Collected Essays

by Graham Greene

  On 2 February there is a break in the record, twenty-seven pages missing: but when the story begins again on 4 September Mr Hulton is still on the run. Three dozen bottles of pale ale arrived that day; Mr Hulton was obliged to pay for them, and ‘Mrs Hulton and her maid were fuddled while it lasted’. We must pass over the incident of the silversmith’s wife, who pulled off Mrs Hulton’s nightcap, and the venison-pasty man who saw through the deceit, and enclosed the pseudo-Hulton’s letter in piecrust and sent it to Mr Hulton (the crust was given to the dog Cobb as they suspected poison). A more subtle form of hoax was in train. It began with an illiterate letter to Mr Pinchbeck (son of Edward Pinchbeck, inventor of the alloy), accusing Hulton of having abused him ‘in a monstrous manner’ at a tavern, but this plot misfired; the two victims got together over a four-shilling bowl of punch.

  It was then that the Reverend Aaron Thompson, of Salisbury, came on the scene (he who had baptized the conspirator Layer’s child and allowed the Pretender to be a godparent by proxy). Somebody using his name ordered a number of articles which he said his agent Hulton would pay for – four canes with pinchbeck heads, a bust of Mr Pope, a set of The Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘the books (of which you know the titles) against Bishop Berkley’s Tar-Water’, a complete set of Brindley’s Classics, and even a chariot. This persecution caused Mr Hulton to write to Mr Thompson accusing him of being a Papist and a Jacobite and threatening him with the pillory, and the amazed Mr Thompson ‘receiving this letter kept himself three weeks in a dark room lest he should see a letter of any kind: by the persuasion of his wife, he at length came forth; but wore a thin handkerchief over his eyes for about a month’. A lot of people’s nerves were getting jumpy as the hoax enlarged its scope, taking in Bath and such worthy local characters as Mr Jeremy Peirce, author of an interesting little book about a tumour, and Mr Archibald Cleland, the surgeon who, it may be remembered, was concerned with Smollett in a controversy over the Bath waters. They all received letters from the pseudo-Hulton, Cleland being told that Thompson had libelled him and Peirce that Thompson had ordered him a set of The Rake’s Progress. The real Aaron Thompson was by now convinced that he was the victim of a mad printseller, just as Hulton believed he was the victim of a mad clergyman, and they both – egged on by their pseudoselves – appealed to a Mr Pitt of Salisbury, who assumed they both were mad. The story becomes inextricably confused with counter-accusations, the pseudo-Hulton writing to the real Aaron Thompson:

  You write, you read, you muzz or muse as you call it, till you are fitter for Bedlam than the Pulpit: poor man! poor Aaron Thompson. I remember you in Piccadilly knocking at the great Gates and returning bow for bow to the bowing Dean, your lean face, your awkward bow, your supercilious nod of the head are still in my mind . . .

  and the pseudo-Thompson would send the accusation flying back, regretting to hear that Hulton and all his family had gone mad, and recalling his strange way of walking about his shop ‘and turning his thumbs one over another, a sure sign of madness’. And all the while goods continued to pour in, particularly drink – three gallons of the best Jamaica rum from Wapping New-Stairs, which Mrs Hulton drank and paid for, a gallon of canary, a gallon of sherry, and a pint of Madeira.

  We shall never know the end – the last pages are torn out with any clue they might have contained to the hoaxer. It was an age of practical jokes, and he may have been one of those who baited Pinchbeck because he was a ‘King’s friend’, mocking at his nocturnal remembrancers and writing odes about his patent snuffer. Perhaps Hulton, by his careful prosperity, had aroused the same balked malice of men who sympathize with the defeated and despise the conqueror and dare do nothing but trivial mischief to assert their independence – as next year proved when Charles Stuart turned back from Derby.

  1939

  A JACOBITE POET

  IN 1679 the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, visited Cambridge University. She was a little over twenty, very graceful and witty and cunning. Even Burnet found it hard to speak ill of her at that time: ‘all her diversion was innocent cheerfulness, with a little mixture of satirical wit’. George Granville, a thirteen-year-old Master of Arts and already a poet, read her an address in couplets in the library of Trinity College. The couplets were more formal and sedate than the poems ‘to Myra’ which followed, for these later poems were the fruit of his eyes, and if we remember his age and the rank and beauty of the girl, it is not hard to recapture the emotion of that moment when he dedicated himself, like a troubadour, to her service:

  No warning of th’ approaching flame;

  Swiftly, like sudden death, it came,

  he wrote in a poem which I wish Miss Handasyde*6 had quoted for she has been a little less than just to her subject. Her biography is a brilliant example of by-way scholarship, comparable to Miss Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars and Miss Tomkins’s The Popular Novel in England for its grace and erudition; she writes with insight of Granville’s verse:

  The general impression made by his songs is of something sweet and sad and infinitely faint, like the tinklings of the musical boxes whose glassy roulades come slightly muffled from the dust of last century. He was old-fashioned even in his own day; for his poems, published in the cold dawn of the Age of Reason, belong by sentiment and even by date to the warm uncritical twilight of the Restoration.

  But she has, I think missed that touch of fatality which raises Lansdowne’s life to the level of tragedy; minor tragedy, for everything he touched from a play to a conspiracy was doomed to be a minor.

  Mary of Modena ruined him as she ruined many more important men. If she had not visited Cambridge that year Granville would have found a safer inspiration; he might have lived and died quite happily a minor poet and dramatist. During the reign of William he passed a pleasant exile from court, writing poetry and improving Shakespeare. He had admirers and flatterers; Pope immortalized him in Windsor Forest: “What Muse for Granville can refuse to sing?’; Dryden in beautifully-weighted verse resigned him his laurels – a gesture a little spoilt by the actor Powell’s comment (one remembers Colley Cibber’s study of ‘giddy’ Powell, how ‘he naturally lov’d to set other people wrong’): ‘this great Wit, with his Treacherous Memory, forgets, that he had given away his Laurells upon record, no less than twice before, viz., once to Mr Congreve, and another time to Mr Southerne’. But during that swift moment in Trinity Library Granville had mortaged his future. Inevitably when William died he was drawn into politics, trying to hold a balance between the brilliant and erratic Bolingbroke and cautious, trimming Harley. He married, too, unluckily, to become later, through his hopeless idealism, a complaisant husband, shutting his eyes with miserable fidelity to his wife’s affairs. With that instinct for doing the right thing, which sometimes conflicted with the still deeper instinct for being on the wrong side, he inscribed these lines on a glass in which her toast was drunk:

  If I not love you, Villiers, more

  Than ever Mortal loved before,

  With such a passion fixt and sure,

  As ev’n Possession could not cure,

  Never to cease but with my Breath;

  May then this Bumper be my Death.

  He was not unfaithful to Myra: all his loves were platonic (in spite of children).

  After Queen Anne’s death he soon became involved in the same chain of circumstances as drew the fiery Atterbury from the see of Rochester to a peevish senility in Rome. It began with secret letters, proceeded inevitably through house searchings (manuscripts of unpublished poems were burned by his servants, who mistook them for dangerous documents), imprisonment, financial ruin and exile on the Continent. Walpole’s government was hardly more corrupt than the Jacobite court. Miss Handasyde describes in detail the libels and bickerings and jealousies of Paris. It was not an air which suited the foolish idealism but unselfish fidelity of Lansdowne; he was happy for a while, raised to the dizzy height of a shadow dukedom, but the bubble eventually burst. He had heard plenty of other men falsely accused of tre
achery, and his own turn came. He was called a traitor by James’s sister-in-law, the Princess of Turenne, at the Hôtel de Bouillon, ‘where all France assembles’. He wrote a letter of pathetic literary dignity to James III, he paraphrased Shakespeare and declared: ‘God knows, sir, I have had no occasion to betray you; if I had consider’d my fortune I needed but to have forsaken you.’ The son of Mary of Modena did not reply and Lansdowne made his peace with Hanover.

  He had ten more years of life, spent much of it in literary controversy (characteristically his feud was against the dead and on behalf of the dead), revised an old play and called it (again characteristically) Once a Lover; and always a Lover. It brought, Miss Handasyde writes, ‘a pale reflection of the glitter and polish of Congreve on to the dull and respectable stage of George Lillo and Moore’. His niece was a little shocked by it; her uncle was old-fashioned. He died a fortnight after his wife, who had buzzed busily from infidelity to infidelity till the end. His life had not been a very happy one. Fortune had consistently frowned on him, fobbing him off with occasional fictitious successes, like his shadow dukedom. He had written with some wit:

  Fickle and false to others she may be,

  I can complain but of her constancy.

  1933

  CHARLES CHURCHILL

  WHEN Charles Churchill died in Boulogne in 1764, all the English ships in the harbour struck their colours. Fifty years later Byron found his grave neglected, among ‘the thick deaths of half a century’, and the gardener quite ignorant of Churchill’s fame. The very quality in his work which gave him immediate popularity (he profited nearly one thousand pounds, Mr Laver states,*7 by his two first poems) made his name short-lived. Like other minor satirists, Rochester and Oldham, he was down in the dust of the every-day battle; his satires are less often of the great than of those small tiresome provocative men as teasing as horse-flies whom history forgets. Dryden’s satires belonged from the first to history; Churchill’s to the newspapers; and his poems have the fascination of an old news-sheet still stained from the coffee-house, the charm of something evanescent which has survived against all odds.

  Here are the echoes of queer cases and queer people: Mary Tofts of Godalming who bore, according to her own account, a litter of fifteen rabbits; Betty Canning, who claimed that she had been kidnapped by a procuress; the Cock Lane Ghost, as fraudulent as either; the Chaplain of the Lock Hospital, who wrote a book in favour of polygamy; the Rev. John Browne, the dramatist who committed suicide because his doctors forbade him to go to St Petersburg to organize Russian education for the Empress; and all the horde of actors who in their beginnings were everything in the world but men of the theatre: sadler, wigmaker, tallow chandler, apothecary, old Etonian, bar-tender, silversmith, wine merchant.

  Mr Laver’s notes on these people are invaluable, but he seems uncertain in what educational strata he will find his readers. This beautiful edition can hardly be intended for an ignorant public, and its purchasers might be spared some of the notes – on Clive, David Garrick, and Sir Isaac Newton for example. Otherwise if the notes err at all, it is that they are too businesslike. With the horrid example before him of Tooke, Churchill’s former editor, Mr Laver has been afraid of digressions. Something is lost. One misses in the note on Woodward, the comic actor, this revealing touch: ‘The moment he opened his mouth on the stage, every muscle of his face ranged itself on the side of levity. The very tones of his voice inspired comic ideas, and though he often wished to act tragedy, he could never speak one serious line with propriety.’ A note like this is more valuable than the date of a birth and a death.

  The comparison of Churchill to Rochester is inevitable. Both satirists died worn out in the early thirties; both were men without moral fastidiousness, the frequenters of brothels, who, retiring at intervals to be cured from the same diseases, damned the world for the vices they did not share (one remembers Gleeson White’s remark quoted by Mr Yeats: ‘Wilde will never lift his head again, for he has against him all men of infamous life’). Both remained loyal to one friend, Rochester to Savile, Churchill to Wilkes, and to one mistress (Elizabeth Barry joins hands across the years with Elizabeth Carr). The comparison must not be drawn too closely. Churchill was a far finer satirist. Rochester’s lines were too rough and angry; he had not the coolness of temper to find, as Churchill did, the final damning epithet. These lines on Webberburn are beyond the accomplishment of uncontrolled hate:

  To mischief train’d. e’en from his mother’s womb,

  Grown old in fraud, though yet in manhood’s bloom,

  Adopting arts by which gay villains rise,

  And reach the heights which honest men despise;

  Mute at the bar, and in the senate loud,

  Dull ‘mongst the dullest, proudest of the proud,

  A pert, prim, prater of the northern race,

  Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face,

  Stood forth; and thrice he waved his lily hand,

  And thrice he twirl’d his tye, thrice stroked his band.

  There are moments when Churchill stands almost level with Dryden and Pope; it is only because his lyrical talents were so inferior to his satirical that in the final estimate he cannot be ranked with Rochester, perhaps not even with Oldham. Mr Laver picks out of Gotham, his rather tedious essay in Utopian politics, a few charming lines on flowers as formal as a Dutch parterre. They are hardly enough to justify even Mr Laver’s modest claim that ‘in his rural retreat he had time to look about him, the sights and sounds of the country steal imperceptibly into his verse’. He was urban through and through. If he had not given all his genius to satire, he might possibly have made a reputation as a lyric poet, but he would have belonged to the school of Prior. The lines which conclude the first book of The Ghost (a poem Mr Laver rather underestimates) have all Prior’s prettiness, saved by all his sophistication:

  Give us an entertaining sprite,

  Gentle, familiar, and polite,

  One who appears in such a form

  As might an holy hermit warm,

  Or who on former schemes refines,

  And only talks by sounds and signs,

  Who will not to the eye appear,

  But pays her visits to the ear,

  And knocks so gently, ‘twould not fright

  A lady in the darkest night

  Such is our Fanny, whose good will,

  Which cannot in the grave lie still,

  Brings her on earth to entertain

  Her friends and lovers in Cock Lane.

  1933

  THE LOVER OF LEEDS

  RALPH THORESBY, the topographer of Leeds, traced – rather dubiously – his family back to the reign of Canute; and certainly he could not have picked a better origin for a topographer than the reign of a king who tried to turn back the tide. That is the hopeless task on which they are all engaged, beating time back from a gravestone, a piece of pottery, a grassy mound. One finds them on their knees in little country churches rubbing brasses: they push ungainly bicycles up steep country lanes towards a Roman vallum: they publish at their own expense the churchwardens’ accounts of Little Bilbury. Vestry books and Enclosure Acts ruin their eyesight. It is one of the most innocent – and altruistic – of human activities, for a topographer never becomes a rich man through his researches: no Kidd’s treasure has ever been discovered under a hawk-stone, at best a piece of Roman piping; and fame in their lifetime is severely limited to men of their own kind and after death to historians’ footnotes, unless like Aubrey or Anthony à Wood some eccentricity, some untopographical malice, catches the attention of posterity. Often they are clergymen – they have so much to do with churches, sometimes they are civil engineers (the profession somehow goes with the bicycle), and sometimes, as in the case of Thoresby, merchants.

  Thoresby, the unsuccessful cloth merchant, will never be a popular figure like Aubrey and Wood, although he kept a diary – the town he chose is perhaps against him, for who today will trouble to hunt through the streets o
f that black city for the sites of his mills and bridges? But none the less in honesty, disinterestedness, piety, and precision he may be taken as the pattern of a topographer. I don’t know what the dictionary distinction may be between a topographer and an antiquarian, but I think of an antiquarian as a man who dwells permanently among the hawk-stones and vallums, never coming nearer to his own day than a wapentake, one with little interest in human beings – in So-and-So who must pay to the Church use ‘at Wytsentyd next a stryk of mawllte’ and somebody else who was a ‘defrauder’ and owes 2d. The topographer takes a small familiar patch of ground and repopulates it: he experiments with time as much as Mr Dunne, so that it is not Leeds – or your own country parish – as you know it that he presents, so much as a timeless God’s-eye Leeds with all the houses that ever stood there re-erected, interpenetrating. Is the result something nearer Leeds than a guide book, a collection of photographs, a map? One doesn’t know, but certainly men like Thoresby, and earlier men like Plot and Aubrey, thought so, and even if we do not share their religious belief (I have yet to come across an atheistic topographer), their work attracts by its very inutility. Out of wars and the decay of civilizations the historian may spin theories which whether true or not can affect human lives, but this – this is beautifully useless, this precise painstaking record of superseded stone.