Part 4 (2/2)

Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula quae te Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.

So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows, and pure streams, and the country life. How peaceful, men say, and blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped in content, and hedged about by his own humility from the world! They forget, who speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were also evil, or would have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou wert poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for greed of money was thy detestation. Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood was alone held in regard; yet tiny virtues made thee hosts of friends, and chiefly among religious men, bishops, and doctors of the Church. Thy private life was not unacquainted with sorrow; thy first wife and all her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring, though, in thine age, new love and new offspring comforted thee like 'the primrose of the later year.' Thy private griefs might have made thee bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows of the State and of the Church, which were deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from their homes; fear everywhere, everywhere robbery and confusion: all this ruin might have angered another temper. But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor the love of angling could alone have displayed. For we see many anglers (as witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself, when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come nigh to swear prophane.

Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing in the party that professes G.o.dliness. But neither private sorrow nor public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a religion which was not untried, but had, indeed, pa.s.sed through the furnace like fine gold. For if we find not Faith at all times easy, because of the oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity of men's minds, neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day. For the learned and pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of England. The humbler folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who gave themselves out to be somebody, while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.

Therefore, such a religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith, strong in despite of oppositions. Happy was the man in whom temper, and religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler's pastime so conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes! Around thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.

Thus, by G.o.d's blessing, it befell thee Nec turpem senectam Degere, nec cithara carentem.

I would, Father, that I could get at the verity about thy poems. Those recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr. Donne and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of thy kind heart than thy fancy. But what or whose was the pastoral poem of 'Thealma and Clearchus,' which thou didst set about printing in 1678, and gavest to the world in 1683? Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author's name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years of his age, in 1679. Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as 'a friend of Edmund Spenser's,' and how could this be?

Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a friend, borrowed by thee out of modesty, and used as a cloak to cover poetry of thine own inditing? When Mr. Flatman writes of Chalkhill, 't is in words well fitted to thine own merit:

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows Except himself, who charitably shows The ready road to virtue and to praise, The road to many long and happy days.

However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green pastures, thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we, who stray into thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold thy hand, and listen to thy cheerful voice. If our sport be worse, may our content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none the less. Father, if Master Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweed-side, be with thee, greet him for me, and thank him for those songs of his, and perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear River.

Tweed! winding and wild! where the heart is unbound, They know not, they dream not, who linger around, How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin From thee--the bliss withered within.

Or perhaps thou wilt better love,

The lanesome Tala and the Lyne, And Mahon wi' its mountain rills, An' Etterick, whose waters twine Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills; An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright, An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed, Their kindred valleys a' unite Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed!

So, Master, may you sing against each other, you two good old anglers, like Peter and Corydon, that sang in your golden age.

X. To M. Chapelain.

Monsieur,--You were a popular writer, and an honourable, over-educated, upright gentleman. Of the latter character you can never be deprived, and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.

Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day, But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out-lives not May.

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but _your_ laurel certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus and where Homer are. Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it, awaited _un si bon homme_. But the moral excellence that even Boileau admitted, _ladfoi, l'honneur, la probiite,_ do not in Parna.s.sus avail the popular poet, and some luckless Musset or Theophile, Regnier or Villars attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many contemporary editions, and of a great commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should have been that fortunately manufactured article. You were, in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers. Never, since Adam's day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbiere his wife with the future author of 'La Pucelle.' Oh futile hopes of men, _O pectora caeca!_ All was done that education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, 'especially lacked fire and imagination,' and an ear for verse--sad defects these in a child of the Muses. Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like Ra.s.selas, 'Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal's minstrels, as M. de Treville was Captain of the King's Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric English, among us n.i.g.g.ard moderns! How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or, even as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and pension me; but Envy be still! Your existence was more happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Ho'tel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic. 'Who, indeed,' says a sympathetic author, M. Theophile Gautier, 'who could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art--a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the great?' Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good faith to advertise your merits. Hard must have been the heart that could resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur G.o.deau, Bishop of Vence, or M. Colbert, who had such a genius for finance.

If bishops and politicians and prime ministers skilled in finance, and some critics, Menage and Sarrazin and Vaugetas, if ladies of birth and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and appraising yourself at the public estimate?

It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you listened to the plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured to p.r.o.nounce judgment on contemporaries whom Posterity has preferred to your perfections. 'Moliere,' said you, 'understands the nature of comedy, and presents it in a natural style. The plot of his best pieces is borrowed, but not without judgment; his _morale_ is fair, and he has only to avoid scurrility.'

Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!

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