To be a Christian does not mean that one thinks that things are getting better. “Surely,” he adds, in a most characteristic phrase, “there is room for pessimism.” But if the Church holds to its duty to tell people what is true, he hopes, by the far distant time he is sixty, to see the tradition restored.
Some Loose Stones was his first serious book, and his first appearance before a wider public, at a time of furious interest in church affairs and in religious controversy. Wilfred, although he was more interested in reunion and communication than in doctrine, congratulated his brother warmly. Dilly thought the book touching but ridiculous, and wrote “Some Floating Pebbles”, designed to wash the whole question out of existence. He showed this only to his friends at King’s.
Dilly was travelling to and from Cambridge to work on the Herodas papyri in the British Museum. His eyesight was affected already; he ate in small cafés in Soho—Henry Lamb had moved back to Fitzroy Street—and took the first steps towards the total ruin of his digestion.
By this time his collaborator, John Sheppard, had so many commitments that he was obliged to leave Dilly to complete the edition by himself. Dilly had, of course, the expert help of the Museum staff and of scholars at home and abroad, with whom he sometimes corresponded in that inferior but international language, Latin, and sometimes in his stiff German. But for weeks and months on end he was alone with the seedy and oversophisticated little mimes—the pander who sues for assault because a girl has been stolen from the brothel; the mother with a delinquent son; the woman whose slave has proved an unsatisfactory lover, and wants him whipped, but doesn’t want anyone else to see him naked; the women who complain about servants, visit the temple, can’t wait to see the expert leatherworker in the sex-shop—heavens, what a crew! Dilly never became reconciled to Herodas as a writer, but he respected him as a familiar foe. The mimes provided an intensely difficult game in which nearly all the rules were missing, but Dilly intended to win.
Beyond the sorting out of Headlam’s papers, crossed and recrossed by the dead master’s exquisite Greek and English script, he had six main tasks. First he had, since this was still an accepted convention of classical scholarship, to conduct an attack on all previous editors of Herodas. Dilly was, in fact, rather less violent than most when he wrote of the “stream of editions” based on “illiterate” texts, “Bücheler, more sober, and with an extensive knowledge of obscene literature, but mostly Latin and therefore irrelevant,” the “quite inconsistent” efforts of Dr Nairn, and so forth. Next, having cleared the field, he had to arrive as nearly as possible to the correct text. The strips of papyrus had been knocked about a good deal before reaching the Museum, but had been carefully mended. The Mimiambi was a copy which had been corrected, at least twice, in a smaller handwriting in the second century ad. The correctors were not grammarians, and not much good at metre either, as they overlooked a number of “false verses”. The original copy (P) was made by a slave, probably of average inattentiveness. (Anyone who has taught a class—most scholars have, and Dilly had—can guess how inattentive.) The problem was (and still is) to deduce, from his errors in copying, what the original (P1) in front of him was like, eighteen centuries ago. What kind of handwriting was it, and which words might be written alike, so that the not very intelligent (P) might have confused them? And what missing words—taking into consideration the whole of ancient Greek literature—must have been written in the holes and rubbings and missing portions of (P)? Thirdly, after a painstaking recension of the first seven mimes, Dilly had to make clear who was responsible for the emendations. Headlam’s (collected from scattered publications, or found on the floor, or remembered from conversation) Dilly decided to mark [ ], while his own would be [[ ]], and [[[ ]]] represented a mixture of both. To Dilly this system appeared beyond any possibility of confusion; he never confused them, after all.
Next, the speeches, since the text ran on without a break, must be correctly assigned to their speakers. Headlam had called this “the most baffling problem in Herodas”. Did the gaps in the text indicate hesitations or a change of speaker? And might it not be useful, Headlam had added, warming to his subject, to read the novels of “Gyp”, a French lady who wrote salon romances, almost entirely in dialogue? Without trying Gyp, Dilly allocated and reallocated the speeches into what is now accepted as the best arrangement we can get.
Then there were Headlam’s notes, which again had to be recovered. They were far too long, but none of them ought to be lost. Dilly added a few on his own account, which could only have been written by him; for example: “To the Greek humorists appropriate misfortune was an enthralling joke. The Greek book of jests called Philogelus says: ‘A drunkard who had bought a vineyard died before vintage.’ We are not amused. Or rather we use different forms … ‘Have you heard about poor old X?’ …”
Every generation gets the version of Greece and Rome which it deserves, and so does every scholar. Dilly’s judgment of the ancient Greeks was apparently dispassionate, as though they had been his own family. He by no means saw Greece, as some did, as a long golden Cambridge afternoon without Puritan inhibitions. He was somewhat depressed by E. M. Forster’s early short stories in which Pan, or a naked faun, tends to put to confusion the stuffy and tiresome English. Dilly was surprised that Forster should have been a pupil of Wedd.
The last major problem of Herodas was the assembling of the fragments. These Headlam had never had time to study, but a complete text would be impossible until they were fitted into their proper places. Most of the damage was at the edge of the rolls, and the larger pieces, which still kept their original shape, could be treated much like a jigsaw puzzle. The real trouble arose with the badly worn portions. Lamacraft, the Museum’s papyrus expert, had no great knowledge of Greek letters; Sir Frederick Kenyon knew everything about Greek and palaeography, but little about papyrus or jigsaw puzzles. In working on the first two mimes, Dilly had noticed something wrong about the strips which Kenyon had already mounted. They had been put close together, whereas there should have been a gap of one letter between them—you could just see the beginnings of the “shadow letter” on the edges—and they had stretched unevenly, so that strip B was a whole line wrong at the top, and a third of a letter too low at the bottom. After some persuasion, the courteous Kenyon agreed to realign the precious crumbling strips. Mimes VIII and IX, however, consisted of fragments only, and in Dilly’s view they were, as they had been arranged, a complete hash, but they were so brittle that the Museum would not consider remounting. The last two mimes, therefore, became a crisis area, and years of work, perhaps a lifetime, stretched ahead. Papyri were still coming in from Oxyrhynchus. He must examine everything of roughly the right date and familiarize himself with every possible variety of scribe’s handwriting. Even then, he might need an inspired guess.
Sometimes Dilly relaxed. In the summer of 1912 Maynard Keynes reserved the whole of the Crown Hotel at Everleigh, in the middle of Salisbury Plain, for six weeks. Some of his guests behaved badly and with such reckless disregard of his landlady’s feelings that Keynes had to pay forty pounds extra, but the mid-July party, with Dilly, John Sheppard and Duncan Grant—no women—was one of uninterrupted happiness.
Eddie thought that Dilly ought to get married, perhaps to Henry Lamb’s unconventional sister Dorothy. But nothing came of this, and casual meetings, in the London of 1907, were difficult. Eddie described, in A Little Romance, his introduction, in a crowded room, to a charming Miss Robinson—“The weather is dreadful, is it not?”—and how he had to wait for several weeks, and another introduction, before he could reply—“What else is to be expected of an English summer?” Dilly, in company, was always gravely charming, but stammered and became “Erm”, and he never seemed to be alone with a young lady for any length of time. In Eddie’s opinion, if ever this should happen, Dilly would be defenceless.
Eddie felt that marriage must be the best solution for his brother for the very human reason that he wanted to get married him
self. In his letters to Mrs K. from Balliol, in 1908, Ronnie mentions more than once that Eddie had appeared in Oxford, but could not stay long; he had to find a chaperon; he had to find a straw hat; he had to take out Christina in a punt.
Christina Hicks had come up to Somerville to read English in 1904, with a scholarship, five pounds a year for clothes and books, and a letter from the college reminding her that she must change her dress for dinner, but “must bring no fal-lals, as they only collect dust.” She was a gentle, spirited, scholarly, hazel-eyed girl, a lover of poetry and music, and a determined, though not a militant, suffragette. She was also particularly ready to laugh at herself. When the Holbein Christina of Denmark arrived at the National Gallery in 1907, her friends noticed the resemblance, not in the face, but in the tranquillity of the hands.
Like Eddie, Christina was one of a large vicarage family. Her father, Canon Edward Hicks, was a rector in Salford, one of the poorest parishes in the Manchester area.
Thomas French himself was not more unworldly than Edward Hicks. Son of a small Oxford tradesman who got into difficulties, he had struggled for years to get the family out of debt. He entered Magdalen Choir School knowing practically nothing, for he had been taught nothing, and within a few years was a Fellow of Corpus and a leading expert on Greek inscriptions. In fact, he had helped Kenyon to assemble the Aristotle and Herodas papyri for the Museum.
At Corpus he became deeply attached to Ruskin, who had a set of rooms in the Fellows’ Buildings. Though he found it needful to check some of Ruskin’s extravagances (the Professor had wanted to go out and harangue the Oxford farmers into planting “the lovely red clover” instead of the pale variety) he reverenced the great teacher who “showed him a pathway through life.” In 1872 Ruskin gave him a number of Fors Clavigera in which he had marked a passage contrasting the peasant with the scholarly recluse, “the peasant being always content to feed the recluse, on condition of his becoming venerable.” “I am not ashamed to confess,” Hicks wrote, “that this piece of irony has haunted me through life.”
He turned his back on a college living and went first to the exceedingly rural parish of Fenny Compton, then, after thirteen years’ hard parish work, to industrial Salford. The Greek inscriptions had to be fitted into what spare time he had. Perhaps his greatest sacrifice was in 1906, when he was asked once again to work on the papyri, and to collaborate on a dictionary of Hellenistic Greek which would show, for the first time, what many of the words in the New Testament really meant. But he did not feel justified in leaving Salford.
Hicks and his wife, Agnes, for the first thirty years of their married life, were as poor as church mice. “I never heard my father say he regretted the life of scholarship,” Christina wrote, “or make great reference to it.” The rule was “plain but good”. Music the children taught themselves, and they were never short of that. Occasionally they would write down a list of all the things they wanted but couldn’t afford, and then burn the piece of paper. This is a device which is always worth trying.
Poverty affected the Hicks children, however, in different ways. Neither Christina nor her elder sister ever felt it as a hardship, although they found it impossible, to the end of their lives, to take a cab or a taxi without feeling guilty. “Cabby” was their word for “expensive”. Edwin and Bede, on the other hand, the two elder sons, were sent out to Rangoon as clerks in a shipping firm, and it was their intention to make as much money as they could, and enjoy themselves as returning Nabobs. Ned, the youngest, was cheerful and musical, happy, as a small boy, to carry their music and their shoebags round to parish concerts. A scholar of Magdalen Choir School, he made friends with another young tenor, Ivor Novello. Ivor was a holiday visitor at Salford, where he followed Christina round like a faithful pet dog, begging her to marry him.
Ned was now at Oxford, and was thought to be, like so many other young men, under Ronnie’s influence. To the Hicks family, whose religion was “the beauty of holiness, quiet worship and the steady discharge of common duties”, Ronnie seemed nothing but a wild extremist, who might, they feared, be “getting at” their youngest.
Edward Hicks was not made a bishop until he was sixty-seven. He was regarded, because of his Ruskinian socialism and his opposition to the Boer War, as a dangerous man, but by 1910 his wisdom and scholarship could hardly be put on one side any longer, and he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln. There was satisfaction both in the world of scholarship and at Fenny Compton, where the villagers said: “Hicks is our bishop; we broke him in.”
By this time, Eddie had admitted to Christina that he had once felt strongly about Peggy Beech, but could not now imagine why, because it was impossible for him to think of marrying anyone but herself. They loved each other; but Eddie’s only regular job was still with The Pall Mall Magazine, and he did not think he could look after her on his salary of two hundred pounds a year.
Eddie was, however, placing more verse and prose in Punch, and improving his acquaintanceship with Owen Seaman.
I was determined to do the thing in style [he wrote of an early visit to the old offices at 10 Bouverie Street], and I chartered a hansom cab for the occasion. ‘Many and many a time’, said the driver, ‘I have driven the great artist, Mr Phil May, to this address.’ When I told Seaman of this strange coincidence he said, ‘The Cabmen always tell one that. They all have the notion that Phil May went to sleep in their cab after the Punch dinner, and spent the night in the mews.’
It was the old office in Bouverie Street, with small rooms, except for the dining-room, and narrow and rather perilous stairs. The machines were on the premises, so that the jokes, however long they had been in arriving, did not have very far to travel.
Knowing the Editor only as a brilliant satirist who had been a schoolmaster, I was still more impressed by the stag’s head which was almost the only ornament in his sanctum. I told him that I was writing verses for Garvin, the omnipotent editor of the Observer, and I told him why. Garvin had explained that a few verses here and there would help the look of the page and form a good break in the editorial columns.
This shocked Owen, who controlled the politics of England entirely in verse. He had, indeed, a strong sense of vocation, and I remember his saying sadly about somebody or other, ‘he is the kind of man who doesn’t take his humour seriously’.
Eddie, grateful for the encouragement, went up to Fleet Street to find another of Phil May’s cabs. Evidently, Seaman had formed his life on a solemn, indeed heroic, vision of what a Punch editor should be. At one time, he told Eddie, he had been a member of the Samurai, a society who had vowed themselves, through meditation and clean living, to evolve a “higher human type”. No one must know that his family had been “in trade”—a ladies’ haberdashers, Stagg & Mantle; this was one of Owen’s endearing weaknesses. Punch, under his guidance, forgot its early rollicking days, and became a supporter of the Constitution. Owen took his correspondence away at weekends, like a cabinet minister, and answered it from country houses. Here he was a valued inmate of the bachelors’ wing; indeed he apparently ousted Max Beerbohm as a favourite guest, driving him into exile in Italy; this episode was described by Beerbohm in Maltby and Braxton. By now, Seaman was nearly sixty, and apparently installed in the editorship forever. It was clear that Punch was no country for young men, but Eddie was prepared to serve his apprenticeship, hoping in time to join the staff and to work with Seaman’s assistants, the bland E.V. Lucas and the young and radical A. A. Milne.
Eddie’s early contributions to Punch were often imitative of Calverley, of Barry Pain’s Eliza, even of Seaman himself. Later on he considered that imitation was not a bad thing for a young writer—“it increases the word-hoard”. But his own distinctive style emerged. He had an ear for rhyme superior even to Ronnie’s, so ingenious, so delicate—indeed, Ronnie and he claimed that there was no word, in English, Greek or Latin, to which they could not find a rhyme. In the fogs of the London winter, Eddie made “nimbus” rhyme with “knocked down by a dim
bus”. When the birds sang, “soloist” rhymed with “blow lowest”. When he watched a young lady “crimping” her red hair at a neighbour’s window, he wrote
Phyllis, farewell, if that’s the name
By which your parents had you christened,
Long ere your beauty flashed to fame—
Or even if it isn’t.
The skill in rhyming Owen Seaman appreciated, though he usually made a number of schoolmasterly alterations. He was more doubtful about a kind of lunatic fantasy to which Eddie was inspired by quite ordinary domestic incidents, perhaps the words on the side of a bus, or on a packet of something. Then his thoughts took wing, like swifts in late summer, and made a kind of crazy sweep, skimming back in the end to their starting point. At one of the large Kensington stores, for example, there was a Great White Sale; Eddie imagined this Great White Sale travelling through glittering seas, ever onward, fleeing from the harpoons of a thousand lady shoppers.
Pseudonyms were much used in Edwardian Fleet Street, and were part of the powerful mystery of the Press. Eddie took the pen name “Evoe”, partly to distinguish himself from E.V. Lucas, partly because, according to the dictionary, “Evoe” was “a cry of rejoicing uttered by the followers of the wine-god.” The word was pronounced “E.V.”, but as most of his public read it as “Ev-oey,” or “Eave-oh” (a variant of “Heave-ho!” he thought), the little joke fell flat, a good training for a professional humorist.
Bishopscourt was sympathetic to the idea of marriage. After a formal tea party, the Bishop pressed Christina’s hand and said: “Well, my dear, I believe your influence is good; God moves in mysterious ways.” Christina, though a little dashed at being called a mysterious way, was not at all vain, and remained firm even when Mrs K. added: “I have always heard it said that your elder sister is handsomer, but I tell them the younger has more spirit.”
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