TAR AND WHITEWASH

I am, I confess it, hard to please. If a round dozen of Bad Women, all made in England too, does not satisfy me, what will? What ails the fellow at them? Yet was I at first dissatisfied, and am, therefore, glad to notice that whilst I was demurring and splitting hairs the great, generous public was buying the Lives of Twelve Bad Women, by Arthur Vincent, and putting it into a second edition. This is as it should be. When the excellent Dean Burgon dubbed his dozen biographies Twelve Good Men, it probably never occurred to him that the title suggested three companion volumes; but so it did, and two of them, Twelve Bad Men and Twelve Bad Women, have made their appearance. I still await, with great patience, Twelve Good Women. Twelve was the number of the Apostles. Had it not been, one might be tempted to ask, Why twelve? But as there must be some limit to bookmaking, there is no need to quarrel with an arithmetical limit.

My criticism upon the Dean's dozen was that they were not by any means, all of them, conspicuously good men; for, to name one only, who would call old Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, a particularly good man? In a sense, all Presidents, Provosts, Principals, and Masters of Colleges are good men—in fact, they must be so by the statutes—but to few of them are given the special notes of goodness. Dr. Routh was a remarkable man, a learned man, perhaps a pious man—undeniably, when he came to die, an old man—but he was no better than his colleagues. This weakness of classification has run all through the series, and it is my real quarrel with it. I do not understand the principle of selection. I did not understand the Dean's test of goodness, nor do I understand Mr. Seccombe's or Mr. Vincent's test of badness. What do we mean by a good man or a bad one, a good woman or a bad one? Most people, like the young man in the song, are 'not very good, nor yet very bad.' We move about the pastures of life in huge herds, and all do the same things, at the same times, and for the same reasons. 'Forty feeding like one.' Are we mean? Well, we have done some mean things in our time. Are we generous? Occasionally we are. Were we good sons or dutiful daughters? We have both honoured and dishonoured our parents, who, in their turn, had done the same by theirs. Do we melt at the sight of misery? Indeed we do. Do we forget all about it when we have turned the corner? Frequently that is so. Do we expect to be put to open shame at the Great Day of Judgment? We should be terribly frightened of this did we not cling to the hope that amidst the shocking revelations then for the first time made public our little affairs may fail to attract much notice. Judged by the standards of humanity, few people are either good or bad. 'I have not been a great sinner,' said the dying Nelson; nor had he—he had only been made a great fool of by a woman. Mankind is all tarred with the same brush, though some who chance to be operated upon when the brush is fresh from the barrel get more than their share of the tar. The biography of a celebrated man usually reminds me of the outside of a coastguardsman's cottage—all tar and whitewash. These are the two condiments of human life—tar and whitewash—the faults and the excuses for the faults, the passions and pettinesses that make us occasionally drop on all fours, and the generous aspirations that at times enable us, if not to stand upright, at least to adopt the attitude of the kangaroo. It is rather tiresome, this perpetual game of French and English going on inside one. True goodness and real badness escape it altogether. A good man does not spend his life wrestling with the Powers of Darkness. He is victor in the fray, and the most he is called upon to do is every now and again to hit his prostrate foe a blow over the costard just to keep him in his place. Thus rid of a perpetual anxiety, the good man has time to grow in goodness, to expand pleasantly, to take his ease on Zion. You can see in his face that he is at peace with himself—that he is no longer at war with his elements. His society, if you are fond of goodness, is both agreeable and medicinal; but if you are a bad man it is hateful, and you cry out with Mr. Love-lust in Bunyan's Vanity Fair: 'Away with him. I cannot endure him; he is for ever condemning my way.'

Not many of Dean Burgon's biographies reached this standard. The explanation, perhaps, is that the Dean chiefly moved in clerical circles where excellence is more frequently to be met with than goodness.

In the same way a really bad man is one who has frankly said, 'Evil, be thou my good.' Like the good man, though for a very different reason, the bad one has ceased to make war with the devil. Finding a conspiracy against goodness going on, the bad man joins it, and thus, like the good man, is at peace with himself. The bad man is bent upon his own way, to get what he wants, no matter at what cost. Human lives! What do they matter? A woman's honour! What does that matter? Truth and fidelity! What are they? To know what you want, and not to mind what you pay for it, is the straight path to fame, fortune, and hell-fire. Careers, of course, vary; to dominate a continent or to open a corner shop as a pork-butcher's, plenty of devilry may go to either ambition. Also, genius is a rare gift. It by no means follows that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate. It casts a little doubt upon a man's badness if he does not, at least, make a little money. It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret. That was one of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe's Twelve Bad Men. Most of them came to violent ends. They were all failures.

But I have kept these twelve ladies waiting a most unconscionable time. Who are they? There are amongst them four courtesans: Alice Perrers, one of King Edward III.'s misses; Barbara Villiers, one of King Charles II.'s; Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, who had to be content with a royal Duke; and Mrs. Con Phillips. Six members of the criminal class: Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston. Of these twelve bad women one-third were executed, Alice Arden being burnt at Canterbury, Jenny Diver and Elizabeth Brownrigg being hung at Tyburn, and Mary Bateman suffering the same fate at Leeds. Elizabeth Canning was sentenced to seven years' transportation, and, indeed, if their biographers are to be believed, all the other ladies made miserable ends. There is nothing triumphant about their badness. Even from the point of view of this world they had better have been good. In fact, squalor is the badge of the whole tribe. Some of them, probably—Elizabeth Brownrigg, for example—were mad. This last-named poor creature bore sixteen children to a house-painter and plasterer, and then became a parish mid-wife, and only finally a baby-farmer. Her cruelty to her apprentices had madness in every detail. To include her in this volume was wholly unnecessary. She lives but in George Canning's famous parody on Southey's sonnet to the regicide Marten.

With those sentimentalists who maintain that all bad people are mad I will have no dealings. It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all remind us it is sheer nonsense. Some of our greatest men have been infernal scoundrels—pre-eminently bad men—with nothing mad about them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about in it.

Twelve Bad Women contains much interesting matter, but, on the whole, it is depressing. It seems very dull to be bad. Perhaps the editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded. Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these courtesans and criminals put together. The note of jollity is entirely absent. It was no primrose path these unhappy women traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were unchristian to doubt. The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is in a third, for it has a moral tendency.



ITINERARIES

Anyone who is teased by the notion that it would be pleasant to be remembered, in the sense of being read, after death, cannot do better to secure that end than compose an Itinerary and leave it behind him in manuscript, with his name legibly inscribed thereon. If an honest bit of work, noting distances, detailing expenses, naming landmarks, moors, mountains, harbours, docks, buildings—indeed, anything which, as lawyers say, savours of realty—and but scantily interspersed with reflections, and with no quotations, why, then, such a piece of work, however long publication may be delayed—and a century or two will not matter in the least—cannot fail, whenever it is printed, to attract attention, to excite general interest and secure a permanent hold in every decent library in the kingdom.

Time cannot stale an Itinerary. Iter, Via, Actus are words of pith and moment. Stage-coaches, express trains, motor-cars, have written, or are now writing, their eventful histories over the face of these islands; but, whatever changes they have made or are destined to make, they have left untouched the mystery of the road, although for the moment the latest comer may seem injuriously to have affected its majesty.

The Itinerist alone among authors is always sure of an audience. No matter where, no matter when, he has but to tell us how he footed it and what he saw by the wayside, and we must listen. How can we help it? Two hundred years ago, it may be, this Itinerist came through our village, passed by the wall of our homestead, climbed our familiar hill, and went on his way; it is perhaps but two lines and a half he can afford to give us, but what lines they are! How different with sermons, poems, and novels! On each of these is the stamp of the author's age; sentiments, fashions, thoughts, faiths, phraseology, all worn out—cold, dirty grate, where once there was a blazing fire. Cheerlessness personified! Leland's anti-Papal treatise in forty-five chapters remains in learned custody—a manuscript; a publisher it will never find. We still have Papists and anti-Papists; in this case the fire still blazes, but the grates are of an entirely different construction. Leland's treatise is out of date. But his Itinerary in nine volumes, a favourite book throughout the eighteenth century, which has graced many a bookseller's catalogue for the last hundred years, and seldom without eliciting a purchaser—Leland's Itinerary is to-day being reprinted under the most able editorship. The charm of the road is irresistible. The Vicar of Wakefield is a delightful book, with a great tradition behind it and a future still before it; but it has not escaped the ravages of time, and I would, now, at all events, gladly exchange it for Oliver Goldsmith's Itinerary through Germany with a Flute!

Vain authors, publisher's men, may write as they like about Shakespeare's country, or Scott's country, or Carlyle's country, or Crockett's country, but—

'Oh, good gigantic smile of the brown old earth!'

the land laughs at the delusions of the men who hurriedly cross its surface.

'Rydal and Fairfield are there,— In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead. So it is, so it will be for aye, Nature is fresh as of old, Is lovely, a mortal is dead.'

These reflections, which by themselves would be enough to sink even an Itinerary, seemed forced upon me by the publication of A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland by Joseph Taylor, Late of the Inner Temple, Esquire. This journey was made two hundred years ago in the Long Vacation of 1705, but has just been printed from the original manuscript, under the editorship of Mr. William Cowan, by the well-known Edinburgh bookseller, Mr. Brown, of Princes Street, to whom all lovers of things Scottish already owe much.

Nobody can hope to be less known than this our latest Itinerist, for not only is he not in the Dictionary of National Biography, but it is at present impossible to say which of two Joseph Taylors he was. The House of the Winged Horse has ever had Taylors on its roll, the sign of the Middle Temple, a very fleecy sheep, being perhaps unattractive to the clan, and in 1705 it so happened that not only were there two Taylors, but two Joseph Taylors, entitled to write themselves 'of the Inner Temple, Esquire.' Which was the Itinerist? Mr. Cowan, going by age, thinks that the Itinerist can hardly have been the Joseph Taylor who was admitted to the Inn in 1663, as in that case he must have been at least fifty-eight when he travelled to Edinburgh. For my part, I see nothing in the Itinerary to preclude the possibility of its author having attained that age at the date of its composition. I observe in the Itinerary references which point to the Itinerist being a Kentish man, and he mentions more than once his 'Cousin D'aeth.' Research among the papers of the D'aeths of Knowlton Court, near Dover, might result in the discovery which of these two Taylors really was the Itinerist. As nothing else is at present known about either, the investigation could probably be made without passion or party or even religious bias. It might be best begun by Mr. Cowan telling us in whose custody he found the manuscript, and how it came there. These statements should always be made when old manuscripts are first printed.

The journey began on August 2, 1705. The party consisted of Mr. Taylor and his two friends, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Sloman. They travelled on horseback, and often had difficulties with the poor beast that carried their luggage. They reached Edinburgh in the evening of August 31, and left it on their return journey on September 8, and got home on the 25th of the same month. The Itinerary concludes as follows:

'Thus we spent almost 2 months in a Journy of many 100 miles, sometimes thro' very charming Countryes, and at other times over desolate and Barren Mountaines, and yet met with no particular misfortune in all the Time.'

I may say at once of these three Itinerists—Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman—that they appear to have been thoroughly commonplace, well behaved, occasionally hilarious Englishmen, ready to endure whatever befell them, if unavoidable; accustomed to take their ease in their inn and to turn round and look at any pretty woman they might chance to meet on their travels. Their first experience of what the Itinerist calls 'the prodigies of Nature,' 'at once an occasion both of Horrour and Admiration,' was in the Peak Country 'described in poetry by the ingenious Mr. Cotton.' This part of the world they 'did' with something of the earnestness of the modern tourist. But I hardly think they enjoyed themselves. The 'prodigious' caverns and strange petrifactions shocked them; 'nothing can be more terrible or shocking to Nature.' Mam Tor, with its 1,710 feet, proved very impressive, 'a vast high mountain reaching to the very clouds.' This gloom of the Derbyshire hills and stony valleys was partially dispelled for our travellers by a certain 'fair Gloriana' they met at Buxton, with whom they had great fun, 'so much the greater, because we never expected such heavenly enjoyments in so desolate a country.' If it be on susceptibilities of this nature that Mr. Cowan rests his case for thinking that the Itinerist can hardly have attained 'the blasted antiquity' of fifty-eight, we must think Mr. Cowan a trifle hasty, or a very young man, perhaps under forty, which is young for an editor.

After describing, somewhat too much like an auctioneer, the splendours of Chatsworth, 'a Paradise in the deserts of Arabia,' the Itinerist proceeds on his way north through Nottingham to Belvoir Castle, where 'my Lord Rosses Gentleman (to whom Mr. Harrison was recommended) entertained us by his Lordship's command with good wine and the best of malt liquors which the cellar abounds with'; the pictures in the Long Gallery were shown them by 'my Lord himself.' At Doncaster, 'a neat market-town which consists only in one long street,' they had some superlative salmon just taken out of the river. By Knaresborough Spaw, where they drank the waters and had icy cold baths, and dined at the ordinary with a parson whose conversation startled the propriety of the Templar, the travellers made their way to York, and for the first and last time a few pages of Guide Book are improperly introduced. Then on to Scarborough.

'The next morning early we left Scarborough and travelled through a dismall road, particularly near Robins Hood Bay; we were obliged to lead our horses, and had much ado to get down a vast craggy mountain which lyes within a quarter of a mile of it. The Bay is about a mile broad, and inhabited by poor fishermen. We stopt to taste some of their liquor and discourse with them. They told us the French privateers came into the Very Bay and took 2 of their Vessels but the day before, which were ransom'd for L25 a piece. We saw a great many vessels lying upon the Shore, the masters not daring to venture out to sea for fear of undergoing the same fate.'

We boast too readily of our inviolate shores.

A curious description is given of the Duke of Buckingham's alum works near Whitby. The travellers then procured a guide, and traversed 'the vast moors which lye between Whitby and Gisborough.' The civic magnificence of Newcastle greatly struck our travellers, who, happier than their modern successors, were able to see the town miles off. The Itinerist quotes with gusto the civic proverb that the men of Newcastle pay nothing for the Way, the Word, or the Water, 'for the Ministers of Religion are maintained, the streets paved, and the Conduits kept up at the publick charge.' A disagreeable account is given of the brutishness of the people employed in the salt works at Tynemouth. At Berwick the travellers got into trouble with the sentry, but the mistake was rectified with the captain of the guard over '2 bowles of punch, there being no wine in the town.'

Scotland was now in sight, and the travellers became grave, as befitted the occasion. They were told that the journey that lay before them was extremely dangerous, that 'twould be difficult to escape with their lives, much less (ominous words) without 'the distemper of the country.' But Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman were as brave as Mr. Pickwick, and they would on. 'Yet notwithstanding all these sad representations, we resolv'd to proceed and stand by one another to the last.'

What the Itinerists thought of Scotland when they got there is not for me to say. I was once a Scottish member.

They arrived in Edinburgh at a great crisis in Scottish history. They saw the Duke of Argyll, as Queen Anne's Lord High Commissioner, go to the Parliament House in this manner:

'First a coach and six Horses for his Gentlemen, then a Trumpet, then his own coach with six white horses, which were very fine, being those presented by King William to the Duke of Queensbury, and by him sold to the Duke of Argyle for L300; next goes a troop of Horse Guards, cloathed like my Lord of Oxford's Regiment, but the horses are of several colours; and the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State, and the Lord Chief Justice Clerk, and other officers of State close the cavalcade in coaches and six horses. Thus the Commissioner goes and returns every day.'

The Itinerists followed the Duke and his procession into the Parliament House, and heard debated the great question—the greatest of all possible questions for Scotland—whether this magnificence should cease, whether there should be an end of an auld sang—in short, whether the proposed Act of Union should be proceeded with. By special favour, our Itinerists had leave to stand upon the steps of the throne, and witnessed a famous fiery and prolonged debate, the Duke once turning to them and saying, sotto voce, 'It is now deciding whether England and Scotland shall go together by the ears.' How it was decided we all know, and that it was wisely decided no one doubts; yet, when we read our Itinerist's account of the Duke's coach and horses, and the cavalcade that followed him, and remember that this was what happened every day during the sitting of the Parliament, and must not be confounded with the greater glories of the first day of a Parliament, when every member, be he peer, knight of the shire, or burgh member, had to ride on horseback in the procession, it is impossible not to feel the force of Miss Grisel Dalmahoy's appeal in the Heart of Midlothian, she being an ancient sempstress, to Mr. Saddletree, the harness-maker:

'And as for the Lords of States ye suld mind the riding o' the Parliament in the gude auld time before the Union. A year's rent o' mony a gude estate gaed for horse-graith and harnessing, forby broidered robes and foot-mantles that wad hae stude by their lane with gold and brocade, and that were muckle in my ain line.'

The graphic account of a famous debate given by, Taylor is worth comparing with the Lockhart Papers and Hill Burton. The date is a little troublesome. According to our Itinerist, he heard the discussion as to whether the Queen or the Scottish Parliament should nominate the Commissioners. Now, according to the histories, this all-important discussion began and ended on September 1, but our Itinerist had only arrived in Edinburgh the night before the first, and gives us to understand that he owed his invitation to be present to the fact that whilst in Edinburgh he and his friends had had the honour to have several lords and members of Parliament to dine, and that these guests informed him 'of the grand day when the Act was to be passed or rejected.' The Itinerist's account is too particular—for he gives the result of the voting—to admit of any possibility of a mistake, and he describes how several of the members came afterwards to his lodgings, and, so he writes, 'embraced us with all the outward marks of love and kindness, and seemed mightily pleased at what was done, and told us we should now be no more English and Scotch, but Brittons.' In the matter of nomenclature, at all events, the promises of the Union have not been carried out.

After September 1 the Parliament did not meet till the 4th, when an Address was passed to the Queen, but apparently without any repetition of debate. So it really is a little difficult to reconcile the dates. Perhaps Itinerists are best advised to keep off public events.

How our travellers escaped the 'national distemper' and journeyed home by Ecclefechan, Carlisle, Shap Fell, Liverpool, Chester, Coventry, and Warwick must be read in the Journey itself, which, though it only occupies 182 small pages, is full of matter and even merriment; in fact, it is an excellent itinerary.



EPITAPHS

Epitaphs, if in rhyme, are the real literature of the masses. They need no commendation and are beyond all criticism. A Cambridge don, a London bus-driver, will own their charm in equal measure. Strange indeed is the fascination of rhyme. A commonplace hitched into verse instantly takes rank with Holy Scripture. This passion for poetry, as it is sometimes called, is manifested on every side; even tradesmen share it, and as the advertisements in our newspapers show, are willing to pay small sums to poets who commend their wares in verse. The widow bereft of her life's companion, the mother bending over an empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as memorials of their pleasure or their pain.

'Hark! how chimes the passing bell— There's no music to a knell; All the other sounds we hear Flatter and but cheat our ear.'

So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever wearies of Martial's 'Erotion'?—

'Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra, Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems. Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli Manibus exiguis annua justa dato. Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua'—

so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:

'Underneath this greedy stone Lies little sweet Erotion, Whom the Fates with hearts as cold Nipped away at six years old. Those, whoever thou may'st be, That hast this small field after me, Let the yearly rites be paid To her little slender shade; So shall no disease or jar Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar, But this tomb be here alone The only melancholy stone.'

Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:

'I'll stay and read my sermon here, And skulls and bones shall be my text.

* * * *

Here learn that glory and disgrace, Wisdom and Folly, pass away, That mirth hath its appointed space, That sorrow is but for a day; That all we love and all we hate, That all we hope and all we fear, Each mood of mind, each turn of fate, Must end in dust and silence here.'

The best epitaphs are the grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once, and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death and, it may be, judgment to come.

Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting Selection of English Epigrams and Epitaphs, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country. The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean. It is admirably suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four:

'When the Archangel's trump shall blow And souls to bodies join, Many will wish their lives below Had been as short as mine.'

It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.

Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is arrested by Pope's well-known lines from his magnificent 'Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' which are often to be found on tombstones:

'So peaceful rests without a stone and name What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. How loved, how honoured once avails thee not, To whom related or by whom begot. A heap of dust alone remains of thee; 'Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.'

I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope's claim to be a poet no worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was denied them—the ear of the public.

Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which remind the passer-by of his transitory estate. In different parts of the country—in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray—are to be found lines more or less resembling the following:

'Man's life is like unto a winter's day, Some break their fast and so depart away, Others stay dinner then depart full fed, The longest age but sups and goes to bed. O reader, there behold and see As we are now, so thou must be.'

The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has become a proverb. Pope's famous epitaph on Newton:

'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'

is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the preference given to prose Latinity.

The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:

'UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.

Here she lies a pretty bud Lately made of flesh and blood; Who as soon fell fast asleep As her little eyes did peep. Give her strewings, but not stir The earth that lightly covers her.'

Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called The Epigrammatists, published in Bohn's Standard Library, calls these lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson's beautiful epitaph on S.P., a child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, beginning,

'Weep with me all you that read This little story; And know for whom the tear you shed Death's self is sorry,'

is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay's, for example:

'Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it.'

But does he know it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a striking exception:

'Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he. O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C, That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame, He ask'd and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.'



'HANSARD'

'Men are we, and must mourn when e'en the shade of that which once was great has passed away.' This quotation—which, in obedience to the prevailing taste, I print as prose—was forced upon me by reading in the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of Hansard's Parliamentary History and Debates were exposed for sale, and, it must be added, to ridicule. Yet 'Hansard' was once a name to conjure with. To be in it was an ambition—costly, troublesome, but animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship. No wonder that unimaginative men still believed that Hansard was a property with money in it. Is it not the counterpart of Parliament, its dark and majestic shadow thrown across the page of history? As the pious Catholic studies his Acta Sanctorum, so should the constitutionalist love to pore over the ipsissima verba of Parliamentary gladiators, and read their resolutions and their motions. Where else save in the pages of Hansard can we make ourselves fully acquainted with the history of the Mother of Free Institutions? It is, no doubt, dull, but with the soberminded a large and spacious dulness like that of Hansard's Debates is better than the incongruous chirpings of the new 'humourists.' Besides, its dulness is exaggerated. If a reader cannot extract amusement from it the fault is his, not Hansard's. But, indeed, this perpetual talk of dulness and amusement ought not to pass unchallenged. Since when has it become a crime to be dull? Our fathers were not ashamed to be dull in a good cause. We are ashamed, but without ceasing to be dull.

[Footnote A: March 8, 1902.]

But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. 'Things are what they are,' said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. 'Why, then, should we desire to be deceived?' The test of truth remains undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried by this test, it is plain that Hansard has fallen upon evil days. The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray's Elegy, or Peregrine Pickle, is worth more than, or nearly as much as, the 458 volumes of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Three complete sets were sold last Tuesday; one brought L110, the other two but L70 each. And yet it is not long ago since a Hansard was worth three times as much. Where were our young politicians? There are serious men on both sides of the House. Men of their stamp twenty years ago would not have been happy without a Hansard to clothe their shelves with dignity and their minds with quotations. But these young men were not bidders.

As the sale proceeded, the discredit of Hansard became plainer and plainer. For the copyright, including, of course, the goodwill of the name—the right to call yourself 'Hansard' for years to come—not a penny was offered, and yet, as the auctioneer feelingly observed, only eighteen months ago it was valued at L60,000. The cold douche of the auction mart may brace the mind, but is apt to lower the price of commodities of this kind. Then came incomplete and unbound sets, with doleful results. For forty copies of the 'Indian Debates' for 1889 only a penny a copy was offered. It was rumoured that the bidder intended, had he been successful, to circulate the copies amongst the supporters of a National Council for India; but his purpose was frustrated by the auctioneer, who, mindful of the honour of the Empire, sorrowfully but firmly withdrew the lot, and proceeded to the next, amidst the jeers of a thoroughly demoralized audience. But this subject why pursue? It is, for the reason already cited at the beginning, a painful one. The glory of Hansard has departed for ever. Like a new-fangled and sham religion, it began in pride and ended in a police-court, instead of beginning in a police-court and ending in pride, which is the now well-defined course of true religion.

The fact that nobody wants Hansard is not necessarily a rebuff to Parliamentary eloquence, yet these low prices jump with the times and undoubtedly indicate an impatience of oratory. We talk more than our ancestors, but we prove our good faith by doing it very badly. We have no Erskines at the Bar, but trials last longer than ever. There are not half a dozen men in the House of Commons who can make a speech, properly so called, but the session is none the shorter on that account. Hansard's Debates are said to be dull to read, but there is a sterner fate than reading a dull debate: you may be called upon to listen to one. The statesmen of the time must be impervious to dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well. Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous politician of the future.



CONTEMPT OF COURT

The late Mr. Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he, with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew, and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with the sinner on the bench, 'Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, what are you about taking my life like that?' usually exhibits signs of great depression, and meekly allows himself to be conducted to his cell, from whence in due course he is taken and throttled according to law.

This situation described by Carlyle is doubtless mighty full of humour; but, none the less, were any prisoner at the bar to adopt Craigenputtock's suggestion, he would only add to the peccadillo of murder the grave offence of contempt of court, which has been defined 'as a disobedience to the court, an opposing or despising the authority, justice, and dignity thereof.'

The whole subject of Contempt is an interesting and picturesque one, and has been treated after an interesting and picturesque yet accurate and learned fashion by a well-known lawyer, in a treatise[A] which well deserves to be read not merely by the legal practitioner, but by the student of constitutional law and the nice observer of our manners and customs.

[Footnote A: Contempt of Court, etc. By J.F. Oswald, Q.C. London: William Clowes and Sons, Limited.]

An ill-disposed person may exhibit contempt of court in divers ways—for example, he may scandalize the the court itself, which may be done not merely by the extreme measure of hurling missiles at the presiding judge, or loudly contemning his learning or authority, but by ostentatiously reading a newspaper in his presence, or laughing uproariously at a joke made by somebody else. Such contempts, committed as they are in facie curiae, are criminal offences, and may be punished summarily by immediate imprisonment without the right of appeal. It speaks well both for the great good sense of the judges and for the deep-rooted legal instincts of our people that such offences are seldom heard of. It would be impossible nicely to define what measure of freedom of manners should be allowed in a court of justice, which, as we know, is neither a church nor a theatre, but, as a matter of practice, the happy mean between an awe-struck and unmanly silence and free-and-easy conversation is well preserved. The practising advocate, to avoid contempt and obtain, if instructed so to do, a hearing, must obey certain sumptuary laws, for not only must he don the horsehair wig, the gown, and bands of his profession, but his upper clothing must be black, nor should his nether garment be otherwise than of sober hue. Mr. Oswald reports Mr. Justice Byles as having once observed to the late Lord Coleridge whilst at the Bar: 'I always listen with little pleasure to the arguments of counsel whose legs are encased in light gray trousers.' The junior Bar is growing somewhat lax in these matters. Dark gray coats are not unknown, and it was only the other day I observed a barrister duly robed sitting in court in a white waistcoat, apparently oblivious of the fact that whilst thus attired no judge could possibly have heard a word he said. However, as he had nothing to say, the question did not arise. It is doubtless the increasing Chamber practice of the judges which has occasioned this regrettable laxity. In Chambers a judge cannot summarily commit for contempt, nor is it necessary or customary for counsel to appear before him in robes. Some judges object to fancy waistcoats in Chambers, but others do not. The late Sir James Bacon, who was a great stickler for forensic propriety, and who, sitting in court, would not have allowed a counsel in a white waistcoat to say a word, habitually wore one himself when sitting as vacation judge in the summer.

It must not be supposed that there can be no contempt out of court. There can. To use bad language on being served with legal process is to treat the court from whence such process issued with contempt. None the less, considerable latitude of language on such occasions is allowed. How necessary it is to protect the humble officers of the law who serve writs and subpoenas is proved by the case of one Johns, who was very rightly committed to the Fleet in 1772, it appearing by affidavit that he had compelled the poor wretch who sought to serve him with a subpoena to devour both the parchment and the wax seal of the court, and had then, after kicking him so savagely as to make him insensible, ordered his body to be cast into the river. No amount of irritation could justify such conduct. It is no contempt to tear up the writ or subpoena in the presence of the officer of the court, because, the service once lawfully effected, the court is indifferent to the treatment of its stationery; but such behaviour, though lawful, is childish. To obstruct a witness on his way to give evidence, or to threaten him if he does give evidence, or to tamper with the jury, are all serious contempts. In short, there is a divinity which hedges a court of justice, and anybody who, by action or inaction, renders the course of justice more difficult or dilatory than it otherwise would be, incurs the penalty of contempt. Consider, for example, the case of documents and letters. Prior to the issue of a writ, the owner of documents and letters may destroy them, if he pleases—the fact of his having done so, if litigation should ensue on the subject to which the destroyed documents related, being only matter for comment—but the moment a writ is issued the destruction by a defendant of any document in his possession relating to the action is a grave contempt, for which a duchess was lately sent to prison. There is something majestic about this. No sooner is the aid of a court of law invoked than it assumes a seizin of every scrap of writing which will assist it in its investigation of the matter at issue between the parties, and to destroy any such paper is to obstruct the court in its holy task, and therefore a contempt.

To disobey a specific order of the court is, of course, contempt. The old Court of Chancery had a great experience in this aspect of the question. It was accustomed to issue many peremptory commands; it forbade manufacturers to foul rivers, builders so to build as to obstruct ancient lights, suitors to seek the hand in matrimony of its female wards, Dissenting ministers from attempting to occupy the pulpits from which their congregations had by vote ejected them, and so on through almost all the business of this mortal life. It was more ready to forbid than to command; but it would do either if justice required it. And if you persisted in doing what the Court of Chancery told you not to do, you were committed; whilst if you refused to do what it had ordered you to do, you were attached; and the difference between committal and attachment need not concern the lay mind.

To pursue the subject further would be to plunge into the morasses of the law where there is no footing for the plain man; but just a word or two may be added on the subject of punishment for contempt. In old days persons who were guilty of contempt in facie curiae had their right hands cut off, and Mr. Oswald prints as an appendix to his book certain clauses of an Act of Parliament of Henry VIII. which provide for the execution of this barbarous sentence, and also (it must be admitted) for the kindly after-treatment of the victim, who was to have a surgeon at hand to sear the stump, a sergeant of the poultry with a cock ready for the surgeon to wrap about the stump, a sergeant of the pantry with bread to eat, and a sergeant of the cellar with a pot of red wine to drink.

Nowadays the penalty for most contempts is costs. The guilty party in order to purge his contempt has to pay all the costs of a motion to commit and attach. The amount is not always inconsiderable, and when it is paid it would be idle to apply to the other side for a pot of red wine. They would only laugh at you. Our ancestors had a way of mitigating their atrocities which robs the latter of more than half their barbarity. Costs are an unmitigable atrocity.



5 EDWARD VII., CHAPTER 12

The appearance of this undebated Act of Parliament in the attenuated volume of the Statutes of 1905 almost forces upon sensitive minds an unwelcome inquiry as to what is the attitude proper to be assumed by an emancipated but trained intelligence towards a decision of the House of Lords, sitting judicially as the highest (because the last) Court of Appeal.

So far as the parties to the litigation are concerned, the decision, if of a final character, puts an end to the lis. Litigation must, so at least it has always been assumed, end somewhere, and in these realms it ends with the House of Lords. Higher you cannot go, however litigiously minded.

In the vast majority of appeal cases a final appeal not only ends the lis, but determines once for all the rights of the parties to the subject-matter. The successful litigant leaves the House of Lords quieted in his possession or restored to what he now knows to be his own, conscious of a victory, final and complete; whilst the unsuccessful litigant goes away exceeding sorrowful, knowing that his only possible revenge is to file his petition in bankruptcy.

This, however, is not always so.

In August, 1904, the House of Lords decided in a properly constituted lis that a particular ecclesiastical body in Scotland, somewhat reduced in numbers, but existent and militant, was entitled to certain property held in trust for the use and behoof of the Free Church of Scotland. There is no other way of holding property than by a legal title. Sometimes that title has been created by an Act of Parliament, and sometimes it is a title recognised by the general laws and customs of the realm, but a legal title it has got to be. Titles are never matters of rhetoric, nor are they jure divino, or conferred in answer to prayer; they are strictly legal matters, and it is the very particular business of courts of law, when properly invoked, to recognise and enforce them.

In the case I have in mind there were two claimants to the subject-matter—the Free Church and the United Free Church—and the House of Lords, after a great argle-bargle, decided that the property in question belonged to the Free Church.

Thereupon the expected happened. A hubbub arose in Scotland and elsewhere, and in consequence of the hubbub an Act of Parliament has somewhat coyly made its appearance in the Statute Book (5 Edward VII., chapter 12) appointing and authorizing Commissioners to take away from the successful litigant a certain portion of the property just declared to be his, and to give it to the unsuccessful litigant.

The reasons alleged for taking away by statute from the Free Church some of the property that belongs to it are that the Free Church is not big enough to administer satisfactorily all the property it possesses; and that the State may reasonably refuse to allow a religious body to have more property than it can in the opinion of State-appointed Commissioners usefully employ in the propagation of its religion. Let the reasons be well noted. They have made their appearance before in history. These were the reasons alleged by Henry VIII. for the suppression of the smaller monasteries. The State, having made up its mind to take away from the Free Church so much of its property as the Commissioners may think it cannot usefully administer, then proceeds, by this undebated Act of Parliament, to give the overplus to the unsuccessful litigant, the United Free Church. Why to them? It will never do to answer this question by saying because it is always desirable to return lost property to its true owner, since so to reply would be to give the lie direct to a decision of the Final Court of Appeal on a question of property.

In the eye—I must not write the blind eye—of the law, this parliamentary gift to the United Free Church is not a giving back but an original free gift from the State by way of endowment to a particular denomination of Presbyterian dissenters. In theory the State could have done what it liked with so much of the property of the Free Church as that body is not big enough to spend upon itself. It might, for example, have divided it between Presbyterians generally, or it might have left it to the Free Church to say who was to be the disponee of its property.

As a matter of hard fact, the State had no choice in the matter. It could not select, or let the Free Church select, the object of its bounty. The public sense (a vague term) demanded that the United Free Church should not be required to abide by the decision of the House of Lords, but should have given to it whatever property could, under any decent pretext of public policy and by Act of Parliament, be taken away from the Free Church. If the pretext of the inability of the Free Church to administer its own estate had not been forthcoming, some other pretext must and would have been discovered.

Having regard, then, to 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, how ought one to feel towards the decision of the House of Lords in the Scottish Churches case? In public life you can usually huddle up anything, if only all parties, for reasons, however diverse, of their own, are agreed upon what is to be done. Like many another Act of Parliament, 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, was bought with a sum of money. Nobody, not even Lord Robertson, really wanted to debate or discuss it, least of all to discover the philosophy of it. But in an essay you can huddle up nothing. At all hazards, you must go on. This is why so many essayists have been burnt alive.

First.—Was the decision wrong? 'Yes' or 'No.' If it was right—

Second.—Was the law, in pursuance of which the decision was given, so manifestly unjust as to demand, not the alteration of the law for the future, but the passage through Parliament, ex post facto, of an Act to prevent the decision from taking effect between the parties according to its tenour?

Third.—Supposing the decision to be right, and the law it expounded just and reasonable in general, was there anything in the peculiar circumstances of the successful litigant, and in the sources from which a considerable portion of the property was derived, to justify Parliamentary interference and the provisions of 5 Edward VII., chapter 12?

Number Three, being the easiest way out of the difficulty, has been adopted. The decision remains untouched, the law it expounds remains unaltered—nothing has gone, except the order of the Final Court giving effect to the untouched decision and to the unaltered law. That has been tampered with for the reasons suggested in Number Three.

John Locke was fond of referring questions to something he called 'the bulk of mankind'—an undefinable, undignified, unsalaried body, of small account at the beginning of controversies, but all-powerful at their close.

My own belief is that eventually 'the bulk of mankind' will say bluntly that the House of Lords went wrong in these cases, and that the Act of Parliament was hastily patched up to avert wrong, and to do substantial justice between the parties.

If asked, What can 'the bulk of mankind' know about law? I reply, with great cheerfulness, 'Very little indeed.' But suppose that the application of law to a particular lis requires precise and full knowledge of all that happened during an ecclesiastical contest, and, in addition, demands a grasp of the philosophy of religion, and the ascertainment of true views as to the innate authority of a church and the development of doctrine, would there be anything very surprising if half a dozen eminent authorities in our Courts of Law and Equity were to go wrong?

Between a frank admission of an incomplete consideration of a complicated and badly presented case and such blunt ex post facto legislation as 5 Edward VII., chapter 12, I should have preferred the former. The Act is what would once have been called a dangerous precedent. To-day precedents, good or bad, are not much considered. If we want to do a thing, we do it, precedent or no precedent. So far we have done so very little that the question has hardly arisen. If our Legislature ever reassumes activity under new conditions, and in obedience to new impulses, it may be discovered whether bad precedents are dangerous or not.

THE END