"O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum,
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem."
1896.
ON TEACHING ONE’S GRANDMOTHER
HOW TO SUCK EGGS
IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the important thesis hereto affixed as a title went a-begging among those hair-splitting philosophers. Since Aristotle himself overlooked it, Duns Scotus and the noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim himself, were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon of whose understanding was much larger than the hemisphere of this world," neither unearthed the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.
It is reserved therefore, for some modern inquirer to establish, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were theoretical merely; and at what age the grandams (for the condition of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to begin operations.
It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled: whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this new, leisurely, mild, and genteel trade could be acquired with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past his October, are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother, learning, with melancholy energy, to suck eggs.
We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses, who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night. But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the shaggy lords of creation, by whom the innutritious properties of the shell were happily unsuspected.
By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved? Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history. One bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage under consideration permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have
"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"
and which has come even to the notice of grave inductive theologians: videlicet, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority of existence. For had it been otherwise, one's grandmother would been early acquainted with the very article which her posterity recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care, they taught her to utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her time of life.
Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as did the bulla of the lad, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of the social code. But the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, austere, meditative pastime, is no more, and the glory of grandams is extinguished forever.
The dreadful civility of our western woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting,—the casting of eggs wherefrom the element of youth is wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears to be a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen; the very primordial battle, where reloading was superfluous, where every shell told, whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail. What havoc over the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies! What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts trickled unwelcome moisture: a terror not unshared in the recesses of the coast:—
"Intus aquæ dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domus."
One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the superb spirits of Richelieu and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the great Revolution. What marvel, if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of the "she-citizens," they vowed never, never to teach another grandmother to suck eggs! So it was, maybe, that the abused custom was lost from the earth.
Nay, more; its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. Sus Minervam is Cicero's elegant equivalent; and Partridge says to Tom Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster: "Polly Matete cry town is my daskalon": the English whereof runneth: Teach your grandmother how to suck eggs! Is not the phrase the cream of scorn, the catchword of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a one-year's colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into the most amiable of professions, was nothing better, in memory, than an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to aspire now to the chair of that professorship.
Let some reformer, who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish the extended acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing and giblets in posse; and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.
1885.
WILFUL SADNESS IN
LITERATURE
"Leave things so prostitute,
And take the Alcaic lute!"
Ben Jonson.
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in the preface to the first edition of his collected poems (1853) withdrew from circulation, and gave reasons for withdrawing, his splendid Empedocles on Etna. Nothing in Mr. Arnold's career did him more honor than that fine scrupulousness leading him to decry his dramatic masterpiece as too mournful, too introspective, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage which it is the business of poets to give to the world. He says of it, that it belongs to a class of faulty representations "in which suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic: the representation of them in poetry is painful also." The same verdict that condemns the stagnant sadness of Empedocles, reacts upon Clough's Dipsychus, to some of us the most attractive of modern monodies, on Marlowe's Faustus, and on Hamlet itself. But every one of these is an inestimable experience to the happy and the virtuous who love the intimate study of humanity, and are made, by the perusal, more thoughtful and tender. On none but general considerations, could Mr. Arnold have attempted to suppress Empedocles. The great rules of æsthetics, as for ethics, must be for the many, not for the few; and the many are neither happy nor virtuous: and it may well seem a sort of treachery in a man of genius to speak aloud at all, in our vast society of the desponding and the unspiritual, unless he can speak the helping word. This cannot be sufficiently insisted upon before young writers, who are too ready to burst in upon us with their Ahs and Welladays, and to set up, at twenty, for jaded cynics, and lovers who have loved, according to their own pinched measure, too well. Some public censor, a Stoic having a heart, and perfect control of it, should be appointed, in every township, to kill off whatever is uselessly doleful, in the egg, and spread abroad the right idea of what is fit to be uttered in this valley of tears. The elect should be supplied with Empedocleian extras: but the multitude which can be impressed by their intrinsic evil should never be incited to approach their extrinsic beauty.
The play which leaves us miserable and bewildered, the harrowing social lesson leading nowhere, the transcript from commonplace life in which nothing is admirable but the faithful skill of the author,—these are bad morals because they are bad art. With them ranks the invertebrate poetry of two and three generations ago, which has bequeathed its sickly taint to its successor in popular favor, our modern minor fiction. Authors are, in a sense, the universal burden-bearers: those who can carry much vicariously, without posing or complaining. Mr. Arnold's penance for his melancholy is a noble spectacle; and it will always do what he feared Empedocles would fail to do, "inspirit and rejoice the reader." The ancients stepped securely in this matter of sadness; for piety, retribution, awe, spring from every agony of Œdipus and Orestes. Many of the Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible; but they compel men to think, and teach more humanities than a university course. Mr. Meredith's influence, in our own day, is not such as will induce you to sit shaking your maudlin head over yourself and all creation; neither—need it be added?—is Mr. Stevenson's. Mr. Henry James has just said of Mr. Lowell: "He is an erect fighting figure on the side of optimism and beauty." What made Browning exceedingly popular at last, was his courage in overthrowing blue devils.
"What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?"
His many and unique merits have small share in the result.
Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, as the Schoolmen heartily thought after him, is nothing less than an actual crime. Sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly uttered, and adjusted, in the utterance, to the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to conceal the merely painful, as did the Greek audiences and the masters of their drama. That critic would be crazy, or excessively sybaritic, who would bar out the tragic from the stage, the studio, the orchestra, or the library shelf. Melancholy, indeed, is inseparable from the highest art. We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery over it in the least, as well as in the greatest: a melancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, native dignity itself; or the Virgilian melancholy of Tennyson in his sweet broodings over the abysses of our unblest life, and the turn of his not hopeless thought and phrase. We can demand, in these matters, the insincerity of the too-little, rather than the cant of the too-much. The danger of expressing despondency is extreme. The maudlin shoots like a parasite from the most moving themes, and laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It was not without reason that Thackeray made fun of Werther. What Sidney sweetly calls—
"Poore Petrarch's long-deceasèd woes,"
stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh Hunt, and of the indelicate public after him. No poet can put fully into words the ache and stress of human passion: no very wise poet will ever try to do so, save by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. The pathos which goes deep is generally a plain statement, not a reflection. The old ballad, Waly, Waly, for instance, is a terrible thing to get away from, dry-eyed. Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, as a mere obituary announcement. Hear the long throbbing lines of the old elegy supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke:
"Learning her light hath lost, Valor hath slain her knight:
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight."
Or Chapman:
"For now no more of Œneus' race survived: they all were gone.
No more his royal self did live; no more his noble son,
The golden Meleager now: their glasses all were run."
The heartbreaking climax of Lear, the bursting-point of so much grandeur and so much suffering, is a dying commonplace almost grotesque: "Pray you, undo this button." But to harrow us is another affair altogether. Plato could never forgive a subject not inevitable, chosen simply because it is in itself piteous or startling, and invites the rhetorical gabble which its creator, after one fashion or another, can spend upon it.
The French and their followers have driven us into a demand for decency, and unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent than the things oftener named and contested by our worthiest critics. What use have we for any Muse, be she the most accomplished in the world, who lives but to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, "soothed with delicious sorrow"? Art has little to do with her: for art is made of seemly abstinences. The moment it speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases to represent a choice and a control of its own material, ceases to be, in short, an authority and a mystery, and prefers to set up for a mere Chinese copy of life,—just so soon its birthright is transferred. "I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly," that even Beauty has her responsibilities, and Art her ideals of conduct. Nay, she has her definite dogma. "Our only chance," says Addington Symonds in a private letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, "seems to me to maintain, against all appearances, that evil can never, and in no way, be victorious."
We owe our gratitude to the men of letters who deliberately undertake to be gay: for nobody expects unconscious and spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. The modern spirit has seen to that. No thanks of ours are too good even for the bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid towards Americans: for he is the one living poet already famous, who has struck, and means to strike, the very note of "How happy is he born and taught," and "Shall I, wasting in despair." But if our dilettantes lament a withered wildflower, or praise a young face, they feel that they have done enough towards clearing the air, and justifying "the ways of God to man." It is inconvenient to have the large old fundamental feelings: to be energetic, or scornful, or believing. The fashionable poetic utterance is dejected, and of consummate refinement; le besoin de sentir is about it like a strange fragrance. We have had disheartening modern music, and of the highest order, too long. Beginning with Byron, and, in a far different manner, with Shelley, we may count those problems of our life few indeed which have lacked the poor solution of a protest or a tear. Wordsworth was the last great man
——"contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand."
Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this case, since he had no marked constitutional sensitiveness. The lyres of "Parnaso mount" have grown passive and unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse us, and we have ceased to wonder at them because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in the magazines; of the three, whimpering is the favorite. Now, to "make a scene" is not mannerly, even on paper. Before the implacable Fates we may as well be collected. It seems less than edifying to ask the cold one, though in enchanting numbers, whether her bosom be of marble, or of her ghost whether it will not visit us in the garden. Yet such attitudinizing pathos, impossible so long as faith was general, and true emotion therefore unexhausted, the pathos of the decadence, the exaggeration of normal moods and affectation of more than is felt, l'expression forte des sentiments faibles,—is the prevailing feature of current verse. Rather, to be quite accurate, it was the prevailing feature a moment ago. There are, in the east, other portents more significant. It is indicative not only of his middle age, but of something touching ourselves and our to-morrow, that Mr. Swinburne, let us say, is less stormy and maledictionary, and longs not so incessantly to be laid in the exquisite burial-places of his imagination. They that wail well in duodecimo may presently be accused of giddiness and shallow thought. For literature, at last, is picking up heart: health and spring and fight are re-establishing themselves. Out of the alcoves of time, certain sunny faces of old look fatherly and smiling, as the vapors disperse. Hail also, young meek out-riders, morning-colored contemporaries! At least, you are of excellent cheer. You have done with sourness, and
——"hear it sweep
In distance down the dark and savage vale."
Change is at hand. The Maypole is up in Bookland.
1892.
AN INQUIRENDO INTO THE
WIT AND OTHER GOOD
PARTS OF HIS LATE
MAJESTY, KING
CHARLES THE
SECOND
Scene: Saint James's Park, on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of May. Edward Clay, with a twig of oak stuck in his hat is on the bank of the little lake, feeding the water-fowl. Percy Wetherell, a fellow-author, and Rhoda, his wife, who are crossing the bridge, perceive him.
MRS. WETHERELL
See! there's our dear Mr. Clay. What is he doing that for?
WETHERELL
The motive must be pure benevolence. Give me a little start, and I will run him down. [Followed by Rhoda, he goes down the steps, close to his friend's shoulder, observes the decoration, and utters in a sepulchral tone: "Long live Oliver!" Clay looks up, and smiles, still breaking his biscuit. Finally he speaks:]
CLAY
You have guessed it: I am keeping Restoration Day. It struck me as a pleasing rite to come up here and feast the descendants of King Charles the Second's water-fowl. I have to lecture on him to-night.
MRS. WETHERELL
King Charles the Second! Why, Mr. Clay, I thought he was the dreadfullest person!
WETHERELL
Easy now, my only love: don't hurt Edward's little feelings. He is a notorious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, a pre-Jacobite, a seventeenth-centurion, and all that.
MRS. WETHERELL
Oh! a Royalist, a White Rose man? I never dreamed it.
CLAY
Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue; people don't understand him. If I had your husband's leisure, I should never rest until I had moused in the archives at first hand, and said the authentic last good word for him. There would be no end of fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine pair.
WETHERELL
That green bird on your boot will choke himself. It is wonderful how tame they are!—I thought you knew more than anybody alive, on that subject, these ten years.
CLAY
I might say with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: "I have thought more than I have read, and read more than I have written."
MRS. WETHERELL
Do you really mean to make people like him? They taught us in the school-books that he was a bad good-for-nothing king.
WETHERELL
Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, he did not choose to consider himself as being in "the king business." He was a choice wag, at any rate.
CLAY
Yes: though not much worse than you. And he was the last Mind we have seen, or shall ever see, on the throne.
WETHERELL
Owch! Treason! She is all she should be, God bless her.
CLAY
[Laughing.] Allowed. I was contending that Charles the Second had wit, and a keen survey of men and things: he had the literary-philosophic turn, in short. He wasn't good, he wasn't beautiful, he wasn't much of a Protestant, or a Constitutional Sovereign; but it is my long-standing theory that he was an indolent original genius of the first water, and a fine character spoiled. Here, billy, quack, quack, quack!
WETHERELL
Your indolent original point of view! I don't deny we have some pretty valuable bequests from that bacchanalian reign: the Habeas Corpus Act, for instance. But Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket Compendium of all the vices? How are you going to excuse him? Because he was weak?
CLAY
Why do you think he must be excused? My pious intention is only to extra-illustrate him: "naught extenuate, and naught set down in malice." I mean to provide the ordinary listener at the Institute with a little dispassionate extra acquaintanceship, pleasant in its nature, with the gentleman in question; and I distinctly mean not to tamper with what knowledge of him he may have acquired on other themes, and from other sources. You see how sly a plan of campaign it is. But your adjective, Wetherell, will never do. Weak? Where did you hear that fiddle-faddle? He had the most tremendous will. Repeatedly, and with the greatest severity and despatch, he took matters over into his own hands; and very often he was right, and ahead of contemporary policy. Look at the way he prorogued Parliament, in the May of 1679, after the famous quarrel over the trial of the five lords; the way he rejected the application of the Roos divorce bill, shaped so as to give himself latitude and precedent; his speech in the Upper House, insisting on holding to the terms of pardon which he had offered from Breda; his letters to the young Duke of Gloucester, when there was rumor of a change of religion; or, to come to smaller and uglier matters, look at his obstinate maintenance of his right to appoint the ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his whole inexcusable treatment of the great Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read Green? Green, who comes down hard on him, would sooner have you think him an accomplished tyrant, and so should I.
WETHERELL
Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful to the very people who brought about the Restoration, wasn't he?—Rhoda, these swans are actually fatter than Lord Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay talk? I am egging him on; it does me good.)
MRS. WETHERELL
I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to atone for you. Yes: it is great to find so much animation expended on dead issues.
CLAY
Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can see. Think of the times, think of the hue and cry after indemnities and offices; think of the million million services, little and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, and real, all being urged together, on the day when fortune first smiled on the King. Could any one man satisfy such greed? Might not any one man get confused in such a muddle of beseeching hungry hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, save with the few he knew and remembered? And those he never forgot: not the least Penderell among them.
WETHERELL
How about the epigram,—Barrow's, wasn't it? A very good hit: let me see. Te magis, that's it:
Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo:
Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus.
CLAY
That is just the sort of dig Charles enjoyed. It isn't malicious. He was immensely amused by the protestations of the realm which, according to its own tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, and labored to bring him to his own again. He said ironically: "The fault is plainly mine that I came not before." How did he keep his patience through the incessant begging? He must have suffered more than a newly-elected president in America. As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, and restitutions, and awards, "hearing anybody against anybody," and sure to be of propitious bent when petitions forced their way into his own hand. But he kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, "he never would break his Head with Business." Long before there was much chance of his securing his succession to the crown, the hints of his adherents fell about him as thick as snow-flakes. Hasn't he told us how the country innkeeper, alone with him a moment, during his fugitive days, read him through his disguise? "He kissed my hand that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me: 'God bless you wherever you go, for I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and went away.... He proved very honest." That same innkeeper must have turned up, two hundred strong at least, at Whitehall. Again, you know how poor the King was, and how estates and emoluments had been parcelled out, and tied up, during the Protectorate. He had actually nothing, at first, to give.
WETHERELL
Except scandal.
CLAY
Irrelevant!
WETHERELL
And, of course, the immortal house-warming: a gift to the imaginations of all Englishmen forever. I am sorry I wasn't there myself.
CLAY
O that day! What a wonderful procession it must have been, from London Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, in his Diary, so beautifully calls "a lane of happy faces," and troops pressing to their lips the hilts of their weapons, and waving them overhead, in a unique salutation; the King, whom the Speaker of the House of Commons was about to address as King of Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth birthday, between his brothers of York and Gloucester, past the long waving of scarfs and glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right, like a dark pine in the wind; the saddle-cloths of purple and gold, the salvos, the tears, "the ways strewn all with flowers, bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with wine, trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking; and two hundred thousand horse and foot brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy."
WETHERELL
Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. England clamored against the Judges, and for the King; and, like Saul, he came: tall, robust, keen, suave, comely, with the curse of retrogression behind him.
MRS. WETHERELL
Hear the magnificent phrases!
CLAY
But they are true.
WETHERELL
Our collaborated Prose Works, specimen sheets.
MRS. WETHERELL
And to think you are all out of practice!
WETHERELL
Of what, shepherdess? Of truth?
MRS. WETHERELL
Mr. Clay, haven't you some more nice Charles-Secondy things to tell me? I am so interested.
WETHERELL
More of your ingenious charities, Clay, by all means. Those faithless ducks of yours are seceding to the children, and Rhoda and I are out for a walk. Come, let us sink to the occasion. We might pace up and down awhile, under the trees beyond, at the edge of the old tilt-yard. Then let us all go together to the Abbey. We have promised to meet two American relatives of Rhoda's, at half after three. They wrote us that they arrived only yesterday; but your homing pigeon of a Yankee always must make straight for the Abbey. Meanwhile, can't you give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture?
MRS. WETHERELL
He will, he will!
CLAY
I haven't all my notes with me. You are sure it won't tire you?
WETHERELL
Never. I love the æsthetic point of view. If any man remind me now that my father was a Whig, I will bray at him.
CLAY
Well, well, nice of you, I'm sure. You know my idea is just to present a special plea. How will you have me begin? I can't go on automatically, as if you were the Public Eye.
WETHERELL
Oh, anecdotes: or his witticisms. There must be scores of them running wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. Cut me no sirloin, sirrah; starve me no Nellies.
CLAY
I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb puns, sayable enough, only not said by the sayer.
WETHERELL
There isn't much chance for a king who has a genius for concise conversation.
CLAY
No. He doesn't get reported correctly, for one thing. How could Sir Walter, weighted as he was, as writers of his time were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of diction, reproduce, in Peveril or Woodstock, this light super-civilized fashion of speech, supple and stinging as a whip? And no writer of fiction since, has quite captured it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You remember that episode in Galloping Dick? Exquisite! Charles the Second's talk is altogether the most admirable thing about him: though courtly, it had none of the circumlocutions of courtliness; it was exclusive and pertinent. "All this," as Walton sweetly says of Donne, "with a most particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness." The King's only long story, which for years he was always ready to tell from the beginning, "ever embellished," says mischievous Buckingham, "with some new circumstance," and which was wont to gather a knot of listeners old and new, was the story of his adventures after the battle of Worcester, in 1650. No heartier romance exists of pluck and patience, save the later record, so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, and his heroism under them; and its author's attachment to his only novel is simply a connoisseurship, a piece of esoteric appreciation: he took and gave delight with such thrilling biographical details as might have come from the mouth of Odysseus himself. His short sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, the grave and too inductive gentleman who so moved the mirth of Miss Frances Stuart, was "Whereas" to his royal master; the yacht named after the stout Duchess of Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great sheets the King and the Duke of York sprang "like common seamen," in a terrible storm once, off the Kentish coast, was known far and wide as "The Fubbs." Another joke about "Hans in Keldar," patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, and inscribing his name there among the visitors, one need not recall too circumstantially. The Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria, was always "Mam," to her perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest son; in an alliteration like an early English poet's, he congratulated his sister on her recovery from a grave illness, "between Mam's Masses, and M. de Mayerne's pills." His little portraitures of people, his given reason for a human like or dislike, his insight into character, and his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in expressing it,—are they not all superior things of their kind? He felt it impossible to marry a princess out of Germany: she would be "so dull and foggy." Of Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic, Charles said: "Voss refuses to believe nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated man of affairs, then a deft page at court, won this neat encomium: "Sidney Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of the way." Sedley, shining Sedley, whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed "Apollo's viceroy." His "Save the Earl of Burford!" when riding under the window whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne ironically offered to throw her small son, since she had no name to call him by, is like the very finest coup de théâtre, and too like him not to be true. This climate he rated as the best climate, "because it gives the greatest number of out-of-door days." Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long before him, arraigning English weather from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, as at all times "prejudicial to the human frame." And every one knows the inimitable apology of Charles to his watchers, for "being so unconscionably long a-dying."
Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue to monologue. His gravity and authority were so fixed, his merriment so obviously local and temporal, that repartee was part of his game; he winced at nothing, and often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper thrusts than his own. It is sometimes repeated that he was angered by Rochester's incomparable epigram, pinned to his chamber door:
"Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one."
But we have on record his amusing and sufficient footnote, that his sayings were his own, and his doings were his ministers'. (This answer, by the way, must have been made to fit the occasion, and the gay exigency of it, for he was exceedingly jealous of his unused prerogative. "I assure you," he writes to one of his family, about 1668, "that my lord of Buckingham does not govern affairs here." And Clarendon attests later, that "he abhorred to be thought to be governed by any single person.") At Whitehall, as the gentlemen-in-waiting laid the plates before the King, they bent a knee. "You see how they serve me," Charles said pleasantly to his guest, the Chevalier de Grammont. "I thank your Majesty for the explanation," that accomplished wag replied, "for I thought they were begging your Majesty's pardon for so bad a dinner." No reply at all, were it but pungent, offended him. "Shaftesbury, Shaftesbury, I do believe thou art the wickedest fellow in my dominions!" "Of a subject, Sire, mayhap I am." "Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted and spurred?" "To Hell, to fetch up Oliver to look after the welfare of the English." As a monitor, this same lewd, lying, scribbling, kindly, music-loving Killigrew was almost as successful with Charles as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp sensible comment went home to him; he saw a point none the less because it told against him. "Such ability and understanding has Charles Stuart," growled the man who was called his jester, "that I do long to see him employed as King of England." Libels and satires had small sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young lady of the court, seated in her own apartment, warbles Old Rowley, the ballad of close but inelegant libel, at the top of her silvery voice. A rap comes at the outer door, from one strolling by. "Who's there?" she asks, with unconcern. "Old Rowley himself, Madam!" in the "plump bass" of Carolus Secundus. Nothing much more diverting ever happened to him than the inverted salute of a worthy citizen, who once ran along in the street, beside his coach, with a half-formed fervent "God bless your Majesty!" upon his lips: the spaniel pup on his Majesty's knee, suddenly reaching out, gave the man a nip, and caused the ready benison to blurt forth incontinently as "God bl—amn your dogs!" The well-worn tradition of Master Busby of Westminster School reversing conditions with the King, is characteristic on both sides: Charles all humor and toleration, the little man stiffened with conscious reputation, to be upheld at all costs, and heroically wearing his cap before the face of visiting royalty, "lest the boys should think there lived a greater than myself." And was it not a prettier pass yet, between the monarch and his impregnable Quaker who wanted a charter? Penn came to his first audience with his hat, on the principle of unconvention and equality, firmly fixed upon his brows. Presently the King, having moved apart from the attendants, in his gleaming dress, slowly and ceremoniously bared his head. Penn interrupted his own plea. "Friend Charles, why hast taken off thy hat?" "Because it has so long been the custom here," said the other, with that peculiar lenient smile of his, "for but one person to remain covered at a time." (It strikes one that a little of this humor would have saved his father from much woe on a not dissimilar occasion in the Commons; and, indeed, throughout.) Equally charming was his behavior, on being laid hold of, by the hiccoughing Lord Mayor,—Vyner, wasn't that his name?—who insisted that he should come back and "finish t'other bottle." Charles, instead of glowering, hummed a line of an old song, a synopsis of the difficult situation to the company, which none other but he could have given with any grace:
"The man that is Drunke is as good as a King!"
and sat again. He never became, as his tutor, the loyal Duke of Newcastle, feared, "seared with majestie."
The Lord's Anointed liked to forego his authority, and come as a mere spectator into a session of Parliament. "'Tis as good as a play," the provoking creature said. He would get down from his throne in the Lords, to stand with folded arms by the hearth, drawing a group around him, and breaking up the order and impressiveness of the place. Those really interested in statecraft, whose fond incubations he so overturned, must have found him an enfant terrible to an incorrigible degree. A memorandum-book, to be seen in one of the cases at the Bodleian, lies open at a bit of scribbled correspondence between himself and his Chancellor, passed from one to the other in the middle of debate. The King's share is as wayward and roguish as Sterne could have made it.
——"I would willingly make a visite to my sister at tunbridge, for a night or two at farthest. When do you thinke I can best spare that time?"
——"I know no reason why you may not, for such a tyme (two nights) go the next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, and return tyme enough for the adiournement, which you ought to do the weeke following. I suppose you will goe with a light Trayne."
——"I intend to take nothing but my night-bag."
—"God, you will not go without forty or fifty horses?"
——"I counte that part of my night-bag."
The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more willing Alfred, insisted on preparing supper, and produced "Scots collops," with Colonel Careless for under-cook. His minute solicitude for others, at this time and after, in the stress of his own troubles, left indelible impress on many hearts. He was at his bravest on the open road, and in the secret manor and the oak tree: the odd situations became him as if he were King of the Romany. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds he had a thorough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly amid "the pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, relates, in his book of travels, that at a state banquet at Whitehall, the host privily requested that his chair be removed and changed, because it was conspicuously the most comfortable in the room. Could informality farther go? But Charles maintained his gay grace and easy simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction with decisive dignity. With mere standoffishness he had nothing to do. Sir Walter Besant tells us in his London: "The palace was accessible to all; the guard stood at the gate, but everybody was admitted, as to a town; the King moved freely about the courts, in the mall, in the parks, sometimes unattended. The people drove their packhorses or their waggons up and down the road, and hardly noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood under the shade of a tree, watching the players along the mall. This easy and fearless familiarity vanished with the Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might see his sovereign dance the brantle, perhaps with the young delicate-footed Italian Duchess, his brother's wife; or hear him tell over the "grouse-in-the-gunroom" stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at home he went his way, with a nod, a smile, and a word for all: "a far more successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, "than any his father or grandfather had practised." In the beginning, Charles had a beggarly income, and whimsically complained of it. "What troubles me most, is to see so many of you come to me to Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your dinner!" He was hostile only to "fuss and feathers," the dry husk of social laws. He had his father's instinct for what was beautiful and imposing. At his coronation, he revived for the last time, and with its most august splendors, the ancient custom of procession from the Tower to the Abbey: a personal revelation, moreover, of that generous kindness towards the common people, which made them adore him. He also endeavored, though in vain, to re-establish the masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, intertwined with all manner of old fragrant poetic associations. At his coming, he found the Maypoles down, the shows over, races, dances, and merry-hearted sports cut short; the theatres were dismantled, and the sole appreciation that actors got, or hoped for, was at the whipping-post. His first thought was for the London parks and drives; his second, for the London stage. The way was soon cleared for those dramas which managers must now handle, as Thoreau handled a certain newspaper, "with cuffs turned up"; but these, despite their build and basis, have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and mastery of incident. The plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys from the middle gallery, were nearly all equipped at the expense of the King and gentry, and were brought out with nice details of costly scenery and costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, and the Duke of York even gave their coronation suits to the actors. When Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loosened the jewelled sword and belt which he wore, and enthusiastically clasped them upon the comedian, proud of both to his dying day. Charles originated the plot of Crowne's sprightly production, Sir Courtly Nice (the King died the night of its final rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's Secret Love: he was very vain of the latter when it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always delighted to have it called his play. He was responsible, in the same degree, for Oronokoo: for it was he who first discerned, in the affecting tale of the West Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an enslaved prince, choice material for a tragedy.
He was no reader, no student, in the usual sense: he read folk, and not folios. Newcastle had written him, then the child Prince of Wales: "Whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will spoil your government; for you cannot be a good contemplative man, and a good commonwealth's man. Therefore take heed of too much book." Never was tutor eventually better obeyed. Charles was a shrewd observer; he could sift ambassadors, ministers, and "persons of quality," as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, the while, impervious as rock. His early education was neglected: he was forced too soon into active life. Fortunately, he had the æsthetic bent of his race: thought and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy processes, all he knew. He became a good mathematician, and a good draughtsman; he was something of an expert in anatomy; he perfectly understood the sciences of fortification and shipping. He once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to race "the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, which have my invention in them." (It is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of the Rhine did not command his crew, as Monk did, to wheel to the left!) Charles was as thorough a sailor as his brother, and would have made as fair a record on deck, had his lines been cast there. Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred that he directed the course better than himself. It was this King who gave the charter to the Royal Society, and founded the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as the Mathematical School at Christ Hospital. Nor were these things done perfunctorily, but from close personal interest. Charles could gossip in several languages. His taste for chemistry was almost as marked as his cousin Rupert's; and in the month he died, he was running a process for fixing mercury. Cowley, before that period, had lapsed into a pretty conceit about his liege lord in the laboratory.