The verses fascinated my mind with their serpentine mazes of sound, and the argument bit in deep. I asked my brother James to give me his true opinion of the poem, but to weigh it well first, for I thought the verses extraordinary good and would not be pleased with a contrary judgment.
James answered judiciously, when he had read it, that this was an extraordinary poem indeed, and presented two notable paradoxes. The first, that it appeared a compost or mosaic of many other poems that he had read, set in a frame borrowed from the Comus of Henri du Puy—a Latin poem which had been published in Oxford a few years since and a part of which, James said, he had been instructed to turn into Greek hexameter verses as a college exercise. Yet, said he, none could deny that this new Comus outwent them all for smoothness and beauty, or that the poet was a discoverer of new things by means of the old. The second paradox was that, after the arguments pro and contra upon the true worth of chastity had been bandied between the Lady and Comus, Comus was defeated, yet that this defeat was only by the sword, not by force of reason; moreover, the lines that had the greater compulsion in them and which would linger longest in his memory were those that the Sorcerer spoke against the ungrateful folly of abstinence, and against the puritanical manner of living “like Nature’s bastards, not her sons.”
James also said: “The man who wrote this, though I dare call him a very skilful poet, yet seems uncomfortable in the imaginations of his heart and unhappy in the acuteness of his mind. One thing I will wager: he is not a nurseling of our own University. This smacks to me of Cambridge, where they tune their viol strings always a little sharp. It is a poem to admire rather than to love; and here is another paradox, for how can any man truly admire what he does not love? Almost, I prefer the silly, homely verses of Taylor the Water-poet to these: for with Sculler Taylor there is nothing hid, but all bubblingly well expressed, though the matter be trifling. Nay, I mean not that, for there is no comparison between poet and rhymester. Indeed, I know not well what I mean. ’Tis the case with me: Non amo te, Licini, nec possum dicere quare—I do not love thee, Liciny, but cannot tell the reason why.”
James could not let the argument rest there, but came back to it often in his discourse and carried it further. “Dear heart, this fellow Tiresias troubles me much. You say that in the garden at Enstone he spoke of pluming his wings. This word ‘pluming’ might be understood in two senses: either as smoothing and dressing his wing-feathers, or as furnishing his naked wings with borrowed plumage. For he has plucked out the feathers from other poets’ wings to make of himself a great immortal Phœnix; yet has gone about it so cunningly and with such admirable judgment that these plumes glow with richer colour upon his wings and tail, as he preens them, than in their former places. Or, I might say, he has stolen the laborious honey from the hives of his fellow poets, to spread it thick upon his own white roll, and now says to them scornfully: ‘Sic vos non vobis mellificatis, apes’—‘Thus, bees, you gather honey, yet not for your own maws.’ And I think that I can read his secret: he is more passionately set on literate fame than in love with poetry itself. Yet, by God, I have no flaw to find in a single line, search as I may. There’s a turbulent devil in him, which devil shows his cloven foot, as I say, in the speeches of the wizard Comus.”
I would not agree with James, and held it fitting that the pro and contra of chastity should be exactly counterpoised, and that only the sword, or compulsion, should decide the cause in Virtue’s favour. If it were not for the Law’s compulsion, what woman born would not follow the inclination of her heart and prostitute herself to the first handsome young man for whom she took a liking? I said, also, that what he said about the University of Cambridge snowed the spiteful bias of his judgment. And I pressed him for instances that would prove this poet a plagiary or copyist; some dozen of which he then gave me, but in every case the resemblances between the old and the new seemed slight and accidental. James, though he was a patient and affectionate brother, almost lost his patience with me in the end and cried out: “O Child, Child, cannot you see, cannot you hear? It is not the single words or phrases so much as the cadence or very soul of the verse that he has borrowed: here from William Browne’s Pastorals, and there from John Fletcher’s Shepherdess, and there from George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, and here again….”
“I neither see it,” I said, “nor hear it. This Masque is a lovely poem. Then, as for literate fame, how can a poet not desire it? Fame assures him readers and patrons; without readers and patrons a poet is undone, his poems are locked up in the prison of his cupboard drawer and serve no purpose.”
“The more that a poet regards Fame, so much the less will he regard Truth,” said James.
To this I objected: “I had not thought that it was for poets to speak truth, which is rather left to the divines and philosophers to expound.”
He answered: “Sister, you are fallen into a vulgar error. Poetry without truth is mere honey-cake and sugar-works.”
“I am a glutton for both,” I confessed.
“Then it will be your ruin,” said he, a little too soberly for my liking. He begged me not to be offended, but asked me whether it were not true what Zara had said, that I had conceived a sort of love for the author of this masque. I answered him, that he could think what he pleased, yet I could not help but be mightily offended by his question. He begged my pardon, which I grudgingly granted. Yet I thought it perhaps a useful thing for my purpose that the hounds were running on a false scent. Let them bay after my supposed love for this Cambridge scholar and poet; I would be secretly happy in my love for an Oxford dunce and soldier.
Then the East wind abated, and a mild wind blew from the South, and soon the little lambs in the fields were grown half as big as the ewes; and though the Earl of Strafford was convicted of treason and beheaded, yet the King, who had undertaken that not an hair of his head should be touched, let him die, for fear of worse things; and the country breathed again, because the threat of war had passed. The Parliament pressed on with its legislation, wresting from the King a great part of his powers, though leaving him the name and honours of sovereignty, and none expected that where he had once yielded—very basely, as many considered—he would dare to stand again. The Scots were still kept under arms in the North, as a caution to him that he must mind well what he said and did.
We had good crops that summer, of hay, wheat and barley, though other farmers were not so well advantaged, whose lands were fried up by the unusual fierce sun. Nothing remarkable happened in our house or village except that upon a complaint of two householders to Bishop Skinner (who succeeded Dr. Bancroft, recently dead) the curate was examined by my father in private; who judged his familiarity with Molly Wilmot to have become scandalous, though there might be no adultery proved against him. My father liked the Rev. John Fulker well, who was a good-hearted man, though a loose liver; and did not bring him before the Ecclesiastical Court, but sent him off quietly and I do not know what has become of him. My father was careful in his choice of a successor, and therefore consulted with my Uncle Jones and asked him to recommend a priest fit for the times: that is to say, one who would be content to obey Parliament, yet without railing indecently at the bishops.
Thus the Rev. Luke Proctor came to us, who was a tall, grave, budge man, with a leaning towards the Presbyterial discipline, and no fondness for Whitsun-ales and leet-ales and clerk-ales and our other regular holidays. He did not rail against bishops, but neither did he magnify the bounty of God; preaching instead of the terrors that lay in store for the whole land, unless we repented. Once at evensong, when the sun set as he was preaching to us, he said: “My brethren, I doubt not but that you see this broad red glow as a jolly sunset, and as ‘the shepherd’s delight’; but to me it shines as the distant glow of that Hell which is prepared for the ungodly, the hard-hearted, the scoffers, the liars, the adulterers and the fornicators.”
Whereat John Mathadee’s young child, in a seat behind us, set up a wail, and the curate pointed at hi
m and said: “Yea, wail, child, you do well to wail! For in that day shall women rejoice who are barren, because of the curse that has come upon their sisters whose wombs were fruitful.” By this he offended my mother, who led all her younger children out of the church; and so did Goodwife Mathadee.
The poet whom the Reverend Proctor loved best and from whose facile, flat verse he quoted oftenest, as “very apples of gold with pictures of silver,” was Mr. George Wither, a Puritan—he to whom old Ben Jonson had denied the title of poet, naming him “a mountebank of wit and scorn of all the Muses,” because he wrote merely to suit the capacity of the rabble. Mr. Wither (who has since become a high officer in General Cromwell’s army) had prophesied to England after this manner, which sounded lovely in our curate’s ears:
Upon thy fleets, thine havens, and thy ports,
Upon thine armies and thy strong-walled forts,
Upon thy pleasures and commodities,
Upon thine handicrafts and merchandize,
Upon the fruits and cattle in thy fields,
On what the air, the earth, or water yields,
On Prince and People, on both weak and strong,
On priest and prophet, on both old and young,
YEA, ON EACH PERSON, PLACE AND EVERYTHING
His just, deservèd judgments God will bring.
“Yea, Amen, Amen, Amen and even so,” cried our curate—“unless ye repent!”
When at Michaelmas, by order of Parliament, my father was obliged to blot out or break all deceitful idols that were to be found in the Church, whether images, pictures or painted glass, this curate was ready enough to comply and was for breaking the glass with a stick; but my father would not have it, because, as he said, by such awkwardness some child might run a splinter into his foot or hand. He conveyed the glass away himself that night, and gave out that he had thrown it into a pit in the woods, together with the dark old pictures painted on boards, and the little decayed statue of St. Nicholas holding a child on either arm, and the ancient pulpit-cloth of purple velvet handsomely broidered with plumed angels, and the ancient cope broidered with six-winged seraphim and other devices. However, I believe that he hid them somewhere in the cellar of our house, in the hope that one day a milder Parliament would reverse this harsh and foolish judgment. The people grieved heartily when these ancient ornaments were ordered to be removed, and when they saw how the curate himself with a spud, or scurvy knife, had scraped from the plastered wall of the chancel the pictures that we had known and loved from childhood: of Saint Nicholas, who wore a tall mitre, distributing cakes and apples to little children, and of St. Nicholas dealing the heretic Arius a great whirret on the ear with his fist. They muttered that good luck had left the town for ever; but they could do nothing, for it was too late and Parliament not to be gainsaid. Then the Church officers came to view the Church and presently certified that the thing was done according to order and all relics of superstition removed.
The Reverend Proctor always climbed up into the pulpit holding a long roll of paper in his fist, the other end resting upon his right shoulder, as it might be an axe. He gave out his text in a resolute voice, twice over, sawing it off like a log from the massy trunk of Scripture and, after he had glowered awhile at the pews and benches, addressed himself to the task of splitting it with his axe. Sometimes the wood proved soft or of a straight grain, so that with one or two little taps he would soon reduce it to billet-wood; but sometimes it was knotted and twisted and he must scheme and writhe and struggle and sweat, using a beetle and twenty wedges to rive it apart into consumable pieces.
I remember how once he told us: “My brethren, here is a fine sweet discovery, that I have found in the three-and-twentieth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, the eight-and-twentieth verse: Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves. See now how easily these eight words may be divided: our text falls apart, it falls apart, I say, as easily as a Valencia orange, into eight several divisions, or little pigs as the children call ’em.
Weep not.
But weep.
Weep not, but weep.
Weep for me.
For yourselves.
For me, for yourselves.
Weep not for me.
But weep for yourselves.
These eight headings are like the points upon the mariner’s compass, the four cardinal points and the four intermediate points. Now to begin from Due North, that is to say from ‘Weep not.’ Here the Lord plainly commands us not to weep. Who are we to gainsay or disobey Him? Yet may we humbly inquire whether His injunction is conveyed to our inward spiritual eye or to our outward carnal eye, or whether to both? My brethren, when I come to North by East I shall have somewhat to tell you upon this score. But in the meantime, listen how the Lord commands you to weep not, to restrain the fountains of grief (if only for an instant of time) that, weeping not, as children startled in the midst of their grief, ye may the better give ear to His words of terror and judgment….” And so he would continue, splitting his fine ash log into slivers which he gathered up at the end, winding them together with a cord and heaving them upon his shoulder. The people called him Woodman Luke.
He had that horrible habit, when he prayed, of rolling his eyes inward so that the pupils vanished, which is called “hoisting the white”; and he pronounced words strangely in the new Presbyterial manner, with “Aymen” for “Amen” and “glaurious” for “glorious” and “the Laud’s murcy” for “the Lord’s mercy”. He always preached with an hour-glass on the pulpit ledge beside him until all the sand was through. One day, being the feast of All Hallows, he would have turned the glass about again and preached a second hour, but my father cried out from his seat: “Sir, I smell a stink of burning. I pray you, excuse me!” All the congregation ran out after him in fear, leaving the preacher in the pulpit, preaching still.
Then Goodman Mathadee asked my father: “Your Worship, did you indeed smell burning?”
“Ay, neighbour,” said my father. “I smelt the little veal pasties burning in the oven of our bakehouse. Ten minutes more of the sermon and they would have been cinders.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Strange Tale of Sympathy
About this same time, the Scottish and English armies being again disbanded, Mun, who had been a captain of the garrison at York, went home to his father’s house at Claydon; and late in the afternoon on the second day of November, he rode over in the company of our neighbour Sir Thomas Gardiner the Younger. Sir Thomas came upon some business which concerned lands, lying near to ours at Wheatley, which had been bought by his father, the Recorder of London; as also to desire our good wishes upon his betrothal to Mun’s little sister Cary. I expected that it would again be otherwise between Mun and me than at our former meeting, for between-whiles I was grown into a woman, being equal in age with Cary, who was already counted marriageable; besides, I had greatly improved my person and manners and address, and sharpened my wit. Yet how marvellously far otherwise our meeting would be, I could never have imagined.
We sat down that day to a good supper, fifteen or sixteen of us at one board, with two green-geese-pies before us and three excellent hare-pies (prepared with butter that had been clarified, and strong red claret sauce, and onions quartered and thick lardons of lard) and, besides, for those who were of good appetite, a well-dressed Spanish salad of cold roasted turkey, sliced thin, with lettuce, rocket and tender ciboules.
The discourse turned upon some experiments of our friend Sir Kenelm Digby, in the matter of curing of wounds by sympathy. Sir Kenelm held that if a powder of his own invention, which was compounded of Roman vitriol and other elements, were applied, not to the wound itself—being too igneous—but to a handkerchief or garment dipped in the blood of the wound, or to the weapon that had caused it, then the wound would presently heal by sympathy, though the man were thirty miles distant. Sir Thomas Gardiner drolled jocularly at the notion, but Mun, who had become learned enough from his reading in Utrecht University, asked why such a
cure should be held impossible? Pliny the Roman philosopher, said he, had used this word “sympathy” to stand for the fellow-feeling or amity that is natural not only between the body and the soul (so that, if one suffers above the ordinary, the other will suffer likewise), but between inanimate things, for example between the magnet and iron, or between amber when it is rubbed and wood ash.
James then said his say, how that there can be sympathy also between animate and inanimate things, as between crabs and the moon; which point was much debated by Sir Thomas and my father.
Mun was thereby encouraged, though shy of airing his knowledge in company, to touch upon a sort of echo called a bombus. I found a world of difference between his hesitant, modest explication of the nature of echoes and the stern lecture upon the same subject that I had once heard from the lips of Mr. Tiresias at Woodstock Town End. Mun’s theme was of the perception that resides in otherwise senseless and inanimate bodies; thus, some seats in churches and chapels are thrillingly affected with certain notes of the organ and some by others; there are arches (as that in the gate-house of Brazen Nose College) which answer to particular notes—this echo is called a “bombus.” He also spoke of the blue turquoise that turns pale if the wearer fall sick, and of the pearl that loses its lustre if the woman grow melancholic who wears it.
Here my mother who, in common with all the Moultons, cared not a fico what she said, nor in what company, cried: “Why, damn my soul, Captain Verney, the power of sympathy is known to every housewife. How does she protect her poultry against the fox, but by giving ’em the lungs or lights of a fox to eat? For thus they cry cousins with the fox, who sympathizes with them and will not eat them, be he never so hungry. And if a naughty serving-man dare to let down his breeches outside the kitchen door, as unwilling to run out to the house of easement, because of the dark or the rain, why then in the morning—if none confess the fault—we touch the nuisance with a red-hot spit and, by God, you would laugh to see with what a sudden shriek the guilty man claps his hand behind him!”
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