And Even Now
should not advise any one to imitate Tillotson’s style; though I don’t
know; I should be cautious of censuring anything that has been applauded
by so many suffrages.--South is one of the best, if you except
his peculiarities, and his violence, and sometimes coarseness of
language.--Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological.
Jortin’s sermons are very elegant. Sherlock’s style, too, is very
elegant, though he has not made it his principal study.--And you may add
Smalridge. BOSWELL: I like Ogden’s Sermons on Prayer very much, both for
neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like to
read all that Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is, what
sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence. JOHNSON:
We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for
anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name
I do not recollect: Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?
JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.’
The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
burrow was no more.
I know not which is the more startling--the de’but of the unfortunate
clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn’t Boswell told
us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful
and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman
was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.
Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or
later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in
our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around
Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his
self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell’s page it startles
us. In Johnson’s massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.
Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This
unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he
lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however,
does not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson’s
strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the
Cloth. To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grave and
charming deference. To-day moreover, he was in excellent good humour. He
was at the Thrales’, where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine
dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to
be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the
question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was
one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been
agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the
blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in
which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.
Say the words aloud: ‘Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the
passions?’ They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic
sense, cannot be said except in a high, thin voice.
You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
you must pipe them.
Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well,
the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very
loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when
at length he suddenly mustered courage to ‘cut in,’ let his high, thin
voice soar too high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no other
hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson turned and
rended him. Johnson didn’t, we may be sure, mean to be cruel. The old
lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw and claws
was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the strength
of Johnson’s voice; and the very cadence of those words, ‘They were
nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may,’ convinces me that the
old lion’s jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does not record
that there was any further conversation before the announcement of
dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily deafened. But
I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the poor dear
clergyman exclusively.
I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I
omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any
one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even
the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that question.
He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the
neighbouring church? I think so. It would account for his having been
invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor’s
pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a
chair in the background. He has colourless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a
face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-coloured. His
hands are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply.
This constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak.
He has no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something
whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for
thought, ‘Why yes, Sir. That is most justly observed’ or ‘Sir, this has
never occurred to me. I thank you’--thereby fixing the observer for
ever high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents
itself. ‘We have,’ shouts Johnson, ‘no sermons addressed to the
passions, that are good for anything.’ I see the curate’s frame quiver
with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can’t bear it,
I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill,
followed by something thunderous.
Presently I re-open my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.
Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established
Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?
And, by the way, who were they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought
that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palaeo-Georgians
conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a
big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath him.
But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all very
elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled
full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian gentleman’s library will be complete
without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but,
bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels
are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a
very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years
hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and
sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly
as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. ‘Yes, Sir,’
some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, ‘Wells
is one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his
concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of
problems, but is not very creational.--Caine’s books are very edifying.
I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is
very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair.’ ‘What I want to know,’
says the disciple, ‘is, what English novels may be selected as specially
enthralling.’ The pundit answers: ‘We have no novels addressed to
the passions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of
enthralment.’ And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will
not remember) inquires: ‘Are not Mrs. Glyn’s novels addressed to the
passions?’ and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will
come when readers of this passage in our pundit’s Life will take more
interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those
great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate
between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above
Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must
remember that things are not always what they seem.
Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past
favours, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if
by so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a
correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human,
but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson
and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.
They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.
Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not
elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us
keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than
merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the
Thrales’ that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well
became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But
at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.
And that is what in fact happened, I’m sure of it. A robust man might
have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in
infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had
they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you
are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest,
the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. ‘A
Clergyman’ never held up his head or smiled again after the brief
encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.
Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall’s almond trees he was no more.
I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.
THE CRIME 1920.
On a bleak wet stormy afternoon at the outset of last year’s Spring, I
was in a cottage, all alone, and knowing that I must be all alone till
evening. It was a remote cottage, in a remote county, and had been ‘let
furnished’ by its owner. My spirits are easily affected by weather, and
I hate solitude. And I dislike to be master of things that are not mine.
‘Be careful not to break us,’ say the glass and china. ‘You’d better
not spill ink on me,’ growls the carpet. ‘None of your dog’s-earing,
thumb-marking, back-breaking tricks here!’ snarl the books.
The books in this cottage looked particularly disagreeable--horrid
little upstarts of this and that scarlet or cerulean ‘series’ of
‘standard’ authors. Having gloomily surveyed them, I turned my back on
them, and watched the rain streaming down the latticed window, whose