The Common Reader
years; she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley’s account
of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half of his work on Passion; and
of Hobbes only “the little book called _De Cive_”, all of which is
infinitely to the credit of her native wit, so abundant that outside
succour pained it, so honest that it would not accept help from others.
It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her
own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that
was to oust all others. The results were not altogether happy. Under the
pressure of such vast structures, her natural gift, the fresh and
delicate fancy which had led her in her first volume to write charmingly
of Queen Mab and fairyland, was crushed out of existence.
The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells,
Its fabric’s built all of hodmandod shells;
The hangings of a Rainbow made that’s thin,
Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in;
The chambers made of Amber that is clear,
Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;
Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,
And with a butterfly’s wing hung about;
Her sheets are of the skin of Dove’s eyes made
Where on a violet bud her pillow’s laid.
So she could write when she was young. But her fairies, if they survived
at all, grew up into hippopotami. Too generously her prayer was granted:
Give me the free and noble style,
Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.
She became capable of involutions, and contortions and conceits of which
the following is among the shortest, but not the most terrific:
The human head may be likened to a town:
The mouth when full, begun
Is market day, when empty, market’s done;
The city conduct, where the water flows,
Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.
She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally; the sea became a
meadow, the sailors shepherds, the mast a maypole. The fly was the bird
of summer, trees were senators, houses ships, and even the fairies, whom
she loved better than any earthly thing, except the Duke, are changed
into blunt atoms and sharp atoms, and take part in some of those
horrible manœuvres in which she delighted to marshal the universe.
Truly, “my Lady Sanspareille hath a strange spreading wit”. Worse still,
without an atom of dramatic power, she turned to play-writing. It was a
simple process. The unwieldy thoughts which turned and tumbled within
her were christened Sir Golden Riches, Moll Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman,
and the rest, and sent revolving in tedious debate upon the parts of the
soul, or whether virtue is better than riches, round a wise and learned
lady who answered their questions and corrected their fallacies at
considerable length in tones which we seem to have heard before.
Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad. She would issue out in
her own proper person, dressed in a thousand gems and furbelows, to
visit the houses of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant report
of these excursions. She recorded how Lady C. R. “did beat her husband
in a public assembly”; Sir F. Ο. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued
himself so much below his birth and wealth as to marry his
kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sanctified soul, a spiritual
sister, she has left curling her hair, black patches are become
abominable to her, laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to pride—she
asked me what posture I thought was the best to be used in prayer”. Her
answer was probably unacceptable. “I shall not rashly go there again”,
she says of one such “gossip-making”. She was not, we may hazard, a
welcome guest or an altogether hospitable hostess. She had a way of
“bragging of myself” which frightened visitors so that they left, nor
was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck was the best place for
her, and her own company the most congenial, with the amiable Duke
wandering in and out, with his plays and his speculations, always ready
to answer a question or refute a slander. Perhaps it was this solitude
that led her, chaste as she was in conduct, to use language which in
time to come much perturbed Sir Egerton Brydges. She used, he
complained, “expressions and images of extraordinary coarseness as
flowing from a female of high rank brought up in courts”. He forgot that
this particular female had long ceased to frequent the Court; she
consorted chiefly with fairies; and her friends were among the dead.
Naturally, then, her language was coarse. Nevertheless, though her
philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses
mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of
authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and
lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page.
There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as
crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her
intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true
and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of
some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although
“they”, those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever
since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the face
at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all, had the wit
to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw for the
sufferings of the hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk to some
one “of Shakespeare’s fools”. Now, at any rate, the laugh is not all on
their side.
But laugh they did. When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess was
coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the
streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys twice brought him
to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the pressure of the crowd about
her coach was too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in her
silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a velvet cap on her head,
and her hair about her ears. He could only see for a moment between the
white curtains the face of “a very comely woman”, and on she drove
through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse
of that romantic lady, who stands in the picture at Welbeck, with large
melancholy eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing,
touching a table with the tips of long pointed fingers in the calm
assurance of immortal fame.
[Footnote 4: _The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Etc._,
edited by C. H. Firth; _Poems and Fancies_, by the Duchess of Newcastle;
_The World’s Olio; Orations of divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers
Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical Letters_, etc., etc.]
_Rambling Round Evelyn_
Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three
hundred years hence, your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary.
Only first be certain that you have the courage to lock your genius in a
private book and the humour to gloat over a fame that will be yours only
in the grave. For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or
for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and
justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of
affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail,
volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not
necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business
and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men,
reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the
land.
The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth
anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn,[5] is a case in point. It is
sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar;
but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all
that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm
conscience to his children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble to
read what we must consider the uninspired work of a good man we have to
confess, first that diaries are always diaries, books, that is, that we
read in convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death; second, that
this reading, about which so many fine things have been said, is for the
most part mere dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book;
watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless occupation which
no critic has taken the trouble to investigate, and on whose behalf only
the moralist can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to be an
innocent employment; and happiness, he will add, though derived from
trivial sources, has probably done more to prevent human beings from
changing their religions and killing their kings than either philosophy
or the pulpit.
It may be well, indeed, before reading much further in Evelyn’s book, to
decide where it is that our modern view of happiness differs from his.
Ignorance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his ignorance, and
our comparative erudition. No one can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign
travels without envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in
the second his activity. To take a simple example of the difference
between us—that butterfly will sit motionless on the dahlia while the
gardener trundles his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with
the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, instantly on the
alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly sees but does not hear; and here
no doubt we are much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into the
house to fetch a knife and with that knife dissecting a Red Admiral’s
head, as Evelyn would have done, no sane person in the twentieth century
would entertain such a project for a second. Individually we may know as
little as Evelyn, but collectively we know so much that there is little
incentive to venture on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopædia,
not the scissors; and know in two minutes not only more than was known
to Evelyn in his lifetime, but that the mass of knowledge is so vast
that it is scarcely worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant, yet
justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his
private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all
the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with
unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and drew inferences
and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to
the talk of old women round the village pump. The moon, they say, is so
much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and the
carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins. So Evelyn, Fellow of
the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence,
carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen
when a whale came up the Thames. In 1658, too, a whale had been seen.
“That year died Cromwell.” Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate
the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence
and eccentricity from which she now refrains. There were storms, floods,
and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a
cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s bed the kitten was inevitably gifted
with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.
But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears that if there is an
insoluble difference between our ancestors and ourselves it is that we
draw our happiness from different sources. We rate the same things at
different values. Something of this we may ascribe to their ignorance
and our knowledge. But are we to suppose that ignorance alters the
nerves and the affections? Are we to believe that it would have been an