Stilted Formulas of Courtesy in the Past

The Weekly Machen

In the following installment of the irregular series, “Odd Volumes,” we find the books “reviewed” to be little more than starting points for the meditations of Arthur Machen. He issues warnings on the dangerous game of literary commentary, grants his two shillings on a poetic argument, and discusses views on the mystical role of art in the life of man. It is a rewarding article rich in literary allusions and quotes from a well-read thinker.

The following is not listed in the bibliography by Goldstone and Sweetser.

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Odd Volumes:
Stilted Formulas of Courtesy in the Past
by
Arthur Machen
November 26, 1910

“We scarcely see a human touch,” Lord Rosebery admits, speaking of his hero, “Chatham” (Humphreys). But here and there, apart from the welter of Whig politics, one finds points of interests in the book. For example, young William Pitt, writing to his mother in the ‘seventeen-twenties,’ begins “Dear Madam,” and subscribes himself as follow:—

          I am
               Madam yr most Dutifull
                    Son.

The oddest and most unexpected survival of these stilted forms is recorded in Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.”

Everybody, I hope, remembers Colonel Grangerford, an aristocrat of the Mississippi mud-banks. He lived in a double log-house, and Mrs. Grangerford smoked a corn-cob pipe. Colonel Grangerford’s grandfather was, probably, a small Scotch tenant framer who had emigrated somewhere about 1750. But:

          When him and the old lady came down in the morning, all the family got up put of their chairs and give them good-day, and didn’t set down again until they had set down. Then Tom and Bob [sons] went to the sideboard where the decanters was, and mixed a glass of bitters and handed it to him, and he held it in his hand and waited till Tom’s and Bob’s was mixed, and then they bowed and said, “Our duty to you, Sir, and Madam.”

There is something very interesting about the mixture of early eighteenth century formulas of courtesy with the rough life of corn-cob pipes and “corn-pone” meals on the banks where Dickens found Eden.

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And there is a classic instance of the buckrammed politeness of the time being used as well as a veil for the most savage and righteous indignation that had ever been expressed. Thus Johnson repudiates the pompous approbation of Lord Chesterfield, bestowed when all the difficulties of the great work has been overcome—without the help of Chesterfield:

        The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. …
          Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, my lord, your lordship’s most humble, most obedient servant,

Sam. Johnson.

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Mr. James McKechnie has published “Meredith’s Allegory: The Shaving of Shagpat” (Hodder and Stoughton). The work is an interpretation of the supposed mysteries of “Shagpat,” and the author is a daring man.

For the ingenious commentator on romance is often in great danger of finding concealed meanings that were never intended.

I remember being told many years ago that “the Snark” really means Popularity; but though my informant was a clergyman I have my doubts as to the soundness of his view.

Then there is “Don Quixote.” The explanatory game began in this case with Père Rapin’s assertion (1674) that the book was a satire on the Duke of Lerma. Then a Spanish writer smelt allusions to the Inquisition, Walter Savage Landor found that “Don Quixote” was “the most dexterous attack made against the worship of the Virgin” and another critic—a Spaniard again—maintained that Dulcinea was “the objective soul of Don Quixote,” and that the work is a philosophical treatise.

It is a dangerous game. But, oddly enough, there seems reason to suppose that there is a hidden allegory in “Robinson Crusoe”—of all the books in the world! As far as I remember, Defoe intended the Desert Island to typify a prolonged fit of sulks from which he—or a friend—had suffered.

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Mr. Edward Thomas, reviewing Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s “Alarms and Discussions” (Methuen) in the Chronicle, remarks of his author:

          He says somewhere that the poet has an uncommon way of expressing what the common man feels; if so, his claim to be a poet is small.

And I am not sure that I agree with either party to the dispute. I do not know, for example, about the phrase “uncommon way.” It is an uncommon way, inasmuch all great poetry is an uncommon thing, rarely encountered; in that sense the word may stand.

But if by “uncommon” is meant contorted, or oddly constructed, or queerly worded, then I should differ; some of the finest poetry in the world is absolutely simple, absolutely pellucid. For example:

          Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
          The earliest pipe of half-awken’d birds
          To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
          The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
          So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

And, as against Mr. Thomas, I should be inclined to think that it is the poet’s function to interpret to “the common man” that common man’s subconscious feelings.

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The late Count Tolstoi held a monstrous and paradoxical view on this question: that the only true judge of a work of art is an ignorant peasant.

It is necessary to guard against the other extreme: that art is something super-added to human nature by a process of “culture.” This latter heresy is at the root of much of the “Baconian” nonsense; the people who are for Bacon as the author of the “Plays” cannot believe that a man of indifferent education could have been a great poet.

It is odd that while Shakespeare’s education was, no doubt, a smattering, Milton was a highly cultured and educated and learned man.

Shelley, again, was a scholar; Keats got his mythology from Lemprière. “Kubla Khan” is the work of a man versed in all wisdom of the schools; “Kilmeny” of an ignorant and boorish Scottish shepherd.

It seems, then, that to establish any certain ratio between the poetic faculty and education is to attempt to square the psychological square.

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While we are on this topic it is interesting to quote a dictum of the late Oscar Wilde’s. I have just read it in Mr. Humphrey’s very pretty little collection, “Oscariana.” “We spend our days,” said Wilde, “each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.”

Exactly; because, as I have explained before in this column, art gives us things in their reality, in their essence.

And as every man is gifted with a palate for food and drink, which he may destroy or cultivate to a high point of perfection; so every man has in him the sense of art.

The “art palate,” naturally enough, requires more pains to be taken with it than the vintage-palate. But we expect the higher work to demand the greater labour.

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The question of the price of new novels, asleep for the moment, is sure to wake up again. The difficulty is this. We are all agreed that 4s. 6d. is not too much to give for a good book; but, then, we cannot tell whether a new novel is a good book till we have read it.

Going farther back into the matter; the real difficulty is in the production by tens and scores and hundreds of novels, which are, frankly, of no use at all. They have no merit of any sort or kind; they are not funny, they are not exciting, they are not original, they are not well written, they have neither character nor “characters.”

They almost make the “non-ens”—the existence of nothing—an imaginable idea.

But, somehow, or other, they form a marketable commodity.

“Which,” as Cousin Feenix observed, “is a devilish disagreeable reflection for a man.”

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The Weekly

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