The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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A VOLUME OF POETICS,

ill-fated offspring of a foolish father; miscellaneous collection of
occasionals and fugitives, longer or shorter, as the army of Bombastes.
Poetical as in verity I must confess to have been, (using the word
"poetical" as most men use it, and the words "have been" in the sense of
Troy's existence,) there must have lingered in me, even at that
hallucinating period, some little remnant of prosaic wisdom; for it is
now long since that I consigned to the most voracious of elements all
the more love-sick rhythmicals, and all the more hateful satiricals.
Now, I will maintain that act of incremation to be one of true heroism,
nearly equal to the judgment of Brutus; nor less is it matter of
righteous boasting to have immolated (warned by Charles Lamb's ghost)
divers albuminous preparations, which to have to do, were, Clio knows,
little pleasure, and to have done, we all know, as little praise. Such
light follies are like skeins of cotton, or adjectives, or babies, unfit
to stand alone; haply, well enough, times and things considered, but
totally unworthy to be dragged out of their contexts into the
imperishability of print; it is to take flies out of treacle, and embalm
them in clear amber. As to sonnets, what real author's mind will not,
if honest, confess to the almost daily recurrence of that symptom of his
disease? With mine, at least, they have increased, and are increasing;
yea, more--as a certain statesman suggested of Ireland's multitudinous
_pisantry_, or as tavern patriots declare of the power of the
crown--they ought to be diminished. Nevertheless, resolutely do I hope
that some of these at least are little worthy of the days of good Queen
Anne.

In matters of the sacred muse, lengthily as others have I trespassed
heretofore; the most protracted _fytte_, however, made a respectable
inroad on a new metrical version of the '_Psalms_,' attempting at any
rate closer accuracy from the Hebrew than Brady's, and juster rhymes
than Sternhold's: but this has since been better done by another bard.
On the whole budget of exploded poeticals is now legibly inscribed "to
be kept till called for," a period rather more indefinite than the
promise of a spendthrift's payment. Let them rest in peace, those
unfortunate poetics!

There are also in the bundle, if I rightly do remember me, sundry
metricals of the humorous sort, which may be considered as really
_waste-failures_ as any tainted hams that ever were yclept Westphalias.
For of all dreary and lugubrious perpetrations in print, nothing can be
more desolate than laboured witticism. A pun is a momentary spark dropt
upon the tinder-box of social intercourse; and to detach such a sentence
from its producing circumstances, is about as efficacious a method of
producing laughter, as the scintillatory flint and steel struck upon wet
grass would be of generating light. Few things are less digestible than
abortive efforts at the humorous; the stream of conversation instantly
freezes up; the disconcerted punster wears the look of his well-known
kinsman, the detected pickpocket; and a scribe, so mercilessly suicidal
as regards his better fame, deserves, when a plain blunt jury comes to
sit upon the body, to be found in mystical Latin, _felo de se_, or in
plain English "a fellow deceased."

"There shall come in the last days, scoffers;" those same last days in
which "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." It
is true that these phrases (quoted with the deepest reverence, though
found in lighter company) are forcibly taken from their context; but
still, the judgment of many wise among us will agree that they present a
remarkable coincidence: in this view of the case, and it is a most
serious one, the concurrent notoriety of humour having just arisen like
a phoenix from its ashes, of railroads and steamboats having partially
annihilated space, and of the strides which education, if not intellect,
has made upon the highroad of human improvement, assumes an importance
greater than the things themselves deserve. To a truly philosophic ken,
there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous is but skin-deep,
papillae on the surface of society; cut a little deeper, you will find
the veins and arteries of wisdom. Therefore will a sober man not deride
the notion that comic almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books
of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular
views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil
and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thick
upon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, are
flying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and
of a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, and
wise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence a state of the
universal mind degenerated and diseased. Still, let us not be too
severe; and, as to individual confessions, let not me play the
hypocrite. Like every thing else, good in its good use, and evil only in
abuse of its excesses, humour is capable of filling, and has filled, no
lightly-estimable part in the comedy of temporal happiness. What a good
thing it is to raise an innocent and cheerful laugh; to inoculate
moroseness with hearty merriment; to hunt away misbelieving care, if not
with better prayers, at the lowest with a pack of yelping cachinations;
to make pain forget his head-ache by the anodyne of mirth! Truly, humour
has its laudable and kindly uses: it is the mind's play-time after
office-drudgery--an easy recreation from thought, anxiety, or study.
Only when it usurps, or foolishly attempts to usurp, the office of more
than a temporary alleviation; when it affects to set up as an atheistic
panacea; when it professes to walk as an abiding companion, lighting you
on your way with injurious gleams (as that dreadful figure in Dante, who
lanterns his path by the glaring eyes of his own truncated head); and
when it ceases to become merely the casual scintillation, the flitting
_ignus fatuus_ of a summer evening--then only is wit to be condemned.
Often, for mine own poor part in this most mirthful age, have I had

HEARTY LAUGHS,

IN PROSE AND VERSE;

but take no thought of preserving their echoes, or of shrining them in
the eternal basalt of print, like to the oft-repeated cries of Lurley's
hunted in-dweller. The humorous infection caught also me, as a thing
inevitable; but the case, I wot, proved an unfavourable one: and who
dare enter the arena of contention with these mighty men of Momus, these
acknowledged sages of laughter, (pardon me for omitting some fifty
more,) so familiar to the tickled ear, as Boz, and Sam Slick, Ingoldsby,
and Peter Plymley, Titmarsh, Hood, Hook; not to mention--(but that
artists are authors)--laughter-loving Leech, Pickwickian Phiz, and
inimitable Cruikshank? Nevertheless, let a tender conscience penitently
ask, is it quite an innocent matter to lend a hand in rendering the age
more careless than perchance, but for such ministrations, it would cease
to be? Is it quite wise in a writer, by following in that wake, to be
reputed at once to help in doing harm, and help to do harm to his own
reputation? There are professors enough in this quadrangle of the
college of amusement, popular and extant in flourishing obesity, without
so dull a volunteer as Mr. Self intruding his humours on the world: and
surely the far-echoing voices of a couple of cannons, thundering their
mirth throughout Europe from the jolly quarters of St. Paul's, may well
frighten into silence a poor solitary pop-gun, which, as the frog with
the bull, might burst in an attempt at competition, or, like Bottom's
Numidian lion, could imitate the mighty roar only as gently as your
sucking-dove.

* * * * *

Grapho-mania, or the love of scribbling, is clearly the great
distinguishing characteristic of an author's mind; pen and ink are to
it, what bread and butter are to its lodging-house the body: observe, we
do not hazard a remark so false as that the one produces the
other--their relations are far from being mutual; but we only suggest
that the mind, as well as the body, hobbles like a three-legged
OEdipus, resting on its proper staff of life. And what can be more
provocative of scribbling than travel? How eagerly we hasten to describe
unheard-of adventures, how anxiously record exaggerated marvels! to
prove some printed hand-book _quite wrong_ in the number of steps up a
round-tower: or to crush, as a wicked vender of execrable wines, the
once fair fame of some over-charging inn-keeper! Then, again, how
pleasant to immortalize the holiday, and read in after-years the story
of that happy trip langsyne; how pleasant to gladden the kind eyes of
friends, that must stay at home, with those wonder-telling journals, and
to taste the dulcet joys of those first essays at authorship. A great
charm is there in jotting down the day's tour, and in describing the
mountains and museums, the lakes and lazzaroni, the dishes and disasters
that have made it memorable: moreover, for fixing scenery on the mental
retina, as well as for comparison of notes as to an _alibi_, for duly
remembering things heard and seen, as well as for being humbled in
having (as a matter inevitable) left unseen just the best lion of the
whole tour, journals are a most praiseworthy pastime, and usually rank
among the earliest efforts of an embryo author's mind.

It is a thing of commonest course, that, in this age of inveterate
locomotion, your present humble friend, now talking in this candid
fashion with your readership, has been every where, seen every thing,
and done his touristic devoirs like every body else about him: also, as
a like circumstance of etymological triviality, that he has severally,
and from time to time, recorded for self-amusement and the edification
of others all such matters as holiday-making school-boys and
boarding-misses, and government-clerks in their swift-speeding vacation,
and elderly gentlemen vainly striving to enjoy their first fretful
continental trip, usually think proper to descant upon. Of such
manuscripts the world is clearly full; no catacomb of mummies more
fertile of papyri; no traveller so poor but he has by him a packet of
precious notes, whereon he sets much store: every tourist thinks he can
reasonably emulate clever Basil Hall, in his eloquent fragments of
voyages and travels; and I, for my part, a truth-teller to my own
detriment, am ashamed to confess the existence of

A DECADE OF JOURNALS;

which of olden time my _cacoethes_ produced as regularly as recurred the
summer solstice. Unlike that of Livy's, I am satisfied that this poor
Decade be irrevocably lost; but, for dear recollection's sake of days
gone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation.
Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-side
wanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, _a la
Roscoe_, be set forth. But--what conceivable news can be told at this
time of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded British isles?
Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to the
top of Egyptian pyramids or the bottom of Polish salt-mines, my
authorship would long since have publicly declared, in common with many
a monkey, that it had "seen the world." As things are, to Bruce,
Buckingham, Belzoni, and that glorious anomaly, the blind brave Holman,
let us leave the harvest of praise, worthy to be reaped as their own by
modern travellers.

* * * * *

More, yet more, most exemplary of listeners; and a web or webs of very
various texture. Let any man tell truths of himself, and seem to be
consistent, if he can. From grave to gay, from simple to severe, is the
line most expressive of such foolish versatility as mine; _varium et
mutabile semper_, to one thing constant never. I have heard, or read,
among the experiences of a popular preacher, that one of his most
vexatious petty temptations, was the rise of humorous notions in his
mind the moment he stepped into the pulpit; and it is well known that
many a comic actor has been afflicted with the blackest melancholy while
supporting right facetiously his best, because most ludicrous character.
Let such thoughts then as these, of the frailties incident to man, serve
to excuse the present juxtaposition of fancies in themselves
diametrically opposite.

It is proper to preamble somewhat of apology before announcing the next
presumptuous tractate; presumptuous, because affecting to advise some
thousands of men whose office alike and average character are sacred,
and just, and excellent. Why then intrude such unrequired counsel? Read
the next five pages, and take your answer. Zealously inflamed for the
cause of truth, if not also charitably wroth against sundry lukewarm
cumber-earth incumbents, and certainly more in love with the
Church-of-England prayer-book than with her no-ways-extenuated evils of
omission or commission, I wrote, not long since, [and truly, not long
since, for few things in this book can boast of higher antiquity than a
most modern existence, some things being the birth of an hour, some of a
day, a week, or a month; and not more than one or two above a twelve
month's age.--Alas, for Horace's forgotten counsels!--alas, for Pope's
and Boileau's reiterated prescription of revisal for--_morbleu et
parbleu_--nine years!] I wrote then a good cantle of an essay addressed
to the clergy on some matters of judicious amelioration, which we will
call, if you please--and if the word hints be not objectionable--

LAY HINTS.

Now, as to the unclerical authorship of this, it is wise that it be done
out of metier. Laymen are more likely to gain attention in these
matters, from the very fact of their influence being an indirect one,
speaking as they do rather from the social arm-chair, the high-stool of
the counting-house, or the benches of whilom St. Stephen's, than _ex
cathedra_ as of office and of duty.

It would be a fair exemplification of the stolid prowess of a Quixote
tilting against, yea, stouter foes than wind-mills, were I to have
commenced with an attack upon external church architecture: this topic
let us leave to the fraternity of builders; only asking by what rule of
taste an obelisk-like spire, is so often stuck upon the roof of a
Grecian temple, and by what rule of convenience gigantic columns so
commonly and resolutely sentinel the narrowest of exits and entrances.
Let us be more commonly contented, as well we may, with our grand,
appropriate, and impressive indigenous kind of architecture--Gothic,
Norman, and Saxon: the temple of Ephesus was not suitable to be fitted
up with galleries, nor was the Parthenon meant to be surmounted by a
steeple. But all this is useless gossip.

Similarly Quixotic would be any tirade against pews, those pet
strongholds of snug exclusive selfishness; bad in principle, as
perpetually separating within wooden walls members of the same
communion; unwholesome in practice, confining in those antre-like
parallelograms the close-pent air; unsightly in appearance, as any one
will testify, whose soul is exalted above the iron beauties of a plain
conventicle; expensive in their original formation, their fittings and
repairs; and, when finished, occupying perhaps one-fourth of the area of
a church already ten times too small for its neighbouring population.
Fixed benches, or a strong muster of chairs, or such modes of
congregational accommodation as public meeting-rooms and ordinary
lecture-rooms present, seems to me more consistent and more convenient.
But all this again is vain talking--a very empty expenditure of words;
we must be satisfied with churches as they are; and, after all, let me
readily admit that steeples are imposing in the distance, and of use as
belfries; (probably of like intent were the strange columnar towers of
Ireland;) and with regard to pews, let me confess that practice finds
perfect what theory condemns as wrong, so--let these things pass.

Nevertheless, let me begin upon the threshold with the extortionate and
abominable race of pew-women, beadles, clerks, vergers, bell-ringers,
and other fee-hungry ravens hovering around and about almost every
hallowed precinct: pray you, reform all that, and copy railroad
companies in forbidding those begrudged gratuities to mendicant and
ever-grumbling menials. Next, give more sublunary heed, we beseech you,
to the comforts or discomforts incidental to doors, windows, stoves,
paint, dust, dirt, and general ventilation; consider the cold, fevers,
lumbagos, rheums, life-long aches, and fatal pains too often caught
helplessly and needlessly by the devout worshipper in a town or country
church. Look to your organist, that he wot something of the value of
time and the mysteries of tune; or, if a country parson, drill cleverly
that insubordinate phalanx of _soi-disant_ musicians, a rustic
orchestra; and exclude from the latter, at all mortal hazards, the
huntsman's horn, the volunteer fiddle, and the shrill squeaking of the
wry-necked pipe. Much is being now done for congregational psalmody; but
when will country folks give up their murderous execution of the
fugue-full anthem, and when will London congregations understand that
the singing-psalms are not set apart exclusively for charity-children?
When shall Bishop Kenn's '_Awake my soul_,' cease to be our noonday
exhortation; and a literal invocation for sweet sleep to close our
eye-lids no longer be the ill-considered prelude to an afternoon
discourse? Take some trouble to improve and educate, or get rid of, if
possible, your generally vulgar, illiterate, ill-conditioned clerk;
insist upon his v's and h's: let him shut up his shoe-stall; and raise
in the scale of society one of the leaders of its worship: as, at
present, these stagnant, recreant, ignorant clerks are sad
stumbling-blocks; no help to the congregation, and a nuisance to its
minister. In reading--suffer this foolishness, my masters--fight against
the too frequent style of dogged, dormant, dull formality; we take you
for earnest living guides to our devotion, not mere dead organs of an
oft-repeated service; quicken us by your manner; a psalm so spoken is
better than the sermon. In more fitting places has your author long ago
delivered his mind concerning matters of a character more directly
sacred than shall here find room; as, the sacrament with its holy
mysteries, and the many things amendable in ordinary preachments; but
for these my unseasonable Wisdom shrouds itself in Silence: therefore,
to do away with details, and apply a general rule, above all things, and
in all things, strive by judicious acquiescence with human wants, and
likings, and failings too, if conscientiously you can, as well as by
spirited and true devotion, to break down the sluggish mounds of needful
uniformity, and to build up round the church a rampart of good sense:
and so, Heaven bless your labours! A word more: if it be possible, take
no fees at a baptism, and let it not be thought, by either rich or poor,
that an entrance into Christ's fold must be paid for; no, nor at a
burial; but let the service for the Christian dead be accorded freely,
without money and without price. To a wedding, the same ideas are not
perhaps so closely applicable; therefore we will generously suffer that
you keep your customs there; but on the introduction of a little one to
the bosom of the church, or restoring the body of a saint to Him who
made it of the dust, nothing can be more repulsive to right religious
feelings than to be bothered by a fee-seeking clerk, thrusting in your
face an itching palm: to the poor, these things are more than a mere
annoyance; they amount to a hardship and a hindrance; for such demands
at such seasons are often nothing less than a bitter extortion upon the
self-denial of conscientious duty.

More might be added; but enough, too much has been alluded to. Nothing
would strengthen the bulwarks of our Zion more than such easy reforms as
these: recent happy revivals in our church would thus be more
solidified; and where, as now, many have been lulled to slumber, many
grieved, many become disgusted or Dissenters, our sons and our daughters
would grow up as the polished corners of the temple, and crowds would
throng the courts of our holy and beautiful House.

Suffer thus far, clerical and lay, these crude hints: in all things have
I studied brevity, throughout this little bookful; therefore are you
spared a perusal of my reasons, and so be indulgent for their absence. I
"touch your ears" but lightly; be you for charity, as in old Rome, my
favourable witnesses.

* * * * *

My before-mentioned Censor of the press had a very considerable mind to
dock all mention of the following intended _brochure_. But I answered,
Really, Mr. Judgment, (better or worse, as occasion may register your
Agnomen,) you must not weigh trifles in gold-assaying scales; be not so
particular as to the polish of a thumb-nail; endure a little incoherent
pastime; count not the several stems of hay, straw, stubble--but suffer
them to be pitch-forked _en masse_, and unconsidered: it is their
privilege, in common with that of certain others--lightnesses that froth
upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's
classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that
if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the
antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give
the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same
colt, as straying without a responsible rider, is indeed liable to be
impounded by any who can catch him; but still, if he be found to have
done great damage to his master's character, or to a neighbour's fences,
the estray shall rather be abandoned than acknowledged. Let then this
unequal work, this ill-assorted bundle of dry book-plants, this
undirected parcel of literary stuff, be accounted much in the same
situation as that of the wanton caitiff-colt, so likely to bait a-pound,
and afterwards to be sold for payment of expenses, in true bailiff-sense
of justice. And let thus much serve as discursive prolegomena to a
notion, scarcely worth recording, but for the wonder, that no professed
writer (at least to my small knowledge) has entered on so common-sense a
field. Paris, I remember, some years ago was inundated with copies of a
treatise on the important art of tying the cravat; every shop-window
displayed the mystic diagrams, and every stiff neck proclaimed its
popularity. This was my yesterday's-conceived precedent for entertaining
the bright hope of illuminating London on the subject of shaving:

ANTI-XURION;

A CRUSADE AGAINST RAZORS,

should have been my taking title; and perchance the learned treatise
might have been characteristically illustrated with steel cuts. Shaving
is a wider topic than most people think for; it is a species of insanity
that has afflicted man in all ages, deprived him of nature's best
adornment in every country under heaven. So contradictorily too; as
thus: the Spanish friar shaves all but a rim round his head, which rim
alone sundry North American aborigines determine to extirpate; John
Chinaman nourishes exclusively a long cue, just on that same inch of
crown-land which the P.P. sedulously keeps as bare as his palm: all the
Orientals shave the head, and cherish the beard; all the Occidentals
immolate the beard, and leave the honours of the head untouched. Then,
again, the strange successive fashions in this same unnatural, unneedful
depilation; look at the vagaries of young France: not to descend also to
savage men, and their clumsy shell-scrapings; and to devote but little
time to the voluminous topic of wigs, male and female, cavalier and
caxon, Marlborough and monstrous maccaroni--from the plaited
Absalom-looking periwig of a Pharaoh in the British Museum, to
Truefitt's last patent self-adjuster. Of all these follies, and their
root a razor, might we show the manifest absurdity: we might argue upon
Eastern stupidity as caused by thickness of the skull, such thickness
being the substitute for thatchy hair suggested by kind ill-used Nature
as the hot brain's best protection: we might reason upon the average
sheepishness of this peaceful West, as due to having shorn the lion of
his mane, Phoebus of his glory, man of his majestic beard. Then the
martyrdom it is to many! who stoically, day after day, persist in
scratching to the quick their irritable chins, and after all to little
better end than the diligent earning of tooth-aches, ear-aches, colds,
sore throats, and unbecoming blank faces. Habit, it is true, makes us
deem that a comfort, and our better halves (or those we would fain have
so) think that a beauty, which our forerunners of old time would have
held a plague, a disgrace, a deformity, a mortification: prisoned
paupers in the Union think it an insufferable hardship to go bearded,
and King David's ambassadors would have given their right eyes _not_ to
have been shaved; so much are we the slaves of custom: Sheffield also,
it is equally true, is a town that humane men would not wish to ruin; by
razors they of Sheffield live, and shaving is their substance. But, as
in the case of the smoother and softer sex, we are convinced that the
wand of fashion would presently convert their heterodox anti-barbal
prejudices: so, in the case of harder-ware Sheffield, while we hope to
live to see razors regarded as antiquarian rarities, (even as a
watchman's rattle, or the many-caped coats of the semi-extinct class
_Welleria coachmanensis_ are now some time become,) still we desire all
possible multiplication to the tribe of trimming scissors. Like Ireland,
we shout for long-denied justice; give us our beards. That reasonable
indulgence shall never be abused; our Catholic emancipation of moustache
and imperial, whisker and the rest, shall not be a pretence for lion's
manes, or the fringe of goats and monkeys: we would not so far follow
unsophisticated nature as to relapse into barbarous wild men; but
diligently squaring, pointing, combing, and perfuming those natural
manly decorations, after the most approved modes of Raleigh, Walsingham,
and Shakspeare, and heroical Edward the Black Prince, and venerable
apostolic Bede, we will encroach little further than to discard our
comfortless starched collars and strangling stocks, to adopt once more
in lieu thereof open necks and vandyke borders.