Shelburne Essays

By

Paul Elmer More

Fourth Series

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G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London Imic&erbocfcer press 1907

GENERAL

COPYRIGHT, 1906

BY

PAUL ELMER MORE

Published, December, 1906 Reprinted, January, 1907

Ube •Knickerbocker prcee, flew

ADVERTISEMENT

The first of these essays was written for the Inter national Quarterly. Those on Franklin and Paradise Lost appeared in the Independent. All the others are taken from the literary pages of the New York Evening Post. In several cases a good deal of new matter has been added for the present publication.

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CONTENTS

PAGE

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW . . . . i

FANNY BURNEY 35

A NOTE ON " DADDY" CRISP 61

GEORGE HERBERT >66

JOHN KEATS 99

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 129

CHARGES LAMB AGAIN 156

WALT WHITMAN 180

WILLIAM BLAKE 212

THE THEME OF " PARADISE LOST" . . . 239 THE LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE . . .254

OF

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SHELBURNE ESSAYS

FOURTH SERIES

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW

Some thirty years ago, in 1875 to be exact, that unstable compound, trie Knglish Church, was shocked by the news that a Cornish cler gyman, dying away from home, had received the sacraments from the hands of a Roman priest. Over the head of his young wife, who had summoned the . ministrant to his bedside, there was poured a bitter stream of controversy, as was the wont of the Establishment in those days ; and the storm was not allayed by the pub lication a few months later of a somewhat irre sponsible biography of the apostate by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. It was then seen that this death bed conversion was only the last act of a life crammed with eccentricities, and from that day to this the Vicar of Morwenstow has enjoyed a kind of pre-eminence in curiosity. At last his son-in law, Mr. C. E. Byles, has collected his scattered prose and verse in two attractive volumes, and has added to these a full and accurate record of i

;2\ SHELBURNE ESSAYS

his Hfe.1 There is no doubt as to the value of the result. Hawker cannot by any stretch of cour tesy be called quite a great writer, but I do not hesitate to say that the works and biography to gether bring us acquainted with one of the most original and most interesting personalities of the past century. He is likely to be remembered longer than some who have achieved more as artists.

And if he cannot be ranked among the great, at least his writings, long before Mr. Baring- Gould made him a subject of romance, had at tained an anomalous celebrity. One of his curi ous methods of reaching the public was to print off a poem in the form of leaflets, which he then inclosed, like advertisements, 5n business and friendly letters. In this way and through other obscure channels of publication, some of his poems attained a kind of life apart from their author. They even received the dubious praise of being imitated and stolen, and his best work had a humourous trick of gaining currency as anonymous and ancient folklore. His Sir Beville

1 Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall. By R. S. Hawker. New York: John Lane, 1903.

Cornish Ballads and Other Poems. By R. S. Hawker. John Lane, 1904.

The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (Sometime Vicar of Morwenstow). By his Son-in-law, C. E. Byles. John Lane, 1905.

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 3

was included in Major Egerton Leigh's Ballads and Leg ends of Cheshire, published in 1867, where it was described as "A Royalist song found amongst the family papers in an old oak chest, at Brdeswick Hall, one of the seats of the Minshull family." Nor was this a solitary instance. Most notable of all was the fortune of his Song of the Western Men, which, as the ballad that has raised the loudest discussion, may here be quoted entire:

A good sword and a trusty hand !

A merry heart and true ! King James's men shall understand

What Cornish lads can do !

And have they fixed the where and when ?

And shall Trelawny die ? Here 's twenty thousand Cornish men

Will know the reason why !

Out spake their Captain brave and bold :

A merry wight was he : — " If London Tower were Michael's hold,

We 'd set Trelawny free !

" We '11 cross the Tamar, land to land :

The Severn is no stay : With ' one and all,' and hand in hand ;

And who shall bid us nay ?

" And when we come to London Wall,

A pleasant sight to view, Come forth ! come forth ! ye cowards all :

Here 's men as good as you."

4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

Trelawny he 's in keep and hold :

Trelawny he may die : But here's twenty thousand Cornish bold Will know the reason why !

The stanzas were first published by Hawker anonymously in a provincial newspaper, when he was twenty-three. With the exception of the italicised refrain, which is traditional and was supposed by Hawker to allude to Sir Jonathan Trelawny, one of the seven Bishops imprisoned by James II., the poem is entirely original. Yet so well had it caught the popular vein that it soon passed for an ancient ballad. Mr. Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal Society of London, had it printed as such on a broadside ; Sir Walter Scott, in a note to his own poems, wrote of it as "a curious and spirited specimen" of the popular ballad; and Macaulay, in his History of England y used it as an indication of the feeling in Cornwall during the trial of the bishops. It has since been discovered that Hawker himself was partly mis taken, and that the refrain alludes to an earlier Trelawny than the persecuted Churchman; but that is small matter. No wonder that the author contemplated his ravished honours with some jeal ousy. "All these years," he exclaimed bitterly, "the Song has been bought and sold, set to music and applauded, while I have lived on among these far-away rocks unprofited, unpraised, and un known. This is an epitome of my whole life. Others have drawn profit from my brain, while

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 5

I have been coolly relinquished to obscurity and unrequital and neglect."

And as with his works, so with the man. For years before his death people who had scarcely heard the name of Robert Stephen Hawker knew vaguely of the strange Vicar of Morwenstow, and associated his oddities with the wonders of the West Country. Visitors to Devonshire and the Duchy of Cornwall turned aside, as did Tennyson on a memorable occasion, from the haunts of King Arthur and the relics of a thousand super stitions to break bread with the lonely parson whose life was absorbed in the spirit of the land. And what a land! Beauty and terror there divide the scene between them, and the recollections of saint and human fiend jostle each other for pos session. There is Kynance Cove, on the Lizard, which Swinburne, in his exaggerated way, thinks the most incomparably lovely spot in the world. Here one may follow up some river valley of many-changing charms till suddenly he comes out on the wide, rocky moors, whose vastness seems more lonely than the sea, and whose mys teries have wrought an indescribable fear in the minds of men. Barely a score of miles west of Morwenstow, on the north coast, rises the stern headland of Tintagel (or Dundagel; it is spelt in many ways), which fame has made the birthplace of Arthur, and hallowed and saddened with the loves of Tristram and Iseult and King Mark. It may almost be called the Bethlehem of Ro-

6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

mance. One approaches it to-day through a dark ravine that drops precipitously to the sea ; and standing on the shore, one looks up and sees that the great cliff on the left has been rent asunder, how long ago cannot be told, leaving a chasm between the two ruined castles, in one of which Ygerne shut herself up against the guilty passion of Uther Pendragon, but in vain. Through that riven gate the wet wind rises and the sound of waves that are said never to be still ; and one thinks of Hawker's noble image :

There stood Dundagel, throned : and the great sea Lay, a strong vassal at his master's gate, And, like a drunken giant, sobb'd in sleep !

Or, if the mood of the waters is more boisterous, it may be that Swinburne's swinging lines break on the memory, as he describes the carrying of Iseult, with the fire of the magic potion already in her veins, up the steep path, while King Mark and his knights cluster before the walls and look down on the climbing procession:

So with loud joy and storm of festival

They brought the bride in up the towery way

That rose against the rising front of day,

Stair based on stair, between the rocks unhewn,

To those strange halls wherethrough the tidal tune

Rang loud or lower from soft or strengthening sea,

Tower shouldering tower, to windward and to lee,

With change of floors and stories, flight on flight,

That clomb and curled up to the crowning height

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 7

Whence men might see wide east and west in one And on one sea waned moon and mounting sun. And severed from the sea-rock's base, where stand Some worn walls yet, they saw the broken strand, The beachless cliff that in the sheer sea dips, The sleepless shore inexorable to ships, And the straight causeway's bare gaunt spine between The sea-spanned walls and naked mainland's green.

Inland from Tintagel, over the Camel River, stands Slaughter Bridge, where, according to tradition, Arthur was defeated in that great battle of the West, and where he got his death wound. Further on lies Dozmar6 Pool, in the desolate moorland. Here it was that the King, wander ing with Merlin, beheld an arm clothed in white samite rise out of the water, and in the hand the mystical sword Kxcalibur. And down to this same lake came Sir Bedivere from his stricken lord and cast the blade from him; and afterward appeared the barge bearing the three Queens, and wafted the dying man to his rest. It is not hard for a lover of poetry who stands on that shore when the homeless breeze is astir, to hear in im agination the cry that issued from the boat, breaking into —

an agony

Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world.

But to the unlettered moormen the wailing of the storm is more likely to sound like the anguish of

8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

-P

a certain John Tregeagle of infamous memory, whose ghost, for an ancient, cruel sin, is com pelled forever to bale the water of Dozmare with ? pierced limpet shell; while Satan himself lurks among the reeds and leaps, roaring, upon him if for a moment he slackens in his task. The country is haunted with these weary revenants who keep alive the memory of old wrongs, and not a few of Hawker's poems are a retelling of the local legends of this sort.

It is natural that those who travelled thither to gather up the traditions of the land should have included the little hamlet of Morwen- stow in their pilgrimage. Tennyson, as I have said, did so in 1848, when he was working at his Idyls of the King, and he has left in his journal this brief record of the visit : "June 2nd — Took a gig to Rev. S. Hawker at Morwen- stow, passing Comb valley; fine view over sea; coldest manner of Vicar until I told my name, then all heartiness. Walk on cliff with him; told of shipwreck." The note is brief and dry, as befits a great man writing of a lesser — lesser, although to some there is a note in Haw ker's poem on the Sangraal which almost compen sates for Tennyson's art and his finer graces of the spirit. But the solitary parson made more of the occasion and wrote out in his notebook one of the most graphic accounts of the Laureate that we possess. The passage is too long to repeat in full, but part of it may serve as an example of

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 9

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the talent lavished by Hawker on letters and memoranda that have reached the public only by accident :

I found my guest at his entrance a tall swarthy Spanish-looking man, with an eye like a sword. He sate down and we conversed. I at once found myself with no common mind. All poetry in particular he seemed to use like household words, and as chance led to the mention of Homer's picture of night he gave at once a rendering simple and fine. " When the Sky is broken up and the myriad Stars roll down, and the Shepherd's heart is glad." It struck me that the trite translation was about the reverse motion of this. We then talked about Cornwall and King Arthur, my themes, and I quoted Tennyson's fine acct. of the restoration of Excalibur to the Lake. . . . [Follows the dialogue through which the poet's name was revealed to the host, and then] We went on our way to the rocks, and if the converse could all be written down it would make, I think, as nice a little book as Charlotte Elizabeth [Mrs. Hawker] could herself have composed. All verses — all lands— the secret history of many of his poems, which I may not reveal — but that which I can lawfully relate I will. We talked of the sea, which he and I equally adore. But as he told me strange to say Words worth cannot bear its face. My solution was, that nursed among the still waters with a mind as calm and equable as his lakes the Scenery of the rough Places might be too boisterous for the meek man's Soul. He agreed. We discussed TIOVTIGOV rs Kvfj,a.TGav, etc., and I was glad to find that he half agreed with a thought I have long cherished, that these words relate to the Ear and not to the Eye. [De Quincey, apparently unknown to Hawker, had expressed the same fancy, and elsewhere Hawker finds confirmation of it in a line of Catullus.]

IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS

He did not disdain aversion of mine made long ago:—

" Hark how old Ocean laughs with all his Waves."

Then, seated on the brow of the Cliff, with Dundagel full in sight, he revealed to me the purpose of his jour ney to the West. . . .

I lent him Books and MSS. about King Arthur, which he carried off, and which I perhaps shall never see again. Then evening fell. He arose to go ; and I agreed to drive him on his way. He demanded a pipe, and pro duced a package of very common shag. By great good luck my Sexton had about him his own short black dud- heen, which accordingly the minstrel filled and fired. Wild language occupied the way, until we shook farewell at Combe. This, said Tennyson, has indeed been a day to be remembered, at least it is one which I shall never again forget. The Bard is a handsome well-formed man and tall, more like a Spaniard than an Englishman — black, long elflocks all round his face, mid which his eyes not only shine but glare. His garments loose and full, such as Bard beseems, and over all a large dark Spanish Cloak. He speaks the languages both old and new, and has manifestly a most bibliothec memory. His voice is very deep, tuneful and slow — an organ, not a breath. His temper, which I tried, seemed very calm — His spirits very low. When I quoted " My May of Life" [?] and again, " O never more on me," etc., he said they too were his haunting words.

All which may seem to concern Tennyson rather than the subject of this sketch, but there is a fascination in these meetings of the poets which always tempts one to linger; some breath of larger life blows from them to us, and for the

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW I I

time makes us of their company. It is easy to imagine ourselves visiting the same reliques of the romantic past, and turning aside with Tenny son to Morwenstow. Hedges line the road on either side, and it has been observed that every bush is bent away from the sea, so steady and ruth less are the landward winds. There are no groves save a plantation at the chapel, and here every tree crouches imploringly from the same gales. We may, perhaps, find the Vicar in his glebe, which, as he himself has described it, occupies a position of wild and singular beauty; its western boundary is the sea, skirted by tall and tremen dous cliffs, and near this brink, with the exquis ite taste of ecclesiastical antiquity, is placed the church. Chapel and glebe and parsonage, after the ancient Celtic tradition, lie alone and separ ated from the hamlet they serve. Despite the " coldest manner " noted by Tennyson, the Vicar, when his suspicions were not aroused, had usually a hearty welcome for strangers, even an awkward eagerness such as grows on one who is much isolated. He stands erect in the field overseeing the care of his garden or flocks, a tall, sturdy fig ure in striking garb. He is blond with weather- beaten cheeks, and long, light hair, which, in later life, turns white. The head is intellectual, but the eyes, to judge from the portraits, lack con centration, and there is a kind of pudginess about the mouth and chin, the result, it may be, of his habit of taking opium. At a d stance he might

12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

be thought a venerable old lady. He wears over all, perhaps, a yellow vestment made of a poncho, and beneath it a reddish-brown cassock ; " a blushing brown,'* he once said, " was the hue of Our L,ady's hair, as typified in the stem of the maiden-hair fern." Or, possibly, the cassock has been supplanted by a long purple coat. Un der this is a fisherman's blue jersey, as befits a fisher of men ; and a small red cross marks the spot where the spear entered the Saviour's side. A carpenter's pencil, betokening the life at Naza reth, dangles from his button-hole, and besides this he is adorned with a medal of gold struck in honour of the promulgation, in 1854, of the Immaculate Conception. His trousers are of some odd colour, navy blue or red brown ; black he utterly eschews, and has stipulated that even in death he shall be covered with a purple pall. Crimson gloves cover his hands (he kept them on even in church), and loose Hessian boots rise from his feet. His hat is the fez of a Greek priest or, by way of alternation, a broad-brimmed felt of the favourite reddish-brown. The " pastoral staff" is cross-handled to complete the symbolism of his habiliments.

The costume is unusual, to say the least, but let a man beware how he shows surprise and, above all, let him avoid comment ; for our mild- looking parson has a nimble wit and a cutting tongue. More than one patronising stranger has departed from this provincial nook utterly non-

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 13

plussed and chop-fallen. If you are yourself clad in dignified black, and especially if you are a dissenting clergyman, it may be as well to gaze and pass on without salutation. One innocent guest was regaled by Hawker with the story of a preceding visitor who for his unlucky garb had been pinned to the earth by the Vicar's pet stag Robin. "This Evangelical," said Hawker, " had a tail-coat ; he was dressed like an under taker, sir. Once upon a time there was one like him travelling in Kgypt, with a similar coat and a tall hat ; and the Arabs pursued him, calling him the 'father of saucepans, with a slit-tail.' " The guest to whom the story was told wore a like garment, and found the situation somewhat embarrassing.

The tame stag, with its proper hatred of Evan gelicals, was not the only odd pet that made favour in the Vicar's eyes. At one time he was attended everywhere by an intelligent black pig, and it is as like as not we shall meet him in his glebe surrounded by a dog and nine or ten cats. Both dog and cats are so indulged that they accompany him to church and circle about him while he performs the divine office. There is altogether something uncanny in the familiarity between this man and the wild beasts of earth and air. " Beans and peas," he once wrote, " are interdicted by the Jackdaws. We have sown twice, and twice they have devoured them all. And a Scarecrow put up by my old Man, was so

14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

made up in my hat and broken Cassock that they took it for me, and came around it, looking up to be fed." All that we learn about him confirms this impression of his almost mythical attachment to the soil, and if we talk with him we shall dis cover his mind to be a veritable storehouse of Cornish history and legend.

Yet, as a matter of fact, he was not native to the Duchy, but was born, in 1803, at Plymouth, in the neighbouring county of Devon. Even as a boy he made himself notorious for his droll pranks and practical jokes. For several years he attended the Cheltenham Grammar School at the expense of an aunt, and while there published his first book of poems, Tendrils, by Reuben. L,ater in life he could not even recall the name of this early venture. At the age of nineteen he was matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and took his B.A. degree five years later. As a scholar he seems not to have risen much above the average, though he won the Newdigate with a poem on Pompeii. The most notorious esca pade of his college career was his marriage, which, even without the embellishments added by Mr. Baring-Gould, was singular enough. His father had been a physician, but had abandoned the profession for holy orders and was incumbent of the living at Stratton, not far from Morwen- stow. Robert had become acquainted with the family of Colonel Wrey I'ans, who dwelt in the neighbourhood of this place, and in 1823 he mar-

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 15

ried one of the daughters, Charlotte. The bride, whom he carried back with him to Oxford, was forty-one, while he was still under twenty; but the union turned out to be unusually happy. He was until her death, in 1863 at the age of eighty, a kind and devoted husband. During her last illness he gave much of his time to reading aloud to her, and it is said that after going through a three-volume novel so great was his abstraction that he knew no more of the book than if he had never seen it. Her loss left him in a state of pathetic loneliness and depression, but he soon found consolation. In something less than two years he took to himself a new wife, a Miss Pauline Kuczynski, the daughter of a Polish exile and an Englishwoman. As if to balance the dis parity of the first marriage, the groom was now sixty-one and the bride only twenty ; yet again the venture proved in every way fortunate.

But this is to anticipate. On leaving Oxford Hawker was appointed to the curacy of North Tamerton, and after a brief period was removed to Morwenstow, where he resided for forty years, seldom crossing the boundary of his parish during all that time. He became, as it were, the genius loci^ in whom the spirit of the valley and sea found expression. The very towns of Cornwall near by seemed to him remote and set in some unvisited province of the world. "No one can even imagine the horror it is to me," he once wrote to a friend, after a residence of twenty-eight

1 6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

years, " to look forward to the journey from hence to Stratton to attend the Confirmation. The streets, the strange faces, the unusual crowd — the Salutations in the market-place are to me, a shy, nervous man, an actual trial and a burthen to bear. When I had to attend at the Archdea con's Visitation at L,aunceston, twenty-five miles off, every year, I could not sleep for long nights before, and the faint and sickening sensation I felt at the aspect of the Town was humiliating and depressing indeed." It was one of the whims of a more eccentric power than himself that he should after all have died away from home. Morwenstow had not hitherto enjoyed a resident vicar for a century, and Hawker found the church dilapidated, and the people, rude and ignorant peasants and seamen for the most part, unattached. He set himself diligently to right these conditions, and by persistence and a kind of rough wisdom succeeded. To restore the church, whose legendary history appealed to his fancy, he drew heavily on the small fortune of his wife, laying up for himself endless debts and difficulties in the future. He also built a vicar age, in which he did not fail to embody some of his own original notions. " The kitchen chim ney," he explained, "perplexed me very much, till I bethought me of my mother's tomb ; and there it is, in its exact shape and dimensions." His yearly revenue was ^365, as he announced in an inscription placed over the front door:

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW Ij

A House, a Glebe, a Pound a Day ; A Pleasant Place to Watch and Pray. Be true to Church— Be kind to Poor, O Minister ! forevermore.

In the solitude of this haunted land his mind brooded on its own fancies until the actual and the visionary lost their sharp distinction for him. Probably the habit of opium-taking strengthened the reality of this dream-world. As a conse quence, in dealing with him it is always difficult to know what should be attributed to religion and what belongs to superstition and pure char latanry. When he wrote of Joseph of Arima- thea's Syrian home those two perfect lines, —

Young men, that no one knew, went in and out, With a far look in their eternal eyes,

he was merely repeating what he held to be his own experience. So real would he have these angelic visitants to be that he impressed on children's minds the fact that they were wrongly depicted with wings. It is easy, in dealing with such a character, to write down the word dupe or hypocrite, but who shall presume to draw the boundary between these morbid states and the profounder conviction of celestial communion ? And has not the least religious of poets said it, Et sunt commercia cali f l

1 In the year 1895 Lionel Johnson wrote this sonnet on Hawker of Morwenstow^ alluding to his death-bed conversion and to his visionary life : 2

1 8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

In other matters his supernaturalism assumed a grosser form. He had charms for the evil eye and for inflictions of the body. He recognised a witch by the five black spots placed diagonally under her tongue, like those made in the feet of the swine by the entrance of the devils at Gad- ara. Elemental demons and emissaries of Satan beset his path, and it is not unusual to come upon such a note as this in his letters: " As I entered the Gulph between the Vallies to-day, a Storm leaped from the Sea and rushed at me roaring — I recognised a Demon and put Carrow into a gallop and so escaped. But it was perilous work. There once I saw a Brownie; and Thence at Night the Northern Glances Gleam." He had a philosophy for these apparitions and con ceived a medium midway between matter and

"Strong Shepherd of thy sheep, pasturers of the sea ; Far on the Western marge, thy passionate Cornish land ! Oh, that from out thy Paradise thou could'st thine hand Reach forth to mine, and I might tell my love to thee ! For one the faith, and one the joy, of thee and me, Catholic faith and Celtic joy : I understand Somewhat, I too, the Messengers from Sion strand ; The voices and the visions of the Mystery.

Ah, not the Chaunt alone was thine : thine too the Quest ! And at the last the Sangraal of the Paschal Christ Flashed down its fair red Glory to those dying eyes : They closed in death, and opened on the Victim's Breast. Now, while they look for ever on the Sacrificed, Remember, how thine ancient race in twilight lies I"

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 19

Spirit for which he coined the outlandish name of " Numyne." This was nothing less than the " sacramental element of the Shechinah," the " Mater et Filia Dei " of the Rabbins, the " at mosphere of the angels," a blend of God and man, and a dozen other quaint conceptions jum bled together from the luminiferous ether of science and the aura anim<z of the mediaeval schoolmen. Yet if he could be solemn over his beliefs one moment, he could treat them as a jest the next. He is known to have pointed out with apparent seriousness the haunt of mermaids to a stranger, but Mr. Baring- Gould also tells how, when a young man, he decked himself in sea weeds and an oilskin wrap and, so disguised, sat on a rock in the moonlight and sang, to the great wonderment of the neighbourhood. Undoubtedly there was not a little of this deliberate attempt at mystification in the minor eccentricities of the reverend gentleman, and Superstition entwined herself cunningly with Charlatanry, as is the custom with those foster sisters.

It is not to be supposed that any great and accomplished work should proceed from such a life and character. He was, indeed, not without natural ambition, and in his youth had made a brave effort to imitate Byron and other reigning favourites of the day. But as time slipped by and he became more and more involved in the cares and solitudes of his parish, he realised with some bitterness that the race of fame was not for him.

2O SHELBURNE ESSAYS

His letters contain pathetic allusions to the in numerable memorandum books into which he had poured his scattered thoughts and which he hoped might one day be ' ' read and printed as ' the Fragments of a broken mind.' " The phrase evidently flattered his vanity, and came up for use more than once ; it had occurred in a lyric written as early as 1840 :

All, all is gone — no longer roll Vision and dream around my soul : But, in their stead, float down the wind These fragments of a broken mind.

And in the noblest of his poems he put into the mouth of King Arthur the expression of his own futile doom, mingled with laments for an erring land. Had he always, or often, written as mag nificently as this, there would be no need to make allowance for his shortcomings :

Ha ! Sirs — ye seek a noble crest to-day,

To win and wear the starry Sangraal,

The link that binds to God a lonely land.

Would that my arm went with you, like my heart !

But the true shepherd must not shun the fold :

For in this flock are crouching grievous wolves,

And chief among them all, my own false kin.

Therefore I tarry by the cruel sea,

To hear at eve the treacherous mermaid's song,

And watch the wallowing monsters of the wave, —

'Mid all things fierce, and wild, and strange, alone !

Ah ! native Cornwall ! throned upon the hills, Thy moorland pathways worn by Angel feet,

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 21

Thy streams that march in music to the sea 'Mid Ocean's merry noise, his billowy laugh ! Ah me ! a gloom falls heavy on my soul — The birds that sung to me in youth are dead ; I think, in dreamy vigils of the night, It may be God is angry with my land, Too much athirst for fame, too fond of blood ; And all for earth, for shadows, and the dream To glean an echo from the winds of song !

It is the cry of a mau who feels his powers caught in some spell of impotence, who knows there are great things to do and great labourers starting for the field, while he lingers behind in a lesser duty and a lonelier dream. But his worst fear was baseless :

I would not be forgotten in this land.

No ; as that strange West Country is trodden into conformity with the routine of civilisation, he is likely to become better and more distinctly known as the personification of a semi-mythical past. No other writer can supplant him. For we must recognise that there are two kinds of\^X poetical genius, the essential and the contingent, and that their claims on our memory are as diverse as their faculties. Nor is this division quite coterminous with that into major and minor poets. Keats and Wordsworth both belong to the major group, yet one is essentially, whereas the other is in large measure contingently, poetic. We judge the work of Keats in itself, and its value rises or sinks purely in proportion to its own intrinsic interest ; it would be almost the

22 SHELBURNE ESSAYS

same to us if we had never heard the writer's name. On the contrary, no small portion of Wordsworth's verse, and that not always the least cherished, derives its weight and signifi cance from what we know of the poet's own character and of his philosophy. It is the voice of the High Priest of Nature to which we are lis tening, and behind his words is the authority of a grave teacher. Take away the memory of that systematic life with its associations, forget the hallowed beauty of the Lake Country, and how much of Wordsworth's celebrity would be an nulled! Now it is just these contingent qualities that render even the minor verse of our Cornish Vicar precious. You may read his book of poems alone with comparative coldness ; but first go through Mr. Byles's admirable but rather bulky memoir, read Hawker's own prose sketches, steep your mind in the history and topography of Cornwall, and then turn once more to the poetry. The difference of its effect will be startling.

A specific example will make clear what is meant by the contingent interest of Hawker's work. One of his shorter ballads is founded on the story told him of the death of a noted wrecker, Mawgan of Melhuach :

'T was a fierce night when old Mawgan died, Men shuddered to hear the rolling tide: The wreckers fled fast from the awful shore, They had heard strange voices amid the roar.

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 23

"Out with tlie boat there," some one cried, — " Will he never come ? We shall lose the tide: His berth is trim and his cabin stored, He 's a weary long time coming on board."

The old man struggled upon the bed:

He knew the words that the voices said;

Wildly he shriek'd as his eyes grew dim,

"He was dead ! he was dead ! when I buried him."

Hark yet again to the devilish roar ! " He was nimble once with a ship on shore; Come ! come ! old man, 'tis a vain delay, We must make the offing by break of day."

Hard was the struggle, but at the last, With a stormy pang old Mawgan pass'd, And away, away, beneath their sight, Gleam'd the red sail at pitch of night.

The workmanship of the piece is sufficiently good, and if read without preparation it might pass as a fair specimen of the school which pro duced Southey's Old Woman of Berkeley and a host of similar ballads of the time. lyike South ey's work, it cannot be classed with such a poem as Keats' s La Belle Dame Sans Merti, which depends for its effect on emotions that lurk in every human breast and hence requires no realism behind its supernatural imagery ; but, when properly considered, it also differs as radi cally from the spurious school which it seems to resemble. Southey's lines are clever and catch the fancy, and nothing more ; they have no back ground of real terror. On the contrary, the full

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effect of Hawker's ballad is to be got by reading it repeatedly and lingeringly, and by allowing the memories of the poet's own experiences to blend with the impression of the verse. Gradu ally, as at the sound of a spell, the memories of the sea about those pitiless coasts arise in the mind. We recall the legends of great storms and terrible wrecks from the days of the Spanish Armada to the present, and the wild life of the Western men, which had not wholly ceased in Hawker's own time. So constant is the peril of the ocean that even to-day a child in these towns is rebuked if he brings to the table a loaf of bread resting on its cut side — it looks too much like a vessel floating bottom upwards. But if the waves take away, they also restore, and the history of that coast is a long record of heroic fighting with England's enemies and of no less ruthless smuggling and wrecking. In one of the chapters of his Footprints in Far Cornwall, Haw ker relates with extraordinary vividness his own labours in taming the habits of these wreckers, who did not scruple to allure vessels on the rocks with false lights. It was reckoned an omen of ill-luck to restore life to the bodies washed ashore, as he once learned emphatically from his own servant ; and horrible tales were abroad of occa sions when the murderous waves were not swift enough in their work for these ghouls of the sea. To be awakened at midnight when the wind was screeching like a lost soul, to clamber down the

THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW 25

precipitous cliff some three hundred feet with the spray lashing about him, to labour in the surf for the rescue of a forlorn ship, was an adventure that tried the nerves and troubled the imagina tion. Too often only the lifeless bodies came to his hands, but these at least he saved from dese cration and buried with decent ceremony.

There had been more than one Mawgan in his parish. Just before Hawker's time a stranger, whose origin and end were wrapped in obscurity, gained the sobriquet of ' ' Cruel Coppinger ' ' for his lawless practices. His life and mysterious disap pearance furnished Hawker with one of his best prose sketches, and the same character figures in Mr. Baring- Gould's In the Roar of the Sea. Still more like the fate of Mawgan was the story sent to the Times by a resident of the district during Hawker's incumbency. The storms had been unusually severe, and one night a cloud filled with a fiery glow was seen by many of the sailors gliding up the valley to the house of a notorious merchant and wrecker, and passing inland along the glen until it reached a church where his family lay buried. Hawker himself half, or wholly, believed the tale, and it evidently im pressed him deeply. His own knowledge of the event he writes in a letter :

On Sunday evening this day week went out on

the cliffs, and was seen watching the sea, it is supposed for Wreck. He returned quite well and went to bed. At 5 in the morning his Servants heard him walk about

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his room. Then his footsteps ceased. He had returned to bed. At Six O'Clock a vast roll of the tide came up the Harbour, and one of his Vessels broke loose. The Servants went up to tell him — knocked — no answer — again — silence — frightened, they went in, and there he lay quite dead, His head upon his hand. Ever since that day it is certain the storms have been continual — again and again with violence, and while I now write my Table trembles with the wind. All this is awful. The Bnemy of Man, j-ou know, is called the Prince of the Powers of the Air.

But it was something more than superstition that supported the Vicar in his long years of trib ulation. Above all these wandering fires glowed the steady light of faith, and he is one of that succession of clergymen, beginning with the saintly George Herbert, who from the heart of their isolated parishes have enriched English poetry with a body of pure and high meditation. I do not know how it may be with others, but with me the knowledge of Hawker's