie? Let us turn to a very typical character in old cathedral life. Dr. Stanhope, one of the canons of Barchester, would be impossible now, but is easily conceived in the “fifties.” I should say that he was the sort of man who had become a clergyman because his family was able to advance him; and had never had any real vocation for his calling. His wife and children were a great expense to him; and he had lived long abroad in order to retrench, getting his work done for him in England. His son was a thorough Bohemian, and his daughter had married an Italian nobleman, who had left her. Bishop Proudie had compelled Dr. Stanhope to return to his duties at Barchester; and the family were thoroughly out of place in a cathedral city with their foreign ideals and lax views of propriety. You have to picture the decorous formality of Barchester society to realise the humour of Trollope’s description of Bertie Stanhope and his sister the Signora. Throughout Trollope’s novels there is the background of rural life; and especially that of the clergy. At times it is amusing, but often it is tragic; and, believe me, in those parsonage houses in the picturesque villages of England some veritable tragedies have been enacted. How many a clergyman and his wife have succumbed before the work of bringing up an enormous family on insufficient means! How many a man of high culture has found in the parish he entered with such high hopes the end of his career! How many have dreariness and isolation led to find relief in habits which have proved their ruin! The story of the rural clergy of England is the theme of many a novelist, from Fielding onwards; and there is generally a tone of sadness about it. And may I commend especially the writings of Charlotte Young for perhaps the best description of the subject? Side by side with the comfortable dignitaries, who lived around the cathedrals,--the Grantleys, the Proudies, the Stanhopes,--were the Quiverfuls, with the crushing load of children innumerable, and Mr. Crawley, a famous scholar in his day, who had sunk amid the poverty of a wretched parish and the weight of utterly uncongenial surroundings.

One of the greatest changes in England that people of my age have seen is the complete shifting of influence from the country to the town. And this is peculiarly true of the clergy, who often belonged to the country families and shared in the ideas, tasks, and pursuits of their brothers. Now that our young clergy are recruited from a totally different class, they are perhaps more devoted to their profession but are unfortunately bred in towns rather than the country and often fail to understand the people in the way their predecessors had done.

Even in my younger days the possession of land meant power and social prestige; and people really lived on it. But the change was coming rapidly; and the writers I have quoted show us the scene just before it was about to shift. Among all classes there has been a rush from the country to the towns; and there has been a growing tendency to regard rural England rather as a playground than as the source of the nation’s best inhabitants. This tendency has unfortunately, in my judgment at least, been fostered by a legislation which has refused to give agriculture the encouragement it requires, with the result that our villages in England almost all tell the same tale of falling population. Perhaps one of the most urgent problems before our English statesmen is how to attract people back to the beautiful country, which under modern economic conditions has been so much deserted.

I have now brought my lectures to an end. I have tried to place before you as vivid a picture as I could of English life in a bygone age; and if I have not made it adequate to the expectation of my auditors, I have at least a hope that I have aroused sufficient interest to make some here desire to know more of the subject. For the study of social life is, in truth, a most important branch of history. It is almost impossible to form a just conception of the men of any age from documents unless one can gain an idea what manner of men they really are. Unless we have this knowledge, no amount of research, no ingenuity or discrimination will assist us to arrive at an apprehension of the truth. For it is not possible to understand men’s actions unless we have that sympathy which makes us realise that under different conditions they were human beings not, after all, unlike what we ourselves should have been in their circumstances. And it is in the novel, the private letter, the caricature, the half-forgotten jest or good story, that we are helped to depict the men and women of the past.

A pleasing task awaits me; namely, to thank you for the welcome you have given me as a stranger, when I first appeared before you, for the patience you have shown in listening to what I had to say, for the evident sympathy and good feeling you have shown throughout these lectures. Let me say that I felt deeply the honour conferred on me by the offer of a Lowell lectureship, that I enjoyed, in these days of great sorrow and anxiety shared by all my countrymen, the distraction which I found in preparing for my responsible task; and that though, I confess, I first entered this room with no little trepidation and wondered how I could possibly interest complete strangers, I now feel that I am speaking to friends, who have, by their kindness to an Englishman with whose very name they must have been unfamiliar, demonstrated the reality of the ties which bind the two Englands, the old and the new, each to the other.

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Representative English Comedies, Vol. I

_FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO SHAKESPEARE_

With introductory essays and notes. An historical view of our earlier comedy and other monographs by various writers under the general editorship of

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I. AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH COMEDY. By
Charles Mills Gayley.

II. JOHN HEYWOOD: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Alfred W. Pollard.

Edition of the _Play of the Wether_. The same.

Edition of a _Mery Play between Johan Johan, Tyb._ The same.

III. NICHOLAS UDALL: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Ewald Flügel.

Edition of _Roister Doister_. The same.

Appendix on Various Matters. The same.

IV. WILLIAM STEVENSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Henry Bradley.

Edition of _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_. The same.

Appendix. The same.

V. JOHN LYLY: CRITICAL ESSAY. By George P. Baker.

Edition of _Alexander and Campaspe_. The same.

VI. GEORGE PEELE: CRITICAL ESSAY. By F. B. Gummere.

Edition of _The Old Wives’ Tale_. The same.

Appendix. The same.

VII. GREENE’S PLACE IN COMEDY: A MONOGRAPH. By G. E. Woodberry.

VIII. ROBERT GREENE: HIS LIFE, AND THE ORDER OF HIS PLAYS. By Charles
Mills Gayley.

Edition of the _Honourable Historie of Frier Bacon_. The same.

Appendix on Greene’s Versification. The same.

IX. HENRY PORTER: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles Mills Gayley.

Edition of The _Two Angry Women of Abington_. The same.

X. _Shakespeare as a Comic Dramatist._ By Edward Dowden.

INDEX.

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Representative English Comedies, Vol. II

_THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE_

BEN JONSON AND OTHERS

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CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.,

Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California

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In this volume are included a number of the plays of Ben Jonson and the best play of several of his contemporaries. Each of these has been edited by a scholar of unquestioned standing, and is accompanied by an introductory critical and historical essay. Furthermore, Professor Gayley, the general editor, has included a most scholarly introduction in the form of an essay entitled “A Comparative View of the Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare in Comedy.”

CONTENTS

I. A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE FELLOWS AND FOLLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE.
(Part One.) By Charles Mills Gayley.

II. BEN JONSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles H. Herford.

Edition of _Every Man in His Humour_. The same.

III. BEN JONSON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Charles Mills Gayley.

Edition of _Epicœne, or the Silent Woman_. The same.

IV. BEN JONSON. THE ALCHEMIST: CRITICAL ESSAY. By George A. Smithson.

Edition of _The Alchemist_. The same.

V. CHAPMAN, JONSON, AND MARSTON. EASTWARD HOE: CRITICAL ESSAY. By
John W. Cuncliffe.

Edition of _Eastward Hoe_. The same.

VI. THE MERRY DEVILL OF EDMONTON: CRITICAL ESSAY. By John Matthews
Manly.

Edition of _The Merry Devill of Edmonton_. The same.

INDEX.

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Representative English Comedies, Vol. III

_THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE_

FLETCHER AND OTHERS

With introductory essays and notes and a comparative view of the fellows and followers of Shakespeare under the general editorship of

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.,

Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California

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This volume, like the second one of this series, contains plays of the later contemporaries of Shakespeare. The editors of the different plays are scholars of wide reputation who have made a special study of the period and the various dramatists here represented. In this volume Professor Gayley’s masterly essay on “The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare” is brought to a close.

CONTENTS

I. A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE FELLOWS AND FOLLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE IN
COMEDY. (Part Two.) By Charles Mills Gayley.

II. THOMAS DEKKER: CRITICAL ESSAY. By Alexis F. Lange.

Edition of _The Shomakers Holiday_. The same.

III. MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY. THE SPANISH GIPSIE: CRITICAL ESSAY. The
late H. Butler Clarke.

Edition of _The Spanish Gipsie_. The same.

IV. JOHN FLETCHER. RULE A WIFE AND HAVE A WIFE: CRITICAL ESSAY. George
Saintsbury.

Edition of _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. The same.

V. PHILIP MASSINGER: CRITICAL ESSAY. Brander Matthews.

Edition of _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_. The same.

VI. RICHARD BROME: CRITICAL ESSAY. G. P. Baker.

Edition of _The Antipodes_. The same.

VII. JAMES SHIRLEY: CRITICAL ESSAY. Sir A. W. Ward.

Edition of _The Royall Master_. The same.

INDEX.

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* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Other spelling has also been retained as originally published except for the corrections below.

Page 24: “fearlesss mildness of” “fearless mildness of”
Page 34: “of an hill and commands” “of a hill and commands”
Page 34: “near an hundred” “near a hundred”
Page 34: “stately appartments lie” “stately apartments lie”
Page 118: “and solemn occasion” “and solemn occasions”
Page 118: “At all other time” “At all other times”
Page 324: “Duke of Omniun.” “Duke of Omnium.”
Page 343: “Gammer Gurton’s Nedle” “Gammer Gurton’s Needle”
Page 345: “followers of Skakespeare” “followers of Shakespeare”