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Title: Judgments in Vacation
Author: Parry, Edward Abbott, Sir
Language: English
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JUDGMENTS IN VACATION
JUDGMENTS IN
VACATION
BY
HIS HONOUR JUDGE
EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY
_Author of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” “Life of Macklin,”
“The Scarlet Herring,” “Katawampus: Its Treatment and Cure,”
“Butterscotia,” etc._
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
MANCHESTER: SHERRATT & HUGHES, 34 CROSS STREET
1911
[All rights reserved]
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD ALVERSTONE
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND
THIS VOLUME IS
BY KIND PERMISSION
DEDICATED IN AFFECTION AND RESPECT
BY
THE AUTHOR
CONTENTS.
PAGE
‘The Box Office’ 1
The Disadvantages of Education 21
Cookery Book Talk 45
A Day of my Life in the County Court 52
Dorothy Osborne 75
The Debtor of To-day 103
The Folk-Lore of the County Court 114
Concerning Daughters 129
The Future of the County Court 137
The Prevalence of Podsnap 158
An Elizabethan Recorder 165
The Funniest Thing I ever saw 190
The Playwright 196
Advice to Young Advocates 212
The Insolvent Poor 220
Why be an Author? 236
Which Way is the Tide? 265
Kissing the Book 273
A Welsh Rector of the Last Century 290
PREFACE.
To a sane world one must offer some few words of excuse for writing
judgments in vacation. One has heard of the emancipated slave who
invested his savings in purchasing a share in another slave and of the
historical bus-driver who made use of his annual holiday to drive a bus
for a sick friend. And so it is with smaller men. One gets so used to
giving judgments upon matters, the essence and properties of which one
really knows very little about, that the habit remains after the sittings
are over into the vacation. And on that rainy day, when golf and the more
important pursuits of life are impossible, one finds oneself alone with
pen, ink and paper, and thoughts that voluntarily move towards written
judgments. And there is this excuse, that a Judge of a County Court can
offer which would not be possible to his ermined brother—or should it be
cousin, a poor relation had best be careful in claiming relationship—of
the High Court. If we have any lurking desire to write our judgments,
we shall not find leisure or opportunity to write them in term time.
There is such a vast number of cases to try that judgments must be given
forthwith, relying on authority perhaps rather than accuracy for the
kindly manner of their reception. Well do I remember a great Judge giving
a parting word of advice to a friend of mine on the Northern Circuit who
preceded me to the County Court Bench: “Better be strong and wrong than
weak and right.” The wisdom of the world is on the side of this epigram,
and demands that all judgments of real importance should be given
forthwith and spoken rather than written. Thus that most influential
arbitrator in the larger affairs of Englishmen, the umpire in the cricket
field, is never allowed to write his judgments.
It must be a pleasant thing to listen for many days to the learned
arguments of the ablest minds at the bar, noting down here and there
an added thought of your own which is to find a place in the ultimate
judgment which some days hence you will write at leisure in your study
surrounded by the reports and text books necessary to give weight to
your written word. A poor Judge of the County Court can have no such
refinement of pleasure. Does Bill’s cat trespass in Thomas’s pigeon
loft, at Lambeth or Salford?—the twenty-five shilling claim is argued
in unison, certainly without harmony, until a skilful adjudication is
planted right between the disputants in a breathless pause in their
contest, and they are whirled out of Court speechless and astonished at
the result to revive the wordy argument in the street or to join their
voices in maledictions of the law and all her servants. How far otherwise
in the High Court? Should some millionaire’s malkin, some prize Angora
of Park Lane, slay the champion homer of a pigeon-flying Marquis—what a
summoning to the fray of Astburys and Carsons. How thoughtfully through
the long days of the hearing would learned counsel “watch” on behalf of
the London County Council. What ancient law concerning pigeons and cats
would be disentombed by hard-working juniors and submissively quoted
to the Bench by their leaders as matter “which I am sure your Lordship
remembers.” And then how interesting to write down the final just word of
the Law of England on cats and pigeons, and to read it amid a reverent
hush of learned approval, and finally to bring down the curtain on the
comedy, justifying the hours and treasure that had been expended to
obtain the judgment you had written, with some such tag of learning as:
“Deliberare utilia mora utilissima est.”
I am by no means suggesting that these delays of the law would be useful
in inferior Courts, or that Judges of the County Court have the wit and
ability to write judgments in term time of value to the world. Inferior
as they necessarily are in equipment of learning and worldly emolument
to the Judges of the High Court, they can only take a humble pleasure in
believing that they administer justice at least as indifferently.
But if you are driven to writing judgments in vacation, there is this to
be said for it, that you can choose your own subject upon which you will
deliver your words of wisdom, you are not forced to listen to arguments
pro and con before retiring to the study with the text books, and you are
bound by no precedents governing your thoughts and driving your ideas
along some mistaken lane that you know in your own heart leads to No
Man’s Land. Nor are you tied down to the narrow, courtly and somewhat
pompous language in which it is the custom of the judiciary to publish
their wisdom.
There is this further to be said about judgments written in vacation. No
one is bound to listen to them, no shorthand writer has to strain his
ear to take them down, no editor of the Law Reports has to disobey his
conscience to include them in the authorised version of the law; and,
best of all, no Court of Appeal can either reverse them or lessen their
authority by approving them. Indeed, it is only in one attribute that
judgments in vacation seem to me scarcely as satisfactory as judgments
delivered in term time. With the latter costs follow the event.
Many of these papers have appeared in print before. The oldest of them,
Dorothy Osborne, appeared in the _English Illustrated Magazine_ as long
ago as April 1886, and I have reprinted it in the belief that many of
Dorothy’s servants may like to read the little essay that led to my
receiving from Mrs. Longe her copies of the original letters and her
notes upon them, whereby the full edition was at length published. The
quotations in it were taken from Courtenay’s extracts in his “Life of
Temple.” In reprinting the article here I have only amended actual errors
and misprints. In the paper on “An Elizabethan Recorder” the spelling has
been modernized. In reproducing the article on “The Insolvent Poor” which
was published originally in the _Fortnightly Review_ in May 1898, it has
not been thought necessary to modernize all the instances and figures
that were then used. Unhappily the situation of the Insolvent Poor is no
better to-day than it was in 1898, and the argument of that day remains
unaffected by any reform. “Kissing the Book” was published before the
recent alteration in the law, but even now the custom is not extinct, and
the folk-lore of it may still be entertaining. I have to thank Messrs.
Macmillan for leave to reprint the paper on “Dorothy Osborne,” and my
thanks are also due to the proprietors of the _Fortnightly Review_, _The
Cornhill_, _The Manchester Guardian_, _The Contemporary Review_, _The
Pall Mall Magazine_, and _The Rapid Review_, for their leave to reprint
other papers.
EDWARD A. PARRY.
‘THE BOX OFFICE.’
Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please must please to live.
—_Samuel Johnson._
I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some
former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled
‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was
printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury
Square.
But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern
title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I
discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of
serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as
ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and
then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the
great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely
unappreciated and misunderstood.
Speaking of the actor and his profession, I pointed out that the only
real test of merit in an actor was the judgment of the Box Office, and
that therefore an actor is bound to play to a Box Office and succeed with
a Box Office if he wants to continue to be an actor.
The suggestion was received with contempt and derision. No artist, I
was told, no man of any character would deign to think of so low a
thing as the Box Office. All the great men of the world were men who
had had a contempt for the Box Office, and the Box Office is, and must
in its nature be, a lowering and degrading influence. This opinion
seemed so widely held that I decided to hold an inquest upon my original
suggestion, and the result of this, I need hardly say, was not only to
confirm me in the view that I was entirely right, but to convince me that
my neighbours were sunk in the slough of a dangerous heresy, in which it
was my duty to preach at them whilst they slowly disappeared in the ooze
of their unpardonable error.
There is something essentially English in the very name of the
institution—the Box Office. About the only thing an average Box Office
cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor
knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane
manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to
the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the
critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box
Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the
_vox populi_, which is far nearer the _vox Dei_ than the voice of the
expert witness.
Before discoursing of the Box Office in its widest sense, let us return
for a moment to the case of the actor. Here the Box Office must, in
the nature of things, decide his fate. It is the polling booth of the
playgoer, and it is the playgoer and not the critic who decides whether
an actor is great or otherwise. Why do we call Garrick a great actor?
Because the Box Office of his time acclaimed him one. Davies tells us
how his first performance of Richard III. was received with loud and
reiterated applause. How his ‘look and actions when he pronounced the
words,
Off with his head: so much for Buckingham,
were so significant and important from his visible enjoyment of the
incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the triumph
of the actor and satisfaction of the audience.’ A modern purist would
have walked out of the playhouse when his ear was insulted by Cibber’s
tag; but from a theatre point of view it is a good tag, and I have always
thought it a pity that Shakespeare forgot to set it down himself, and
left to Cibber the burden of finishing the line. The tag is certainly
deserving of this recognition that it was the line with which Garrick
first captured the Box Office, and it is interesting that the best
Richard III. of my generation, Barry Sullivan, always used Cibber’s
version, for the joy, as I take it, of bringing down the house with ‘so
much for Buckingham.’ Shakespeare was so fond of improving other folk’s
work himself, and was such a keen business man, that he would certainly
have adopted as his own any line capable of such good Box Office results.
Throughout Garrick’s career he was not without critics, and envious ones
at that; but no one to-day doubts that the verdict of the Box Office
was a right one, and it is an article of universal belief that Garrick
was a great actor. Of course one does not contend that the sudden
assault and capture of the Box Office by a young actor in one part is
conclusive evidence of merit. As the envious Quin said: ‘Garrick is a
new religion; Whitfield was followed for a time, but they would all come
to church again.’ Cibber, too, shook his head at the young gentleman,
but was overcome by that dear old lady, Mrs. Bracegirdle, who had left
the stage thirty years before Garrick arrived. ‘Come, come, Cibber,’ she
said, ‘tell me if there is not something like envy in your character of
this young gentleman. _The actor who pleases everybody must be a man of
merit._’ The old man felt the force of this sensible rebuke; he took a
pinch of snuff and frankly replied, ‘Why faith, Bracey, I believe you are
right, the young fellow is clever.’
In these anecdotes you have the critic mind annoyed by the Box Office
success of the actor, and the sane simple woman of the world laying down
the maxim ‘the actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ And
when one considers it, must it not necessarily be so? An actor can only
appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him
and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he
plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office
success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at
all?
So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in
setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor,
my position was indisputable. Of course, there were, and are, Box Offices
and Box Offices. Cibber, Quin, Macklin, and Garrick appealed to different
audiences from Foote. An actor to-day has a hundred different Box Offices
to appeal to, but the point and the only point is, does he succeed with
the Box Office he attacks? Moreover, the more Box Offices he succeeds
with and the greater the public he can amuse, the better actor he is.
Garrick knew this when, in the spirit of a great artist, he said: ‘If you
won’t come to Lear and Hamlet I must give you Harlequin,’ and did it with
splendid success.
How was it, then, when the thing seemed so clear to my mind, there should
be so many to dispute this Box Office test? The more one studied the
attitude of these unbelievers, the more certain it seemed that their
unbelief arose in a great measure as Cibber’s and Quin’s had arisen,
namely, from a certain spirit of natural envy. It is obvious that not
every one of us can achieve a great Box Office success, and that many
men who live laborious lives, without much prosperity of any kind, not
unnaturally dislike the success that an actor appears to attain so
easily. But the suggestion that Box Office success is or can be largely
attained by unworthy means is, it seems to me, a curious delusion of
the envious, insulting to the generation of which we are individuals,
inasmuch as it suggests that we are easily deceived and deluded, and
exhibiting unpleasantly that modern pessimism that spells—or should we
more accurately say smells?—degeneration. Garrick’s career is an eloquent
example of the fact that a great Box Office success can only be attained
by great attributes used with consummate power, and that pettiness and
meanness, chicanery and bombast are not the methods approved of by the
patrons of the Box Office.
Of course it will be said by the envious ‘This man is a great success
to-day, wait and see what the next generation think of him.’ But why
should a man act or paint or write for any other generation but his own?
Common sense suggests that many men can successfully entertain their
own generation, but that only the work of the rare occasional genius
will survive in the future. Luckily for all artists of to-day, this is
and always was a law of Nature; equally fortunate for artists of the
future, that nothing that is being done to-day is in the least likely to
interfere with the workings of that law in days to come.
There is undoubtedly a tendency—and probably there always has been a
tendency—to infer that because a man is rich therefore he is lucky, and
that a man who is successful is very likely a dishonest man; indeed,
it seems a common belief that to gain the verdict of the Box Office it
is necessary to do that which is unworthy. This idea being so widely
spread, it appears interesting to study the Box Office in relation to
other scenes in the human drama. What part does it play, for instance, in
literature or art or politics?
Of course, a writer or painter is in a somewhat different position from
an actor. He can, if he wishes, appeal to a much smaller circle, or, in
an extreme case, he can refuse to appeal at all to the generation in
which he lives and make his appeal to posterity. The statesman, however,
is perhaps nearer akin to the actor. Let us consider how statesmen and
politicians have regarded the Box Office, and whether it can fairly be
said to have exercised a bad influence on their actions.
And as Garrick is one of the high sounding names in the world of the
theatre, so Gladstone may not unfairly be taken as a type of English
politician, and it is curious that the whole evolution of his mind
is chiefly interesting in its gradual discovery of the fact that the
Box Office is the sole test of a statesman’s merit, that the _vox
populi_ is indeed the _vox Dei_, and that the superior person is of
no account in politics as against the will of the nation. As in the
theatre, so in politics, it is the people who pay to come in who have
to be catered for. In 1838, Gladstone was as superior—‘sniffy’ is the
modern phrase—about the Box Office as any latter-day journalist could
wish. He complimented the Speaker on putting down discussions upon
the presentation of petitions. The Speaker sagely said ‘that those
discussions greatly raised the influence of popular feeling on the
deliberation of the House; and that by stopping them he thought a wall
was erected—not as strong as might be wished.’ Young Mr. Gladstone
concurred, and quoted with approval an exclamation of Roebuck’s in
the House: ‘We, sir, are, or ought to be, the _élite_ of the people
of England, for mind; we are at the head of the mind of the people of
England.’
It took over forty years for Gladstone to discover that his early views
were a hopeless form of conceit, and that the only test of the merit of a
policy was the Box Office test. But when he recognised that the _élite_
of the people were not in the House of Commons, but were really in the
pit and gallery of his audiences, he never wearied of putting forward and
explaining Box Office principles with the enthusiasm, and perhaps the
exaggeration, of a convert.
Take that eloquent appeal in Midlothian as an instance:
We cannot (he says) reckon on the wealth of the country, nor
upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which
rank and wealth usually bring. In the main these powers are
against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever
there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a
narrow and sectional interest—apart from that of the country,
and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public,
there we have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above
all these and behind all these, there is something greater
than these: there is the nation itself. This great trial is
now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard
to rouse, but when roused, harder and still more hopeless to
resist.
Now here is the Box Office test with a vengeance. Not in its soundest
form, perhaps, because the really ideal manager would have found a piece
and a company that would draw stalls and dress circle as well as pit
and gallery. For Bacon says: ‘If a man so temper his actions as in some
of them he do content every faction, the music will be the fuller.’ But
Gladstone at that time had neither the piece nor the company for this,
and, great artist as he was, his music did not in later years draw the
stalls and dress circle; but having mastered the eternal Box Office
principle, this did not disconcert him, for he knew that of the two the
pit and gallery were sounder business for a manager who wanted to succeed
in the provinces and was eager for a long run.
This recognition by Mr. Gladstone of the Box Office as supreme comes with
especial interest when you consider that his education and instinct made
it peculiarly difficult for him to appreciate the truth. Disraeli jumped
at it more easily, as one might expect from a man of Hebrew descent, for
that great race have always held the soundest views on questions of the
Box Office. As a novelist, the novels he wrote were no doubt the best he
was capable of, but whatever may be their merits or demerits, they were
written with an eye to the Box Office and the Box Office responded. His
first appearance upon the political stage was not a success. The pit
and gallery howled at him. But this did not lead him to pretend that
he despised his audience, and that they were a mob whose approval was
unworthy of winning; on the contrary, he told them to their faces that
‘the time would come when they would be obliged to listen.’ A smaller man
would have shrunk with ready excuse from conquering such a Box Office,
but Disraeli knew that it was a condition precedent to greatness, and
he intended to be great. He had no visionary ideas about the political
game. As he said to a fellow-politician: ‘Look at it as you will, it is a
beastly career.’ Much the same may be said in moments of despondency of
any career. The only thing that ultimately sweetens the labour necessary
to success is the Box Office returns, not by any means solely because of
their value in money—though a man honest with himself does not despise
money—but because every shilling paid into the Box Office is a straight
testimonial from a fellow-citizen who believes in your work. Disraeli’s
Box Office returns were colossal and deservedly so—for he had worked hard
for them.
When you come to think of it seriously, the Box Office principle in
the drama of politics is the right for that drama’s patrons to make its
laws, a thing that this nation has contended for through the centuries.
Indeed, there are only two possible methods of right choice open: either
to listen to the voice of public opinion—the Box Office principle—or to
leave affairs entirely to the arbitrament of chance. With sturdy English
common sense we have embodied both these principles in an excellent but
eccentric constitution. We allow public opinion to choose the members of
the House of Commons, and leave the choice of members of the House of
Lords entirely to chance. To an outside observer both methods seem to
give equally satisfactory results.
In political matters we find that for all practical purposes the Box
Office reigns supreme. No misguided political impresario to-day would
plant some incompetent young actor into a star part because he was a
member of his own family. We may be thankful that all parties openly
recognise that any political play to be produced must please the pit
and gallery, and that any statesman actor, to be a success, must play
to their satisfaction. No one wants the stalls and dress circle of the
political circus to be empty, but it would be absurd to let a small
percentage of the audience exercise too great an influence on the
productions of the management.
As in politics, so in business, for here no sane man will be heard to
deny that the Box Office test is the only test of merit. If the balance
sheet is adverse, the business man may be a man of culture, brain-power,
intellect, sentiment and good manners, but as a business man he is not
a success, and Nature kindly extinguishes him and automatically removes
him from a field of energy for which he is unfitted. It is really
unfortunate that one cannot have a moral, social, and literary Bankruptcy
Court, where, applying the Box Office test, actors, authors, artists,
and statesmen might file their petitions and be adjudged politically,
or histrionically, or artistically bankrupt, as the case might be, and
obtain a certificate of the Court, permitting them to open a fried-fish
shop, to start a newspaper, or to enter upon some simpler occupation
which, upon evidence given, it might appear they are really fitted for.
It is the vogue to-day for those claiming to possess the literary and
artistic temperament to shrink with very theatrical emphasis from the
Box Office. They point out how the Box Office of to-day overrules the
Box Office of yesterday, forgetting that the Box Office of to-morrow may
reinstate the judgment of the inferior Court. Even if the Box Office is
as uncertain as the law, it is also as powerful as the law. Of course
a painter or writer has the advantage over the actor—if it be one—of
appealing to a smaller Box Office to-day, in the hopes of attracting a
large Box Office to-morrow. A man can write and paint to please a coming
generation, but a man cannot act, or bring in Bills in Parliament, or
bake or brew, or make candlesticks for anyone else than his fellow living
men. Not that, for myself, I think there have ever been many writers or
artists who wrote and painted for future generations. On the contrary,
they wrote and painted largely to please themselves, but in so far as
they cared for their wives and children, with an eye on the Box Office,
and in most cases it was only because their business arrangements were
mismanaged that their own generations failed to pay to come in. These
failures were the exception. The greatest men, such as Shakespeare and
Dickens, were immediate Box Office successes—others were Box Office
successes in their own day, but have not stood the test of time.
Nevertheless, it is something to succeed at any Box Office, even if the
success be only temporary. Every man cannot be a Prime Minister, but is
that any reason why he should not aspire to a seat on the Parish Council?
When one turns to the lives of authors and artists, one does not find
that the wisest and best were men who despised the test of the Box Office.
Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he
scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending
him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady
had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle
of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and
sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test
absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and
from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a
reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office
test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to
superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap
a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of
bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who
are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future
generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern
craze among the _cognoscenti_ to assess the ability of a writer or an
artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his
own generation.
If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one
would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and
recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box
Office success.
Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature,
writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:
I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays,
or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very
great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek
to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms
which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would
be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in
the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion
of every number, I am ensured _for_ that writing in every
number, a certain sum of money.
That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from
the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward
significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself.
As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of
America:
To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant
countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures;
to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great
mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me
in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not
barter for a mine of wealth.
Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds
and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the
backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages
can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood
the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to
pretend that he despised it.
Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle.
He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating
chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who
failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an
author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his
way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth
of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs
of genius at the hands of publishers.
What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body
of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of
all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand?
Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and
can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all
to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their
worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad,
saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine
to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value
of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals,
but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a
lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack
for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.
One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it
is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same
opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’
as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever
wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and
recognition have produced the best work that has been done.
Nor do we find that the painter is in this matter less sensible than his
artistic brethren. The late Sir John Millais expresses very accurately
the sensible spirit in which all great artists attend to the varied
voices of critics as against the unanimous voice of the Box Office.
I have now lost all hope of gaining just appreciation in the
Press; but thank goodness ‘the proof of the pudding is in
the eating.’ Nothing could have been more adverse than the
criticism on ‘The Huguenot,’ yet the engraving is now selling
more rapidly than any other of recent time. I have great faith
in the mass of the public, although one hears now and then such
grossly ignorant remarks.
The artist then gives instances of public criticism in other arts with
which he disagrees; but the only matter that I am concerned with is
that in his own art, and for himself, he has arrived at the Box Office
conclusion that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer
or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed,
or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large
numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote
their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good
of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to
find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no
necessity of appealing to that institution for support.
If I had been asked to name any writer of my own time who was absolutely
free from any truck with the Box Office, I should, before I had read
his charming autobiography, have suggested Herbert Spencer. For indeed
one would not expect to find a Box Office within the curtilage of a
cathedral or a laboratory. Religion and science and their preachers have
necessarily very little to do with the Box Office.
But Spencer was not only a great writer, but a keen scientific analyst of
the facts of human life. He could not deceive himself—as so many of the
literary folk do—as to his aims and objects. Looking back on the youthful
valleys of his life from the calm mountain slopes that a man may rest on
at the age of seventy-three, he asks himself
What have been the motives prompting my career? how much have
they been egotistic, and how much altruistic? That they have
been mixed there can be no doubt. And in this case, as in most
cases, it is next to impossible to separate them mentally in
such a way as to preserve the relations of amount among them.
So deep down is the gratification which results from the
consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of
the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is
impossible for anyone to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case,
the desire for such recognition has not been absent.
He continues to point out that this desire for recognition was ‘not the
primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive
of my larger and later efforts,’ and concludes, ‘Still, as I have said,
the desire of achievement, and the honour which achievement brings, have
doubtless been large factors.’
It is very interesting to note that a man like Herbert Spencer recognises
what a large part the Box Office played in his own work—work which was
rather the work of a scientist than the work of a literary man.
In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached,
emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they
were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children
and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run
all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember
that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding
human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye
may obtain.’
These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish
they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on
the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be
desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an
appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions
such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great
extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed
at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all
practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common
one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering
to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery,
is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his
self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A
study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the
two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are
summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.
It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in
some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of
a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box
Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared
among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and
spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they
may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were
troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would
not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there
are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are
busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness
they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone
else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the
Box Office principle.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF EDUCATION.
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine:
But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
_Proverbs_ xvii., 22.
The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine
that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere
“man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention
to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding
that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages
of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For
my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest
days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy,
distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest
respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most
school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many
remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their
youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished
and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that
undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without
becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in
themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and
judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that
the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect
social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is
able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these
ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues
to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned
into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the
sanctity of schoolmasters.
Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that
I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly
say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or
that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few
irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the
everyday business of life.
If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court
upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to
prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very
rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community
for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the
best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so
dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll,
was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly
appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its
place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life
as the Beautiful.
If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of
man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary,
the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that
education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to
onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one
generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not
much hope of onward movement.
Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation
depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters,
whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by
authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all
events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently
offers to the next.
We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation,
nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with
which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But
unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the
human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great
one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest
wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it
is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of
us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to
be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some
well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.
One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts
progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is
uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster
to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled
out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts,
accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place
whatever in the schoolroom.
Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and
opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the
little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and
theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know
that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in
fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us
like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.
This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for
many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a
child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only
conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the
affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school,
is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children,
especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which
all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.
My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller
senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son
Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him
run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s
the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of
schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me
thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be
made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony
Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can
teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at
least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of
the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education
are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.
Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I
choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the
subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something
one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of
education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every
writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle
hour to the other side of the picture.
In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the
endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of
education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are
more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally
solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all
thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that
education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea
of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will
choose the right means.
If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine
that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably
in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side
and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would
be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an
individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had
taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful
hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to
a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for
everyone.
One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its
professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the
least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and
prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems
with the inspired regularity of a War Office.
Another of the disadvantages of education to-day is that there is too
much of it, and that what there is is in the hands of well-meaning
directors, who are either middle-aged and ignorant, or, what is worse,
middle-aged and academic. If we cannot reach the ideal of Tony Weller
and let the child shift for himself, let us at all events unshackle the
schoolmaster and allow him to shift for himself. The head master of a
great English school is a despot. He has at his back—and I use the phrase
“at his back” with deliberate care, not meaning “upon his shoulders”—he
has at his back a powerful board of citizens of position who are wise
enough and strong enough to leave the question of education to the man at
the wheel, and to remember that it is dangerous to speak to him whilst
he is steering the ship. Any system of education that is to be of any
avail at all must be a personal system in a great measure, and the
elementary head master should be in the same position as the head master
of our great public schools. The boards and committees should interfere
as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster,
of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And
who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried
and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and
you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental
condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into
the rivers of life.
I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must
confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to
a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good
citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from
being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the
matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards
and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have
sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a
condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business
whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the
individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference,
will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed
am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt
the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs
of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large
committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our
ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who,
learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding,
running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of
instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded
on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and
who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could
appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham,
who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good
boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,”
and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are
any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any
interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a
prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to
choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to
leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned
off on the golf-links.
Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten
to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the
schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having
learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education
of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in
education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules
and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary
outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree
with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate,
and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a
school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think
that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the
creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the
largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force.
Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my
schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any
real value to me in after life.
A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some
delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that
there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it
is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially
detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really
mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that
it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties,
and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in
this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are
young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life
thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the
position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.
If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must
of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in
education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child
teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary
lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat,
for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its
mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs
itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks
and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses
the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother,
finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed
energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of
victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful.
The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its
way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a
schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful
things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It
learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist
on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly
irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to
master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too,
not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I
have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days
checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first
primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind
some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think
of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and
talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there
were no schoolmaster?
If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the
answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation
would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father
was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft,
would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as
his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The
school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any
worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of
self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers.
Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of
her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,”
she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of
a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside
my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this
that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a
stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even
the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress
in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry
in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry
could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar,
composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education
it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.
In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship
from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for
the children and the State than any other form of education they receive
to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and
crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents
who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the
schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.
We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how
much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless
subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to
be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance
of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County
Council prize in geography.
I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among
other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on
the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she
could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a
fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you
cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting
two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?
One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for
probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting
of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your
educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would
have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of
schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself
cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in
every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to
make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in
his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having
charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have
made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school
education of to-day.
In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter,
learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could
help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and
learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers,
though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of
teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n
win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book
he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more
important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he
should know how to spell it.
The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man
of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean
and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked,
and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the
smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to
put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest
honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are
in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing
should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable
of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the
same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they
possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains
these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a
master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in
getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been
forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient
leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even
to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young
the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more
important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the
man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling
you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel
of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages
of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller
importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as
music or drawing.
Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places
the school course and literary things above the playing fields and
physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who
had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training
a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon
lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can
teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past
in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics
for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with
certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than
Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and
the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and
secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket,
football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all
manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body,
and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty
and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only
be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful
than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great
advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are
taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation
and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation
into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were
diverted into the schoolroom.
Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities
to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all
young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers.
Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees
are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their
livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham,
or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and
playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not
only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will
thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.
But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons.
Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as
disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it
in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the
masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave
disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything
that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many
people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870,
a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for
the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in
reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power
of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies
for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the
people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant
people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they
may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and
common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays
and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go
out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some
years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his
own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much
for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through
the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted
the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There
is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained
unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been
written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so
remained but for State encouragement through its system of education.
As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the
County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief
use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds
on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is
done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is
thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has
been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a
boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of
these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to
the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing,
and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at
least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit
of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must
admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more
should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these
pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is
no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after
life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the
benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education
as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of
elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to
make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a
boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to
shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the
community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school
he and his rifle might be a national asset.
That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger
to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of
India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of
education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community
which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens
so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has
developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made
education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what
has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.
It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power
that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these
matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify
their existence.
I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily
appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not
agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being
a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world
heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the
world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from
slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that
can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and
we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine
will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about
the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I
think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.
If you go into an English village you find three great public
institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to
some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You
find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put
up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half
a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself
hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic
bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry
children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the
happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are
under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system
and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches
them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.
I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which
institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment
they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish
to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing
fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only
better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly
give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to
mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them
scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and
I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed
with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place.
I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his
Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in
the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.
If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every
school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and
forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only
to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we
forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for
to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children
when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that
we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness
which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us
strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach
by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be
the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation.
And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long
ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed
whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or
her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of
its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a
service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.
COOKERY BOOK TALK.
_Arviragus._ How angel-like he sings!
_Guiderius._ But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters,
And sauc’d our broths as Juno had been sick
And he her dieter.
_Cymbeline_ iv. 2.
In this passage Shakespeare exalts cookery above songs that are merely
angel-like, and anyone who has dined at a modern restaurant with “music
off” as part of the stage directions will agree with Guiderius that it is
impertinent to consider the merit of song at moments that should be given
to the praise of cookery. Incidentally, too, the passage has a value for
the cuisinologist of an antiquarian turn of mind by pointing out that the
decoration of dishes with alphabetical carrots and turnips, “roots cut in
characters,” was a commonplace of the Shakespearean table.
And if in a detached passage from a dramatic writer we can find so much
culinary thought, how much more remains to be sought after in those
masterpieces of kitchen literature given to the world by the great artist
cooks of bygone centuries.
It has always been a matter of considerable surprise to me that so few
people really read their Cookery Book with any diligence and attention.
There is no subject of conversation so popular as Cookery Book. It
blends together all persons in a common chorus of talk irrespective of
rank, age, sex, religion and education. The dullest eye lights up and a
ripple crosses the most stagnant mind when the dying embers of formal
conversation are called into brilliant flames by a few pages from the
Cookery Book. Every one lays claim to take a hand at Cookery Book talk,
no one is too bashful or ignorant in his own seeming, and yet how few
really bring to the discussion a sound literary knowledge of even Mrs.
Beeton and Francatelli, and how many prate of cookery to whom Mrs. Glasse
and John Farley are unknown names. No one will talk of Shakespeare and
the musical glasses without at least a slight knowledge of Charles Lamb’s
delightful nursery tales and the study of an article on the theory of
music in “Snippy Bits.” But if Cookery Book is mentioned—and in ordinary
society the subject is generally reached in the first ten minutes after
the introduction—the humblest and most ignorant is found laying down the
law with the misplaced confidence of a county magistrate. And yet with
Cookery Book as with lower forms of learning one can never tell whence
illumination may spring. True indeed is it that out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings strength is ordained.
I remember a beautiful and remarkable instance of this which occurred
but recently. I was privileged to dine at the family table of a great
artist and there were present besides myself several others of sound
learning and religious education from whom might be expected stimulating
and rational conversation. We began I remember with the Pre-Raphaelites
and ox-tail soup. Albert Durer started with the fish but “failed to
stay the course,” as a sporting friend of my host remarked. He it was
who brought the conversation round to the haven and heaven of all
conversation—Cookery Book. He told a story of a haggis which drew from
my host—an ardent Scotsman—a learned and literary defence of the haggis,
which in common with the thistle, the bagpipes and Burns poetry it is a
matter of patriotism for a Scotsman to uphold in the company of aliens.
There was no doubt that my friend broke down in cross-examination
as to the actual contents of the haggis, but as to the necessity of
drinking raw whisky at short intervals during its consumption he was
eloquent and convincing. When he had finished—or maybe before—I began
to describe the inward beauties of a well-grilled mutton chop, and to
detail an interesting discussion I had had the week before with a Dean
of the Church of England on the respective merits of Sam’s Chop House
in Manchester and the South Kensington Museum Grill Room. Listening is
I fear a lost art for my entertaining reminiscences were broken into by
a babel of tongues. Every one named his or her particular and favourite
dish which was discussed rejected, laughed at and dismissed by the rest
of the company. So loud was the clash of tongues that you might have
imagined you were taking part in a solemn council at Pandemonium, when
suddenly the shower of Cookery Book talk dried up and there was a pause,
a lull—a silence. At that moment the youngest son of the house whose
little curly head—like one of those heads of Sir Joshua’s angels—rested
on his hands as he listened to the earnest converse of his grave
elders—this child threw down before us a pearl of simple wisdom—“Surely
you have forgotten bread sauce and chicken!” And so we had. The artist
also remembered that we had left out sucking pig. The conversation
started with renewed force. The whole question of onions in bread sauce
was exhaustively debated and a happy evening was spent in congenial and
intellectual conversation.
But how seldom it is that you find yourself among persons capable of
discussing with knowledge any of the nicer problems of the kitchen.
At my own table the other day a graduate of Cambridge actually asked
my wife whether she put maraschino or curaçoa in the Hock cup. Yet
in educational affairs this man passes for a rational and highly
cultivated man. Colossal ignorance of this type is but too common. I
have stayed—but never for more than one week-end—with families of the
highest respectability to whom tarragon vinegar is unknown, and I once
entertained a Judge of the High Court who did not know the difference
between Nepaul and Cayenne pepper,—yet in his daily life he must have
been called upon to decide differences of graver importance.
I wish I had the pen and the inspiration of one of the early prophets
to rouse my countrymen to urge upon Education Committees, schools and
universities their duty in dealing with this national ignorance. But one
may at least make a practical suggestion. Why should not “What to do with
the Cold Mutton” be read as a first reader in our elementary schools? It
touches on no points of doctrine and teaches truths that both Anglican
and Nonconformist could discuss pleasantly at a common board.
Once the young mind has tasted of the delight of the literary side of
cookery a demand would spring up for the re-publication of many earnest,
eloquent and scientific Cookery books of olden time. The eighteenth
century was a golden age in the literature of cookery, and the works
of Charlotte Mason, Sarah Harrison’s “Housekeeper’s Pocket Book,” and
Elizabeth Marshall’s “Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery,”—these
are books that should be in every polite library. For myself I prefer
what may be called the Archæology of Cookery and the study of “The Proper
New Book of Cookery, 1546,” or Partridge’s “Treasury of Commodious
Conceits and Hidden Secrets, 1580?” will have a charm for all who like to
pierce the veil that hides the old world from us. We have moved on since
then it is true, but for my part I like to learn how to “pot a Swan” or
“make an Olio Pye,” though such learning is no longer practical.
To those who have not access to the original editions of the classics,
let me commend that charming volume of the Book Lovers’ Library, Mr. W.
Carew Hazlitt’s “Old Cookery Books.” Problems are there touched upon that
when we have a serious business Government untrammelled by party ties
will be solved by Royal Commissions dealing with the various aspects of
cookery which, as an old writer says, is “The Key of Living.” It was
Tobias Venner, as long ago as 1620, who endeavoured to dissuade the poor
from eating partridges, because they were calculated to promote asthma.
Many Poor Law Commissions have sat since then, but the truth of Venner’s
theory has never yet been subjected to modern scientific criticism,
and every year from September to February the poor continue to remain
under the shadow of asthma. The Government give us volumes of historical
records, but I search in vain among them for the way to make Mrs. Leed’s
Cheesecakes and “The Lord Conway, His Lordship’s receipt for the making
of Amber Pudding.” Thus are we trifled with by our rulers, few of whom I
think could tell us without research why the porpoise and the peacock no
longer grace the tables of Royal persons.
But see how Nature supplements the mistakes of mankind. True it is that
Governments do nothing for our greatest art, sadly true it is that
the great masterpieces of culinary writing remain on the shelves, and
disgracefully true it is that among the idle rich of our universities
there is not one Professor of Cookery—though there be many ignorant
critics of the Art at high tables. And yet, round every board, simple
or noble, with the steam that rises from the cooked meats comes the
heartfelt praise of mankind rejoicing to lift up the voice in that
Cookery Book talk, which is the oral tradition that carries on the
religion of the “Key of Living.”
Indeed, there is only one human being who does not talk about Cookery,
and that is the high Priestess herself—the Cook. This I have on the
evidence of a policeman.
A DAY OF MY LIFE IN THE COUNTY COURT.
“We take no note of time
But from its loss.”
_Young’s Night Thoughts._
It is a difficult task to describe to others the everyday affairs of
one’s own life. The difficulty seems to me to arise in discovering what
it is that is new and strange to a person who finds himself for the
first time in a place where the writer has spent the best part of the
last twenty years. The events in a County Court are to me so familiar
that it is hard to appreciate the interest shown in our daily routine by
some casual onlooker whom curiosity, or a subpœna, has brought within
our walls. Still, in so far as the County Court is a poor man’s Court,
it is a good thing that the outside world should take an interest in its
proceedings, for much goes on there that has an immediate bearing on the
social welfare of the working classes, and a morning in the Manchester
County Court would throw a strong light on the ways and means of the poor
and the fiscal problems by which they are surrounded.
An urban County Court is a wholly different thing from the same
institution in a country town. Here in Manchester we have to deal with
a large number of bankruptcy cases, proceedings under special Acts of
Parliament, cases remitted from the High Court, and litigation similar in
character to, but smaller in importance than the ordinary civil list of
an Assize Court. Cases such as these are contested in much the same way
as they are in the High Court, counsel and solicitors appear—the latter
having a right of audience in the County Court—and all things are done
in legal decency and order. The litigants very seldom desire a jury,
having perhaps the idea that a common judge is as a good tribunal as a
common jury, whereas a special judge wants a common jury to find out the
everyday facts of his case for him. I could never see why juries are
divided into two classes, special and common, and judges are not. It is a
fruitful idea for the legal reformer to follow out.
The practice in Manchester is to have special days for the bigger class
of cases, and to try to give clear days for the smaller matters where
most of the parties appear in person. The former are printed in red
on the Court Calendar, and the latter in black, and locally the days
are known as red-letter days and black-letter days. On a black-letter
day counsel and solicitors indeed often appear—for it is a practical
impossibility to sort out the cases into two exact classes—but the
professions know that on a black-letter day they have no precedence, and
very cheerfully acquiesce in the arrangement, since it is obvious that
to the community at large it is at least as important that a working
woman should be home in time to give her children their dinner as that a
solicitor should return to his office or a barrister lunch at his club.
Let me try, then, to bring home to your mind what happens on a
black-letter day.
We are early risers in Manchester, and the Court sits at ten. I used to
get down to my Court about twenty minutes earlier, as on a black-letter
day there are sure to be several letters from debtors who are unable to
be at Court, and these are always addressed to me personally. Having
disposed of the correspondence there is generally an “application in
chambers” consisting of one or more widows whose compensation under
the Workman’s Compensation Act remains in Court to be dealt with for
their benefit. I am rather proud of the interest and industry the chief
clerks of my Court have shown in the affairs of these poor women and
children, and the general “liberty to apply” is largely made use of that
I may discuss with the widows or the guardians of orphans plans for the
maintenance and education of the children, and the best way to make the
most of their money.
You would expect to find the Court buildings geographically in the centre
of Manchester, but they are placed almost on the boundary. Turning out
of Deansgate down Quay Street, which, as its name implies, leads towards
the river Irwell, you come across a street with an historic name, Byrom
Street. The name recalls to us the worthy Manchester doctor and the days
when even Manchester was on the fringe of a world of romance, and John
Byrom made his clever epigram:
God bless the King, I mean the faith’s defender,
God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who the King,
God bless us all—that’s quite another thing.
It is a far cry from Jacobites to judgment debtors, but it is a pleasant
thought to know that one lives in an historic neighbourhood, even if the
building you work in is not exactly fitted for the modern purpose for
which it is used.
At the corner of Byrom Street and Quay Street is the Manchester County
Court. It is an old brick building with some new brick additions. Some
architect, we may suppose, designed it, therefore let it pass for a
house. It was built, as far as I can make out, in the early part of last
century, when the brick box with holes in it was the standard form of the
better class domestic dwelling house. Still it is an historic building.
In 1836 it was No. 21 Quay Street, the residence of Richard Cobden,
calico printer, whose next door neighbour was a Miss Eleanora Byrom.
Cobden sold it to Mr. Faulkner for the purposes of the Owens College, so
it was the first home of the present Victoria University. It is now a
County Court. _Facilis descensus._ It still contains several very fine
mahogany doors that give it the air of a house that has seen better days.
You will see groups of women making their way down to the Court, many
with a baby in one arm and a door key slung on the finger. The wife is
the solicitor and the advocate of the working class household, and very
cleverly she does her work as a rule. The group of substantial-looking
men chatting in the street are debt-collecting agents and travelling
drapers discussing the state of trade. These are the Plaintiffs and their
representatives, the women are the Defendants. Here and there you will
see a well-dressed lady, probably summoned to the Court by a servant or
a dressmaker. There will always be a few miscellaneous cases, but the
trivial round and common task of the day is collecting the debts of small
tradesmen from the working class.
I have no doubt that a County Court Judge gets an exaggerated view of the
evils of the indiscriminate credit given to the poor. They seem to paddle
all their lives ankle-deep in debt, and never get a chance of walking the
clean parapet of solvency. But that is because one sees only the seamy
side of the debt-collecting world, and knows nothing of the folk who pay
without process. At the same time, that indiscriminate credit-giving as
practised in Manchester is an evil, no one, I think, can doubt, and it
seems strange that social reformers pay so little attention to the matter.
The whole thing turns, of course, upon imprisonment for debt. Without
imprisonment for debt there would be little credit given, except to
persons of good character, and good character would be an asset. As it
is, however, our first business in the morning will be to hear a hundred
judgment summonses in which creditors are seeking to imprison their
debtors. There are some ten thousand judgment summonses in Manchester
and Salford in a year, but they have to be personally served, and not
nearly that number come for trial. We start with a hundred this morning,
of which say sixty are served. It is well to sit punctually, and we will
start on the stroke of ten.
A debt collector enters the Plaintiff’s box, and, refreshing his memory
from a note book, tells you what the Defendant’s position is, where he
works, and what he earns. The minute book before you tells you the amount
of his debt, that he has been ordered to pay 2s. a month, and has not
paid anything for six months. His wife now enters into all the troubles
of her household, and makes the worst of them. One tries to sift the true
from the false, the result being that one is generally convinced that the
Defendant has had means to pay the 2s. a month, or whatever the amount
may be, since the date when the order was made. The law demands that the
debtor should be imprisoned for not having paid, but no one wants him to
go to prison, so an order is made of seven or fourteen days, and it is
suspended, and is not to issue if he pays the arrears and fees, say in
three monthly instalments. The wife is satisfied that the evil day is put
off and goes away home, and the creditor generally gets his money. He may
have to issue a warrant, but the Defendant generally manages to pay by
hook or by crook, rather than go to Knutsford Gaol, where the debtors are
imprisoned, and as a matter of fact only a few actually go to gaol. Of
course, the money is often borrowed or paid by friends, which is another
evil of the system. The matter is more difficult when, as often happens,
the Defendants do not appear. It is extraordinary how few people can read
and understand a comparatively simple legal notice or summons. Mistakes
are constantly made. A collier once brought me an official schedule
of his creditors, in which in the column for “description,” where he
should have entered “grocer,” “butcher,” etc., he had filled in the
best literary description he could achieve of his different creditors,
and one figured as “little lame man with sandy whiskers.” There are of
course many illiterates, and they have to call in the assistance of a
“scholard.” An amusing old gentleman came before me once, who was very
much perturbed to know if, to use his own phrase, he was “entaitled to
pay this ’ere debt.” The incident occurred at a time when the citizens of
Manchester were being polled to vote on a “culvert scheme” of drainage,
which excited much popular interest.
“I don’t deny owing the debt,” he said, “and I’ll pay reet enow, what
your Honour thinks reet, if I’m entaitled to pay.”
I suggested that if he owed the money he was clearly “entitled” to pay.
“Well,” he continued, “I thowt as I should ’ave a summons first.”
“But you must have had a summons,” I said, “or how did you get here?”
“’E towd me case wor on,” he said, pointing to the Plaintiff, “so I coom.”
I looked up matters and discovered that service of the summons was duly
reported, and informed the Defendant, who seemed much relieved.
“You see,” he said, “I’m no scholard, and we got a paaper left at our
’ouse, and I took it up to Bill Thomas in our street, a mon as con read,
an’ ’e looks at it, an’ says as ’ow may be it’s a coolvert paaper. ‘I’m
not certain,’ ’e says, ‘but I think it’s a coolvert paaper.’ So I asks
him what to do wi’ it, and he says, ‘Put a cross on it, and put it in a
pillar box,’ and that wor done. But if you say it wor a summons, Bill
must a bin wrong.”
One can gather something from this poor fellow’s difficulties of the
trouble that a summons of any kind must cause in a domestic household,
and one can only hope for the day when England will follow the example of
other civilised countries and at least do away with the judgment summons
and imprisonment for debt.
The hundred judgment summonses will have taken us until about eleven
o’clock, and meanwhile in an adjoining Court the Registrar has been
dealing with a list of about four hundred cases. The bulk of these are
undefended, and the Registrar enters up judgment and makes orders
against the Defendant to pay the debt by instalments at so much a month.
A small percentage—say from five to ten per cent. of the cases—are sent
across to the Judge’s Court for trial, and small knots of folk come into
Court to take the seats vacated by the judgment debtors and wait for the
trials to come on.
The trial of a County Court action on a black-letter day, where Plaintiff
and Defendant appear in person, where neither understands law, evidence,
or procedure, and where the main object of each party is to overwhelm
his opponent by a reckless fire of irrelevant statements, is not easy
to conduct with suavity and dignity. The chief object of a County Court
Judge, as it seems to me—I speak from many years’ experience—should be
to suffer fools gladly without betraying any suspicion that he considers
himself wise. Ninety-nine per cent. of the cases are like recurring
decimals. They have happened, and will happen again and again. The same
defence is raised under the same circumstances. To the shallow-witted
Defendant it is an inspiration of mendacity, to the Judge it is a
commonplace and expected deceit. All prisoners in a Police Court who
are found with stolen goods upon them tell you that they have bought
them from a man whose name they do not know. There is no copyright in
such a defence, and it sounds satisfactory to each succeeding publisher
of it. No doubt it is disappointing to find that the judge and jury
have heard it before and are not disposed to believe it. In the same
way in the County Court there are certain lines of defence that I feel
sure students of folk-lore could tell us were put forward beneath the
oak trees when the Druids sat in County Courts in prehistoric times.
The serious difficulty lies in continuing to believe that a Defendant
may arise who actually has a defence, and in discovering and rescuing a
specimen of a properly defended action from a crowded museum of antique
mendacities. Counter-claims, for instance, which of course are only filed
in the bigger cases, are very largely imaginative. The betting against
a valid counter-claim must be at least ten to one. It is, of course, in
finding the one that there is scope for ingenuity. It is the necessity
for constant alertness that makes the work interesting.
The women are the best advocates. Here, for instance, is a case in point.
A woman Plaintiff with a shawl over her head comes into the box, and an
elderly collier, the Defendant, is opposite to her. The action is brought
for nine shillings. I ask her to state her case.
“I lent yon mon’s missus my mon’s Sunday trousers to pay ’is rent, an’ I
want ’em back.”
That seems to me, as a matter of pleading, as crisp and sound as can be.
If the trousers had been worth five hundred pounds, a barrister would
have printed several pages of statement of claim over them, but could
not have stated his case better. My sympathies are with the lady. I know
well the kindness of the poor to each other, and, won by the businesslike
statement of the case, I turn round to the Defendant and ask him why the
trousers are not returned and what his defence may be.
He smiles and shakes his head. He is a rough, stupid fellow, and
something amuses him. I ask him to stop chuckling and tell me his defence.
“There’s nowt in it all,” is his answer.
I point out that this is vague and unsatisfactory, and that the words do
not embody any defence to an action of detinue known to the law.
He is not disturbed. The lady gazes at him triumphantly. He is a slow
man, and casually mentions “The ’ole street knows about them trousers.”
I point out to him that I have never lived in the street, and know
nothing about it. He seems to disbelieve this and says with a chuckle,
“Everyone knows about them trousers.”
I press him to tell me the story, but he can scarcely believe that I do
not know all about it. At length he satisfies my curiosity.
“Why yon woman an’ my missus drank them trousers.”
The woman vociferates, desires to be struck dead and continues to live,
but bit by bit the story is got at. Two ladies pawn the husband’s
trousers, and quench an afternoon’s thirst with the proceeds. The owner
of the Sunday trousers is told by his wife a story of destitution and
want of rent, and the generous loan of garments. Every one in the street
but the husband enjoys the joke. The indignant husband, believing in
his wife, sues for the trousers and sends his wife to Court. The street
comes down to see the fun, and when I decide for the Defendant there is
an uprising of men, women, and babies, and the parties and their friends
disappear while we call the next case. These are the little matters where
it is easy to make a blunder, and where patience and attention and a
knowledge of the ways and customs of the “’ole street” are worth much
legal learning.
One must learn to sympathise with domestic frailties. I was rebuking
a man, the other day, for backing up his wife in what was not only an
absurd story, but one in which I could see he had no belief.
“You should really be more careful,” I said, “and I tell you candidly I
don’t believe a word of your wife’s story.”
“You may do as yer like,” he said, mournfully, “but I’ve got to.”
The sigh of envy at the comparative freedom of my position as compared
with his own was full of pathos.
A case of a workman who was being sued for lodging money gave me a new
insight into the point of view of the clever but dissipated workman. His
late landlady was suing for arrears run up when, as she said, he was “out
of work.”
The phrase made him very angry.
“Look ’ere,” he said, “can that wumman kiss the book agen? She’s swearin’
false. I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life. Never.”
“Tummas,” says the old lady, in a soothingly irritating voice. “Think,
Tummas.”
“Never been out o’ wark i’ my life,” he shouts.
“Oh, Tummas,” says the old lady, more in sorrow than in anger. “You
remember Queen’s funeral. You were on the spree a whole fortneet.”
“Oh, ay!” says Thomas unabashed; “but you said out o’ wark. If you’re
sayin’ on the spree I’m with yer, but I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my
life.”
It was a sad distinction for a clever working man to make, but a true one
and to him an important one, and I rather fancy the nice old lady knew
well what she was doing in her choice of phrase and hoped to score off
Thomas by irritating him into an unseemly exhibition by the use of it.
A class of case that becomes very familiar arises out of the sale of
a small business. A fried-fish shop is regarded by an enterprising
widow who does not possess one as a mine of untold gold. She purchases
one at a price above its value, fails from want of knowledge to
conduct it successfully, and then brings an action for fraudulent
misrepresentation against the seller. Of course, there are cases of fraud
and misrepresentation; but, as a rule, there is nothing more than the
natural optimistic statements of a seller followed by incompetence of the
purchaser and the disgust of old customers. In a case of this sort, in
which up to a point it was difficult to know where the truth lay, owing
to the vague nature of the evidence, a graphic butcher gave a convincing
account of the reason of the failure of the new management. He had come
down to the Court in the interests of justice, leaving the abattoir—or as
he called it “habbitoyre”—on his busiest morning.
“Yer see,” he said, “I knew the old shop well. I was in the ’abit of
takin’ in a crowd of my pals on Saturday neet. So when the old Missus
gave it up, I promised to give it a try wi’ the new Missus. Well, I went
in twice, an’ there wor no sort o’ choice at all. There worn’t no penny
fish, what there wor, wor ’a-penny fish, and bad at that, an’ the chips
wor putty.”
It was obvious that the Plaintiff had started on a career for which
Nature did not intend her, and that the cause of the failure of
the business was not the fraud of the Defendant, but the culinary
incompetence of the Plaintiff.
It is amazing how, apart altogether from perjury, two witnesses will
give entirely different accounts of the same matter. No doubt there is a
great deal of reckless evidence given and some perjury committed, but a
great deal of the contradictory swearing arises from “natural causes,”
as it were. A man is very ready to take sides, and discusses the facts
of a case with his friend until he remembers more than he ever saw. In
“running down” cases, where the witnesses are often independent folk
and give their own evidence their own way, widely different testimony
is given about the same event. One curious circumstance I have noticed
in “running down” cases is that a large percentage of witnesses give
evidence against the vehicle coming towards them. That is to say, if a
man is walking along, and a brougham is in front of him and going the
same way as he is, and a cab coming in the opposite direction collides
with the brougham, I should expect that man to give evidence against
the cab. I suppose the reason of that is that to a man so situated the
brougham appears stationary and the cab aggressively dangerous, but
whatever the reason may be the fact is very noticeable.
On the whole the uneducated man in the street is a better witness of
outdoor facts than the clerk or warehouseman. The outdoor workers have,
I fancy, a more retentive memory for things seen, and are more observant
than the indoor workers. They do not want to refresh their memory with
notes.
A story is told of a blacksmith who came to the farriery classes held
by the Manchester Education authorities. The clerk in charge gave him a
notebook and a pencil.
“Wot’s this ’ere for?” asks the blacksmith.
“To take notes,” replied the clerk.
“Notes? Wot sort o’ notes?”
“Why, anything that the lecturer says which you think important and want
to remember, you make a note of it,” said the clerk.
“Oh,” was the scornful reply, “anything I want to remember I must make
a note of in this ’ere book, must I? Then wot do you think my blooming
yed’s for?”
It is the use and exercise of the “blooming yed” that makes the
Lancashire workman the strong character he is. May it be long before
the mother wit inside it is dulled by the undue use of the scholastic
notebook.
Witnesses are often discursive, and the greatest ingenuity is devoted
to keeping them to the point without breaking the thread of their
discourse. Only long practice and a certain instinct which comes from
having undergone many weary hours of listening can give you the knack of
getting the pith and marrow of a witness’s story without the domestic and
genealogical details with which he—and especially she—desires to garnish
it.
I remember soon after I took my seat on the bench having an amusing
dialogue with a collier. He had been sued for twelve shillings for three
weeks’ rent. One week he admitted, and the week in lieu of notice,
which leads to more friction between landlord and tenant than any other
incident in their contract, was duly wrangled over and decided upon. Then
came the third week, and the collier proudly handed in four years’ rent
books to show nothing else was owing. The landlord’s agent pointed out
that two years back a week’s rent was missing, and sure enough in the
rent book was the usual cross instead of a four, showing that no rent had
been paid for that week.
“How did that week come to be missed?” I asked the collier.
“I’ll never pay that week,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “Not
laikely.”
“But,” I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to. You see you admit it’s owing.”
“Well, I’ll just tell yer ’ow it was. You see we wor ’aving rabbit for
supper, an’ my wife——”
He looked as if he was settling down for a long yarn, so I interposed:
“Never mind about the rabbit, tell me about the rent.”
“I’m telling yer. Yer see we wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife
’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every——”
“Oh, come, come,” I said impatiently, “just tell me about the rent.”
He looked at me rather contemptuously, and began again at the very
beginning.
“I’m telling yer, if yer’ll only listen. We wor ’aving rabbit for supper,
an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every neet for
supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle, the noo kettle——”
“Oh, never mind about the kettle, do please get to the rent,” I said, and
was immediately sorry I had spoken.
“I’m getting to it, ain’t I?” he asked, rather angrily. “We wor ’aving
rabbit for supper”—I groaned inwardly and resolved to sit it out without
another word—“an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit
every neet for supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle—the noo kettle
with the rabbit—on to th’ fire, when down coom chimley an’ aw into middle
o’ room. Was I going to pay rent for that week? Not laikely!”
It turned out that I was wholly in the wrong, and that the destruction
of the rabbit was a kind of equitable plea in defence to the action for
rent. When I am tempted now to burst in too soon upon an irrelevant
story, I think of the rabbit and am patient. Of course all rabbit stories
are not even equitable defences, but the diagnosis of what is purely
domestic and dilatory and of what is apparently anecdotal but in reality
relevant gives a distinct charm to one’s daily work.
One day of my life every month is given up to the trial of Yiddish cases.
The Yiddisher is a litigious person, and his best friend would not
describe him as a very accurate witness. One ought to remember, however,
that he has not had generations of justice administered to him, that he
is a child and beginner in a court of law, and that the idea of a judge
listening to his story and deciding for him upon the evidence is, in
some cases from personal experience and in all cases from hereditary
instinct, an utterly unfamiliar thing. The fact, too, that he speaks
Yiddish, or very broken English, and never answers a question except
by asking another, always gives his evidence an indirect flavour. One
strong point about a Yiddisher is his family affection, and he swears in
tribes, so to speak. A Christian in a family dispute will too often swear
anything against his brother, and is often wickedly reckless in his sworn
aspersions. A Yiddisher, on the other hand, will swear anything for his
brother, and most Yiddish evidence could be discounted by an accurate
percentage according to the exact relationship by blood or marriage of
the witness to the Plaintiff or Defendant.
It is needless to say a foreign-speaking race such as this gives one some
anxiety and trouble in a small-debt court. One of my earliest Yiddish
experiences was a case in which two Yiddishers each brought his own
interpreter. A small scrap of paper cropped up in the case with some
Hebrew writing on it. One interpreter swore it was a receipt, the other
that it was an order for a new pair of boots. Without knowing anything of
Hebrew, it occurred to me that these divergent readings were improbable.
The case was adjourned. I applied to some of my friends on that excellent
body, the Jewish Board of Guardians, a respectable interpreter was
obtained, and the Hebrew document properly translated. There is now an
official interpreter attached to the Manchester Court, and I think I can
safely congratulate the Yiddish community on a distinct improvement in
their education in the proper use of English law courts.
That some of them have the very vaguest notions of the principles on
which we administer justice may be seen from the following story which
happened some years ago. A little flashy Yiddish jeweller who spoke very
bad English, had taken out a judgment summons against an old man who
appeared broken down in health and pocket. I asked the little man for
evidence of means which would justify me in committing the debtor to
prison.
“Vell,” he says, “I vill tell you. He ish in a very larsh vay of pizness
indeed. He has zree daughters vorking for him and several hands as vell,
and zare is a great deal of monish coming into ze house.”
The old man told a sad story of ill-health, loss of business, and said
that his daughters had to keep him. It turned out that there was a
Yiddish gentleman in Court, Mr. X., who knew him, and Mr. X. corroborated
the defendant’s story in every particular. He had had a good business,
but was now being kept by his daughters, having broken down in health.
I turned to the little jeweller and said: “You have made a mistake here.”
“It ish no mishtake at all,” he cried excitedly. “Mr. X. ish a very bad
man. He and the Defendant are both cap makers, and are vot you call in
English a long firm.”
This was too much for Mr. X.—a most respectable tradesman—and he called
out: “My Lorts, may I speak?” Without waiting for leave, he continued
very solemnly: “My Lorts, I have sworn by Jehovah that every vord I say
ish true, but I vill go furder than that. I vill put down ten pounds in
cash, and it may be taken avay from me if vot I say ish not true.”
The offer was made with such fervour and sincerity that I thought it best
to enter into the spirit of the thing.
Turning to the little man, I asked: “Are you ready to put down ten pounds
that what you say is true?”
He looked blank and lost, and, shaking his head, murmured sadly, “No, it
ish too motch.”
I pointed out to him how his attitude about the ten pounds went to
confirm the evidence for the Defendant, and seeing his case slipping away
from under his feet, he cried out, as if catching at the last straw, “My
Lorts thish ish not mine own case, thish ish mine farder’s case, and I
vill put down ten pounds of mine farder’s monish that vot I say ish true.”
The offer was not accepted, and the Defendant was not committed. But the
story throws light on the rudimentary ideas that some Yiddishers have of
the administration of justice.
And now we have finished the list of cases, but there are a few
stragglers left in Court. Some of them have been in the wrong Court, or
come on the wrong day; some have applications to make, or advice to ask.
I always make a point now of finding out what these folk want before
leaving the bench. I remember in my early days a man coming before me the
first thing one morning, and saying he had sat in my Court until the end
of yesterday’s proceedings.
“Why didn’t you come up at the end of the day,” I asked, “and make your
application then?”
“I was coming,” he replied, “but at the end of last case you was off your
chair an’ bolted through yon door like a rabbit.” I think his description
was exaggerated, but I rise in a more leisurely way nowadays, though I am
still glad when the day’s work is over.
I do not know that what I have written will convey any clear idea of the
day of my life that I have been asked to portray. I know it is in many
respects a very dull grey life, but it has its brighter moments in the
possibilities of usefulness to others. I am not at all sure that the
black-letter jurisdiction of a big urban County Court ought not to be
worked by a parish priest rather than by a lawyer. I know that it wants a
patience, a sympathy, and a belief in the goodness of human nature that
we find in those rare characters who give up the good things in this
world for the sake of working for others. I am very conscious of my own
imperfections; but I was once greatly encouraged by a criticism passed
upon me which I accidentally overheard, and which I am conceited enough
to repeat. I was going away from the Court, and passed two men walking
slowly away. I had decided against them, and they were discussing why I
had done so.
“Well, ’ow on earth ’e could do it I don’t see, do you, Bill?”
“’E’s a fool.”
“Yes, ’e’s a fool, a —— fool, but ’e did ’is best.”
“Ay. I think ’e did ’is best.”
After all, coming from such source or indeed from any source, the
suggestion contained in the conversation was very gratifying. I have
often thought that one might rest beneath an unkinder epitaph than this:
HE WAS
A —— FOOL,
BUT
HE DID HIS BEST.
DOROTHY OSBORNE.
_Iachimo._ Here are letters for you.
_Posthumus._ Their tenor good, I trust.
_Iachimo._ ’Tis very like.
_Cymbeline_ ii. 4.
They had set (it is years ago now) the Period of the Restoration as
subject for the Historical Essay Prize at Oxbridge. I had been advised
to read Courtenay’s _Life of Sir William Temple_. It would give me an
insight into the times, and a thorough knowledge of the Triple Alliance.
It was in my uncle’s library that I found the book—two octavo volumes of
memoirs bound in plain green cloth, with mouldy yellow backs. I remember
it well, and the circumstances surrounding it.
I threw open the windows, piled all the red cushions into one window
seat, placed a chair for my feet, and took up the volumes. I cast my
eyes over the contents of Vol. I.: a portrait of Temple—a handsome
fellow—engraved by one Dean, after Sir Peter; a genealogical table. Ugh!
And twenty chapters of negotiations to follow. My uncle was right, it was
undoubtedly a dull book.
The second volume looked more interesting; there was something in it
about Swift. Memory asserting herself, I remembered Temple to be Swift’s
first patron, and Stella, I fancy, was Lady Temple’s maid. Happy Stella!
At that moment a piece of paper fluttered out of the volume in my hand on
to the floor, driving the Dean and his affairs out of my head. I picked
it up. An old paper, brown at its edges and foldings, singed by time. On
it were some verses—a sonnet. It ran thus:—
“TO DOROTHY OSBORNE,
“Why has no laureate, in golden song,
Wreathed rhythmic honours for her name alone,
Who worships now anear a purer throne?
And chosen, from that lovely, loyal throng
Of wantons ambling devilward along
At beck of God’s Anointed, one to praise,
Of brightest wit, yet pure through works and days,
Constant in love, in every virtue strong.
Dorothy, gift of God, it was not meant,
That thy bright light should shine upon the few,
Within the straitened circle of thy life;
Failing to reach mankind and represent
His own ideal, manifest in you,
Of holy woman and the perfect wife.”
I was a sonneteer myself, and therefore critical. This effort (was it my
uncle’s?) did not seem to me of portentous genius. I hate your sonneteer
who has more than two rhymes in his octett. It proves him a coward at the
measure, one who is burdened by those shackles in which he should move as
skilfully and lightly as a clever dancer bound to the knees on stilts.
Those two subdominant rhymes were misplaced; so was the sudden stop in
the sixth line, the violent _cæsura_ in the sense, sending a cold shiver
through the cultured mind. I did not admire the sestett either in its
arrangement, but much liberty has always been allowed in the management
of the sestett. For an amateur sonnet, I had read, nay, I will be just, I
had written worse.
But whom does this sonnet describe? Dorothy Osborne, who is she? Lady
Temple, answers Courtenay, and says little more. But she has written her
own life, and painted her own character, as none else could have done it
for her, in letters written to her husband before marriage. When I had
read these, I pitied the unknown, and forbore to criticise his sonnet.
I, too, could have written sonnets, roundels, ballads by the score to
celebrate her praise. But I remembered Pope’s chill warning about those
who “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and, full of humility I did not
apply it to my friend the sonneteer, but—to myself.
These letters of Dorothy Osborne were, at one time, lying at Coddenham
Vicarage, Suffolk. Forty-two of them has Courtenay transferred to an
appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly
confesses, but not without misgivings as to how they will be received
by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which
took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. Poor Courtenay! Did
he live to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over
dull excerpts from inhuman state papers? For the lighting of fires, for
the rag-bag, or, if of stout paper or parchment, for the due covering of
preserves and pickles, much of these Temple correspondences and treaties
would be eminently fitted, but for the making of books they are all but
useless; book-making of such material is not to be achieved by Courtenay,
nay, nor by the cunningest publisher’s devil in Grub Street. Here,
beneath poor blind Courtenay’s eye, were papers and negotiations, not
about a triple alliance between states, but concerning a dual alliance
between souls. Here, even for the dull historian, were chat, gossip,
the witty portrayal of neighbours, the customs, manners, thoughts, the
very life itself, of English human beings of that time, set out by the
living pen of Dorothy Osborne. Surely it was within his power at least to
edit carefully for us those letters? Alas, no! All that he can do is to
produce a book in two unreadable octavo volumes, and to set down in an
appendix, not without misgivings but forty-two of these charming letters.
But I will dare to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all. I cannot,
I know, make her glorious by _my_ pen, but I can let her own pen have
free play, and try to draw from her letters, and what other data there
are at hand, some living presentment of a beautiful woman, pure in
dissolute days, passing a quiet domestic existence among her own family;
a loyalist, leading, in Cromwell’s days, a home-life of which those who
draw their history from the pleasant pages of Sir Walter’s historical
novels can have little idea. To confirmed novel readers it will be,
I think, an awakening to learn that there was ever cessation of the
“clashing of rapiers” and “heavy tramp of cavalry” in the middle of the
seventeenth century.
Dorothy Osborne, born in 1627, was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne,
Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (an inherited office) and Governor of
Guernsey in the days of James I. and Charles his son. She was the only
daughter now (1650) unmarried, and had been named after her mother,
Dorothy, without further addition. Much more could be collected of this
sort from the lumber in Baronetages and Herald’s manuals; but to what
purpose? William Temple was born in 1628.
It was in 1648, when the King was imprisoned at Carisbrook, in Colonel
Hammond’s charge, that Dorothy first met her constant lover. They met
in the Isle of Wight. She and her brother were on their way to St.
Malo. Temple was starting on his travels. A little incident, almost a
Waverley incident, took place here, worth reciting, perhaps. The Osbornes
and Temple were loyalists. Young Osborne, more loyal than intelligent,
remained behind at an inn where they had halted, that he might write on a
window pane with a diamond “And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had
prepared for Mordecai.” This attack on Colonel Hammond, and the audacity
of a cavalier daring to apply the Scriptures after the Puritanical
method, caused the whole party to be arrested by the Roundheads, and a
very pretty adventure was spoilt by the ready wit of our Dorothy taking
the offence upon herself, when, through the gallantry of the Roundhead
officer, the whole party was suffered to depart. “This incident,” says
Courtenay, on good authority, “was not lost upon Temple.” Indeed, I think
with Courtenay; but would add that much else besides was not lost upon
him. Travelling with her and her brother, staying with her at St. Malo,
is it to be wondered that Temple was attracted by the bright wit, clear
faith and honesty of Dorothy; or that the brilliant parts and seriousness
of Temple—a great contrast to many of the bibulous, rowdy cavaliers whom
she must have met with—made her find in him one worthy of her friendship
and her love? That Temple at this time openly declared his love I doubt.
Love grew between them unknown to either. Years afterwards Dorothy
writes:—
“For God’s sake, when we meet let us design one day to remember old
stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to
this height ’tis at. In earnest I am at a loss sometimes in thinking
on’t; and though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I
know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak
ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I
thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that
all the traverses it has met with since, have served rather to discover
it to me than at all to hinder it.”
The further circumstances necessary to the understanding of Dorothy’s
letters, are shortly, these: Dorothy lived at Chicksands Priory,
where her father was in ill-health, and there she received suitors at
her parent’s commands. The Osbornes, it seemed, disliked Temple, and
objected to him on the score of want of means; whilst Temple’s father
had planned for his son an advantageous match in another quarter. Alas!
for the frowardness of young couples! They held their course, and waited
successfully.
Hardly can we do better that you may picture Dorothy and her mode of life
clearly to yourself, than copy this important letter for you at length:
“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account,
not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this
seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably
early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of
that, and then in the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten
o’clock I think of making me ready; and when that’s done I go into my
father’s chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin Molle and I sit
in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many
more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. comes in question, and
then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and
about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by
the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit
in the shade singing of ballads; I go to them, and compare their voices
and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a
vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as
those could be. I talk to them, and find _they want nothing to make them
the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so_.
Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks
about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all
run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay
behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle I think ’tis time
for me to retire too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to
the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you
with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, ’tis a
pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company. I sit
there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some
cruel thought of the crossness of our fortune, that will not let me sleep
there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to
bed.”
Truly a quiet country life, in a quiet country house; poor lonely Dorothy!
Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, is a low-built sacro-secular edifice,
well fitted for its former service Its priestly denizens were turned
out in Henry VIII’s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of
the neighbourhood: who knows now? Granted then to one, Richard Snow,
of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to
Sir John Osborne, Knt. (Dorothy’s brother was first baronet); thus it
becomes the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is a crisp etching of
the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire. The very exterior of
it is Catholic, unpuritanical, no methodism about the square windows set
here and there, at undecided intervals, wheresoever they may be wanted.
Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof. At the corner of the
house a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall;
five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower
windows from the morning sun, in one place reaching to the sill of an
upper window. Perhaps Mrs. Dorothy’s window; how tempting to scale and
see. What a spot for the happier realisation of Romeo and Juliet, or of
Sigismonde and Guichard, if this were romance. In one end of the wall
are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now, perhaps, the
dining-hall, where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state; or the saloon,
where the latter received her servants. There are old cloisters attached
to the house; at the other side of it may be. Yes! a sleepy country
house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills
of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when
Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place, “slow”
is the accurate modern epithet for it, “awfully slow.” But to Dorothy, a
quite suitable home at which she never repines.
This etching of Thomas Fisher, of December 26th, 1816, is a godsend to
me, hearing as I do that Chicksands Priory no longer remains to us,
having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer. For
through this, partly, we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s
surroundings, and may now safely let Dorothy herself tell us of the
servants visiting her at Chicksands during those long seven years through
which she remains constant to Temple. See what she expects in a lover!
Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George
Eliot have done more for us in like space?
“There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in a
husband. First, as my Cousin Franklin says our humours must agree, and to
do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and used that
kind of company. That is, he must not be so much a country gentleman as
to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than
of his wife; nor of the next sort of them, whose aim reaches no farther
than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads
no books but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech
interlarded with Latin, that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours,
and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. He must not be
a thing that began the world in a free school, was sent from thence to
the university, and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court,
has no acquaintance but those of his form in those places, speaks the
French he has picked out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories
he has heard of the revels that were kept there before his time. He must
not be a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,
that cannot imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless
it be in sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks
they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled
Monsieur, whose head is feather inside and outside, that can talk of
nothing but of dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes,
when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not be a fool of
no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor courteous; and to
all this must be added, that he must love me, and I him, as much as we
are capable of loving. Without all this his fortune, though never so
great, would not satisfy me; and with it a very moderate one would keep
me from ever repenting my disposal.”
These negative needs doubtless excluded many of the neighbours who were
ready to throw themselves at her feet. But, from far and near, came many
suitors, Cromwell’s son, Henry, among others; who will be “as acceptable
to her,” she thinks, “as anybody else.” He seems almost worthy of her,
if we believe most accounts of him, and allow for the Presbyterian
animosity of good Mrs. Hutchinson. However, Henry Cromwell disappears
from the scene, marrying elsewhere; whereby English history is possibly
considerably modified. Temple is ordered to get her a dog, an Irish
greyhound. “Henry Cromwell undertook to write to his brother Fleetwood,
for another for me; but I have lost my hopes there; whomsoever it is that
you employ, he will need no other instruction, but to get the biggest he
can meet with. ’Tis all the beauty of those dogs, or of any, indeed, I
think. A mastiff is handsomer to me than the most exact little dog that
ever lady played withal.” Temple, no doubt, procured the biggest dog in
Ireland, not the less joyfully that “she has lost her hopes of Henry
Cromwell.”
There is another lover worthy of special mention—a widower—Sir Justinian
Isham, of Lamport, Northamptonshire, pragmatical enough in his love suit,
causing Mrs. Dorothy much amusement. She writes of him to Temple under
the nickname “The Emperor.” This is the character she gives him: “He was
the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited, learned coxcomb that ever yet I
saw.” Hard words these!
The Emperor, it appears, caused further disagreement between Dorothy and
her brother. Like the kettle in the _Cricket on the Hearth_, the Emperor
began it. “The Emperor and his proposals began it; I talked merrily
on’t till I saw my brother put on his sober face, and could hardly then
believe he was in earnest. It seems he was; for when I had spoke freely
my meaning, it wrought so with him, as to fetch up all that lay upon his
stomach. All the people that I had ever in my life refused were brought
again upon the stage, like Richard the III’s ghosts to reproach me
withal, and all the kindness his discoveries could make I had for you was
laid to my charge. My best qualities, if I have any that are good, served
but for aggravations of my fault, and I was allowed to have wit, and
understanding, and discretions, in all other things, that it might appear
I had none in this. Well, ’twas a pretty lecture, and I grew warm with it
after a while. In short, we came so near to an absolute falling out that
’twas time to give over, and we said so much then that we have hardly
spoken a word together since. But ’tis wonderful to see what curtseys and
legs pass between us, and as before we were thought the kindest brother
and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England.
’Tis a strange change, and I am very sorry for it, but I’ll swear I know
not how to help it.”
It is doubtless unpleasant to be pestered by an unwelcome suitor; however
Dorothy has this compensation, that the Emperor’s proposals and letters
give her mighty amusement.
“In my opinion, these great scholars are not the best writers (of
letters I mean, of books perhaps they are); I never had, I think, but one
letter from Sir Jus, but ’twas worth twenty of anybody’s else to make
me sport. It was the most sublime nonsense that in my life I ever read,
and yet I believe he descended as low as he could to come near my weak
understanding. ’Twill be no compliment after this to say I like your
letters in themselves, not as they come from one that is not indifferent
to me, but seriously I do. All letters, methinks, should be free and easy
as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words
like a charm. ’Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour
to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I
know, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that ‘winter began
to salute us.’ I have no patience at such coxcombs, and cannot blame an
old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man’s head, because
he writ a letter for him, where, instead of saying (as his master bid
him) ‘that he would have writ himself but that he had gout in his hand,’
he said, ‘that the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to
paper.’”
The Emperor, it seems, this much to his credit, is much enamoured of
Mrs. Dorothy; and does not take a refusal quietly. Or is she playing the
coquette with him?
“Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor
Justinian, that comes to renew the treaty? In earnest ’tis true, and I
want your counsel extremely what to do in it. You told me once that of
all my servants you liked him the best. If I could so too, there were no
dispute in’t. Well, I’ll think on’t, and if it succeed I will be as good
as my word: you shall take your choice of my four daughters. Am not I
beholding to him, think you? He says he has made addresses, ’tis true, in
several places since we parted, but could not fix anywhere, and in his
opinion he sees nobody that would make so fit a wife for himself as I. He
has often inquired after me to know if I were not marrying: and somebody
told him I had an ague, and he presently fell sick of one too, so natural
a sympathy there is between us, and yet for all this, on my conscience
we shall never marry. He desires to know whether I am at liberty or
not. What shall I tell him, or shall I send him to you to know? I think
that will be best. I’ll say that you are much my friend, and that I am
resolved not to dispose of myself but with your consent and approbation;
and therefore he must make all his court to you, and when he can bring me
a certificate under your hand that you think him a fit husband for me,
’tis very likely I may have him; till then I am his humble servant, and
your faithful friend.”
But, at length Sir Justinian marries some other fair neighbour, and
vanishes from these pages; leaving, however, other lovers in the field
seeking Dorothy’s hand. “I have a squire now,” she writes, “that is as
good as a knight. He was coming as fast as a coach and six horses could
bring him, but I desired him to stay till my ague was gone, and give
me a little time to recover my good looks, for I protest if he saw me
now he would never desire to see me again. Oh, me! I cannot think how I
shall sit like the lady of the lobster, and give audience at Babram; you
have been there, I am sure, nobody at Cambridge ’scapes it, but you were
never so welcome thither as you shall be when I am mistress of it.” Also
there comes to woo her “a modest, melancholy, reserved man, whose head
is so taken up with little philosophical studies, that I admire how I
found a room there.” A new servant is offered to her: “who had £2000 a
year in present, with £2000 more to come. I had not the curiosity to ask
who he was, which they took so ill that I think I shall hear no more of
it.” Thus in one way or another, she gets rid of them all. But they are
very importunate, these “servants,” as they style themselves, requiring
wit and determination to send them about their business. Dorothy is
determined to marry where she loves. “Surely,” she says, “the whole world
could never persuade me (unless a parent commanded it) to marry one that
I had no esteem for.” It is doubtful if a parent’s command would suffice,
did Dorothy come face to face with such.
Here is a sharp refusal dramatically given to one importunate servant,
Mr. James Fish by name (fancy Dorothy Osborne as Mrs. Fish), who would
fain have become master. “I cannot forbear telling you the other day he
made me a visit; and I, to prevent his making discourses to me, made
Mrs. Goldsmith and Jane sit by all the while. But he came better provided
than I could have imagined. He brought a letter with him, and gave it
me as one that he had met with, directed to me; he thought it came out
of Northamptonshire. I was upon my guard, and suspecting all he said,
examined him so strictly where he had it, before I would open it, that he
was hugely confounded, and I confirmed that ’twas his. I laid it by, and
wished then that they would have left us, that I might have taken notice
on’t to him. But I had forbid it them so strictly before, that they
offered not to stir further than to look out of window, as not thinking
there was any necessity of giving us their eyes as well as their ears;
but he, that thought himself discovered, took that time to confess to me
(in a whispering voice that I could hardly hear myself), that the letter
(as my Lord Broghill says) was of great concern to him, and begged I
would read it, and give him my answer. I took it up presently, as if I
had meant it, but threw it sealed as it was into the fire, and told him
(as softly as he had spoke to me) I thought that the quickest and best
way of answering it. He sat awhile in great disorder without speaking
a word, and so rose and took his leave. Now what think you; shall I
ever hear of him more?” We think not, decidedly. He, like the others,
recovers, doubtless to marry elsewhere.
But Temple’s father, Dorothy’s brother, and her solicitous servants, are
not the only obstacles these lovers meet with. There are long separations
at great distances when the lovers can hear but little of each other. Few
meetings, and these at long intervals, break the monotony of Dorothy’s
life of love.
’Tis not the loss of love’s assurance,
It is not doubting what thou art,
But ’tis the too, too long endurance
Of absence, that afflicts my heart.
Thus would Dorothy have written, perhaps, had she rhymed her thoughts in
these days.
Now and again, indeed, Mrs. Dorothy is in London, “engaged to play and
sup at the Three Kings,” or at Spring Gardens, Foxhall; enjoying for the
time, as gay a life as is possible, in these Puritan days. But this is
not the life for our Dorothy. “We go abroad all day,” she writes, “and
play all night, and say our prayers when we have time. Well, in sober
earnest, now, I would not live thus a twelvemonth, _to gain all that
the king has lost, unless it was to give it him again_.” No! Dorothy’s
life is at Chicksands tending her father, writing to her lover, reading
romances sent to her by him, and crying real tears over the miseries of
their poor pasteboard heroines. In those days Fielding was not, and the
glories of fiction were unknown and quite unconceivable. Mr. Cowley’s
verses reach her (in MS. Courtenay thinks), and occasional news of
political matters. Here, set down in this dull priory house, she lives a
calm domestic life without repining, without sympathy in her troubles.
Is not this difficult; impossible to most, and worthy of a heroine? But,
though her life is at Chicksands, her heart is far away with Temple;
though her eyes are brimming with tears for the sorrows of Almanzar,
it is because they mirror her troubles in their own weak fashion; and,
whilst her soul is longing to commune with her lover, is it marvellous
that by some mesmeric culture, she, quite untrained in literary skill, so
portrays her thoughts that not only were they clearly uttered for Temple,
but remain to us, clothed in the power of clear intention, honesty of
expression, and kindly wit?
Perhaps, in these seven long apprentice years to matrimony, Dorothy
had no trouble causing her more real anguish than her fears concerning
Temple’s religious belief. Gossiping Bishop Burnet, in one of his more
ill-natured passages, tells us that Temple was an Epicurean, thinking
religion to be fit only for the mob; and a corrupter of all that came
near him. Unkind words these, with just perhaps those dregs of truth
in them, which make gossip so hard to bear patiently. Temple, I take
it, was too intelligent not to see the hollow, noisy, drum nature of
much of the religion around him; preferred also, as young men will
do, to air speculative opinions rather than consider them; hence the
bishop’s censure. Was it true, as Courtenay thinks, that jealousy of
King William’s attachment to Temple, disturbed the episcopal equipoise
of soul, rendering his Lordship slanderous, even a backbiter? To us,
brother servants of Dorothy, this matters not. Sufficient pity is it,
that Dorothy is forced to write to her lover in such words as these: “I
tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter: for the love of
God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with
the safety of your soul? Are a thousand women or ten thousand worlds
worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left as you pretend, nor
so little religion; for God’s sake let us not neglect what can only make
us happy for a trifle. If God had seen it fit to have satisfied our
desires, we should have had them, and everything would not have conspired
thus to cross them; since He has decreed it otherwise (at least as far as
we are able to judge by events) we must submit, and not by striving make
an innocent passion a sin, and show a childish stubbornness. I could say
a thousand things more to this purpose if I were not in haste to send
this away, that it may come to you at least as soon as the other.
Adieu.”
Thus, you see, Dorothy is not without her fears; but, though she can
write thus to her lover, yet, when he is attacked by her brother,
she is ready to defend him; having at heart that real faith in his
righteousness, without which there could be no love. “All this,” she
writes in another letter, “I can say to you; but when my brother disputes
it with me, I have other arguments for him, and I drove him up so
close t’other night, that for want of a better gap to get out at, he
was fain to say that he feared as much your having a fortune as your
having none, for he saw you held my Lord S.’s principles; that religion
and honour were things you did not consider at all; and that he was
confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do
anything to advance yourself. I had no patience for this: to say you were
a beggar, your father not worth £4,000 in the whole world, was nothing
in comparison of having no religion, nor no honour. I forgot all my
disguise, and we talked ourselves weary; he renounced me again, and I
defied him.”
There is no religious twaddle in Dorothy’s letters; her religion grew
from within herself, and was not the distorted reflection of Scriptural
beliefs coloured by modern sympathies and antipathies. She does not
satisfy her tendency towards righteousness by the mock humility of
constant self-abasement, or by the juggling misapplication of texts of
Scripture. Indeed, the depth of her faith and belief is not to be seen
on the surface of these letters—hardly, indeed, to be understood at
all, I think, except from the charitable tendency of her thoughts, her
deep silences and self-restraint. Dorothy, it appears, sees with her
clear smiling eyes quite through the loudly-expressed longings for the
next world, which had helped to put some prominent men of the time in
high places in this. “We complain,” she writes, “of this world and the
variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in and yet for all this
who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of
leaving it or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived
all the comforts of life desire to continue it and nothing can wean us
from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity
and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories
that are promised with it. Is this not very like preaching? Well, ’tis
too good for you—you shall have no more on’t. I am afraid you are not
mortified enough for such discourses to work upon, though I am not of my
brother’s opinion neither, that you have no religion in you. In earnest,
I never took anything he ever said half so ill, as nothing is so great an
injury. It must suppose one to be the devil in human shape.”
Seven long years! Which of you, my readers, has waited this time without
a murmur and without a doubt? Was not this an acting of faith far
higher than any letter writing of it? Let us think so, and honour it
as such. Here is a letter, written when doubt almost overwhelmed, when
the _spleen_ (a disease as common now as then, though we have lost the
good name for it) was upon her, when the world looked blank, and life a
drifting mist of despair.
“Let me tell you that if I could help it I would not love you, and that
as long as I live I shall strive against it, as against that which has
been my ruin, and was certainly sent me as a punishment for my sins.
But I shall always have a sense of your misfortunes equal if not above
my own; I shall pray that you may obtain quiet I never hope for but in
my grave, and I shall never change my condition but with my life. Yet
let not this give you a hope. Nothing can ever persuade me to enter
the world again; I shall in a short time have disengaged myself of all
my little affairs in it and settled myself in a condition to apprehend
nothing but too long a life, and therefore I wish you to forget me, and
to induce you to it let me tell you freely that I deserve you should.
If I remember anybody ’tis against my will; I am possessed with that
strange insensibility that my nearest relations have no tie upon me,
and I find myself no more concerned in those that I have heretofore had
great tenderness of affection for, than if they had died long before I
was born; leave me to this, and seek a better fortune: I beg it of you
as heartily as I forgive you all those strange thoughts you have had of
me; think me so still if that will do anything towards it, for God’s sake
so, take any course that may make you happy, or if that cannot be, less
unfortunate at least than
Your friend and humble servant,
D. OSBORNE.”
Such letters are, happily, not numerous. Here is another, of a quite
different nature, in which you can read the practical English sense of
our Dorothy, and her thoughts about love in a cottage:—
“I have not lived thus long in the world, and in this age of changes,
but certainly I know what an estate is; I have seen my father’s reduced
better than £4,000 to not £400 a year, and I thank God I never felt the
change in anything that I thought necessary. I never wanted, and am
confident I never shall. But yet I would not be thought so inconsiderate
a person as not to remember that it is expected from all people that
have sense that they should act with reason; that to all persons some
proportion of fortune is necessary, according to their several qualities,
and though it is not required that one should tie oneself to just so
much, and something is left for one’s inclination, and the difference
in the persons to make, yet still within such a compass; (a little
incoherent this, meaning, I think, that Dorothy does not believe that
even the world would have you choose by money and goods alone), and
such as lay more upon these considerations than they will bear, shall
infallibly be condemned by all sober persons. If any accident out of my
power should bring me to necessity though never so great, I should not
doubt with God’s assistance, but to bear it as well as anybody, and I
should never be ashamed on’t if He pleased to send it me; but if by my
own folly I had put it upon myself, the case would be extremely altered.”
But this is Dorothy in her serious strain; often (how often?) she plays
the lover, and though I disapprove of peeping into such letters,
doubting if Cupid recognises any statute of limitations in these affairs,
yet to complete the fabric we must play eavesdropper for once.
“It will be pleasinger to you, I am sure, to tell you how fond I am of
your lock. Well, in earnest now, and setting aside all compliment I never
saw finer hair, nor of a better colour; but cut no more of it. I would
not have it spoiled for the world; if you love me be careful of it; I am
combing and curling and kissing this lock all day, and dreaming of it all
night. The ring, too, is very well, only a little of the biggest. Send
me a tortoiseshell one to keep it on, that is a little less than that I
sent for a pattern. I would not have the rule absolutely true without
exception, that hard hairs are ill-natured, for then I should be so;
but I can allow that all soft hairs are good, and so are you, or I am
deceived as much as you are, if you think I do not love you enough. Tell
me, my dearest, am I? You will not be if you think I am not yours.”
Space! space! how narrow, how harsh, and ungallant thou art; not ready to
give place, even to Dorothy herself. We must hasten to the end. Dorothy,
it appears, unlike some of her sex, does not like playing the Mrs. Bride
in a public wedding. “I never yet,” she writes, “saw anyone that did not
look simply and out of countenance, nor ever knew a wedding well designed
but one, and that was of two persons who had time enough I confess to
contrive it, and nobody to please in’t but themselves. He came down into
the country where she was upon a visit, and one morning married her. As
soon as they came out of the church, they took coach and came for the
town, dined at an inn by the way, and at night came into lodgings that
were provided for them, where nobody knew them, and where they passed for
married people of seven years’ standing. The truth is I could not endure
to be Mrs. Bride in a public wedding, to be made the happiest person on
earth; do not take it ill, for I would endure it if I could, rather than
fail, but in earnest I do not think it were possible for me.”
But her father is now dead. Her brother, Peyton, is to make the treaty
for her. Here is the letter, dated for once (Oct. 2, 1654), inviting
Temple to come, and she will name the day; at least, Courtenay tells
us, that in this interview the preliminaries were settled. “After a
long debate with myself how to satisfy you, and remove that rock (as
you call it) which in your apprehensions is of no great danger, I am at
last resolved to let you see that I value your affection for me at as
high a rate as you yourself can set it, and that you cannot have more
of tenderness for me and my interests than I shall ever have for yours.
The particulars how I intend to make this good, you shall know when I
see you, which, since I find them here more irresolute in point of time
(though not as to the journey itself) than I hoped they would have been,
notwithstanding your quarrel to me, and the apprehensions you would make
me believe you have that I do not care to see you—pray come hither, and
try whether you shall be welcome or not.”
And now one moment of suspense. A last trial to the lover’s constancy.
The bride is taken dangerously ill. So seriously ill that the doctors
rejoice when the disease pronounces itself to be small-pox. Alas! who
shall now say what are the inmost thoughts of our Dorothy? Does she not
now need all her faith in her lover, in herself, ay, and in God, to
uphold her in this new affliction. She rises from her bed, her beauty
of face destroyed; her fair looks living only on the painter’s canvas,
unless we may believe that they were etched in deeply bitten lines on
Temple’s heart. But this skin beauty is not the firmest hold she has
on Temple’s affections; this was not the beauty that had attracted her
lover, and held him enchained in her service for seven years of waiting
and suspense; this was not the only light leading him through dark days
of doubt, almost of despair, constant, unwavering in his troth to her.
Other beauty, not outward, of which I may not write, having seen it but
darkly, only through these letters; knowing it indeed to be there, but
quite unable to visualise it fully, or to paint it clearly on these
pages; other beauty it is, than that of face and form, that made Dorothy
to Temple and to all men, in fact, as she was in name—the gift of God.
They are wedded, says Courtenay, at the end of 1654; and thus my task
ends. Of Lady Temple there is little to know, and this is not the
place to set it down. She lies on the north side of the west aisle at
Westminster, with her husband and children.
“Her body sleeps in Capel’s monument,
And her immortal past with angels lives.”
You, reading for yourself, will perhaps gaze upon the darkened tablet,
with new interest; and may, perhaps, thank him who has shown you this
picture. Yes, thank him, not as author or historian, but as a servant
holding a lamp, but ill-trimmed may be, before a glowing picture, careful
that what light he holds, may not glisten on its shining surface,
and hide the painting from sight; or as a menial, drawing aside with
difficulty the heavy, dusty curtain of intervening ages which has veiled
from human eyes the beautiful figure of Dorothy Osborne. She herself is
the picture, and the painter of it; the historian of her own history. But
not even to her are the real thanks due; these must be humbly offered to
Him from whom she came to represent
“A holy woman and the perfect wife.”
THE DEBTOR OF TO-DAY.
“He that dies pays all debts.”
_Tempest_ iii., 2.
The debtor is a slave. In the nature of things he always has been and
must be a slave. The debtor of to-day is not such a direct slave as his
ancestor of remote ages, but he is, in political phrase, a relic of
barbarism living under servile conditions. As he has no organisation,
and as, in the picturesque analogy of the man in the street, he is a
bottom-dog in every sense of the word, no one worries about him. Eleven
thousand of him go to gaol every year, and process is issued against
three or four hundred thousand, but there is no party capital to be made
out of the subject, no one statesman can abuse any other statesman for
neglecting the question, and the churches and chapels are so keen about
fighting over the technicalities of catechisms that they have no time to
worry over the sorrows of the debtor of to-day.
It was not always so. Elisha the Prophet thought it worth while to
perform a miracle on one well-known occasion in order to pay the bailiffs
out. The creditor, if you remember, had come to the widow’s house “to
take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.” In those days you took in
execution not only the debtor himself, but his wife and family. Elisha
was indignant. He orders the widow to borrow her neighbour’s vessels and
fills them miraculously with oil. Then he says: “Go, sell the oil and
pay thy debt, and live thou and thy children of the rest.” One does not
expect miracles from our clergy of to-day, but a consideration of the
subject, and the discussion of its social aspects, would be a following
out of Elisha’s example. I for one have never yet heard a sermon on
imprisonment for debt, but the texts are plentiful, and to any intending
preacher I will willingly supply the references.
As in Hebrew times, so in the days of Greece and Rome, you find the
slavery of the debtor continue, and what seems to be wanting in the
legislator of to-day, an anxiety to relieve his condition. Solon, the
Greek law-giver, had sounder notions of the matter than any modern Home
Secretary whose views I have come across. It would be interesting to
trace the evolution of our poor unfortunate County Court debtor of to-day
across the spacious pages of history, through the various degrees of
ignominy, slavery, and misery that the debtor has been made to suffer,
until we see him what he is to-day—not a very ill-used martyr, perhaps,
but the victim of an utterly out-of-date system, the remnant of the cruel
laws of the Middle Ages.
To Charles Dickens must be awarded a great portion of the honour that is
due to those who abolished the horrible incidents of the imprisonment
for debt that existed in his day.
The picture of the old debtor dying in the Fleet after twenty years
of captivity must have haunted even the most callous official the
Circumlocution Office ever produced. Great reforms followed, but in
the usual English way, in scraps and portions by means of compromise
and amendment, and by degrees. At last, in 1869, came the start of the
present system of imprisonment for debt which abolished a great deal of
imprisonment, but left the very poorest still under threat of the gaol if
they did not pay their debts. There were many great reformers of that day
who saw that the time was even then ripe for total abolition, and that
the House of Commons was legislating on too conservative lines.
Jessel, a great lawyer and a sound law-giver, laid down the principle
that has always been to me a statement of the true gospel on this
question. “In no case,” he says, “should a man suffer penal imprisonment
because he failed to pay a certain sum of money on a private contract
with which the public had nothing to do.” When we have legislated to that
effect we shall get rid of this relic of the barbarous ages that is still
with us—imprisonment for debt.
And a word to explain what the system means. It must be remembered that
the smaller debts in County Courts are generally ordered to be paid by
instalments. Where a debt or instalment is in arrear, and it is proved
to the satisfaction of the Court that the person making default either
has, or has had since the date of the order or judgment, the means to
pay the sum in respect of which he has made default, and has refused
or neglected to pay, the Judge may commit him to prison for a period
of not more than forty-two days. In practice the wind is very much
tempered to the shorn lamb, and a period of twenty-one days is generally
the maximum imprisonment ordered. In practice, also, debtors will beg,
borrow, and perhaps do worse rather than go to prison, and the result is
that the percentage actually imprisoned is small. This, to my mind, has
very little bearing on the question whether the system is a wise one in
the interests of the State and of the working-man. For it must not be
forgotten that the system is in practice a system of collecting debts
from the wage-earning class, and the wage-earning class only. It is, of
course, incidentally used against small tradesmen and others, but the
bulk of those against whom orders are made are working-men. As the late
Mr. Commissioner Kerr said in 1873, “The rich man makes a clean sweep of
it, and begins again, and the poor man has a miserable debt hanging round
his neck all his life.”
For the rich bankrupt is really rather a pampered creature. Here you have
the younger son of a duke whose creditors are mostly money-lenders and
tradesmen, whose downfall is due to betting, and who has known of his
insolvency for a long period, owing £36,631, and his assets are £100.
The Official Receiver drops a silent tear of pity over the statement
of affairs, and, like the tear of the recording angel, it blots out
the record and the younger son goes forth ducally to prey upon a new
generation of creditors. Here, again, you have a bankrupt, an ex-Army
officer, living on his wife’s income, and betting, and winding up with
debts £27,741, and assets £667. These are not fancy cases, they come out
of the stern, dull reports of the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy. And as
long as such men are allowed to live without fear of imprisonment day by
day, we cannot sit down and say with a clear conscience that we have only
one law for rich and poor.
The chief evil of the present system of imprisonment for debt is
the undesirable class of trade and traders that it encourages: the
money-lenders, the credit drapers, the “Scotchmen,” the travelling
jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all those firms who tout their
goods round the streets for sale by small weekly instalments, relying
on imprisonment for debt to enable them to plant their goods out on the
weaklings. The law as it stands assists the knave at the expense of the
fool. I was discussing with a rather slow-minded working-man and his wife
why he had purchased a showy and unsatisfactory sideboard wholly beyond
his means. It had been seized and sold for rent, and he had this burden
of a few pounds debt to clear off as best he might.
“Why buy it?” I asked.
“My wife would have it,” he replied.
“Why did she want it?” I asked.
“She didn’t want it, but yon man (the shopman) seemed to _instil_ the
sideboard into her.”
The shopman was a clever salesman, no doubt, but does anyone suppose he
would have _instilled_ a sideboard into the workman’s wife if it had not
been for imprisonment for debt. To a working-man on small weekly wages no
credit can be given in any commercial sense. His only asset is character,
and there are many retail traders who never come near the County Court at
all, because they make it a rule only to give credit after inquiry.
Constantly one finds goods taken by women, and immediately pawned,
the proceeds being spent on drink. How can a workman prevent this? He
probably never hears of the matter until a judgment summons is served
on him. I asked such a man the other day if his wife had had the goods,
mentioning the date when they were said to be delivered.
“I don’t doubt she had the goods. Indeed, she must have got some goods
that day,” he admitted.
I asked why.
“Because that day she got locked up for being drunk and disorderly, and I
never knew until now where she got the money.”
This is by no means an isolated case. I have been several times applied
to by quite respectable men whose wives had run up debts with as many
as twelve to nineteen different drapers for relief under the power
permitting of small bankruptcies. One man told me he was putting a
nail in the wall, and on moving a picture he found some County Court
summonses. I asked him what he did.
“I upbraided my wife,” he replied, in a rather melancholy tone, “and she
ran away, and I have never seen her since.”
A creditor corroborated the fact, and it was clear that debt had
destroyed that household. The man had no idea that there were any debts
owing, they had been hidden from him, but he thought it right to arrange
honestly enough to pay them all off. Many a man removes, or has his house
sold over his head, or his wife leaves him through misunderstanding
arising out of credit recklessly given for useless articles, and the law
as it stands encourages this kind of thing.
Nor can it be said that the wife is always to blame. The husband finds
that his wife can obtain credit at any grocer’s for the week’s food,
and the necessity of carrying home his wages to the chancellor of his
domestic exchequer is less apparent. The temptation to spend wages on
drink or gambling is distinctly encouraged in the debtor of to-day by a
system that makes credit so readily obtainable by the unthrifty and unfit.
There was a story illustrating this aspect of the matter told me by a
member of a relief committee during the late war. The committee were
paying women half wages whilst the men were at the front. The wife of a
working-man refused a sovereign saying, “That ain’t half my man’s wages.”
It was explained that he earned forty shillings.
The honest woman shook her head. “Nay, he didn’t,” she said. “Nowt o’
sort. He never earned more than twenty-five. Twenty-three he give me, and
two shillings spending money.”
After some time and examination of the books, the good lady was convinced
that she was entitled to a sovereign, and she went away aghast at her
husband’s deceit, and murmured, “Eh, but if yon Boers don’t kill him,
wait till I get him back!”
One reason why imprisonment should be abolished in relation, at all
events, to amounts under forty shillings is the dangerous and slippery
paths of evidence along which a Judge has to walk in dealing with
small cases. Some witnesses have not the remotest idea of their duties
and responsibilities. On one occasion a low-class Jewish workman was
sufficiently impressed with his responsibilities to make the following
demand after he was sworn.
“My lort, I cannot be a vitness in this case.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything about it?”
“Oh, yes, I know all about it, but I don’t vant to speak.”
After a good deal of trouble I obtained from him the reason of his
reticence.
“You see,” he said, “Moses (the plaintiff) is mine brother-in-law, and
little Isaac (the defendant) he is mine vife’s nephew, and if I speak
about this case, vy, I must give vun of them avay.”
I condoled with him about his family difficulties, and tried to persuade
him that his duty was to speak the truth, but my only recollection of his
evidence is that it was of no service to anyone, and that he certainly
succeeded in giving himself away.
In a family dispute the greatest care must be taken to accept nothing as
true that can possibly be prompted by hatred or malice. To do justice
to the Jews they do not, as a rule, bring family disputes into court. A
cynical registrar once told me that a Jew would swear anything for his
brother, and a Christian anything against his brother. Without endorsing
this epigrammatic exaggeration, I must sorrowfully admit that a downright
North Country fight between blood relations over club money or the cost
of a funeral tea or the furniture of a deceased parent is one of the
saddest exhibitions of uncharitableness that I know.
The recklessness with which good ladies of unblemished character will
commit what technical-minded lawyers might be inclined to consider
perjury, and on occasion even stoop to something like forgery, would
surprise anyone who was not conversant with it. In ordinary matters
these good people are honest citizens enough, but in a family dispute
honour requires that no iniquity must be left undone in order to gain the
day. I remember in my early days a fat old dame of cheerful countenance
suing her son-in-law, a young workman, for £2 17s. 9d. The odd shillings
and pence were admitted, but the £2, which figured through two or three
greasy books as “ballanse of account,” could not be traced to any
particular source.
The old lady swore it was a grocery account. The young man denied it with
emphasis, and said it was spite. Sarah, the old lady’s elder daughter,
remembered some of the items of it, and with a great relish swore to them
in detail. The young wife, who had been keeping a very lively baby quiet,
and trying in between whiles to give evidence from the body of the court,
at last got into the witness-box. Flinging the baby into her husband’s
arms, and kissing the book with a smack, she shot out the following
testimony at her mother and myself: “Look ’ere, mother, you know reet
enow what that there balance is; it ain’t no balance at all—it’s my ’at
and the wedding-dress, and the shoes to match, and the pair o’ greys
what druv us to church, which I paid for when I was in service for three
years, putting by ’arf-a-crown a month, which mother kep’ for me, and
well she knows it, which it’s Sarah’s spite as ain’t got married yet.”
What was the real truth may be doubtful, but I was clear the “ballanse
of account” was not groceries, and struck it out; yet, had the mother
succeeded, she would have pursued her son-in-law to prison in an
endeavour to collect the money.
For my part I think it is bad business for the community that homes
should be broken up in order that a creditor may collect a trumpery debt
that should never have been incurred, and it is because I believe it is
the interest of the State to keep together the home of the working-man,
and to deliver him from temptation, that I hope to see imprisonment
for debt diminished, if not abolished altogether. An intelligent
landlord wishing to preserve game kills off birds of prey and puts down
poachers. An intelligent State, if it wishes to preserve the home of the
working-man and his wife and children, should make it illegal for him to
mortgage his future earnings, and to place his liberty in jeopardy in
order to possess for the moment some shoddy piece of jewellery or drapery
for which he has no real use.
THE FOLK-LORE OF THE COUNTY COURT.
“To those athirst the whole world seems
A spring of water in their dreams.”
_From the Arabic._
Being snowed up in a library, well stocked with modern scientific
folk-lore, I began a serious study of the subject. I started with
enthusiasm. I saw myself propounding a new theory for every variant
text, and pictured myself triumphantly riding through the otherworld
on the Ossianic cycle. After a few days of it, however, I found that,
wonderful as the science was, it was not made for me. I ran into a
thick German fog, I got mixed up with _sagzug_ and _märchen_, I failed
to appreciate the true differences between those holy men, Zimmer and
Rohde, and I wandered aimlessly among parallels and analogues of varying
age and _provenance_. When I emerged from the German fog I found myself
staggering about a bleak Irish moor in company with a fellow named
Cormac—or was it Finn? We were studying the _Dinnshenchas_, or playing
with an _Agallamh_ or looking for a _Leprechaun_. It was worse than
political economy, or logic, or the lost tribes. The fiscal problem is
merriment compared to folk-lore. I finished my holiday with Trollope and
have put folk-lore on my index _expurgatorius_.
One thing, however, haunts me still. I seem to have escaped from the
learned confusions of this dismal science with a belief that the world
is certainly not progressing. They took a lot of trouble at school to
persuade me that the world kept going round. Since I have dipped into
folk-lore I find this to be only part of the truth. The fact seems to
be that the world does nothing else but go round and round and round,
reiterating its old ideas in a very tiresome way indeed. The things we
do and gossip and preach about to-day are much the same as the things
they worried over in the ages of caves and mammoths and flint implements.
I feel sorry that I cannot explore folk-lore further, for there are
evidently great possibilities in it. But folk-lore is like collecting
stamps, or keeping gold-fish or guinea-pigs. It is a “fancy,” and if you
don’t fancy it you cannot be of the “fancy.” The slang of the science
is too difficult for most of us, and if you cannot master the technical
terms of a game, how can you hope to play it? Even football would be dull
if you had no elementary conception of “off-side,” and it is easier to
get “off-side” at folk-lore than it is at football. Then these scientists
are so solemn. Euclid has his pictures and occasionally admits that
things are absurd; but the smiles of folk-lore are in the otherworld, and
even their ghosts do not appear to the latter-day student.
I should never have troubled further about folk-lore had not I met one of
its greatest professors. To him I unburdened myself and told my trouble.
“Folk-lore books,” he explained, “are not made to read. They are written
to amuse the writer. You write about folk-lore—then you will begin to
enjoy it.” I remembered that Lord Foppington held similar views when he
said: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the
forced product of another man’s brain. Now, I think a man of quality and
breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” An idea
held in common by a peer and a professor must be precious indeed.
I modestly murmured that I knew nothing about folk-lore. To which the
Professor encouragingly remarked that I should “approach the subject
with an open mind.” “There is one royal road to success,” he said, as we
parted, “have a theory of your own, and whatever happens, stick to it.”
Now curiously enough, I had a theory about folk-lore. It was the
simple common idea that comes to many children even in their earliest
school-days. The schoolmasters were all wrong. The professors of
folk-lore were teaching it upside down. Instead of beginning with ancient
legends and working back towards to-day, they should begin with to-day
and march forward into the past. I wired to the Professor about it—reply
prepaid. His answer was encouraging. “Theory probably Celtic origin;
stick.”
As my business is to preside over a County Court, I went down to my work
full of my theory and determined at all costs to stick to it. I know
that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-place for
microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer sees in it
only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary disputes, whilst the
facile reporter comes there to wash from its social dirt a few ounces of
golden humour for his latest headline. These are but surface views. I
went there like the poet, “whose seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore,
and I was overwhelmed.
No sooner did I enter the Court, as I had done many and many a hundred
times, than the High Bailiff, rising in his place, called out, as
he, too, had done many a hundred times, “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! All
persons having business in the Manchester County Court draw near and
give attention.” At once I knew that the place I was in belonged to the
old days of fairies and knights, and ladies and giants, and heroes and
dragons. The “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” struck my certain ear and told me I was
in the presence of folk-lore. The creeping voice of the old world came
stealing across the ages, calling upon me “Oyez!” “Hear!” and if you can
“Understand!” It seemed to bring its message with a sly chuckle as if to
say, “There you are, my modern, up-to-date, twentieth century judicial
person, beginning your day’s work with the same old cry that has called
men together to listen to official wisdom for centuries of time.”
My friend the High Bailiff has not, I am sure, the least notion that he
is, from a folk-lore point of view, a man of parallels and analogues,
or that the “fancy” would undoubtedly classify him along with that most
beautiful of human fritillaries, the Herald. For indeed, in everything
but glory of costume, he is one of those delightful figures of the middle
ages who carried challenges and messages of peace and war, and set out
the lists in jousts and tournaments, and witnessed combats and wagers of
battle—which my friend sits and watches to-day—and recorded the names
of those who did valiantly, and remembered the dead when the fight was
over—which to-day he leaves to the reporters. Here in this dingy court
in a Manchester back street students of folk lore may see a real Herald
calling out “Oyez! Oyez!” announcing that the lists are open, and that
anyone may come prancing into Court and throw down his glove—with the
post-heroic gloss of a treasury hearing fee upon it—and that if the
challenge be taken up, the fight may proceed according to the custom of
County Courts.
I would inaugurate a movement to apparel the High Bailiff in scarlet
and gold lace, and I would have him ride into Court on a white palfrey,
sounding a trumpet, but that I fear it would lead to jealousy among
Registrars. Besides, some envious German Professor will, I know, point
out that as a crier my High Bailiff is more akin to the _Praeco_ of a
Roman auction, and that the village town crier is his poor relation. The
answer to this is that his auctioneering tendencies really belong to his
bailiff cycle, as the “fancy” would say. And as a bailiff we could, did
time permit, trace him in dry-as-dust glossaries and abridgments, through
a line of sheriffs of counties, and stewards of manors, and in various
forms of governors and superintendents, until we lose sight of him as a
kind of tutor to the sons of emperors in the twilight of the gods.
Let the High Bailiff call on the first case, and say with Richard
Plantagenet, Duke of York:
This is the day appointed for the combat,
And ready are the appellant and defendant,
The armourer and his man to enter the lists;
So please your Highness to behold the fight.
It seems a real pity that we no longer follow the rubric of the Second
Part of Henry VI., and that we cannot see Horner enter with his
neighbours “bearing his staff with a sand-bag fastened to it,” on the
other side, “Peter with a drum and a sand-bag.” Horner and Peter to-day
would make a much better fight of it, thumping each other with sand-bags,
than they do “barging” at each other with tongues, and they would be
better friends afterwards. With a small charge for admission, too, and
two houses a night, the County Courts might be self-supporting.
But we have not got very far away from the wager of battle after all.
The hired champion is still with us from the house of the old Knights
Templars, but he breaks his wit against his adversary instead of a lance.
In another hundred years or so our methods of settling disputes may seem
as laughable and melodramatic to our more reasonable great grandchildren
as our grandfathers’ romantic methods seem to us. They may think that
fees paid to eminent counsel, dressed in antique shapes, to exhibit their
powers before packed galleries, according to the ancient and musty rules
of a game that is wholly out of date, is an absurd way of endeavouring to
reconcile human differences. The whole thing must before long, one would
think, tumble into the dustbin of history and become folk-lore. But the
legendary charm of the absurdity will always remain. Sir Edward Clarke
or Mr. Rufus Isaacs, appearing for an injured ballet-girl in a breach of
promise case against a faithless and wicked peer, is only a new setting
of the story of Perseus and Andromeda, with the golden addition of a
special fee. Perhaps there is even a parallel for the special fee in the
old myth, for may it not be said that in a sense Perseus was moved to
leave his usual circuit, and appear against the dragon by the tempting
special fee of Andromeda herself? Could such a glorious figure be marked
on the brief of to-day, what eloquence we should listen to.
The longer one stays in a County Court, the more does the atmosphere seem
charged with folk-lore. Sagas seem to float in the air with the soot
of our smoky chimneys, and wraiths of old customs swim in the draughty
currents of cold that whistle under our doors. No sooner does a witness
step into the box than one perceives that he too is an eternal type, and
our methods of dealing with him as everlasting as the forms of the waves.
The Greeks with all their noble ideals were a practical people, and the
exactitude of their terminology is beyond praise; with a true instinct
they described their witness as μάρτυς, a martyr. For, in the Golden Age,
and equally I take it, in the Bronze, Stone, and Flint Chip period, the
only way to stimulate your witness to truth was by blood or fire. These
rough, kind-hearted, jovial, out-of-door fellows had not considered the
superior and more subtle torture of cross-examination. The rack and the
stake were good enough for them. Yet I feel sorry for the Greeks. How an
Athenian mob would have enjoyed the intellectual entertainment of Mr.
Hawkins, Q.C., administering one of those searching cross-examinations
so lovingly described in Lord Brampton’s “Book of Martyrs.” Many others
I have heard greatly skilled in this truly gentle art, but no one who
played the game with such sporting strictness or approached his task
with such loving joy. To see a witness in his hands made one feel almost
jealous of the victim. To say this is only to say that to be a great
advocate you must also be a great sportsman. How many moderns could
handle a witness after the manner of Master Izaak Walton dealing with
his frog? “I say, put your hook, I mean the arming-wire, through his
mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew the
upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your
hook; or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed wire; and,
in so doing, use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little
as you may possibly that he may live the longer.” Alas! Lord Brampton’s
arming-wire is laid on the shelf, and the pike in his pool mourns for
Master Izaak—but what sportsmen they were. Really, when I think of the
sorrows of the human frog in the witness-box, I begin to think the hour
is coming to start a Witness Preservation Society with a paid secretary
and a London office. It would be a charity—and there is a lot of money in
charity nowadays.
Some day I will write a book the size of a Wensleydale cheese on the
folk-lore of evidence. It should be written in German, but unfortunately
I am such a bigoted Imperialist that I have patriotically avoided the
study of the tongue. It should perhaps be published in several cheeses,
and the biggest cheese should be all about the Oath. It was the flood
of folk-lore on this subject that overwhelmed me when I first began to
consider the matter.
In our County Court we administered two oaths.[1] The Scotch oath, with
uplifted hand, and the English oath, with its undesirable ceremony of
kissing the Book. The Scotch form is incomparably the older, and though
some maintain that the hand of the witness is lifted to show he has no
weapon about him, there seems no doubt that the sounder view is that
both Judge and witness are really each lifting his hand in appeal to the
Deity. In this way did the Greeks lift their hands at the altars of their
gods when they made sacrifice. In similar fashion was the oath to Wodin
administered in the Orkneys by two persons joining their hands through
the hole in the ring-stone of Stennis. So also Aaron “lifted up his hand
toward the people.” And it is no stretch of imagination to suppose the
lifting of the hands to the sun to have been one of the most natural and
solemn attitudes of early man. In the Scotch form of oath we seem to have
a ceremony that has been with us from the earliest dawn of humanity. I
have seen this oath administered in a Scotch Court, and it certainly
still retains many of the solemn incidents of a religious ceremony, and
compares very favourably from a serious dramatic point of view with the
English oath as administered here. The fact that the Judge administers
the oath himself, standing with hand uplifted, is impressive, at all
events to those to whom it is not made stale by custom. To me it seems a
very appropriate ceremony in an old-world system of law such as prevails
in Scotland, where there are numerous judges and not too much work to
do. In a busy English urban County Court, it would render the life of a
Judge uninsurable.
Our English oath is a much younger branch of the family. I have made my
own theory of its incidents, and remembering my professor’s advice, I
propose to stick to it. It is a quite modern idea that the oath should be
taken on the New Testament. Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, writing to John Paston
in 1460, says that the late Sir John Falstafe in his place at Suffolk,
“by his othe made on his primer then granted and promitted me to have
his manner of Gunton.” Even as late as 1681, Coke’s “Institutes” print a
form of oath with the Roman Catholic adjuration, “So help you God and all
Saints.” An Irish woman in Salford County Court quite recently objected
to kiss the Book, and desired to kiss a crucifix. But the “kissing” idea
is very modern. In 1681 it seems clear that kissing the Book was not a
necessary official act. All that was necessary was to place the hand upon
the Bible. “It is called a corporall oath,” writes Coke, “because he
toucheth with his hand some part of the Holy Scripture.”
The efficacy of the “touch” runs through all the old legends, and we have
an amusing survival of it to-day when a punctilious Crier insists upon
a nervous lady struggling out of her glove before he will hand her the
Book, and again, in the peremptory order constantly given by a clerk when
handing the Book to a witness, “Right hand, if you please.” For these
demands there is as far as I know no legal sanction, and I take them to
be echoes of the social system of these islands that prevailed some time
prior to the building of Stonehenge.
Touching a sacred object seems a world-wide method of oath-taking. The
Somali—who are not yesterday’s children—have a special sacred stone, and
observe a very beautiful ceremony. One party says, “God is before us, and
this stone is from Amr Bur,” naming a fabulous and sacred mountain. The
other party receiving the stone says, “I shall not lie in this agreement,
and therefore take this stone from you.” Let us hope that what follows is
more satisfactory than are my everyday experiences.
The exact origin of kissing the Book in English Courts, though modern, is
obscure. It is not, I should say, a matter of legal obligation, but seems
to be merely a custom dating from the middle or end of the eighteenth
century. If a witness claims to follow the law according to Coke, and
to take his “corporall oath” by touching the Book, who shall refuse him
his right? The “kissing” act seems akin indeed to what the “fancy” call,
somewhat unpleasantly, a saliva custom, which in modern western life
exists in very few forms, though many of the lower classes still “spit”
on a coin for luck. The subject is a very large one, but the fundamental
idea of all customs relating to saliva seems to have been a desire for
union with divinity, and if the Book were always kissed in our Courts
with that aspiration, the custom might well be retained.
Unfortunately, the practical value of an oath depends in almost exact
ratio upon the depth of superstition of the person to whom it is
administered. The moral man will speak truth for practical moral reasons.
The immoral man will lie for practical immoral reasons. The latter in the
old days was hindered by the oath from lying, because he firmly believed
in the practical evil effects of breaking the oath. The perjurer of old
was certainly “looking for trouble.” This is not a phrase of the “fancy,”
but it exactly describes the oath-breaker’s position. Some of the few
minor _sequelæ_ of perjury were such domestic troubles as a curse which
ran on to the seventh generation, or the perjurer’s death from lingering
disease in twelve months, or that he would be turned into stone, or that
the earth might swallow him up and that after death he would wander round
as a vampire. These simple beliefs, which were no doubt part of the
cave-dwellers’ early religious education, must have done a great deal to
render the evidence of early man more trustworthy and accurate than that
of his degenerate younger brother.
Though in an occasional burst of atavism an uneducated man may kiss
his thumb instead of the Book, the bulk of humanity take any oath that
is offered without any deep feeling of religious sanction, nor any
particular fear of supernatural results. It is not altogether a matter
of regret that this should be so. Our ceremony of oath-taking is really
a Pagan one. Our very verb “to swear” takes us back to the pre-Christian
days when man’s strength and his sword were the masters, and peace and
goodwill had come to conquer the earth. To swear was a vow to Heaven
upon a sword. When we offer the Book to a witness to swear upon, we
really tender him, not a Christian thought, but the old Pagan oath which,
splendid as it was, is no longer of force. It was a fine thing in its
day when a knight vowed upon his sword “to serve the King right well by
day and night, on field, on wave, at ting, at board—in peace, in war, in
life or death; so help him Thor and Odin, likewise _his own good sword_.”
It is no use replacing the sword by the Book if you retain the spirit of
the sword in the old Pagan ceremony. The word “to swear” is very closely
related to the word “sword,” and the very essence of swearing, deep down
in the root form of the thing and the word itself, is to take one’s
sword in one’s right hand, and fight for one’s own side with an energy
that will make the Pagan gods shout with joy in the Valhalla. Medical
witnesses and land surveyors are real Vikings in this respect, especially
as it seems to me those of Celtic origin.
But of a truth it is not only the oath and the witnesses that want
amendment. For when I suggest that it would be well in Court if we obeyed
the command, “Swear not at all,” and that the outward use of the Book
in the County Court is undesirable, it is because I feel that some such
thing as a Court on the lines of the teaching of the Book ought not to
be wholly impossible after 1,900 years of endeavour. You must drive out
of the Court all the folk-lore with its Pagan notions of fighting and
hired champions and oaths, and witnesses and heralds, and above all you
must get rid of the anachronism of a Judge, and appoint in his place a
peace-maker or official reconciler. The idea is not wholly Quixotic. Lord
Brougham, a very practical reformer, had hopes of constructing Courts of
Reconciliation in this country seventy years ago. We shall not close the
courts of litigation and replace them by courts of reconciliation in a
day. But I am optimist enough to hope that I may go down to my work one
morning to find that we have been taken over by a new department called
the Office of Peace, and that under the Royal Arms is our new official
motto, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”
CONCERNING DAUGHTERS.
“As is the mother so is the daughter.”
_Ezekiel_ xvi., 44.
I am far from thinking Ezekiel knew much about it. True he was a married
man and a householder, but I remember no evidence of his being the
father of daughters. At all events if he thought that the education and
bringing up of daughters was an inferior thing because of the authority
of mothers, I think he was gravely mistaken. When the daughters of the
middle ages were part of the household plant their mothers turned them
out with certain practical qualities that made them a valuable asset to
the comfort of mankind.
It was when unthinking fathers began to meddle in the affair and to
consider the subject of the education of their daughters that the
trouble began. The fathers—particularly the middle class Early Victorian
father—discovered that it was a desirable thing to be a gentleman.
Remembering and misapplying one of the catch words of his own education
that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another,
he thought it was equally important to the success of his family that as
his sons were to be gentlemen his daughters should be gentlewomen.
And this is where he missed it. The word “gentlewoman” is obscure, but
it is certainly not the grammatical feminine of gentleman. True it has
a narrow technical dictionary meaning, but it is used popularly to
signify the result of a well-to-do middle class father’s education of
his daughters, as in the phrase “Gentlewoman’s Employment Association”
the name of an excellent society for helping daughters of the well-to-do
father when he is deceased or has ceased to be well-to-do.
Concerning daughters then, and to help their fathers to bring them up
as gentlewomen I take upon myself as one who has given grave personal
consideration to the subject, to offer a few suggestions of a practical
nature; for I have found the gentleman father in the matter of the
education of girls—like his namesake the gentleman farmer in matters of
agriculture—to be an enthusiastic and amiable, but eccentric amateur.
And remember my dear sir, that there are two main objects to be kept in
view in the education of a daughter. The first is to fit her for the
ultimate ownership of a well-to-do husband, the second is to guard her
from acquiring any knowledge or capacity that might take her out of the
ranks of the unemployable.
And first of marriage. Charlotte Lucas when she has made up her mind
to the inevitable Mr. Collins, “was,” writes Jane Austen, “tolerably
composed. She had gained her point and had time to consider it. Her
reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure,
was neither sensible nor agreeable: his society was irksome and his
attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband.
Without thinking highly of either man or of matrimony, marriage had
always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well
educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving
happiness must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”
How refreshing in these neurotic days is Charlotte’s old-fashioned
commonsense. And once recognising that marriage is the “pleasantest
preservative from want” a father may be wise to leave the affair to
mothers and daughters and chance. Holding, as I do, the extreme doctrine
that anything that a mother does is of necessity absolutely right, I
do not propose to enlarge upon this branch of the subject. There is a
belief, however, among social naturalists that the solvent son-in-law is
fast becoming extinct. This may be from the fact that he has been hunted
with too great rigour in the past. The handsome but non-solvent variety
though ornamental in the house is vastly expensive. Then there is the
larger question of grandchildren. Here, too, sentiment finds itself again
opposed by considerations of economy.
The problem of training one’s daughters to become in Charlotte
Lucas’s phrase “well educated” or as Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth
so constantly word it “gentlewomen” is a far easier matter, and may
therefore be the more safely left in the hands of a father. Still in
this, as in the more serious amusements of life, there are principles to
be followed.
The main object of such education to-day should be to give girls what
their brothers describe as “a good all round time.” Avoid anything
that hints of serious work, eschew “grind,” choose a multitude of
accomplishments rather than any one serious study, encourage the
collection of useless objects and the manufacture of much fancy-work,
and by this means there will be little fear of your girls attaining any
real knowledge of affairs. So may your daughter be as one of the polished
corners of the Temple, in the world and of the world, and in her you will
see reflected the delightful patterns of the society by which she is
surrounded.
But to descend to particulars. In early life commence with home-training.
Beware of kindergartens. They are too often taught by women trained from
early life in habits of work. They are apt to instil ways of industry,
and to cultivate a socialistic tendency towards unselfishness, and
might even at an early age suggest to the girl baby that the mission
of women is to work as well as to weep. The poet must not however be
taken too literally about this. Men _must_ work and women _must_ weep,
but intervals ought clearly to be allowed for joint amusement, and
the length of these is for one’s own decision. In her young days then
let the girl be taught that she alone exists in the world, and that
other human beings are mere dream persons. The difference, never to be
bridged over, between herself and the household servants, ought to be
constantly insisted upon. A nursery governess is a suitable companion.
Some of these neither know nor desire to know how to scrub a nursery,
and teaching is not their mission. Obtain one if possible, who is a
nursery governess only in name, she will be cheap, and what is more
important to you—ladylike. In a few years a school becomes a necessity;
partly from the irksomeness of constant association with a spoiled
child, but more immediately in the real interests of the girl herself.
Choose by all means a school that you cannot well afford. Here your
daughter will meet with companionship that must fill her young mind with
ideals of life and society that cannot possibly be attained by her in
after life. Be careful, too, not to thwart her expenditure in dress or
amusement. Shun the modern craze—sprung up now I fear even among the
wealthiest—for instruction in such subjects as cookery, dressmaking, and
the like. A camera is a necessity. It enables inaccurate representations
to be produced without skill or labour, and checks that desire for
detailed information, which might easily develop into scientific study.
The presence of a camera has saved many a young person from serious
attention to art. It is an excellent plaything. By all means let your
daughter learn French, for it is the language of the _menu_, and there
is no great harm in a little Latin, but let it be ladylike. Whenever you
are in difficulties, Mrs. Malaprop—who is always with us—will be only too
glad to tell you in further detail what kind of education becomes a young
woman, and the school where it can be found.
If you are “carriage people”—and by all means be “carriage people” if
your wealthier neighbours are—then of course your daughter will not learn
to cycle, but will rather learn to regard the cyclist as the curse of
the highway, which was obviously built for her pleasure. The omnibus or
tramcar will, I hope, always be regarded as impossible. Remember that
people who nowadays possess motor-cars are not necessarily “carriage
people.” It is becoming daily more difficult to diagnose “carriage
people” by the symptoms of their outward circumstances.
When your daughter leaves school, if your income is less than £_x_, and
you are spending more, you should certainly have your daughter presented
at Court. She will naturally desire it, and it may for the moment go far
towards appeasing your creditors who, I take it, will by this time be
pressing you after the vulgar fashion of such people.
Bring out your daughter at a ball, similar in cost and style—but
especially the former—to that given by Mrs. Goldberg Dives, when your
daughter’s dear school friend, Aurora “came out,” as the saying is. You
remember that on that occasion young Dives brought home Lord Bareacre’s
youngest son from Oxford, and the marriage that ensued, was followed by
that entertaining case so recently decided in the third division of the
Probate and Admiralty Court. Who knows what good fortune your daughter
may have if you follow these high examples.
But if during the prolonged pursuit of pleasure—which after her careful
education your daughter ought now to be able to plan and carry out for
herself—no son-in-law solvent or insolvent appears, then when you have
departed to another sphere leaving behind assets insufficient to meet
your worldly liabilities, or—as we may hope will be your case, dear
reader,—when you have called together the callous creditors into an upper
chamber of some persuasive accountant who can explain to them cheerily
the true inwardness of your estate, and tender, with fitting apology, the
pence that now represent the pound that was,—think not with the austere
moralist that this costly education of your daughter has been a rash
and hazardous speculation. Let us be thankful that the world is not at
one with the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy with his sallow views of
the possibilities of life. True your daughter will know nothing, and be
fit for nothing, true it will take her years of misery to make herself
capable of the meanest employment. She has eaten dinners she cannot
cook, she has worn dresses she cannot make, she has lived in rooms she
cannot sweep, and she has grumbled at the service of others she could not
herself perform, but at least you can say that she has been brought up as
other gentlewomen are, and that shall be your boast.
THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTY COURT.
“Had I God’s leave, how I would alter things!”
—_Robert Browning._
The County Court like the poor in whose interests it was invented is
always with you if you have one of those perverted minds that wastes its
moments on dreams of legal reform. Seventeen years ago I studied the
question with earnest enthusiasm under the strange hallucination that it
was a real business question ripe for a business solution. It seemed to
me nearer to the lives of people than the Veto, or Tariff Reform or the
Ornaments Rubric. That is the result of leading a narrow self-centred
life. In a word, without knowing it, I must have been a Whig, for, as
Sir Walter Scott remarks, “Whigs will live and die in the heresy that
the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can
sufficiently demonstrate that a line of conduct is most consistent with
men’s interest you have therefore and thereby demonstrated that they will
at length after a few speeches adopt it of course.” Thus for many years
I have pegged away with papers and speeches and like a true Whig find
myself still hopefully at it, playing the same game perhaps but with
slightly increased handicap. To-day I have learned by experience that the
future of the County Court is not to come in my time and to doubt if I
shall ever climb into some sufficiently high place to see the promised
land that I shall certainly never enter.
I have come to regard the question with the same child-like affection
and belief in its possibility, but also in a sense archæologically, as
becomes one whose first childhood is but a dream and who feels himself
pausing on the threshold of a second. Had I any political foresight
seventeen years ago I should have recognised that the reform of the
County Court system is not a party matter, it is eminently a matter
of greater interest to the poor than to the rich, to the business man
than to the man of leisure. Now, more and more, Parliament has become
a machine for registering the decrees of the prevailing party and
one cannot find that the poor are in any way directly represented in
Parliament and business men only in a small degree, whilst the interests
of the rich and of men of leisure have an overwhelming representation.
Moreover Legal Reform has to fight for its hand against that band of
brothers, the lawyers in Parliament, who from generation to generation we
find stalwart and faithful in their clear-sighted optimism that all is
well with the law—and lawyers.
The story of the evolution of the County Court is not without
entertainment for those who are interested in the practical affairs of
the community. In its struggle for existence we find a warfare being
carried on between the business man and the lawyer in which, foot by
foot, the business man gains and places his pet tribunal in a more secure
position whilst he takes breath for a new encounter. Still, although
the building up of the County Court to its present story of usefulness
has been the work in the main of business men, yet few realise that the
County Court of to-day with its £100 jurisdiction is only a belated
attainment of the ideals of Lord Brougham in 1830. It was in that year
that Brougham brought in a Bill in the Commons—he was then member for
Yorkshire—to establish “Local District Courts,” with a jurisdiction
limited to £100 in contract, £50 in injury to person or property, and an
unlimited jurisdiction by consent. It has taken us seventy-five years to
arrive at the position that was thought practicable by a great reforming
Chancellor in 1830. And yet there are many Englishmen in daily terror
lest we should reform anything too hurriedly. Lord Brougham’s ruling idea
was free law. He was in a sense a legal socialist. Law to him was one of
those things that every member of an ideal community should have without
paying for it individually, like fresh air and sunshine, and the Church
of England and the British Museum, and gaslight (in urban streets), and
roads, and the police, and the education of your children—all which
things an English citizen is entitled to have to-day without the payment
of any fees. He admitted the over-ruling necessity of fees in his day,
owing to the poverty of the Exchequer, but he said, “he must enter his
protest against the principle, and insist that any tax no matter what,
for the purpose of drawing the payment from the public rather than from
the suitor would be better than fixing it on legal proceedings.” Free law
is, of course, a grand ideal, and may again attract legal reformers; but,
without attaining that ideal, it might be possible to abandon in a great
measure the fees collected from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and
surgery, might be free to the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who
are unable to pay fees and costs without running into debt. It will take
a Savonarola to convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing
subject for a youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed
of what the insurance world calls “a good life.”
The dramatic duel between Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst over the
former’s Bill in 1833 is full of historical interest, but Lord Brougham
was unsuccessful, and it remained for Lord Cottenham in 1847 to establish
County Courts with a jurisdiction of £20. These are the Courts that we
use to-day, with an enlarged jurisdiction up to £100 in common law, £500
in equity matters, and the added jurisdictions given by the Workmen’s
Compensation Acts and many other statutes which have chosen for their
tribunal the County Court.
Throughout the country we are face to face with two statistical facts
which, if our reforms were moved by scientific considerations, would
lead the legal reformer to turn his serious consideration to the County
Court. We find in the great centres of population in the north and the
midlands, firstly, that there is a slight shrinkage or perhaps only
stagnation in the world of the High Court, and secondly, that there
is a continuous increase of business keeping pace with the growth of
population in the County Courts. I am far from saying that all the
expansion of County Court work is progress—much of it is the reverse and
in order to understand how far it is good and how far it is bad, it is
worth while trying to understand what the County Courts do.
These Courts lead as it were a double life. They have extended their
energies along two different branches of business. Each Court has
become a huge debt-collecting machine for minor tradesmen and at the
same time has developed into an important and trusted tribunal for
deciding disputes between citizens. Both these functions are important
ones, but the two branches have nothing to do with each other. In the
debt-collecting branch the cases are, for the most part, undefended; in
the other branch the cases are nearly all fought out. In the first branch
the judicial work is unimportant, the machine works automatically; in the
second branch the vitality of the Court depends almost entirely on the
quality of the judicial work.
In considering the future of the debt-collecting branch of the Court it
will be necessary to consider the whole question of imprisonment for
debt, which is the ultimate sanction of the business. The point to be
considered is, I think, How far is it right for the State to provide a
machine to collect the class of debts that are, in fact, collected by
the County Courts? The point is a practical one, for if imprisonment
for debt were abolished or mitigated, a great deal of the work of the
County Courts would undoubtedly fall away, leaving reasonable time at
the disposal of the Courts to try cases under the present extended
jurisdiction, and possibly making room for a further extension, if that
were thought desirable.
Let me try and describe the present system in a few words. A grocer,
draper, or jeweller hands over to a debt-collector a large number of
debts to collect; the customers are, from a business point of view, the
“undesirables.” The debt-collector makes some effort to collect the
debts outside the Court, and then issues a batch of summonses against
all who are or pretend to be impecunious. It is no uncommon thing for
one collector to issue a few hundred summonses in one day. On the day of
trial the cases are either undefended, or the wife appears and consents
to judgment, and an order is made of so many shillings a month. The
defended cases are, I should say, less than five per cent. of the total
summonses issued, and those successfully defended are a negligible
quantity. In Manchester and Salford, where we used to divide this class
of work from real litigation, the lists were seldom less than 400 cases
a day. When the judgments are obtained, the duty of the defendant is to
pay the monthly instalment into Court, and a ledger account is opened,
the Court becoming a sort of banker for the purpose of collecting and
paying out the money. Whenever the debtor fails to pay an instalment,
the collector is entitled to take out a judgment summons, calling on
the debtor to show cause why he should not be committed to prison for
non-payment. On proof that the debtor has means to pay, or has had means
since the judgment, the judge’s duty is to commit him to prison.
Two things are clear about this system. It is not a system of deciding
disputes, but a system of collecting debts, and in the cases of
workpeople without property it could never be carried out without
imprisonment for debt. When the legal reformer looks at the figures
relating to imprisonment for debt, he will see at a glance that if he
could get rid of a large quantity of the debt-collecting, there would
be more time for the real litigation. Many people still seem to think
that imprisonment for debt is abolished. In France and the United States
and in most civilised countries I believe it is, but in England it is
not only not abolished, but is greatly increased. The actual number
of debtors imprisoned has recently decreased, owing no doubt to the
fact that Judges are more and more inclined to temper the wind of the
statute to the shorn lamb. But the number of summonses issued and heard
increases, and there is no doubt the credit habit grows upon the working
classes, and is encouraged by the system of imprisonment for debt.
In 1909, the last year of statistics before me, no less than 375,254
summonses were issued. It is the commercial and domestic waste which lies
hid in these figures that distresses me. They reduce me to the despair of
those two immortals, the Walrus and the Carpenter, who
“Wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand.
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’”
But ought it to be cleared away? In the main I think it should. One might
lay down the principle that where the debt was not necessarily incurred
the State should not assist the creditor to collect it by imprisoning
the debtor. For the system is used, in the majority of cases, by a very
undesirable class of creditor. I analysed a list of 460 summonses heard
by me in one day. There were 284 drapers and general dealers. These
include all the instalment and hire system creditors. There were sixty
jewellers, thirty-five grocers, twenty-four money-lenders, and ten
doctors. Now, with the exception of the doctors, and possibly in a few
instances the grocers, it was not in the least desirable, from the point
of view of the State, that these debts should be collected at all. Why
should taxes be imposed and work done at the public expense to enable a
jeweller to persuade a man to buy a watch he does not want? Why should
the State collect the jeweller’s money for him by imprisonment for debt?
If there had been no imprisonment for debt the jeweller’s business
wouldn’t pay, and the workman would have one chance less of mortgaging
his wages for the immediate delight of possessing a third-rate piece of
jewellery. This would be better for the State and the workman, and for
everybody but the jeweller. But why should his interests prevail over
those of the rest of the community, and why should we spend money in
promoting a business of which most of us disapprove? Everyone must have
noticed of late years the enormous growth of firms whose main business
seems to be to tempt people of small means to purchase things they do not
want, or, at all events, cannot afford. Take up any newspaper or magazine
circulating among the lower middle classes, or among working men, and
you will find it crowded with advertisements of musical instruments,
cycles, furniture on the hire system, packets of cutlery, all of which
can be obtained by a small payment down and smaller instalments to
follow. Remember, too, that over and above these there exists a huge
army of “tally men” and travelling touts, who are pushing on commission,
clothing, sewing machines, Family Bibles in expensive series, jewellery,
and a host of unnecessaries. What chance has the working-man to keep out
of debt? Not one of these transactions has any commercial sanction.
Credit is given merely because there is imprisonment for debt. And
there is a further aspect of this question which I am surprised has
never attracted the attention of temperance reformers. As long as a man
can get credit for groceries and clothes there is not the same urgent
reason to spend his cash upon these things. But cash is necessary in the
public-house, because, by the Tippling Acts, no action can be brought for
the price of drink consumed at a public-house. So the obvious result too
often follows: the wages are spent at the public-house, and the credit
for the week’s groceries and the children’s boots is obtained under the
sanction of imprisonment for debt.
Much more might be said in objection to the system of imprisonment for
debt, but we have enough before us, I think, to show a strong case for
reform. The next question will be: Should that reform be abolition?
Although I am personally in favour of the abolition of imprisonment for
debt, I am in doubt whether it is desirable at the moment; and I am
so eager to see some reform that I would welcome any measure, however
meagre, that did something to mitigate the misfortunes of the insolvent
poor. I have suggested as a practical measure that no summons should
be issued or committal made for a less sum than forty shillings. One
must remember that there are a huge number of traders giving reasonable
credit to their fellow-traders, who find, when they seek to recover
the debt, that the goods in the house or shop are in the wife’s name.
This is really a quasi-fraudulent obtaining of credit, and there are
many similar cases not within the criminal law where imprisonment for
debt seems a natural remedy. Moreover, if one studies the evidence
given before the Commissioners on the subject, and if one discusses it,
as I have, with men in business, one finds that abolition would meet
with great opposition from powerful trade interests, whereas the “forty
shilling” proposal is generally regarded as a fair experiment, which
would injure no one but traders who deliberately give credit to the
poorer working class under the sanction of imprisonment for debt. In my
own experience, I have found hardly any cases of judgments summonses
taken out for more than two pounds where there was not ample evidence
of means, and where the non-payment was not more or less of the nature
of a contempt of Court. In the smaller cases the means, though proved
to have existed since the judgment, have disappeared, and the debtor
is only saved from imprisonment by the leniency of the Court. Total
abolition of imprisonment for debt would probably never be carried by
consent. It would mean more commissions, inquiries, reports, and the
waste of time that these things necessitate. Abolition of imprisonment
for debt for sums under forty shillings—a great practical reform for the
very poor—would, I believe, be carried by consent. That is why I put it
forward. It is utterly illogical but intensely practical; and when one
has been face to face with the misery of others for many years, one cares
more for business than logic.
Assuming, therefore, that the future of the County Court as a
debt-collecting machine is to be a future of decrease, that the
legislature are going to save the taxpayer’s money and encourage thrift
by refusing to collect undesirable debts, what will be its future as a
litigating machine?
I may commend to anyone desirous of studying in further detail
the arguments for and against the extension of County Courts, the
proceedings of the Norwood Commission on County Courts in 1878. There
is no doubt that if the business man had had his way the County Court
in urban centres would have long ago been a district Court for all but
cases of some peculiar public or legal importance. The great enemy to
such an extension has always been the lawyer, and the London lawyer
in particular. A very eminent solicitor, giving evidence before the
Commission in 1878, had no confidence whatever in County Courts. His
evidence was very typical, and shows how carefully one should criticise
the evidence of a professional man who is also a very superior person.
His view was that “When occasionally a client of mine of position who
has been summoned to the County Court comes to me, I am unable to leave
him in the lurch, but I never go into the County Court myself.” Asked
whether he thought it “undignified,” he replied enigmatically: “It is
not a matter of dignity, but a man of position cannot go into the County
Court.” It turned out later that it was a physical difficulty, for it
was “quite inconsistent with the position of a professional man to stand
in the County Court with women bringing cases about washing-tubs, and
servants summoning their masters for wages.”
He called them untaught knaves unmannerly
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse,
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
Dozens of times, he told the Commission, barristers had declined to go
into the County Court, and his clerk had gone to half-a-dozen barristers
before he could find one who would demean himself by taking a case in the
County Court. County Courts were, in his view, “inherently incapable of
conducting important litigation.” The County Court Judges had not, in his
opinion, the confidence of the country, because they are not taken from
the successful members of the Bar, it is known that their salary is an
extremely small one, there is no Bar attending before them, there is no
report of their proceedings, and there are difficulties of appeal. One
thing I find very delightful in the eminent solicitor’s evidence.
_Question._—Some of the County Court Judges are very competent
men, are they not?
_Answer._—Extremely.
_Question._—You think that there are some who are not equal to
the others?
_Answer._—Yes.
_Question._—Is not the same thing true in regard to the
Superior Courts?
_Answer._—You will not expect me to answer that question, I
think.
Even in the dark ages of 1878 one would have thought he might have risked
an affirmative.
One does not quote the eminent solicitor’s opinion merely for the humour
that attaches to old-fashioned ideas and prophecies that are brought to
light in a new age and found to be absurd. No doubt he was fighting for
a substantial thing, in a word—costs, and he was fighting the wreckers
that wanted to break up the machinery that made costs, for he naturally
disliked to see the smooth, well-oiled machine that worked so well for
him replaced by some cheap machinery of one-horse “costs” power. In one
thing I confess to his statesmanlike insight. If you want to improve
the County Courts, he said, the “only improvement would be to double
the salary of the judges at least,” and let the judge reside in his
district, “but then you would be establishing superior Courts all over
the country.” And the idea of the “country” having similar facilities to
London for the trial of actions was too preposterous. It had only to be
stated, it was self-condemned, and the matter dropped.
One must not suppose that there were no champions of saner methods in
1878. On the contrary, I think the reformers were the better team of
the two, and pressed their opponents hard, although they did not score
greatly in the end. What could be more interesting or important than the
opinion of Lord Bramwell, who was concerned in several of the Judicature
Commissions prior to 1878? His view was that the County Courts should
be made constituent branches of the High Court of Justice, and that as
a consequence of that, the existing jurisdiction in common law should
be unlimited. That is to say every action would commence in the County
Court and be tried there unless the defendant chose to remove it to the
High Court. It was pointed out that this would practically mean giving
to every district, local Courts with full powers, and among other things
that it would lead to the “deterioration of the Bar.” Lord Bramwell
objected to the phrase, and answered his opponents by saying that the
then Attorney-General (Sir John Holker) and Mr. Gully and Mr. Pope and
Mr. Higgins, one of her Majesty’s counsel, have belonged to the local
Bar, “and I think I may say of my knowledge, that the local Bar of
Liverpool is as good as the London Bar.” This is important testimony,
inasmuch as any evolution towards district Courts that will injure the
assize system is sure to be opposed by those barristers—and there are
many in Parliament—who are interested in the assize system, and one
argument will be that the client will be deprived of the advantage of
London “silk” if his case is tried in the County Court. Lord Bramwell
disposes of that argument very shortly. “If there is any disparagement
or injury to the Bar for the benefit of the public, the Bar must undergo
it; that is all.”
In other words, the Courts of the future must be made convenient to the
public as well as convenient to the profession; and where interests clash
the public interest must be considered before the professional interest.
This looks when written down an obvious platitude, but the history of the
efforts to obtain and improve County Courts since 1830 will convince the
legal reformer that it is worth re-stating.
Some years ago I made some elaborate calculations from the Blue
Books, the results of which were rather surprising even to myself. I
investigated the figures of ten typical urban Circuits in the centres of
industry and of ten typical rural Circuits in agricultural districts. I
found that in the former Circuits in ten years there had been a large
increase in business. Nearly £40,000 a year more was paid to the Treasury
in fees, and more than £150,000 was the increase in monies collected for
suitors. In the same ten years similar figures for the rural districts
showed a marked decrease. When one compared the turnover of the ten urban
Circuits as against the turnover of the ten rural Circuits, it was as ten
to one. I wondered what a Harrod or a Lipton or a Whiteley would have
done with these Courts if he had found in auditing their accounts over
many years that ten of them were non-increasing in a business sense, and
that the other ten were increasing; if he found that he drew £150,000
as an income from one set and £40,000 from the other set. Would he not
consider whether there was not a class of business being done by the
urban circuits worthy of special consideration and encouragement?
For what did these figures show? They showed on the one hand a stagnant
and non-increasing business, and on the other a business increasing by
leaps and bounds. What business man would hesitate to extend ten branch
concerns capable of so great an improvement in turnover in the course of
a few years? I am frankly an enemy to making the suitor pay for his law.
I believe, as Lord Brougham did, in free law; but if the system is to
continue, why should a suitor in Birmingham pay more for his law than is
necessary in order that a suitor in Ambleside may pay less for his law
than it costs?
The Courts are, no doubt, not paying concerns, but how far some Circuits
are run at a profit it is impossible for anyone outside the Treasury to
ascertain. There is no doubt, however, that the loss in small Courts is
very great, and whether they are of any great value to a district in
these days of postal facilities and cheap railway transit I have grave
doubts. I have always thought that the Post Office might work a great
deal of the pure debt-collecting business in connection with the County
Court, if it were thought desirable. It would, to my mind, be a natural
co-ordination of two public offices, and might adapt itself very well to
the needs of rural districts. If a country debtor could pay his debt to
the nearest post office, and get an official receipt there, many small
Courts and offices would become wholly unnecessary, and with a post
office cash on delivery system one excuse for giving credit would be
removed.
Why one little town has a Court and another has none it is as impossible
to say, as why one little pig went to market and the other little pig
stayed at home. These ancient myths are part of our history, and any
effort to dislodge them is rightly made difficult. But whilst the Courts
of London and the Midlands and the North are overcrowded, there are
actually ten Courts issuing less than 100 plaints each—their average is
57!—and thirty-two Courts with less than 200. Alston, in Cumberland, is
the holder of the record. This Court issued twenty-seven plaints and
four actions were heard. It heard two judgment summonses, and made a
commitment order in one. And the Court collected sixteen pounds in fees.
To cope with this annual business the Judge sat once and the Registrar
three times. It will take a long time to persuade these small communities
that it is necessary they should give up conditions such as these to
which they have become accustomed. I think it would be more readily done
if the districts that had no real use for a County Court or an Assize
Court were only allowed to retain them on payment of what they cost to
the community.
The endeavour to bring justice to the poor man’s door is more
praiseworthy than practical. I remember explaining to a collier’s wife
that her husband must attend with her, and adjourned the case to a Monday
for that purpose. Monday is often kept by colliers as a saint’s day.
“Eh!” she replied. “It will be very onconvanient. My maister winna like
coming on a Monday. Besides, it’s my weshing-day.”
I expressed my regret, but said it must be.
“Well, it’s very onconvanient our coming here. Couldn’t yo call?”
The idea of calling personally on the litigants—especially in these days
of motor-cars, when every registrar is probably an expert chauffeur—is a
very attractive one, and not much more absurd that the present system of
sending Judges to Courts that have no real use for them.
But from my point of view, the difficulties of dealing with the smaller
Courts, if they exist, should not hinder the development of the larger
Circuits. It is clear that the problems of providing adequate Civil
Courts for Central Wales and Norfolk is not the same as the problem of
providing similar tribunals for Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. I have
shown that there are a large number of districts where the Courts are
increasing yearly in usefulness and in public favour, and there is, I
think, a strong case that from a business point of view Circuits that are
dealing with large amounts of work should be specially considered.
I do not think there will be any great difficulty in dealing with the
great urban centres when the legislature makes up its mind to make the
County Courts district Courts working directly in touch with the High
Courts. No doubt it will mean the providing of money for further and
better equipment, but it has certainly to come about, and there are
signs that it is being faced. The problem of the rural Courts is more
difficult, but I think the grouping of several Courts under one resident
permanent registrar with extended powers and allowing him to gather
together in one place a day’s work for the Judge who is to travel his
Circuit with a business regard for the actual wants of litigants from
time to time is a statement of the general lines upon which reforms can
be carried out. The rural Courts will always be costly to the community,
out of all proportion to the services rendered, but they are necessary
and the expense must be borne; the urban Courts, on the other hand, might
be made to pay their way, and might be of far greater service to the
business communities around them than they already are.
It is difficult, of course, to write upon such a subject without personal
bias, and it has been my lot to take an official position for the sake
of its comparative leisure, and to find that leisure taken away by
successive Acts of Parliament without compensation for disturbance.
Still, experience of legal reform leads me to believe that I cannot be
writing this with any personal motive, for I cannot hope to be presiding
in any County Court in the latter part of the twentieth century, when,
according to recorded precedent, such reforms as I propose will be about
due.
Why, then, do I commend the future of the County Court to the attention
of the legal reformer? Because I see in the County Court, and in that
Court only, a growing and popular tribunal favoured by the business men
of the country. Because in that Court there is a crying abuse calling
aloud for reform, namely, imprisonment for debt, which abuse, when
abolished or mitigated, will release Judges from odious duties, and give
them time for more honourable services. Because in great urban centres
there has long been a demand for continued sittings, which the High
Court has been unable to comply with, but which the County Court already
satisfies to some extent, and with reasonable equipment could supply in
full measure. The record of the County Courts in the last fifty years
is a very remarkable one. In the face of keen professional opposition,
Parliament has given them year by year more important and onerous duties.
These have been carried out in the main to the satisfaction of the
business man in the business centres. It is because the urban County
Courts are live business concerns, carrying on their business to the
satisfaction of their customers, that I believe in the future of the
County Court.
THE PREVALENCE OF PODSNAP.
“The question about everything was would it bring about a blush
into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of
the young person was that according to Mr. Podsnap she seemed
always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at
all.”
—_Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend._
There seems an alarming recrudescence of Podsnappery at the present
moment. Perhaps in a measure it is a protest against things that are
wrong. If some novel-writers exceed the limits of reasonable plain
speech, and some dramatists seek publicly to exhibit the results of moral
leprosy, they challenge the latent Podsnap, that is a valuable asset in
our national character, to flourish its right arm and say, “I don’t want
to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” With
every proper contempt for Podsnap, there are some excesses about which he
is right when he sweeps them away with the verdict, “Not English!” But
having tasted too much success by reason of the excesses of his enemies,
he is beginning not only to reform our morals, but has started upon our
manners.
A “Town Vicar,” writing a letter to a Church paper, recently lifted up
his voice in the following complaint: “It is not long ago that I heard
a Dean declare that ‘we were not going to take it lying down,’ and more
than one Bishop has in preaching lately had recourse to ‘the bottom dog.’
But these are mere details in the alarming spread of vulgarity where
culture and right feeling used to be.”
What would Charles Kingsley have said or His Honour Judge Hughes to a
parson who shrank from a simile drawn from the noble art of self-defence?
Seeing, too, that the phrase has attained esoteric political value in
respect of its use by the leader of Birmingham state-craft, the Podsnap
in our good Vicar takes too much upon itself when it declares that the
sporting Dean who used it was wanting in “culture and right feeling.”
The reference by more than one Bishop to the “bottom dog” is less easy
to defend. The “Town Vicar” no doubt regards a Bishop as so far removed
from the everyday affairs of the world that the phrase should never have
polluted his ears, far less his lips, and that if he has indeed heard of
the existence of “bottom dogs,” and he desires to express himself about
them, he should allude to them on the platform as the “submerged tenth,”
and in the pulpit as “our poorer brethren.”
To many of us it will come as a pleasant surprise to know that there is
more than one Bishop whose courage is stronger than his culture. Not that
one desires to see in Bishops or in anyone else a tendency towards the
patronage of meaningless slang or dull expletive. I remember a story of
the seventies that used to be told with equal inaccuracy of Canon Farrar
and Bishop Fraser. The Bishop—let us say—travelling in a third-class
carriage with some workmen, took occasion to reprove one on his constant
and meaningless use of the adjective “bloody.”
The workman took the reproof in good part, and by way of excuse said:
“You see, Mister, I can’t help it. I’m a plain man, and I call a spade a
spade.”
“That is just what you don’t do,” retorted the Bishop quickly. “You call
it ‘a bloody shovel.’” At which they all laughed in a friendly spirit,
and the offender promised amendment.
Relating this anecdote at a dinner, a well-known pillar of the Church,
noted for his pompous demeanour and the ignorant pleasure he took in
the use of long words, expressed his horror that such language could be
used in any form of society. “For myself,” he said, “I cannot believe
it possible that, however I had been brought up, such words could pass
my lips.” “I am sure of it,” replied the Bishop, “in whatever society
you found yourself you would always refer to a spade as an agricultural
implement for the trituration of soil.”
And, indeed, in this story lies the test of the matter. A spade is to be
called a spade. And whilst even Podsnap is right in putting his veto on
the mediæval adjective dear to the sons of toil, we are not going to be
bullied by him into periphrastic descriptions of facts that are better
stated in plain, simple, and even vulgar language.
The “Spectator” voiced a very general feeling among the Podsnap family
in writing of Mr. Lloyd-George’s reference to the hereditary principle
and his simile that a peer became a legislator by being “the first of the
litter.” The word ‘litter’ quoted without its context may seem a little
harsh, but the point of the allusion was that, although we chose our
legislators in that way we did not choose our spaniels by this curious
and, as he argued, obsolete method. The “Spectator” found this to be
mere vulgarity. I have a great affection for the “Spectator,” having
been brought up from earliest childhood to reverence her teachings. I
say “her” because I always visualise the “Spectator” as some being like
Charles Lamb’s aunt, who was “a dear and good one ... a stedfast friendly
being, and a fine old Christian ... whose only secular employment was
the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a china basin of
fair water.” Much as I honour the “Spectator,” I cannot but think the
prevailing Podsnap is warping her better judgment.
But there is an excuse for the “Spectator” that cannot be offered for the
average man of the world who claims to be righteously offended at the
vulgarity of Mr. Lloyd-George’s similes.
I met a friend upon the golf links who used language upon the last
green, where he failed to hole out in three, that no Bishop could have
sanctioned, even although he fully appreciated that my friend was for
the moment a “bottom dog.” On the way to the Club-house he vented his
wrath upon the offending Chancellor of the Exchequer for the language
he used on the platform. I pleaded in mitigation that just as my friend
had been endeavouring to hole out a lively “Helsby” on a tricky green,
so the Chancellor was endeavouring to put the House of Lords in a hole,
a process in which that rubber-cored institution refused to assist him.
To express your feelings and beliefs at a moment like that required
that some latitude should be allowed to you in the choice of simile and
language.
But so far had the microbe of Podsnap entered into my friend’s
understanding that he treated my poor pleasantry as an added insult and
complained bitterly that such vituperation, as he called it, was “not
English, and never used to be done.” Curiously enough, I had in my mind
a passage in a political speech that created even greater pleasure and
displeasure to Reds and Blues more than a quarter of a century ago. It
was that famous passage in which Mr. Chamberlain scorned Lord Salisbury
as constituting “himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which
he himself belongs—‘who toil not neither do they spin,’ whose fortunes,
as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such
services as courtiers render kings, and have since grown and increased
while their owners slept by the levy of an unearned share on all that
other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and
prosperity of the country of which they form a part.” There was not so
much whining over a few hard words in those days, and Lord Salisbury
himself could hit out with his “black man” allusion and the famous
Hottentot simile, and, lost, as the ‘Town Vicar’ would think, to culture
and right feeling, could talk of “having put our money on the wrong
horse.”
Memory may be misleading after a gap of twenty-five years, and the wisest
of us is apt to grow “_difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti_,”
yet I cannot but think that there are signs in the air that our old
friend Podsnap is having it too much his own way. He is a good fellow
in the main, and some of the ideas he worked for are sound. His belief
in the young person had its touching and beautiful side as it had its
ridiculous side. The young person, however, has grown up since his day,
and has her own movements which are but lightly clad with Podsnappery
of any kind. And for grown-ups dealing with the everyday affairs of the
world we must, in the old English way, stick to our fighting instincts,
and give and take hearty blows in good part, and win pleasantly and lose
ungrudgingly, as most of our fighters, fair play to them, still do.
And we must not be afraid of the Town Vicar’s “mere vulgarity.” For,
after all, our language is a vulgar tongue, and we are proud that our
Bible is printed in it, and our speeches have to be made in it. As a
vulgar tongue vulgarly used it brought forth the triumphs of Elizabethan
literature, and was the medium of such varied writers as Fielding,
Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. And when it is the duty of wisdom to cry
without and utter her voice in the street, she must do it without fear of
Podsnap and in the vulgar tongue.
AN ELIZABETHAN RECORDER.
“I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”
—_Walt Whitman._
Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of
Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of
the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And
in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of
William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been
left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters
edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.
Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of
Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced
together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His
career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official,
and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant
magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and
integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience
of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure
our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.
And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the
more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient
Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village
Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the
probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an
illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of
Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire
family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known
as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master
of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have
been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas,
for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family,
Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford,
and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London
to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we
find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster,
and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London.
The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his
influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became
Recorder of the City of London.
This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of
£100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not
live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble
Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden,
in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.
Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional
lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world
of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and
humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor
does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical
minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with
many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I
cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics,
whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a
learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant
conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old
editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference
to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have
combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That
he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his
examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning
Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience
as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would
have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an
undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too,
of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose
Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter
Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details
of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for
them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the
Children of the City.”
There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast
into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid
upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The
Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his
proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese
Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her
treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of
all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a
pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder,
who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet,
“without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to
Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his
most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it.
I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for
me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much
as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a
man may quietly be acquainted with God.”
It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure
becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our
eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an
Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one
studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without
afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social
progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth
is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of
mankind is but a small moment of time.
The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in
1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling
of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier
got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing
ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the
Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody
at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.
Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the
world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports
to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of
view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had
received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of
the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and
Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to
them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported
all to be well.
“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the
book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like,
we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had
taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately
been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd
fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries.
As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St.
John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for
neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.”
Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt
Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official
that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.
Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to
put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day,
thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere
evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.
One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the
oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in
Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that
are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern
reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council
at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the
reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for
the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing
upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the
liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth
town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground,
Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we
have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have
left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will
well like of at his next coming.”
All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was
an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders
if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were
spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and
there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of
Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As
for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall
and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like
manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure
they will use great diligence in this matter.”
One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed
to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that
they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood
return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the
twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the
methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of
austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”
Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575.
The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as
Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation”
which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three
days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an
interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that
has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is
with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for
the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell
out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one
died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting,
but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce
half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday,
at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be
dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our
health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I
have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that
none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the
house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the
which order is well observed.”
“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the
Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious
penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case
put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of
position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have
always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well
an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to
become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays.
Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the
interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much
truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no
business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came
to the Temple.”
In July, 1577, Lord Burghley is again at “Buckstons” [_sic_] and the
faithful recorder sends him a budget of news. He has been at the Mercers’
feast “and there were we all very merry ... and I told them that I was
to write privately to your Lordship; and they required me all to commend
them to your good Lordship; at which time the Master of the Rolls, who is
no wine drinker, did drink to your Lordship a bowl of Rhenish wine and
then Sir Thomas Gresham drank another, and Sir William Demsell the third
and I pledged them all.” It reads like a page from the Book of Snobs.
And after the “great and royal banquet” which took place at the house of
the new Master, some time we may suppose about mid-day, Fleetwood, as
he tells us “walked to Powle’s to learn some news.” For in that day St.
Paul’s was the Exchange and the club and the Market Place of the men of
the world where news came from all quarters of the world and where news
passed from lip to lip and thence out into the corners of England in such
letters as this of Fleetwood’s to Lord Burghley. The extraordinary uses
to which the Cathedral was put in Elizabeth’s time, are a constant theme
of reproach from religious-minded men. Idlers and drunkards used to sleep
on benches at the choir door, and porters, butchers and water bearers
were suffered in service time, to carry and re-carry their wares across
the nave, and in the upper choir itself irreverent people walked about
with hats on their heads, whilst if any entered the Cathedral booted
and spurred, the gentlemen of the choir left their places and demanded
“spur-money” and threatened their victim with a night’s imprisonment
in the choir if the tax were not paid. Such was “Powle’s” on this July
afternoon when Recorder Fleetwood went down in search of news, and
indeed he heard terrible tidings; for there “came suddenly into the
church Edmund Downing, and he told me that he was even then come out of
Worcestershire and that my Lord Chief Baron died at Sir John Hubbard’s
house and that he is buried at Leicester. And he said that the common
speech of that country is that Mr. Serjeant Barham should be dead at
Worcester, but that is not certain. The like report goeth of Mr. Fowler,
the Clerk of the same Circuit ... and a number of other gent that were at
the gaol delivery at Oxon are all dead. The inquest of life and death
are almost all gone. Such Clerks servants and young gent, being scholars
as were at the same gaol delivery, are either dead or in great danger.
Mr. Solicitor’s son and heir being brought home to his father’s house at
Woodstock, lieth at the mercy of God. Mr. Attorney’s son and heir was
brought very sick from Oxon to his father’s house at Harrow, where he
lieth in as great danger of death as might be, but now there is some hope
of amendment. The gaol delivery of Oxon, as I am told, was kept in the
Town Hall, a close place and by the infection of the gaol as all men take
it, this mortality grew.”
We know now all about the Oxford Black Assizes of the 5th and 6th of
July, 1577, and how Judges, Sheriffs, Knights, Squires, Barristers and
members of the Grand Jury were stricken down with what was probably
typhus. The disease spread to the Colleges. Masters, Doctors and heads
of houses left almost to a man. “The Master of Merton remained _longe
omnium vigilantissimus_ ministering to the sick. The pharmacies were soon
emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind
of confection.” Wild rumours spread abroad that it was the result of a
Papist plot. In a few weeks of the Assizes, some five hundred perished,
nearly all men of the better class. The disease did not attack the poor
or women. There seems little doubt that the infection was among the
prisoners and there is a record that two or three thieves had died in
chains shortly before the Assizes. One would have supposed that such a
visitation would have been a signal for prison reform, but those who have
read of Howard’s experiences, know how little was done to mitigate the
horrors of life in gaol until a much more recent date.
Fleetwood tells us a great deal about his own activity at this time. He
is holding an oyer and terminer at the Guildhall in the vacation “to
keep the people in obedience.” He sits with the Justices to discuss the
abolition of alehouses and the advancement of archery, he is constant
in his search after rogues and masterless men and there being cases of
plague in the Savoy, he takes occasion to pass with all the constables
between the bars and the tilt-yard in both the liberties, to see the
houses shut, which he notes with pride “neither the Master of the Rolls
nor my cousin Holcroft the Bailiff, would or durst do.” At the same time
he was writing a book on “The Office of a Justice of the Peace” which was
printed a hundred years later. Amidst these various employments however,
he finds room for the lighter social duties and spends an afternoon
with the Shoemakers of London, who “having builded a fair and a new
hall, made a royal feast there for their friends, which they call their
housewarming.”
A really heavy sessions must have been a terrible experience since this
is what the Recorder evidently regards as a light one. “At the last
Sessions,” he writes, “there were executed eighteen at Tyburn, and
one, Barlow, born in Norfolk but of the house of the Barlows in the
county of Lancashire, was pressed. They were all notable cut-purses and
horse-stealers. It was the quietest Sessions that ever I was at.” At the
beginning of the year he makes an audit of known criminals “that I may
know what new may be sprung up this last year and where to find them
if need be” and he makes out a list of “receivers and gage takers and
melters of stolen plate and such like.”
Part of his duty was the actual police work of “searching out of sundry
that were receptors of felons.” In the course of this duty he tells
Burghley on another occasion of the discovery of a den that Dickens
might have used as a model in Oliver Twist, so little had the ways of
criminals altered from Elizabeth to Victoria. “Amongst our travels this
one matter tumbled out by the way, that one, Walters, a gentleman born
and some time a merchant of good credit, who falling by time into decay,
kept an alehouse at Smart’s Keye (Quay) near Billing’s Gate, and after
some misdemeanour being put down he reared up a new trade of life and in
the same house he procured all the cut-purses about this city to repair
to his same house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys
to cut purses. There were hung up two devices, the one was a pocket, the
other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung
about with hawk’s bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring
bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed
to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out
of the purse without the noise of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial
nipper.” Note that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nipper is termed a
pick-purse or a cut-purse.
The path of an honest judge in the days of Elizabeth was beset with
difficulties. Although bribes were not actually offered to the individual
magistrate, yet he was written to by influential persons about the Court,
and he had to choose between doing his duty and incurring the dislike
of powerful men. Fleetwood complains “that when by order we have justly
executed the law ... we are wont either to have a great man’s letter, a
lady’s ring, or some other token from some other such inferior persons
as will devise one untruth or another to accuse us of if we prefer not
their unlawful requests.” Our honest Recorder is strong to maintain the
principle that all men are equal in the sight of the law.
Here is a typical case of which he complains: “Mr. Nowell of the Court
hath lately been in London. He caused his man to give a blow unto a
carman. His man hath stricken the carman with the pommel of his sword and
therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man
are likely to be indicted thereof, I am sure to be much troubled with his
letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like
case heretofore, I have been even with the same man. Here are sundry
young gentlemen that use the Court that most commonly term themselves
gentlemen; when any of them have done anything amiss, and are complained
of or arrested for debt, then they run unto me and no other excuse or
answer can they make but say—‘I am a gentleman, and being a gentleman I
am not thus to be used at a slaves and a colion’s (scullion’s) hands.’ I
know not what other plea Mr. Nowell can plead. But this I say, the fact
is foul.”
A “gentleman” in England in Elizabethan days seems to have thought
himself as little amenable to law as an American millionaire, but
Fleetwood had the English gist of the matter in him when he says “the
fact is foul.”
But though the Recorder stood firm against the hangers on of the Court,
London was not a happy soil for judicial integrity. He never attained
to the promotion he deserved, and maybe it was because he could not
dishonour his office to serve his friends at Court. Such mercy as the
Recorder could honestly show to a prisoner, he was only too ready
to exercise. “Truly, my Lord,” he writes, “it is nothing needful to
write for the stay of any to be reprieved for there is not any in our
commission of London and Middlesex but we are desirous to save or stay
any poor wretch if by colour of any law or reason we may do it. My
singular good Lord, my Lord William of Winchester was wont to say: ‘When
the Court is furthest from London then is there the best justice done in
all England.’ I once heard as great a personage in office and authority
as ever he was and yet living say the same words. It is grown for a
trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves; twenty pounds for a
reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days. I see it will
not be holpen unless one honoured gentleman who many times is abused by
wrong information—and surely upon my soul not upon any evil meaning—do
stay his pen. I have not one letter for the stay of a thief from your
Lordship.”
But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little
to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work
and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall
at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were
condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number
of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from
the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a
shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars,
who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal
dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two
days further life.
The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and
masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped
and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find
someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a
year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land
or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way
in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars,
poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called
“reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood
seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they
committed any excesses.
One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the
air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During
her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number
of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord
Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of
any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary
efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to
the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took
seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and
very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we
examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a
euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the
mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of
double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty
rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse
Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these
went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the
Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The
Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And
although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and
sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the
Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.”
Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell
received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these
poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could
not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that
we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor
Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for
the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and
Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or
four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our
searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these
evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is
curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe
writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches
of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the
difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping
in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a
force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very
little to amend.
The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations
of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings
of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The
suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London
with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons.
It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I
must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out
that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called
Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers.
Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of
one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already
we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal
Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then
it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in
Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its
whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and
the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the
hemp with her mallet.
The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners
charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a
very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter
of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with
stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The
carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I
examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not
confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and
soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination,
the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues
Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell,
where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said
that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny
it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her
over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this
wretched woman.”
But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a
Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson,
was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the
ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to
the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile
stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that
the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to
the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren,
standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by
name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him,
and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and
then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office
of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto
the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission
was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and
then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he
himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then
my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench.
And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case,
and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did
himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue
of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very
learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing
I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more
difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole
week in his predecessor’s time.”
So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder
presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services
as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails,
chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in
Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.
And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a
good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh
persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we
hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an
eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in
these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man
can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty,
and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the
best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed
to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582,
is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular
good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I
am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in
searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the
most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man
to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every
day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such
a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from
this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is,
as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship
please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will
do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my
good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for
your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”
The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end
did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood
resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted
him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s
Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February
28th, 1594.
And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the
day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind
he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment
awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.
“This day I rode to the Yeld (Guild) Hall to sit on the commission for
strangers and in the lower end of Cheapside towards Poole’s (St. Paul’s)
there stood a man and a woman both aged persons with papers upon their
heads. The man was keeper of the conduit there. These two lewd people in
the night entered into the Conduit and washed themselves, _et ad hunc et
ibidem turpiter exoneraverunt ventres eorum, etc._
This day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office. The lot is now to be cast
between Mr. Serjeant Drew and one Mr. Fleming of Lincoln’s Inn. This
present Saturday.
Your good Lordship’s most bounden
W. FLETEWOODE.”
This picture of the old Recorder riding out to the Guild Hall for his
last sitting and reporting to my Lord the common sights of the City
brings back to us a real picture of his days. So that we can almost feel
that we are living on “this present Saturday” and regretting with all
good citizens that “this day Mr. Recorder surrendered his office.”
THE FUNNIEST THING I EVER SAW.
“Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to
ourselves and nature.”
—_Sir Philip Sidney._
To ask one to write to such a title is a challenge to be taken up, but
one does not expect to vanquish the challenger. The funniest thing I
ever saw would not make you laugh because you never saw it and if I had
the skill to make you see it probably you would not think it funny. Then
again the older you grow the few funnier things you see. What a lot of
laughter there was thirty or forty years ago. Whither has it fled? In
childhood nearly every discomfort or disaster to others is food for
laughter whilst your own little troubles are tragedies fit for tears.
It is a curious thing that the funny things you see always involve a
certain amount of cruelty, pain or at least discomfort to others, and I
suppose as one grows older the painful side of the matter oppresses you
more than the funny side inspires you to laughter. There are some human
attributes that are always laughable. Of these the chief is fatness.
The troubles of a fat man or woman are always comic. Littleness, if it
amounts to wee-ness, is comic in a somewhat less degree and thin-ness may
move folk to laughter but scarcely unless it be added to some amusing
eccentricity. Height and tall-ness are not funny. One never heard of a
king employing a giant as a jester or a butt. The dwarf on the other
hand has been cast for such parts from time immemorial.
I believe quite small babies see a lot of funny things. Certainly they
laugh to themselves without end and seem to find their surroundings
full of amusement. I have no doubt the funniest thing one ever saw is
cinematographed on some ancient film at the back of one’s brain so far
out of reach that the memory cannot get at it. Children undoubtedly see
most of the fun. I remember many years ago Louis Calvert, the well-known
actor, was staying with me in a little house in a remote corner of
Wales. The house had a small verandah doorway with two narrow doors,
one of which was usually bolted as it was a windy place and the outlet
by the half door was, to say the least of it, meagre. Louis Calvert was
in those days, I will not say fat or stout or corpulent—these ample men
are so susceptible—but he was a fine figure of a man and he was then
as he is now a great actor in both comedy or tragedy. It was a summer
afternoon and I was lolling in a deck chair beneath our only tree, and
the children, four of them, from five years old to twelve, were sitting
on the lawn in front of the doorway basking in the sun. Suddenly Calvert
appeared at the doorway and accidentally stuck in it as he was coming
through. The children caught sight of him and on the moment were off in
fits of laughter which good manners required them to stifle as he came
among us. But if laughter challenges manners, the latter generally get
the worst of it, and the mere memory of the incident sent one or another
off into small explosions of laughter. Calvert who always wanted to be
in at any fun sought explanations, which only made them laugh the more
and reprove each other for doing it, and whilst their attention was so
engaged I told Calvert what the joke was. A few minutes later he went
back into the house making an elaborate sideway entrance, which started
the young audience on the laugh again and all eyes were fastened on the
door watching for his return.
And he did return and gave us one of the finest pantomimes I have ever
seen. He came along loading a pipe and not looking at the doorway at all
and stuck fairly fast in it before he was aware that he was up to it
and opened his eyes in annoyance and amazement. Four shouts of laughter
greeted him. Fingers of delighted mockery were pointed at him and he
made a face as if he were on the brink of tears, which drew echoing
tears of uncontrollable laughter from the youngsters. Then his pipe
dropped on to the shingle path in front of the door and he dived to get
it and failed and grabbed and kicked in the air until the children threw
themselves on the ground and sobbed and begged him to leave off for he
was hurting them. Then Calvert, to give them a moment’s respite, pulled
himself together and still fast in the doorway rested his hand on the
door-post and thought dismally while the audience sobbed and sniffed
and slowly recovered breath enough to laugh again. By a mighty effort
he now backed out of the doorway and approached it as Uncle Remus would
say “behime” first. This was a signal for yells of delight, the more so
as the manœuvre resulted in the most undignified and comic failure. All
beautiful and simple people have a thoroughly broad and healthy laugh for
the “behime” quarters of man in awkward positions. A man sitting down
on the ice, a man sitting on another’s hat—these are situations that
can never cease to be funny whilst there is any fun left in the world
and simple minds to be moved to laughter. But this effort at an exit
was only one of many. A carefully designed strategetic move edgeways,
after the fashion of Bob Acres, which was so nearly successful that it
grew really exciting to watch, ended in hilarious shouts and yells,
when the climax of it was the victim waving his arms and head out of
the door and kicking violently inside the house and calling for help.
This business having nearly reduced the audience to exhaustion there
was further pantomime of deep expressive thought followed by a solemn
retirement within the doors and a laboured and careful pulling at the
bolts of the other half of the door and a ceremonial entrance through the
whole double space of it with a smile and sigh of supreme content at the
glorious triumph over difficulties undergone and vanquished. I can see in
my mind’s eye a middle-aged gentleman with tears rolling down his cheeks
and four absolutely limp children lying on the grass still gasping with
laughter—dying with laughter as the phrase is—and begging Calvert in the
intervals of their spasms to “Do it again!”
Now this may not seem one of the funniest things in the world nor was
it perhaps the funniest thing I ever saw, for unfortunately I was only
the middle-aged gentleman and my days for seeing funny things were more
or less over. But to the children it was certainly one of the funniest
things they ever saw, only the question that haunts me is—will they, when
they grow up, be able to describe the fun they saw so as to impart a
tithe of it to those who never saw it? And although I know that, at some
period of my life, I must have seen equally funny things that moved me to
equally stormy and glorious laughter, yet the storm and the glory have
died so completely away that the memory of them is gone and I cannot even
remember from what point of the compass they sprang.
And in my view grown up people really see beautifully funny things only
in the conduct of children and these incidents can only be described to
fathers and mothers, or people who love children as though they were
their fathers or mothers. One of the funniest things I ever saw since
I was grown up was a baby struggling to find its way to its mouth with
a rusk. Why don’t they have a baby doing that at a music hall to slow
music, or at least show one on a cinematograph? I could laugh at such a
thing “sans intermission an hour by the dial.” How it jabs itself in the
eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and loses
the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother
finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed
energy and at length is rewarded by success.
There is plenty of comedy and laughter about a baby as well as sleepless
melodrama in the middle of the night—but it must be your own baby. There
is no fun in next-door babies except when the Clown gets hold of them in
a pantomime.
And now having solemnly failed to recount the funniest thing I ever saw,
let me again remind you that I said from the first that the task was
impossible, since the thing to be funny must be seen, and the funniest
thing I ever saw you never saw. But the way to see funny things and to
enjoy them is to keep your heart like the heart of a little child, for it
is only children who are moved to the purest and healthiest laughter as
the trees are moved in the breeze by a power they know nothing of. And of
course if you have never been a child—and some poor people are born grown
up—you will never have been able to see the funniest thing you ever saw.
THE PLAYWRIGHT.
“In youth he learned had a good mistére
He was a well good wright a carpentére.”
_Chaucer._
The play is very nearly extinct. This is an age of dramatists. The
reason is not far to seek. The playwright is merely a craftsman. The
dramatist—so his friends in the press tell him—is a genius. And in these
years genius is plentiful and craftsmanship becomes a rarer thing every
day.
Just at the moment it is certainly not considered important to be a
playwright. It is better to be an aviator. In the eighteenth century
it was better to be a performing bear. But in my view now as in the
eighteenth century the alternatives to the theatre will not destroy the
theatre and a sound entertaining play will always find theatre-goers.
There is room for plays written by a playwright, and as it is open
to anyone who cares to learn the business to become a respectable
craftsman—just as a man can learn to play the fiddle or make an etching
on copper—there will generally be a few writers for the stage of literary
merit who can turn out a stage play capable of weathering the varied
storms of taste and criticism by which it is assailed in its endeavours
to make safe harbour in the Box Office.
A playwright is according to Dr. Johnson “a maker of plays.” The word
“wright” is satisfactorily enough a Saxon word derived from _wyrht_,
the third person indicative of _wyrcan_, meaning “one that worketh.”
The mere derivation of the word is enough to account for the absence of
the thing itself. This is not an age of work. We retain in a degraded
form the Saxon word, but the Saxon idea is foreign to our civilisation.
Still in things that really matter we cling to the old world notion of a
“wright” or person who knows his business, as in our word “ship-wright.”
Unfortunately in the affairs of the theatre which in the present age
do not really matter very much, any clever man may exploit his wares
without learning his business. Money is lost over it, and the theatre as
an institution suffers. But playgoers like voters and ratepayers will
continue the struggle to obtain a well-made article built according to
their tastes, and in course of time workmanship in playwriting will have
its value again. Meanwhile it seems a pity that among so many brilliant
and intelligent writers for and about the stage, hardly one will take the
trouble to master a few essential problems of what is really, compared to
the technicalities of music or painting, a simple business.
If a man were to claim to be a ship-wright for instance, it would be
accounted to him as a matter of blame if, after money and time had
been spent on building his vessel, it were to be found bottom up on
the evening of the launching. Explain it as he might, his career as a
ship-wright would be endangered. With a playwright it is quite otherwise.
If a man hangs out a sign that he is a wheelwright, you go to him in the
expectation that he can make a wheel. It may not be a highly artistic
wheel. It may be roughly painted, there may be no poetical carving in
its wood-work, still you do expect him to turn you out a wheel. You
would be disappointed if the article were oblong or rhomboid in shape.
You would hesitate to trust yourself to it if it had no hub, no spokes,
no tyres—none of the attributes of a wheel, and you would certainly be
utterly disgusted if it did not run. But a playwright who makes his play
without dramatic hubs or spokes or tyres, is often accredited a genius
by those who have never learned how, and how only, a play can be made,
and the fact that his play does not run is set down to the centrifugal
ignorance of the spectators by the side of the road who came there
desiring to see it run.
There are of course many playwrights to-day who are masters of their
craft and audiences who can approve of them, but unfortunately the
men who make it their business to write criticisms of the theatre are
peculiarly and in some cases boastfully ignorant of the business of
the playwright. In this way they mislead the aspirant dramatist into
the idea that his audience is to blame for not appreciating his play,
when his audience is only the mercury in the barometer recording the
general depression that must result in a theatre from a badly made
play. However beautiful the words and the sentiments of a play may be,
and whatever their moral and literary value, they are quite useless
unless they are put in a form to get over the footlights. Quite silly
sentiments and foolish language may be made serviceable by a playwright
who knows his craft, and it would be valuable if some of the writers
about theatrical affairs were to turn their attention from the discovery
of new genius to the interesting business of the making of stage plays.
One does not expect this to happen just yet, for the stage as a craft
is a dull thing from a literary point of view, compared to the politics
of the theatre and the apportioning of praise and blame—especially the
latter—to writers, actors, and theatre-goers. Besides, there is a cult
and creed among these writers, and to be in the movement, you must of
necessity abjure the well-made play. I read a very clever essay the other
day by a modern writer about the theatre, proving that “the well-made
play” was the abomination of desolation. The essay was full of learning
and epigram, and the questions were cleverly begged and answered in an
apparent spirit of generosity, but it did not convince me. Supposing the
title of the essay instead of being “the well-made Play” had been “the
well-made Coat” or “the well-made Porridge” and the author had set out
to prove to you that you were a stodgy Early Victorian duffer, because
you pretended to like well-made coats and well-made porridge, might you
not reasonably have sighed over his perversity. But this would never
happen, for you will find that in the matter of coats and porridge,
your writer is full of learning, and will write on these subjects if at
all, with a sound knowledge of the craft he is criticising. Indeed I
think the playwright and the actor are the only craftsmen whose work is
widely written about by people who deliberately refrain from learning the
grammar of the crafts they are writing about. Even the critic of pictures
has generally failed to paint them, and that in itself is a liberal
education. But many brilliant entertaining writers about the stage seem
to base their right to be read with attention upon the scant attention
they have themselves given to the subject matter of their criticisms.
Thankful as I am, for the amusement contained in their epigrams, I am
still of opinion that for men to set out to judge a play who have no idea
how a play is made, and no desire to learn how a play is made, is bound
to end in amazement.
I remember taking an eminent antiquarian to Old Trafford on the occasion
of a county cricket match. It was in the historic days of A. N. Hornby
and Lancashire were in the field. My friend—who by-the-bye had written
dramatic criticism in his early days—knew little or nothing about cricket
but was not wanting in that kind of courage that goes to the making of
a great critic. Viewing the game solemnly for about a quarter of an
hour, he at length delivered judgment. “If I were Hornby,” he said, “I
should never have chosen those two fellows in the long white coats for
a Lancashire team; they haven’t tried to stop a ball for the last ten
minutes.” I am often reminded of that story when I read a criticism of a
play. Nor do I for a moment harbour any feelings of wrath against average
critics. Like my friend they too have great literary and scholastic
qualities that I can humbly envy and admire, but there is one thing that
they have not taken the trouble to learn because it is too simple and
easy for their really superior intelligence—the rules of the game.
And playwriting is a game like chess or cricket or many another great
game and many a duffer can learn its elementary moves and rules and the
more studious can master its gambits and strategy, but not even the
greatest can succeed at the game, or understand what the game is about if
they will not learn the rules. This is an age in which quackery and slush
and conceit are having a long innings, and it is a common boast that some
new genius has found a new way of saving souls, or painting pictures
or making plays that is to revolutionise the practice of these things.
Originality is a good thing, and who shall say a harsh word to the youth
who dreams in the waking hours of his inexperience of a new way of doing
old things. There are many new things to be done in the world, but not so
very many for the playwright or the wheelwright. The world has long ago
laid down the lines on which a play or a wheel is to be built and whilst
it is open to us to use any material we choose, that will bear the
necessary strain and decorate it with all the artistic ability we possess
the structure must be sound—the work of the _wright_ must be done—or all
is vanity. The most eloquent writer of sermons in the world cannot make a
play of his preachings merely by chopping them into acts and giving them
to different eminent actors and actresses to recite.
There is an A-B-C for the apprentice playwright to learn as there is
for the child at school, and if he never learns it, he will not be a
proficient workman. I acknowledge this simile is a little old-fashioned
for the modern kindergarten child is taught nowadays to grunt strange
sounds instead of mastering his or her A-B-C; the scientific teacher
being I suppose, under a delusion that English is a phonetic language
like my own native Welsh. But when the educational slush has subsided a
little, we shall begin again with the A-B-C in our study of the English
tongue, just as our playwrights will go back to the simple elementary
rules of their interesting craft.
When Shakespeare wrote of the players that “they have their exits and
their entrances,” he wrote what was strictly true of his own plays, for
he took care to provide them with exits and entrances as any honest
playwright should. And to explain briefly what I mean by the simple rules
of the craft, let us consider for a moment the subject of “entrances.”
It does not, nor need it, enter into the head of the playgoer that his
convenience is consulted by the playwright on the matter of the entrances
of the characters. The critic generally misses the best “entrances” if
any, and makes his own exit with the programme as a book of reference
before the players’ exits are completed. He has a soul above these
matters. But Shakespeare knew that an actor wanted—and rightly wanted
both an exit and an entrance and would not be happy unless he got them.
These matters had to be thought out and designed, and in the matter of
entrances, Shakespeare seems to have learned a very simple little truth,
namely, that from a playwright’s point of view, and equally from an
audience’s point of view, it was not the slightest use for a player to
be talking upon the stage unless the audience knew who he was. Open your
Hamlet and see how the play begins:
_ACT I. SCENE I. A Platform before the Castle._
_FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO._
_Ber._ Who’s there?
_Fran._ Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
_Ber._ Long live the king!
_Fran._ Bernardo?
_Ber._ He.
_Fran._ You come most carefully upon your hour.
_Ber._ ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
_Fran._ For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
_Ber._ Have you had a quiet guard?
_Fran._ Not a mouse stirring.
_Ber._ Well, good-night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
_Fran._ I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who’s there?
_Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS._
_Hor._ Friends to this ground.
_Mar._ And liegemen to the Dane.
_Fran._ Give you good-night.
_Mar._ O! farewell, honest soldier:
Who hath relieved you?
_Fran._ Bernardo has my place.
Give you good-night. [_Exit._
_Mar._ Holla! Bernardo!
_Ber._ Say,
What! is Horatio there?
_Hor._ A piece of him.
_Ber._ Welcome, Horatio; welcome, good Marcellus.
Notice how naturally and in what a businesslike way Bernardo, Francisco,
Horatio and Marcellus are all introduced to the audience, and the care
taken to stamp their identity upon the mind of the spectators. The
natural easy way in which it is done springs from the good craftsmanship
of Shakespeare, but the doing of it is the business of every playwright.
One would suppose that such a simple matter as that could not be
overlooked, but if one turns to the plays of some modern dramatists
and seeks to understand them without studying the stage directions and
noticing carefully the name of the speaker, one is apt to get into
confusion. The latest craze is to publish a programme with the “order
of going in” like a cricket card and thus you can buy for sixpence
information that the playwright is too slovenly and too ignorant of his
business to provide for you. There were no programmes in Shakespeare’s
time, but there were playwrights.
It may occur to those who have not studied the rules of the game that
there is not the same necessity for careful workmanship in the matter of
entrances in a play of to-day that there was three hundred years ago. The
answer to that is that a play or a wheel of to-day is essentially the
same as a play or a wheel was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The duty of the playwright to make his entrances obvious to his audience
is equally clear, and is equally understood by the man who knows his
business.
Compare as a modern instance Sir Arthur Pinero’s opening of “Sweet
Lavender.” The scene is a sitting-room at 3 Brain Court Temple. Left and
right are two doors leading to the rooms of Richard Phenyl and Clement
Hale. Ruth, the housekeeper, is discovered, and Bulger, the barber,
enters the room and the play begins. Now note the workmanship.
_Bul._ I’ve give Mr. ’Ale a nice shave, Mrs. Rolt, clean and
quick. Water’s ’ot enough for me jist to rub over Mr. Phenyl’s
face if ’e’s visible.
_Ruth._ I’m afraid Mr. Phenyl isn’t well enough for you this
morning, Mr. Bulger.
_Bul._ Not one of ’is mornings, hey?
(_Ruth goes to the right-hand door and knocks sharply_).
_Ruth_ (_calling_). Mr. Phenyl! Mr. Phenyl! The barber.
You see, Sir Arthur Pinero, having been an actor and knowing his
business, informs you in a few lines not only the names of Phenyl, Hale,
their housekeeper, and barber, but where each of the two men sleep and
something of their characters. In a word, Pinero, like Shakespeare, is a
thoroughly experienced playwright.
No doubt the younger writers of to-day have been led into their contempt
for the business they have undertaken by the success that has enriched
Mr. Bernard Shaw. They should remember, however, that he is more of a
preacher and society entertainer than a playwright, winning the game by
his delightful personality or personalities. He is an earnest religious
man, with a great hatred of the theatre, the stage, and entertainment,
to use his own words, “the great dramatist has something better to do
than to amuse either himself or his audience.” But dour Nonconformist as
he is, his dullest moments are interrupted by his deep insight into the
really funny things of this world. Mr. Shaw could make a sound play if he
cared enough about it to try to do so, and in “Arms and the Man” and “You
Never Can Tell” he showed much knowledge of the business. He would never,
I think, have attained the real grip of the matter that Shakespeare and
Pinero have, and knowing this he prefers to exploit his really great
qualities in other ways.
But anyone can see for himself in this one little matter of entrances
how slovenly the modern writer can be. If you turn to Mr. Galsworthy’s
“Joy,” the play is opened without any effort being made to tell you the
names and identities of the people on the stage; so, too, I remember,
in the first act of the “Silver Box,” Mr. and Mrs. Borthwick discourse
amusingly about politics without disclosing who they are. No doubt these
little mysteries are easily solved by the regular up-to-date theatregoer
armed with a programme, but the absence of the information irritates
some of the duller members of the audience, and the play suffers. Mr.
Granville Barker, in “Waste,” opens his piece with a room containing five
ladies and one gentleman. He does not disclose you an identity by name
for twelve lines, and Mr. Walter Kent, one of the characters, is not
introduced by name until some nine pages of very clever dialogue have
been spoken.
No one supposes that Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Barker could not put these
little matters right somehow, though they could not do it with the
craftsmanship of Pinero or Shakespeare. Unfortunately they seem to have
a very real contempt for the minor details of the playwright’s business,
which prevents the full effect of their literary gifts being appreciable
in a theatre. Mr. Galsworthy, it is very pleasant to notice, is growing
out of these ways somewhat, and will probably, as his knowledge of the
stage increases, come to respect its old world characteristics, and
recognise that they are permanent, fixed, and unalterable. In his love of
pantomime and the exhibition of real things on the stage, he has the true
playwright’s instinct. His real police courts, real prisons, and real
boardrooms are admirable, and he is on the verge of understanding the
true gospel of the playwright according to Vincent Crummles, manager, who
really knew all about it from the Shakespearean standpoint.
Of course, this little matter of opening a play and designing an
entrance for a character is only one of many simple matters that a
good workman or “wright” has to attend to, but it is a very important
one, and sufficiently illustrative of the difference between good and
bad craftsmanship. To extend the theme by citing further instances of
elementary rules broken and followed would be to commence an essay on the
construction of plays. But to anyone who wishes to pursue the matter,
it is curiously entertaining to see how in all essential things the
actor-playwright is invariably the better craftsman than the literary man
who commences dramatist. Mr. McEvoy, one of our most interesting modern
dramatists, who has still perhaps something of the craft to learn, writes
in a spirit of noble optimism: “I, as a dramatist, who knows how to do
things the right way, mainly because I never had to unlearn how to do
them wrong,” in a few words, expresses the attitude of the dramatist of
to-day towards the experience of centuries in the craft of playwriting.
No one doubts that Mr. McEvoy and others may help a little in the
evolution of the stage, but they lessen their chances of success by the
belief so piously held nowadays that there is nothing to be learned from
the playwrights that have gone before. It was reckoned a mad conceit that
prompted Walt Whitman to sing:
“I conn’d old times
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters
Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.”
The modern genius finds nothing to study in the old masters, and if they,
poor fellows, were now eligible to return and study our world of genius,
I fear they would lack even the courtesy of an invitation box.
It is a pity that it should be so, but for my part I think it is only
a temporary matter, and that, like all other things connected with the
stage, it will work itself out under the wholesome discipline of the
Box Office. A man who will not learn some of the elementary rules of
playwriting must ultimately become too expensive for the most patient
patron. Nor should we blame the literary man who turns dramatist very
severely because he has a contempt for the craft of the playwright. He
was born for higher things. His journalist friends proclaim the value of
his ideas, and the literary expression of them in his play, and it is
only the carelessness of the players and the stupidity of the playgoers
that hinder his success. It is all to the good for the stage that men of
education and intellect should be players, and that good artists should
be scene painters, but no one who is a player or a painter expects to
succeed in his stage work without learning the rules of the game. Why
should a literary man despise the craft of the playwright when he seeks
to earn his wages as a craftsman?
There is nothing new in this distaste of a literary man for the baser
duties of playwriting. Bulwer Lytton, who, whatever we may think of his
literary qualities, had undeniable talent as a playwright, discovered
when he wrote “The Duchess de la Vallière” the interesting fact that
playwriting was a special craft and that “dramatic construction and
theatrical effect” were mysteries to be mastered. “I felt,” he writes in
his preface to the _Lady of Lyons_, “that it was in this that a writer
accustomed to the narrative class of composition would have the most
faults to learn and unlearn. Accordingly, it was to the development
of the plot and the arrangement of the incidents I directed my chief
attention, and I sought to throw whatever belongs to poetry less into the
diction and the ‘felicity of words’ than into the construction of the
story, the creation of the characters and the spirit of the pervading
sentiment.”
Genius will shrug his shoulders at the name of Bulwer Lytton, but as
a playwright two things are worth remembering about him—first, that
in modern phrase he “got there,” and, second, that “he remains.” And
if genius desires to write plays with a view to “getting there” and
“remaining,” after the manner of Bulwer Lytton and other greater men
who have stooped to the craft, let genius seriously consider whether, in
his own interests as well as in the interests of the harmless necessary
playgoer, it is not worth while to learn the rules of the game and
commence playwright.
ADVICE TO YOUNG ADVOCATES.
Here in the street poor Juvenis
May raise his head and proudly trudge
Alongside Judex—judicis
The Third Declension—Judge.
_Pater’s Book of Rhymes._
In England the legal profession has two branches. There is also the
root of the matter, but that is seldom referred to. These two branches
are called—(i.) The Upper Branch, and (ii.) The Lower Branch. In great
affairs the Lower Branch tells the Upper Branch what it has learned about
the case from the client, and the Upper Branch tells the Court what it
remembers of what it has been told by the Lower Branch. The advantage
of retaining these separate branches is that where error occurs it is
difficult to assign responsibility therefor. The Upper Branch learns
advocacy by passing examinations and eating dinners; the Lower Branch
by means of further and better examinations and fewer dinners. Those
rules of advocacy that have not been learned by that method are acquired
afterwards, if at all, by practical experience in the Courts of Law at
the expense of the client.
To offer advice to members of the Upper Branch of the Profession on the
Art of Advocacy would be unseemly, and these hints are intended—merely
as suggestions made in the friendliest spirit—for the Law Student of the
Lower Branch who proposes to take up advocacy in those inferior Courts
which are open to him. Long experience of sitting as Judge in an inferior
Court has led me to believe that it is not necessary or convenient that
the advocacy should also be inferior, and I humbly commend this point of
view to the younger members of both branches of the Profession.
Perhaps the most important Court from the young solicitor’s point of
view is the County Court. A solicitor is allowed to act for a client
in a County Court. When he is acting he has what is called a right of
audience. This does not mean that all he says will be listened to by
the audience, even if it be uttered in an audible voice. Moreover, the
advocate’s right of audience must not be confounded with the rights of
the audience themselves, who are always entitled to leave the Court if
they are bored. For this purpose the Judge is not “audience.” He is
bound to go on sitting, and ought to listen. The commission of Judge is
_oyer_ and _terminer_, but in actual practice in County Courts you will
find that Judges are more ready to dispense justice _terminando_ than
_audiendo_.
Law students who have afterwards risen to eminence in their profession
have sought to practise advocacy in their earlier years by making
appearances at the local Police Courts as defendants. Much of the law of
the motor-car may be learned in this matter—and much that is not law.
The young enthusiast will find, I fear, that the method is an expensive
one, the legal educational value of the magistrate’s _dicta_ is slight,
and the opportunities allowed by the magistrate’s clerk to the defendant
for the practice of advocacy wholly unsatisfying.
Even in later life the young solicitor is not advised to begin his career
as an advocate in the Police Courts. Criminals have very little cash,
and ought not to receive much credit. As to licensing matters, these
are wisely placed in the hands of matured and experienced advocates.
A licensing Bench has always made up its mind—which is divided into
two parts—long before the case is called on, and the advocate’s duty
is to say nothing that could conceivably disturb the considered
judgment of the Court. This is a delicate task not often entrusted to
beginners, and although it is well worth while to study the technic of
some of the masters of the game, yet it is to be remembered that only
with a licensing Bench, and perhaps before some of the more remote
Ecclesiastical Courts, is this style of advocacy required. The young
solicitor will probably find more scope for his abilities as an advocate
in the County Court than before any other tribunal. The Judges of these
Courts are far more tolerant of advocacy and less dogmatic on legal
questions than lay Magistrates, and are neither as omnipotent nor as
omnivorous as Magistrates’ Clerks.
Thus much for advocacy in general. “I will now,” as Lord Chesterfield
says, “consider some of the various modes and degrees of it.” I assume
that you are a young solicitor entrusted by some hopeful and friendly
client with a County Court Action. Your first duty as a solicitor
advocate is to get something on account of costs. Do not omit this common
opening. A gambit here is a mistake. The fact of your client being a
personal friend makes it the more necessary. Many a friendship has not
survived a fourteen days’ order to pay a debt and costs. This sum on
account may prove your real and only solace (_solatium_) when you hear
the judgment.
Always consider yourself before your client. Your client is here to-day
and gone to-morrow, whilst you, I hope, may remain. Proper pride will
instinctively teach you when to consider your own interests rather than
your client’s. Remember Bacon’s saying that “Affected dispatch is one
of the most dangerous things to business that can be.” All dispatch
is indeed alien to the interests of your profession, whether affected
or otherwise, but there are many forms of affectation which you will
find useful to your advancement. I would not have you pretend to forget
the names of the earlier cases you obtain, though I do not advise you
to take cognisance of the Court number of your case. If you knew this
it would save the Court officials trouble, and they are paid to take
trouble. Later in life you will find it well to call the Defendant by
the Plaintiff’s name and _vice versa_. It suggests to the Court and the
audience that you have too many cases to attend to, though it will not
gratify your particular client.
In examining a witness, never let him tell his own story in his own
way. Many a case is lost by this. The leading question is a sign of
ripe advocacy. But do not overdo it; remember over-ripeness is rotten.
The seniors at the Bar are called “leaders” from their habit of using
this form of question unless restrained by quasi-physical violence.
Cross-examination is not merely the art of making the witness cross. If
your opponent’s witness proves nothing against your client, cross-examine
vigorously. By this means the truth is often brought out and justice is
done. During your cross-examination notice carefully whether the Judge is
taking a note of the answers you are obtaining, or writing letters. In
either case do not prolong your cross-examination, for if the latter it
is useless trouble, and if the former it is probable you are eliciting
answers that will be used against you. In re-examination, endeavour to
lead your witness once more through his proof. It is an excellent test of
judicial complacency.
The rules of the County Court are to be found in books, and need not
therefore be committed to memory. Indeed, most law can be found in
books by those who know where to look for it. Yet it is ill to stir the
green mantle of the standing pool of law yourself if you can persuade
another to do it for you. A slight knowledge of the first principles
of elementary law will always be welcome in any Court. You may evade a
detailed study of the more intricate points in your case by insisting
that it falls within the rule laid down in one of Smith’s Leading Cases.
For this purpose, however, you should learn at least the one rule you
propose to quote. After all, the Judge has to decide the law, and ought
to know it. The legal presumption is that everyone knows the law—this
includes Judges. In cases under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, be
careful how you quote a decision of the Court of Appeal. It may not have
gone to the House of Lords, but if it did it is well to find out what
happened to it when it got there. If an appeal to the House of Lords is
pending the current odds against the legal value of the existing decision
will be found in any sporting paper. If, during your argument, the Judge
points out to you that there is a leading case deciding exactly the
opposite of what you are arguing, ask him, with pained irritation, to be
patient, and tell him you will distinguish it presently—but do not try to
do so. Never give yourself away unnecessarily, rather give your client
away, and you will find that generosity of this kind is never forgotten.
Allow the Registrar’s clerks to fill up for you the prolix and difficult
forms in use in the County Court. They are not solicitors, and are
therefore less likely to make mistakes in the work. If, however, a
mistake is made you can always explain to the Judge how it arose, and
you will not be blamed for it. In any case, where the law is really
obscure and difficult, agree with your learned friend to leave the
matter entirely to His Honour. By this means His Honour—if he makes no
objection—will have to hunt up the authorities, and this will save you
and your learned friend much useless labour, whilst the decision of the
Judge will be far more valuable to your client. If you lose your case and
your client loses his temper, blame the Judge, and urge your client to
write to one of the Government departments—it does not matter which—to
make a formal complaint of the Judge’s conduct. Government departments
enjoy correspondence, and will treat your client’s letter with the
respect and attention it deserves. On days when county cricket matches
are being played in the neighbourhood of the Court, and generally on
fine summer afternoons, your arguments will be the more admired if they
are brief and occasionally to the point. If the case you have lost is
for an amount of over £20, nevertheless ask leave to appeal. You do not
want leave, but the Judge may not remember this, and may either grant or
refuse it. In any case it gives you what you are probably longing for at
that particular moment—an effective exit. Finally, remember that however
genuine your contempt for the Court may be, you conceal it until you get
outside—otherwise, seven days.
If the law student will peruse these suggestions and act upon them,
and assuming him to be, as no doubt he believes he is, a young man of
clear, strong, subtle intellect, of sound judgment, quick perceptions
and brilliant forensic abilities, I can assure him that there is nothing
between him and a very considerable and remunerative practice as an
advocate in the County Court in matters which are not of sufficient
importance to “stand” Counsel.
THE INSOLVENT POOR.
“Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every
side and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts
are like cannon; of loud noise but little danger.”
—_Dr. Johnson._
The average man—the “man in the street,” as the journalist of to-day
calls him—has no clear notion of the affairs of the County Court. He
reads occasional paragraphs in the evening papers of some amusing
incident, in which the humour of the Plaintiff or Defendant is capped
by the humour of the playful and learned Judge, and the humour of the
reporter, displayed in his dramatic sketch of the litigants, is the
chief motive for the record of the case. I have often been told that my
work must be very amusing, that I must see a great deal of life, and
that County Court cases seem very entertaining, and I have come to the
conclusion that those of the public who never enter a County Court, or
read any sane record of its everyday work, which is too often dull,
wearisome, and painful, and no fit material for paragraphs and headlines,
live in the belief that the occupation of a Judge of a County Court is
a legal form of small beer and skittles, in which the Judge’s part is
to preside with free and easy good humour, and settle disputes with as
much wit and readiness as he happens to possess. No one who has any
experience of the actual proceedings of the Courts would recognise such
a picture as in any way portraying the facts of the case.
In Manchester and Salford I was able to divide the work of the Courts
into two classes, and to keep them distinct from each other. One
contained an increasing number of Bankruptcy, High Court, and other
cases, in which the litigants are of the same class and have the same
legal assistance as in the High Court. The main differences between the
High Court and the County Court in the conduct of such actions, being the
simplicity of the procedure, and the rapidity and punctuality of trial
in the inferior Court. The second, and to my mind the more important, if
less interesting class of cases, was the large mass of debt collecting
cases under £2, which were the original work of Courts created by the
legislature for the “better securing the payment of small debts.” The
first class of work is a somewhat onerous compliment to the ability with
which the County Courts of the country are worked, but the second class
ought always, it seems to me, to be the chief interest and care of County
Court officials. And in the work connected with this smaller class of
cases, the chief result of my experience has been a dull sense of the
enormous mass of misery and wretchedness it is one’s duty to cause, and
the despondent feeling that of necessity oppresses one in the presence of
misfortune, that one can sympathise with, but not to any material extent
alleviate. I should like, therefore, if it be possible to bring home to
the average citizen the hopeless and almost degrading position of the
insolvent poor, and to suggest for his consideration some of the reforms
which, with or without legislation, might assist in bringing about a
better state of things.
To begin with, one may state that there are over a million cases entered
every year in County Courts, to recover debts under £20, and it will
give some idea of how few cases are seriously disputed when I state that
there are only between eleven and twelve thousand cases in which the
Plaintiff fails to succeed, and these latter figures refer to all cases
up to and above the £50 limit. Many cases get settled, some plaints
never get served, but I have no doubt that one is well within the mark
in stating that 98 per cent. of cases under £20 result in judgment for
the Plaintiff. It is clear, therefore, that the Court is to this extent a
collecting agency rather than a Court for the determination of disputes,
and it is, in this respect, that its machinery should be examined. Few
who do not know by personal experience, something of the life of the
poorer class of working men and women, recognise the enormous extent
to which they live and have their being on credit. The extent to which
credit is given, and recklessly given, to men, women, and children, by
the competing tradesmen who supply the working classes, would be an
absurdity if it did not lead to so much misery. As Judge Chalmers put it
in an epigram born of his wide experience of the insolvent poor: “They
marry on credit to repent on Judgment Summonses.”
Now the two main causes of this reckless system of credit are:—(1) the
keen competition among tradesmen; (2) the existence of imprisonment for
debt. It is not advisable here to say much of trade competition. If it
were a competition to sell the best goods at the most reasonable price it
would perhaps be healthy enough, but it seems to be rather a competition
to give the longest credit for the most inferior article. The largest
classes of competitors are the money lenders, the credit drapers, or
“Scotchmen,” the travelling jewellers, the furniture hirers, and all
those firms who tout their goods round the streets for sale by small
weekly instalments. These of necessity give reckless credit, and, equally
of necessity, collect their monies with much suffering to their poorer
customers. It seems fairly clear that to a working man on small weekly
wages, no credit can be given in any commercial sense. A tradesman, if
he gives credit at all to such a man, ought to give it upon the ground
that he has reason to believe that he is an honest man who can and will
pay his debts. As a matter of fact, the two chief reasons, or rather
excuses, for giving credit are both somewhat weak. Tradesmen will tell
you that they have given a man credit either because he was in receipt of
good wages or because he was out of work. In the first case they ought
clearly to insist upon cash, and the workman ought to get the advantage
of a cash price, and in the second case they should only give credit if
they know the character of the man, unless, of course, they choose to
call it charity, with which the County Court has nothing to do. But in
truth, credit is given without enquiry, recklessly and equally to those
in work and out of work, for necessities, luxuries, and inutilities,
and given at a price which includes the profit of the credit giver, his
costs of making weekly collections, the costs of his debt collector or
solicitor, and ultimately a considerable tribute towards the maintenance
of the County Court.
Now all this is only possible because of the second factor in our
treatment of the insolvent poor, namely, imprisonment for debt. The
insolvent rich—if we may use such a phrase—do not nowadays fear
imprisonment for debt. At the expense of a few pounds borrowed from a
friend, they file their petition in bankruptcy and shake themselves
free of all their creditors as if by magic; for not being traders their
discharge is of little importance to them, and they go absolutely
unpunished. I set down a few cases from an Annual Report of the Board of
Trade for comparison with some other cases, which I propose to set out
later:—
“Bristol. No. 64, of 1896.
Liabilities expected to rank £36,631
Probable value of assets on realisation £100.”
Debtor, younger son of a duke. Creditors, mostly money-lenders
and tradesmen. His expenditure, which included losses by
betting, largely exceeded his income, and knowledge of his
insolvent position for some considerable period was admitted.
“Kingston. No. 21, of 1896.
Liabilities expected to rank £21,741
Probable value of assets on realisation £667.”
Debtor, formerly in the army, lived on his wife’s income, lost
money in Stock Exchange speculations and betting. No income
except £135 derived under marriage settlement.
“No. 471, of 1896.
Liabilities expected to rank £298,166
Probable value of assets on realisation £1,700.”
Debtor, a peer. At the time of his succeeding to estates
in 1864 his liabilities were £30,000, and have apparently
continued to increase in consequence of his expenditure being
larger than his income. His discharge was suspended three years
on account of unjustifiable extravagance in living.
These are samples of the glorious achievements of the insolvent rich.
Now let us turn to the shorter and simpler annals of the insolvent poor.
For them the maxim, “_Si non habet in aere luat in corpore_,” is still
a living truth, only they hear it as quoted to me once by a poor woman
in the words of some Scotch draper: “If I canna ’ave yer brass I’ll
tek yer body.” The law is not the same for the speculator who lives
extravagantly above his income to the injury of his creditors and the
working man on five-and-twenty shillings a week who fails to live within
his means. The latter is only in a very limited sense the creature of
bankruptcy. The luxury of legal insolvency is almost denied to him. He
is ordered to pay his creditor, and the costs his creditor has incurred
in obtaining judgment, and the fees of the County Court, at so many
shillings a month, and if he fails to pay his instalments his creditor
proceeds, at further cost to the debtor, to collect them by means of
a judgment summons. Then, upon proof that he has or has had the means
to pay the instalments due, he is committed to prison for default. Few
citizens, I think, recognise the number of persons who are thus committed
to prison. In 1909[2] no less than 375,254 summonses were issued, 234,753
heard, 136,630 warrants issued, and 8,904 debtors actually imprisoned.
Nor can it be granted that of those who pay between the issue of the
summonses and the day of imprisonment, all, or nearly all, are in a
position to pay, in the sense of possessing surplus money sufficient
to discharge the debt. Friends and relatives come to the rescue, fresh
credit is obtained to pay off the old debt, and thus the result of a
committal order is too often to thrust the unfortunate debtor one step
deeper into the slough of insolvency in which he is already sinking
beyond recovery. At the same time it is of no use railing at the system.
The Select Committee of 1893 reported generally in favour of it, mainly,
I think, because the working class themselves uphold it. They uphold
it for one reason—and a powerful one—because without imprisonment for
debt there would be no reckless credit, and without reckless credit
there would be no possibility of prolonging a strike after their own
accumulated funds began to give way. All that any individual Judge can
do is to administer the system with as much sympathy and mercy as is
compatible with its honest working, without prejudice to his right of
private protest as a citizen against its social iniquity.
Having now pointed out the position of the small debtor in the County
Court, I want to draw attention to an existing system of small
Bankruptcies known as Administration Orders which are very little used
or appreciated by either the Courts or by debtors, but which with some
improvements might do much to mitigate the evils of the existing system
of imprisonment and check the recklessness with which credit is given to
the poor.
This Administration Order was the creation of the Bankruptcy Act of 1883,
and in a few words the system may be thus described: Where a debtor has
a judgment against him in a County Court and is unable to satisfy it
forthwith, and alleges that his whole indebtedness does not exceed £50,
he may file a request for an Administration Order. In this request he
gives a full list of all his creditors with particulars of their debts,
and states whether or not he proposes to pay them in full and by what
monthly or other instalments. Notice is given to creditors of the date of
hearing, and on that day the Judge either makes or refuses the order, or
makes a modified order at his discretion. As soon as the order is made
all proceedings against the debtor, in respect of the debts scheduled,
are suspended, and the creditors individually cannot attack him. He can,
however, if he does not pay his instalments, be committed for default
or the order can be rescinded. The fund created by his payments is
appropriated—(1) for the Plaintiff’s costs in the action; (2) for the
Treasury fees, which are 2s. in the £ on the total amount of the debts;
and (3) for the debts in accordance with the order.
This is the system which Mr. Chamberlain, on the second reading of his
Bill, March 19th, 1883, described as a system whereby the “small debtor
would be in exactly the same position as a large debtor who had succeeded
in making a composition with his creditors or in arranging a scheme of
liquidation. Although he had not abolished in all cases imprisonment for
debt, yet, if these provisions became law, it could be no longer said
that any inequality existed in the law as between rich and poor. The
resort to imprisonment[3] to secure payment would be much rarer, and a
large discretion would be vested in the Judges to arrange for the relief
of the small debtor by a reasonable compensation.”
These were brave and wise words, interesting to-day as showing the then
intentions of the author of the system, hopeful to-day as suggestive of
what may be expected from those in authority when they recognise the
failure of the system in achieving the objects for which it was invented.
The advantage of the Administration Order over the individual collection
of debts is manifest, but the imperfections in the system are equally
manifest. The limit of £50, and the exorbitant Treasury fees to be paid
in priority to the dividend to creditors, are of themselves sufficient
to account for the failure of the system. Thus it is not surprising to
find that in many of the Courts this section of the Act is a dead letter,
and the Administration Order is unknown. There is, and I think rightly,
a wide discretion given to Judges of the County Courts who are supposed
to study the needs and wants of their particular localities, and minister
to these wants in a quasi-pastoral spirit. Without the active assistance
of Judges and Registrars such a system as this could not be either known
to—or understood by—the insolvent poor. Many Judges probably think the
system worthless, and in consequence it is not used. Thus in 1909, on
two circuits, 5 and 8, Bolton and Manchester, 821 orders were made,
while on five large London circuits, 40-44 inclusive, only 37 orders
were made. I have myself found a considerable increase in applications
for Administration Orders since I have encouraged debtors whose affairs
were in a hopeless state, to make their application, and taken occasion
to explain to debtors appearing on Judgment Summonses the provisions of
the section enabling them to apply. How hopeless is the condition of many
of the insolvent poor, and what they are reduced to by reckless credit
given to them by some classes of tradesmen may be seen from some of
the following cases extracted from the Administration Order Ledgers of
Manchester and Salford:—
“M. No. 358.—Labourer; wife; 9 children; 18s. per week; 12
creditors; 7 judgments; debts £40. 9s. 8d. Has nearly finished
paying these at 5s. in the £ by instalments of 6s. a month. The
Treasury got £3. 4s. Court fees on the 7 judgments, and £4 fees
on the Administration Order.
“M. No. 399.—Labourer; 22s. a week; wife; 11 children, two
earning 5s. a week; 14 creditors; 10 judgments; debts £44. 16s.
1d. Was paying 10s. in the £ at 10s. per month. Paid £6; order
then rescinded. Treasury taking £4. 8s. fees; creditors, £1.
12s. The Treasury had previously had £3. 17s. Court fees on the
10 judgments.
“S. No. 429.—Railway Porter; 16s. 10d. a week; wife and 1
child, aged three; 19 creditors; 13 of the creditors travelling
drapers; debts, £33. 10s. Order, 10s. in the £ at 5s. 6d. a
month. Before the Order was made he was, under the 9 judgments,
bound to pay 39s. 6d. a month, and liable to committal if he
failed. The Treasury had already had £3. 4s. 9d. Court fees
on the judgments, and will get a further £3. 6s. fees on the
Administration Order.
“S. No. 551.—Labourer; wife and 6 children, two earning jointly
10s. per week; wages, 18s. a week; 18 creditors, of whom
11 were travelling drapers; 16 judgments; debts, £20. 10s.
2d. Already liable to pay 35s. a week to different judgment
creditors. Order made, 10s. in the £ at 4s. a month. Court
fees already paid to Treasury £4. 14s. 3d. Under the Order they
will have another £2. In this case the State has added more
than 30 per cent. to the original indebtedness of the man in
the vain endeavour to make him do what he was unable to do,
_i.e._, pay his debts without the means to pay them.
“S. No. 460.—Ostler; wife; no children; 21s. a week; 25
creditors; 9 judgments; debts, £32. 7s. 6d.; 14 of the
creditors travelling drapers. Order, 10s. in the £ at 6s. per
month. Apart from the Order he was bound under the judgments
to pay 22s. a month. Here the Treasury have already had £2.
8s. 6d. Court fees, and will get a further £3. 4s. fees on the
Order.”
In the three last cases the insolvency was chiefly due to a careless
wife. The porter’s wife was quite young and an easy prey for the
travelling draper.
From these cases it is at least clear that if such debtors are to be
left to their various creditors, a large portion of their time will be
spent in evading the service of Judgment Summonses or appearing in Court,
either by themselves, or more usually by wife and baby, to show cause
why they should not go to gaol. Without the assistance of some form of
bankruptcy and discharge their case is hopeless, and their future must be
one of chronic insolvency.
One of the chief objections to the present system raised by creditors
is the exorbitant fees charged by the Treasury. Parliament enacted that
these fees should “not exceed” 2s. in the £ on the total amount of the
debt. The Treasury interpreted this to mean that there should always be
2s. in the £, whatever composition was paid, and ordered accordingly.
So, if a man’s total debts be £50, the Treasury draw £5, whether the
debtor pays 20s. in the £ or 2s. in the £, and draws this in priority
to creditors and whether the Order is fully carried out or not. As we
have seen, the Treasury have often, before the Order is made, drawn
considerable sums on judgments forming part of the Order, and creditors
contend, and I think rightly, that these fees are excessive.
Some time ago I collected the views of the Judges on these fees, and
forwarded them to the Treasury. Speaking generally, they were adverse
to the fees, but the Treasury, although they have the power to mitigate
the fees, cannot see their way to do it. I put this matter in the
forefront of possible reforms, because it can be done by a stroke of the
departmental pen without legislation, and if done would do much to render
these orders more useful to—and therefore less unpopular with—creditors.
I have often pointed out to grumbling creditors that these fees were
probably not intended by Parliament to be exacted, for I have never
thought it part of my duty to apologise for the rapacity of a Government
department. And when I saw the figures for 1909, “Treasury income from
fees on Administration Orders £12,824, money paid to creditors £45,059,”
I could only concur in the view that it was little short of a scandal
that such an income should be drawn by any department out of so miserable
and helpless a class as the insolvent poor, especially when it is done at
the expense of those to whom they owed money.
The Treasury, of course, have a departmental view perfectly sane and
satisfactory after its sort. If I understand the view aright it is
this:—These Orders do not pay their way according to our calculations.
There is an income of nearly £13,000 a year coming to us under an Act of
Parliament, and our duty is to take what is provided, asking no questions
for conscience sake. If one could get beyond the department to the
individuals composing it, and make them realise in the midst of their
great affairs that this sum of £13,000 a year, trumpery but acceptable,
at Whitehall, is a grievous tax in the cottages of the insolvent poor,
some reform would perhaps be made. Indeed, I cannot but think that the
departmental view of the small work of the County Court is altogether
wrong in principle, and that the time is at hand when Parliament should
enforce a more modern view of its duties on the department. The constant
cry is that the Courts do not pay. The answer is that they ought not
to be asked to do so. The toll-bar principle ought to be gradually
abolished, and the Courts of the country ought to be as free to Her
Majesty’s poorer subjects as the high roads. Nowhere is this more true
than in the County Court, where the fees throughout are exorbitant and
excessive, pressing with the greatest harshness on those who are already
over-burdened with debts.
These and other matters have, however, been reported upon by
commissioners and mentioned in Parliament. The only immediate reform
that can be made is the reduction in Treasury fees. That can be done
forthwith and without legislation if Parliament desires it, and ought
to be done without delay. After that it will be time to put forward
a more satisfactory scheme of small bankruptcies, open to all weekly
wage-earners, whatever the amount of their debts, with an official
receiver responsible to the creditors and the Court. Parliament ought
at least to find time to carry out the recommendations of the Select
Committee of the House of Lords in their report on the working of the
Debtors’ Act, printed in 1893. The most important suggestion there made
was: “That the question of costs in respect of Judgment Summonses and
Orders of Commitment is one deserving serious consideration, and that it
would be advisable that a Departmental Committee of the Treasury should
carefully consider the matter as early as possible.” This question of
costs and fees in all small proceedings is one that wants an immediate
and searching investigation and reform of a not wholly departmental
character.
Meanwhile faith, which will remove mountains, enables me to believe that
the Departmental Committee of the Treasury are giving it a wise and most
deliberate consideration. Hope also buoys me up to look forward to a time
when Parliament will amend the Statutes of Limitations in regard to small
debts, curtail imprisonment for debt, and enact at least as favourable
laws for the insolvent poor as exist for the insolvent rich. Charity,
meanwhile, compels me to grieve that so little is done to stop the
reckless credit which is offered to the poorer classes, and to urge the
consideration of such measures as may assist the insolvent poor, who of
all our fellow citizens seem to me to demand pity and sympathy, in place
of punishment, rigour, and harsh laws.
WHY BE AN AUTHOR?
“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a
weariness of the flesh.”
_Ecclesiastes_ xii., 12.
The connecting of the making of books with study is an old world idea
that it is difficult for a latter-day reader to understand. A modern
world recognises that book-making in all its branches is a natural
pursuit for those of the unemployed who honestly strive to live by their
wits. But if the making of books was allowed to be a national nuisance in
the days of Solomon, much more must it be so to-day, when books are fast
ceasing to be saleable, and have to be given away with out-of-date or
up-to-date newspapers, pounds of tea, and other doubtful merchandise.
If, therefore, the supply of authors could be mitigated, much of this
long-standing trouble might be abated; and it becomes a reasonable thing
for a citizen—especially one who has himself been guilty of some of the
minor literary misdemeanours—to inquire why authors become authors,
instead of following some useful trade, and what human motive it is that
drives people to authorship. I do not pretend that I have found the
answer to the question, “Why be an Author?” If I had I should have solved
one of the riddles of the universe. But I can, perhaps, set forth a few
suggestions upon the lines of which future scientists will be able to
pursue the problem to its ultimate solution.
To make a rough attempt at the classification of the common motives of
authorship is a bold thing to do. Experimentally I should set down—“in
the order of going in,” to use a cricket phrase—the four following,
namely:—
(1) Vanity, or conceit.
(2) Greed.
(3) The fun of the thing,
and
(4) Having a message to deliver.
And first of vanity or conceit. How easy this is to diagnose in the
literary works of others; how impossible to admit, even for a moment,
that it is at all a permissible suggestion about the motive of our own
work. And yet if one will be honest with oneself, what is there in life
that ministers to the delightful pleasure of vanity so thoroughly and
satisfactorily as the sight of one’s first printed production. I remember
well the first book I ever published. It was, curiously enough, a Life
of Queen Elizabeth, a subject I returned to in later years. It was not a
large book—but then at the time I published it I was not a large person,
being only nine years old, and the physical act of writing was burdensome
to me; spelling also had more difficulties about it than perhaps it has
to-day. No, it was not a large volume: to be exact it contained two
pages demi octavo of rather large print. It was not however, intended
to be printed in book form at all. It was rather a first effort at
journalism, and was written for the pages of an excellent periodical
called _Little Folks_, which had offered a prize for the best life of
the Maiden Queen. The prize, no doubt, was, as these things often are,
carelessly adjudged to some budding author, who has probably never been
heard of since. Anyhow, I did not get it, and my MS. was returned,—you
send a stamped envelope if you want it returned, never forget that—mine
was returned “highly commended.” That Editor has saved himself a lot of
nasty abuse from literary historians of the next century by those two
words, “highly commended.” He made a mistake, no doubt, about the prize;
but I, who have had to give many hundred decisions in my later years—not
perhaps verdicts of such moment, but concerning smaller matters, where
right decision is equally advisable—know the difficulties of coming to a
true result, and have long ago readily forgiven him. Doubtless the poor
fellow did his best, and if he is still alive—more power to his elbow, if
he has gone
Where the Rudyards cease from Kipling,
And the Haggards ride no more
then—peace to his ashes.
The world was not however to lose this masterpiece. I remember showing it
to my father when it came back in its stamped envelope, and he put it in
his pocket, gravely expressing a desire to read it. I am not sure that he
did read it, but he had it printed—at Guildford, I believe, when he was
away on circuit.
I remember him placing the parcel in my hands on his return and my
delight in opening it, and my wild surprise at the discovery of the
contents, and the awed silence that came over my soul when I saw the
print on the pages and knew I was an author. I can hear my father’s
good-natured laugh over the affair, and my mother’s insistence on my
autograph on the front page “with the author’s compliments.” I spelt
compliment with an “e.” It is absurd having two ways of spelling one
word. Afterwards I have a dim remembrance of walking about on air for
a few days, and finding it difficult to sit on chairs for any length
of time, and quite impossible to learn lessons. All my spare time was
taken up by reading the great work in solitary corners, and marvelling
at the beauty of the language and the respectability of the spelling.
When I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens I shrank from the gaze of
the populace, much as a real grown-up author might do, who had lived at
the Isle of Man or Stratford-on-Avon. After a time I became normal again,
but the mischief was done: I had, in the seventeenth century phrase,
“commenced author.”
Looking back at the matter from the cold, grey standpoint of a
grandfather, there is this to be said for my first book. It is out of
print. It is so rare that I doubt if an American millionaire could buy
one. The last copies of it that I saw fell out of an old desk many years
ago, and were made into paper boats by my children. Luckily I have plenty
more materials for paper boats for the next generation when they shall
need them.
I have written down this little experience because, to my mind, it is
perhaps the one certain instance I can testify to, of a book being
written wholly and entirely from motives of vanity or conceit. The
prize did not attract me in the least; it was, I believe, a book of
religious tendency. There was no greed about the matter. I did not do it
for the love of the thing, for in those days I spent my spare time in
carpentering and producing pantomime in a toy theatre. As for any sense
of having a message to deliver that was absurd, because I copied the bulk
of it out of Little Arthur’s History of England, carefully paraphrasing
the language to hide from the over-curious the source of my authorities.
There is no doubt that this book was written and produced solely by the
author’s—and perhaps his parents’—strong sense of vanity and conceit. I
can speak about the author impersonally to-day for he seems to me such an
entirely different person from myself.
I have asked many living writers whether they have ever knowingly written
anything purely from motives of vanity and conceit. They all answer me in
a pained and haughty negative. For myself, I rather glory in it. It is
good to have done something that nobody else has achieved. It is a big
thing to have written at least one book that does not lie on the shelves
of the British Museum, a book the original edition of which no gold can
buy, a book that has given, to one reader at least, moments of more
thrilling joy than any book that was ever printed.
But although we may accept the statements of living authors, that
they never feel moved to authorship by vanity, yet if we look at the
records of those who are gone we shall find schools of literature whose
mainspring has been conceit. Of such are the French _Philosophes_ of the
reign of Louis XV. of whom Carlyle writes: “They invented simply nothing:
not one of man’s powers, is due to them; in all these respects the age of
Louis XV. is among the most barren of recorded ages. Indeed, the whole
trade of our _Philosophes_ was directly the opposite of invention: it
was not to produce that they stood there, but to criticise, to quarrel
with, to rend in pieces, what has been already produced;—a quite inferior
trade: sometimes a useful, but on the whole a mean trade; often the
fruit, and always the parent of meanness in every mind that permanently
follows it.”
And indeed in all critics there must be a marrow of conceit stiffening
the backbone. Else how could they—who fell out of the ranks footsore on
the march to battle—come along so complacently when the fight is over,
to talk to the soldiers covered with the grime and sweat of their work,
and tell them how easily it might all have been done without soiling the
pipeclay.
All critics however do not write merely from this motive. There are
many of course writing from the far higher motive of greed. Then there
are some few who do it for the rare fun of the thing—to enjoy the
intense annoyance it gives to foolish, sensitive artists—these are the
mud flingers and corner boys of the trade, and of course a few critics
have lived who played the game and knew it and brought a message of
heaven-sent sympathy to the artist. Maybe such a one exists to-day,
in some corner behind the clouds, struggling to let his rays shine
encouragement on honest endeavour.
But apart from the writings of critics vanity and conceit have always
been strong motives of authors. They are found especially in schools
of literature, where the form is preferred to the substance. Take our
eighteenth century writers and read the story of their lives. Can it be
denied that they were a vain crowd? Even Swift, Pope and Addison—the
greatest of them—were not without it. As for the smaller fry, with their
degrading squabbles and jealousies—their very faces seem to me pitted
with the small-pox of conceit. And throughout this period you have one
symptom;—the writer exalting the letter above the spirit,—and when you
find that, it is invariably the indication of disease, and the disease is
vanity.
This is not only the case in writing. It is so in nearly all pursuits.
When you begin to believe in technical excellence of form as an end
in itself, it is necessary to become to some extent narrow, vain and
conceited or you will not achieve your end. In those arts in which form
is more essential to the art than substance, vanity and conceit are more
commonly found. Thus actors, singers, dancers, and schoolmasters are
often not without vanity. You may notice, too, that the minor technical
pursuits of life produce a certain conceit. It is occasionally observable
in the semi-professional lawn-tennis amateur. In a lesser degree too by
many golfers the same vice is sometimes displayed, but more often in the
club-house and on the first tee than during the progress of the game.
When a man is deeply bunkered style becomes a secondary consideration.
But generally speaking all writers who think literature an affair of
quantities, metres, syntax and grammatical gymnastics, all men who
reverence literary form rather than practical substance, are bound
to write in a spirit of vanity and conceit, which is the only petrol
that can push them along the weary road they have chosen. It oppresses
you to-day to find this spirit in nearly all the great writers of the
eighteenth century. How Oliver Goldsmith stands out amongst them as the
one great writer with a human heart; how we readers of to-day love him
and reverence him with an enthusiasm we cannot offer to Addison himself.
But enough of conceit and vanity, let us turn to our second motive—a far
pleasanter and more everyday affair—greed. I should put Shakespeare
among the first and greatest whose motive was greed. I cannot imagine
anyone taking the trouble to write a play from any other motive,
certainly not from a lower motive. Shakespeare’s main desire in
life, if we may trust his biographers, was to become a landowner in
Warwickshire—possibly a county magistrate. What an ideal chairman
he would have made of a licensing bench. Would Mistress Quickly’s
license have been renewed? I doubt it. Shakespeare wrote plays for the
contemporary box office to make money out of them and thrive. As Mr.
Sidney Lee tells us he “stood rigorously by his rights in all business
relations.” There being in those days no law of copyright he borrowed
all he could from common stock, added to it the wonderful flavouring
of his own personality and served up the immortal dramatic soup which
nourishes us to-day. After this fashion of borrowing, if Emerson be
right, the Lord’s Prayer was made. The single phrases of which it is
composed were, he says, all in use at the time of our Lord in the
rabbinical forms. “He picked out the grains of gold.” It is the same if
you think of it with Æsop’s fables, the Iliad and the Arabian Nights,
which no single author produced. And so must all great work be done,
for we are nothing of ourselves and if we do not take freely of those
who are gone before we can do naught. But only those have the right to
borrow who can embroider some new and glorious pattern on the homely
stuff they appropriate. Shakespeare had no vanity and conceit; no doubt
he wrote for the fun of the thing, as all writers who are worth their
salt must do, possibly—though I for one doubt it—he knew of the message
he was delivering to the world; but that he wrote his plays primarily
for greed, the few records of his life that we possess seem to me to
prove beyond reasonable doubt. Unless, of course, you are mad enough
to believe Bacon wrote the plays. Then indeed the motive power of the
author was greed—greed of a baser sort than Shakespeare’s—for the great
Lord Chancellor never did anything that I know of, except a few trivial
scientific experiments, from any other motive.
But when I speak of Shakespeare and greed, I speak as a modern and not
as an Elizabethan. Greed in Shakespeare’s day meant the greed of filthy
lucre, the insatiate greediness of evil desires. It was an insanitary
word in those days. But greed to-day means something quite otherwise.
When I speak of greed as the main motive of authorship I use the word,
not with any old-fashioned dictionary meaning, but in an up-to-date,
clear-sighted, clarion, socialist sense. You speak to-day—those of you
who are in the movement—of the greed of the capitalist, the greed of the
employer. In this way I speak of the greed of the author. The greed of
anyone to-day is the greed which urges him to endeavour to enrich himself
and provide for himself and his family by using his brains in producing
things. Incidentally he may employ a vast number of people with less
brains or no brains, incidentally he may ruin himself after he has used
his brains, and paid a large number of people in publishing the result
of his brain-work; but do not let us in an age of socialism gainsay that
it is pure greed to use your brains for the purpose of putting money
into your own pocket. It is true this kind of greed led to Columbus
discovering America—but if he had not done so how many fewer capitalists
there would have been. Sir Walter Raleigh, too, was a bad instance of a
man moved by greed; we cannot acquit Drake, or the great Lord Burghley
or even my own historical heroine the Maiden Queen herself. The greed
of Elizabethan England is a thing to shudder at, if you are a real
socialist, and Shakespeare, I fear, must be found guilty from a modern
standpoint of having written his plays from the simple motive power of
greed.
I am the more certain of this for the only Shakespearean play of modern
times “What the Butler Saw,” was written, I am ashamed to say, from
similar motives. I happen to know that this is a play after Shakespeare’s
own heart. I learned it in a vision. I am not a believer in dreams
myself, but there must be something in some of them, and mine is worthy
of the consideration of the Psychical Research Society. It was after the
first night of the Butler in London, and after a somewhat prolonged and
interesting supper with some of those responsible for the production,—in
psychical research supper should always be confessed to,—that I had
a curious dream of the people who were present at the theatre. Many
who appeared had actually been present, others had not. Milton and
Oliver Cromwell, both came up to me and hoped it would not have a long
run—Wordsworth, I remember, wanted to know what the Butler really did
see, and Charles Lamb, winking at me, took him away to tell him. It was
then that Shakespeare came and patted me lightly on the shoulder, saying
“It’s all right, my young friend”—young of course from Shakespeare’s
point of view—“I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
Many will wonder why this story has not long before this gone the
round of the press. The answer is that I am not a business man. I once
mentioned the dream to a spiritualist, who said that there was no
evidence that it was the shade of Shakespeare—it might have been the
astral body of one of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man. I replied that
then we should have heard of it long ago.
As an instance of dramatic justice it is interesting to know that the
production of this play costs its authors money. Incidentally it made
money for others, actors, actresses, scene-shifters, proprietors of
theatres, dramatic critics and the like, to the tune of tens of thousands
of pounds. Some day when I publish the play, as I hope to do, I will set
out in detail its financial side, which is quite as amusing as the play
itself. But the main point, which from a socialist point of view is so
entirely satisfactory, is that the brain-workers who wrote it, and the
capitalist who produced it lost over it; but that it provided work and
bread and cheese for a large number of people who might otherwise have
filled the ranks of the unemployed. It is a fitting termination to the
work of an author whose motive power is greed. The only fear is that if
this were always to happen, there might come a time when there would be a
shortage of authors ready to supply food and wages for others at a cost
to themselves. Personally, I do not think this is all likely to occur,
for authors seem to me a class of persons who will always be actuated by
vanity, and a greed of so unintelligent and unbusinesslike a character
that they will go on writing for others, rather than themselves to the
end of time. I in no way regret the results of “What the Butler Saw.” I
fear my greed is of a very poor commercial standard. I had plenty of fun
for my money. It is something to have written a masterpiece, and it is
something better to have seen it beautifully acted. I am very poor at
taking the amusements of life seriously, and even when playing golf I
often find myself looking at the scenery instead of at the ball. Indeed,
I am not sure that I did write “What the Butler Saw,” from any really
high sense of greed, and that may account for its having turned on me and
bitten me financially. I have more than a half belief that I wrote it for
the fun of the thing.
And this brings me to my third motive of authorship, writing for the
fun of the things. All the best writing in the world—short of the very
highest and most sacred work—is done for the fun of the thing. Some
people prefer the phrase the love of the thing, and say it is the love
of the beautiful, or the love of mischief, or the love of romance that
moves them to writing. But I prefer to call it writing for the fun of the
thing, because that describes to me exactly what I mean. All games should
be played in this spirit, and writing is a far less serious game with
most of us than games like bridge or chess or golf or cricket.
Charles Marriott—not the national novelist of our high seas, but Marriott
the modern—who has a gracious gift of hinting great ideas in simple
phrases and never shouts them at you, so that if you are a deaf reader
you do not always get the best out of him—Marriott says in “The Remnant”:
“Quite in the beginning, when men went out to kill their enemies or their
dinner, there was always one man who wanted to stay, at home and talk
to the women, and make rhymes and scratch pictures on bones.” There are
two great truths in this. One is that the first author was an artist. He
scratched pictures on bones long before he made rhymes. Of course he did
it for the fun of the thing. There could be no other reason, the motives
of vanity and greed were not open to him. There was no publisher in the
cave-dwellers’ days to seize his bones, and pay him a royalty on them,
and build a big cave for himself out of the proceeds of the speculation,
whilst the bone-scratcher slept in the open. I think a cave-artist had a
good time. He enjoyed his life in his own way, and I believe got better
food for his work than many an artist of to-day. But modern artists have
forgotten the great truth that to paint well you must paint for the fun
of the thing, as the cave-man scratched his bones, and as children draw
to-day if you give them paper and pencil, and don’t look on and worry
them. Few artists now paint for the fun of the thing without vanity or
greed, but when they do they sometimes find an echo in the shape of
a patron as mad as themselves, who buys pictures for the fun of the
thing, and not because the critics tell him that this or that is good.
The recent McCullough collection at Burlington House was worth showing
despite the sneers of the superior persons, because it was an honest
collection of what one man had really liked. What annoyed the critics was
that a man had bought the pictures because he loved them, and not because
he had been told he ought to love them.
And then there is another great truth in what Marriott says. The
cave-artist stayed at home to make rhymes and pictures for the women
whilst the men went out to get the dinner. How few writers remember that
the real judges of literature are and must be the women of the country.
Women necessarily fill the churches and lecture halls, and the lending
libraries, and the theatres, and the picture galleries—only in music
halls do men predominate. It is for women primarily that all literature
and art are made to-day, just as they were in the cave-dweller’s time.
To follow out this interesting theme and account scientifically for the
phenomenon would take a longer essay than this. Moreover, one would run
up against the problem of the women who want to vote and many other
dangerous questions. The cave-dwellers really knew all about it. The men
went out to get the dinner in those days merely because there were no
shops in Cave Street—but the researches of all professors show that even
in those days the women ordered the dinner. And the voice that orders the
dinner, and the hand that rocks the cradle will always rule the world.
If you want to test the value of writing for the fun of the thing in
relation to the work produced take the case of Southey. Southey was,
among the many mansions of literature of his day, the most eligible
mansion of all. He was a most erudite and superior literary man. But
though what he wrote was important and well paid for when he wrote it,
to-day the world has no use for it. But once in a way Southey wrote
a story for the fun of the thing and it will live for ever. I refer
of course to “The Three Bears.” Southey, strange to say, wrote that
wonderful story. He invented the immortal three, the Great Huge Bear with
his great rough gruff voice, and the Middle Bear with his middle voice,
and the Little Small Wee Bear with his little small wee voice. And such
a work of genius is it that already it is stolen and altered and the name
of the author is almost unknown. And just because he wrote it for the fun
of the thing it will go on living as long as there are children in the
world to tell it to. Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, Dumas’ three musketeers,
may vanish into oblivion, but the three bears will be a folk-lore story
when the affairs of this century are a prehistoric myth.
Remember too, Southey’s companion, Wordsworth, the “respectable poet”
as De Quincey unkindly called him. Did he ever write anything for the
fun of the thing? Had he any fun in him to write with? Wordsworth serves
his purpose to-day, no doubt. He is there for professors of English
literature to profess. He is there for serious-minded uncles to present
as a birthday gift, in one volume bound in whole morocco, floral back
and sides, gilt roll, gilt edges, price sixteen shillings and sixpence,
to sedate nieces. But do the sedate nieces read his poetry? As Sam
Weller says: “I don’t think.” Coleridge again, when you set aside the
few poems that he did write for the fun of the thing, presents the
somewhat mournful spectacle of a literary man spending a literary life
doing literary work. You read of him starting this periodical and that
periodical, roaming about England in search of subscribers under the
impression that he had a message to deliver; when, sad to say, all the
while he was ringing his bell and shouting “Pies to sell” the tray on
his head was empty of any useful food for mankind.
Compare these great names with that of their humble companion, Charles
Lamb. He never wrote an essay or a letter except for the fun of the
thing. He had to go down to an office day by day and do his task. He
might have kept pigeons or done a little gardening or played billiards,
but he preferred to read books and to go to plays and write about things
he loved. Not that his hobby was in its nature a higher thing to him than
another man’s, but it was his naturally, and he simply wrote because
he enjoyed writing, in the same way that he drank because he enjoyed
drinking. And what is the result? Southey has departed into the shadows,
when you take Wordsworth off the young lady’s shelves you have to blow
the dust off the top of the volume, and Coleridge is only to be found
in school poetry books which are carefully compiled by economic editors
of poems which are non-copyright. But Charles Lamb has more friends and
lovers to-day than he had in his own lifetime. He wrote for the fun of
the thing and the fun remains with us to-day, bounteous and joyful,
bubbling over with humour and delight, and overflowing with affection and
respect for everything that is best in human nature.
And perhaps part of what I mean by writing for the fun of the thing is
to be found in a phrase that used to be uttered about writings that they
“touch your heart.” It is a curious old-fashioned phrase. It would
be interesting to enquire what it is that keeps a book alive through
after-generations. I think that this capacity of “touching the heart”
has much to do with it. Shakespeare, Dickens and Goldsmith had this
quality; so in a different way had Izaak Walton and Samuel Pepys. It may
be that this magic power is the salt that keeps a man’s writings sweet
among the varied temperatures of thought through which they survive.
Qualities of brain and intellect vary century by century, but what we
call the heart of man is the same to-day as it was when King David wrote
his psalms. Therefore, unless our writings appeal to the heart it is
impossible for them to attain everlasting life. Much of the literature
of to-day is, I fear, as Touchstone says—“damned like an ill-roasted
egg all on one side.” For the fashion of the hour is to despise the
heart and to sneer at the simple folk whose hearts still beat in harmony
with the silly domestic notions of love and honour and charity and
family life. To-day who would be a writer must write for the brains and
intellects of the learned—meaning by the learned those who have passed
sufficient examinations to render it unnecessary they should ever think
for themselves again. And even this is outdone by the new school who
pride themselves that the brain is as old-fashioned an audience for the
author as the heart, that the proper portion in the twentieth century is
the liver. If a book stirs the bile of all decent people it is to-day a
popular success. So unintelligent a view do some take of the movement
that they try to throw opprobrium upon it by the use of the epithet
“yellow” as in the phrase “Yellow Press”: whereas, yellow among the
inner brotherhood is the holy colour as typical of the movement as it
is of jaundice itself. Personally, I should like to send many of our
great novelists and playwrights of to-day to Harrogate for the season.
I believe that a course of ten ounce doses of the “strong sulphur,” at
that charming watering place would diminish the risk for them of a far
longer course of far stronger sulphur in the hereafter. Their writings
may have a vogue for a time and after all their position in literature
will not be decided by anything I say, or anything their friendly and
scholarly critics say, except in so far as we are atoms of the general
mob of mankind whose taste is final. For as Newman said: “Scholars are
the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public
is the only right judge.”
But before I deal with the last motive of authorship which I suggest, let
me say a few words about an entirely different answer to the question
I am putting “Why be an Author?” There are wise men who declare that a
man is an author from pre-destination; because he cannot help himself,
because he is built that way. In other words that to be an author is a
habit like drink or gambling. I can see that if this theory gains ground,
libraries are going to have a rough time of it in the future. No doubt
there are people—like myself—who waste a great deal of time in reading
and writing which might be better used by digging in the garden, or
cleaning the boots. As education proceeds upon the lines of to-day this
bad habit will grow more popular. Young folk will take to spending their
evenings, and even their Sundays, in libraries and meeting together over
books as they do over football. Older folks will imbibe books much as
they imbibe beer. Respectable employers of labour will see the danger of
it—indeed, many of them to-day are clamouring against plays and fiction
and other literary products as evil in themselves. They will, I think,
rightly begin by persuasion. They will form Blue Ribbon Societies and a
United Kingdom Alliance for the total suppression of the Book Trade. Then
will come, in the natural order of things, a Licensing Bench to license
libraries. On this no magistrate will sit who has ever written a book, or
been connected with the publishing trade, but magistrates who are total
abstainers from reading and writing will properly form a majority of the
tribunal. And in the city of Manchester, which is a city of Libraries,
which library will they close first? I should say the Ryland’s Library.
For there is a seductive beauty about its surroundings, and the books it
gives you to drink are of such wondrous flavour and served in such rare
goblets, that to the poor erring man, who like myself is not a teetotaler
among books, the temptation to leave his worldly duties and forget
his tasks among its luxurious pleasures, is one that wise magistrates
will not permit. Then, too, the landlord—I mean the librarian—is such
a kind-hearted fellow. Always ready to give you another—and nothing to
pay. Charles Lamb would never have got to the East India Office if the
Ryland’s Library had been in his path. For my part I always used to
approach my County Court in Quay Street from the other side, saying to
myself as I crossed Deansgate, “Lead us not into temptation.”
Do not think that this idea of a future licensing authority for
literature is by any means a fanciful one. We have seen a Yorkshire town
council turning Fielding’s works out of a free library to their own
eternal disgrace, and a Library Committee in Manchester boycotting Mr.
Wells. Already Town Councils decide what sort of plays we may go and see,
and what sort of dances are good for us, and absolutely settle for us
what we are to drink in between the acts, putting all the whisky on one
side of the street and all the soda on the other. When, therefore, the
town council mind wakes up to the fact that from a respectable employer
of labour point of view the author habit is as dangerous a habit as the
drink habit, the licensing system will most certainly extend. And I feel
sure when things progress and authors themselves are made to take out
licenses I shall run a serious risk—unless I mend my ways—of having my
license endorsed.
But for my own part, I do not believe in an author habit any more than I
greatly believe in a drink habit. Given sanity I believe a man can keep
off authorship if he tries. I never seriously tried, but I think I could
stop, if I wished to, even now. And there would be a danger in any system
of state or municipal control of authors that you might hinder or prevent
the author who has a message to deliver. Surely there are enough amateur
censors to bully and destroy the man with a message without setting the
Town Council at him. And the man with a message after all is the only man
who can plead justification to the indictment “Why be an Author?”
Of course there are messages and messages; purely business and temporary
messages, and heaven-sent messages of eternal import to mankind. Of
temporary messages, sermons, and scientific treatises should be published
by telegraph, lest the message become stale news before it reaches its
destination. All books written by craftsmen and schoolmen to impart
knowledge are instances of books written by people who have messages to
deliver. Lamb calls some of them _biblia a biblia_—books that are no
books. In a sense he is right, the more so because this class of book is
generally written by an author, wholly unable to explain the very limited
message he sets out to deliver. Reading a text-book is too often like
listening to a stutterer over the telephone. You know that he knows what
he has to say, but he can’t get it over the wires to your receiver. Some
literary gift is required even to write a school book. One must have
knowledge, power of arrangement, and the gift of imparting knowledge to
the ignorant. This last quality depends, I believe, in a great measure
on the capacity in the writer to conceive the depth of ignorance in his
probable readers.
He must have the rare faculty of putting himself in the students’ place.
I do not myself remember a single good school book—but that may be due
to my youthful inattention, rather than any critical insight in early
life. On the other hand, I can name three books which I regard as models
of the kind of message-literature I am speaking about; books that told
me clearly and admirably everything I wanted to know about the subjects
they dealt with. These books are, Dr. Abbott’s “How to write clearly,”
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s “Law of Evidence,” and Mr. H. Paton’s
“Etching Drypoint and Mezzotint.” The last book I regard as a model of
what a practical treatise on a craft should be. Although himself an
etcher of experience and great ability, he is able to follow the mind of
the ignorant and its possible questions, so accurately, that he provides
answers to the questions that arise from time to time in the mind of the
duffer bent on making an etching on a copper plate. I have never seen the
process done, but with the aid of this book I have made many etchings—and
what I have done other duffers can do. I do not say these etchings of
mine are masterpieces, but I do say that the book so delivers its
message that the most ignorant may hear and understand. Mr. Justice
Stephen’s book on Evidence is a most wonderful piece of codification. The
English Law of Evidence has about as near relation to the real facts of
life as the rules of the game of Poker. It is one of those things that
must be learned more or less by heart, there is no sense or principle
in it. Until Mr Justice Stephen published his book the law was a chaos
of undigested decisions; since the publication it has been as orderly a
science as a game of chess. It has still no reality about it, but the
moves and gambits and openings are analysed and can be learned. As to
Dr. Abbott’s “How to write clearly,” let no one think evil of the work
on account of anything I have written, any more than Mr. Paton’s volume
should be judged by the artistic quality of my etchings.
As to the greater messages of life which we have had delivered to us by
the hands of the great authors, these are as I have suggested, the real
answer to the question, “Why be an Author?” The writings of men like S.
Paul and the author of the Book of Job and S. Augustine, and in our own
day, of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, all seem to me to have been
written in reply to some such command as was given to S. Paul himself to
whom it was said: “Arise and go into the City and it shall be _told_ thee
what thou must do.” The writer who has a message to deliver is generally
told what it is and he never, I think, fails to deliver it. He does not
need motives of vanity or greed—nor is there any question of writing for
the fun of the thing—he is told by some force beyond and outside him what
he must do, and he does. He is a happy messenger boy sent on his errand
by the Great Postmaster, whose messages he delivers.
There are many names we all instinctively remember of writers who seem
to have had messages to deliver to ourselves, and whose messages we
have received with thankfulness, and I trust, humility. It is wonderful
sometimes to remember how these messengers have been upheld in their
service through dangers and difficulty, and protected against the hatred,
malice and uncharitableness of the official ecclesiastical post-boys who
claim a monopoly of all moral letter carrying. Take as an instance the
author of the Book of Job. It has always been a marvel to me how he ran
his message through the cordon of the infidelity and ignorance by which
the holy places of his time were surrounded, and landed his book safely
and soundly into the centre of the literature of the world. I suppose the
creed of the author of the Book of Job was, as Froude puts it, “that the
sun shines alike on good and evil, and that the victims of a fallen tower
are not greater offenders than their neighbours.” That was a new message
then, and very few believe it in their hearts now. Most of us have a
secret notion that riches are the right reward of goodness, and poverty
the appropriate punishment of evil. It must have required a stout heart
to pen that message when the Book of Job was written, and a fearless
heart to face the publication of it among the orthodox literature of the
time.
I do not know if attention has ever been drawn to the point, but the
author of the Book of Job has always settled for me the literary
righteousness of the happy ending. Job, you know—as every hero of every
story-book ought to—lives happily ever afterwards. The Lord gave him
twice as much as he had before, his friends each gave him a piece of
money and a ring of gold, and he finished up with fourteen thousand sheep
and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand
she-asses, not to mention seven sons and three daughters—“So Job died,
being old and full of days.”
Now-a-days, when every story we read or play we see is deliberately
formed to leave us more unhappy than it found us, is it not pleasant
to those, who like myself do not believe in the dismal Jemmy school of
writers, to remember that the author of the Book of Job “went solid” for
the happy ending? I have no doubt the dramatic critic of the Babylon
Guardian “went solid” for him, and called him a low down, despicable
person—but the critics, if any, have disappeared—the author, too, has
disappeared—only his message remains, and will always remain until it is
no longer necessary to us. And one reason that it remains is, because
he was a big enough author to know that if you write for mankind you
must not despise mankind, you must not sneer in your hearts at the very
people you are writing for, but you must write for them in a spirit
of love and affection, and respect, even to the respecting of their
little weaknesses, and you must remember that one of the weaknesses of
mankind—if it be a weakness—is the child-like love of a story which
begins with “Once upon a time,” and ends with everyone living happily
ever afterwards.
I have not answered the question, “Why be an author?” because as I
said in the beginning I do not know the answer. In so far as there is
an answer, it is given, I think, in the words of the prophet, Thomas
Carlyle. He is reassuring himself that the work of a writer is after
all as real and sensible and practical a work as that of any smith or
carpenter. “Hast thou not a Brain?” he says to himself, “furnished with
some glimmerings of light; and three fingers to hold a pen withal? Never
since Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was there
such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recorded miracles have
been performed by Pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming World,
which nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that
_Sound_ to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of
all things. The WORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world; man,
thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what
is in thee; what God has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away.
Higher task than that of Priesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but
the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honour enough therein to
spend and be spent?”
That, if any, is the answer to the question, “Why be an Author?”
WHICH WAY IS THE TIDE?
“O call back yesterday, bid time return.”
_Richard II._ iii., 2.
Dozing in a railway carriage on a journey to Wales I listened dreamily
to the faint echoes of an argument between a gentleman of the old school
who contended that the country was going to the dogs, and a younger
enthusiast who was optimistic as to the present and future of our race.
It was at Deganwy that the older man, who had, I thought, somewhat the
worst of the argument, pointed to the sea and said, with the air of one
who uttered a new thought, that it was impossible for those who stood
on the shore to say at the moment which way the tide was setting. The
younger man accepted the stale simile with the courteous reverence that
is the debt we willingly pay to age when we know that we know better.
A few days afterwards a friend handed me a copy of an old newspaper.
His wife had discovered it with other of its fellows during the Spring
cleaning. “The things,” she said in her practical way, “were harbouring
dirt.” But from my point of view they were also harbouring history, and
turning over the single sheet it occurred to me that it might help one to
a conclusion about the ever interesting problem “which way is the tide?”
The newspaper was, to be exact, the _Manchester Guardian_, of Saturday,
January 24th, 1824, No. 143 of Vol. IV. The price was sevenpence or seven
and sixpence a quarter if paid in advance, and eight shillings on credit.
In the matter of price the tide was clearly with the moderns. There was
an excellent wood-cut on the front page, a semi-advertisement—as I took
it—of Messrs. David Bellhouse and Sons, of Eagle Quay, Oxford Road, who
“respectfully informed the public that they have commenced carriers of
timber by water betwixt Liverpool and Manchester” by means of a paddle
steam tug “The Eagle,” with a funnel, the height of its mast and a huge
square sail and two Union Jacks, one floating at the masthead and the
other astern, and accompanying rafts of timber following the tug. In
another column Fredk. and Chas. Barry, sworn brokers, of Vine Street,
America Square, London, advertise that the fine fast sailing new brig,
Walworth Castle, 240 tons, A.1. coppered, I. Wrentmore, Commander, will
sail for Vera Cruz from London, and had only room for about fifty tons
of goods. Certainly in the matter of the carriage of goods at sea and
by canal we seem to have made progress. When you come to the matter of
passenger traffic, it is interesting to read of “The Telegraph,” which
leaves every afternoon at 3.30 for London through Macclesfield, Leek,
Derby, Leicester, and Northampton to the White Horse, Fetter Lane. In
the same column we read of the “North Briton” and “Robert Burns,” which
leave every morning at 4.30, and run through Chorley, Preston, Lancaster,
Kendal, and Carlisle, to the Buck Inn, Glasgow, and the splendid service
of six coaches to Liverpool, starting at intervals from 5 a.m. to 5.30
in the evening. This column of coach advertisements is fine picturesque
reading, but it is a little old-fashioned by the side of a sixpenny
Bradshaw of to-day.
Again, if we turn to the report of the Salford Epiphany Quarter Sessions,
Thomas Starkie, Esquire, Chairman, we have much to be thankful for in
latter-day records. It must be remembered of course that the Sessions
of to-day are more frequent, and different Sessions are held in small
areas. Still, in January, 1824, there were no less than 240 prisoners, a
number far in excess of anything we read of to-day. Nearly all the cases
seem to have been cases of stealing, and there were few acquittals. The
sentences were terrible, and only those who remember sentences given by
some of the minor tribunals in comparatively recent years can credit the
fact that such sentences were passed by humane and thoughtful men, in
what was genuinely believed to be the interest of society. A long list
of sentences begins thus: “Transported for life, William Thomas (16),
for stealing one pocket handkerchief.” Lower down we find that Thomas
Kinsey (21), for stealing thirty pieces of cotton cloth, gets off with
transportation for fourteen years. The number of young people that
are transported for small thefts is astonishing. Martha Jowett (30),
for stealing a purse; John Webster (19) and John Drinkwater (24), for
stealing a gun; Martha Myers (16), for stealing wearing apparel, and
Mary Mason (24), for stealing a purse, are all among the list of those
transported for seven years. More aristocratic sinners had a better
chance of acquittal, and the receivers of the Birmingham notes stolen
from the Balloon coach were respited because the jury found that the
receiving “was elsewhere than in the County of Lancaster,” and counsel
successfully contended that they must be discharged. Certainly in these
matters the tide has flowed towards less crime and more humanity to
prisoners since 1824.
But whereas human institutions seem to have improved, human nature seems
to have been much as it is to-day. Dr. Lamert—the predecessor of many
twentieth century quacks—is at No. 68 Piccadilly, ready to be consulted
about and to cure “all diseases incidental to the human frame,” and
has his testimonials and affidavits as to the success of his treatment
almost in the very language in which we can read them to-day. “The
greatest discovery in the memory of man is universally allowed to be
the celebrated Cordial Balm of Rakasiri,” whose name is “blown on the
bottle” and whose properties will cure any disease from “headache to
consumptions.” “Smith’s Genuine Leamington Salts are confidently offered
to the public under the recommendation of Dr. Kerr, Northampton,” and
other eminent medical men, whilst from Mottershead and other chemists
you can obtain Black Currant Lozenges “in which are concentrated all the
well-known virtues of that fruit.” In this backwater of life the tide
seems to be running, if at all, the other way. In the matter of gambling,
too, it would be hard to say whether State lotteries, well protected
from private imitations, were worse for our morals than free trade in
bookmaking, coupled by uncertain and unequally worked police supervision.
In the paper before me, “T. Bish, of the Old State Lottery Office, 4
Cornhill, respectfully reminds his best friends the public that the State
lottery begins the 19th of next month.” There are to be seven £20,000
prizes and many others, and “in the very last Lottery Bish shared and
sold 18,564, a prize of £20,000, 1379 a prize of £10,000, and several
other capitals.” Bish of 1824 was but one evil more or less honest in
his dealings and controlled by the State. Bish of 1911 is a legion of
bookmakers, more or less dishonest and wholly uncontrolled. Still I am
far from saying things are not better so, and even here could we discern
it clearly the tide may be flowing the right way.
In the interest taken in art and literature it would be hard to say that
we do not see signs of earnestness and enthusiasm in this one newspaper
of 1824 that it would be hard to find in a single copy of a journal
of to-day. The people of Liverpool are sinking sectarian differences
and starting a mechanics and apprentices’ library, and already have
1,500 volumes. It is true that the whole thing was done very much on
the lines of the gospel according to Mr. Barlow and Mr. Fairchild, but
it was being done with enthusiasm. The elder Mr. Gladstone sent ten
pounds and a letter of “correct ideas,” which was read to the meeting,
but unfortunately we shall never read the “correct ideas” which were
“basketed” by the then subeditor. The Library was to contain no works
of controversial theology or politics, and the _Liverpool Advertiser_
sees with regret that “Egan’s Sporting Anecdotes” was amongst a number
of volumes contributed by an American gentleman. The Pharisee, we must
admit, is with us to-day, and even in well governed cities sometimes
finds a place on Library Committees. But here is another announcement
in this wonderful number of the newspaper which lovers of art will read
with pious interest. “There is to be a General Meeting of the Governors
of the Manchester Institution, to consider a report to be submitted with
reference to the building and to the general welfare of the Institution.”
Below this is printed “amounts already advertised £14,610,” and then
follows a list of between thirty and forty new hereditary members
subscribing forty guineas apiece.
A hundred years hence a newspaper of our own day will be unearthed
to tell future generations of a City Council refusing supplies for
continuing the great work that these city fathers started with their own
monies. Could we to-day from a far richer Manchester and far wealthier
citizens obtain hereditary subscribers at forty guineas apiece for a
new theatre or opera house or art gallery, if such were required in
Manchester? It is at least doubtful.
Two other announcements that cannot rightly be evidence of human
progress, but which may make us worthily envious of the good old days
that are gone:—at the Theatre Royal, Mr. Matthews is playing in “The
Road to Ruin” and the musical farce of “The Bee Hive,” and on Wednesday
he will have a benefit with three musical farces including “The Review.”
It would be worth owning one of Mr. Wells’s time machines to take the
chance of dropping into Manchester in 1824, if only to go to the Royal
and see the show. And here is another echo of glad tidings. “We have been
informed that the author of Waverley has contracted with his bookseller
to furnish him with three novels a year for three years, and that he is
to have ten thousand pounds a year for the supply, and that four novels
have actually been delivered as per contract.”
When one reads an announcement such as that, and thinks of the joy of
unpacking the parcel of books when it arrives, and cutting and reading
three new masterpieces a year hot from the press, the novel reader of
to-day may be excused if he sighs over a golden age that will never
return. Nevertheless, man cannot live by Waverley novels alone; and what
is this we read a little lower down the column? “Average price of corn
from the returns received in the week ending January 10:
Wheat, 57s. 4d.”
Of a truth in essential things the tide has flowed steadily in the right
direction since this year of 1824, and is not on the turn—as yet.
KISSING THE BOOK.[4]
“The evidence you shall give to the Court touching the matter
in question shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth—So help you God.”
_The Oath._
When the clerk in an English Court of Justice administers the usual oath,
he finishes with the words “Kiss the Book,” spoken in an imperative mood,
and if the witness shows any hesitation in carrying out the unsavoury
ceremony, he does his best to compel performance. The imperative mood
of the clerk has not, to my thinking, any legal sanction. Kissing the
Book is not, and never has been, as far as I can learn, a necessary
legal incident of the oath of a Christian witness or juror. Why, then,
does the twentieth-century Englishman kiss the Book by way of assuring
his fellow-citizens that he is not going to lie if he can help it? The
answer is probably akin to the answer given to the question: “Why does
a dog walk round and round in a circle before he flings himself upon
the hearth-rug?” Naturalists tell us that it is because the wild dog of
prehistoric days made his bed in the contemporary grass of the forest
after that fashion. Both man and dog are victims of hereditary habit.
Probably the majority of men and dogs never consider for a moment how
they came by the habit. But when, as in the case of kissing the Book, the
habit is so insanitary, superstitious and objectionable, it is worth a
few moments to consider its history, origin, and practical purpose, and
then to further consider whether mankind is not old enough to give it up,
and whether we should not make an effort at reform in the healthy spirit
that a growing schoolboy approaches the manly problem of ceasing to bite
his nails.
In a modern English Encyclopædia of Law it is suggested that the habit
of kissing the Book did not become recognised in the English Courts
until the middle of the seventeenth century, and that it only became
general in the latter part of the eighteenth century. For my part, I
cannot subscribe to that view. It is true that there is very little
direct authority in any ancient law book on practice which enables one to
say what the practice was. But that is because the old lawyers did not
consider “kissing the Book” essential to the oath, and the practice was
so universally followed that there was no need to describe it.
Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” about 1613. He gives Stephano, when
offering Caliban the bottle, these lines: “Come, swear to this; kiss the
book:—I will furnish it anon with new contents:—swear. (_Gives Caliban
drink._)” And a few lines later on Caliban says, “I’ll kiss thy foot;
I’ll swear myself thy subject.” To me, reading the scene to-day, and
bearing in mind that it was a low-comedy scene written to amuse the
groundlings, the conclusion is irresistible that Shakespeare drew his
simile from the common stock of everyday affairs, and that the idea of
kissing the Book was as familiar to the average playgoer at the Globe or
the Curtain as it is to-day to the pittite at His Majesty’s. Beaumont and
Fletcher, too, in _Women Pleased_, II, vi, have the lines: “Oaths I swear
to you ... and kiss the book, too”; and no doubt, if diligent search were
made in the Elizabethan writers other such popular references could be
found.
Samuel Butler, who, we must remember, was clerk to Sir Samuel Luke, of
Bedfordshire, and other Puritan Justices of the Peace, and therefore had
administered the oath many hundreds of times prior to the Restoration,
has the following passage in “Hudibras” concerning a perjurer:—
“Can make the Gospel serve his turn,
And helps him out; to be forsworn;
When ’tis laid hands upon and kiss’d;
To be betrayed and sold like Christ.”
This is, I think, conclusive that in 1660, in the common form of oath,
the practice was for the witness to lay the hand upon the Book and
afterwards to kiss it.
Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, writing to Lord Burghley, describing
Serjeant Anderson taking his seat as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas
in 1582, notes that: “Then the clarke of the corone, Powle, did read
hym his oathe, and after, he himself read the oathe of the supremacie,
and so kist the booke.” This, of course, was a ceremonial oath, but it
throws light upon the custom. Although the direct references to kissing
the Book are few and far between, several interesting specimens are given
in _Notes and Queries_ from early Irish records, showing that oaths were
taken both upon holy relics and upon the Holy Gospels, _corporaliter
tacta et deosculata_, in the time of Henry VI., and that in the reign of
Edward I. kissing the Book was an incident of the official oath of the
Exchequer. It is possible that a close study of the records of a Catholic
country would throw light upon the origin of kissing the Book, which,
from a Protestant point of view, is doubtless as superstitious a custom
as kissing relics or the Pope’s toe or a crucifix. It was said by John
Coltus, the Archbishop of Armagh, in 1397, that the English introduced
the custom of swearing on the Holy Evangelists into Ireland, and that
in earlier days the Irish resorted to croziers, bells, and other sacred
reliquaries to give solemnity to their declarations. That kissing the
Book is directly evolved from the superstitious but reverential worship
of holy relics can scarcely be doubted. When Harold pledged his solemn
oath to William the Conqueror, we learn in the old French _Roman de Rou_
how William piled up a reliquary with holy bodies and put a pall over
them to conceal them, and, having persuaded Harold to take the oath
upon these hidden relics, he afterwards showed Harold what he had done,
and _Heraut forment s’espoanta_, Harold was sadly alarmed. Curious, but
interesting, is the form of oath here described. Harold first of all _suz
sa main tendi_, held his hand over the reliquary, then he repeated the
words of his oath, and then _li sainz beisiez_ kissed the relics. It is
almost the same ceremony that we have to-day, and in the same order. The
Book is held in the hand, the words of the oath are repeated, and then
the Book is kissed.
The Rev. James Tyler, in his interesting book on oaths, quotes an
eleventh-century oath of Ingeltrude, wife of Boston, that she swore to
Pope Nicholas, as one of the earliest examples of kissing the Book. It
runs thus: “I, Ingeltrude, swear to my Lord Nicholas, the chief Pontiff
and universal Pope, by the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and these
four Evangelists of Christ our God which I hold in my hands and kiss with
my mouth.” This early example of the habit shows that kissing the Book
was contemporaneous with kissing bells, crucifixes and relics, and that
the religious origin of the custom is similar. In the Roman Catholic
ritual the priest still kisses the Gospel after he has read it, and I
have been told that this is done in some Anglican churches. It is curious
that the ceremony should survive in the law courts and have died out in
most of the churches. But in these things the average man violently
strains at gnats and complacently swallows camels. The Roman ceremony
of kissing the Book—which is done reverently by the priest as part of a
religious ceremony—would distress a Protestant, who watches the kissing
of the same Book in a modern police court without the least sign of moral
or mental disturbance.
Of the ultimate origin of kissing as a sign and pledge of truth much
could be written, and it would be an interesting task to trace the
history of the ceremonial kiss to its earliest source. The perjury of
Judas was signed by a kiss, and Jacob deceived his father with the same
pledge of faith. So also false, fleeting, perjured Clarence swears to
his brother: “In sign of truth I kiss your highness’ hand.” The kiss
as a pledge or symbol of truth is probably as old in the world as the
degraded ceremony of spitting on a coin for luck, and is what students of
folk-lore call a saliva custom, the origin of which seems to have been
a desire on the part of the devotee for a union with the divine or holy
thing.
So much for the ancient origin of the kissing portion of this ceremony.
It is shown to be of superstitious if not idolatrous origin, and I hope
to show beyond doubt that in the view of English lawyers it is not, and
never has been, an essential part of the English Christian oath. That
is to say, an English Christian has a legal right to take the oath by
merely laying his hand upon the Book, and the act of kissing the Book
afterwards is a work of supererogation, and of no legal force or effect
whatever.
No lawyer that I know of has ever suggested that a witness or juror must
kiss the Book. Nor, on the contrary, has any lawyer sought to forbid a
man to kiss the Book. I take it that any reverent and decent use of the
Book as a voluntary addition to the oath would be allowed. The general
rule of English law is that all witnesses ought to be sworn according to
the peculiar ceremonies of their own religion, or in such manner as they
deem binding on their consciences. If, therefore, a Christian wishes to
kiss the Book he may do so, but the only formality that need be legally
observed is the laying of hands upon the Book. As Lord Hale says, “the
regular oath as is allowed by the laws of England is _Tactis sacrosanctis
Dei Evangeliis_.” Lord Coke, too, says “It is called a corporal oath
because he toucheth with his hand some part of the Holy Scripture.”
Modern antiquarians have sought to show that the word corporal was used
in connection with the ritual of an oath, and referred to the “Corporale
Linteum” on which the sacred Elements were placed, and by which they were
covered. Some suggest that the word comes from the Romans, and draws a
distinction between an oath taken in person and by proxy. But for my part
I think Lord Coke knew as much about it as any of his scholarly critics,
and is not far wrong when he says a corporal oath is an oath in which a
man touches the Book.
This form of oath was practised by the Greeks and Romans, and is of great
antiquity. Hannibal, when only nine years old, was called upon by his
father to swear eternal enmity to Rome by laying his hand on the sacred
things. Livy, in describing it, uses the words _tactis sacris_, the very
expression that passed into the University and other oaths of modern
England. Izaak Walton, in his “Life of Hooker,” sets down a bold but
affectionate sermon preached to Queen Elizabeth by Archbishop Whitgift,
in which he reminds the Queen that at her coronation she had promised to
maintain the Church lands, and then he adds: “You yourself have testified
openly to God at the holy altar by laying your hands on the Bible, then
lying upon it.”
That this is the real form of an English Christian oath, and that kissing
the Book is purely a voluntary ceremony is, I think, made clear in a
curious little volume, entitled, “The Clerk of Assize, Judges Marshall
and Cryer, being the true Manner and Form of the Proceedings at the
Assizes and General Goale Delivery, both in the Crown Court and Nisi
Prius Court. By T.W.” This was printed for Timothy Twyford in 1660, and
sold at his shop within the Inner Temple Gate. It is probably the book
Pepys refers to when he notes in his diary: “So away back again home,
reading all the way the book of the collection of oaths in the several
offices of this nation which is worth a man’s reading.”
I am quite of Pepys’ opinion, and a man may read it after two hundred
and fifty years with as much profit as Pepys did. It is a quaint little
book, and in the preface T. W. writes that “the Government of this nation
being now happily brought into its ancient and right course, and that the
proceedings in Courts of Justice to be in the King’s name, and in Latine
and Court-hand (the good old way), I have set forth and published the
small Manuel,” for the benefit of the new officers who may here “find all
such Oaths and Words as are by them to be administered.” In the rubric
attached to the jurors’ oath is the following:—“Note that every juror
must lay his hand on the Book and look towards the prisoners.” In the
same way in the oath to the foreman of the grand jury, T. W. writes: “The
foreman must lay his hand on the Book.”
Although it seems probable that kissing the Book was customary at this
date, T. W. would, I think, certainly have pointed out that it was
necessary if he had so considered it, and the absence of any reference
to kissing the Book in a “manuel” published for the very purpose of
explaining to the ignorant the correct manner in which to administer the
oath, shows that the author did not consider that part of the ceremony a
necessary one. The references to the form of oath in old law books are
very few. There is a case reported, in “the good old way” of law French,
in Siderfin, an ancient law reporter, in Michaelmas Term, 1657. Dr. Owen,
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, refused to take the oath _en le usual manner
per laying son main dexter sur le Lieur et per baseront ceo apres_. The
doctor merely lifted up his right hand, and the jury, being in doubt,
asked Chief Justice Glin whether it was really an oath. The Chief Justice
said, “that in his judgment he had taken as strong an oath as any other
witness, but said if he was to be sworn himself he would lay his right
hand upon the Book.” There is another curious decision upon the necessity
of kissing the Book mentioned in Walker’s “History of Independency,” in
the account of the trial of Colonel Morrice, who held Pontefract Castle
for the King. The colonel wished to challenge one Brooke, foreman of the
jury, and his professed enemy, but the Court held, probably rightly, that
the challenge came too late, as Brooke was sworn already. “Brooke being
asked the question whether he were sworn or no, replied ‘he had not yet
kissed the Book.’ The Court answered that was but a ceremony.”
The whole matter was very much discussed in 1744, when, in a well-known
case, lawyers argued at interminable length as to whether it were
possible for a person professing the Gentoo religion to take an oath in
an English court. Sir Dudley Rider, the Attorney-General, says in his
argument “kissing the Book is no more than a sign, and not essential to
the oath.” He seems to think that touching the Book is not essential;
but the true view seems to be laid down by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke,
who says that the outward act is not essential to the oath, but there
must be some external act to make it a corporal act. That is to say, that
the kind of external act done may be left to the taste and fancy of the
person taking the oath. The laying the hand on the Book is convenient,
and is the recognised form, but a salute or act of reverence towards the
Book would be sufficient, as Dr. Owen’s case seems to show.
Apart altogether from the forms and ceremonies of oaths, it is surely
well worth considering whether the practice of oath-taking in courts
of justice should not be discontinued. Although many good and learned
men have argued with great ability that a man taking an oath does not
imprecate the Divine vengeance upon himself if his evidence is false, yet
the whole history and practice of oath-taking is adverse to their amiable
and well-meaning philosophy. The gist of an oath is, and always has been,
that the swearer calls upon the Almighty to inflict punishment upon him
here or hereafter if he is false to his oath. In early days oaths were
only taken upon solemn occasions, and in a solemn manner. In modern life
they have been multiplied, and become so common that little attention
is paid to them. Even in this country prior to Elizabeth there was no
statute punishing perjury, and the oath was the only safeguard there
was against the offence. The statute then passed shows of what little
use the oath was even in those days as a preventive of perjury. But then
few people could give testimony in courts, and there may have been some
semblance of a religious ceremony in the affair. To-day that is gone, and
necessarily gone.
All writers who have seriously considered the matter condemn the
multiplicity of oaths on trivial occasions as taking away from the
ceremony any practical value it may have. Selden, in Cromwell’s day,
says: “Now oaths are so frequent they should be taken like pills,
swallowed whole; if you chew them you will find them bitter; if you
think what you swear, ’twill hardly go down.” What would he think of our
progress to-day in this matter? Defoe, at a later date, lays down the
principle that “the making of oaths familiar is certainly a great piece
of indiscretion in a Government, and multiplying of oaths in many cases
is multiplying perjuries.” England has been called “a land of oaths,” and
familiarity with oath-taking has always bred contempt of the oath. In the
old days of the Custom House oaths it is said that “there were houses of
resort where persons were always to be found ready at a moment’s warning
to take any oath required; the signal of the business for which they were
needed was this inquiry: ‘Any damned soul here?’”
Without suggesting that there is a great amount of perjury in English
courts, for Englishmen respect the law and have a wholesome dread
of indictments, we cannot pride ourselves on a system that uses what
ought to be a very solemn ceremony on every trumpery occasion. In the
County Courts alone a million oaths at least must be taken every year
in England. And upon what trifling, foolish matters are men and women
invited by the State to make a presumptuous prayer to the Almighty to
withdraw from them His help and protection if they shall speak falsely.
Two women, for instance, have a dispute over the fit of a bodice; each is
full of passion and prejudice, and quite unlikely to speak the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Is it fair to ask them to take
an oath that they will do so, and, in the language of Chaucer, to swear
“in truth, in doom and in righteousness,” about so trivial a matter? Or,
again, in an arbitration under the Lands Clauses Act, is it fitting that
six land surveyors should condemn themselves to eternal penalties when
everyone knows that, like the barristers engaged in the arbitrations,
they are paid for services of an argumentative character rather than as
witnesses of mere fact? As Viscount Sherbrooke said in an excellent essay
on the oath, written at the time of the Bradlaugh case, “If you believe
in God it is a blasphemy; if not, it is a hollow and shameless cheat.”
Any practical, worldly scheme to prevent perjury is of more use than a
religious oath, and one might quote many historical instances in proof
of this. Two widely apart in circumstance and period will show my
meaning. The Ministers of Honorius on a certain occasion swore by the
head of the Emperor, a very ancient form of oath. (Joseph, it may be
remembered, swore “by the life of Pharaoh,” and Helen swore by the head
of Menelaus.) The same Ministers, says Gibbon, “were heard to declare
that if they had only invoked the name of the Deity they would consult
the public safety (by going back on their word), and trust their souls
to the mercy of Heaven; but they had touched in solemn ceremony that
august seal of majesty and wisdom, and the violation of that oath would
expose them to the temporal penalties of sacrilege and rebellion.” In
like manner I remember a Jew, annoyed by apparent disbelief of his oath,
saying before me in a moment of irritation, “I have sworn by Jehovah that
every word I say is true, but I will go further than that: I will put
down ten pounds in cash, and it may be taken away from me if what I say
is not true.” What sane man will say that the oath, as an oath, is of
practical use when for centuries we find instances such as these of the
way it is regarded by the person by whom it is taken. But it will be said
that if a man pleases he can to-day affirm. Undoubtedly that is so, but
the average Englishman has a horror of making a fuss in a public place,
especially about a matter of everyday usage. The other day I suggested
to a man who was suffering from cancer in the tongue that he might take
the Scotch oath instead of kissing the Book. He did it reluctantly, as
I thought. Once, too I made the same suggestion to a witness at Quarter
Sessions who was in a horrible state of disease, but he preferred to kiss
the Book—which was afterwards destroyed.
The average man is like the average schoolboy, and would any day rather
do “the right thing” than to do what is right. All of us have not the
courage of Mrs. Maden, who was refused justice in a Lancashire county
court as late as 1863 because she honestly stated her views on matters
of religion. As Baron Bramwell pointed out in deciding the case, the
judgment he was giving involved the absurdity of ascertaining the fact
of Mrs. Maden’s disbelief by accepting her own statement of it, and then
ruling that she was a person incompetent to speak the truth. Truly no
precedent in English law can be over-ruled by its own inherent folly.
Later on, too, in our own time, we can remember the fate of Mr. Bradlaugh
in his struggles with Courts and Parliament, and we can read in history
the stories of George Fox and Margaret Fell. The cynic may say that these
people made a great deal of fuss about a very unimportant matter; but,
after all, the attitude of George Fox on the question of the oath was a
very noble one.
“Will you take the oath of allegiance, George Fox?” asks the
Judge in the Court of Lancaster Castle.
_George Fox_: “I never took an oath in my life.”
_Judge_: “Will you swear or no?”
_George Fox_: “Christ commands we must not swear at all; and
the apostle: and whether I must obey God, or man, judge thee, I
put it to thee.”
And having read many volumes of man’s answer to George Fox, I am content
for my part to think he still has the best of it, and that “Swear not at
all” is as much a commandment as “Thou shalt not steal,” or “Sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor.” Whether in a work-a-day world of
timid people, who cling to the bad habits of their prehistoric ancestry,
it is possible to live up to the ideals of these commandments is quite
another matter, and I should be the last in the world to throw stones at
others in this matter.
I must confess that on the few occasions I have given evidence I have
dutifully “kissed the Book” like any other witness. Whether I should do
so again I am not so sure. Probably literary pride would overcome the
natural shyness of my disposition, and I should propose to read what I
have written here to a long-suffering judge, and claim as of right to
take the oath “tactis sanctis,” with no ceremony of kissing.
For the more I see of the ceremony the more it jars upon me as a mere
matter of reverence to holy things, and the more I read of the matter the
more convinced I am of its superstitious origin. When, too, I feel sure
that it is of no practical purpose and is as useless as it is insanitary,
I begin to think that the hour is approaching when we may, without
impiety to the shades of our ancestors, adopt some more reasonable
ceremony of commencing our evidence in the law courts than that of
kissing the Book.
A WELSH RECTOR OF THE LAST CENTURY.
“E’en children follow’d with endearing wile,
And pluck’d his gown to share the good man’s smile.”
—_Oliver Goldsmith._
“I must tell you this indeed,” as the Reverend John Hopkins, Rector of
Rhoscolyn, always began his stories; but I wish I could tell you what
I have to tell in his own delightful accent. For the form of words, “I
must tell you this indeed,” was only, I think, a trick of speech he used
in order to give himself time to translate his Welsh thought into the
English tongue, and his English tongue, when it spoke, gave something of
the rhythm and music of the Welsh to the foreign language he was using.
His was a curious Welsh accent, unlike any I have heard. For though he
had lived in the pure and bracing atmosphere of Anglesey—where, as in
all the Welsh counties I have been in, they assure me the most classical
Welsh is spoken—yet the rector did not speak with the Anglesey tongue,
being a South Wales man himself, a “Hwntw” in the phrase of the North, or
“man from beyond.” And the beyond he had sprung from was, I believe, in
the neighbourhood of Merthyr. He was a son of the soil and of the school
of Lampeter, and—the rectory of Rhoscolyn being in the gift of the
Bishop of Llandaff—he had, when I first knew him, been sent some twenty
years ago to minister on this out-of-way rock, and there he remained to
the day of his death. The rector’s duties included ministering in two
distant chapels, Llanfair-yn-Neubwll and Llanfihangel-y-Traeth, which
was performed by deputy, but wholly or partly at his cost. In the days
of Elizabeth, the whole of the duties were performed for ten pounds five
shillings; nowadays, I believe, the living is worth nearly two hundred
pounds.
But though, as I said, there was the song in his words that there is in
all right-spoken Welsh, and the high note lovingly dwelt on towards the
end of the sentence, which only a Welshman can produce without effort,
yet I am not artist enough to describe to you in words the difference of
the rector’s speech from that of his neighbours, only, “I must tell you
this indeed,” that so it was and always is, I am told, with the “men from
beyond.”
The Rector of Rhoscolyn was a bachelor, a man of stout build and middle
stature. He had the air of a Friar Tuck about him. His eyes were merry
and kindly. If he had changed his long rusty black coat and clerical hat
for a cassock and cowl, he would have been a monk after Dendy Sadler’s
own heart. He loved his pipe and his glass, when the day’s work was done,
and the talk of books and men, with those who had lived in the outer
world, was to him the rarest and most delightful of pleasures. He was
outspoken, simple, and generous, an earnest believer in his creed and his
Church, a lover of music, and above and beyond all, a man who attracted
to himself animals and little children as if by instinct, and gained
their love as only those who suffer them to come without affectation
can do. He seemed, as far as I could see, to have no enemies. I think
it was a weakness in his character—a Christian weakness—that he shrank
from causing annoyance or hurt to anyone’s susceptibilities. I was his
neighbour for some seven summer weeks, and five evenings out of seven
we smoked our pipes together, and he poured out to very willing ears
the tales of his lonely parish, but I scarce remember an unkindly story
among them all. If there was a tale that he feared might give pain in the
repetition, it was always prefaced by a smile of great candour, and as he
began, “I must tell you this indeed,” he placed his fore-finger on his
broad nostril and said in a sly merry whisper, with a great rolling of
the letter “r”: “This is _inter-r-r nos_.” That is why some of his best
stories cannot be set down here.
But, to understand the man and his ways, you must know how and where he
lived. For the surroundings and the man were as if Nature had designed
the one for the other, and he was as much in his place in his rectory,
on the side of the Mynydd Rhoscolyn, as the Sarn Cromlech is on the
slopes of Cefnamlwch. Rhoscolyn is a typical Anglesey parish. No doubt,
when Mona was one of the Fortunate Islands, it had a Druid temple and a
Druid priest, and if the latter had come back to the site of his temple
he would have found little of change. A church, a plâs, a post-office, a
rectory, a life-boat, and a few farmhouses in sheltered corners; but the
rest is as it always was. The eternal rocks, the restless waves rushing
up into the black water caves, the steep cliffs crumbling a little day by
day, the cruel, sharp island rocks hidden at high water and marked by the
spray and swirl of the tide as it sinks away from the shore, the purple
heather and yellow gorse clothing the cliffs to the edge of the sky, the
samphire finding a fearful footway between earth and sea, and, above all,
the wild bees humming their eternal summer song, and the fresh breezes,
always pure, always sweet, always sweeping backwards and forwards across
the promontory. Those things were there in the day of the Druids and they
are there to-day.
And in Roman times Rhoscolyn was of more note than it is now, for some
say that the name of it is derived from a Roman column that was placed
here to signify the utmost bounds of Roman victories. Whether this be
true or not, we have in the name Bodiar—which is still the squire’s
house—the governor’s habitation, and in the neighbouring Prieddfod the
Præsidii Locus; or, at least, this is what antiquaries tell us, and it
is comfortable to believe these things. Telford and his new road thrust
Rhoscolyn further away from civilisation, and the railway brought it no
nearer as it sneaked into Holyhead, across the Traeth-y-grubyn, behind
the shelter of the road embankment. For Holyhead is on an island, and
the old main road, with that instinct for the line of least resistance
which in old highways tends to such picturesque results, kept south of
the wide marsh and crossed the water at Four Mile Bridge—Rhyd-y-bont
Pennant calls it, and he rode over it, and knew at least as much of Wales
as an ordnance surveyor of to-day. There you can see the most beautiful
sunset views of the Holyhead Mountain, at the head of the open water,
when the tide is high; and if you turn your back to the town, you will
find Rhoscolyn within a couple of miles of Four Mile Bridge and six miles
south of Holyhead.
The rectory stands on the slope of the Rhoscolyn Mountain—there are no
hills in Wales to speak of, for we speak of them all as mountains. It
is four-square, whitewashed, and has a slate roof. There are no trees
round it. The only trees in Rhoscolyn are an imported plantation at the
plâs. There are a few thorn bushes in the hedgerows, but the wind has
carved them into finger-posts, pointing consistently eastward, and they
scarcely look like trees at all. The rectory is surrounded by substantial
farm buildings, for the rector is a farmer. His old mare, Polly, and
the low gig are well-known figures in Holyhead market, and he tells you
with a farmer’s pride that all through the winter his evening supper is
oatmeal porridge and milk, the produce of his own farming. He had no
relish, he told me, for oatmeal that was bought at a shop, for he had a
countryman’s delight and belief in the home-made. His was a good herd of
cows, and he knew each by name, and, like all true Welshmen, could call
them to him as he walked through his fields. Different Welsh districts
seem to have different calls for their cattle, and the real Nevin call,
for instance, is another thing altogether from the Rhoscolyn call. These
things are a mystery, and are well understood by the cows themselves, who
will shake their heads contemptuously at the Saxon imitator.
The church is a pretty modern building, with a belfry, standing on an
eminence away from other buildings. The post-office where I was living
is its nearest neighbour. There are no streets in Rhoscolyn, nor has it
any centre square. It is a parish rather than a village, and its few
hundred inhabitants live in scattered farms and cottages. There are
generally a few artist visitors, for Rhoscolyn is almost another Sark
for the rock-painter, and one or two families find summer homes in the
neighbouring farms. There is bathing out of your tent, which you leave
on the grass at the edge of the tiny bay, at the mercy of the winds and
the little black bullocks that roam about in the flat marshes inland.
There are rambles among the cliffs and the heather. An ideal place for a
holiday for those who really want a holiday and are content with oxygen
and rest.
I think, perhaps, I should have found seven weeks of Rhoscolyn more than
enough, if it had not been for the rector. I had met him casually on
an earlier visit, and looked forward to meeting him again. One evening,
soon after I had arrived, I was walking for some distance behind him. He
was in company with a Nonconformist minister, and at a turn in the road
the two parted very amicably with a kindly shake of the hand. It is not
always so in Wales. I ventured, when I got up to the rector, to make some
remark to this effect. He did not at that time know whether or not I had
any ecclesiastical leanings, and with great simplicity he remarked, “I
must tell you this indeed, Judge Parry: we must be charitable, you know,
even to Dissenters.” I have often wondered whether the phrase would be
acceptable to the authorities if it were inserted in the Welsh Church
Catechism. As it was uttered and acted upon by the Rector of Rhoscolyn,
it could give offence to no one who had the least charity and sense of
humour.
The post-office was between the rectory and the outer world, and so the
rector came in that evening, and many another evening afterwards, and
I was always glad to hear the heavy scrunch of his boots on the loose
gravel in the front of the door. Seated in an armchair with a pipe, he
would proceed to discourse at length of the affairs of the world and his
parish with great simplicity and humour.
The recent Disestablishment Bill of Mr. Asquith had troubled him very
much. “I must tell you this,” he said: “it has given rise to a great
deal of ill-feeling. Very wicked things have been said indeed, and the
pulpit has been used in chapels on the Liberal side.”
I was glad to meet a clergyman of the Church of England in Wales who
did not approve of this use of the pulpit, and asked him the kind of
thing that had happened. “I must tell you this indeed, though you will
hardly believe it,” he began. “There was a preacher at the Calvinistic
Methodist Chapel at Llan——, who, on the eve of the election, told his
congregation this. He said he had once been at a hanging—I suppose,” said
the rector with a pleasant smile, “that was the hanging of a late member
of his congregation, but I do not know—and he went on to say it had been
a terrible ordeal for him, and had made him very sick and ill. But he
told his congregation quite solemnly that, if he knew any of them on the
morrow were going to vote for the Conservatives, he would not only go to
his hanging with pleasure, but he would be there to pull his legs.”
I am afraid I was more amused than shocked, for he added quickly, “I must
tell you it was terrible, and it sounds very much worse in Welsh indeed.”
I dare say the story had little foundation in fact; but, like all these
election stories, each side firmly believes them for the moment, and as
the rector said, “it makes it very difficult not to be angry.”
The bitterness of the election seemed, however, to have quite passed
away. By nature, the Welshman is Conservative, almost to the point of
bigotry. This is particularly noticeable in his methods of agriculture,
horticulture, and sanitation. When he is emancipated, and, like the Jew
and the Catholic, his grievance is gone, it will be very interesting to
note his further political development.
The rector was a great theologian, and enforced his views with liberal
quotations from the Greek Testament, which he could recite in great
quantity. He took a simple pride in his knowledge of the Greek, and used
it on occasions, I must say, in a somewhat unsportsmanlike manner. He had
much sympathy with the Baptists, and was an upholder of the ceremony of
total immersion. He told me, more in sorrow than in anger, of the wicked
outburst of a Particular Baptist whom he had encountered in a third-class
carriage between Holyhead and Bangor.
“I must tell you this, Judge Parry—for you know I have a great weakness
for the Baptists, and I should see no objection to the ceremony of total
immersion being performed in our Church; well, to-day I met an old
gentleman, a grave reverend man, with a white beard, in the train, and
he asked me what views I had about baptism. Well, I told him, and then I
found he wanted to speak very evil things about the ceremony of baptism
in the English Church. So I quoted the Greek Testament to him to explain
it, and I could see he did not understand it, so then I quoted a whole
chapter to the fellow in Greek, and he got in a terrible rage and jumped
up and shook his fist in my face, and said, ‘I will tell you what you
are! You are nothing but a damned sprinkler. That’s what you are!’ Dear
me, it was terrible for a reverend old gentleman with a white beard to
use such language to a rector, was it not?”
I asked him if he had ever performed a ceremony of total immersion as a
minister of the Church of England, and he told me he had not, but he was
very near it on one occasion. “I must tell you this,” he continued; “it
was when I was curate in Glamorganshire, a fellow, named Evan Jones, came
to me and wanted to be baptized. Well, I knew he was a poacher and a bad
fellow, and a Presbyterian, but he said he had never been baptized, so I
said I would baptize him.
“‘But I want to be baptized like the Baptists do it,’ says he.
“‘Total immersion, you mean,’ says I. ‘Well, I will do it then for you,
if my vicar will let me.’
“‘Where will you do it?’ asked Evan.
“‘It would be good to do it at the pond in the middle of the village on a
Saturday afternoon, when the school children are there to see, and we can
have a hymn,’ said I.
“Well, Evan did not like that idea at all, and wanted me to go up to a
pool on the hills by a little bridge on the old mountain road; and I did
not care to go up the hills with him alone, for he was a bad fellow.
But he did not want anyone to come with us, for his wife objected to him
being baptized, and he was afraid she might get to hear of it and cause
a disturbance. Well, I decided it was my duty to go with the fellow, and
I told him I would do so if my vicar would allow me. Now my vicar was a
very shrewd, wise old man, and I was very eager to do this if it was for
the good of the Church, so I went to him at once.
“‘What is it, Hopkins, my boy?’ he said, looking up from a sermon he was
writing.
“‘Evan Jones wants to be baptized.’
“‘Who is Evan Jones?’ asked the vicar.
“‘He is a poacher and a Presbyterian, and has never been baptized,’ I
said.
“‘Well baptize him then,’ said the vicar.
“‘But he wants to be immersed.’
“‘Oh, indeed,’ cries the vicar; ‘Well, why not? Immerse him, if you like.’
“‘But he wants me to go up on the hills and baptize him all alone in the
pool by the bridge.’
“‘What does he want that for?’
“‘I don’t know,’ said I.
“‘But I do,’ said the vicar. ‘He will just be drowning you in the pool,
and we shall have all the Dissenters going about saying Hopkins fell in
the pool late at night, when he was coming home drunk, and that will be a
very bad thing for the Church. No, I will have none of it at all.’
“‘But what shall I tell him then?’ I asked.
“‘Tell him to go to—the Presbyterians,’ says the vicar, and I knew well
what he meant.”
You rarely saw the rector going through the lanes without a few of the
children of the parish at his heels. For they all loved him. He stuffed
the pockets of his long black coat with sweets, and was never in too
much of a hurry to have a chat with his young parishioners and hear the
news of their families, and listen to the recital of a text from the
Welsh Bible. He knew even more of his Welsh Bible by heart than his Greek
Testament and would correct the least slips in the recital. But when the
text was said, it was duly rewarded by bull’s-eyes and toffee, and a few
kindly words of encouragement. I heard that, when he was dying, several
of the shyest and wildest lads in the place used to haunt the rectory for
news of their friend, and when the end came they would not believe that
he was gone until they saw the coffin being carried from the house, and
then they burst into a dismal howl of mourning and despair. Certainly,
the Rector of Rhoscolyn was a friend to all the children under his care.
He did not shine as an English preacher, for to him it always remained a
foreign language, though he was a great student of the English classics
and always seeking to improve his English. Milton was a favourite author.
His idea of winter happiness was to draw by the fire after his porridge
supper and read Milton. As a Welsh preacher he was sought after and I
have heard the chanting song of his eloquence through the open windows
of the church, as I sat upon the hillside, many fields away, on a still
summer evening. He read the service in English fairly well, with some
curious tricks of pronunciation, and I remember that we “hurried and
strayed from thy ways” rather than “erred,” which in these modern days
sounded a very reasonable reading. But in a sermon, the foreign tongue
with which he wrestled bravely and visibly sometimes threw him, and one
still remembers with a smile phrases such as “I must tell you this, said
St. Peter,” and “Excuse me”—another favourite form of words to gain time
for translation—“Excuse me, but we are all mortal.” I think, in the use
of the last phrase, there was an expression of his constant desire not to
give pain, and perhaps a feeling that the well-dressed West-End English
congregation that filled his little church from many miles round in
the summer holidays were unused to hear these home truths in their own
elegant tongue.
But the great charm of the service was the welcome he gave you. The Welsh
service was ended, and the English service started at half-past eleven.
The rector stood at the door of his church in a prehistoric but very
square and dignified top-hat, shaking hands with all as they arrived. He
used to scandalise the stricter brethren somewhat by his greeting to me.
“Good morning Judge Parry, I am glad to see you. I saw you going down to
bathe. I was afraid you would not be back in time for church. How was
the water this morning?”
I think he was—like many another good man—at his very best in his own
home. Many a visitor to Rhoscolyn will have taken part in one of his
picnic cricket matches. We played in a field in front of the rectory,
from which the grass had been recently mown with scythes. The pitch was
of the nature of rough stubble; but as everyone played between the ages
of two and seventy, without restraint of sex, there was, of course, no
swift bowling, and the science of the game as we play it in the east was
neither wanted nor missed. For there was great excitement and enthusiasm,
and the heartiest cheering when the rector thundered across from wicket
to wicket, and this was redoubled when, at length—having been technically
out on several occasions—he gave up his bat from sheer fatigue, and
hurried off to look after the preparations for his tea. His anxiety
that the buns should arrive in time from Holyhead, and that the butter
should be put on thickly, and that the tea should be well-brewed, makes
his feasts more memorable to me than many an important banquet I have
assisted at.
But in his own study, when two or three were gathered together, he was
even more at ease and at home. He had never been a rich man, and had
always been a lover of books, and his shelves were crowded with the most
unkempt collection of dear friends that ever a book-lover had gathered
together. Bindings were in many cases conspicuous by their absence, and
in a series of volumes one or two were often missing. These were bargains
he had picked up on some of his rare visits to English towns. The most of
his books were theological, and many were Welsh; but the English classics
were well represented. There were no decorative books. Favourite volumes
were placed lengthways on the shelves instead of upright, with slips of
paper in them, so that the passages he wished to read again could be
readily found. He was, I fancy, a slow reader and a thoughtful one. I was
often astonished at the passages from Milton and Shakespeare he could
quote. These he translated in thought, he told me, into Welsh, to get
their real meaning into his mind.
I have heard say that he was eloquent in extempore prayer, and I can well
believe it. He used to be very indignant over the alleged shortcomings
of some of the Nonconformists in this respect. “I must tell you this
indeed,” he said: “there are fellows who will repeat the most beautiful
passages of our beautiful Prayer-book in a chapel, and pretend to the
poor people it is extempore prayer. I wonder what they think! Do they
think God has never heard our Prayer-book at all?” Then he would speak
with great respect of the powers of extempore prayer of some of the
great Welsh Nonconformist divines, but he always wound up in a spirit
of sportsmanlike churchmanship rather than boasting: “Excuse me, but I
think I could pray extempore against any of them.”
One of the sights of the rectory was the kitchen. It was a bright example
of cleanliness, comfort, and hospitable warmth. In it was the only
musical instrument in the house, an harmonium, and here, of an evening,
the rector came to play over the Welsh hymns which he and his servants
loved to sing. The rector was always rather in fear of his housekeeper
and spoke of her with the affectionate awe that a capable domestic
rightly inspires in a confirmed old bachelor. I have no doubt that his
habit of friendliness with all the children of the parish who visited the
rectory freely, and at their own moments, made dirt and trouble for the
household authorities, whose views of children were more practical than
the rector’s, and born of a wider and different experience of their ways
and habits.
I remember him telling me, one Sunday evening, a story that, I think,
must have been very characteristic of the man and his methods with the
little ones about his gate. The story arose quite naturally, and he told
it with pleasure, but without the least suspicion that it was in any way
a story to his own credit.
“Did you see that young fellow at the church door this morning with a
top-hat and a black coat, and a gold watch-chain?” he asked.
“I did not notice him,” I said.
“Dear me! I must tell you this,” he said. “Have I never told you of
‘Schoni-bach’?”
The name “Schoni-bach”—the “Sch” was soft, and the “o” moderately
long—was, I felt sure, a Welsh equivalent for Little Johnny, and I waited
with interest to hear more about him.
“It is a long time ago,” continued the rector, “since Schoni’s father
died. You know the thatched cottage on the shore! Well, he lived there.
He was the strongest man in the parish, and he could get underneath a
cart, a big farm cart, and lift it on his back. On market day, he would
go to Holyhead and make bets he could lift a cart, and he would win a lot
of money, as much as half-a-crown or three shillings sometimes. But he
was not a temperate man, and one day he had been drinking in Holyhead,
and they got him to lift a cart, when he slipped, and the cart broke
his back, and he died. Well, his widow had three little children, and
Schoni-bach was the eldest. And they wanted her to go to the workhouse,
but she would not go. And they were very poor, for she was not strong,
poor woman, and there was very little work for her to do, and the little
children were often starving. They were wild, naked, shy little things,
and would never come near anyone. The poor mother had frightened them by
telling them that they would be taken to the workhouse, and if a stranger
came near the house, they ran up to the mountain-side and hid among the
heather. However, one day I found little Schoni on the hillside near
the rectory. He looked very thin and starved, so I brought him down the
hill, and gave him a slice of bread and some butter-milk, and he ate it
like a dog, I tell you. I told him to come down again, but I was out
next day, and he came with his wet, bare feet into the kitchen, and my
housekeeper sent him off, I think. However, the day after, I was writing
my sermon, and there came a tap at my own side-door—a very gentle, little
tap—and I went to the door, and there was Schoni-bach, a little ragged,
yellow-haired urchin with bare feet. So I went round to the kitchen, and
got a loaf and some butter-milk, for the housekeeper was in the laundry,
and the coast was clear. So I asked him where his little brother and
sister were, and he went behind the laurel bush and dragged them out.
For there they were in hiding all the time, more like little wild foxes
than children. Well, indeed, after that, Schoni-bach would always bring
them down and tap at my side-door, and he always found out when the
housekeeper was away; but how he did it I don’t know. He must often have
been lying hid about the house, waiting for an hour or more, but he was
good friends with my dog, Gelert, who never barked at him at all. But he
was very frightened of the housekeeper, who had scolded him for his dirty
feet.
“Well, in the summer, they did not come so often, for there were
bilberries and blackberries to gather, and more chances of work and food,
and before winter came Schoni’s uncle, who was a farmer in Canada, sent
for him and paid his passage out, and a little after that he sent for his
mother and the other children, and so they went away, and a very good
thing it was, too, for all of them.
“Well, all this was many years ago. And last Thursday I was writing my
sermon, and I heard old Gel start up and growl, and there was quite a
gentle little tap at my side-door. I went to the door, for my housekeeper
was out, and there was a big fellow with a top-hat and a black coat, and
a gold watch-chain. I knew what he would be after, so I said to him, ‘It
is no use coming here to sell cattle spice and patent foods and gold
watches, for we don’t want them, indeed, in Rhoscolyn!’
“The fellow laughed a bit, and said: ‘Don’t you know me, Mr. Hopkins?’
“‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.
“‘I have often knocked at this door before,’ he said.
“‘I don’t believe you, indeed,’ I replied.
“‘Well, it is true,’ he said. And he looked straight at me, and I
looked at him, and then I began to see him again just a little ragged,
yellow-haired boy, and I cried out: ‘It is Schoni-bach! Little Schoni
come back!’ And I must tell you this, that I was so full of joy to see
him again, I could have fallen on his neck and wept. Dear me, but I was
glad to see him yet alive!”
The rector sighed to think of the old days, and then went on; “Yes, that
was little Schoni outside the church this morning. He was a great fellow
among all the young men there, indeed. ‘What do you think of Canada,
Schoni?’ they kept asking him. And all he did was to keep his hands in
his pockets and rattle his money. That made them stare, I can tell you.
Schoni-bach, with a black coat and a top-hat, and a gold watch-chain, and
his hands in his pockets rattling his money. That was something for these
fellows who have stayed at home to see, wasn’t it? Schoni-bach rattling
his money—or, perhaps, it was only a bunch of keys. He was always a smart
lad, was Schoni-bach.”
These stories of the old rector’s seem very colourless without the
music of his accent, the constant pauses for the whiff of the tobacco,
and the kindly smile that accompanied them. To those who never knew
him, any written portrait of the man must give but a faint echo of his
personality; but to the many English visitors, artists, sportsmen, and
others, who have found their way beyond the Four Mile Bridge to the
ultimate corner of Anglesey, and there been made welcome by the rector,
these recollections will, I doubt not, call to mind the memory of a kind
friend, and a holiday made the brighter by his cheerful hospitality.
Characters such as his seem to grow rarer day by day. Few men of his
energy and enthusiasm would remain nowadays for a quarter of a century in
so narrow a sphere, content with such a simple life. But the Reverend
John Hopkins was more than content—he was happy. He had sprung from the
people, and was by nature a farmer, and to live upon the land was to
him to be at home. But, above all things, he was enthusiastic in his
ministry. His qualities are set out without flattery on a bronze tablet
that his friends erected in the church he loved so well:
“A servant of God, in true simplicity of soul, he loved books, music,
and happy human faces, but his chief delight was in the services of the
Church.”
I have written what I remember of the man, and not of the priest, and
though I should have no right to chronicle or criticise his ministerial
career, I saw enough of him to understand that the keynote to the
cheerfulness and simplicity of his character is sounded in the text that
the friends amongst his congregation have chosen for his memorial:
“Llawenychais pan ddywedent wrthyf: Awn i dy’r Arglwydd.”
“I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] This was written prior to The Oaths Act 1909.
[2] The figures of 1909 are given because in June, 1911, when this was
revised, no later figures were then published.
[3] In 1883, 43,344 warrants of commitment were issued; and, in 1909,
136,630 warrants of commitment were issued.
[4] This was published in April 1909. The Oaths Act 1909, 9 Edw. vii. c
39 abolished the practice of kissing the book.
WORKS BY HIS HONOUR JUDGE EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY
Letters From Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple.
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_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
Katawampus: Its Treatment and Cure.
Second Edition, 96 pages, Cloth. 3s. 6d.
“One of the very best books of the season.”—_The World._
“The book is one of rare drollery, and the verses and pictures are
capital of their kind.”—_Saturday Review._
“A truly delightful little book, ...”—_Pall Mall Gazette._
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
Katawampus Kanticles.
Music by Sir J. F. Bridge, Mus. Doc., Organist of Westminster Abbey.
Words by His Honour Judge E. A. Parry. Illustrated Cover, representing
Kapellmeister Krabb, by Archie Maccregor.
Royal 8vo. Price 1s.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.
Crown 8vo. 193 pp. Price 1s. 6d.
Pater’s Book of Rhymes.
Illustrated by A. Rusden. Crown 4to. Price 3s. 6d. net.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
The Scarlet Herring, And Other Stories.
Illustrated by Athelstan Rusden. 253 pp.
Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover
Price 6s.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
Butter-Scotia
Or a Cheap Trip to Fairyland.
180 pages. Map of Butter-Scotia, many full-page Plates and Illustrations
in the Text. Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover. 6s.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
The Story of Don Quixote Retold.
Beautifully Coloured Plates by Walter Crane.
Price 6s.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
The First Book of Krab.
Christmas Stories for children of all ages.
132 pages, with many Full-page Plates and Illustrations in the Text.
Bound in specially designed Cloth Cover, 3s. 6d.
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