Chapter 11

And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the last year of the five in which those two had lived as one soul and one heart. They were at Dove Cottage, on something under £150 a year. Poems were thronging thick about them; they were living intensely. John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for writing, to settle for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at half-past eleven (it is now two) I have been putting the drawers in order, laid by his clothes, which he had thrown here and there and everywhere, filed two months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two boiled eggs and two apple tarts.... The robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I _will_ be busy. I _will_ look well, and be well when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitter apples, I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the fire.... I walked round the two lakes, crossed the stepping-stones at Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always sit. I was full of thought of my darling. Blessings on him." Where else in our literature will you find mood so tender, so intimately, so delicately related?

A week later, and William returned. With him, it seems, her descriptive powers. "Monday morning--a soft rain and mist. We walked to Rydale for letters, The Vale looked very beautiful in excessive simplicity, yet at the same time, uncommon obscurity. The church stood alone, mountains behind. The meadows looked calm and rich, bordering on the still lake. Nothing else to be seen but lake and island." Exquisite landscape. For its like we must go to Japan. Here is another. An interior. It is the 23rd of March, "about ten o'clock, a quiet night. The fire flickers, and the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my beloved as he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf...." No more, but the peace of it is profound, the art incomparable.

In April, between the 5th and 12th, William went into Yorkshire upon an errand which she knew and dreaded. Her trouble makes the words throb.

"Monday, 12th.... The ground covered with snow. Walked to T. Wilkinson's and sent for letters. The woman brought me one from William and Mary. It was a sharp windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came with me to Barton and questioned me like a catechiser all the way. Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart. I was so full of thought of my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he left me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking of my own thoughts. The moon travelled through the clouds, tinging them yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger than the other.... At this time William, as I found the next day, was riding by himself between Middleham and Barnard Castle."

I don't know where else to find the vague torment of thought, its way of enhancing colour and form in nature, more intensely observed. Next day: "When I returned _William_ was come. _The surprise shot through me._" This woman was not so much poet as crystal vase. You can see the thought cloud and take shape.

The twin life was resumed for yet a little while. In the same month came her descriptions of the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, and of the scene by Brothers Water, which prove to anybody in need of proof that she was William's well-spring of poesy. Not that the journal is necessarily involved. No need to suppose that he even read it. But that she could make him see, and be moved by, what she had seen is proved by this: "17th.-- ... I saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly this morning"; and "Sunday, 18th.-- ... William wrote the poem on _The Robin and the Butterfly_." No, beautiful beyond praise as the journals are, it is certain that she was more beautiful than they. And what a discerning, illuminative eye she had! "As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world...." What a woman to go a-gipsying through the world with!

Then comes the end.... "Thursday, 8th July.-- In the afternoon, after we had talked a little, William fell asleep. I read _The Winter's Tale_; then I went to bed but did not sleep. The swallows stole in and out of their nest, and sat there, _whiles_ quite still; _whiles_ they sung low for two minutes or more at a time, just like a muffled robin. William was looking at _The Pedlar_ when I got up. He arranged it, and after tea I wrote it out--280 lines.... The moon was behind.... We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and dull, but our own vale was very solemn--the shape of Helm Crag was quite distinct though black. We walked backwards and forwards on the White Moss path; there was a sky like white brightness on the lake.... O beautiful place! Dear Mary, William. The hour is come.... I must prepare to go. The swallows, I must leave them, the wall, the garden, the roses, all. Dear creatures, they sang last night after I was in bed; seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell."

Next day she set out with William to meet her secret dread, knowing that life in Rydale could never be the same again. Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson on the 4th October, 1802. The secret is no secret now, for Dorothy was a crystal vase.

_NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ_

Weather has sent me indoors, chance to an old book. I have been reading _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ again. Bad buffoonery as much of it is and full to the throttle of the warm-watery optimism induced by whisky, yet as fighting literature it is incalculably better than its modern substitute in _Blackwood_. The sniper who monthly tries to pinch out his adversaries there--Mrs. Partington's nephew, in fact--wants the one quality which will make that kind of thing intolerable--that is, high spirits. The Black Hussars of Maga both had them, and drank them, frequently neat. I judge that the Nephew has to be more careful. Eupepsy is not revealed in his writing; but Christopher North and his co-mates must have had the stomachs of ostriches. The guzzling and swilling which were the staple of the _Noctes_ were remarked upon at the time as incredible as well as disgusting; but it is to be presumed that they wouldn't have been there if, to the majority at least, they had not been a counsel of perfection. "I wasn't as drunk as I should have liked to be, your Worship, but I was drunk."

As well as that, most people thought it exceedingly funny. Dickens and his readers thought it funny too. Christmas would not have been Christmas unless somebody got beastly drunk. We have moved on since then, and carried the Nephew with us, _multum gementem_. One can see him kicking violently under the arm of the _Zeitgeist_ as he is borne down the ringing grooves of change. Now, therefore, he is tart in his musings, chastises rather with fleas than with scorpions.

When the _Noctes_ can stand away from Politics and Literature--for the two were always involved in those days, so that unless you approved a man's party you couldn't allow that he wrote tolerable verse--they can wile away a winter evening very pleasantly. Christopher North had an eye for character, a sense of humour, and knew and loved the country. He was country bred. He is at his best when he combines his loves, as he does in the person of the Shepherd. Keep the Shepherd off (_a_) girls, (_b_) nursing mothers, (_c_) the Sabbath, (_d_) eating, (_e_) drinking, (_f_) his own poetry, and he is good reading. Knowing and loving Ettrick Forest as I do, I need no better guide to it than North's Shepherd. Having fished all its waters from Loch Skene downwards, I should ask no better company, evenings, at Tibbie Shields' or the Tushielaw Inn. Edward FitzGerald could have made a good book out of the _Noctes_, cutting it down to one volume out of four. As it is mainly, it will stand or fall by its high spirits. The really funny character in it is Gurney, the shorthand writer, who is kept in a cupboard, and at the end of the last uproarious chapter, when the coast is cleared of the horseplaying protagonists, "comes out like a mouse, and begins to nibble cheese." That is imagination.

The real Ettrick Shepherd was better than the _Noctes_ can make him. Lockhart gives a delightful account of his first visit to Walter Scott in Castle Street--his first visit, mind you. He is shown into the drawing-room and finds Mrs. Scott, disposed, _à la_ Madame Recamier, on a sofa. His acuteness comes to the aid of his bewilderment, and he is quick to extend himself in similar fashion upon the opposite sofa. In the dining-room he was much more at his ease. Before the end of the meal he had his host as "Wattie" and his hostess as "Charlotte." Next day he wrote to Scott to ask what he might have said, and to offer apologies if needful.

A remark put into his mouth by North, that he could "ban" Burns for having forestalled him with the line--

The summer to Nature, my Willie to me!

set me wondering wherein consists the true lyrical magic. In that line of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and lyric lilt. In--

Come away, come away, Death,

it is in the lilt alone. One thing only about it is sure, and that is that the diction must be conversational. There will be tears in the voice, but the voice must be that of the homely earth, never of the stage, never of the pulpit If you agree with that, you will have to cut out practically all the poets from Dryden to Cowper, Gray and Collins among them; for Gray has a learned sock, and hardly allows familiarity when he is elegising Horace Walpole's cat. But Shakespeare proves it, Ben Jonson proves it, and all the good poets from Wordsworth. Burns had the vernacular to help him, and for the most part a model to steer by. All Lowland Scots, lads and lassies, wail, and occasionally howl, in his songs. The first two lines of that one envied by Hogg run:

Here awa, there awa, wandering Willie, Here awa, there awa, haud awa hame!

and of these the second is traditional, altered only in one word. Burns writes "haud awa hame" instead of repeating "here awa"--and improves it. Shakespeare used the King's English, but never shirked a racy idiom. Here is a good instance from the Sonnets, and from one of the greatest of them, "Farewell, thou art too dear."

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter-- In sleep a king; but waking _no such matter_.

You might call that a slang phrase and be right.

There are other cases, and many; some where he goes all lengths, and one at least where he goes beyond them. But to leave Shakespeare, for a perfect example of passion married to common speech, commend me to--

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; But I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart That thus so clearly I myself can free.

Intense feeling, intense music, a lovely thing: a poem.

SKELETONS AT A FEAST

The other day the village was celebrating the birthday of its Labourers' Union in a manner which used to be reserved for the coming of age of the Squire's son, or for the Harvest Festival, in which the farmer might give thanks for the harvest, and the peasant, perhaps, for having been allowed to assist in winning it. I take a sort of pride in recording a staidness in the observance which I believe to be peculiar to the countryside in which I live. There was a service, with a sermon, in church, all persuasions uniting; then a dinner with speeches; then sports and dancing on the grass. Every stave of the Pastoral was announced and punctuated by the village band. "God save the King" closed all down at nine o'clock.

It was sober merry-making after our manner, yet one could feel the undercurrent of a triumph not difficult to understand. Not a man there but knew, or had heard his father tell, of how things used to be. Ten years ago those men were earning sixteen shillings a week for twelve hours a day; fifteen years ago they were earning twelve shillings; thirty years ago they were earning nine shillings; a hundred years ago they were on the rates, herded about in conscript gangs under the hectorings of an overseer. Now--and it has seemed to come all in a moment--the humblest of them earn their 36_s._ 6_d._; the head men their 40_s._; their hours are down to fifty for the week, with a half-holiday on Saturday; delegates of their kind sit at a board in Trowbridge face to face and of equal worth with delegates of their employers. All matters affecting their status, housing, terms of employment can be brought before the board; and beside that, and behind it, like a buttress, there is a Union, whose name recalls that other grim fortress to which alone in times bygone they had to look when old age was upon them. This new Union has been in existence here little more than a twelvemonth, but they know now that it has spread all over England.

They know more than that. They know that this plexus of organisations is not only social, but political; they feel that the estate of the realm which they stand for may soon become, and must before long become, the predominant estate. They feel the rising tide already lifting them off their feet. The elders are sobered by the flood; but the young ones taste the salt water sprayed off the crest of the wave and look at each other, laugh and cheer. If they rejoice they have good reason, knowing what they know; and if I rejoice with them, I think that I have good reason too. This time seven years ago I sang at length of Hodge and his plow; and looking back and forth over his blood-stained, sweat-stained and tear-stained history, I seemed to see what was coming to him as the crown of his thousand years of toil.

I look and see the end of it, How fair the well-lov'd land appears; I see September's misty heat Laid like a swooning on the corn; I see the reaping of the wheat, I hear afar the hunter's horn, I see the cattle at the ford, The panting sheep beneath the thorn! The burden of the years is scor'd, The reckoning made, Hodge walks alone, Content, contenting, his own lord, Master of what his pain has won.

And so indeed it is. The peasant now has his foot on the degrees of the throne, and has only to step up, he and his mates of the mine, the forge, the foundry and the railroad--to step up and lay hand to the orb and sceptre.

If I had misgivings, and if those, when imparted to, were shared by an old friend of mine who still gives me six hours a day of his strength and skill when the weather and his rheumatics can hit it off together, I may say at once that though they were renewed in me by the late threat of the railwaymen arrogantly hurled at the only Government in my recollection which has made arrogance in asking almost a necessary stage in negotiation, they had been present for a long time--beyond Mr. Smillie's wild proposals of direct action, beyond the Yorkshire miners and the flooded coalfields; back to the day when electricians refused to light the Albert Hall, and Merchant Seamen refused passage to some politician or another because they didn't like his politics. One and each of those direct and unsteady actions made me shiver for the men with their feet on the throne's degrees. And now a Railway Strike, which has injured every one and will throw back the railwaymen and their Labour Party for many a year! If these things are done in the green wood, I asked my friend, what will be done in the dry?

He couldn't answer me but by asking in his turn questions which were but a variation of my own. He said: "Our people don't seem to understand anything but 'each man for himself.' The miners hold up the country for higher wages, and the country has to pay them; the railwaymen do the same, and the country must find double fares and high freight. They hit their own class hardest of all, because dear coal and high tariffs touch everybody. And they don't even help themselves, because directly wages are raised, up goes the price of everything. Now what I want you to tell me is how are they going to stop all that when they are the Government? For it will have to stop."

He is right: it will have to stop; but I don't see how the Labour Party is going to stop it. So far as I can make out, the Labour Party, as a responsible, political body, has no control whatsoever over the trade unions; and the trade unions, as such, none over their members. How, then, is one to look forward with comfort to the establishment of a Labour Government? It will take a readier speech than even Mr. Webb's, a more confident than even Mr. Smillie's to illuminate this smoke-blurred scene whereon we make out every trade union preying upon Mr. George's vitals (which are, unfortunately, for the moment our own vitals), and with a success so disastrously easy as to make any prospects of a return to sane, honest, dignified or just government almost hopeless! Mr. George is destroying himself hand over fist, and the sooner the better; but one does not want to see England go down with him. I am all for anarchy myself when once it is thoroughly grasped by everybody that anarchy means minding your own business. But we are far from that as yet. Anarchy at present means minding, and grudging, other people's business. Such anarchy is not government, but plundering with both hands.

My point, however, is that, if we are to have a Labour Government, it must be a Government of a nation, and not a class-affair. When the Duke said that the King's Government must be carried on, he meant the Government of King George or King William. Our present Prime Minister means the Government of Mr. George, which is a very different affair. In its way of simple egotism it is precisely the meaning of the trade unions, and can be shortlier put as "After me the deluge." And that won't do. We want neither autocracy nor anarchy; and just now the one involves the other.

A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER

Mr. Festing Jones has written a large book about his friend, and written it very well.[A] It is candid, and it is sincere; the work of a lover at once of Butler and of truth; it neither extenuates the faults nor magnifies the virtues of its subject so far as the author could perceive them; and it makes it possible to understand why Butler was so underrated in his lifetime, though not at once why he was so overrated after his death. That remains a problem which cannot be resolved by saying that his friends trumpeted him into it, or that posthumous readers enjoyed seeing him belabour his betters, which his contemporaries had not. It is true that _The Way of All Flesh_ did not appear until he was dead, and also true that _The Way of All Flesh_ is a witty and malicious novel, whose malice and wit Mr. Shaw had prepared London to admire. Perhaps it is true, once more, that we are more scornful of the old orthodoxy than our fathers were, and less careful whose feelings are hurt. But I must confess that I should not have expected any age to be so complacent about caricaturing one's father and mother as our own was. However, for those who admire that sort of thing--and there must be many--I doubt if they will find it better done anywhere, with more gusto or more point. Dickens is believed to have put his father into _David Copperfield_, not, I think, his mother. But one can love Mr. Micawber, and Dickens would not have so drawn him without love. We are led to Butler's favourite distinction between _gnosis_ and _agapé_. There's no doubt about the _gnosis_ that went to the making of Theobald and Christina. But where was _agapé_?

[Footnote A: _Samuel Butler, Author of "Erewhon"_ (1835-1902): _a Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. Two Vols. Macmillan, 1919.]

Butler was in many respects a fortunate man, and should have been a happy one. He had a good education, good health, a sufficiency of means. Even when his embarrassments were at their heaviest he could always afford to do as he pleased. He could draw a little, play a little, write more than a little; he loved travel, and covered all Southern Europe in his time; he had good friends, a good mistress, a faithful servant; he had a strong sense of humour, feared nobody, had a hundred interests. Why, then, did he think himself a failure? Why was the sense of it to cloud much of his writing, and much of Mr. Jones's biography?

He had his drawbacks--who has not? He did not get on with his father, criticised his mother; his sisters scraped the edges of his nerves; a man to whom he was extremely generous betrayed him. The like of these things must happen to mortal men. Butler knew that as well as any one. But his books were not read; the great men whom he attacked ignored him. He thought himself to be something, they treated him as nothing, and the public followed them. He knew all about it, and Mr. Jones knows all about it. He had unseated the secure with _Erewhon_, outraged the orthodox with _Fairhaven_, flouted the biologists, himself being no biologist, plunged into Homeric criticism without archæology, swum against the current in Shakespearianism, enjoyed himself immensely, playing _l'enfant terrible_, and treading on every corn he could find--and then he was angry because the sufferers pretended that they had no corns. How could he expect it both ways? If he was serious, why did he write as if he was not? And if he had tender feelings himself--as he obviously had--why should he expect all the people he attacked with his pinpricks to have none? It was not reasonable.

The answer to these questions is to be found in some little weaknesses of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals. Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little tale about a tipsy man from Manchester--rather a good little tale. "I do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly amusing. Butler was seldom at his best with a celebrated man. He was not successful himself, and had a sub-aggressive feeling that a celebrated man probably did not deserve his celebrity; if he did deserve it, let him prove it." There is no getting away from that symptom, which is as unreasonable as it is perverse. Celebrated men are not usually so anxious to "prove" their celebrity as all that comes to. It is bad enough to be "celebrated." It was hard lines on old Lear to sulk with him because he would not show off. If he had wanted to do that he would not have gone to Varese. But that is mortified vanity. The same thing happened when he met Mr. Birrell at dinner in 1900. Then it was the celebrity who took pains to save his host and hostess from a frosty dinner party. The same thing is recalled of meetings with Sir George Trevelyan and Lord Morley earlier in the book. It is all pretty stupid; but when a man is ridden by a vanity like that there can be no healthy pleasure to be got out of writing for its own sake. You must have your public flat on its back before your vanity will be soothed.