The Common Reader
gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us,
because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or
observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens,
millers, old peasant women, flowers—there is a special stimulus in
seeing all these common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry
affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see them out of
doors. There is a pungency in this unfigurative language; a stately and
memorable beauty in the undraped sentences which follow each other like
women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their bodies as they
go—
And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.
And then, as the procession takes its way, tranquilly, beautifully, out
from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, grinning, malicious, in league
with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to mock the pomp and ceremonies of
life—witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad
bottom of English humour.
So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind
blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father’s tombstone unmade.
But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of those
ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one age merges in
another and are not able to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for
buying books cheap; next he was off to France and told his mother, “My
mind is now not most upon books”. In his own house, where his mother
Margaret was perpetually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys
the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was always reason on her
side; she was a brave woman, for whose sake one must put up with the
priest’s insolence and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke
into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou proud Squire” were
bandied angrily about the room. All this, with the discomforts of life
and the weakness of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter
places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after
year, the making of his father’s tombstone.
Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare ground. The
Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave cloth was in tatters, and he
had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud woman like
Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the Pastons’ lack of
piety, and other families she heard, of no greater standing than theirs,
spent money in pious restoration in the very church where her husband
lay unremembered. At last, turning from tournaments and Chaucer and
Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold
which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and might now be sold
to defray the expenses of his tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she
had hoarded it and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair.
She grudged it; but there was no help for it. She sent it him, still
distrusting his intentions or his power to put them into effect. “If you
sell it to any other use,” she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust
you while I live.”
But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in the
course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk
in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of
the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in dirty lodgings,
alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to the end for money,
Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural
daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb
was still unmade.
The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up this
frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all collections
of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the
fortunes of individuals. The family will go on whether Sir John lives or
dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often
dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds
itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day
shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes. It is early morning and
strange men have been whispering among the women as they milk. It is
evening, and there in the churchyard Warne’s wife bursts out against old
Agnes Paston: “All the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is
the autumn in Norfolk and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for
clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that
winter and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your
gift.” There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.
But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the
pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of
endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters since.
Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part, does
Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse. “Men cut
large thongs here out of other men’s leather. . . . We beat the bushes
and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . . which is to my
heart a very spear.” That is her eloquence and that her anguish. Her
sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to their will. They jest
rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like
a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two
directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must
have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far
better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious
solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips
of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short it is easy
to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not _Lear_ or _Romeo
and Juliet_, but the _Canterbury Tales_.
Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his turn.
The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the same as
before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness; of
unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the
draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping
straight over land unmitigated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle
covering with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain-faced
Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth, treading out the roads of
Norfolk, and persisting with an obstinate courage which does them
infinite credit in furnishing the bareness of England.
[Footnote 1: _The Paston Letters_, edited by Dr. James
Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.]
_On Not Knowing Greek_
For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our
ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since
we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to
laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and
ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a
tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that
we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn
back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of
Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight
resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?
It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal
literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from
Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European
chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are
floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives, and
later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a
figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters,
its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal
catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has
been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides
was eaten by dogs; Æschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a
cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that
is all.
But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up any play
by Sophocles, read—
Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of
Agamemnon,
and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes
some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it
imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea.
Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of
England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in
this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the
elements of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here the Manor
house, the farm and the cottages; the church for worship, the club for
meeting, the cricket field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into
its main elements. Each man and woman has his work; each works for the
health or happiness of others. And here, in this little community,
characters become part of the common stock; the eccentricities of the
clergyman are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper; the
blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the loves and matings of the
boys and girls. Here life has cut the same grooves for centuries;
customs have arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops and
solitary trees, and the village has its history, its festivals, and its
rivalries.
It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles
here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists.
We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of
stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and
sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is
instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known
to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street,
not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble;
inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue
peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the
slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy
of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.
That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the
lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the
most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses
in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door bandying words like
village women, with a tendency, as one might expect, to rejoice in
language, to split phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory.
The humour of the people was not good natured like that of our postmen
and cabdrivers. The taunts of men lounging at the street corners had
something cruel in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek
tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality: Is not Pentheus,
for example, that highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the
_Bacchæ_ before he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and
Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows
crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking
to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant
southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The
poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be
read for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic,
familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an