Hesternus to His Publisher

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

SIR : This is a fine morning, and I am in a confessional humour. You will learn, not without a flicker of interest, that I have been brooding all my life over the thought of my magnum opus, under your imprint. But the whole tyranny of things has been against it and me. I shall never do it now; nor will it ever be done by another, mark me, upon that lordly, lover-like plan of mine. By historiology, criticism, or mere humanistic eclecticism, — call the small tool by what big name you will, — I was fain to gather out of the dust of the crowded English seventeenth century “ this or that down-trodden name,” and augment the sum of perfections which men like to remember. Long ago I loosened my hold on “ the spacious times of great Elizabeth ; ” these have candles and incense enough by now. My knee, Sir, was given to the fallible years, the years, say, between the chase after the Spanish Infanta and the Boyne fight. Take away the incomparable lyrics, the philosophies and the statecraft of that great era, and still, for its intense drama and its individualism, it is as wine to the historic sense. Only the Italian Renascence can match it for play of color, although the little English afterglow is very innocent and misgiving beside that.

You know me for an out-and-out partisan and reactionary. It is not for me “ to spell Oliver with a great O,” nor to rise to The Immortal Memory whom he made possible. And so my landmarks were always the Composition Papers and the Calendars for Compounding; and Clarendon ; and Wood ; and Fuller ; and Lloyd, Winstanley, Fanshawe, Burton, Symonds, North, Howell, Evelyn, and the thousand minor memoirs, the calfskin booklets in their tipsy types, where so much dead ingenuity, so much live loveliness, bear witness to those stormy years. Dear to me have been that vanished London and Oxford. Who has sought, if not I, the places of execution and of exile, the smoothed trenches, the sweet far-scattered village churches where my friends, my wild flocks, lie folded ? Have I not pored by night and by day over their clean-sanded manuscripts, here all hard thought or thought-packed music, and there a loose skurry as of little goats pursuing their tails ? Who has gloried so in their burning vitality, and gone so blind to all their sins ?

They are the gods I have prayed to, and the boon-companions I have missed. They should have had such a dedication from me as not even Mr. Saintsbury has conceived : such an abject, compromising, irrevocable dedication! Thus: Patribus laetissimis curatoris labor et cor. If I judge them rightly, they love compliment yet; they must prick up their love-locked ears, and stand nose in air, sniffing that once familiar homage of which they have been defrauded. While I have slept, Carolians and Jacobeans have won rehabilitation in ever so many quarters. Jewel after jewel has been dug up and reset, and some day my whole mine will be rifled. I can but
take it out in growling.

so much is flat! But hardly may my procrastinating foot think to track them in Poets’ Paradise. I have been long away: explanations are difficult. And as every man-jack of them still wears a sword, I shall feel that unconsummated labor et cor on the side of my faithless head. A very proper ending, too! Only the pith of the matter will really have been that I grew discerning as I grew old ; that I loved them less when I planned the broad authentic book, and more, when at last I came to consider no modern public half good enough for them, and folded up their names in lavender in the sacristy of a jealous heart. Because they are like children, they will whack me, nevertheless, for coming on a visit, and bringing no sweets.

Meanwhile, it has been my game in this world to remember them, and those last tumults and graces of chivalry which subsided with them. Sir, it has been no more than a Following of my Geny to seek their Company on every Usuall or Emergent Occasion, and to be theirs singularly and intirely, beyond Expresses, and therein Most Happy! I know nothing, ancient or modern, to beat them for a certain play of sympathy in mental conception, and for romance that somehow attaches itself to every outward result. For a visible symbol of this sympathy and romance (much as a blue moth hovers over a blue wood-violet) we have the very clothes they wore. Human dress was in its perfection about 1645 A. D. If one wishes a pageant of colour and form, divorced from all that is teasing or fantastic, he has but to think of the saffron velvet, the slashed cloth-of-silver, the lilac camlett with points, the

of which Vandyck has given us the fragmentary and unshadowed record.

The historical eye is as a gourmand at a feast, summoning up the unique Type: those long, dark faces, careworn and impudent; those firm, sensitive hands; those lean bodies, so gayly alert, as if consciously made for the saddle and the march, and not for chairs; and the women, in their fragrance of personality, the delicate proud women of “the Warres,” long laid away under exquisite epitaphs cut in alabaster. What astonishing, what endearing people, these, above all, of “the Warres!” Who will catalogue them, expound them, and give us their secret ?

Every deed had character, and every word had beauty. There were geniuses and heroes, there were scamps and nobodies out for King Charles; but how comes it that those nobodies suddenly do and say, as by miracle, such adorable things ? Every judgment-hall, prison-cell, scaffold, stake, and battlefield heard unforgettable words. The English had all the emotions then, and had them in their heights and depths. But they did not sneer; they did not dawdle; they had fury and enthusiasm, and fight to spare.

A biography of that time is either a tender idyll or a mad extravaganza. For wonder and pity, wildness and melancholy, few stories can match those of John Morris of Pontefract, John Smith the standard-captor, or the younger Francis Windebank. And again, we have the Lucas and the Lisle who cast a light upon bygone Colchester; and the young Pudsey slain at Bristol, to whose meadow grave, over fifty years after, his aged sweetheart was carried, as she desired, in her bridal veil; and the young Villiers who fell with his back to the Kingston oak, the “nine mortall Woundes in his Beautiful Bodie,” recorded, and idolatrously mourned, by contemporaries. Was there ever in the world so lovely a letter as “ trothful ” Anthony Payne’s to Lady Grace Grenville, with its news that he was “ bringing home the greate Hearte that is colde to Kilkhampton vault ? . . . and oh, my Lady! how shall I brooke your weeping Face ? ”

“A sense of humor,” says a modern moralist, “saves us from a cartload of things, especially from grumbling! ” And that priceless solvent of humor was the most noticeable of Cavalier assets. I have always thought it an economic cruelty that none of it, not a scraping nor shaving, fell to the Cavaliers’ King, and that this one circumstance, as much as anything,

There was much banter and “jollying” in those days, in quantity and in quality a good deal like the best American talk; and like that, too, it covered affection, rather than malice. Think of Denham’s plea for Wither’s life and maintenance, “ in order that I may not be sett up for the Worst Poet in England;” of plain Falkland’s smiling pride in the company of plain “little Sid” Godolphin, “where I am ever the properer Man;” of Charles the Second’s psychological summary in regard to plots : “Odds fish, Brother James! wo’d they kill me to make you King ?” Yes, they were funny, as a harassed generation has to be.

Black spirits or white, these Malignants thought and wrought with all the definite obsolete manliness of men. Awestruck Roundhead religiousness may well have rolled its eyes at their almost laughing hold on mysticism and the supernatural. Saints like Derby, devils like Buckingham and Rochester, average gentlemen like Carnarvon and Cherbury and Carew, lived hard and died humbly, not ashamed of contrition, and ran forward into eternity as schoolboys bound for the holidays at home. To their lovers, their like never was nor will be. It is, to one horny-hearted “researcher,” proof enough of the reality of a favorite dreamlike past, that one may hang over the annals of it, as it were cum luctu el ploratu. It is an application of the excellent backhanded argument for human immortality that one clamors so to find a certain company again, cum gaudio et jucunditate in sempiternum !

No, Sir: as a publisher, you have nothing to fear from me. But I have advisedly fired phrases and feelings at my friend, and now, having done so, do heartily bid you Farewell.