The Common Reader
no development along these lines is possible. Of its kind such a
portrait is perfect; and when we find, scattered up and down the
_Spectator_ and the _Tatler_, numbers of such little masterpieces with
fancies and anecdotes in the same style, some doubt as to the narrowness
of such a sphere becomes inevitable. The form of the essay admits of its
own particular perfection; and if anything is perfect the exact
dimensions of its perfection become immaterial. One can scarcely settle
whether, on the whole, one prefers a raindrop to the River Thames. When
we have said all that we can say against them—that many are dull,
others superficial, the allegories faded, the piety conventional, the
morality trite—there still remains the fact that the essays of Addison
are perfect essays. Always at the highest point of any art there comes a
moment when everything seems in a conspiracy to help the artist, and his
achievement becomes a natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to
a later age, half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day after day, essay
after essay, knew instinctively and exactly how to do it. Whether it was
a high thing, or whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more
profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is due to Addison
that prose is now prosaic—the medium which makes it possible for people
of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.
Addison is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable progeny. Pick up
the first weekly journal and the article upon the “Delights of Summer”
or the “Approach of Age” will show his influence. But it will also show,
unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary essayist, is attached
to it, that we have lost the art of writing essays. What with our views
and our virtues, our passions and profundities, the shapely silver drop,
that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions of human life,
is now nothing but a hold—all knobbed with luggage packed in a hurry.
Even so, the essayist will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it,
to write like Addison.
In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more than once amused
himself with speculations as to the fate of his writings. He had a just
idea of their nature and value. “I have new-pointed all the batteries of
ridicule”, he wrote. Yet, because so many of his darts had been directed
against ephemeral follies, “absurd fashions, ridiculous customs, and
affected forms of speech”, the time would come, in a hundred years,
perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would be “like so many pieces of
old plate, where the weight will be regarded, but the fashion lost”. Two
hundred years have passed; the plate is worn smooth; the pattern almost
rubbed out; but the metal is pure silver.
[Footnote 7: Written in 1919.]
_The Lives of the Obscure_
Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription to this faded,
out-of-date, obsolete library, which with a little help from the rates,
is chiefly subsidised from the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and
country gentlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to dust.
In the middle of the wide airy room, with windows that look to the sea
and let in the shouts of men crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled
street below, a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local
flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath. The elderly, the
marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper, or sit holding
their heads over back numbers of _The Illustrated London News_ and the
_Wesleyan Chronicle_. No one has spoken aloud here since the room was
opened in 1854. The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each
other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs are
flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why disturb their sleep? Why
re-open those peaceful graves, the librarian seems to ask, peering over
his spectacles, and resenting the duty, which indeed has become
laborious, of retrieving from among those nameless tombstones Nos. 1763,
1080, and 606.
I
THE TAYLORS AND THE EDGEWORTHS
For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with
lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a
Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—waiting,
appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one
coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to
their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be
theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert—but the contact with life is
instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert may be doing, she is not
thinking about us. Far from it. Colchester, about the year 1800, was for
the young Taylors, as Kensington had been for their mother, “a very
Elysium”. There were the Strutts, the Hills, the Stapletons; there was
poetry, philosophy, engraving. For the young Taylors were brought up to
work hard, and if, after a long day’s toil upon their father’s pictures,
they slipped round to dine with the Strutts they had a right to their
pleasure. Already they had won prizes in Darton and Harvey’s pocketbook.
One of the Strutts knew James Montgomery, and there was talk, at those
gay parties, with the Moorish decorations and all the cats—for old Ben
Strutt was a bit of a character: did not communicate; would not let his
daughters eat meat, so no wonder they died of consumption—there was
talk of printing a joint volume to be called _The Associate Minstrels_,
to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The Stapletons
were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander over the old town wall
at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moonlight. Perhaps there was a little
too much poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking back in the middle of a
prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to lament many broken careers,
much unfulfilled promise. The Stapletons died young, perverted,
miserable; Jacob, with his “dark, scorn-speaking countenance”, who had
vowed that he would spend the night looking for Ann’s lost bracelet in
the street, disappeared, “and I last heard of him vegetating among the
ruins of Rome—himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills, their fate
was worst of all. To submit to public baptism was flighty, but to marry
Captain M.! Anybody could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain
M. Yet off she drove with him in his fine phaeton. For years nothing
more was heard of her. Then one night, when the Taylors had moved to
Ongar and old Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, thinking
how, as it was nine o’clock, and the moon was full, they ought,
according to their promise, to look at it and think of their absent
children, there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open
it. But who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? “Oh, don’t you
remember the Strutts and the Stapletons, and how you warned me against
Captain M.?” cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill—poor Fanny Hill,
all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used to be so sprightly. She
was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge
for her husband’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune,
ruined all her life.
Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently
through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir
writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a
wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on. One thinks
of Colchester in 1800. Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery—so they
begin; the Hills, the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and disappear as
one knew they would; but here, after long years, is Ann still
scribbling, and at last here is the poet Montgomery himself in her very
house, and she begging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just
holding him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bachelor), but
taking her for a walk, and they hear the thunder, and she thinks it the
artillery, and he says in a voice which she will never, never forget:
“Yes! The artillery of Heaven!” It is one of the attractions of the
unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their
identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one
another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving,
and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so that we can
lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance of countless
lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from life to life.
Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is young Mr. Elman
talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither arms nor legs; a
footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his
sister. Then he is in the stage coach on the road to Oxford with Newman.
Newman says nothing. Elman nevertheless reflects that he has known all
the great men of his time. And so back and so forwards, he paces
eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there
he sits in his Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and
making—it is his great consolation—string bags for missionaries. And
then? Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is
exquisitely refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend
trotting along the Strand with her father. They meet a man with very
bright eyes. “Mr. Blake,” says Mr. Frend. It is Mrs. Dyer who pours out
tea for them in Clifford’s Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room.
Mrs. Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him
so. What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently,
beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more
traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the
star dust of innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it, and
we see a wretched little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast in the
middle of the nineteenth-century. There is an unmistakable air of 1840
about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou’westers lurching and
spitting over the sloping decks, yet treating the solitary young woman
who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing, gazing, not without
kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave the deck. She will stand there
till it is quite dark, thank you! “Her great love of the sea . . . drew
this exemplary wife and mother every now and then irresistibly away from
home. No one but her husband knew where she had gone, and her children
learnt only later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly she
disappeared for a few days, she was taking short sea voyages . . .” a
crime which she expiated by months of work among the Midland poor. Then
the craving would come upon her, would be confessed in private to her
husband, and off she stole again—the mother of Sir George Newnes.
One would conclude that human beings were happy, endowed with such
blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their own activities,
were it not for those sudden and astonishing apparitions staring in at
us, all taut and pale in their determination never to be forgotten, men
who have just missed fame, men who have passionately desired
redress—men like Haydon, and Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Blanco White.
And in the whole world there is probably but one person who looks up for
a moment and tries to interpret the menacing face, the furious beckoning
fist, before, in the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces,
echoes of voices, flying coat-tails, and bonnet strings disappearing
down the shrubbery walks, one’s attention is distracted for ever. What
is that enormous wheel, for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in
the eighteenth-century? It runs faster and faster; suddenly a youth
jumps out from within; next moment it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit