CHAPTER VI
THE RUSTIC LOVER
Despairing beside a clear stream
A shepherd forsaken was laid.
The next morning, after a comfortable breakfast, the doctor set out on his walk home. His young friend accompanied him part of the way, and did not part with him till he had obtained a promise of another and longer visit.
The doctor, as usual, soliloquised as he walked. ‘No doubt these are Vestals. The purity of the establishment is past question. This young gentleman has every requisite which her dearest friends would desire in a husband for Miss Gryll.
And she is in every way suited to him. But these seven damsels interpose themselves, like the sevenfold shield of Ajax. There is something very attractive in these damsels:
Faciès non omnibus una,
Nec diversa tamen: qualem decet esse sororum.
1 Though various features did the sisters grace,
A sister’s likeness was in every face.
Addison: Ovid. Met. 1. ii.
If I had such an establishment, I should be loath to break it up. It is original, in these days of monotony. It is satisfactory, in these days of uncongenial relations between master and servant It is effective, in the admirable arrangements of the household. It is graceful, in the personal beauty and tasteful apparel of the maidens. It is agreeable, in their manners, in their accomplishments, in their musical skill. It is like an enchanted palace. Mr. Gryll, who talks so much of Circe, would find himself at home; he might fancy himself waited on by her handmaids, the daughters of fountains, groves, and rivers. Miss Gryll might fancy herself in the dwelling of her namesake, Morgana. But I fear she would be for dealing with it as Orlando did with Morgana, breaking the talisman and dissolving the enchantment This would be a pity; but it would also be a pity that these two young persons should not come together. But why should I trouble myself with matchmaking? It is always a thankless office. If it turns out well, your good service is forgotten. If it turns out ill, you are abused by both parties.’
The doctor’s soliloquy was cut short by a sound of lamentation, which, as he went on, came to him in louder and louder bursts. He was attracted to the spot whence the sounds proceeded, and had some difficulty in discovering a doleful swain, who was ensconced in a mass of fern, taller than himself if he had been upright; and but that, by rolling over and over in the turbulence of his grief, he had flattened a large space down to the edge of the forest brook near which he reclined, he would have remained invisible in his lair. The tears in his eyes, and the passionate utterances of his voice, contrasted strangely with a round russetin face, which seemed fortified by beef and ale against all possible furrows of care; but against love, even beef and ale, mighty talismans as they are, are feeble barriers. Cupid’s arrows had pierced through the os triplex of treble X, and the stricken deer lay mourning by the stream.
The doctor approaching kindly inquired, ‘What is the matter?’ but was answered only by a redoubled burst of sorrow, and an emphatic rejection of all sympathy.
‘You can’t do me any good.’
‘You do not know that,’ said the doctor. ‘No man knows what good another can do him till he communicates his trouble.’
For some time the doctor could obtain no other answer than the repetition of ‘You can’t do me any good.’ But at length the patience and kind face of the inquirer had their effect on the sad shepherd, and he brought out with a desperate effort and a more clamorous explosion of grief —
‘She won’t have me!’
‘Who won’t have you?’
‘Well, if you must know,’ said the swain, ‘you must. It’s one of the young ladies up at the Folly.’
‘Young ladies?’ said the doctor.
‘Servants they call themselves,’ said the other; ‘but they are more like ladies, and hold their heads high enough, when one of them won’t have me. Father’s is one of the best farms for miles round, and it’s all his own. He’s a true old yeoman, father is. And there’s nobody but him and me. And if I had a nice wife, that would be a good housekeeper for him, and play and sing to him of an evening — for she can do anything, she can — read, write, and keep accounts, and play and sing — I’ve heard her — and make a plum-pudding — I’ve seen her — we should be as happy as three crickets — four, perhaps, at the year’s end: and she won’t have me!’
‘You have put the question?’ said the doctor.
‘Plump,’ said the other. ‘And she looked at first as if she was going to laugh. She didn’t, though. Then she looked serious, and said she was sorry for me. She said she saw I was in earnest She knew I was a good son, and deserved a good wife; but she couldn’t have me. Miss, said I, do you like anybody better? No, she said very heartily.’
‘That is one comfort,’ said the doctor.
‘What comfort,’ said the other, ‘when she won’t have me?’
‘She may alter her mind,’ said the doctor, ‘if she does not prefer any one else. Besides, she only says she can’t.’
‘Can’t,’ said the other, ’is civil for won’t. That’s all.’
‘Does she say why she can’t?’ said the doctor.
‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘She says she and her sisters won’t part with each other and their young master.’
‘Now,’ said the doctor, ‘you have not told me which of the seven sisters is the one in question.’
‘It’s the third,’ said the other. ‘What they call the second cook. There’s a housekeeper and two cooks, and two housemaids and two waiting maids. But they only manage for the young master. There are others that wait on them.
‘And what is her name?’ said the doctor.
‘Dorothy,’ said the other; ‘her name is Dorothy. Their names follow, like ABC, only that A comes last. Betsey, Catherine, Dorothy, Eleanor, Fanny, Grace, Anna. But they told me it was not the alphabet they were christened from; it was the key of A minor, if you know what that means.’
‘I think I do,’ said the doctor, laughing. ‘They were christened from the Greek diatonic scale, and make up two conjunct tetrachords, if you know what that means.’
‘I can’t say I do,’ said the other, looking bewildered.
‘And so,’ said the doctor, ‘the young gentleman, whose name is Algernon, is the Proslambanomenos, or key-note, and makes up the octave. His parents must have designed it as a foretelling that he and his seven foster-sisters were to live in harmony all their lives. But how did you become acquainted?’
‘Why,’ said the other, ‘I take a great many things to the house from our farm, and it’s generally she that takes them in.’
‘I know the house well,’ said the doctor, ‘and the master, and the maids. Perhaps he may marry, and they may follow the example. Live in hope. Tell me your name.’
‘Hedgerow,’ said the other; ‘Harry Hedgerow. And if you know her, ain’t she a beauty?’
‘Why, yes,’ said the doctor; ‘they are all good-looking.’
‘And she won’t have me,’ cried the other, but with a more subdued expression. The doctor had consoled him, and given him a ray of hope. And they went on their several ways.
The doctor resumed his soliloquy.
‘Here is the semblance of something towards a solution of the difficulty. If one of the damsels should marry, it would break the combination. One will not by herself. But what if seven apple-faced Hedgerows should propose simultaneously, seven notes in the key of A minor, an octave below? Stranger things have happened. I have read of six brothers who had the civility to break their necks in succession, that the seventh, who was the hero of the story, might inherit an estate. But, again and again, why should I trouble myself with matchmaking? I had better leave things to take their own course.’
Still in his interior speculum the doctor could not help seeing a dim reflection of himself pronouncing the nuptial benediction on his two young friends.
CHAPTER VII
THE VICAR AND HIS WIFE — FAMILIES OF LOVE — THE NEWSPAPER
/> Indulge Genio: carpamus dulcia: nostrum est
Quod vivis: cinis, et manes, et fabula fies.
Vive memor lethi: fugit hora: hoc quod loquor, inde est.
Persius.
Indulge thy Genius, while the hour’s thine own:
Even while we speak, some part of it has flown.
Snatch the swift-passing good: ‘twill end ere long
In dust and shadow, and an old wife’s song.
‘Agapetus and Agapêtê,’ said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, the next morning at breakfast, ‘in the best sense of the words: that, I am satisfied, is the relation between this young gentleman and his handmaids.’
Mrs. Opimian. Perhaps, doctor, you will have the goodness to make your view of this relation a little more intelligible to me.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Assuredly, my dear. The word signifies ‘beloved’ in its purest sense. And in this sense it was used by Saint Paul in reference to some of his female co-religionists and fellow-labourers in the vineyard, in whose houses he occasionally dwelt. And in this sense it was applied to virgins and holy men, who dwelt under the same roof in spiritual love.
Mrs. Opimian. Very likely, indeed. You are a holy man, doctor, but I think, if you were a bachelor, and I were a maid, I should not trust myself to be your aga — aga —
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Agapêtê. But I never pretended to this sort of spiritualism. I followed the advice of Saint Paul, who says it is better to marry.
Mrs. Opimian. You need not finish the quotation.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Agapêtê is often translated ‘adoptive sister.’ A very possible relation, I think, where there are vows of celibacy, and inward spiritual grace.
Mrs. Opimian. Very possible, indeed: and equally possible where there are none.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. But more possible where there are seven adoptive sisters, than where there is only one.
Mrs. Opimian. Perhaps.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. The manners, my dear, of these damsels towards their young master are infallible indications of the relations between them. Their respectful deference to him is a symptom in which I cannot be mistaken.
Mrs. Opimian. I hope you are not.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I am sure I am not. I would stake all my credit for observation and experience on the purity of the seven Vestals. I am not strictly accurate in calling them so: for in Rome the number of Vestals was only six. But there were seven Pleiads, till one disappeared. We may fancy she became a seventh Vestal. Or as the planets used to be seven, and are now more than fifty, we may pass a seventh Vestal in the name of modern progress.
Mrs. Opimian. There used to be seven deadly sins. How many has modern progress added to them?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. None, I hope, my dear. But this will be due, not to its own tendencies, but to the comprehensiveness of the old definitions.
Mrs. Opimian. I think I have heard something like your Greek word before.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Agapêmonê, my dear. You may have heard the word Agapêmonê.
Mrs. Opimian. That is it. And what may it signify?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. It signifies Abode of Love: spiritual love of course.
Mrs. Opimian. Spiritual love, which rides in carriages and four, fares sumptuously, like Dives, and protects itself with a high wall from profane observation.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Well, my dear, and there may be no harm in all that.
Mrs. Opimian. Doctor, you are determined not to see harm in anything.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I am afraid I see more harm in many things than I like to see. But one reason for not seeing harm in this Agapêmonâ matter is, that I hear so little about it The world is ready enough to promulgate scandal; but that which is quietly right may rest in peace.
Mrs. Opimian. Surely, doctor, you do not think this Agapemone right?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I only say I do not know whether it is right or wrong. It is nothing new. Three centuries ago there was a Family of Love, on which Middleton wrote a comedy. Queen Elizabeth persecuted this family; Middleton made it ridiculous; but it outlived them both, and there may have been no harm in it after all.
Mrs. Opimian. Perhaps, doctor, the world is too good to see any novelty except in something wrong.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Perhaps it is only wrong that arrests attention, because right is common, and wrong is rare. Of the many thousand persons who walk daily through a street you only hear of one who has been robbed or knocked down. If ever Hamlet’s news— ‘that the world has grown honest’ — should prove true, there would be an end of our newspaper. For, let us see, what is the epitome of a newspaper? In the first place, specimens of all the deadly sins, and infinite varieties of violence and fraud; a great quantity of talk, called by courtesy legislative wisdom, of which the result is ‘an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot down, as from a rubbish-cart, on the heads of the people ‘; lawyers barking at each other in that peculiar style of dylactic delivery which is called forensic eloquence, and of which the first and most distinguished practitioner was Cerberus; bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin’s wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from ‘highly respectable’ gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody’s business, and mending everybody’s morals; mountebank advertisements promising the beauty of Helen in a bottle of cosmetic, and the age of Old Parr in a box of pills; folly all alive in things called réunions; announcements that some exceedingly stupid fellow has been ‘entertaining’ a select company; matters, however multiform, multifarious, and multitudinous, all brought into family likeness by the varnish of false pretension with which they are all overlaid.
1 Jeremy Bentham.
2 Cerberus forensis erat causidicus. Petronius Arbiter.
Mrs. Opimian. I did not like to interrupt you, doctor; but it struck me, while you were speaking, that in reading the newspaper you do not hear the bark of the lawyers.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. True; but no one who has once heard the wow-wow can fail to reproduce it in imagination.
Mrs. Opimian. You have omitted accidents, which occupy a large space in the newspaper. If the world grew ever so honest, there would still be accidents.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. But honesty would materially diminish the number. High-pressure steam-boilers would not scatter death and destruction around them, if the dishonesty of avarice did not tempt their employment, where the more costly low pressure would ensure absolute safety. Honestly built houses would not come suddenly down and crush their occupants. Ships, faithfully built and efficiently manned, would not so readily strike on a lee shore, nor go instantly to pieces on the first touch of the ground. Honestly made sweetmeats would not poison children; honestly compounded drugs would not poison patients. In short, the larger portion of what we call accidents are crimes.
Mrs. Opimian. I have often heard you say, of railways and steam-vessels, that the primary cause of their disasters is the insane passion of the public for speed. That is not crime, but folly.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. It is crime in those who ought to know better than to act in furtherance of the folly. But when the world has grown honest, it will no doubt grow wise. When we have got rid of crime, we may consider how to get rid of folly. So that question is adjourned to the Greek kalends.
Mrs. Opimian. There are always in a newspaper some things of a creditable character.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. When we are at war, naval and military heroism abundantly; but in time of peace these virtues sleep. They are laid up like ships in ordinary. No doubt, of the recorded facts of civil life some are good, and more are indifferent, neither good nor bad; but good and indifferent together are scarcely more than a twelfth part of the whole. Still, the matters thus presented are all exceptional cases. A
hermit reading nothing but a newspaper might find little else than food for misanthropy; but living among friends, and in the bosom of our family, we see the dark side of life in the occasional picture, the bright is its every-day aspect The occasional is the matter of curiosity, of incident, of adventure, of things that really happen to few, and may possibly happen to any. The interest attendant on any action or event is in just proportion to its rarity; and, happily, quiet virtues are all around us, and obtrusive virtues seldom cross our path. On the whole, I agree in opinion with Theseus, that there is more good than evil in the world.
1 Eurip. Suppl. 207: Herm.
Mrs. Opimian. I think, doctor, you would not maintain any opinion if you had not an authority two thousand years old for it.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Well, my dear, I think most opinions worth mentioning have an authority of about that age.
CHAPTER VIII
PANTOPRAGMATICS
Cool the wine, Doris. Pour it in the cup,
Simple, unmixed with water. Such dilution
Serves only to wash out the spirit of man.
The doctor, under the attraction of his new acquaintance, had allowed more time than usual to elapse between his visits to Gryll Grange, and when he resumed them he was not long without communicating the metamorphosis of the old Tower, and the singularities of its inhabitants. They dined well as usual, and drank their wine cool.
Miss Gryll. There are many things in what you have told us that excite my curiosity; but first, what do you suppose is the young gentleman’s religion?
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. From the great liking he seems to have taken to me, I should think he was of the Church of England, if I did not rather explain it by our Greek sympathy. At the same time, he kept very carefully in view that Saint Catharine is a saint of the English Church Calendar. I imagine there is less of true piety than of an abstract notion of ideal beauty, even in his devotion to her. But it is so far satisfactory that he wished to prove his religion, such as it is, to be within the pale of the Church of England.
Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock Page 80
