The English Eccentrics
By E. M. FORSTER.
I Alw a member of the Royal Horticultural Society because of its gardens at Wisley, because of its occasional gifts of seedlings, because of its fortnightly flower shows and because of my fellow members. Where else in England, and where but in England, could one meet such an adorable display of eccentricity ? Those two ladies knitting with mittens on their feet and their feet on two chairs ; that silver-haired man in pale blue homespun, hurrying after a wife whose trousers are darker blue ; the other old gentleman, to be likened with all possible tenderness to a nutritious and benevolent mutton chop, unable to hurry because of his girth, fob and stock; those hats like gloxinias or mushrooms, those dustcloaks of asparagus and nemophila—where are they to be seen except at Vincent Square ? Where, except in the pages of Miss Sitwell ? Not in the grand annual displays at Chelsea, where the fashionable world turns out. Not in the full-dress documented surveys of literature and life. But in pages such as hers, where erudition is controlled by fantasy, and a slight wave of the parasol performs a minor magic, transforms exhibitors into exhibits, auriculas, cacti, sedums, Dom Pedro tulips, a few mushrooms, some spurge.
Nor is she confined to horticulture. Are those birds, flapping and squawking in the dust ? No—yes--no. They are the quacks and alchemists who pretend to cure the ills of this world, " Merry Andrew " who was physician to Henry VIII and all his throng : Dr. Thomas Rands with his cure for the Pimple-Pamplins, Dr. Thomas Suffold with his Pillulae Londineae, Dr. Van Butchell on a purple pony with a large white bone in his hand, Colonel Ketterfelto with his cats, Dr. Graham with his Celestial Bed (£100 a night) and Magneto-Electric Bed (szo only), all who heal the Female Sex of the Glimm'ning of the Gizzard, the Quavering of the Kidneys and the Wambling Trot, and mankind in general of the Strong Fives, the Marthanbles, the Moon-Pall and the Hockogrockle. Evoked by Miss Sitwell they rise from the dust, but not quite in human semblance—they would be too ugly if they were, and cases for the magistrate. She gives them a touch of the birdish—a feather, a grating little squawk, they are quacks who can quack, and so move our compassion or laughter.
There are others whom a cold little wind prefigures: small violent creatures riding hell for leather over the chill country- side, skating after ducks naked, and setting their night shirts on fire to scare away the hiccups. These are the sportsmen, Mr. Hirst, Colonel Thornton, Squire Mytton. They ride upon bulls with pigs for pointers, drink eight bottles of port a day, use their coffins as sideboards and are carried to their graves on the shoulders of stout widows, unless they die in a debtor's prison. Tracked to their lairs, they become the hunted rather than the hunters, the starry brightness of their public appearance fades in the icy twilight, the madness of Actaeon is on them, and the misery of Herne. Because they are not quite human but part of the wind which chase them, their oddities are bearable : " poor driven drunken The English Eccentrics. By Edith Sitwell. (Faber and Faber. 15s.) ghosts." And there are other eccentrics of gentler habit-- more like my sedentary auriculas and home-spun sedum& There are the amateurs of fashion—Romeo Coates of Antigua and his mishaps and his diamonds, and his friend Baron de Geramb. There is Mr. Herbert Spencer. There are the ornamental hermits. Ornamental Hermits were demanded by connoisseurs of landscape towards the close of the eighteenth century. Their duties were to sit in a grotto in the grounds and grow beards. Some of them set up for themselves, and merged into another class of oddities, the Misers, and I remember one of these when I was a boy—or rather his house, for he was already dead. Miss Sitwell mentions him. He lived at St. Ippolyts, near
Stevenage, and his barred and boarded windows seemed to extend endlessly as the pony trotted past. No doubt it was actually a small house. Presently it was pulled down, and mementoes made out of the timber. I have or had one of them ; a little round urn-shaped box with a lid. Perhaps it contains the little pinch of dust which, in Miss Sitwell's vision, is the conclusion of the whole matter.
Her book is a friendly excursion rather than a guide, and fuller of acknowledgements than of references. The lesson to be drawn from it—if so heavy a draught as a lesson be required—is that eccentricity ranks as a national asset,
and that so long as it is respected there is some hope that our country will not go mad as a whole. Madness, today, is becoming a State-monopoly, beneath whose death-dealing wings the standardized individuals march to their doom. In the England of Miss Sitwell and of my Royal Horticultural
Society this is not so. There are local vents, through which disperse the peccant humours elsewhere infecting the body politic. And those of _us .who assume (perhaps wrongly) that we are sane, can 'learn from her pages the lesson most necessary for a sane man ; the need of a tolerance which is
touched by pity but untouched by contempt.
Let me end by quoting at random—at genuine not literary random. On page 93 we read : " The Jesuit missionary, Paleotti, who wrote a treatise proving that the American aborigines were eternally damned beyond hope of redemption, because they were the offspring of the Devil and one of Noah's daughters—he, alas, helpful as- he was, cannot be num- bered among our heroes. And of Baxter, who wrote Hooks and Ego for Believers' Breeches, I know nothing."
And on page 193 :
".The disillusioned Mr. Nathan began to pick quarrels with Miss Fuller, but she replied only : You still upbraid me to the stars, and I feel sure that you will not find me incompetent.' This irritated Mr. Nathan so much that he found more and more faults in her."
On page 293 :
" Mr. Elwes lamented the habits of the common crow, that bleak and boring bird. For, having the custom of picking up stray chill% bones, wool, etc. with which to light his fire, he was found on ono occasion demolishing an old crow's nest. The interested observers asked him why he should give himself so much trouble, whereupon the old gentleman replied : Oh, sir, it is really a shame that these creatures could do so—do but see what a waste they make.' " On page 393—but alas, there is no page 393.
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