Collected Essays (29 page)

He was not unfaithful to Myra: all his loves were platonic (in spite of children).

After Queen Anne’s death he soon became involved in the same chain of circumstances as drew the fiery Atterbury from the see of Rochester to a peevish senility in Rome. It began with secret letters, proceeded inevitably through house searchings (manuscripts of unpublished poems were burned by his servants, who mistook them for dangerous documents), imprisonment, financial ruin and exile on the Continent. Walpole’s government was hardly more corrupt than the Jacobite court. Miss Handasyde describes in detail the libels and bickerings and jealousies of Paris. It was not an air which suited the foolish idealism but unselfish fidelity of Lansdowne; he was happy for a while, raised to the dizzy height of a shadow dukedom, but the bubble eventually burst. He had heard plenty of other men falsely accused of treachery, and his own turn came. He was called a traitor by James’s sister-in-law, the Princess of Turenne, at the Hôtel de Bouillon, ‘where all France assembles’. He wrote a letter of pathetic literary dignity to James III, he paraphrased Shakespeare and declared: ‘God knows, sir, I have had no occasion to betray you; if I had consider’d my fortune I needed but to have forsaken you.’ The son of Mary of Modena did not reply and Lansdowne made his peace with Hanover.

He had ten more years of life, spent much of it in literary controversy (characteristically his feud was against the dead and on behalf of the dead), revised an old play and called it (again characteristically)
Once a Lover; and always a Lover
. It brought, Miss Handasyde writes, ‘a pale reflection of the glitter and polish of Congreve on to the dull and respectable stage of George Lillo and Moore’. His niece was a little shocked by it; her uncle was old-fashioned. He died a fortnight after his wife, who had buzzed busily from infidelity to infidelity till the end. His life had not been a very happy one. Fortune had consistently frowned on him, fobbing him off with occasional fictitious successes, like his shadow dukedom. He had written with some wit:

1933

CHARLES CHURCHILL

W
HEN
Charles Churchill died in Boulogne in 1764, all the English ships in the harbour struck their colours. Fifty years later Byron found his grave neglected, among ‘the thick deaths of half a century’, and the gardener quite ignorant of Churchill’s fame. The very quality in his work which gave him immediate popularity (he profited nearly one thousand pounds, Mr Laver states,
*7
by his two first poems) made his name short-lived. Like other minor satirists, Rochester and Oldham, he was down in the dust of the every-day battle; his satires are less often of the great than of those small tiresome provocative men as teasing as horse-flies whom history forgets. Dryden’s satires belonged from the first to history; Churchill’s to the newspapers; and his poems have the fascination of an old news-sheet still stained from the coffee-house, the charm of something evanescent which has survived against all odds.

Here are the echoes of queer cases and queer people: Mary Tofts of Godalming who bore, according to her own account, a litter of fifteen rabbits; Betty Canning, who claimed that she had been kidnapped by a procuress; the Cock Lane Ghost, as fraudulent as either; the Chaplain of the Lock Hospital, who wrote a book in favour of polygamy; the Rev. John Browne, the dramatist who committed suicide because his doctors forbade him to go to St Petersburg to organize Russian education for the Empress; and all the horde of actors who in their beginnings were everything in the world but men of the theatre: sadler, wigmaker, tallow chandler, apothecary, old Etonian, bar-tender, silversmith, wine merchant.

Mr Laver’s notes on these people are invaluable, but he seems uncertain in what educational strata he will find his readers. This beautiful edition can hardly be intended for an ignorant public, and its purchasers might be spared some of the notes – on Clive, David Garrick, and Sir Isaac Newton for example. Otherwise if the notes err at all, it is that they are too businesslike. With the horrid example before him of Tooke, Churchill’s former editor, Mr Laver has been afraid of digressions. Something is lost. One misses in the note on Woodward, the comic actor, this revealing touch: ‘The moment he opened his mouth on the stage, every muscle of his face ranged itself on the side of levity. The very tones of his voice inspired comic ideas, and though he often wished to act tragedy, he could never speak one serious line with propriety.’ A note like this is more valuable than the date of a birth and a death.

The comparison of Churchill to Rochester is inevitable. Both satirists died worn out in the early thirties; both were men without moral fastidiousness, the frequenters of brothels, who, retiring at intervals to be cured from the same diseases, damned the world for the vices they did not share (one remembers Gleeson White’s remark quoted by Mr Yeats: ‘Wilde will never lift his head again, for he has against him all men of infamous life’). Both remained loyal to one friend, Rochester to Savile, Churchill to Wilkes, and to one mistress (Elizabeth Barry joins hands across the years with Elizabeth Carr). The comparison must not be drawn too closely. Churchill was a far finer satirist. Rochester’s lines were too rough and angry; he had not the coolness of temper to find, as Churchill did, the final damning epithet. These lines on Webberburn are beyond the accomplishment of uncontrolled hate:

There are moments when Churchill stands almost level with Dryden and Pope; it is only because his lyrical talents were so inferior to his satirical that in the final estimate he cannot be ranked with Rochester, perhaps not even with Oldham. Mr Laver picks out of
Gotham
, his rather tedious essay in Utopian politics, a few charming lines on flowers as formal as a Dutch parterre. They are hardly enough to justify even Mr Laver’s modest claim that ‘in his rural retreat he had time to look about him, the sights and sounds of the country steal imperceptibly into his verse’. He was urban through and through. If he had not given all his genius to satire, he might possibly have made a reputation as a lyric poet, but he would have belonged to the school of Prior. The lines which conclude the first book of
The Ghost
(a poem Mr Laver rather underestimates) have all Prior’s prettiness, saved by all his sophistication:

1933

THE LOVER OF LEEDS

R
ALPH
T
HORESBY
, the topographer of Leeds, traced – rather dubiously – his family back to the reign of Canute; and certainly he could not have picked a better origin for a topographer than the reign of a king who tried to turn back the tide. That is the hopeless task on which they are all engaged, beating time back from a gravestone, a piece of pottery, a grassy mound. One finds them on their knees in little country churches rubbing brasses: they push ungainly bicycles up steep country lanes towards a Roman
vallum
: they publish at their own expense the churchwardens’ accounts of Little Bilbury. Vestry books and Enclosure Acts ruin their eyesight. It is one of the most innocent – and altruistic – of human activities, for a topographer never becomes a rich man through his researches: no Kidd’s treasure has ever been discovered under a hawk-stone, at best a piece of Roman piping; and fame in their lifetime is severely limited to men of their own kind and after death to historians’ footnotes, unless like Aubrey or Anthony à Wood some eccentricity, some untopographical malice, catches the attention of posterity. Often they are clergymen – they have so much to do with churches, sometimes they are civil engineers (the profession somehow goes with the bicycle), and sometimes, as in the case of Thoresby, merchants.

Thoresby, the unsuccessful cloth merchant, will never be a popular figure like Aubrey and Wood, although he kept a diary – the town he chose is perhaps against him, for who today will trouble to hunt through the streets of that black city for the sites of his mills and bridges? But none the less in honesty, disinterestedness, piety, and precision he may be taken as the pattern of a topographer. I don’t know what the dictionary distinction may be between a topographer and an antiquarian, but I think of an antiquarian as a man who dwells permanently among the hawk-stones and
vallums
, never coming nearer to his own day than a
wapentake
, one with little interest in human beings – in So-and-So who must pay to the Church use ‘at Wytsentyd next a stryk of mawllte’ and somebody else who was a ‘defrauder’ and owes 2d. The topographer takes a small familiar patch of ground and repopulates it: he experiments with time as much as Mr Dunne, so that it is not Leeds – or your own country parish – as you know it that he presents, so much as a timeless God’s-eye Leeds with all the houses that ever stood there re-erected, interpenetrating. Is the result something nearer Leeds than a guide book, a collection of photographs, a map? One doesn’t know, but certainly men like Thoresby, and earlier men like Plot and Aubrey, thought so, and even if we do not share their religious belief (I have yet to come across an atheistic topographer), their work attracts by its very inutility. Out of wars and the decay of civilizations the historian may spin theories which whether true or not can affect human lives, but this – this is beautifully useless, this precise painstaking record of superseded stone.

A little above this is the
Moot-Hall
in the Front of the
Middle-Row
, on one side of which is one of the best-furnished
Flesh-Shambles
in the North of England: on the other the
Wool-Market
for
Broad-Cloth
which is the All in All.

There speaks the lover, the lover of what you see in the plate called ‘The Prospect of Leeds’ – two churches, a town hall like a German toy, a little river with a few sailing ships and a bridge, and perhaps two hundred houses trailing gently off into the fields where an artist sits on the grass.

What sort of life do topographers lead? We know the bicycle and the back bent by brasses, but if we want to know more we cannot do better than read Thoresby’s diary. For the times, with topographers hardly change. Born just before the Restoration, Thoresby’s period included the Popish Plot, the Revolution, the wars with France. The wars
did
affect him – they made the price of paper dear and delayed a little the publication of
Ducatus Leodiensis
, and at the time of the Revolution the rumour that the Irish were ravaging the country, spread by God knows what Orange agents, struck home in Leeds with a night alarm – ‘Horse and arms! Horse and arms! Beeston is burnt, and only some escaped to bring the doleful tidings!’ – a fine topographical lament. Yet Thoresby admits himself that he was ‘more immediately concerned’ that year with a little fire in his house which burnt his children’s coats hanging on a line. No, he had little interest in great events, in his trade or even the government of his local town. He paid a fine of £20 rather than be an alderman and his eventual ‘conversion’ from nonconformity was partly, one feels, due to the presence of good antiquarians on the bench of bishops, partly his desire simply to avoid trouble – for the sake of his studies. There is a charming passage in which he refers to a friend’s ‘little Paradise, his library’, but Thoresby himself was no bookworm. He would ride miles to hear a story, to copy an epitaph, to preserve from time. . . . Topographers are not selective – everyone who ever lived, any building which ever existed, contributes to the ideal city, so that the habit of collecting grows and Thoresby’s museum included such various things as a toothbrush from Mecca, the Crown of an Indian King, a large Prussian Boot, the hand and arm of quartered Montrose, just as his successors collected postage stamps, cigarette cards, even tram tickets. Pedigrees of all the leading families, ‘strange accidents’ like the ‘Stones that came out of the Hands and Feet of the Rev. and pious Mr Blackbeard, once Lecturer at
Leedes
’ – all were part of this city in the mind. Sometimes he arrived too late: we watch him peer in vain at an inscription: ‘Alexander Foster, who departed this life the 27th June, 167 . . . aetat 61:

The rest not legible.’

But one is glad he was in time to preserve from weather and lichen:

and this sad conceit:

Alas! a topographer needs a topographer in turn to preserve what he has preserved. Thoresby’s book, of course, is there, but his collection left to a clerical son was sold, scattered, destroyed. Montrose’s arm found a temporary home with a Dr Burton, but against other items in the auctioneer’s catalogue there are grim notes. ‘Eggs – All broken’, ‘Serpents – Thrown away’, ‘Plants – all rotten and thrown on the dunghill’. And as for Leeds itself – well, we may question whether the dunghill, too, was not its proper destination, though Thoresby would not have thought so, glad of a chance to record another century of sooty life. He would have said, perhaps, with his plainness and simplicity and the smirk of satisfaction you see on his portrait, that one can fare further and fare worse, and it is true that his own family came to an abrupt end in far away Calcutta, in a worse Black Hole than his ideal city was ever to become.