Part 8

It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance, that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and “oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton, he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably by the entire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in some _Manchester-Tickin_, and to fasten them with the _pinns_, or tye them with the _tape_, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind them about with _points_ and _laces_, all made in the same place.” That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his daughters and pupils.

He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair complections to the women in this county art may save her _pains_ (not to say her _sinnes_) in endeavouring to better them. But let the females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express notice be taken of the beauty of many women, _a._ Sarah, _b._ Rebekah, _c._ Rachel, _e._ Thamar, _f._ Abishaig, _g._ Esther; yet in the New Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.” Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome, _Ribchester_ was as rich as any town in Christendom”--that is one; and the other is that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with spades and matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground, and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.

Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him eels, hares, saffron, and willows--a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops and _puitts_, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes, and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness they are far short of the Indian”--but there they are. He tops up a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones: Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”; Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and _larks_”; slightly better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent, “cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire mining lead and brewing mild ale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton; Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for another hundred years before it came to a head.

But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time. He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife, nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.

“MERRIE” ENGLAND

The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane, _Pizzaro_ or _Artaxerxes_ would be followed by _Harlequin Dame Trot_, or _Harlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat_. I am not scholar enough to say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if they were I can perceive some intention in _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or, as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would have been if Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew’s Fair_ had not been revived the other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable of being pleased with _Gammer Gurion’s Needle_. It is no worse than Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and of course no Falstaff. But the difference is of degree, not of kind. _Gammer Gurton_ is written _de haut en bas_, as Shakespeare also wrote of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever he was--and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties--as heartily scorned the peasantry as William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should know in what England’s merriment consisted.

Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief, she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick, and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest; Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The priest edges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.

According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the only intellectual exercise. In _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ there was not even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.

“I cannot eate but lytle meate, my stomacke is not good; But sure I thinke that I can drynke with him that weares a hood. Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothinge acolde:

“I stuffe my skyn so full within of joly good Ale and olde. Back and syde go bare, go bare, both foote and hand go colde: But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe whether it be new or olde”:--

and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has piled up, which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.

But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of man. If you named a woman the thing--and you always did--you named a man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable to-day--but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.

Religion provides the only other expletives there are in _Gammer Gurton_, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play called _Dyccon of Bedlam_ was licensed to be printed in 1562, and one by the presumed author of _Gammer Gurton_ was acted at Christ’s College in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’s name, Master Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:

“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found; Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas) Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”

Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that, the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys” (by Jesus); finally this:

“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine, S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine, That ye shall keepe it secret....”

These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one has been able to go. Certainly _Gammer Gurton_ will take us no further.

Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village life in Merrie England. Take this:

_Gammer_: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.

_Cocke_: Howe, Gammer?

_Gammer_: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan, Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell, Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it--except perhaps this:

“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”

ENDINGS

I

Not very long ago I took occasion to inquire into the beginnings of books. I found that the rules were simple, the formulæ few, and the practice seldom varied until near our own times. If you were an Epic poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began, in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. No matter for that: everything was in your favour: hope was high in your breast, and, no doubt, in your hearer’s or reader’s. The rules were simple; you laid out the theme, and off you went.

But the _ending_ of your work is a very different thing. There are no formulæ for that. You are at the stretch of your tether, either thankfully or not; you are in your public’s discretion; however you take it, you are judged already. You may amend all by your ending, or you may make weariness more weary. In any case, you have somehow to “get off with it,” and will find that your shifts to make a good end to your adventure are not easily reduced to rule or comfortably suited by convention. We don’t hear so many sermons as we did; yet most of us know by experience that it is one thing for a clergyman to open upon his text, and quite another for him to turn to the East with credit. If he have prepared his peroration, and the way to it--what I may call his _coda_ and _finale_--well or ill, he will let it off. If he have not, then in addition to his anxious care for what he is to say, he will have another for what he must by no means say. Let him beware, for example, of using the hortatory words “And now”; for so surely as he pronounces them the congregation will rise as one man, and then nothing for it but the rest of the Ascription. I have known that happen more than once, and never faced the preacher with nerve enough to reseat the congregation for one more turn.

The writer and the orator may be compared, since literature, by origin a spoken word, has never lost the habits it then acquired--or has only just now lost them. As the ancient bard, Homer or Demodocus, as the wandering minstrel, trouvère or balladist, faced his assize, somehow or other he had to get off his platform. What was he to do? He desired a supper, perhaps a bed: one need not shirk the probability that he was to send round his hat. Could he be sure of them without some kind of a bang? Should it be a long or a short bang? Was he to sum up the whole argument of his poem in its last twenty lines, condense it all into one compendious epigrammatic sentence? As we shall see, that was the means of one of our great prose-writers. Then, otherwise, should he perorate, and, in the musician’s way, recall the theme with which he began? As poet, perhaps he should--so indeed Tennyson more than once did; but as epic poet it was not always possible. No better poet than Homer ever lived, no better ending to an epic was ever made than that to the Iliad, whose last book shows Achilles, for once, generous, and Priam, in his simplicity, noble. But the Iliad does not end upon the matter of its beginning, nor with the hero of it. On the contrary, it ends with the hero’s chief enemy; and its very last line,

“So served they the last rites of Hector, tamer of horses,”

is remarkable, because it shows that the interest of poet and hearers alike had shifted during the progress of the poem. Homer, a Greek, singing to a Greek audience, finds it necessary to close his poem with Priam and Hector of Troy!

That shows you how difficult it is to end an epic. The Odyssey shows it you from another side. Everybody now agrees that what happens in that after the return of Ulysses, his revenge upon the suitors and recognition by Penelope, is anti-climax. We are not prepared, at the end of a long poem, to descend once more into Hades and listen to the ghosts of the wooers relate their griefs to the ghosts of Agamemnon and Achilles. We are not prepared for an outbreak of retaliatory war between the Ithacans and their recovered prince. _Nor were Homer’s auditors._ Therefore Homer turned to the old stage device of the god from the machine; he brought an Athené to shut all down. No other means was open to him, and the knot was worthy.

I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain which a book can have is the _Explicit_, or _Colophon_; but I only know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I mean is the _Song of Roland_, which, as we have it now, has neither beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon--

“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’ Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;

and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:

“Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”

Clearly, if Turoldus made the _Song of Roland_, he did not put his colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff, devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long story by beginning another. These things are not done.

The ending of the _Divine Comedy_ is original and characteristic at once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and lamentation of Hell he issues

“a riveder le stelle”;

after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself

“Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle”;

the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe is Love, and that Love it is which

“muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”

As I say, there is artifice in that. After it we are not surprised to learn that the number of cantos in each cantica, the number of verses, the number of words in each was approximately planned out and very closely kept. It is much of a question what is gained by such joinery; but there is no question at all of the starry endings. Philosophically and poetically they are beautiful and right.

Dante belonged to the scholastic age, and to the Middle Age; but he stood alone both in his art and his artifice. Poets less serious than he, poets like Boccaccio and Chaucer, had other cares. As they drew near the end of their occasionally very light-hearted poems, they began to think about their own end as well as that of their poesy. Fears of the Archdeacon and his “Somonour,” fears of a summons still more dread beset them. The more they had written about pagan antiquity as if they believed in it, the more necessary it became to make their peace with Heaven before they had done. _The Canterbury Tales_ were never finished, so one cannot say whether Chaucer’s wholesale recantation of the “worldly vanitees” of them, of _Troilus_, and of practically all that has made him immortal was really designed to fit on to the end of them or not. It certainly looks as if it was; and one can believe that The Wife of Bath, mine Host and others of the joyful company may have required some extenuation before the Recording Angel. So perhaps did _Troilus and Cresseide_, for which he provides a careful and solemn ending, following Boccaccio there as elsewhere. He shades off Troilus’ death very artfully by the translation of his “light gooste” to the eighth sphere of Heaven, from which elevation he was able to look down at the mourners bewailing his decease. And then the poet is elevated in his turn and, dropping all his debonair detachment, himself translated, becomes a pulpiteer of the best. “Such fyn,” he cries:

“Such fyn hath then this Troilus for love! Such fyn hath all his greté worthinesse!”

It is fierce and powerful pulpit eloquence, mounting up and up until he reaches a height of scorning what he had previously loved, from which invective may be poured out like lava from Vesuvius:

“Lo here, of payen’s curséd oldé rights! Lo here, what all their Goddés may availe!”