Part 8 (1/2)
[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
I am generally rather a happy ”sort” of man, but your letter makes me very happy. How kind you are! Up in the morning betimes to catch people still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their sympathies before they had ”faded into the light of common day,” and to collect all their ”loving” words for me. That was a good and faithful act; and I am deeply grateful.
Yes, the man was right. I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right, I have it from my father. He had a way of taking for granted, not only the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned respectability. He, at least, never questioned it. The effect was twofold.
Some of the ”weak brethren” felt uncomfortable at being met on those terms of equality. My father might have been practising on them the most dreadful irony; and they were ”that shy” and confused. But it was not irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for the poor ”sowls,” well--respect, that's it, respect for all human beings; _his_ respect made _them_ respectable. Wasn't it grand? To others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room with him was enough. To be conscious that he was there, that he didn't fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of ”scowlin'” them, that they were treated as gentlemen. Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the interval of repose! Extraordinary, though, was it not? To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, G.o.d forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, _theirs_. Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking.
My father would have considered he was ”taking a liberty” if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far.
But don't suppose for a moment that the ”weak brethren” thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they--they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating _delicacy_? G.o.d only knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a n.o.ble innocence, a _respect_ for our fellow creatures--glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty. It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present. Was he far wrong? Yet how many people would have thought him stern!
One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind. We called him U.T., that is Uncle Tom. He was not our uncle--we never had one--but the uncle of our predecessors at Kirk Braddan. And almost every Sunday evening he spent at the Vicarage--poor old thing! He was quite silent. One thing, though, he would say, as ”regglar as clockwork.” My mother occasionally apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: ”I'm pa.s.sionately fond of music.” This, to us children, was highly ludicrous.
Indeed, my mother was amused--she had no Manx blood in her--but my father accepted U.T.'s a.s.surance with the utmost confidence. His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (_Anglice_--humbug; oh those Englis.h.!.+), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s ”pa.s.sionately.”
_Pa.s.sion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence of pa.s.sion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the pa.s.sion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being ”scoulded,” of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of ”pa.s.sion,” even so ethereal a pa.s.sion as that of music. How blessed those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not appear on a Sunday, he must have been ”hard at it” on Sat.u.r.day; and into the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Sat.u.r.days.
Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help extending the portrait a little.
And for the backsliders, the ”weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let's feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'”
Do write again. You will do me so much good.
VISIONS [Sidenote: _Calverley_]
In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening cas.e.m.e.nts light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.
It is, in brief, the evening--that pure and pleasant time When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme; When in the gla.s.s of Memory the forms of loved ones s.h.i.+ne-- And when, of course, Miss Goodchild's is prominent in mine.
Miss Goodchild!--Julia Goodchild!--how graciously you smiled Upon my childish pa.s.sion once, yourself a fair-haired child: When I was (no doubt) profiting by Dr. Crabb's instruction, And sent those streaky lollipops home for your fairy suction!
”She wore” her natural ”roses, the night when first we met”-- Her golden hair was gleaming 'neath the coercive net: ”Her brow was like the snawdrift,” her step was like Queen Mab's, And gone was instantly the heart of every boy at Crabb's.
The parlour boarder _cha.s.seed_ tow'rds her on graceful limb; The onyx deck'd his bosom--but her smiles were not for him: With _me_ she danced--till drowsily her eyes ”began to blink,”
And _I_ brought raisin wine, and said, ”Drink, pretty creature, drink!”
And evermore, when winter comes in his garb of snows, And the returning schoolboy is told how fast he grows; Shall I--with that soft hand in mine--enact ideal Lancers, And dream I hear demure remarks, and make impa.s.sioned answers:--
I know that never, never may her love for me return-- At night I muse upon the fact with undisguised concern-- But ever shall I bless that day: I don't bless as a rule, The days I spent at ”Dr. Crabb's Preparatory School.”
And yet we two _may_ meet again--(be still, my throbbing heart!)-- Now rolling years have weaned us from jam and raspberry-tart.
One night I saw a vision--'twas when musk-roses bloom, I stood--_we_ stood--upon a rug, in a sumptuous dining-room:
One hand clasped hers--one easily reposed upon my hip-- And ”Bless ye!” burst abruptly from Mr. Goodchild's lip: I raised my br.i.m.m.i.n.g eye, and saw in hers an answering gleam-- My heart beat wildly--and I woke, and lo! it was a dream.
”BOSWELL AND JOHNSON”
[Sidenote: _Macaulay_]
The Life of Johnson is a.s.suredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his compet.i.tors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when ”The Dunciad” was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then ”binding it as a crown unto him,” not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of ”Corsican Boswell.” In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally bl.u.s.tering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common b.u.t.t in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword,--such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be.
Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind.