Part 18

There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s whimsicality.

James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays), something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed, commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain (where he was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also, and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat, who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not. If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist--for that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a “small hymn” for Christmas Day:

“Hail holy Tyde Wherein a Bride, A Virgin (which is more) Brought forth a Son, The lyke was done Ne’er in this world before--;”

and this is the beginning of an elegy upon the Earl of Dorset,

“But is great Sackville dead? Do we him lack, And will not all the Elements wear black?”

and this the middle,

“Thus have I blubber’d out some tears and verse On this renownéd heroe and his herse,”

and this the end,

“In the meantime this Epitaph shall shut, And to my Elegy a period put--”

on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!

He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married, divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived their father except his _Familiar Letters_, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac, well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or Milton. He reports, for example, that the Prince Palatine has got together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long letter containing many anecdotes _ad hoc_ and a “Gradual Hymn tending to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his “frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb--but I think Howell was the latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson, of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a similar reproof. The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed his “Father Ben” as follows:

“You know,

Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect.”

Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.” And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside. But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing it, that I feel sure Howell _aut diabolus_ must have taught it him:

First, the theme--“I was according to your desire to visit the late new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram petticoat lined with satin.”

Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:

“I think _Clotho_ had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”

Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.

How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I must not leave out. In the stress of Civil War he writes to a friend in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here. Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but now a temple is become a stable.”

Lamb, we all know, had a love of tags and proverbs, and could string them with anyone. Not more surely than Howell could, who has a long letter of advice to a friend, upon marriage, consisting entirely of them. As thus:

“Sir, although I am none of those that love to have an oar in everyone’s boat, or such a busybody as deserves to be hit in the teeth, yet you and I having eaten a peck of salt together, and having a hint that you are upon a business that will make or mar you, for a man’s best fortune or his worst’s a wife, I would wish you to look before you leap, and make more than two words to a bargain.”

He keeps it up with immense zest for two full sheets, and ends all with “yours to the altar.” If Lamb knew that, he would never have forgotten it--and I believe he never did.

CROCUS AND PRIMROSE

This year, it deserves to be recorded, the first crocus and the first primrose flowered together on January 18th. I know not when this article will appear; it may well be that Spring will have set in with its usual severity, in other words, that in mid-March we may be snowbound, and in mid-winter, as is now customary, before my record can be read. That is as may be, but my duty is clear. For the moment, and until we have become used to the new procession of Seasons, a first crocus and first primrose on the 18th of January constitute an event in South Wilts, if they do not in the rest of England. And lest any caviller should arise, as assuredly he will, and tell me that my primrose was the last, not the first, I may as well nip him in the bud of his endeavour by declaring that leaf and flower are alike new growth. It is true that many primulas have a second flowering--my _japonicas_ always do. But I do not observe that they make new leaf twice a year. Here, the primrose, which is comparatively rare even in the woods, and unknown in the hedges, disappears altogether, like the cowslip, until new growth begins. The cowslip is our only native primula.

Such things--I don’t mean the early flowering, but the flowering of such things at all--are events in the garden, red-letter days in its year. The flowers themselves, to some one of them, to some another, are vocal; for there is a real language of flowers, very different from that made out of them by the love-sick. It has no syntax, and is incommunicable by speech. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard ...! So with flower-language. The first wild crocus talks to me immediately of Greece, where on the top of rugged Chelmos I saw it in perfection burning its way into the snow. I had climbed up there to see Homer’s [Greek: Stygos hydatos aipa rheethra], a sight, I am bound to say, not at all remarkable. Charon could have hopped over it. It was the crocuses that I remarked: the orange, called, I think, _bulbo-codium_, and a white striped with brown, which I have always known as the Scotch crocus, but which in botany is named _biflorus_. It is no use my saying that that is the way to grow them. It is Nature’s way, but cannot be ours, unless they will seed themselves, as some will. So far as I know, those two will not. They will increase otherwise; but by seeding flowers alone will you get the happy accidents which make a natural wild garden. They tell me, by the by, that you can hardly now obtain that most beautiful of all crocus, the blue _Imperati_, an autumn flower. I don’t know whether I am singularly favoured--I hope not; but at any rate, I can obtain, within reason, as much _Imperati_--not as I want, for that could never be, but as is good for me. I put some few dozen into a rock-garden which I then had, some fifteen years ago, and it has increased a hundredfold. So have some other species of crocus. _Imperati_ grows very large and, unfortunately, very lax. Heavy rain in September will beat it down to a purple jelly. But when fair weather lasts out that loveliest month of the year crocus _Imperati_ is a theme for poets.

As for the nurseryman’s crocus, colour is its real point; and it should be grown in masses for that alone; in masses where it can get the sun, and the bees can get _it_. Unfortunately it has many enemies. In London it lures the sparrows into Bacchic orgies; obscenely they tear it petal from petal. In the country field-mice seek it in the bud and eat the embryo flower. I have tried everything, Stockholm tar and sand mixed in layers in the barrow; read lead and paraffin; strawberry netting, soot and such like. I owe my best remedy to the discovery I have made that, much as mice like crocuses, they like toasted cheese yet more. One or two traps with that for a bait will save vast numbers of crocuses, for it is a mistake to suppose that many mice are involved. A pack of field-mice is a terrible thought, but only a nightmare happily. One mouse, with the whole night before him, will ruin a border.

The primrose is vocal of my childhood and the Kentish woodlands. There they used to grow marvellously, though now I daresay that Lord Beaconsfield and his League have made an end of them. Wherever the axe had been there were they, in sheets, in a galaxy, even to the scent of milk in the spicy air. I remember now, whenever I see my first primrose of the year, the almost fainting rapture with which we used to see, smell, taste, and handle them again--on some still warm April day--after the waiting through the long winter. For winters really were long, and wintry, then--or I think so. One used to wake in the morning and find the water-bottle frozen solid, the sponge like a brick. One used to learn to skate (for which now we go to Switzerland and catch influenza in a super-heated hotel), make snowmen, blow on one’s fingers to fasten one’s shirt-collar. But I have lived in the West of England this twenty years, and can only remember one snowy Christmas. Ah, and how many warm Aprils? Perhaps as many.

But the primrose is not common here. You will find it over the hills in the greensand, and again just over the Dorset border, in Cranborne Chace: not in this valley. I make it grow, importing it, because I can’t do without it; and so do the villagers, for the same reason. But they like it coloured, and have a rooted belief that if you plant a primrose upside down it will come up with red flowers. I tell them that it is Cruelty to Primroses. They point me out red-flowering roots which have been obtained in this way; and I end the inconsequent argument by saying, Well, anyhow, I don’t want it--village logic.

As I said just now, wild gardening, by which I mean the garden use of wild flowers, is to be confessed a failure unless you can induce the flowers to seed themselves. Once you can do that, you may talk about your wild garden. Once I saw a corner of a man’s garden, where there was a waterfall, and _ramondia_ growing as it does in the Pyrenees. That was a memorable sight. I have had my own moderate successes of the sort. Anemone _blanda_ has become as common as groundsel; but _apennina_ refuses to seed. The Widow iris, _tuberosa_, which started in life in a dry ditch under Vesuvius, and came to South Wilts in a sponge bag, is another weed. I left a garden with more of that growing in it than anybody can want. Fritillary is not a native, but seeds freely in my water meadow; colchicum, another alien, increases like coltsfoot. Both the cyclamens, the Neapolitan and the Greek, have large families, which can never be too large--and so on. Such are some of my little triumphs, of which I dare not boast lest I be rebuked as once I was by a high lady in garden society. It was not kind of her, though no doubt she did it for my good. It was a time when I was growing cushion irises, with enormous pains and exiguous results. However, one fine Spring I did induce _Iris iberica_ to utter its extraordinary flowers--six of it, to be exact. Of that feat, meeting her at a party, I vaunted to the high lady. I can still see the glimmering of her eyelids, hear her dry voice commenting, “_I_ had four hundred.” It may have been good for me, but was it good for her? If I had known then, as I knew afterwards, that she had flowered her four hundred at Aix-les-Bains, I think I might have rebuked her--so far as high ladies can be rebuked--by telling her that she could have had four thousand on such terms. But I knew nothing of it. There she had me.

I would not now give twopence for _Iris iberica_ unless it would increase in my plot. I have come to make that the staple of good gardening, and would set no bounds to feats of the kind. Certainly, I am not with the purists who say--or said--that it is inartistic to grow foreign things in wild spaces. The Reverend William Mason, in the eighteenth century, who turned Capability Brown into poetry, was plainly of that opinion. It may be inartistic, but it is very jolly. I am experimenting just now with some of the plants and shrubs from Tibet which poor Farrer gave us before he died. I find that most of them grow like Jack’s beanstalk, but care very little about flowering. I have a briar-rose, a grey-leafed, bushy, spiky thing rather like _Rosa Willmottia_, which gives me canes tree-high, but so far no flowers. Farrer’s behymned _Viburnun fragrans_ grows apace: its fragrance has yet to be tested. He said that it was like heliotrope, and I hope that it may prove so. Then I have a Spiraea from Tibet, which came to me from Wisley in a thumb-pot, marked “Rosa-species,” but is unmitigated Spiraea. You may practically see the thing grow if, like it, you have nothing else to do. It is now as big as a bamboo-clump, and impervious to frost. So far as it is concerned, this might be the valley of Avilion. Once only has the vast affair considered flowering. Two years ago buds showed themselves at the end of August and, with a leisureliness for which the stock had not prepared me, were ready to expand by the middle of October. They then looked as much like bunches of bananas as anything else, and if all had gone well, would no doubt have been the talk of the county. But, as you might suppose, by the time they were ready,

“Swift summer into the autumn flowed, And frost in the mist of the morning rode;”

and the Spiraea, deeply offended, did nothing at all except slowly rot, and, to pursue _The Sensitive Plant_,

“Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth,”

as was only to be expected. Since that check to its ardour, it has devoted itself to root-action and the results; and all I can do is to admire its rapidly maturing timber, and consider whether it or the house should be removed.

Lucky accidents, or happy experiments, will acclimatise difficult things sometimes. I don’t know how often or in how many places I had tried to make the Alpine gentian, _verna_, feel at home, when I happened to meet a soldier somewhere who lived in Ireland. He told me of his own efforts with it in artfully prepared moraines and joy-heaps of the kind. It lived, and it flowered, as it has lived and flowered, and also died, here--but it did not spread. It existed, not throve. Then, perhaps by inspiration, he put some of it into a gravel path, and left it there. Or perhaps it drifted there by itself, as such things will--I don’t remember how it was. There, at any rate, it increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, growing indeed as you may see it in Swiss pastures in early Spring, deep blue stars afloat in the streaming waters--one of earth’s loveliest sights. Ah, what an “event” for a gardener to nail that miracle every year as it comes round. I would wait for that as I do for the cuckoo. But first I must wait for a gravel path.

DAFFODILS

I don’t suppose that any flower in England, except the rose, has been more bepraised, as somebodys aid, by poets who were not gardeners, and gardeners who were not poets; and it is certainly difficult in dealing with it to leave Wordsworth out. I shan’t be able to do it, because I shall want him, but I shall do my best to reach the end of this article without quoting from _A Winter’s Tale_. It is satisfactory, at least, to be certified, as I am from Parkinson, that all of our poets, from Shakespeare to Mr. Masefield, have been exercised about the same plant. Parkinson says that we had two English daffodils, one which he calls Peerless Primrose, and another which can be identified as the double daffodil, and which, he says, Gerard found in an old woman’s cottage garden--just where we find it now. Neither Parkinson nor, I suspect, any of the poets had a notion that, strictly speaking, the daffodil was the Asphodel; but how it came about that the word changed its designation I am not able to say. Branching asphodel grows wild in Ireland--not, I believe, in England--and classical poetry is, of course, full of it, though it puts the stiff and stately thing to strange uses. Poets who, as it was freely declared, reclined upon beds of asphodel and moly had not found out the best sites in the Elysian Fields. No flower, however, more eloquently reports the South. I never see mine, whose seed I collected on the Acropolis at Athens, but I remember the Pont du Gard, and the sharp smell of the box-bushes, or Greece, where it clouds the slopes of Hymettus with pink, and burns brown against the sky as you labour up the winding path to Acrocorinth. It will do in England, and do well, if you can secure it sun and drouth.