CARVEN FROM THE
LAUREL TREE
THEODORE MAYNARD
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
CARVEN FROM THE LAUREL
TREE
NEW YORK AGENTS
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 3<)TII STREET
CARVEN FROM
THE LAUREL TREE
ESSAYS
BY THEODORE MAYNARD
OXFORD
B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET
MDCCCXVIII
Other Books by the same author
LAUGHS AND WHIFTS OF SONG
DRUMS OF DEFEAT AND OTHER
POEMS
FOLLY AND OTHER POEMS
PR
To
CECIL CHESTERTON
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE MYSTICAL NOTE IN POETRY ... ... ... i
MYSTICISM AND THE OXFORD POETRY BOOK ... 13
THE HUMOUR OF THE SAINTS 19
SANCTITY AND THE SANITARY INSPECTOR ... ... 25
ON DRINKING SONGS ... ... ... ... 29
THE ART OF ALICE MEYNELL ... ... ... 37
THE DRAMA OF THE DRAMATISTS ... ... 45
THE REVIVAL OF ENGLISH POETRY ... ... 51
POETS' PROSE 59
THE GUILD IDEA 65
' ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE ' ... ... ... 85
THIS GREEN PLOT SHALL BE OUR STAGE 97
A SECRET ENGLANP , ... ... 103
These essays have been published in the following papers, to
the editors of which 1 tender my thanks for their courteous per-
mission in allowing them to be reprinted : The New Witness,
To-Day, The Poetry Review, The Catholic World, and America.
The essay entitled ' The Revival of Poetry ' was written ori-
ginally as two articles, the first appearing, under its present title,
simultaneously in the Poetry Review and America, the second in
the Magnificat as ' The Heaven of the Poets.'
I must also thank Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr.
G. K. Chesterton, Mrs. Meynell and Mr. Ralph Hodgson for their
courtesy, Mrs. Joseph Plunkett for a poem of Joseph Plunkett,
Mr. Sturge Moore for allowing me to quote from ' Michael Field,'
Messrs. Sidgwick and Jackson and the poet's executor for two
passages from Rupert Brooke, and Mr. Meynell for his generosity
in the matter of Francis Thompson.
THE MYSTICAL NOTE IN
POETRY
IT is now a fashion with those well-fed, woolly,
slightly artistic people, who twenty years or so
ago, paraded their temperament and intensity, to pride
themselves upon being mystics. Any Americanised
Oriental who likes to advertise, any spiritualist or
theosophist who takes the trouble to set up shop, is
reasonably certain to have a considerable clientele,
who seek to escape from a gross world through
they care not what wild avenues'. But beyond these
rather vulgar folk there are quite a number of nice
poetic souls, stirred vaguely but powerfully, who
seek a literary solace in the dreamy loveliness of the
school of W. B. Yeats, 'IE.,' and their kind, or
if they are ordered in mind in a more or less philo-
sophical form of symbolism, which they admiringly,
but incorrectly, describe as ' mysticism.' Their
springs are unquestionably stirred, though they wot
not of the angel.
O sweet everlasting voices, be still ;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander, obeying your will,
Flame under flame, till Time be no more ;
2 Carven from the Laurel Tree
Have you not found that our hearts are old,
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?
O sweet everlasting- voices, be still.
R. L. Nettleship, a lucid spokesman for the more
philosophically-minded, gives this definition of the
subject in his ' Remains ' : ' The true mysticism is
the belief that everything, in being what it is, is
symbolic of something more.' Now that is a very
good description of decent symbolism, but it has
nothing to do with mysticism proper. For while
symbolism is of the utmost value as an expression
of mysticism, it is only the expression of the thing,
not the thing itself. That is an experience remain-
ing inviolably secret and personal. To the soul
having the lonely consciousness of God.
Nee lingua valet dicere,
Nee littera exprimere :
Expertus potest credere
Quid sit Jesum diligere.
Francis Thompson, writing in his ' Ode to the
Setting Sun,'
Even so, O cross ! thine is the victory :
Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields ;
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee,
Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields !
is speaking the language of the heart (or mysticism)
in words which might have been uttered by St. John
of the Cross, where the other modern poet (whose
The Mystical Note in Poetry 3
name I have unhappily forgotten*) expresses only
the language of the eyes or symbolism :
I see His blood upon the rose,
And in the stars the glory of His eyes ;
His body gleams amid eternal snows ;
His tears fall from the skies.
I see His face in every flower ;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but His voice ; and carven by His power
Rocks are His written words.
All pathways by His feet are worn ;
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea ;
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn ;
His cross is every tree.
Fine though that is, the poet has not won to the
secret place which the mystic knows, where God,
without form of words or speech, declares all Truth.
What, then, is true mysticism? That is perhaps
the most difficult of all questions to answer, and if,
in my attempt, I write with a Catholic bias, I do so
not in a spirit of propaganda, but simply because it
is the only way by which I know how to approach
the subject.
Although the saints and mystics are the last fine
flowers which blossom upon the Living Vine, and
are the especial glory of the Catholic Church which
has produced them, there never has been any formal
* T read this poem in a review of a book published six years
ago, and while remembering the verses forgot the name of the
poet, which meant nothing to me at the time. I have discovered,
since writing this essay, that the forgotten name is that of Joseph
Plunkett, who was executed in the Dublin Rebellion of 1916.
4 Carven from the Laurel Tree
and official definition of either sanctity or mysticism.
Yet, since the Church has crowned certain of her
children for the virtue and the charity which they so
splendidly achieved, such as have been distinctly ap-
proved by her may be accepted as showing to the
world, by their lives, what it is that the Church un-
derstands by sanctity and mysticism. Concerning
these there is nothing which can properly be called
a history their biographies and aureoles are all that
have been left us. Each mystic is a separate star,
although the sun around which they revolve is the
same. No class in society has been quite without
them. Popes, kings, queens and cardinals ride in
that brave company, with merchants, soldiers, pea-
sants, cooks, fishermen and labourers! Nor must
we forget one public headsman, or
St. Zita, the good kitchen maid,
She prayed and she prayed and she prayed and
she prayed.
Each one of these souls, differing from the rest in
station, culture, temperament and experience, has
its own secret canticle to sing. No cast-iron defini-
tion can include them all, but one may say that
mysticism, as practised in common by the Blessed,
was their experimental knowledge of God gained
through love of Him.
We are fortunate in having two supreme descrip-
tive mystical poems in our language Thompson's
' Hound of Heaven ' and Crashaw's ' Hymn to St.
Teresa.' The modern poet tells with true mystical
particularity of the remorseless wooing by God of
The Mystical Note in Poetry 5
the human soul, where Crashaw is concerned rather
to sing of that extraordinary woman who reached
such mystical heights as turn even the onlooker
dizzy :
O thou undaunted daughter of desires !
By all thy dower of lights and fires ;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove ;
By all thy lives and deaths of love ;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire ;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire ;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His j
By all the heavens thou hast in Him
(Fair sister of the seraphim !)
By all of Him we have in thee ;
Leave nothing of myself in me,
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may die.
There are opponents of mysticism, men who, in
spite of their sympathy with so much of the sweet
graciousness of the saints, are yet prevented by a
too pedantic love of philosophical definition from a
proper appreciation of the Christian mystics. Some
of them, indeed, would go so far as to deny alto-
gether the existence of mysticism in the Church, be-
cause, for them, the thing begins and ends with
Plotinus and the Alexandrian gnostics, and, accord-
ingly, means the repudiation of humanity and nature
and the atrophy of mind and will. It is the mys-
ticism of Emerson's 'Brahma.'
6 Carven from the Laurel Tree
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same ;
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.
\
They reckon ill who leave me out,
When me they fly, I am the wings,
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the Sacred Seven ;
But thou meek lover of the good
Find me and turn thy back on Heaven.
It must be conceded, and conceded joyfully, that
these anti-mystics are right enough in their dislikes
for the type of mysticism which they condemn has
been condemned repeatedly by the Church. Their
overwhelming wrongness is their failure to recog-
nise the existence of mysticism of another and a
healthier school.
Now the normality of sanctity is a thing especially
insisted on by the Church; that there is no man in
the world who cannot become a saint if he but will,
since the saint is not unique in kind (as a great
musician, for instance, is unique), but only in degree.
He is merely one who, exercising ordinary faculties
and practising the virtues within the reach of any
man, has succeeded to the point of heroism. He
The Mystical Note in Poetry 7
treads the path of simple and humble duties; and
though his soul may be snatched up to the seventh
heaven and the vision of things unlawful for man to
utter, his feet are firmly rooted in quiet soil.
Hence the saints' exquisite poise. They are not
less human for having plumbed the deep sea of God,
but have gained thereby a certainty and lightness of
touch. St. Francis becomes the troubadour of the
Queen of Heaven; St. Bernard, for all his sternness,
is so pitiful for animals that no small bird flying from
a hawk lacked a sign of the Cross from him to aid
its escape; St. Catharine of Siena, mortified to ex-
tremity, smiles out of her pain as the lover of
flowers and the fondler of little children; St. Teresa,
though keeping her stateliness and fine manners to
the end, plays her little flute and tambourine on
feast days in her convent, where they may still be
seen. Laughter is ever on their lips and fun in their
hearts even when it is not expressed in so racy and
whimsical a fashion as it was by St. Philip Neri.
Far from the mystics wasting themselves in idle
and vague dreams, they surely were among the
most painfully lucid of mortals! Although St.
John of the Cross sets out to write on perhaps the
most abstruse and specialistic subject in the world,
he succeeds in being more clear and scientific upon
it than most philosophers could be upon sausages
did philosophers ever deal with so noble a theme t
St. Teresa, for all her
Little eagles and young- loves, whose high
Flights scorn the lazy dust and things that die,
8 Carven from the Laurel Tree
was perhaps the most successful business woman of
her day. More amazing still, St. Catharine was,
even during her ecstasies, an exact and untiring
worker, and while in the mystic state actually dic-
tated letters, often of the highest political impor-
tance! As her secretaries have thoughtfully in-
dicated those written in rapture, we are able to re-
mark the saint's force and good sense while in the
mystic state. Neither her heart nor her head nor
her nerves were the worse for the love of God.
One of the most hopeful signs of our day is a very
real modern revival of interest in mysticism. When
this appears in verse as it does in the work of so
many contemporary poets it is always the earnest
of a renewed literary vigour and originality. Dis-
counting all the crude and vulgar manifestations of
it in the numerous pseudo-Oriental cults, the fact re-
mains that men and women are turning back to
long-forgotten fountains to draw of the sweet and
bitter waters of the old Catholic writers. Even out-
side the Church is the impulse felt, and the studies
of Miss Evelyn Underhill and Dean Inge partial
though they are in the one case, and with a tinge of
unpleasantness in the other have done much to
stimulate a more general interest in the things of
the soul. Even if the waters generally trickle thinly,
they are constant. Ralph Hodgson's lyric, 'The
Mystery,' exquisitely illustrates the new spirit in our
poets.
He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
The Mystical Note in Poetry 9
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me,
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell
And His own face to see.
The mystical note is to be found in such dissimi-
lar writings as those of Mr. Masefield and of Mrs.
Meynell; and the divine theme is in their music,
though thumped by the one on a Salvation Army
tambourine, and given life by the other on the most
delicate of violins, where love and science are as
happily mated as in the Adoro Te of St. Thomas
Aquinas.
'You never attained to Him.' 'If to attain
Be to abide, then that may be.'
' Endless the way, followed with how much pain ! '
' The way was He. '
The potent and purifying influence of Blake, he
who, as a child, saw God looking in through the
window antl never in manhood forgot the sight,
hardly makes for mysticism according to our defini-
tion broad as it is. The man was rather a prophet
or visionary than a mystic proper, and with him may
be grouped Browning, sometimes, and G. K. Ches-
terton, almost always :
The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold ;
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.
10
Her little ones ran on the fields,
The Lamb of God among- them seen ;
And fair Jerusalem, His Bride,
Among- the little meadows green.
Pancras and Kentish Town repose
Among- her golden pillars hig-h,
Among- her g-olden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
The Jew's Harp House and the Green Man,
The ponds where boys to bathe delig-ht,
The fields of cows by Welling-'s Farm
Shine in Jerusalem's pleasant sight.
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side,
And every English child is seen
Children of Jesus and His Bride.
It is Jacob rather than David whose voice is heard
there the first Isaiah, to be higher-critical for a
moment, rather than the second; and though Fran-
cis Thompson had far more of David in him than
had Blake (by the way, one can imagine Blake
dauntlessly wrestling with God until dawn and the
withering of his thigh), yet in his ' In No Strange
Land ' the seer is heard above the saint.
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars !
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places ;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing !
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
The Mystical Note in Poetry n
But (when so sad them canst not sadder)
Cry ; and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched between Heaven and Charing- Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, clinging- Heaven by the hems ;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Genesareth, but Thames !
The sense of divine domesticity has come back to
us, and the text is always ' It is not too hard for
thee, neither is it far off ' ; for in the words Mr.
Chesterton puts into the mouth of our Lady in his
''Ballad of the White Horse':
' The gates of Heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.
' And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the three kings
And see the dear and dreadful things
I hid within my heart.'
When ' Heaven becomes a homely town,' the dul-
lest suburb will take on a bright significance : and
though some people will probably be shocked (for
mystics commonly do seem blasphemous to the ir-
religious) the saints would have seen nothing dread-
ful in the thought of such a familiarity with God as
12 Carven from the Laurel Tree
could prompt the Rev. R. L. Gales to conclude a
baby's grace with
Praise for tea and buttered toast
Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
The thought of this kind closeness of our God is
at the centre of all mystical contemplation ; for mys-
tery is the exact opposite of mystification.
MYSTICISM AND THE OXFORD
POETRY BOOK
THERE has always been an intimate connection
between mysticism and poetry. Just as the
human lover chooses the most beautiful and perfect
words to give fitting praise to his lady, so the saint
finds that song is the natural language for telling
forth the love of God. The Bridegroom demands
music as well as the bride, and the saint's ardour
and tenderness kindle to a passionate flame. It is
remarkable how many of the mystics have become
poets. St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. John of the
Cross, Blessed Henry Suso, and Richard Rolle of
Hampole each
Teach how the crucifix may be
Carven from the laurel tree;
and St. Thomas Aquinas turns from the Summa,
which only make him the doctor of the Church, to
write his matchless hymns which prove him the
lover of Christ.
Even when the mystics are not poets by achieve-
ment themselves, they are themes for poets.
Romance seems to transfigure their sackcloth. One
only has to remember St. Elizabeth of Hungary,
14 Carven from the Laurel Tree
St. Brendan, St. Rose of Lima whose very name
rings like a lyric St. Peter Celestine (the Hermit-
Pope whom Dante, because of his burning honour
for the Papacy, consigned to hell). Blessed Joan of
Arc, and many more, to feel that these lived poetry
even when they did not make it. The roses of
legend cluster round their heads as the daisies grew
at their feet.
But in our day, when mysticism is so fashionable
and unfortunately means so many things, it is of
the utmost importance, if we wish to preserve its
significance and value, to detect the imitations,
those moods of vague wistfulness or enchantment,
which constantly claim its name. Hence a mere
emotional exaltation before the outspread loveliness
of the world, or an intellectual idealisation of beauty,
do not in any sense constitute mysticism, although
they are often thought so to do. ' The Heavens de-
clare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth
His handiwork ' but ' there is no speech nor lan-
guage; their voice cannot be heard.' To the mystic,
to him who has torn aside the veil and heard the
voice of God in his soul, the whole earth is full of
His bright and jewelled beauty, and the mountains
and the hills break forth into singing. Such a
vision is delicately etched by Father Tabb in ' Christ
and the Pagan ' :
I had no God but these,
The sacerdotal Trees,
And they uplifted me.
' I hung upon a Tree.'
Mysticism and the Oxford Poetry Book 15
The sun and moon I saw,
And reverential awe
Subdued me day and night.
' I am the perfect Light.'
But this penetrating insight is not mysticism itself,
but only one of the results of mysticism. Even
when Crashaw exclaimed :
Love, thou art absolute sole Lord
Of Life and Death !
he was only recording another, though a deeper,
effect of the personal and experimental knowledge
of God which is the heart of mysticism. But be-
cause I may be accused of being too ecclesiastical
and specialistic in my treatment of this subject, I am
willing, since God is the sustaining reality of the
universe, to broaden my definition by saying that
mysticism begins with the fierce, unconquerable pas-
sion of the soul to pierce to Reality and is consum-
mated in the union of the soul with Reality. " Too
late have I known Thee, O ancient Truth ! ' prays
St. Augustine. ' Too late have I loved Thee, O
Beauty ever ancient and ever new! And behold
Thou wast within, and I was abroad, and there I
sought Thee, and. deformed as I was, ran after
those beauties which Thou hast made.' Like him
all the mystics lay aside the accidents of the thing
in order to find its essential substance. For them
roses fade and wither until they have found the
Mystic Rose. They ponder over secrets. They
pluck the ' Flower in the crannied wall ' and cry :
Little flower but if I could understand
1 6 Carven from the Laurel Tree
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is !
Like Browning (greater as a mystic than Blake,
even as he was greater as a poet), they know that
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness.
This hunger for Reality is the final test of genuine
mysticism. It seeks to break the ' barrier to eter-
nity/ to ravish the unseen, to make its perilous es-
calade to God. Mrs. Meynell, writing ' To a
Daisy ' :
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee?
speaks for all the true mystics. These do not seek
to weave a cloud of golden glamour round the soul,
but to burst through the cloud to the Reality be-
yond.
Now in Christian mysticism the Ineffable des-
cends to us and lays Itself within our hands. The
Immortal puts on mortality, that the mortal may be
clothed upon with immortality. God is born as a
child. The sacraments make us all partakers of the
divine nature. There is here no place for an eso-
teric doctrine, but man is given the strange road of
humility.
By each new obeisance in spirit I climb to His feet.
When, therefore, we come upon ' The Oxford
Book of English Mystical Verse/* and find that its
* The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse; chosen by D. H.
S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee. The Clarendon Press.'
Mysticism and the Oxford Poetry Book 17
editors can discover nothing better to say of mys-
ticism than that it is ' intin&tions of a consciousness
wider and deeper than the normal,' we know that
they have not the root of the matter. That is not
the language of the mystic, but the jargon of the
practical politician ! The mystic when he speaks at
all of his experience aims at an absolute lucidity.
He may stammer through the burden of overwhelm-
ing glory, his speech may fail him and snap like
glass. But going through such a book one feels
that, however great its fascination may be (and the
fascination in this case is very great indeed), a fun-
damental failure to distinguish between symbolism,
metaphysics and mysticism steals away half the
value it might have possessed. A task of absorbing
interest to me would be to analyse a number of the
poems in turn and to assign them to their proper
categories, but, fortunately for my readers, space
prohibits such gigantic toils. Merely as an illustra-
tion, however, I take Shelley's 'Adonais.' Ignor-
ing the personal facts about Shelley, and the incon-
gruity of claiming as a mystic one who used osten-
tatiously to inscribe himself an atheist, I choose
one stanza for a simple textual dissection. Reading
The One remains, the many change and pass ;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments,
we feel that here are lines that might have been
written by St. Teresa. The next line might have
1 8 Carven from the Laurel Tree
some mystical point if uttered by St. John of the
Cross : *
Die
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek !
We remember, however, that not ' death to the
world ' is sung here, as in the poems of the great
Carmelite, but a pagan pyre, and pass on :
Follow where all is fled ! Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to
speak.
. . . Then the mystic closes the book in chill dis-
appointment. But if, being also a poet, he should
persevere to the end he will wonder why that
egoistic sceptic, Lascelles Abercrombie, is allowed
to be so priggish in its pages, or why an originality-
monger may rehash ' Abt Vogler,' with
Nothing is lost : all that is dreamed or done
Passes unaltered the eternal way,
when Lionel Johnson and R. L. Gales are excluded
from this singing cloister. There are many other
causes for wonder in this Oxford Book, but those I
have pointed out will be sufficient, I imagine, to
stun most people.
THE HUMOUR OF THE SAINTS
TO speak of the Saints as possessing humour will
seem to many people a forced piece of special
pleading. Burglars may be, in their leisure, admir-
able husbands; and professional politicians, good
fellows, but their calling usually precludes them
from honesty or a pedantic regard for veracity. In
much the same way, while the Saints are easily ima-
gined as humble, or ardent, or mortified, or com-
passionate, they are not readily credited with gaiety.
Sounding brass they may sometimes be, but rarely
tinkling cymbals; holy but not hilarious. Anything
else but that. Granted
The courtesy of saints
Their gentleness and scorn,
steadfastness, charity and a burning courage; yet
laughter and sanctity do not easily mix. This idea
springs from a profound misunderstanding of the
nature of holiness of heart, from a feeling that
saints are divorced from humanity and carry their
lives along alien ways. Their wan, unearthly
beauty glows only upon a cathedral window and is
lost if brought out into the daylight and the loud
streets of the world. Kipling put it forcibly when
he boasted that single men in barracks are rarely
2O Carven from the Laurel Tree
plaster saints. The saints who grew before the
Lord inside or outside barracks were made of any-
thing but plaster.
Their infinite variety is astounding; kings and
popes appearing at one end of the scale and arti-
sans and servant girls at the other; St. Benedict
Labre, who cultivated dirt, standing against St.
Theresa, who changed her linen twice a day. But
of all it may be said that gaiety was their staff.
They went laughing to heaven, for, even more than
courage, cheerfulness is the abiding mark of the
cloistered soul.
In some cases, of which St. Aloysius is a type,
we see only dark eyes alive with mystery. But
though we do not catch the personal humour of
such across the centuries, we may imagine that they
were the cause of harmless merriment in others.
The elaborate chilblain plaster of the Jesuit cadet
surely was a well of mirth to his companions. And
if the nurse of the precocious saint, whose name
escapes me, was edified by his refusal to take mam-
mary nourishment on Fridays, we may guess that
she, or at least the child's father, was vastly
amused. The monumental incompetence, however,
of St. Joseph of Cupertino must have been enjoyed
by the saint himself, or why did he name himself
' Brother Ass ' ? And Brother Juniper saw the
point of his fantastic and engaging awkwardness.
He it was who roared loudest over the affair of the
pig's trotters.
Beyond the happy innocence which is the secret
The Humour of the Saints 21
of the child, there is the irony which is the secret
of the universe, and to both of these every saint
comes at last. St. Theresa was a conscious wit,
sprinkling her letters and her conversation with
pungent mots. During the intervals of administer-
ing impartial justice, writing the Utopia, confuting
Tyndall, saying his prayers and being beheaded,
Blessed Thomas More conducted a jocular corres-
pondence with Erasmus and composed Latin epi-
grams. Here is a translation of one made by
Thomas Pike and published in 1569:
None could persuade him Radishes to eat,
Vertue abhors such kinde of luscious Meat.
Casting about his dull unpleasant eye,
He chanc'd fine tender Onions to espie :
He snaps up those. Though Radishes a'nt good,
It seems that Onions are a vertuous food.
St. Thomas Aquinas, when he wasn't writing his
'Summa,' made excellent limericks and even St.
Bernard, that great enigma, a man so rapt in con-
templation that at the end of his novitiate he was
unable to say whether his dormitory ceiling was flat
or arched; who in so many fields was the first man
of his age, as scholar, preacher, poet and man of
affairs; of whom Ernest Hello has aptly said that
' it is impossible to write the history of his life with-
out writing that of the whole world during his life-
time ' even that prince of monks and of saints
loved his little joke. 'Ah, Father Abbot,' said his
muleteer by the lakes of Switzerland, ' why do you
not admire the scenery ? ' ' My son, I was saying-
22 Carven from the Laurel Tree
my prayers.' ' But I can admire the lakes and the
hills and say my prayers too.' 'Come,' was the re-
sponse, ' I will make you an offer. If you can say
one Pater Noster without distraction you shall have
my mule.' Down went the man upon his knees:
'Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur and the
saddle, too, Father Abbot ? ' ' No, my son, no-
thing! '
It is easy to hear the ringing laugh of St. Francis,
for in every company he was the merriest man pre-
sent. There was perhaps something more than
good poetry in his personifications of ' Brother
Sun ' and ' Sister Moon ' ; and he may have been
as glad in his discovery as was a modern friar I
knew, who shook with joy at his jest in speaking of
' Brother Bacon ' and ' Sister Sausage.' The early
Franciscans were constantly doing and saying un-
accountable things, but when St. Anthony preached
to the fishes and Blessed Giles dispelled an unbe-
liever's doubts on the doctrine of free will, by play-
ing a fiddle and dancing round the room, the whole
cosmos stood still to watch the comedy-
In different vein was the advice of St. Louis to
De Joinville, but very good advice nevertheless.
' No man except he be a very learned clerk should
dispute with a Jew or a heretic; but let him smite
with his sword and pierce to the midriff as far as
the blade will enter.'
One of the richest of the saints in the matter of
humour was St. Philip Neri. He who could never
finish the words : Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo
The Humour of the Saints 23
without being snatched away into rapture; he who
towards the end of his life said Mass in private so
that he might dismiss his server for a couple of
hours after the Agnus Dei while he made his Com-
munion, was racy and whimsical to a degree. Did
one of the Fathers of the Oratory appear to be in
danger of groVing puffed up by his eloquence?
Then let him walk round the refectory bearing a
monkey with a little gun upon his shoulder! Or
he must carry Philip's favourite cat on a cushion
behind its master through the streets of Rome!
Lest anyone should think the fun of the best-
beloved saint that ever lived was always at the ex-
pense of other people, we should remember his pic-
nics for the Dominican novices when he urged the
young friars to ' eat and grow fat.'
An almost roguish humour was the natural breath
of the Middle Ages and of their saints. It peeped
out from the carving of a choir-stall or a capital,
from an illuminated letter or a tail piece in a Missal.
The spirit that inspired the lovely Cornish carol
When on the Cross hanged was I,
When a spear to my heart did gflance,
There issued forth both water and blood
To call my true love to the dance
was also in the ' Mirror for Monks ' where Blosius
wrote ' Jesus makes a pleasant sauce for a poor and
unsavoury dish.' It shone in the jewelled gaiety of
Fra Angelico's ' Dance of the Angels ' ; it lives and
moves still where the boys dance at Corpus Christi
before the hi eh altar in Seville.
24 Carven from the Laurel Tree
Nor is this remarkable when we apprehend the
abysmal depths of laughter in the Faith. The
thought of the weak things of the earth confound-
ing the mighty is as fundamentally comic, and comic
for the same reason, as the sight of a bishop slip-
ping on a piece of orange peel. And the strange
humility of our religion receives its fulfilment m
the Incarnation. For in the words of Mr. Chester-
ton's Christmas poem,:
Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes
For God himself is born again
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.
What saint would not be merry in a world which
God created out of nothing and where He founded
His Church with a pun?
SANCTITY AND THE SANI-
TARY INSPECTOR
IN the ages of Faith the average man, though
probably he was not then unabliitioned to any
greater degree than he is to-day, felt in some dim
fashion that a carelessness with regard to personal
cleanliness did in certain instances constitute a
prima facie case for sanctity. Like bodily asceti-
cism, it did not by itself alone offer an absolute
proof of holiness of heart, but it was popularly
taken as presumptive evidence. To-day, neither
fasting nor filth has the smallest honour paid to it.
But the mediaeval man had a different standard of
values. When St. Thomas of Canterbury was mur-
dered and the monks found that beneath his costly
robe his hair shirt was full of lice, a great cry rang
through the Cathedral, ' A saint ! A saint ! ' To
this day at least one saint has a lesson in the Bre-
viary which solemnly recounts among his other
virtues the fact that for a period of some years he
took no bath. Against this, one must admit, may
be set St. Bernard's dictum, ' Poverty I love, but
not dirt.' But it must be remembered, firstly, that
St. Bernard was an aristocrat with an aristocrat's
prejudices, and. secondly, that as an abbot he knew
that the cloister must be maintained in strict order
and decorum to exist at all. The idea must have
26 Carven from the Laurel Tree
been prevalent in his age for him to have attacked
it.
The current opinion, however, is summed up in
the detestable proverb ' Cleanliness is next to God-
liness.' Its advocates wear the white shirt-front of
a blameless life. They will show you their faith by
their works; and their chief sometimes their only
work is washing well behind the ears !
It may be true that the majority of the disrepu-
table people are not too clean; that the man who-
appears in the police court for larceny, or drunken-
ness, or wife-beating is generally unshaven and be-
grimed; but it is true that nearly all the essentially
wicked people in the world are immaculate in their
personal appearance, ' perfumed with myrrh, aloes
and cinnamon.' Those, on the other hand, who are
held up to us as exemplars by our religion child-
ren and the poor are almost universally dirty, and
their happy indifference to mere physical cleanliness
was the source of the admiration once given to a
saint such as Benedict Labre. Innocence went to
the making of mudpies. Charity was in the chapel
cleaner of ' My New Curate ' who saw no harm in
a ' little blessed dust ' upon the altar, and good
sense in the first old wife who held that every
human being must eat a peck of dirt before he
dies ! It may have been felt, too, that there was
here also something of the ascetic antagonism to
material comfort sucfi as prompts the dying Trap-
pist to breathe his last upon a cross of ashes. If
may be only a fanciful notion, but I think I can
Sanctity and the Sanitary Inspector 27
detect a satirical symbolism in the division of the
sheep from the goats sheep are much dirtier than
goats.
Cleanliness may be good as a social custom,
though the decay of Rome may be cited against the
habit of taking too many baths; but there is not
the slightest or most whimsical connection between
being clean of hands and clean of heart. There is
no reason, I grant, why these things should not
go together; only we know from experience that
they rarely do.
Moreover, this cult is quite modern, coming to
us by our contact with the heathen East. I have
heard it said that when it was first proposed to
build bathrooms at Oxford the authorities opposed
the suggestion on the ground that the terms only
lasted eight weeks !
Perhaps it ought to be explained that I take
baths, not indeed with superstition, but with reason-
able regularity. It is true that I shrink from the
icy water of winter ; but. well, not even my de-
pravity is heroic. While by instinct and upbring-
ing I am on the side of an almost fastidious cleanli-
ness, my reason and such remnants of humility as
are left me rise in violent protest against sanitation
gone insane. Our experts declare that it is un-
healthy for a mother to kiss her child on the lips,
and some Protestant bodies have begun to use in-
dividual Communion cups from which the wine sym-
bolising for them the blood of God may be drunk
without fear of a fellow Communicant's germs ! If
28 Carven from the Laurel Tree
this were all, however, we could afford to make
merry over such stupid solemnity; but a scientific
tyranny is stalking gigantic through the earth. The
sanitary inspectors are forcibly opening the win-
dows of the unhygenic poor, and middle-class busy-
bodies are bringing to them soap, and their soapy
pride and the vile cleanliness of eugenics. The Pro-
testant proverb has been elevated into a religion
with a set of new syllogistic dogmas. Cleanliness
is next to Godliness. Cleanliness is a sign of Godli-
ness. Cleanliness is Godliness. The social superiors
of the poor speak of them with a deadly sneer as
' the great unwashed ! '
I have called this religion new; but I am wrong
for it dates from the time of the Pharisees. They too
made clean the outside of the platter and left the in-
ward part full of extortion and wickedness: they
condemned the Disciples because they ate with un-
washen hands. Against them was the Divine anger
kindled and the awful 'woes!' hurled. They made
the point of the parable, where Dives sat in purple
and fine linen, while Lazarus lay at his gate filthy
and in sores. The Pharisees have come back to us
tithing mint and anise and cummin in their hygenic,
draught-proof synagogues, leaving undone the
weightier matters of the law, judgment and mercy
and faith. A protest must be made against their
smug science. Perhaps it will come, as such pro-
tests usually do, in the person of some fierce and
spotless St. Simon Stylites, raised high upon a pillar
of filth as a sign before the world.
ON DRINKING SONGS
Nunc est bibendum (Hor. Lib. I., Car. XXXVII.)
WITH the advent of the social reformer the very
word ' beer ' seems to have taken on a sinister
sound, and is as much tabooed in polite society as
the word ' trousers ' was once said to have been.
This harmless and refreshing drink has become
credited with the most devilish properties and char-
acteristics, so that when it has to be discussed (and
heaven only knows how much the thought of it dis-
turbs the minds of meddlesome philanthropists!) it
must be referred to under the alias of ' alcohol ' or
' the drinking habits of the lower classes.' Official-
dom has beer on the brain which is quite the wrong
place for beer to be.
There is little wonder, then, that conviviality is a
lost art, and that in consequence the making of
drinking songs has suffered a sad decline. ' Simon
the Cellarer,' it is true, may still be allowed even
among Nonconformists, but as it deals with ' Sack '
and ' Canary ' no real Puritan objection can be
raised. In fact, these somewhat heady liquors are
very probably considered to be teetotal drinks, like
Port. At any rate, there is a pleasant and redeem-
ing smack of archaism about their names. Beer,
30 Carven from the Laurel Tree
however, is quite another matter. One may only
sing of that in a music hall and not too often even
there.
Very delightful verses are still occasionally writ-
ten about drinking, but generally these efforts have
a purely literary inspiration and cannot be honoured
with the name of drinking songs. Thus Charles
Stuart Calverley wrote, somewhere about the ^middle
of last century, an elaborate treatise upon ' that
mild, luxurious and artful beverage, beer.' Yet in
spite of the ode's noble apostrophe
' Oh Beer ! Oh Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp,
Bass !
Names that should be on every infant's tongue !'
we feel that Calverly's main interest lies in his poem
rather than in his tankard. The elegant under-
graduate speaks rather than the toper.
And Mr. Housman, carolling
1 Malt does more than Milton can
To reconcile God's ways to man,'
seems to find more satisfaction in a happy allitera-
tion than in his ale. He may be writing about malt,
but the maltworm's note is absent.
More recently the mild Mr. Masefield has led his
swaggering pirates on the stage, decked with striped
jerseys and cutlasses and (that nothing be lacking
in their artistic get up) full of rum.
' Oh ! some are fond of fiddles and a song well
sung,
And some are all for music that you lilt upon the
tongue ;
On Drinking Songs 31
But mouths were made for tankards and for
sucking at the bung,
Says the old, bold mate of Henry Morgan. '
The unfortunate thing about this cheerful poem is
that pirates do not talk like this at least, none of
the pirates that I know do so.
Then Robert Louis Stevenson once created a
pirate, not so gory and blasphemous as those who
stalk about in Mr. Masefield's pages, but a very
nice pirate all the same. Still, I don't think that
' Fifteen men on the dead man's chest
Yo-ho ! ho ! and a bottle of rum '
was exactly the kind of observation that John Silver
and his companions would have been likely to make.
Songs of this type are all either offered with apo-
logetic humorousness or an equally apologetic brag-
gadocio. None of them comes within miles of
catching the simple seriousness of the genuine
boozer. With hardly an exception, modern drink-
ing songs appear to have been written either out of
pleasant affectation or in order to point a moral.
Beer was not made to be moralised about, but to be
drunk.
Those old drinking songs, in which the English
language is so happily rich, are in a different class.
Among all their countless numbers there is no trace
of such a thing as self-consciousness. They were
not written to prove that beer ought to be con-
sumed, but merely to celebrate the fact of its con-
sumption. Shamefacedness or defence are entirely
lacking in them. The only thing to be uttered is a
32 Carven from the Laurel Tree
paean of praise for a material blessing joyfully ac-
cepted.
' Back and side go bare, go bare !
Both foot and hand go cold !
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.'
So wrote Bishop Still in the sixteenth century. But
to-day we would draw long faces at such reprehen-
sible remarks and talk solemnly about less beer and
more boots which is about as sensible as demand-
ing less sun and more sandwiches! Perfect social
reform casteth out conviviality.
I wonder what our advocates of intemperate tee-
totalism would say to this rollicking chorus?
' I cannot go home, and I will not go home
It's long of the oyle of barley ;
I'll tarry all night for my delight,
And go home in the morning early.'
Such a note of vulgar human fellowship would be
certain to scorch Mr. Cadbury's ears, could they
but hear it. Indeed, I often wonder whether it is
not the fellowship that he objects to even more than
its companion drink. Did he but walk down Fleet
Street arm-in-arm with Mr. Gardiner and Dr.
Clifford bawling out
' Tea ! Tea ! Glorious Tea !'
at the top of his voice, what man is there would not
join in? Why cannot they sing
' Come, pass the ginger-pop around
And let us wet our noses ;
On Drinking Songs 33
It is the finest nectar found
Since Noah or since Moses
With my iddly-ow, ti-rumpity-dow,
Since Noah or since Moses !'
at a P.S.A., with Mr. Arthur Henderson booming
in with a stentorian bass and Mr. Philip Snowden
with a ringing tenor? On the day that they do. . .
ten million converts will flock to their cause.
But alas! the teetotallers have triumphed! If
they have not altogether succeeded in putting down
beer (in their sense of the term), they have at least
succeeded in throwing a blight over our songs. If
we have not become sober, we have become sad
and that is something! Mr. Chesterton has to ask
plaintively who will write us a drinking song, and,
upon getting no replies, has to set to work himself.
But though writing some glorious verses in his at-
tempt, he has, on the whole, failed through his in-
ability to forget the earnest face of the Puritan,
whose pale disgust is like a skeleton at his feast.
He, too. is the victim of his environment. How
can he sing the songs of Zion beside the waters of
Babylon? Beer, to him, has ceased to be merely
beer, but has become the touchstone of economics,
politics and philosophy, so that the whole of our
modern contempt for the poor can be set against the
drinking of one honest half-pint.
' I knew no harm of Buonaparte and plenty of the
Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchmen I did not much
desire ;
34 Carven from the Laurel Tree
But I did bash their baggonets because they came
arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English
drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-
mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of
Goodwin sands.'
Even here the facts of the French Revolution and
the tyranny of the countryside have to be dragged
in, and the whole history of England flung down as
a challenging gage.
One of the few genuine modern drinking songs
was made when Mr. Belloc wrote,
' If I should be what I never shall be,
The Master or the Squire ;
If you gave me the hundred from here to the sea,
Which is more than I desire
Then all my crops should be barley and hops,
And did my harvest fail
I would sell ever} 7 rood of my acres, I would,
For a bellyful of good ale.'
But even Mr. Belloc can rarely achieve anything so
single-minded as this. In an age of unbelief he has
to testify to eternal truth with a rousing bar-parlour
chorus, and lays his tankard about him as a
truncheon in defence of the Catholic Church
' So thank the Lord for the temporal sword,
And for howling heretics, too,
And for all the good things that our Christendom
brings
But especially barley brew ! '
On Drinking Songs 35
It is perfectly true that wine is intimately, although
obscurely, connected with the Faith, and Mr. Belloc
is quite right when he shouts out at the top of his
voice that barley brew is one of the good things
that we owe to Christendom; but this, though con-
soling to the soul and clarifying to the mind, cer-
tainly makes our drinking songs complicated. The
boozer's thoughts ought to be on his pot, not on
the Pope. What with having Catholicism bellowed
in at one ear and Puritanism snuffled in at the other,
the poor man in the pub must get sorely distracted
at times. Cannot he be left alone with his beer in
peace ?
THE ART OF ALICE MEYNELL
IT is a relief to turn aside from the loud jostling
streets of cities to a quiet meadow, gleaming
under the summer sun, where into the silence rises
the clear voice of one singing bird. There are also
such refreshing spaces in literature, where, after
empty debate and trafficking, the heart is consoled
with loveliness. The professional entertainer, the
vulgarian, the ' booster,' the record-seller, the man
or worse still the woman with a purpose fill the
market with their clamour; but the flowers are hid
in shy places, and are easily to be missed by the in-
attentive eye. From modern wastefulness we may
save a precious treasury of small books. They are
always few in number and unobtrusive. The lily
has neither need for gilding nor for blowing of her
own trumpet.
Alice Meynell has during the last year published
a pamphlet of verse and a small volume of essays.
In an age when every author is expected to publish;
at least one book in every twelve months, one writer
of unassailable distinction can only point to half a
dozen volumes after a long literary life. Some-
thing better than bulk and quantity is given us, to
those of us at least who weary of the pretentious
38 Carven from the Laurel Tree
and the trivial, to those who are content to wait
patiently for excellence.
In these pages brooded over and lived into, be-
fore written there is a delicate rhythm not to be
caught by other than a delicate ear. 'If life/ she
says, ' is not always poetical, it is at least metrical/
Mrs. Meynell is at her best and most characteristic
in her commentaries, slight essays on such subjects
as 'Rain/ 'The Colour of Life/ 'Composure/ and
' Solitude/ In these how keenly intuitive is her
power of observation, how sweet her detachment!
She has marked the exact note and modulation of the
thrush and its variation; the woodland blooms and
the shadows upon the grassy Downs are known and
known exactly. Nothing escapes her: even care-
lessness must be carefully guarded.
Other hands have often turned the exquisite into
the finicky, but in Mrs. Meynell austerity is wedded
to a great and gracious spirit, a spirit of humour
and of pathos and of laughter. Mysticism is here,
but a mysticism that is gay. To the poet may be
applied her own ' Wind of Clear Weather in Eng-
land ' :
How keen his choice, how swift his feet !
Narrow the way and hard to find !
This delicate stepper and discreet
Walked not like any worldly wind.
Most like a man in man's own day,
One of the few, a perfect one :
His open earth the single way ;
His narrow road the open sun.
The Art of Alice Meynell 39
One other ' delicate stepper and discreet ' has for
* narrow road, the open sun.' She is not finicky but
spacious. Read the first paragraph of ' The Hori-
zon ' :
4 To mount a hill is to lift with you something
higher and brighter than yourself or than any
meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise
the horizon ; you give a signal for the distance to
stand up. It is like the scene in the Vatican
when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands,
bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more
than bid them. He lifts them, he gathers them
up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both
arms ; he takes them to their feet with the com-
pulsion of his expressive force. Or it is as when
a conductor takes his players to successive heights
of music. You summon the sea, you bring the
mountains, the distances unfold unlocked for
wings and take an even flight. You are but a
man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but
as you climb the circle of the world goes up to
face you.'
In ' Hearts of Controversy ' as in the earlier book
lives the same finished art, but with the exception
of its last two short essays, ' Charmion ' and ' The
Century of Moderation,' its pieces are more con-
siderable in matter than her previous work. She
becomes very definitely a controversial critic. Be-
fore criticism was obiter dicta, casual, suggestive;
now vexed questions are asked and answered.
But many of the wisest and wittiest passages are
spoken in a stage ' aside . ' How much humorous good
sense is in her comment upon Matthew Arnold's
4O Carven from the Laurel Tree
classification of the French as the people of ' ideas '
and of the English as the people of ' practicality/
' Practicality,' she cries, ' ascribed to the nation that
has the fifty religions ! Ideas to the nation that has
the fifty sauces ! '
Again, speaking of Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Mey-
nell marvels at the way her freedom was gained
from the bonds of Gibbon-English. ' It is less won-
derful that she should have appeared out of such a
parsonage than that she should have arisen out of
such a language.'
What shrewdness is in this delightful antithesis :
' It is not to the wild light hearts of the seven-
teenth century that we must look for extreme con-
ceits and for extravagance, but to the later age,
to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with
their own propriety. There were straws, I con-
fess, in the hair of the older poets ; the eighteenth
century men stuck straws in the periwigs.'
In the four main essays in ' Hearts of Contro-
versy,' Alice Meynell sits as a judge upon, in turn,
Tennyson, Dickens, Swinburne, and the Brontes.
In each case she does indeed get to the heart of the
controversy. Discriminating between the loose ad-
miration Tennyson received during his life and the
looser reaction of neglect that has befallen him in
our day, she strikes a just balance. ' He. . . had
both a style and a manner : a masterly style, a
magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick;
a noble landscape and in it figures something ready-
made.' Again brushing aside all mean criticism of
The Art of Alice Meynell 41
Dickens' style and grammar, of his wild, and, to my
mind, divine power of caricature, she reaches to the
essential soul of the great Victorian. ' Nothing
places him so entirely out of date as his trust in
human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his
leap at it. He saw it in a woman's face, first met,
and drew it to himself in a man's hand first grasped.'
To Swinburne, however, I feel that Mrs. Meynell
is not so just. Reading her indictment, even a
great admirer of the poet might find no word of
reply. The case seems complete and unanswerable.
Swinburne did only too often give us a jingle rather
than poetry ; his thoughts did have ' their source,
their home, their origin, their authority and mission
in. . . his own vocabulary and the passion of other
men;' too much of his verse did come from ' a per-
fervid fancy rather than an imagination.' All this
we must grant. But his great genius must not be
judged by ' Dolores ' or even by the choruses from
"* Atalanta.' These are of his most amazing but not
of his best work. Moreover, it is cheap to charge
m'm with an absurd couplet (hackneyed beyond en-
durance) written in youth, or to pour contempt upon
"him because ' foam ' and ' flame ' words like these
are too frequently used to deck out his verse.
Swinburne as well as Tennyson is suffering from a
reaction, but I venture to think that his place in
English song will ultimately be reckoned higher
than that of Tennyson or many more of the lordliest
companies of the poets.
Economy in space must be offered for my excuse
42 Carven from the Laurel Tree
in jumping away from the argument in order to
quote, from the essay on Charlotte and Emily
Bronte, a page which may appear to confute my
own opinion. I leave the regard for appearances to
those who mind such matters, and take only for
its own sake a fine and illuminating passage :
' You may hear the poet of great imagery
praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, al-
though a great mystical poet makes images, he
does not do in his greatest moments. He is a
great mystic, because he has a full vision of the
mystery of realities, not because he has a clear in-
vention of similitudes. ... A great writer is
both a major and a minor mystic, in the self-same
poem ; now suddenly close to his mystery (which
is his greatest moment) and anon making it
mysterious with imagery (which is the moment ot
his most beautiful lines).
' The student passes delighted through the
several ' courts of poetry, from the outer to the
inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and
from decoration to more complex decoration ; and
prepares himself for the greater opulence of the in-
nermost chamber. But when he crosses the last
threshhold he finds this midmost sanctuary to be
a hypaethral temple, and in its custody and care a
simple earth and a space of sky.'
Mrs. Meynell's love of simple and wide effects :
her art which, like her religion, gives the free-
dom of a law; her aloofness all these mark her
off from her contemporaries. Many of them write
exceedingly well, but' they are implicated in barren
affairs. They sit at their desks with an eye on the
The Art of Alice Meynell 43
clock which must not move more quickly than their
scribbling, post-haste pens. They serve their causes,
and often wage noble battle, but the ephemeral hap-
pening which called forth this poem, or the crank or
politician who was confuted by that article are un-
substantial. When forgetfulness takes them away,
the journalism of their period though it be litera-
ture also must go with them. This Mrs. Meynell
knows. But 'who of the wise would hesitate? To
be honourable for one day one named and dated
day, separated from all other days of the ages or
to be for an unlimited time tedious?' She herself
has made her choice honourably. The contempla-
tive of letters, she lets the world go by. The
swords of soldiers receive only the aid of her dedi-
cated cloistration ; but her eyes are fixed upon the
reality they struggle for. Her reward is that of all
the prose writers of the Twentieth Century, she is
the one most certain of immortality.
THE DRAMA OF THE
DRAMATISTS.
THERE is a great and lonely name which, passing
from among us, has left a heritage not only of
poetry but of paradox. There had been successful
literary collaborations before, though rarely in
metrical drama, but no collaboration in which the
identity of the artists was so completely sunk as in
the case of the two ladies who were known to their
readers by the name of 'Michael Field.'
Here were souls who, though they had been by
circumstance and choice decadents of the decadents,
never, in the opinion of those best qualified to
judge, committed in all their lives a really serious
sin; dramatists who enacted a drama richer and
more powerful than any that they ever made;
poets, who, after they had learned to write poetry,
learned at the last how to live it. Yet they brought
with them into the Church not a little of their old
pagan loyalties, rounded and purified by their new
love. ' Something changed. . . as when the sky first
kindled into stars.' Beauty was the abiding thing,
whether they served it as priestesses, or knowing
their vocation made it serve their God.
There were many signposts upon the Pilgrim
46 Carven from the Laurel Tree
Way; many milestones to mark their passage: first
the death of a brother and uncle; then (a curious
token!) a dog who saved their sanity and had his
tribute in the strangest book of animal poems; later
the discovery in the ecclesiastical liturgy of the
thread of sacrifice binding together Paganism and
the Faith; and at last pain which, unexplained by
Greece, was revealed by Calvary.
The period of transion was gradual and the verse
written upon the road holds only their renunciation :
' I love but Love, yet must I change my god. . .
Thus it must be is it not ever thus?
Where the Madonna spreads her shining Child
We are not blest, there is no joy in us :
But we are broken, but we are renewed
When, lone as that first Shepherd of the wild,
The God spreads out His arms on Holy Rood.'*
Not easy was the way to such feet, and not at-
tained except by a strange humility and a stranger
pride. With their own Lethington of ' The Tragic
Mary ' they could say, though the text takes on a
deeper meaning, ' I must love my God humanly,
not with stiff constancy, but with every mood T
have. '
The theme of the ensuing drama is so sublime,
that the plainest words shall suffice to tell it.
During 1912 Edith Cooper learned that she had a
cancer in her breast. In order to miss no step of
her Via Crucis she steadfastly rejected the mercy of
morphia : love must be heroic. Throughout her
illness Katherine Bradley (they were always
* Wild Honey. Fisher Unwin.
The Drama of the Dramatists 47
* Henry ' and ' Michael ' to one another) nursed her
with a complete devotion. Before death came to
Henry, Michael discovered a worse cancer in her
own breast. It was a sacrament and a secret shared
only with her doctor and her spiritual director. So
perfect was the silence that the patient died with no
suspicion of the agony endured by her serene nurse.
On the day of Henry's death Michael had a seizure
which revealed her secret to the world.
Lonely and crippled by pain her courage never
faltered; accepting every stroke meekly and gladly,
like her niece, she too refused injections and em-
braced her cross with ardour. Who hearing the
note of exultation in her song guessed what it was
that Katherine Bradley bore as a ' bundle of
myrrh?' Reticence made drama more poignant.
It is said of her :
' The Cross shall be on her breast as a bundle of
myrrh. '
' I have loved odours well,
Loved frankincense and hydromel :
The angels know I have been very far
After where wild roses are ;
And celled morsels of ambergris
Have risen up to my heart as peace.
Will the Cross confer
One day with my breast as a bundle of myrrh?
This would be, if I would let,
Rather as an English violet,
That would make all my bosom's room
A very murmur of perfume
This would be, if I would suffer it.'*
* Mystic Trees. Eveleigh Nash.
48 Carven from the Laurel Tree
To the day of her death she never missed receiv-
ing Holy Communion. Living in a cottage in the
grounds of Hawkesyard she would not suffer her
Lord to visit her, but was carried each morning at
seven o'clock to the Priory Church. But the im-
minence of a longer journey woke her very early in
the dawn of a September day in 1914. Rising, she
asked to be dressed at once to be ready for Mass.
As her attendant was about to lift her into her chair,
Katharine Bradley fell back upon the floor dead.
When half an hour afterwards the priest arrived she
was lying with her head in the lap of a sister of
mercy, and he was struck with remembrance of the
great pieta of Francia, reproduced before him in the
living and the dead.
' Michael ' had always dreaded having to die in
bed surrounded by a crowd and she died upon the
naked floor. In this, and in the facts of her so-
long-concealed cancer and her burial upon St.
Michael's Day, God showed His exquisite courtesy
to one who had given Him a love which knew no
limits to its generosity.
' Michael Field ' always had a secure literary re-
putation, but the work issued under that name never
circulated very widely. In part this was due to the
prohibitive price of the superbly printed volumes ; in
part to the fact that the classic dead who lived again
in their pages could be only sere leaves stirred by
the wind to all but a few readers. The dramas were
not written for the stage, and though powerful and
shot with beauty make hard reading. Fine as were
The Drama of the Dramatists 49
many of the Sapphic translations, and the lyrics
Pagan and Christian, the best things were the
dramas. The slow movement (the solemn pagean-
try of the sonnet or the almost rarer dignity of
blank verse) was aptest to the genius of ' Michael
Field.'
Pagans they had been, knowing, unlike many of
their contemporaries, their philosophy to the begin-
ning and end.
Silenus drew me to an oak-tree root
He taught me in a language like a song.
Though later they knew ' the right, true way of
singing with reserve,' they did not altogether scorn
the oaten flute or the once-loved reeds. With diffi-
dence were the last three volumes of plays contain-
ing 'The Accuser,' 'Tristan de Leonois,' 'A Mes-
siah,' 'Borgia,' 'The Tragedy of Pardon' and
' Dian ' sent to the press. Not with the old pomp,
but in plain covers and anonymously were these
volumes published. A preface is given which while
intended as a shield is full of symbol to those
who have its clue : ' The author of these books of
drama is dead. He had been slowly dying for some
years ; then, of a sudden, he started on a journey of
desire to Rome, that he might reach it before he
died. Soon after his arrival death came; and he is
buried in an uninscribed grave under Roman cy-
presses.'
So the drama ends, with a darkened stage and
whispers more tense and terrible than swords. The
50 Carven from the Laurel Tree
splendour of passion was changed into the meekness
of pain, to the contemplation of the divine face, and
the soft rustlings of the wings of peace.
THE REVIVAL OF ENGLISH
POETRY
FOR the last twenty years or more poetry has been
left to languish in the dungeons of derision by
the English. The very nation which has produced
more great poets than the rest of the world has
treated its poets worst. A superficial critic might,
and in fact frequently does, ascribe this unhappy
state of things to the glut of poetasters whose inv
mortal works are issued (for a consideration) by
careless publishers, and are at once allowed by a
still more careless world to drop into the oblivion of
the fourpenny box. Yet the whole blame must not
be laid to the door of those Miltons who, if in-
glorious, are by no means mute. Indeed, rightly
considered, the fact of a multitude of indifferent
poets, existing in our midst is, given also a few
good poets, a very healthy sign. It at least proves
that the practice of the art of song must be normal
and satisfying to men, since it is the art which
men most persistently essay, even when they have
in it no grain of aptitude. Minor poets should, and
very often do, prove the existence of the major,
whose admirers and imitators they are.
52 Carven from the Laurel Tree
No, the real reason for the decline of noble verse
lies in the fact that toward the end of last century,
the poets only too often wandered in unclean places.
More, they frequently wore their hair long, affected
velvet coats, and had debts. Dowson died of drink,
Davidson by his own hand, and Wilde in the odour
of infamy. Even the more respectable poets
showed themselves to be poor fellows in the affairs
of life. Did not Francis Thompson sell matches
and take opium? Was not the head of Lionel John-
son so weak that a mere fall backward from a chair
in a public-house proved sufficient to smash it ? The
Englishman, proudly conscious of a harder skull,
liked neither the strange vices of the poets nor their
fantastic virtues, so that when a black scandal raised
its head, he reminded his children that he had ' told
them so,' and was glad to see poetry crash suddenly
and, as appeared, finally into almost universal con-
tempt.
But now the poets have very largely come back
again into their own. Even the stout, phlegmatic,
middle-class person has begun dimly to feel that the
times call for something more than a leading article;
that Armageddon and the trump of doom, Michael
and his angels in battle with the dragon, call for an
utterance richer and more terrible than the plain
stuff of prose. The days are epic, but where is the
singer of the epic?
Along with the renewed sense of the need of
poetry has come the vision of our young poets
washed in the awful font of war. The souls that
The Revival of English Poetry 53
were rotten with decay are now made romantic by
danger. Such secret sores and sins as they may
have had once are forgotten in the sudden blaze of
their glory. Their names now ring of death and
the splendour of arms, and their poetry is ended
and made complete.
Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us for our
dearth
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain.
Honour has come back as a king to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage ;
And nobleness walks in our ways again ;
And we have come into our heritage.
The whimperings of the minor poets, the sad
little men whose souls were sick, are heard no more;
but from wild waste places comes upon the wind a
great cry of praise. We were better than we knew.
Our pessimism has fallen from us like a sheath, for
it had never, thank God, really reached our heart.
There ran the blood tempered by our kindly fields
and abiding hills, whence was drawn, all unwitting-
ly, ' a flaming valiancy of soul.' The new spirit is
shot and coloured with the beatitude of the English
country-side, where one sees with reopened eyes
' the lands of stubble, and tall trees.' With some-
thing of the glad note of discovery Geoffrey
Howard can write his lovely sonnet, 'England':
O she is very small and very green,
And full of little lanes all dense with flowers
That wind along and lose themselves between
Mossed farms and parks and fields of quiet sheep ;
54 Carven from the Laurel Tree
And in the hamlets where her stalwarts sleep
Low bells chime out from old elm-hidden
towers.
Even in death do these things endure.
If I should die, think only this of me :
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
wrote Rupert Brooke, dying and giving to Lemnos
a new beauty, thoughts of the cool woods, the wild
hedge-rose and the deep bounty of our soil. With
the same finality ' Edward Melbourne ' sang his
song ' Before Action,' falling a few weeks later in
the Somme advance.
I that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say good-by to all of this :
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die, O Lord.
It is a startling fact that the three finest of the
poets directly produced by the war have all died in
the war. They were crowned with the laurel and
then sealed to the grave with a blazing, splendid
kiss. Rupert Brooke, ' Edward Melbourne ' and
Julian Grenfell have gone, leaving us an imperish-
able legacy. With dramatic irony the Times on
May the 28th, 1915, announced Captain Grenfell's
The Revival of English Poetry 55
death from wounds, and on the same day published
his poem ' Into Battle ' :
And when the burning- moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind,
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring- much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel can reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.
The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings :
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
Ruskin, who hated war, declared nevertheless that
war is the mother of the arts. Whatever may be
the effect of this war upon music and painting and
the plastic arts, there can be no question that poetry
has awoken to a loud reveille. Through fierce fires
men are returning to a new simplicity, to the love
of elemental things, to ' Mother Earth and Father-
land ' ; and with the clearer vision has come the
perception of spiritual things. It is difficult to
gauge accurately a tendency, for that is all that is
abroad at present, but one may notice a growing
Catholic sentiment in poetry. In an age when be-
lief was thought to be failing, it is much to find, as
we so repeatedly do find, a religious instinct healthy
enough to materialize vividly the unseen.
True religion, like true poetry, may be at once
distinguished from the false by a very simple test;
56 Carven from the Laurel Tree
whether or not it loves and deals with elemental
things. One can tell by the feel if it is genuine.
Thus our Christian revelation gives us symbols
which are at once simple and satisfying indeed
which are, quite apart from their symbolic value,
the simplest and most satisfying objects men can
know : bread and wine, and water and oil where
false religions, when they adopt plain symbols at all,
choose for their spiritual tokens some such emblem
as a serpent trying to swallow its own tail though
even a serpent would hardly find a meal of this sort
so simple or so satisfying as it looks!
In just the same way all good poetry stands
rooted in the humble and abiding earth, finding its
permanence in bread that sustains, in wine that
maketh glad the heart of man, and oil that causes
his face to shine. Of all poets, perhaps Virgil and
Wordsworth stand out as possessing in the highest
degree this direct touch with the familiar and ele-
mental, but all true poets must and do share this
calm passion. Decay is marked when the search
begins with Wilde for Pasht and the deities of the
night, the exotic odours, the tapestries and torches
of Babylonian temples.
Now while one cannot expect from English
poetry, which long has been so unhappily severed
from the life of the Catholic Church, a full realization
of the unity between faith and poetic fervour, there
still remain certain attitudes from which a tendency
may be gathered. Among these may be classed the
hearty anthropomorphism, the almost exuberantly
The Revival of English Poetry 57
vivid materialization of the spiritual, which seems
to be native to the good artist. John Davidson, for
example, being the child of Victorian scepticism,
tried to write a poem in praise of the Darwinian bio-
logical theory; moreover, he had much more of
bitterness and despair than the healthy virility of
such a man as Huxley could know. But when
Davidson wrote his ' Ballad in Heaven ' and it was
his finest poem, just as his excursion into versified
science was his worst he had, in order to imagine
Heaven at all, to imagine it as monstrously solid and
full of gorgeous music and the thundering tramp of
a host whom no man could number. One can al-
most see in it the shape and colour of evil :
The slow adagio begins ;
The winding- sheets are ravelled out
That swathe the minds of men, the sins
That wrap their rotting- souls about.
To Davidson, in his dull and doctrinaire moments,
Heaven might be utterly non-existent; to Davidson,
when the divine inspiration held him, Heaven had
to be alive and charged with apocalyptic splendours.
To the faith of the Middle Ages these things were
taken for granted, equally by the austere Dante and
by the dissolute Villon. They shared the same van-
tage spot and saw
Paradis peint, od sont harpes et luths,
Et un enfer oil damn^s sont boullus.
To them ' the city lieth four-square . . . the
length and the height and the breadth thereof are
equal ' surely the acme of solidity ! But even the
58 Carven from the Laurel Tree
moderns, looking up from their desolation, picture
Heaven hardly less vividly ; and though they are
only able to set the conscious effort of a picture
against the casual certainty of a vision, the fact that
they have to accept our paraphernalia should give
us the consolation of knowing that the poets will
one day be the readiest of men to turn from the
shadows of the Faith to its eternal substance.
POETS 1 PROSE
HARDLY one writer has proved himself a lord
of prose without first learning the splendour
of his art from poetry, his nurse. Here and there
may be found one who can achieve good, honest
stuff, strong, dignified and vigorous; now and then
a Cobbett, owing nothing to the schools, who, by
sheer force of the masculinity of his genius, rises
to mastery of language unguarded by the golden
aegis of verse. Over such an one we can marvel,
applauding his power while sadly speculating as to
what he could have done with more culture or less
prejudice. Assuredly much would have been lost
had his training and character been other than they
were. Though we might still possess the ' History
of the Protestant Reformation,' or even the ' Rural
Rides,' would his ' Advice to Young Men ' be so
full of startling sagacity or ' Cottage Economy ' so
much to the point ? In the providence of God there
is a place for the roll of thunder as well as for the
singing of choirs of birds, but in no orchestra can
they be combined. The woods are silent in a
summer storm.
The finer and more delicate graces of the prose
writers are almost invariably derived from song.
Beauty with its cadence and rhythm, its felicities
60 Carven from the Laurel Tree
of thought and phrase, walks majestically appa-
relled through their pages. Her musical footfalls
are only the echoes of poetry, who never ceases to
bless any who have ever been her votaries. The
most jealous of the Muses is in this matter the most
forgiving. And the lustre of the bard is never quite
eclipsed though, turning philosopher or ascetic, he
seek newer shrines.
At the breasts of poetry prose must nuzzle him-
self to drink if he would grow up to be a lovely boy
and a strong man. What a host of historians and
essayists and orators have been nurtured in those
maternal arms! The Roman heads of Addison and
Macaulay have rested there. A young and less
saturnine Swift was weaned by her. The ponderous
form of Johnson be it recorded in grateful mirth
lay poised as easily as a feather against that
bosom. If he was destined for Cyclopean tasks, to
put to shame forty French Academicians and to rout
the world of wit at the Mitre in a tempest of argu-
ment, he never ceased to love his holy mother. If
Lamb sought for roast pig and Mrs. Battle at
whist; if Coleridge became a metaphysician; if
Morris preached hot gospel upon an orange box at
Hammersmith, they remained poets at heart
throughout their lives. Whether they write roman-
ces, or art criticism, or merely the glorification of
Whiggery, verse claims her sons. Whether reli-
gion or politics or bread-and-butter calls them their
laurels wither not. Carlyle is alone in his mood of
black and bitter scorn. Others look wistfully from
Poets' Prose 61
their choir-stalls or professional chairs or pulpits
towards eyes that were dear in their youth. The
host of modern novelists who began as poets
Compton Mackenzie or Maurice Hewlett or Ford
Maddox Hueffer must think regretfully of early
lyrics sacrificed for so many fat cheques. Possibly
Hall Caine would rather be writing sonnets and
Charles Garvice odes than popular fiction. Mere-
dith certainly carried ' Poems and Lyrics of the Joy
of Earth ' in one pocket, while ' The Egoist ' was
in the other. Stevenson smuggled a strange con-
traband of ballads on board the pirate lugger. And
Thomas Hardy has offered a belated repentance in
his old age. But not all escape the tragedy of the
successful-disappointed. Rarely is an Alice Mey-
nell born to serve poetry and prose with equal fealty
and to achieve so exquisite a distinction in each.
Though there is a danger to poetry when poets
put their hands to prose the danger of no retro-
gression at least prose receives an enrichment
which is not altogether at the charge of poetry.
Milton must become a pamphleteer and Dryden and
Shelley critics. (The ideal faithfulness of Brown-
ing and Tennyson to metrical literature is as re-
markable as George Bernard Shaw's eccentric ab-
stention from it.) In poets' prose we have some-
thing not easily to be spared. If Newman is lost
to verse, we can still boast sorrowfully of his splen-
dour, for his marvellous eloquence springs from the
fount of English song. Under his scarlet hat lie
the green bays. In Newman we feel that we can
62 Carven from the Laurel Tree
see prose transmuted, suffering a change, trembling
on the verge of poetry in an attitude of daring equi-
poise, and about to take to itself wings. There is
something finer than rhetoric in his best passages,
something that only one who is a poet in fact if not
in profession is able to handle. That same mystery
and magic is in De Quincey's ' Levana ' and
' Dream Fugue,' and also in Pater's ' Mona Lisa.'
But as excerpts from these writings would be conv
paratively hackneyed, I will avoid them and quote
instead from Hilaire Belloc's book on Danton, the
chapter on The Fall of the monarchy. There is
not quite the same effect of enchantment here as in
the vaguer and more famous essays of the older
writers, but only a man capable of producing ' The
South Country ' or ' Dives ' could have chaunted :
' So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins
stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had
already learned to speak and recognised its own
nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed
heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian
kings. Look up that vast valley of dead men
crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of
Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white
beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his
left hand the globe and in his right the hilt of an
unconquerable sword. There also are the short,
strong horsemen of the Robertian house, half-
hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before
them growing in vestment and majesty, and tak-
ing on the pomp of the Middle Ages; Louis VII.
Poets' Prose 63
all covered with iron; Philip the Conqueror; Louis
IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they stand
in a winding, interminable procession, this great
crowd of kings; they loose their armour, they take
their ermine on, they are accompanied by their cap-
tains and their marshalls; at last, in their attitude
and in their magnificence they sum up in them-
selves the pride and the achievement of the French
nation. But time has dissipated what it could not
tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has
turned these mighty figures into unsubstantial
things. You may see them in the grey end of dark-
ness, like a pageant all standing still. You look
again, but with the growing light and with the wind
that rises before morning they have disappeared.'
How near such a lyrical passage is to pure verse,
how easily it can be converted into verse, was once
shown by Francis Thompson when he translated a
paragraph of one of his essays into strict stanza
form. A few words dropped or added or trans-
posed for the purpose of rhyme was all that was
necessary. But this was only an exhibition of tech-
nical artifice : the paragraph gained no real im-
provement in the process. The greatness of prose
heightened and coloured by poetry lies in the fact
that the poetry remains latent in it. Even when
struggling to escape she is unconscious of herself.
The net holding her loveliness grows alive with
light; her personality thrills along the webbing and
saturates it with glory. But once the silken fila-
ments are broken and their prisoner is free nothing
64 Carven from the Laurel Tree
remains except a coarse coil of hemp Poetry is not
only released but annihilated, for a man has ravished
her secret and revealed it to the world.
THE GUILD IDEA
IN these days when Capitalism with all its ugly
attendant evils of Commercialism is being viewed
with dismay, or at least apprehension, by those who
are interested in the well-being of our society; when
fierce and logical souls too often can find no escape
save through the iron doors of a rigid collectivism;
when (worst of all) many subtle minds are ready to
be contented with reforms of a sort which can only
make disease orderly and perpetual it can hardly
be inopportune to consider if there is no solution
for our desperate difficulties except the academic one
or the bureaucratic one. Mr. Belloc has given us
a powerful piece of steel-cold criticism and a phrase
usually totally misunderstood by those who use it.
' The Servile State ' does not mean in his book that
Socialism will oppress men to the point of servile
degradation, but that unless men strongly insist
upon property as an absolute in their economic
philosophy, the most well meaning attempts at re-
form will be diverted from the freedom which is
their end into a softening but a strengthening of
the plutocracy. There is no difficulty in seeing that
this does actually happen, for recent bureaucratic
legislation, while making for increased security in
material things for the mass of our people, does, on
66 Carven from the Laurel Tree
the other hand, distinctly lessen their spiritual
status. Men are to be well housed, well clothed,
well fed for only by such means can a servile civi-
lization be made endurable but they are not in-
tended to be more independent. Such a tendency
is only possible because of a false philosophy among
both social reformers and the proletariat. The
Capitalists might, of course, be expected to be pre-
pared to pay the price of the workmen's security and
comfort such a bargain would be extremely wel-
come to them but even the philanthropists and
the wage-earners think a man's being sure of his
job, more desirable than a man's being sure of his
soul. They hold, I believe correctly, that most men
in our industrialised society would consider econo-
mic or even political freedom a small matter when
set besides the certainty of regular employment,
and a steady supply of beef, bread-and-butter and
beer. The .Fabians, if they are not the builders of
the temple of social reconstruction, are certainly its
architects. The Socialists have made the Servile
State possible.
Even philanthropists are not so ignorant of men
as to imagine that the desire for independence is
other than normal to the human spirit. They are
forced to their conclusion, not as to an ideal, but as
to a compromise. They have ceased to hope for
the Socialist ' nationalisation of the means of pro-
duction, distribution and exchange,' and in order
to be rid of the intolerable destitution incidental to
the Capitalist system, are willing to accept any kind
The Guild Idea 67
of material amelioration of the poor, even though
it should bring with it disabilities of another kind.
They do not perhaps at first forget that a man
should be free as well as fat, but hope that embon-
point will be likely to induce a desire and an apti-
tude for freedom. They consent to encourage the
enregimentation of the poor in the hope that rations
and drill will make soldiers strong enough to shoot
their officers. Their psychology is at fault. The
thin soldiers might shoot their masters in the
courage born of desperation; but there are to be no
tHin soldiers in this army.
Since, then, the Servile State is only a bitter com-
promise, it is a matter for wonder that the Social
Economists have not given more attention to an
institution which, though still in process of develop-
ment at the time when it fell, yet worked for several
generations to the good of mankind. I refer to the
Mediaeval Guilds. Brentano the Marxian, and
other Socialists who have studied economic history,
have written of the Guilds with sympathy and in-
deed admiration, but except in such quarters and
among a few notably able minds, they have excited
barely more than an archaeological interest.
What were the Guilds? How did they arise?
How did they decay? Upon our realisation of the
import of these questions and their answers the
whole economic future depends.
Wilda and Brentano have, with characteristic
German painstaking research, and with not a little
of that equally German pompous pedantry, seen
their origin in the sacrificial banquets of the ancient
68 Carven from the Laurel Tree
Teutonic tribes; others in an extension and consoli-
dation of the family ideas. That the family was
the germ from which not only the guilds, but the
tribe and the State arose, is of course obvious, and
that with some form of human association social fel-
lowship would be mixed must be taken for granted.
But to insist too strongly upon the family germ or
the feast is to reduce the guilds to being primeval
prototypes of the Ancient Order of Buffaloes or the
Convivial Company of Crocodiles, and to give an
academic instead of a natural explanation of their
rise. With far greater certainty we may believe
with Mr. March Phillips that the real origin of the
guilds was the habit men have of associating to
repel depredation or attack. Such associations
would be bound to feel an intimacy almost amount-
ing to blood relationship. They would think of
themselves as brotherhoods, and their family spirit
would express itself in various social activities. Of
definitely organised guilds in the modern sense per-
haps the earliest of which we have certain record
were those trading corporations and burial societies
which existed from very early times among the
Romans, among the Greeks, and even in India and
China. The explanation of their origin, therefore,
must be an universal one that spirit of union and
solidarity which is normal and native to the heart
of man.
While this is so, nearly all the writers on the sub-
ject have recognised the enormous influence of the
Church upon the development of the Guilds, and
how the Faith informed them and gave them
The Guild Idea 69
vigorous life. The distinction which Toulmin
Smith and Brentano have drawn between religious,
social and trade fraternities, though natural to
those who do not realise how completely religion
can permeate every detail of human life, did not
exist in fact. For though burial of the dead,
loans for poor members and the provision of
dowries for their daughters, sick benefit, plays and
pageants (to mention a few of their secular activi-
ties) might be added to their main purpose as trade
societies, yet suffrages for the dead, communal re-
ligious duties, the maintenance of a chantry priest,
a lamp before the Blessed Sacrament and the like
were so general as to warrant us in thinking that
there were few religious guilds that did not have
some worldly purpose; no trade guild that did not
have its religious functions. The fact that each
craft had its patron saint suffices to show this. And
when the pillage began it was not easy to assign
the guilds clearly in categories of ' religious ' and
4 secular,' where spiritual and material matters
were so closely mingled. The Commissioners prob-
ably quite honestly did their best to make the divi-
sion, and failed because men had not divided their
lives into separate water-tight compartments. The
Creed had coloured everything.
Accordingly, though as industrial corporations the
guilds set themselves to protect their members
against unfair competition, by disabilities upon
traders from abroad or even from other parts of
England, the Christian abhorrence of usury lay at
70 Carven from the Laurel Tree
the core of their being. They regarded not only
their rights but their duties.
Now usury did not mean in the ages of Faith
merely miserliness, the dead accumulation of so
much money, but was universally understood to in-
clude any seeking after profit beyond that which was
needful to support a man and his family in their
station in life. He who desired more than this was
counted as avaricious, and the seeking of wealth as
an end in itself as a sin. The rich were but the
stewards of their riches, and had certain obligations
towards the poor. Nor was avarice only an offence
against religion; it could be and often was subject
to condemnation by the civil authorities as an offence
against the well-being of the State.
The current economic doctrine that ' money makes
money ' would have been abominable to the man of
the Middle Ages. Land and labour were to him the
two forces which in combination could be creative of
wealth, and the dictum of Mr. H. N. Casson,
'Money is productive; property unproductive,'
would have been shocking to his moral sense. To
secure profit through the mere fluctuations in supply
and demand would have been thought wrong; still
more horrible the modern rigging of the market.
Price to him was determined by the actual cost of
production plus the maintenance of the producer.
The modern theory is put, at all events lucidly, by
Mr. H. N. Casson, who recently has set up a
' School of Efficiency ' in London for the instruction
of English business men in the economics of the
The Guild Idea 71
Devil. We have had the practice of the thing be-
fore, so perhaps it is good, for the sake of clarity, to
have a confession o,f its philosophy.
' Intrinsic value has little to do with price. In all
markets you will find a chaos of prices. It is not so
much what the goods are, that matters. It is what
the buyers are willing to pay.'
The condemnation of usury was not, as some
would suppose who cannot understand the Mediaeval
objection to the system, an instance of archaic ec-
clesiastical restriction, but was bred in bones of the
normal man, a universal hatred for something loath-
some and obscene. Chaucer's Prioress spoke for
her age:
' There was in Asia, in a greet citee,
Amongfes Christen folk, a Jewerye,
Sustened by a lord of that contree
For foule usure and lucre of vilanye,
Hateful to Christ and to his companye. '
To-day usury is a word which is but rarely used,
more rarely still with fit abhorrence. Indeed, not
long ago a great London newspaper carried on a
controversy as to whether ' The Merchant of Venice '
was Semitic or anti-semitic in intention and yet
had only one, a belated contributor, who would
mention the thing which the whole play was about.
The word usury was not so much taboo as forgotten.
Against usury the guildmen set their faces like
flints. Did an individual member of the fraternity
attempt to outdo his fellow by cut prices or by
shoddy workmanship, by misrepresentation as to his
72 Carven from the Laurel Tree
goods, or by any other means? Then punishment
swift and drastic descended, as when, according to
their record, the ' Pinners ' craft heavily fined one of
its members for selling Flemish as English pins.
The mysteries had a commercial conscience, and in
the words of Professor W. J. Ashley, 'The guild
legislation kept steadily before itself the ideal of
combining good quality and a price that was fair to
the consumer, with a fitting remuneration to the
workman.'
A word must be said as to price. In the early
days of the crafts, the customer would engage the
artificer to do a certain piece of work, paying him
not by the day or hour but for the completed article,
for which the customer would supply the material.
Thus a man who wanted a coat would take his cloth
to the tailor and bargain for the finished article, or
the wood to the carpenter, who would undertake to
supply a table. Later, with the development of
trade, craftsmen made coats or tables, as they had
time, for prospective customers, thus maintaining a
regular supply of work. They began to employ
journeymen and indentured apprentices. For the
work done the bill would be made out somewhat as
follows : Journeyman's or 'prentice's time (charged
at actual cost), plus master's time (charged at a
higher rate than that of his man. but never at more
than double the rate), plus the cost of the material
and other incidental charges. No profit was made
upon material, except some small amount to cover
the time spent in purchase, and no profit upon the
The Guild Idea 73
labour of his journeyman. To do otherwise would
have seemed usurious to the master. Perhaps the
spirit of the crafts may best be described in the
words of a proclamation issued during the reign of
Edward III : 'That so no knavery, false workman-
ship or deceit shall be found in any manner in the
said mysteries; for the honour of the good folk of
the said mysteries and for the common profit of the
people.'
As, to quote Brentano ' England must be regarded
as the birthplace of the Guilds, and London perhaps
as their cradle;' and as in England their develop-
ment was more in the nature of a gradual growth
than on the Continent, where the conflict between
the merchant guilds and the crafts was fierce and
complete; and as in England, too, the effects of the
cataclysm are more clearly to be seen than else-
where, we can take the English guilds as typical of
all the mediaeval guilds, and study our subject to
most advantage with them before our eyes.
In 1422, when the guilds had as full an organisa-
tion as they were destined to know, there were in
London alone 112 separate crafts brewers, fleshers,
tailors, haberdashers, girdlers, weavers, fullers,
dyers, tapicers, joiners, pewterers, braziers, chand-
lers, hatters, fishmongers, cheesemongers, mercers,
headers, armourers, vinters, grocers, ironmongers,
cutlers, cordwainers, goldsmiths, tanners, black-
smiths, barbers, bakers, carpenters but it would be
tedious to enumerate the entire list. Their story is
admirably told in Miss Helen Douglas Irvine's ' His-
74 Carven from the Laurel Tree
tory of London.' The butcher, the baker and the
candlestickmaker were worthy of their rhyme.
Though municipal government in England was
not so absolutely in the hands of the guilds as it was
in many towns on the Continent, especially in France,
yet the laws of the commune and the crafts were
very closely related. So that when in 1351, and
again later in the century, the members of the Com-
mon Council of the City of London were elected by
the leading guilds instead of by the wards it could
be defended as a return to an earlier system.
But though the crafts did not usually directly
govern, indirectly they certainly always controlled
municipal affairs. Thus retailers had to be freemen
of the city before they were allowed to trade in Lon-
don, and freemen had to be proposed and elected by
their guilds. Organised and vigorous were these
communes, with a keen sense of political actuality
and spirit and determination enough to make their
influence felt. Miss Douglas Irvine relates how,
when in 1269 the choice of the aldermen for Lord
Mayor fell upon Phillip le Tayllur. the crafts
shouted, ' We will have no mayor but Walter Har-
vey.' To the King at Westminster they went cry-
ing, ' We are the commune of the city and to us be-
longs the election of the mayor of the city, and we
will that Walter Harvey be our elected mayor.' The
struggle was sharp and blood was shed, but Harvey
eventually became mayor.
How closely the town and the trades were con-
nected may be seen from the frequent custom of
The Guild Idea 75
' common bargains ' where the mayor had the option
of purchasing commodities for the community.
Town fisheries were often run on the same co-opera-
tive principle and even in some cases a town boat for
merchant trading. A very different affair this from
modern ' municipal socialism ' (always procured at
the price of an uproarious bargain for the capitalists)
where the purchases never really belong to the com-
munity but to the financiers who are astute enough
to put their fingers in the pie !
So the guilds grew. In the fourteenth century
charters began to be given to the crafts. Then the
Livery Companies arose with a corporate identity,
common property, common liability and a common
seal and with their own legal courts for the correc-
tion of their own misbehaving members. Yet it
should not be forgotten that below the liveries and
mysteries there lived many associations still in pro-
cess of organisation which were not recognised by
the authorities. They too were animated by the
same strong and solid spirit, and might have deve-
loped to full stature.
If to the world at large the guild brought the cer-
tainty of a fair price and honest workmanship, and to
its members protection against the dangers of exter-
nal competition and internal roguery, the result was
based upon and attained by the principle of master-
ship within the guild. A boy was apprenticed to a
craft for seven, four, three or two years, according
to the craft and the stage in its history, and became
upon the expiration of his indenture a journeyman,
76 Carven from the Laurel Tree
which he only remained until by habits of industry
and thrift, or the fortunate chance of a marriage
with his master's daughter, he could set up as a
master himself. The relationship of the master to
both apprentices and journeymen was roughly that
of a father to his family. This status was not per-
manent because their normal expectation was that,
when the legal bond of the apprentices had expired
and capital and experience been acquired, they too
would gain their independence and the full freedom of
the guild. The modern workmen's economic philo-
sophy is bounded by tolerable and secure employ-
ment and the wages envelope on Saturday; to the
mediaeval journeyman wages marked but a stage to-
wards frugal and honourable independence. Some-
times there was even more to be gained, and many
country folk of gentility but slender means sent their
sons to seek fortune and advancement by way of the
crafts. Not all turned again as Whittington, Lord
Mayor of London, but many could count upon find-
ing in the London crafts wealth and influence.
The organisation of rural districts was, necessarily
somewhat different from that of the towns, but even
here guilds, though existing, of course, for the
protection of trade or manufactures, served many
excellent economic purposes. They too had their
guild halls and their parish chests and loans for poor
or alms for sick and disabled members. And, as
Professor Thorold Rogers says, ' Few parishes were
probably without guild lands, from which the aged
and the poor were nourished, till on the plea that
The Guild Idea 77
they were devoted to superstitious uses they were
stolen under an Act of Parliament by Protector
Somerset.'
Even Feudalism itself is still largely misunder-
stood. Serfdom had passed with the Dark Ages,
and before the thirteenth century had arrived the
Lord of the Manor could only demand his tenants to
work upon the demesne land for a few days a week
with some extra service at harvest-time and a couple
of turkeys at Christmas. Even this (curtailed to a
large extent by the holidays enforced by the Church)
became very generally commutable by a regular
money payment. In any case, the tenants always
had their own holdings and their customary rights
to the common lands.
Unfortunately these rights were too often only
customary, and when it was seen that pasturage was
more profitable than ploughed fields the lords, find-
ing the prevailing system of scattered strips incon-
venient with the change that had come over agricul-
ture, enforced their rights and enclosed the com-
mons. The legal question is obscure, for while the
people could plead ancient custom the lords were
able to use the law against a peasantry ignorant of
its complexities and of the subtlety of lawyers. The
process began before the Protestant Reformation,
though had the Reformation not come it is probable
that the movement would have failed. Certain it is
that an immense impetus was given to the enclosures
by the grasping hands of the defenders of the new
faith.
78 Carven from the Laurel Tree
The dissolution of the monasteries meant that
whereas previously the rich owned and controlled bare-
ly a third of the land in England (the rest being widely,
though unequally, divided among the mass of the
population) they now had in their absolute posses-
sion over one-half. Two points should be noticed.
First that the owners of the land in days when
machinery and fixtures were of comparatively little
value held infinitely more economic power with it
than they could to-day. Secondly, that the Lords,
who, when they held only a third of the land, could
be kept in check equally by economic forces and by
the power of the Church, now that their possessions
were larger and their purpose more united than
those of the rest of the nation, now that the restrain-
ing influence of religion had disappeared, were able
to make extortions, of which they never dared to
speak before. The ecclesiastical lands had been
ruled indulgently by the abbeys and had set a stan-
dard for other manors. They now passed to those
who had obtained them by rapine and who would be
prepared to acknowledge few restraints in their ad-
ministration.
To the plunder of the monasteries was added the
plunder of the guilds. These corporations being im-
mensely wealthy, but being also in a very real sense
religious fraternities, had their funds and property
confiscated to the Crown where it could be shewn
that they spent money on Masses for the dead or on
any other such superstitious object ! Edward the
VI. 's Commissioners did, in fact, honestly attempt to
The Guild Idea 79
differentiate between secular and religious societies and
recommended the authorisation of many trade guilds.
These recommendations were not always acted
upon, and even where the guilds were allowed to re-
main, heavy taxes were levied to their detriment.
Such proceeds, and the rifled wealth of the Church,
did not pass in any great extent to the Crown; few
schools or hospitals or almshouses arose in conse-
quence though this more often happened in Ger-
many and Denmark than in England but the great
lords and servants of the King steeped their hands
in the blood of the poor, and in what Mr. Lloyd
George now probably regrets to remember he called
'the fat of sacrilege.'
Many of the craft guilds lingered on oppressed by
heavy taxation. But though the livery companies
still remain (in name at least) in London to this day,
the guilds gradually decayed. Economic forces
were too strong for them; capitalism, crude and
cynical, had entered into possession, and the mys-
teries were doomed. When the bond of their union
was taken away their end was in sight. Religion
was proscribed and a new false philosophy took its
place. The keystone of the arch was knocked out,
and the arch fell. Much has been written by many
writers upon the spirit and organisation of the guilds
and nearly all of it is sympathetic in tone. Hardly
anyone has done more than Cardinal Gasquet to
make the kindly past live again for us, but even he
can find it in his heart to write, ' The system of these
voluntary societies would be impossible and out of
8o Carven from the Laurel Tree
place in this modern world of ours.' Everything
which that great scholar says is of interest and im-
portance, but if I cannot agree with him in this
opinion, I have for my comfort the support of the
Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII., which flings the
guilds down as a challenge to industrialism.
' Some remedy must be found, and found quickly,
for the misery and wretchedness pressing so heavily
and unjustly at this moment on the vast majority of
the working classes: for the ancient working-men's
guilds were abolished in the last century, and no
other organisation took their place . . . Hence, by
degrees, it has come to pass that working-men have
been surrendered, all isolated and helpless, to the
hardheartedness of employers and the greed of un-
checked competition. The mischief has been in-
creased by rapacious usury, which, although more
than once condemned by the Church, is, neverthe-
less, under a different guise, but with the like injus-
tice, still practised by covetous and grasping men. . .
So that a small number of very rich men have been
able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring
poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.'
That the idea of the guilds is not dead in current
economic thought may be seen clearly enough by the
eagerness with which one-time Socialists tumble
over each other to declare themselves free from the
taint of collectivism! Not only do they eschew
Marx, but they unashamedly hanker after the guilds.
For though Guild Socialism (or as it is now more
correctly named. ' National Guilds ') and Syndicalism
The Guild Idea 81
are still some distance away from the old intimate
and cosy idea of the mediaeval guilds, they have
come a very long way towards it. Both National
Guilds and Syndicalism insist upon the doctrine that
economic power precedes political power in Mr.
Orage's fine phrase, ' the political moon reflecting
the light of the economic sun.' They would take
care of the economic pence and let the political
pounds take care of themselves. Both unite in de-
nouncing the entanglement of the Trade Union move-
ment in Parliamentary Labourism, pointing out with
truth that Labour has never been so powerless as
now when a strong Labour party sits in the House of
Commons waiting to be bought by the caucus, the
economic piper who calls the political tune !
In both of these systems the first step towards the
abolition of wagery is ' the regimentation into a
single fellowship of all these who are employed in
any given industry.' The second will be the refusal
of the watertight guild to work any longer for the
profit of the capitalists. Though Syndicalism parts
company with National Guilds here, the one demand-
ing the absolute ownership of any given trade by the
men of that particular trade, the other vesting all
ownership in the State and acting merely as the
State's trustee, each would agree that the transition
could not take place ' without an intervening period
of some form of partnership with existing capita-
lism.' The guild would not be a mere Trade
Union, living with certain new rights under the old
wage system, but a corporate body treating directly
82 Carven from the Laurel Tree
in business and paying the members of the guild it-
self.
There is no space to treat the contents of that
brilliant book, ' National Guilds ' in detail here. I
can only outline its thesis, note its tendency and otfer
a criticism.
Though its promoters very properly detest the
modern passion for quantitative instead of qualita-
tive workmanship (the only good work done to-day,
as always, has been executed by men in small shops
regarding themselves as artists rather than ' hands ')
the elephantine organisation of the proposed scheme,
while it would undoubtedly add dignity to labour
and economy to production, could hardly affect
quality to a great extent. For that direct touch is
necessary between the artist-craftsman and the cus-
tomer. Moreover, the officials of a large organisa-
tion are notoriously safer from criticism and con-
trol than the officials of an organisation small enough!
to be open to the eyes of each one of its members.
Then, too, a guild which only recognises corporate
ownership would not satisfy the nature of man so
completely as a guild such as those of the Middle
Ages, which, while possessing its corporate identity,
jealously guarded the property and the individuality
of all its members.
Of course, no one imagines that the ancient guilds
could work successfully in the modern world with-
out very vital modifications. They did not die be-
cause they had served their day and were conquered
by the industrial revolution which introduced steam
machinery. They did not die on beds of disease,
The Guild Idea 83
but were slain in the open air. Had the Faith en-
dured in England and the guilds with It, the crafts
.would unquestionably have adjusted themselves to
new needs, using all that invention has introduced,
not for mercenary profit but for human good. Capita-
lism was not (as the common theory runs) the child
of machinery. The Reformation was its parent.
But machinery coming in a capitalistic society enor-
mously strengthened it, as it would just as certainly
have strengthened the guild system had it found it
then in possession of the field.
Can the guilds ever return? Well, I think not,
until the world again accepts the Faith. Until then
men seem likely to be ready for a purely materialis-
tic contentment and unlikely to show any readiness
to sacrifice for the gaining of what is in the last
analysis a spiritual idea. The exhaustion of the ac-
quired velocity of Catholic traditions is increasingly
apparent, and we may with safety predict that unless
* some remedy be found and found quickly ' society
will inevitably harden itself into the capitalistic
mould, legalising what has up to now been only cus-
tomary, and perfecting the Servile State.
If we can only regain the true and ancient philo-
sophy, clarity of vision and a determination to make
our choice effectual, we can win back a free England
and a merry England. The guilds will live full of
their old genial and independent spirit, purified and
strengthened by religion and coloured with our lost
gaiety. If we will it we can have it, and see again
the mysteries perform their plays on Corpus Christi
and drink perhaps from a loving cup, for which an-
84 Carven from the Laurel Tree
other Catholic Archbishop of York has obtained a
hundred days indulgence ... In this faith I mean
to live and die.
'ROMAN AND UTOPIAN
MORE'
' He who bore
King's wrath, and watched the sacred poor,
O Roman and Utopian More!'
CHARLES WILLIAMS, The Wars.
MORE is not only one of the problems of litera-
ture, but also of life. As M. Henri Bre-
mond says of him, ' At first sight he is entirely pro-
fane.' Here is a pagan who kept his soul as an
anchorite keeps his cell; a graceless satirist, to whom
nothing was sacred, living a secret life of prayer and
mortification possible only to a soul full of grace; a
lawyer-politician with a hair shirt under his robes
and chain of office; a Voltaire ready to go serenely
to the lions ! Doubtlessly there are some good men
in Parliament, God-fearing and honourable citizens;
but can we imagine even the humblest Secretary of
State scourging his bleeding body in a silent room
of Downing Street ? Even if so wildly improbable a
Saint existed in public life would he carry his heart
with More's spirit of daring laughter? I fear that if
such a man fasted, his press agency would see to it:
that the fact should be known. The trumpets would
blow in the market-place for the headlines declare
the glory of the great, the journalists show forth'
their handiwork! Even opening a Church bazaar
86 Carven from the Laurel Tree
is useful (and used) for the gaining of publicity.
Such piety is always portentously pompous.
More, however, hid goodness under the cloak of
good-fellowship, and his boon companions were not
allowed to remark his austerity. The company who
held their sides at his jests could hardly suspect that
the jester's heart was abiding quietly with God.
The cap and bells covered the Crown of Thorns.
Gaiety goes so commonly with sanctify that it would
be difficult to discover a Saint without it. But the
mockery of More is another matter, and raises a
stranger problem. Laughter, except among holy
people, puts holiness at a discount, but the English
wit covered up his piety, not only with hilarity (a
disguise usually effective enough) but with railery,
nay, almost with ribaldry.
It would be a psychological mistake so to analyse
a man's character as to separate his intellect from
his emotions, and if I point out the same paradox in
More's intellectual as in his social life, I do so to
show his unity. For the convenience of criticism,
however, it might be well to note that More seemed
to be a man of divided intellectual allegiance. In his
mind irreconcilables agreed. Of all the humanists
he was most human and most typical of his time.
In him the Middle Ages and the Renaissance met'
and kissed each other. Great Latinist as he was, he
wrote Greek better than Latin and thought in it bet-
ter. The pagan poets and the Fathers of the Church
shared the hospitality of his soul. He could turn
from the reading of Lucretius to lecture in St.
' Roman and Utopian More ' 87
Laurence Jewry on St. Augustine's " De Civitate
Dei.' But his irony was so Greek in its spirit that
he might have written Plato's sentence on a foolish
disputant : ' I saw then, but never before, Thrasyma-
chus blush, after he had acknowledged that justice
was virtue and wisdom, and injustice was ignorance
and vice.' Ruthless critic of ecclesiastical abuse as
More was. his satire was never so severe that he was
not ready to recall it should scandal arise. When
changing circumstances had made the reading of the
humanists' writings dangerous, he could say, ' In
these days, in which men by their own default mis-
construe and take harm out of the very Scripture of
God, until men better amend, if any man would now
translate Moria into English, or some other works,
either that I have myself written on this, albeit there
be none harm therein, folk yet being (as they be)
given to take harm from that that is good, I would
not only my darling's (Erasmus') books, but mine
own also, help to burn them both with mine own
hands, rather than folk should (though through
their own fault) take any harm of them, seeing that
I see them likely in these days so to do.'
To the making of More many things all admir-
able contributed. From the strict, honourable,
though somewhat parsimonious house of his father,
Sir John More, the judge, he passed at the age of
fourteen to the palace of Cardinal Morton, the
Chancellor ; and of this kindly, shrewd and humorous
old man he has given us an affectionate picture in
the Utopia. Morton was wise enough to see genius
88 Carven from the Laurel Tree
in the engaging boy who at his entertainments knew
how to make more impromptu merriment than the
professional players; and delighting in his wit, was
in the habit of prophecying to his guests that ' This
child here waiting at table, whoever shall live to see
it, will prove a marvellous rare man.' With such
encouragement and patronage More went to Ox-
ford, which he left two years later at the age of
eighteen, a finished scholar and the friend of the
greatest scholar of the day. Not even early fame or
the notice of such a man as Erasmus or the new
heady wine of the Renaissance sufficed to take away
from the brilliant youth a longing for the Cloister.
What the Cathusians failed to win. the Franciscans
nearly succeeded in snatching, and it was not until
More was twenty-four that he married, acting upon
the advice of Colet, his confessor. The young law-
yer, returned at about this time to Parliament, soon
made his mark, and though he had incurred the dis-
pleasure of Henry VII., the succession to the throne
of his son opened out the path of success for the
feet of the Saint. His public life is not the subject
of this essay, so I will do no more than mention the
fact that his ability as a lawyer and diplomat gained
for him before he was fifty the summit of his worldly
career, the office of Lord Chancellor. I am more
concerned here with the man than with the poli-
tician; with the patient, pious, humorous saint and
martyr, with the wit and philosopher, than witK
the diplomat whom Henry chose to pick his chest-
nuts out of the fire.
' Roman and Utopian More ' 89
Throughout all these years of incessant and multi-
farious public concerns, More had been leading the
humble and mortified life of an ascetic. Though he
was the father of a family and the ruler of a large
household, he managed by stealing time from the
"bed and table to write his books. When we remem-
"ber his engrossment in public affairs, the demands of
the King upon his leisure, and his habits of prayer,
it is miraculous that so much should have been writ-
ten. It could only have been accomplished by a
man of the most regular life and sweetest temper.
A wit is always in demand, and social intercourse
with a king cannot be avoided even in those rare
cases where the wit desires to avoid it. But More,
who found that being excessively popular in the
Court had its drawback in the fact that he could
never get home to his wife, moderated his gaiety in
order to lessen the King's desire for his conversa-
tion. How this was done we do not know. It must
liave been a difficult and delicate piece of diplomacy
that succeeded in gaining his release from the Court
without giving offence. Even a king less intelligent
or less ardent for amusement or less imperious
than Henry would have had to have been managed
with very careful tact under similar circumstances.
But More gained his end and spent quiet days in
Chelsea. There the affable Henry would come, in-
viting himself to dinner. But More, after walking
in the garden with the King's arm round his neck
a mark of intimate royal friendship accorded only
to himself was shrewd enough to whisper in Roper's
go Carven from the Laurel Tree
ear his estimate of the favour of Princes. ' I find his
Grace my very good lord indeed . . . howbeit, I
may tell thee, I have no cause to be proud thereof,
for, if my head would win him a castle in France (for
then there was war between us), it should not fail to
go/
Not yet had the Grand Turk shown himself, and
the future Chancellor was still basking in the sun of
Henry's geniality. But he held his honours with a
loose hand, for riches and public distinction were
never sought by him. Dearer was his quiet scholar-
ly life amidst his family, enlivened by an occasional
visit from Erasmus, with its riotous evenings of
jocular Latin conversation. Lady More must have
felt rather uncomfortable in having to listen to the
laughter which greeted jest and counter-jest in a lan-
guage she did not understand; but Margaret Roper
and More's other children, having been brought up
on the classics, must have enjoyed the conversation
of the hilarious scholars. Poor Lady More! The
worthy, worldly, middle-aged, unimaginative woman
was not quite the ideal wife for her husband. Yet
of her, Erasmus, with whom she could hardly have
had much in common, was able to say some words
of rich praise, adding for the glory of More's con-
siderate courtesy, ' He loveth his old wife ' (she was
his second) 'as well as if she were a young maid.'
In this atmosphere, full of unpretentious piety,
and of decent domesticities, the ' Utopia ' was writ-
ten. Of the difficulties in the way of its composition
the author speaks in the introductory letter to Peter
'Roman and Utopian More' 91
Gilles, when he begs pardon for the delayed manu-
script. This intriguing work has been largely mis-
understood, because of the difficulty of always being
sure how much of it may be taken as representing
More's own opinions. Other Utopians, Plato or
Swift or Bellamy or Samuel Butler with perhaps
the exception of the last on this list made their
point of propaganda quite clear, and their meaning
unmistakeable. But More, in the typical chapter on
Utopian religion, does not always leave the reader
certain as to whether he is speaking of the ante or
pre Christian Faith of the happy kingdom. Twice
he warns the unwary against too hasty a conclusion,
' For we have taken upon us,' he says, ' to show and
declare their laws and ordinances, and not to defend
them ' ; and again in conclusion, ' As I cannot agree
and consent to all things that he (Hathloday) said. . .
so must I needs confess and grant that many things
be in the Utopian weal-public, which in our cities I
may rather wish for than hope after.' The Utopia is
so often misunderstood, I imagine, because not one
out of ten of its readers know the ' Dialogue of Com-
fort.' In that book the speculative and apparently
sceptical turn of More's mind is balanced by his ex-
plicit faith and confidence in God. There is the Uto-
pia explained.
To me the amazing thing is the way in which the
piercing modernism of More's political and econo-
mical criticism is controlled by the sobriety of his
revolutionism. In the phrase about ' sheep eating
men ' with which he summed up the disaster of the
92 Carven from the Laurel Tree
change which had come over farming when pastur-
age was substituted for tillage, and again in his con-
demnation of the rapacity of the rich and in his fore-
shadowing of collectivism, he was handling highly
explosive stuff. But he would have men exercise
moderation. ' If you cannot even as you would
remedy vices, which use and custom hath confirmed,
yet for this cause you must not leave and forsake the
Commonwealth; you must not forsake the ship in a
tempest, because you cannot rule and keep down the
winds. . . But you must, with a crafty will and a
subtle brain, study and endeavour yourself, as much
as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and hand-
somely for the purpose, and that which you cannot
turn to good, so to order that it may not be very
bad.'
To the ' Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation '
we must turn for the essential More. This, his last
book, was written in the Tower during his imprison-
ment, and gains a tragic interest from that fact, and
because during the latter part of the composition a
piece of charcoal had to serve for pen. The high
courage and constancy of the man are evident upon
every page of the book; and its humorous sagacity
and the knowledge we have that in it the actual pro-
cess of consolation may be seen at work in the
author's own soul, make it one of the most priceless
of all writings. This is almost the only treatise on
consolation that really does console, for there is no-
thing academic about More's spirituality. A monk,
who is one of the most famous preachers of the day,
' Roman and Utopian More ' 93
once assured me that if he had to be shipwrecked on
a desert island with only one book, then that should
be the ' Dialogue of Comfort.' And yet the volume
is so neglected that a recent biographical dictionary
of literature does not so much as mention it !
More was not a mystic, except in the secondary
sense in which every Christian is a mystic. There
are no raptures or visions in his experience; for
though he belonged to the Middle Ages in his faith,
his temperament had the classic rationalism of
Greece. His devotion never soars very far from the
earth, and had no extravagance or ecstasy. Acute,
with the subtlety of the Renaissance, and sensible
with the humorous common-sense of the English,
his intellect bore the stamp of law and feared ima-
ginative flights. To this strong soul consolation
had to be reasonable, not emotional. He knew his
danger to a hair's breadth and fought the legal
battle for his head with all the forensic skill of the
Law courts. He was under no illusion. The pur-
pose of the King and the means of escape were as
clear as daylight to his clear mind. True to himself,
he went to the scaffold with many jests, but the
transports of other martyrs were foreign to his
nature. He balanced the gaining of the world
against his soul and gave a lawyer's verdict. The
world, the flesh and the devil strove with their lonely
antagonist and failed.
Three things stand out in the ' Dialogue.' The
first is the close Presence of God, and upon that:
More builds. ' If you be part of His flock, and be-
94 Carven from the Laurel Tree
lieve His promise, how can you be comfortless in
any tribulation, when Christ and His Holy Spirit,
and with them their inseparable Father, (if you put
full trust and confidence in Them) be never neither
one finger breadth of space, nor one minute of time
from you?' Warring against this Presence are the
treacheries of sin. It would not be easy to find a
saint who has written more usefully upon the varied
resources of the devil. His analysis of the sins of
sloth and pusillanimity and scrupulosity and pride
show a man who has met and recognised them in his
own experience. Of riches and More had been a
moderately rich man he has a special fear. ' Then
were there, I ween, no place in no time since Christ's
days hitherto, nor as I think in as long before that
neither, nor never shall there hereafter, in which
there could any man abide rich without the danger of
eternal damnation, even for his riches alone, though
he demeened it never so well.'
Above all, there shone from More during these
last days the certainty of his Apostolic faith. The
last word of a controversialist with the Lutherans
was that when difference of religious opinion arose
he would rather be on the side of the Saints. Speak-
ing of Purgatory, he says, 'Though they (the Pro-
testants) think there be none, yet since they deny not
that all the corps of Christendom by so many hun-
dred years have believed the contrary; and among
them all, the old interpreters of Scripture from the
Apostles' days down to our own time, of whom they
deny not many for holy Saints, that I dare not now
' Roman and Utopian More ' 95
believe these men against all those. These men
must of their courtesy hold my poor fear excused,
and I beseech our Lord heartily for them, that when
they depart out of this wretched world, they find no
Purgatory at all, so God keep them from Hell.'
Adamant as was his own conviction on the subject
of the oath of supremacy, Sir Thomas More never
made the slightest attempt to persuade any other
man to his own way of thinking. The title assumed
by the King of ' Supreme Head of the Anglican
Church ' had been qualified by the amending clause,
' So far as the law of Christ allows,' and many
Catholics took what was then the defensible course
of acknowledging it when accompanied by the quali-
fication. More would never say that they were
wrong to do so, but his reason and conscience for-
bade him the compromise. He weighed the evi-
dence like the lawyer he was, and then went to his
death for what seemed the trivial and pedantic point
of a flaw in a title deed ! Even when his judges
sneered at him for having no wish to live, urging
him to condemn the law outright, the prisoner would
only add with a proud humility. ' I have not been a
man of such holy living as I might be bold to offer
myself to death, but God, for my presumption,
might suffer me to fall.' Martyrdom was not of his
own seeking, and the legal astuteness More dis-
played in the fight he made for life would have gained
him acquittal from any but such a foresworn tribunal.
Not until his sentence was passed did he break his
reserve or explicitly declare his opinions.
96 Carven from the Laurel Tree
With that relief to his soul the saint's old gaiety
came back to him. To his judges, his wife, his
children, even to his executioner he showed a man-
ner oddly mixed of serenity and whimsicality. He
went placidly to the scaffold, jesting all the way,
and, having kissed the headsman, said the Miserere
psalm, and received the martyr's crown from the
hands of his Redeemer. Twenty years previously
he had described the death-bed traditions of the Uto-
pians : ' They think he shall not be welcome to God,
which, when he is called, runneth not to Him gladly,
but is drawn by force and sore against his will.
They therefore that see this kind of death do abhor
it, and them that so die they bury with sorrow and
silence.'
There is a strange consistency about this man.
His complexity lay only in the subtlety of his intel-
lect ; his motive was always single. Without the im-
petus of romanticism or enthusiasm 1 his integrity re-
mained steadfastly unshaken. Out of Holbein's
canvas he looks at us, wearing his habitual ironic
smile; at once the greatest and the most homely
Englishman of his age; the satirist who is the plain
man's saint.
THIS GREEN PLOT SHALL BE
OUR STAGE
FOR the temper of a period, for the roots and
the motives of its historical life, a ballad will
often convey as much as a battle, a drinking song as
the dooms of a dynasty, or the wanderings of a trou-
badour as the wanderings of a tribe. When men are
taken off their guard, as they are and not as they
want to appear, a tale may be the key to many a
Court chronicle. Even in our own age England
speaks, not in the Houses of Parliament, but in the
public houses. Knowing the songs of a nation we
need not bother to learn its laws. If this is true
even in cases where there have been careful historians
at work, it is still truer of the Middle Ages, where to
a great extent our knowledge of its mind has come
to us in stray and apparently trivial forms, through
parish accounts, wills and guild rolls. Much of the
foolish disdain which men learnt from the text-books
has been dispelled by archaeologists digging out from
old holes and corners small but vivid proofs of the
riches of the lost civilization.
Hardly in any way can the Middle Ages be better
tested than by their amusements; and of the record
of these, though much has been lost, enough has
98 Carven from the Laurel Tree
been fortunately left to enable us to reconstruct the
spirit of the time. We know now what epic enter-
tained the Baron in his castle, what play moved a
peasantry upon a holiday; we know the sort of ad-
ventures which thrilled them, the sort of jokes at
which they laughed, and knowing these things we
become free of their ancient and friendly company.
The wife of Bath, and the Miller, and the Friar, the
Prioress and the rest of their peers (never very sour
or lacking in comradeship, one would think!) un-
bend to us. We may travel with them an we will.
However, it is for the moment our purpose to ride
not to Canterbury, but to Chester, Coventry and
York.
Anyone consumed with the modern passion for
' origins ' would pick out the plays of the Suffering
Christ attributed at one time to St. Gregory Nazian-
zen, and trace the definite descent of the great cycles
through Hrotsvitha, and the French play of Adam,
to the 'Harrowing of Hell and the beginning of our
religious drama. Now the first mentioned play is
written in deliberate imitation of classical models,
whereas mystery plays mark a new beginning. Such
literary influence as was felt came more directly from
the chansons de geste of the wandering minstrels.
No art had, in the Middle Ages, a style for ecclesias-
tical use distinct from that in vogue for secular
needs. Churches were Gothic, because Gothic was
the best style, for a barn as for an abbey. Plain
chant was the popular mode in music, and was em-
ployed (with the necessary modifications) not only
This Green Plot shall be our Stage 99
for the Divine Office but for comic songs. The Sal-
vation Army to-day is alone in having this popular
spirit, though with this vital difference: its inspira-
tion derives from secular things ; in the Middle Ages
secular things are informed by religion. Society
was one whole of body, soul and spirit working to-
gether. The plays really began quite simply and spon-
taneously from the desire every man remembers
from his childhood for ' dressing up ' and impersona-
tion. Even if dramatic art had become completely
forgotten somebody would have invented it, casually
and without realising or demonstrating his origina-
lity. The liturgy of the Church has always been
largely representational, as indeed is the ritual of
every religion, and an effort arose to make the sym-
bolical explicit. Accordingly plays upon the life and
death of our Lord were written, in Latin since they
were appendices and explanations of the services of
Holy Week, and acted either in the Church or in
its porch as a link with worship.
But with the simultaneous growth of their enor-
mous popularity and of a vernacular poetry, the plays
had eventually of necessity to leave the church build-
ing for the streets of the town. When, in 1264, the
feast of Corpus Christi was established, and became
at once a sublime pageant illustrative of the whole
meaning of the Faith, a series of minor pageants
naturally followed, dramatic representation of divine
things which served equally to edify and amuse the
Faithful. The actors attended Mass and walked
in the great procession of the Blessed Sacrament
ioo Carven from the Laurel Tree
and, their religious duties fulfilled, began the plays,
setting forth the Christian's conception of the work-
ing of Providence and the end of man.
This play forsooth begin shall he
In worship of the Trinity.
Portable stages were erected at their several
stations and the artists commenced their entertain-
ment. How full a day's pleasure was offered may
be gauged from the fact that at York there were no
less than fifty-four distinct plays ! Here would the
shipwrights show Noah building an ark, there the
vintners the miracle of Cana. While the goldsmiths
were acting the adoration of the Kings, the bakers
would represent the Last Supper each guild as far
as possible being concerned in some work which de-
monstrated not only the Glory of God, but the worth
and skill of its own craftsmen.
Holiday humour was abroad, and devotion became
mixed and mingled with uproarious jocularity, so
much so that at times the motif of the play became
lost for very exuberance of hilarity. Noah came
near drowning not of water but of wit. He almost
forgot that he had built an ark in his desperate at-
tempt to get his wife away from her gossips.
For at a time thou drinkest a quart
And so will I ere I go.
The whole scene is one of rollicking comedy, down
to the instant when, saved in the nick of time, she
turns round upon her husband and (as the stage
directions put it) Dat alapam victa\ Many of the
jests were direct and not a little broad. The theme
This Green Plot shall be our Stage 101
of the trials of the married man was always turning
up, and the good old jokes were always welcome.
Local and family gibes delighted the audience con-
cerned, but though such allusions are necessarily lost
upon us there is enough of universal as opposed to
accidental humour, in most of these plays, for us to
imagine the roars of laughter which would greet
each fresh sally of Noah's wife or of the dreadful
but ridiculous Sathanas. Yet in the famous Wake-
field nativity play, after an absolute crescendo of
humour, after the stolen sheep had been put to rest
in the cradle and the audience had laughed its fill,
came some of the 'tenderest -and most touching
pathos in the whole of literature.
Haylle, sufferan savyoure, for thou has us soght :
Haylle, frely foyde and floure, that alle thyng has
wroght.
Haylle, fulle of favoure, that made alle of noght !
Haylle ! I kneylle and I cowre. A byrd have I broght
To my barne.
Haylle, lytylle tyne mop,
Of oure crede thou art crop :
I wold drynk on thy cop,
Lytylle day starne.
Haylle, dei lying deie, fulle of godhede,
I pray the be nere when that I have nede.
Haylle ! swete is thy chere : my hart wold blede
To se the sytt here in so poore wede,
With no pennys.
Haylle ! put furthe thy dalle,
I bryng the bot a balle :
Have and play the with alle,
And go to the tenys.
IO2 Carven from the Laurel Tree
The proscription of the Catholic Faith dealt a very
heavy blow to this popular religious drama. In
many places the guilds kept the paraphernalia of
their art, the 'jaws of Hell,' the 'coat of the Holy
Ghost' and the 'crown of our Lady,' and the
like, in the hope of a revival which never came.
Soon they had passed and were forgotten in the full
and conscious glory of the Elizabethan drama. Rus-
tic plays and pageants of a sort lingered on in spite
of puritan disapproval, and these, rather than the
nobler and more beautiful work of Catholic Eng-
land, were burlesqued by Shakespeare in Quince, the
carpenter, Snug, the joiner, Bottom, the weaver,
Flute, the bellows-mender, Snout, the tinker, and
Starveling, the tailor. Shakespeare's parody, how-
ever, is probably touched to great extent with the
professional's supercilious contempt for the amateur.
Crude though the old plays may have been, there
was much deep humour in them and a homely grace
which had gladdened many a simple heart.
A SECRET ENGLAND
THE first sight which greets a traveller reaching
Bosham is a railway station and a row of dismal
red-brick houses disappointing to the eyes and the
soul that had looked for better things. But if the
visitor perservere, a long, winding lane will bring
him out suddenly upon one quiet straggling street,
with the church and the quay at the end and the brown
broads beyond. When the tide is out the fishing-
boats wallow shamelessly in the grey mud which
seems to be everywhere; at other times Bosham is
serene and complete in its beauty.
I arrived in the company of a friend with whom I
had beguiled the weary miles in argument as to the
right pronunciation of the name of our Mecca.
Hailing as he did from Streatham, he might have
been expected to know better than to have insisted
upon the word being Bosh-am. It was in vain that I
protested against such a disregard of etymology, and
pointed out that just as Horsham is the Ham of the
Horse, so Bosham is obviously the Ham of the Bos
whatever the Bos may be. No conviction came until
he had enquired the way to ' Bosh-am ' of a fringe-
bearded Sussex labourer who directed him unequivo-
cally to Bos-ham ! Whereupon I strode on in
triumph.
104 Carven from the Laurel Tree
To find lodgings was not easy; for in the summer
artists swoop down with palettes and easels to take
possession of all the thatched cottages. But by the
gifts of sundry pennies to small boys we were at last
taken to a good woman, who, having eyed us with
intense disapproval, and after consultation with some
invisible power, according to the slow local manner,
agreed to give us what we needed.
The bacon and eggs and beer being disposed of,
we lit our pipes and strolled out to see what we could
in the dusk. The artists had all gone home to roost,
and though we saw them in the morning, each sur-
rounded by his circle of rustic or seafaring critics,
yet for this one still hour we sat on the low sea-wall
and watched the sun set over by Chidham and the
fishing boats grow more and more shadowy in the
darkness ; while behind us the low spire of the church
pushed upwards through the trees. We smoked in
strong silence for a time, then stretched ourselves,
knocked the ashes out of our pipes, and walked back
to bed.
In the morning, after a bathe in delicious naked-
ness from the deserted quay, we set out to see the
village more closely, and finding it a place full of old
runes and memories of our race, I propose setting
some of these things down for you.
Bosham, in a way now exceeding rare in England,
has its life centred in the church, which digs its
roots so deeply into the past as to have been founded
upon the ruins of a Roman basilica. Tradition has
it, indeed, that Vespasian, as general of the second
A Secret England 105
legion, built a house here for himself, which, in view
of Bosham's proximity to the Roman camps and
road, is just probable. Be that as it may, the
Roman foundations of the church are authentic
enough.
In the seventh century came Dicul, a monk from
Ireland with half a dozen brothers in religion, who
made, according to the 1 Venerable Bede, 'a very small
monastery ' here, but whose earnest labours were ut-
terly fruitless, for ' the whole of the kingdom of the
South Saxons was ignorant of the name and faith of
God.' Bede continues with the story of its conversion
by the preaching of St. Wilfrid. ' Bishop Wilfrid, by
preaching the Gospel to this race, not only rescued it
from the misery of everlasting damnation, but also
from an unutterable calamity of temporal destruc-
tion. For three years before his coming into the
province, no rain had fallen in those parts, in conse-
quence of which a very severe famine overtook the
people and cut them off with a horrible death . . .
On the very day, however, on which this people re-
ceived the baptism of the Faith a gentle and plentiful
rain fell. The earth revived and the field grew green;
the season became pleasant and fruitful. . . Be-
sides, the Bishop, when he had come into the pro-
vince and had seen there such great sufferings from
hunger, taught them to obtain food by fishing. . .
By this kindness the Bishop won over the hearts and
affections of all, and soon they began to hope more
readily for spiritual blessings from his preaching, since
by his agency they had obtained earthly blessings.'
Not very long after, for its body and several of its
pillars and doors are of unmistakably Saxon origin,
a church arose, the first in this part of the coun-
try, whose benefice subsequently became one of
the richest in England. It figures in the second
scene of the Bayeux tapestry where Harold, on the
first stage of his disastrous journey to Normandy,
is riding from London very splendidly with his
thanes, a hawk on his wrist and his hounds leaping
in front. The inscription reads:
UBI HAROLD DUX ANGELORUM ET SUI
MILITES EQUITANT AD BOSHAM.
Two men, crossing themselves, I should judge, are
depicted entering the church, which, since it is not
in the least like the real Bosham church, and has no
tower, is conveniently labelled :
ECCLESIA.
To this very church Wulff , the son of Sweyn, and
his Danes, came once, sailing up to the harbour in
their long galleys, and finding nothing of value ex-
cept the great bell (for Bosham was very poor in
those days) they took that with them upon their
ships. But behold a miracle! for the pirates had
not gone far down the Channel when the deck
opened (some say by the intervention of -St. Nicholas)
and the bell dropped into the hold. Then the deck
closed again and the bottom of the ship gaping to al-
low its passage, the bell sank sheer in a place known
as Bell Haven or Bell Hole, where it lies to this day.
And whenever the bells ring from the tower of the
A Secret England 107
church, the ravished tenor still booms in unison from
the deep.
A later legend tells how the only way of raising
the lost bell was by drawing it to land by a team of
seven milk-white oxen. Some years ago, the story
runs, this was tried ; and three times the bell rose to the
surface and three times fell back again. In despera-
tion the oxen were re-examined; but from their soft,
wet snouts to the tips of their long tails no hair not
pure white could be found. So for six; but' (alas!)
upon the seventh an inspection revealed one black
hair! and that, of course, explains the failure to
raise the bell.
But how shall I tell more of Bosham, or of the
evil deed that Swegen, Harold's brother, did there
when he took Biorn, the nephew of Canute, and
slew him in Arun-Mouth, or of Herbert de Bosham,
the faithful friend and biographer of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, or of Canute, who forbade the tide to
come further, sitting in his chair on Bosham mud?
What pleases me even more is to think of that priest
who was disturbed at his Mass at the high altar
by his brawling colleague at Allhallows altar hard by,
who, after many appeals for a more softly-sung
sursum corda, became at last so incensed as to stride
down and punch the disturbing cleric's head being
fined twopence for so doing by the ecclesiastical
court.
The present vicar, Mr. K. H. MacDermott, re-
verently guards the local traditions, and it is to his
courtesy and the scholarship contained in his book
io8 Carven from the Laurel Tree
on Bosham, that I owe much. But a vicar of an-
other sort, a certain disreputable William Kilwick,
from 1800 to 1838, held the living and a chestful of
ancient records. ' For the doeuments themselves/
as Mr. C. J. Longcraft writes, 'in a literary or
archaeological point of view, the vicar cared not a
rush ... but there was an impression on his mind
that in some way or other, an increase of tithe might
be gleaned from the contents of the chest; and when-
ever it happened that anyone having, or professing,
an acquaintance with the writing of departed cen-
turies came in the way of the vicar, he sent, as a
matter of course, for a batch of the papers, and th<
were thereupon examined over a pipe and a jorum of
the vicar's ale.' Tom Kervel, however, his pari u
clerk, became so disgusted at being ordered to fetch
what he considered a lot of mere rubbish at all hours
and the most unreasonable weathers, that he deter-
mined to burn them and did.
And though with the last grey embers went so
much of the recorded past, the spirit of England,
and especially of South England, sits in Bosham
deathless still.
' The heathen kingdom Wilfred found
Dreams, as she dwells apart,'
quiet and kindly and full of old memories by the
Sussex sea.
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