We may notice in passing that Wither's command of the heptasyllabic metre had such an effect on Lamb that he often used it himself. He acknowledges that the Farewell to Tobacco is 'a little in the way of Wither.' 'Fair Virtue' is certainly a tribute to an actual mistress of Philarete'; the passion is far too real for one to think that the long and beautiful poem is a panegyric merely of an abstract quality, as Wither himself hints. But when he published it in 1622, it is typical of him that he should be ashamed of what he considered mere pastimes-'Juvenilia'—and so he preferred to let the world choose whether he meant 'Virtue only, whose loveliness is represented by the beauty of an excellent woman,' or whether she was really flesh and blood. But readers of the poem can have no doubts. Her true beauty leaves behind Of more sweetness than all art That I fear some shallow brain So like strains as these you see, No; if I had never seen Such a beauty, I had been To the homely dairy-maids, Clouted cream and bread and cheese. So long as the shepherd Philarete sang of country shades and country loves, his muse did not desert him; he held poesy in honour, and celebrated in song, as Lamb says, 'the wealth and strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor.' But when he departed from his native county, he left his muse behind him. Her influence remained with him awhile in London, but his troop of Satyrs,' as he called his Abuses Stript and Whipt,' frightened her away. He was now a man, and thought to put away childish things. The work that was 'raised from the heat of youth' was done; that VOL. XIII.-NO. 76, N.S. 35 to come was the 'trencher-fury of a rhyming parasite.' Thereafter facit indignatio versum; he could not remain unheard. On one occasion he thrust a petition into the hands of members of Parliament as they entered the House. Afterwards they retaliated, when Wither was in the Tower, by denying him pen, ink, and paper, and for once the prisoner did not exhaust his store of conceits; after covering three bread-trenchers with verses written in ochre- trencher-fury,' indeed!-he was forced to sit and think What might be writ with paper, pen, and ink. And so it is better not to follow him to London. The spectacle of his old age presents none of that peace which calmed the last blind years of his great contemporary, John Milton; he was rather an overgrown child of the State, alternately to be pampered and punished, now crying for the moon, now playing with the fire, and vociferously excusing and justifying himself when retribution threatened. Let us rather picture him in the wooded heights and deep lanes of Hampshire, when it was as yet unnecessary for him to seek to 'recapture the first fine careless rapture.' Stretched under the Bentworth beeches, I like to recall Wither's meditation, 'whilst he was taking a pipe of tobacco,' Even as this pipe was formed out of clay And may be shapeless earth again this day, So may I too; so brittle that one touch May break it, this is; I am also such, Yet me it makes with thankfulness to heed How God wraps up a blessing in a weed. But on returning to my inn I am forcibly reminded of his later days, when his life was embittered by imprisonment and 'his mind worn out with oppressions,' by seeing in a local paper: 'George Withers, a tramp, charged with soliciting alms on March, 1902.' When all is said, George Wither did but carry out the spirit of his motto, Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo.' The burden of his most famous and characteristic song is, 'What care I?' If only he had cared for his literary reputation, he would be entitled to a high place, even among the famous names of his day, for the undeniable sweetness of his lyrical power. Much of that power may be attributed to the influence and inspiration of the pleasant county of Hampshire. F. SIDGWICK. 547 THE LITTLE BOY. So soon as you shall have put away from you the glamour of the tiny girl, the spells of exquisite sorcery with which she enslaves you, the allurement of her coquetry and caprice, then you may face the question frankly, and acknowledge that the warmest corner of your heart is reserved, alike by reason and instinct, for the little boy. The little boy militant, tramping his nursery with drum and flag and scraps of patriotism; the little boy inconsolable over a broken toy, or shedding tears of tardy repentance upon a melted maternal breast. So easily abashed, so quickly elated; his credulity of glorious chances so illimitable, and his sum of human wealth a penny. He walks among bewildering realities and is companioned by rainbow dreams; the world presents to him a series of golden vistas down which he gazes, faintly cognisant of heroic deed and triumphant adventure at the further end. These are the roads into the past and the future; for the present there is all-desirable and all-sufficient play, upon which the daily details of life are mere excrescences. He is himself so sweet, so tender an anomaly. All those femininities, from petticoats to petulance, which the little girl wears by right, are his only for a brief space. There is continual war within him between these gentler attributes and the incipient virility which crops up at unexpected turns. Thus he draws one's affection by a twofold cord, by his loveliness, his shyness, his frailty, no less than those robuster traits of nascent man by which he puts his sisters to open shame as 'only girls.' He is the crowned king of childhood; his reign begins at two years old, and is over at eight or nine. By that time he has shaken off the last vestiges of sexless infancy, and is launched upon a new state of things: boy now, but little boy no longer. He exists in two main types: the clinging, timorous, quiet child, whose unimpeachable virtue is of the negative kind—more often the result of feeble health than of sound doctrine; and the quicksilver creature, brilliant and restless, scrambling from one mischief into another as fast as his badly bruised legs will carry him. The first may develop into a prig, the last gravitates towards the enfant terrible: each in turn is adorable. Paradoxical though it seem, pathos is the keynote of the little boy and all his works. The little girl is the woman in miniature; her characteristics are not changed but accentuated as years pass. Her toys are the prototypes of her future concerns (this holds good even among savage nations), and all her amusements are of a stereotyped, stay-at-home order. The mother, the housewife, the coquette in embryo, she carries out with more or less verisimilitude the details of these various rôles, and is in herself a standing example of the eternal fitness of things. But the little boy must suffer an explicit change before he can slough his babyhood. In him you shall see Man, the overlord, the dominant partner, held in all humiliation for the nonce under the thrall of women tutors and governors, and in bondage to the weak and beggarly elements. He is the victim of a present incapacity for those matters salient to his ultimate career. He is so chained about with 'Thou shalt nots' on the one hand, and with petticoat influence and little fears on the other, that the measure of his actual achievement under such harassing circumstances touches the marvellous. 'Every child is to a certain extent a genius,' says Schopenhauer, ' and every genius is to a certain extent a child'-not least so in a potency of overcoming obstacles. Those dare-devil acts with which the man-child asserts his manhood and alarms his anxious friends are counted and punished as crimes; and that somewhat inane nondescript, a good boy,' is usually, as I have said, he who lacks sufficient vitality for escapades. It is the mother, the aunt, the nurse, the governess, the elder sister-all his female tyrants, greatly misunderstanding, who are so down' upon the little boy for his heinous transgressions of the nursery code. His own sex are laxer or more lenient; they also have been in Arcadia. You may notice this fact in police reports, in newspaper accounts of those accidents to which the foolhardiness of the little boy renders him, alas! so frequently liable. He is there constantly alluded to, with a veiled tenderness, as 'the little fellow,' 'the poor little fellow,' the unfortunate child.' There is no such sympathy hinted when anything befalls a little girl, but rather a grumbling air, as who should say, 'Que diable fait-elle dans cette galère? But one reads, 'The little boy' (of six) 'cried so bitterly when his dog was brought to the hammer that the auctioneer refused to sell it'; and there was a recent story of Boers raiding a farm and all its live stock, when the little boy of the house, flinging his arms round his beloved pony, defied all and sundry to take it at little boys themEven the stony 'A pretty little father at West the peril of their lives. The Boers had been selves; they laughed, and departed in peace. hearted magistrate relents and Justice nods. boy, eight years old, was charged by his London with being of such a disposition as to be entirely beyond parental control. Mr. Plowden, on seeing the little fellow, said he did not intend to relieve a father of the responsibility of controlling a child of eight. The Father: "I can't control him." The Magistrate: "You must control him." The father went on to state that he had beaten the child and kept him without food. Mr. Plowden said starving a little boy was the way to send him off. The father said the boy had stolen five shillings from his mother, and spent it riding in omnibuses all day long. Mr. Plowden supposed the money was gone, and said the father should keep it out of his way and give him plenty of pudding. The boy was discharged.' This is only a sample of many such cases. Eight years old, by the way, seems to be a significant period in the little boy's history. The other day a child of eight actually received the Royal Humane Society's medal for having saved, at various times, three other babes from drowning. The little girl is certainly mother of the woman, but as to the child being father of the man, that I utterly gainsay. As a rule he is vastly superior to the man, in observation, conscience, sense of beauty, and all those other qualities which fade into the light of common day and leave him but a dull worldling at thirty who was a coruscating brilliance at six. Goethe said that 'if children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses'; and the inevitable decrescence of this natural ability is one of the losses which men regret most bitterly, though they assign other names to it. Sometimes it is the playfulness of childhood they deplore, sometimes its invincible innocence. 'I cannot reach it,' Henry Vaughan writes of that vanished spring: I cannot reach it, and my straining eye Were now that Chronicle alive, Those white designs which children drive, The little boy in the abstract is called Tommy-always Tommy. |
