The Common Reader
rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with one
thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should
have done, the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well
might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs rather grimly from a
distance, counsel him to contrive it so that “ye may have less to do in
the world; your father said. In little business lieth much rest. This
world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart
therefrom, right nought bear with us but our good deeds and ill.”
The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf,
cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell
fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see
that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his soul might escape the
agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the
monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for ever”. The
soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering,
and the fire that destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal
grates. For ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich, and for
ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of Norwich. There was something
matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception both of life
and of death.
With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course
were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They
must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A mother would
clout her daughter’s head three times a week and break the skin if she
did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth
and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a
softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving
the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would not suffer their
sisters to marry beneath them, and “sell candle and mustard in
Framlingham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers,
fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and
custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their efforts to
keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash acts
on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his
father denounced him. He was a “drone among bees”, the father burst out,
“which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth
naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated his parents with
insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.
But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of
John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to
Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing
torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges were said.
Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread,
and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two
panes were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the
torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set burning on the
grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his father’s
tombstone.
He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The
discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran
away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on
the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had
inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with
so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of
acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed
something of his father’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious
temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to women, liked
society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes,
even, reading books. And so life, now that John Paston was buried,
started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There could be little
outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered
the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the lives of the
elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their
tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the
right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the
Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and
Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full of poor
people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her
son as she had worked for her husband, with this significant change
only, that now, instead of confiding in her husband, she took the advice
of her priest.
But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer
shell had served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and
pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his
brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the business on hand to
crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly
and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the
mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too
glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And I shall always be your herald
both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I come home, which I
hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a hawk was to be
bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk,
prosecuting his suit, flying his hawks, and attending with considerable
energy and not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston
estates.
The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s grave. But still
Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with
the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the
disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money
spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John himself,
and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery
falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at
Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life was a little more
various in its pleasures. They were not quite so sure as the elder
generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret
Paston scented the change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had
marched so stiffly through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her
troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to
defend Caister with her own hands if need be, “though I cannot well
guide nor rule soldiers”, but there was something wrong with the family
since the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in
his service to God; he had been too proud or too lavish in his
expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the poor.
Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as
much money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay
their debts without selling land, wood, or household stuff (“It is a
death to me to think if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them
in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone.
The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and
more tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such
stuff. There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of
Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt,
comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting
their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their
own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.
For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops
or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight,
reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind
lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading
Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it
that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing.
A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like
dashes of rain on the window pane. There was no reason in it as there
had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and
acquire an important position for children who were not born, or if
born, had no right to bear their father’s name. But Lydgate’s poems or
Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew,
but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from
London or piecing out from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of
love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before
him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some
description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it,
or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure
of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the
end of the story.
To learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do
that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the
rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as
it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount
them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of
greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers
like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious
story-tellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the
story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his
story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow
it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us
time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.
Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and
in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never
come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country.
His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for
the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs
peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the
hillside. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature,
how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do
not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her
cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than
the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and
London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral
excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a
retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and
moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact,
in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic
devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds
of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country
was no mere jeweller’s shop, or museum of curious objects to be
described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since
the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace
the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to