Chapter C: A. Tait (14)

The evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked, leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the "sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused it. It is almost painful to look through the files of _Punch_ of some sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity. The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and, in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_; we profess to revel in _Tristram Shandy_, and to find the _Pickwick Papers_ delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford--there may be one still--who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of its laughter.

Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily. We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened _coco épileptique_ than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed. Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish, colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles, and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a little classic.

To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the _Irish R.M._ and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves; the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross," like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman, unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that one who knows not what it is to be

Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Clearly rouse the slumbering morn
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill,

can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these authors in describing the joy of horses and the thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily enjoyed by a host of readers who are neither Irish nor hunting people, for the simple reason that they are prompted to an explosion of laughter whenever they take up one of these stories. The bulk of these readers would wish to go no further in their appreciation: they embrace the givers of present laughter with so full a measure of enjoyment that it would seem to them unnecessary to probe any further into the chemistry of such excellence, nor perhaps would they deem it possible that any higher praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment could be looked for by any authors. Yet to my mind it is possible. While including in one's general testimony all that can be said by the most extravagant of these admirers, the taster who is considering the cellar of English literature which is being laid down for posterity may discern qualities not so apparent to the quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish: if they do, the question is, what will be left? My point is that the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine that will keep.

It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is too restricted. The high winds of emotion have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always be bright and rather dry like Vouvray, gay but with a little bite in it: posterity may even call it "curious." But they will recognise that it holds the authentic flavours that distinguish infallibly the finer products of English literary bins. The authors have chosen a small field, but they direct on it an accuracy of vision which is remarkable, and, seeing that they were two, a unity of vision which is a miracle. In the expression of this vision they display an unfailing sureness of touch and a precision which is perfect in its admirable economy. They handle our language with a deftness and flexibility which is a rarity in itself, and their style, though always original, is nourished by a recollection of great models both in prose and poetry. Theirs is a literary equipment of the first class, solidly framed, well clothed, attractive in appearance, and ornamented with taste. They touch nothing that they do not embellish: events by their unflagging narrative power, which goes as unfalteringly as one of their choicest hunters, character by their sympathetic insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty, dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all Ireland that they draw, let that be admitted; they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet, if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat within their pages, a part of it is there, pulsing with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that of Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Synge or Mr. Yeats than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr. Devlin, but, if they are justly praised for their merits, that praise cannot be diminished because they looked on Ireland with laughing eyes through a West Carberry window. Their books are literature no less certainly than _Castle Rackrent_ is literature, and for very similar reasons.

Well, let us taste. It is a bright dry wine, I have said. It is not, perhaps, the quality which the authors would ascribe to what they consider their best work, _The Real Charlotte_--an estimate in which Mr. Stephen Gwynn agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story of a middle-aged woman's jealousy, for Charlotte is a kind of Irish Cousine Bette. But, if the subject is comparable to that of Balzac's novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and that is my reason for not regarding this as the work by which their achievement can best be judged. It is the work in which they have aimed highest, and the measure of their success is not small, but the theme of Charlotte's jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it caused needed for its convincing development all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is with no want of recognition of the authors' artistic aims or want of sympathy with their regret at abandoning them for others less lofty that this is said: but the work of an artist can best be judged from that part of it which most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somerville and Martin Ross most nearly reached perfection in their lighter stories of Irish life, and it says much for their acumen that they saw the line on which their talent could naturally reach its maturity, courageously turning their backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to tax them beyond their capabilities. At the same time, it would be unjust not to point out that even in their best work comedy does not exclude the more poignant feelings. It would be the greatest mistake to regard these two writers as nothing more than jesters. Their humour is the true humour which runs hand-in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled with their laughter robs it of any taste of bitterness. There is a chapter in _Some Irish Yesterdays_ which shows how their hearts were touched.[28] It treats of marriage and love, death and birth among the peasantry in the south-west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which is beyond praise, and shows that the writers did not observe with the aloofness of an explorer among savages, but that for them seeing and describing alike were deeply-felt emotional experiences. The chapter opens with a memory of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic chapel of the village, a simple ceremony, after which the bridegroom hauled his wife up beside him on to a shaggy horse and started for home at a lumbering gallop. Then, in a brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen's reflections on marriage and a glimpse of his married life, we are introduced at Tom Cashen's funeral to the bride of twenty-five years ago, "a middle-aged stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of friendliness," with her ill-health, her profusion of children, and "himself" whose "nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint." Then listen to the passage which follows:

[28] In _Irish Memories_ Miss Somerville says that this
chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross--a
fact which throws some light on the respective
contributions of the two collaborators. I should like
to mention another passage in which these writers
touch the pathetic with distinction. It is that
chapter in _Dan Russell the Fox_ in which, while
tending a poisoned hound, the Irish mother tries
vainly to persuade her younger son to propose to the
infatuated young lady. He rejects her suggestion as
an outrage on the lady, and sets his face towards
America. As the saved hound licks her hand, "It's no
good now, poor puppy," she says.

The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the
glare of the sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent
life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom,
the daffodils hanging their lamps in shady places. How strangely, how
bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy
October evening! Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on
roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day,
with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the
laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would
be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with
talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge
of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the
glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been
well and truly laid at the funeral.

From the funeral we pass again to the cottage in which "the Triplets" are holding their reception, the three day-old babes cradled in the stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the turf fire, the crowd in the doorway, the old woman rocking the cradle:

Obscure corners harboured obscure masses, that might be family
raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant
cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones
that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle
and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless
in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a
woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a
delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of
its playmate.

Such a passage in a Russian novelist would warrant ecstasies on the part of our _illuminati_: let us no less highly praise our own art when it is possible. The chapter concludes with some lights on the commercial methods of matrimony practised by the peasant class: the writers do not defend them, but call attention to the surprising bloom that is apt to spring from them. "From them springs, like a flower from a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland." "There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable common sense, and a profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage. Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last is usually twilight and much faithfulness." The dialogue is a masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour, heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an elderly couple, married by a happy thought some thirty years before, it was said, as the authors' record, "their hearts were within in each other." This chapter, through which breathes all the soft beauty and humour of the soil, is a sufficient answer to those who would tax these writers with a uniform attitude of rather heartless derision or with following--what a blind criticism!--in the benighted footsteps of those who have given us the dreary horror of the traditional stage Irishman.

Then, again, there is another spirit that breathes delicately through these stories, tempering their outlines as the mists of the Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside. It is the spirit of natural beauty, which, to the hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an accomplished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes ever the sharpest appeal. They make the reader plainly feel that if the unconventional dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk clutches powerfully at their feelings, the inexhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces to their very marrow. Quotation after quotation might be given to show their remarkable gift of rendering the scenery which has so moved their imaginations. I can only choose a few, embarrassed at the richness of the field of choice. The last chapter of _Some Irish Yesterdays_ opens with an example which it is hard to surpass:

The road to Connemara lies white across the memory--white and very
quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the
spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line
against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows
peace from the white cottage gables on the hillside, it is accented
by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey
pony. Little else stirs save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to
the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow
oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their
persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the
blossoming boglands and pink heather.

Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness
of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and
there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey
landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her
ragged wails, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.

Here is another landscape, the _Irish R. M.'s_ view of his own demesne:

Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It
was rough heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry
hill, and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and
heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told
where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight.

What, again, could be a more delightful overture to the lifelike description of the regatta on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph which conveys in a few touches all the beauty of the scene?

A mountain towered steeply up from the lake's edge, dark with the
sad green of beech-trees in September; fir woods followed the curve
of the shore, and leaned far over the answering darkness of the
water; and above the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill,
painted with the purple glow of heather. The lake was about a mile
long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a fierce and narrow river
fled away west to the sea, some four or five miles off.

In these descriptions there is no striving for elaborate effect: the authors simply place the scene before our eyes with that aptness of language which is like the unerring needle of a master etcher. To travel on the wings of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross gives one constant thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops after a telling phrase: they catch an apt simile on the wing with an arresting suddenness which adds moments of breathlessness to the already exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative. Instances can be picked out from any of the stories like plums from a pudding.

In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those
singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest
a milkman in his dotage....

It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and
tense, and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse....

I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, and so did Miss M'Evoy;
we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening
of two foot by three steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from
the reed....

Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not
unusual in small fathers of large families; it always struck me
that he understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected,
and pursued an unnoticed, peaceful and observant path of his own in
the background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied
manner, like a partly-chloroformed ferret....

Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that
summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher
on the Order of the Medjidie.

Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of the hunt
belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale green
slopes....

Though the temptation is almost irresistible, I refrain here from displaying this incisive power applied to character, notably to Irish character. The success of our authors in this respect is so notorious that further testimony is superfluous. If we have any appreciation of their art at all, the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife, Flurry and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking as if she had robbed a scarecrow, with her white woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin trumpet, against the inimitable background of her ramshackle mansion of Aussolas, scene of many wit-combats between her and Flurry, Miss Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family, John Kane, Mrs. Knox's henchman, and Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as our dearest friends. It is worth pointing out, however, that an almost diabolical power of delineation is not the only compelling quality in these portraits. There is in their introduction of their characters that natural dramatic instinct which they have so humorously observed in their Irish neighbours. I need only instance the ingenuity by which Mrs. Knox is first heard "off," easily vanquishing in speech that doughty antagonist, an Irish countrywoman: or the introduction of John Kane in "the Aussolas Martin Cat," in two inimitable pages, which are followed by another perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into the old demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr. Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:

Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a
note of exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas;
the turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion,
and from further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally
instant in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to
yell. Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud
harangue, advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.
As it approached the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted
clappings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which
they were wont to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the
fruit. We sat in silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and
the voice said in stentorian tones:

"My father 'e kept a splendid table."

Every gathering of their countrymen--the meet, the run, the horse show, the races, the regatta, the auction--have an intensity of motion and character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised artist, and by a clever condensation of observations--their only form of exaggeration--gathered over a wide range of times and places.

Finally--the word starts up all too soon--let us praise the powerful sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them, moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the _mêlée_ at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin'," with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command." For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement _con brio_:

A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the
check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his
horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that
was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees
and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across
a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and
struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers
broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and
soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.

It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to take down _In Mr. Knox's Country_, and read "Put Down Two and Carry One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The Conspiracy of Silence" (_Further Experiences of an I.R.M._). Major Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the bedroom in its owner's absence:

A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a
groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers
closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.

[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose
to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is
revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing
up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf.
He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower,
and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point
of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion
that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of
war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it
was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him
the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost
too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst
into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by
the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a
speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane
held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I
was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to
inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of
the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give
the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy
must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the
drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its
socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the
floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to
cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was
not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously
muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open.
We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in
our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its
protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.

And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume. Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story. From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests, there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:

At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a
fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and
all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the
hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the
reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and
the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing,
ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man
in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock
with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young
after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity
with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill
glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off
his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.

"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to
look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more
than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the
heat of a summer's day.

"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up
beside him.

"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain
does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the
say from it."

"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.

FORGOTTEN SATIRISTS

By ALDOUS HUXLEY

All readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling, questions of dates and names and little odd facts--it is on such circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more absorbing even than stamp collecting--on the inexhaustible past. We turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity, but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make that effort), to turn to Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_ or to the _Literary Recreations_ of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused, absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit. What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin quotations--these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly, effortlessly, without tears.

This, then, is my excuse and justification for directing attention to an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle and Pordage and Flecknoe--their very names are absurd, Dickensian. These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion, strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake. And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant, so futile, so absorbingly human.

Our purpose is to do justice--a little more than justice, it may be--to a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.

Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved style, we plunge _in medias res_. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury that, on November 17th, Dryden published _Absalom and Achitophel_.

This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these anonymous satires, _A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland_, is worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract, it must be remembered, was written after the production of _The Spanish Friar_ and before the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_. The author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.

The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey), "strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.

To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome, most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box, reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public imagination most greedily seized.

Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication a reply, called _Towser the Second_, in which Dryden is named as the author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of a newspaper entitled _The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome_, an anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned his pen against the Protestants. _Towser the Second_ is as little and despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."

Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous _Some Reflections upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour_, which appeared a few days later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him in _Absalom and Achitophel_, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving conclusively that his own share in _The Rehearsal_, in its own way a masterpiece, must have been extremely small.

Early in 1682 _The Reflections_ were followed by Samuel Pordage's _Azaria and Hushai_. Twenty years before Pordage had proved himself the possessor of a certain ingenuity by his feat of turning the philosophy of Jacob Boehme into English-rhymed couplets. There are even a few passable passages in the _Mundorum Explicatio_. But in this satire of his later years he seems to have lost such cunning as he may once have possessed. The sole merit of the piece is a certain dull restraint of language, an avoidance of the drosser scurrilities. He is very temperate, for instance, in what he says of Dryden:

The falling glory of the Jewish stage.
Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire,
Had he not let his hackney Muse for hire.
Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise,
Because he dubb'd him with the name of Bayes,
Because he durst with his proud wit engage,
And brought his follies on the public stage.

But the next Whig satire to appear has real merits. Settle's _Absalom Senior_ is the one good thing produced by the Whigs in their battle with Dryden. Dryden himself had grudgingly to admit that Settle was something of a poet.

Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad
And in a word, heroically mad.
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.

This is not altogether just. The verse of _Absalom Senior_ does more than rhyme and rattle; it has a music of its own, and there are passages that are curiously Elizabethan in their conception and execution. Take, for example, this character of the Duke of York, the Absalom Senior of the poem:

The mercy and the clemency divine,
Those sacred sparks, which in mild David shine,
Were all put out and left a starless night.
A long farewell to all that's good and brave!
Not cataracts more headstrong; as the grave
Inexorable; sullen and untuned
As Pride deposed; not Lucifer unthroned
More unforgiving.

It is hardly credible that this should have been written in 1682. It reads like the work of some minor poet in the "giant age before the flood," a contemporary of the grave Lord Brooke. Here again is something no poet of the Restoration has any business to write, a simile in which Settle compares the papist plotter to the alchemist:

Who though he see his bursting limbecks crack,
And at one blast, one fatal minute's wrack,
The forward hope of sweating years expire,
With sad, yet painful, hand new-lights the fire.
Pale, lean and wan, does health, wealth, all consume;
And for the great elixir yet to come
Toils and hopes on.

The poem opens with a history of the ceaseless Catholic efforts, ever since the time of Henry VIII., to recapture England for the old faith. This serves as a preface to the main body of the piece, which deals with the Popish Plot. There is the usual portrait gallery, imitated from _Absalom and Achitophel_, of the most important figures on either side. This spirited description of Lauderdale is worth quoting:

Let not that hideous bulk of honour 'scape,
Nadab that sets the gazing crowds agape;
The old kirk-founder, whose hoarse croak could sing
The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop and no King.
By the triumphant Saul he was employed
A huge fang-tusk to gore poor David's side,
Like a proboscis in the tyrant's jaw
To rend and root through government and law.

Settle mentions Dryden in connection with Amiel, the Duke of Buckingham. It is pleasant to note that, like Pordage, he pays tribute, albeit a somewhat equivocal one, to Dryden's poetical genius:

But Amiel had, alas, the fate to hear
An angry poet play his chronicler;
A poet rais'd above oblivion's shade,
By his recorded verse immortal made.
No muse could more heroic deeds rehearse;
H' had with an equal, all-applauding verse
Great David's sceptre and Saul's javelin praised.
A pyramic to his saint Interest he rais'd.

The rest of the remarks about Dryden are not so edifying; they refer to that subject, so fruitful of raillery, the poet's marriage with Lady Howard, whom Settle, repeating scandal, describes as

Laura, in faithful constancy confined
To Ethiop's envoy and to all mankind.

The poem ends with a long list of eulogies addressed to the chiefs of the Country Party, dull as such eulogies always are and are always bound to be. For, while we listen to abuse and defamation of almost any kind with pleasure, we are apt to find the recital of a man's virtues extremely tedious; a fact well known to newspaper proprietors, for whom moral indignation--or mud slinging, for the terms are usually synonymous--is spiritual meat and drink, as well as material bread-and-butter.

The publication of _Absalom Senior_ was the high-water mark of Settle's life. In 1673, at the age of twenty-five, he had all the appearances of a great man: he was the author of _The Empress of Morocco_. But he was very definitely one of those who have had greatness thrust upon them. The success of his fantastic tragedy, gravely judged by the most advanced undergraduate opinion of the day to be superior to anything Dryden had written, was wholly due to the prodigies of log-rolling performed by that shifty and malicious patron of the arts, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who had for a time bestowed his favours upon Dryden, suddenly threw him over and exalted Elkanah Settle in his place. He had _The Empress of Morocco_ specially produced at Court before its appearance on the public stage, and himself contributed a Prologue. The "boom" was so well organised that the public for a time actually took Elkanah seriously. The Empress and her infamous gallant, Grimalhaz, stamped about the stage giving rhymed utterance to sentiments of an unheard of turpitude.

GRIMALHAZ: Have you considered, madam, what you've done?

EMPRESS: Poisoned my husband, sir, and if you need
Examples to instruct you in the deed,
I'll make my actions plainer understood,
Copying his death on all the royal blood.

Loud and prolonged applause, bursting out again with redoubled fury when the Empress hisses into the ear of this new Macbeth:

and your next step t'a throne
Must be, dear sir, the murder of my son.

The applause died away and with it the cat-calls of Settle's three envious rivals, Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. Then came _Absalom Senior_, and for its author the deserved laureateship of Whiggery. But a year later things took an awkward turn for the Country Party; Settle recanted and wrote a history of the Popish Plot, in which he gave Oates his full due as a scoundrel. When James II. came to the throne he wrote a fawning Coronation Ode in the hope of placating one whom he had himself so short a time before called "inexorable as the grave." He even went so far as to publish a panegyric of Judge Jefferies. Inch by inch he was sinking deeper into the slough of Grub Street. With the Revolution he gave up politics (they seemed altogether too unsafe) and applied for the post of City Laureate. Lord Mayor's Shows were now immortalised to the extent of "living in Settle's numbers one day more." Grown old and very miserable, he was reduced to writing puppet plays, better works of art--who knows?--than the proud Empress of his youth; and we find him at last "hissing in his own dragon" at Bartholomew Fair. He was seventy-six when he died in 1724, having survived long enough to be the target of Pope's barbed malice.

_Absalom Senior_ closes the first act of the drama. The second opens with Dryden's _Medal_. This personal attack on Shaftesbury roused more fury among the Whigs than even _Absalom and Achitophel_. In a single day Edmund Hickeringill wrote and sent to press a long retort called _The Mushroom_. "... And if any man think or say that it is a wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to copy this book in a day--it may be so. But it is a truth, as certain as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller, printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it can avouch for an infallible truth--_Deo soli gloria_--when a divine hand assists, one of despicable, dull and inconsiderate parts may do wonders, which God usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments." Hickeringill is a charming character; but he hardly comes within the scope of our article. He is not so much a man of letters as a mental case.

Pordage once again stepped forward and dealt a perfectly ineffective blow. He was followed by a new and more truculent champion, Shadwell. Shadwell laid about him with a will. Of Dryden's poetical powers he says condescendingly: "He has an easiness in rhyme and a knack of versifying and can make a slight thing seem pretty and clinquant." On the other hand, he is wholly lacking in originality, and even in his satires has done nothing but "turn the Observator into rhyme." When he is not writing in rhyme, "in which he has a kind of excellence," he is completely insipid. He has no sense of comedy.

Thou never mak'st, but art a standing Jest.

So much for Dryden's literary reputation; now for his character. At this point Shadwell throws the moral indignation about so freely that we are forced to hold our noses and to avert our eyes.

Left scathless by the clumsy grossness of Shadwell's attack, Dryden retorted murderously with _MacFlecknoe_.

But enough of Shadwell. He has his meed of fame and recognition. His body lies in Westminster Abbey and his plays have been resurrected in the "Mermaid" Edition. Who was Flecknoe? What manner of man was that grandiose figure who

In Prose and Verse was own'd without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute?