Part 16

Of Christmas amusements I can say little. My notion of them is chiefly derived from "Happy Thoughts," where Byng suggests some "Christmassy sort of thing" to amuse his guests, and fails to gratify even his Half-Aunt. My infancy was spent in the country, remote from Dances and Theatres, Pantomimes and Panoramas. "The Classic Walls of Old Drury" never welcomed me on Boxing Night. Certainly a Christmas Tree and a stocking full of presents appealed to that acquisitive instinct which is fully as strong in infancy as in old age; but, though exceedingly young in my time, I never was young enough to be amused by a Snow-Man or dangerously excited by Blind Man's Buff. Looking back, like Tennyson's "many-wintered crow," on these Christmases of infancy, I have sometimes asked myself whether I lost much by my aloofness from the normal merriment of youth. Mr. Anstey Guthrie knows the secret heart of English boyhood more accurately than most of us, and when I read his description of a Christmas party I am inclined to be thankful that my lot was cast a good many miles beyond the cab-radius.

"Why couldn't you come to our party on Twelfth-night? We had great larks. I wish you'd been there."

"I had to go to young Skidmore's instead," said a pale, spiteful-looking boy with fair hair, carefully parted in the middle. "It was like his cheek to ask me, but I thought I'd go, you know, just to see what it was like."

"What was it like?" asked one or two near him, languidly.

"Oh, awfully slow! They've a poky little house in Brompton somewhere, and there was no dancing, only boshy games and a conjuror, without any presents. And, oh! I say, at supper there was a big cake on the table, and no one was allowed to cut it, because it was hired. They're so poor, you know. Skidmore's pater is only a clerk, and you should see his sisters!"

All my sympathies are with Skidmore, and I think that the fair-haired boy was an unmitigated beast, and cad, and snob. But there is an awful verisimilitude about "Boshy Games and a Conjuror," and I bless the fate which allowed me to grow up in ignorance of Christmas Parties.

XXXVII

NEW YEAR'S DAY

On the 1st of January 1882, Matthew Arnold wrote to his sister: "I think the beginning of a New Year very animating--it is so visible an occasion for breaking off bad habits and carrying into effect good resolutions." This was splendid in a man who had just entered his sixtieth year, and we all should like to share the sentiment; but it is not always easy to feel "animated," even by the most significant anniversaries. Sometimes they only depress; and the effect which they produce depends so very largely on the physical condition in which they find us. Suppose, for instance, that one is a fox-hunter, in the prime of life and the pride of health, with a good string of horses which have been eating their heads off during a prolonged frost. As one wakes on New Year's morning, one hears a delicious dripping from the roof, and one's servant, coming in with tea and letters, announces a rapid thaw. Then "the beginning of a New Year" is "animating" enough; and, while we wash and shave, we pledge ourselves, like Matthew Arnold, to "break off bad habits and carry into effect good resolutions." We remember with shame that we missed three capital days' hunting last November because we let our friends seduce us to their shooting-parties; and we resolve this year to make up for lost time, to redeem wasted opportunities, and not willingly to lose a day between this and Christmas. Such resolutions are truly "animating"; but we cannot all be young or healthy or fox-hunters, and then the anniversary takes a different colour. Perhaps one is cowering over one's study-fire, with "an air of romance struggling through the commonplace effect of a swelled face" (like Miss Hucklebuckle in "The Owlet"), or mumbling the minced remains of our Christmas turkey as painfully as Father Diggory in "Ivanhoe," who was "so severely afflicted by toothache that he could only eat on one side of his face." Not for us, in such circumstances, are "animating" visions of wide pastures, and negotiable fences, and too-fresh hunters pulling one's arms off, and the chime of the "dappled darlings down the roaring blast." Rather does our New Year's fancy lightly turn to thoughts of dentistry and doctoring. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come when art must replace what nature has withdrawn; and, if we form a resolution, it is nothing more heroic than that we will henceforward wear goloshes in damp weather and a quilted overcoat in frost.

But, it may be urged, Matthew Arnold was not a fox-hunter (at least not after his Oxford days), and yet he contrived to feel "animated" by New Year's Day. In his case animation was connected with books.

"I am glad," he wrote, "to find that in the past year I have at least accomplished more than usual in the way of reading the books which at the beginning of the year I put down to be read. I always do this, and I do not expect to read all I put down, but sometimes I fall much too short of what I proposed, and this year things have been a good deal better. The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live. It is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that; yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner by reading. If I live to be eighty, I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

We have not quite come to that yet, but we are not far off it, and I should fear that the number of even educated people who occupy New Year's Day in laying down a course of serious study for the next twelve months is lamentably small. But Hunting and Health and Books are not the only topics for New Year's meditation. There is also Money, which not seldom obtrudes itself with a disagreeable urgency. We cast our eye over that little parchment-bound volume which only "Fortune's favoured sons, not we" can regard with any complacency; and we observe, not for the first time, that we have been spending a good deal more than we ought to spend, and are not far from the perilous edge of an overdrawn account. This is "animating" indeed, but only as a sudden stab of neuralgia is animating; and we immediately begin to consider methods of relief. But where are our retrenchments to begin? That is always the difficulty. I remember that after the Cattle Plague of 1865, by which he had been a principal sufferer, the first Lord Tollemache was very full of fiscal reforms. "I ought to get rid of half my servants; but they are excellent people, and it would be very wrong to cause them inconvenience. Horses, too--I really have no right to keep a stud. But nothing would ever induce me to sell a horse, and it seems rather heartless to kill old friends. Then, again, about houses--I ought to leave St. James's Square, and take a house in Brompton. But the Brompton houses are so small that they really would not accommodate my family, and it would not be right to turn the boys into lodgings." And so on and so forth, with a magnificent list of contemplated reforms, which went unfulfilled till things had righted themselves and retrenchment was no longer necessary. In the same spirit, though on a very different scale, the inhabitants of Stuccovia contemplate the financial future which lies ahead of New Year's Day. We must economize--that is plain enough. But how are we to begin?

I must have a new frock-coat very soon, and shall want at least three tweed suits before the autumn. Economy bids me desert Savile Row and try Aaronson in New Oxford Street. "Budge," says the Fiend. "Budge not," replies Self-Respect. Aaronson is remarkable for a fit "that never was on sea or land," and, though his garments are undeniably cheap, they are also nasty, and are worn out before they are paid for. Or perhaps our conscience pricks us most severely in the matter of wine. We will buy no more Pommery and Greno at 98s. a dozen, but will slake our modest thirst with a dry Sillery at 31s. But, after all, health is the first consideration in life, and, unfortunately, these cheap wines never agree with us. The doctor holds them directly responsible for our last attack of eczema or neuritis, and says impressively, "Drink good wine, or none at all--bad wine is poison to you." _Drink none at all._ That is very "animating," but somehow our enfeebled will is unequal to the required resolve; we hold spirit-drinking in detestation; and so, after all, we are driven back to our Pommery. "Surely," as Lamb said, "there must be some other world in which our unconquerable purpose" of retrenchment shall be realized.

Travel, again. Many people spend too much in travel. Can we curtail in that direction? For my own part, I am a Londoner, and am content with life as it is afforded by this wonderful world miscalled a city. But the Family has claims. Some of them suffer from "Liver," and whoso knows what it is to dwell with liverish patients will not lightly run the risk of keeping them from Carlsbad. Others can only breathe on high Alps, and others, again, require the sunshine of the Riviera or the warmth of the Italian Lakes. So all the ways of retrenchment seem barred. Clothes and wine and travel must cost as much as they cost last year, and the only way of escape seems to lie in the steps of the Prince Consort, who, when Parliament reduced his income from the proposed fifty thousand a year to thirty, patiently observed that he should have to give less in subscriptions.

To the Spendthrift, or even to the more modest practitioner who merely lives up to his income, the New Year, as we have seen, offers few opportunities for resolutions of reform; but I fancy that the Skinflint, and his cousin the Screw, find it full of suggestive possibilities. I remember a gentleman of "griping and penurious tendencies" (the phrase is Mr. Gladstone's) telling me when I was a schoolboy that he had resolved to spend nothing with his tailor in the year then dawning. He announced it with the air befitting a great self-surrender, but I thought, as I looked at his clothes, that he was really only continuing the well-established practice of a lifetime. The Screw, of course, is of no one place or age; and here is an excellent citation from the Diary of a Screw--Mr. Thomas Turner--who flourished in Sussex in the eighteenth century: "This being New Year's Day, myself and wife at church in the morning. Collection. My wife gave 6d. But, they not asking me, I gave nothing. Oh! may we increase in faith and good works, and maintain the good intentions we have this day taken up." Those who have tried it say that hoarding is the purest of human pleasures; and I dare say that by the end of the year good Mr. Turner's banking-book was a phantom of delight.

All these reflections, and others like unto them, came whirling on my mind this New Year's Eve; and, just as I was beginning to reduce them to form and figure, the shrill ting-ting of the church-bell pierced the silence of the night. _Watch-Night._ Those who are not the friends of the English Church denounce her as hidebound, immovable, and unreceptive. Here is the--or an--answer to the charge. She has borrowed, originally, from the Swedenborgians and more immediately from the Wesleyans, a religious observance which, though unrecognized in Prayer-book or Kalendar, now divides with the Harvest Festival the honour of being the most popular service in the Church of England.

"Among the promptings of what may be called, in the truest sense of the term, Natural Religion, none surely is more instructive than that which leads men to observe with peculiar solemnity the entrance upon a new year of life. It is, if nothing else, the making a step in the dark. It is the entrance upon a new epoch in existence, of which the manifold "changes and chances" prevent our forecasting the issue. True, the line of demarcation is purely arbitrary; yet there are few, even of the most thoughtless, who can set foot across the line which separates one year from another without feeling in some degree the significance of the act. It would seem that this passing season of thoughtfulness was one of those opportunities which no form of religion could afford to miss. And yet, for a long time, that which may perhaps without offence be termed Ecclesiasticism sternly refused to recognize this occasion. The line was rigidly drawn between the Civil New Year and the Church's New Year. We were told that Advent was the beginning of our Sacred Year, and that the evening before the First Sunday in Advent was the time for those serious thoughts and good resolutions which rightly accompany a New Year."

Yes-so we were taught; and there was a great deal to be said, ecclesiastically, for the teaching. Only, unfortunately, no one believed it. We went to bed quite unmoved on Saturday evening, December 1, 1906. No era seemed to have closed for us, no era to have opened: there was nothing to remember, nothing to anticipate; nothing to repent and nothing to resolve. It is otherwise to-night.[11] The "church-going bell" does not tingle in vain. Old men and maidens, young men and children are crowding in. I involve myself in an ulster and a comforter, and join the pilgrim-throng.

[11] December 31, 1906.

XXXVIII

PETS

My suggestive friend has taken to postcards, and his style, never diffuse, has become as curt as that of Mr. Alfred Jingle. "Why not Pets?" he writes; and the suggestion gives pause.

When Mrs. Topham-Sawyer accepted the invitation to the Little Dinner at Timmins's, she concluded her letter to Rosa Timmins: "With a hundred kisses to your dear little _pet_." She said _pet_, we are told, "because she did not know whether Rosa's child was a girl or a boy; and Mrs. Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of the reply to her invitation." My mind misgave me that my friend might be using the word _pet_ in the same sense as Mrs. Topham-Sawyer, and inviting me to a discussion of the Crêche or the Nursery. As my views of childhood are formed on those of Herod and Solomon, I hastened to decline so unsuitable a task, whereupon my friend, for all reply, sent me the following excerpt from an evening paper:--

"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January 10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends' League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their interest in and affection for domestic pets."

Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory is sweet--sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line

"Delicias dominæ cetera turba fugit."

I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes.

The pet-keeping instinct, strong in infancy but suppressed by the iron traditions of the Public School, not seldom reasserts itself in the freedom of later life. "The Pets of History" would be a worthy theme for a Romanes Lecture at Oxford; and, if the purview were expanded so as to include the Pets of Literature, it would be a fit subject for the brilliant pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison. We might conveniently adopt a Wordsworthian classification, such as "Pets belonging to the period of Childhood," "Juvenile Pets," "Pets and the Affections," "Pets of the Fancy," and "Pets of the Imagination." In the last-named class a prominent place would be assigned to Heavenly Una's milk-white lamb and to Mary's snowy-fleeced follower. "Pets of the Fancy" has, I must confess, something of a pugilistic sound, but it might fairly be held to include the tame eagle which Louis Napoleon, when resident in Carlton Gardens, used to practise in the basement for the part which it was to play in his descent on Boulogne. Under "Pets and the Affections" we should recall Chaucer's "Prioresse"--

"Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde With rostud fleissh, and mylk, and wastel bredde."

The Pets of Tradition would begin with St. John's tame partridge, and would include an account of St. Francis preaching to the birds. The Pets of History would no doubt involve some reference to the Bruce's spider and Sir Isaac Newton's Diamond and the Duc D'Enghien's spaniel; and, if so belittling a title as "pet" may be applied to so majestic an animal as the horse, we should trace a long line of equine celebrities from Bucephalus and Sorrel to Marengo and Copenhagen. The Pets of Literature are, of course, a boundless host--chargers like White Surrey, and coursers like Roland; hounds like Keeldar and falcons like Cheviot--to say nothing of Mrs. Merdle's parrot, or Miss Tox's canary, or Mr. Kipling's appalling monkey, who murdered his owner's wife.

Wordsworth alone is responsible for a whole menagerie of pets--for a White Doe, for a greyhound called Dart, for "Prince," "Swallow," and "Little Music," let alone the anonymous dog who was lost with his master on Helvellyn. The gentle Cowper had his disgusting hares and his murderous spaniel Beau. Byron's only friend was a Newfoundland dog called Boatswain. The horses of fiction are a splendid stud. Ruksh leads the procession in poetry, and Rosinante in prose. A true lover of Scott can enumerate twenty different horses, of strongly marked individuality and appropriate names. Whoso knows not Widderin and his gallop from the bushrangers has yet to read one of the most thrilling scenes in fiction; and I think that to this imaginary stud may be fairly added the Arabian mare which Lord Beaconsfield thought he had ridden for thirty miles across country in the strongly-enclosed neighbourhood of Southend.

Among the Pets of Real Life an honourable place belongs to Sir Walter Scott's deerhounds--were not their names Bran and Maida?--and to Lord Shaftesbury's donkey Coster. Loved in life and honoured in death were Matthew Arnold's dachshunds Geist and Max, his retriever Rover, his cat Atossa, and, above all, his canary Matthias, commemorated in one of the most beautiful of elegiac poems. With Bismarck--not, one would have thought, a natural lover of pets--is historically associated a Boarhound, or "Great Dane." Lord Beaconsfield characteristically loved a peacock. The evening of Mr. Gladstone's days was cheered by the companionship of a small black Pomeranian. Sir Henry Hawkins was not better known to the criminal classes than his fox-terrier Jack; and all who passed Lady Burdett-Coutts's house saw hanging in the dining-room window a china cockatoo-the image or simulacrum of a departed bird which lived to a prodigious age and used to ask the most inconvenient questions.

The greatest patroness of Pets in Real Life was Queen Victoria, and her books have secured for these favourites a permanent place. Noble, the collie, will be remembered as long as "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands" is read; and I can myself recall the excitement which fluttered the highest circles when a black terrier, called, I think, Sharp, killed a rat which had climbed up the ivy into the window of the Queen's sitting-room at Windsor.

There are certain pets, or families of pets, which stand on their own traditional dignity rather than on associations with individuals. All Cheshire knows the Mastiffs of Lyme, tall as donkeys and peaceable as sheep. The Clumber Spaniels and the Gordon Setters are at least as famous as the dukes who own them. Perhaps the most fascinating pet in the canine world is associated with the great victory of Blenheim; and the Willoughby Pug preserves from oblivion a name which has been merged in the Earldom of Ancaster.

In the days of my youth one was constantly hearing--and especially in the Whiggish circles where I was reared--two names which may easily puzzle posterior critics. These were "Bear Ellis" and "Poodle Byng." They were pre-eminently unsentimental persons. "Bear" Ellis (1781-1863) was so called because he was Chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and "Poodle" Byng (1784-1871) because his hair, while yet he boasted such an appendage, had been crisply curled. But the Dryasdust of the future, pondering over the social and political records of Queen Victoria's earlier reign, will undoubtedly connect these prefixes with pet-keeping tendencies, and will praise the humane influence of an animal-loving Court which induced hardened men of the world to join the ranks of "Our Dumb Friends' League."

XXXIX

PURPLE AND FINE LINEN

Dean _versus_ Bishop--it is an antinomy as old as the history of Cathedral institutions. The Dean, with a good house and a thousand a year, has always murmured against the Bishop, with a better house and five times that income; and, as he is generally master of his Cathedral, he has before now contrived to make his murmurs sensible as well as audible. Of late years these spiritual strifes (which beautifully link the post-Reformation to the pre-Reformation Church) have been voted disedifying, and, if they continue to exist, they operate surreptitiously and out of public view. But, though Deans have ceased from clamouring, they retain their right to criticize, and the Dean of Norwich has just been exercising that right with a good deal of vivacity. I cull the following extract from a secular newspaper:--

SIMPLE LIFE FOR BISHOPS

"Dean Lefroy at a meeting of the General Diocesan Committee to make arrangements for the Church Congress at Great Yarmouth in October ... commented on the inordinate expense of founding bishoprics, and said that episcopacy in Canterbury Province cost £142,000 per annum, and in York £44,000. He believed that £2000 a year and a residence would be welcome to most bishops. The upkeep of large palaces swallowed up the bishops' incomes. Preserve the palaces, but give bishops the opportunity of living more simply. The surplus might go to poor and starving clergy."