THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.*
THOSE who cultivate the lighter literature of the day will not require to be told that this volume is the second series of a collection of essays by a writer signing himself "A. K. H. B.," published at various times during the last three years in Fraser': Magazine. To a reader unacquainted with them a tolerably adequate idea of their character will be conveyed by saying that they belong to the class of composition of which "Friends in Council" is one of the best known types, and that they claim a more distant affinity with the "Essays of Elia" and those of Hartley Coleridge. The present volume deals with the subjects of 6 Disappointment and Success"—of "Giving Up and Coming Down"—of the Worries of Life"—of the "Dignity of Dulness "—of "Growing Old "—of "Scylla and Charybdis "—of " Churchyards"—and of "Summer Days." On all these topics the Country Parson discourses with a meditative and generally pleasant pen, touching on matters which interest most of us, and making observations which are just sufficiently below the surface not to have occurred to us on the bare announcement of the title, and not too far- fetched to be beyond the verification of ordinary experience. His style is, for the most part, good ; he always writes like a gentleman, and though there is little evidence of wide reading or deep culture in his pages, the want is partly supplied by some practical acquaintance with human nature, and a kindly sympathy with a certain though not a very large .portion of it. Those who like these essays will probably like them very much; but if they. are persons of tact, they will not recommend them so in- discriminately as they would do the last new novel. For nothing is more curious, in a small way, than to observe what very different judgments are pronounced upon books of this sort by persons of different ages and temperaments, and how you may pass from one circle where the writer is thought a guide, philosopher, and friend, to another where he is nothing but an insufferable twaddler or a pedantic coxcomb. A. K. H. B.'s former volume was a success, and we should not be surprised to hear that some of his more enthusiastic admirers had gone the length of writing to tell him how eagerly they looked forward to the next number of Fraser, and how much they wished they had such a parson in their church. The worst he appears to have heard of himself is that he is a light, or frivolous, because an amusing writer, and that his essays are "sermons played in polka tune." He would, perhaps, be astonished, and would certainly gain some illustrations for the next edition of his paper "On the Art of putting Things," if he could hear the unvarnished manner in which lie is sometimes spoken of by persons whose sincerity he would not deny and whose capacity he could not despise. But it has always seemed to us that both the excessive admiration and violent dispraise of which he is occasionally the object rest upon a mistaken footing, and cannot be adjudged in any case of this sort upon grounds which are to be considered absolute for all the world. Some people, per- haps, prefer him, for their own consumption, to Charles Lamb ; while some think him little better than Mr. Martin Tupper. Both are right in their way, for the case is one in which there is no appeal from the verdict of the individual.
The truth appears to be that every book of the moral essay class, addressed itself to a certain moral temper and to a certain degree of intellectual development, and not to any other. Some moralizers are of a very elementary sort; and though it may be true that they have made their discoveries themselves, the world made the same discoveries long ago, and people are ignorant of them only when very young. But at that time they come in usefully, as a part of educa- tion, to those who are disposed to think at all. We should be sorry
• The Recreations of a Country Parson. Second Series. Parker and Bourn. to have to go through a course of the "Proverbial Philosophy," but we do not question that there is a time of life at which it may be beneficial. All that is required is to stimulate thought, and a book which effects this is good, however much we may be led to look down upon it afterwards. Some books are intellectual baby-jumpers; and the successive stages of perambulators, Shetland ponies, and hacks and hunters, have also their-counterparts in the world of men- tal development. If we take up a book of this class at its proper time, it hits us, like a gun that has been trained to the proper range of the bit of road where an enemy is to pass ; we put it down, and think from time to time as we read it through, and it may colour our view oflife a good deal. When we take it up some time after, it seems flat, stale, and unprofitable, and we wonder how we could ever have liked it. We have outgrown it, that is all and our feet are touch- ing the ground, as they do when we ride the Shetland pony for the last time.
' This, it appears to us, would be the line to take up by any one wishing to defend Mr. Boyd against the charge of perpetrating an elaborate series of truisms, of having risen to address the public without having really anything fresh to tell them. It ought to be no news (though it generally is) to clever and brilliant men, that the mass of mankind are in an extremely sluggish state, and require a peculiar kind of stimulus which may gently rouse without shocking them, and lead them, by a sort of flowery track, into the domain of intellectual pursuits. If they derive this stimulus from the book before us, the fact that it is found a very sickly and mawkish diet by those accustomed to stronger food forms no substantial objection to it. To this description the 'Recreations of a Country Parson" may be as obnoxious in some eyes as it is so to the former m many others, and neither class, in our opinion, has a right to impugn the verdict of their opponents. Whatever view may be taken of the greater or less novelty of the ideas embodied in these essays, no one will ac- cuse them of having been taken up at second-hand, or of expressing anything but the writer's real convictions. They are original as far he is concerned, and are doubtless as much the result of patient thought and observation as he states them to be. He muit be con- tent to accept the appreciation of those who can see this, in compen- sation for the sneers of those who think him "a light writer," and for the better-founded dislike of those who are readily disgusted by anything that savours of affectation. In his former volume there was a passage, introductory to one of the essays, in which the reader was challenged to guess what the author was using to rest his paper on, and was told, after some delay, that it was a horse's forehead. We suspect that this paragraph, and one or two more of the same kind, have made A. K. H. B. not a few enemies; but we are glad to see that the present volume is less exuberant in similar confidences. On the charge of egotism which one frequently hears brought against these essays we should not be disposed to lay much stress— in the sense in which the word is usually employed. We ought not to complain of a man for drawing his illustrations from what is im- mediately about him and what he knows best, and for directing his advice to classes of whom he has specimens continually brought under his notice. A man's life and experience, provided it is to the point, is not necessarily uninteresting because you hear it from him- self, whatever may be your opinion of his self-control, or prudence, in milling it the subject of conversation. But there is a more subtle kind of egotism occasionally observable in these essays' which is pro- bably the ground of that vague dissatisfaction which many persons feel in reading them. The author is not selfish, neither is he narrow- minded ; but he unconsciously refers all things to the standard of worldly prosperity which he has himself attained. We have all imagiaed, and perhaps sometimes seen, the ideal parsonage—gabled roofs and domed windows—deep porch overgrown with roses—trim gravel and grass outside—intellectual man by study window, com- posing (early in the week) next Sunday's sermon. We heave a little sigh of envy as we take in the aspect of such a spot from the roof of a coach, and it remains in the mind as a pleasant little picture, though quite out of our own way. But this does not mean that we wish to have it always obtruded on our notice, and the contrast, with a perhaps very different lot, drawn out in every aggravating detail. The allusions which A. K. H. B. is constantly making told s surroundings of respectability and comfort may be a little irritating; and though we do not in the least mean to say that the feeling is a proper one it is certainly very natural to the unregenerate mind. Much of the essay on Summer Days" is pervaded by this sort of epicmOatt sentiment. "Looking mentally away," says the author, "from this cool shady verdure amid which we are sitting, let us think of summer days elsewhere- " Let as think of them listlessly, that we may the more enjoy the quiet here: as a child on a frosty winter night, snug in his little bed, puts out a foot for a moment into the chilly expanse of sheet that stretches away from the warm nest in which he lies, and then pulls it swiftly back again, enjoying the cozy warmth the more for this little reminder of the bitter chilL Here, where the air is cool, pure, and soft, let us think of a hoarding round same old house which the la- bourers are pulling down, amid clouds of the white, blinding, parching dust of lime, on a sultry summer day. I can hardly think of any 'human position as worse, if not intended directly as a position of torture. . . . • • "Think of being to-day in a stiffing counting-house in the hot bustling town. I have been especially interested in a glazed closet which I have seen in a certain immensely large and very crowded shop in a certain beautiful city. It is a sort of lit tie office partitioned off from the shop: it has a sloping table, with three or four hugelooks bound in parchment. There is a ceaseless bustle, crush, and hum of talking outside; and inside there are clerks sitting writing, and receiving money through little pigeon-holes. I should like to sit for two or three days in a corner of that little retreat, and to write a sermon there. It would be curious to sit there to-day in the shadow, and to see the warm sunbeams only outside through a distant window, resting on sloping roofs. If one did not get sea-sic.k, there would be something fresh in a summer day at sea. It is always cool and breezy there, at least in these latitudes, on the warmest day. Above all, there is no dust. Think of the luxurious cabin of a fine yacht to-day. Deep cushions; rich curtains; no tremor of machinery; flowers, books, carpets inches thick ; and through the windows, dim bills and blue sea. Then, flying away in spirit, let us go to-day (only in imagination) into the Courts of Law at Westminster. The atmosphere on a summer day in these scenes is always hot and choky. There is a suggestion of summer-time in the sunshine through the dusty lanterns in the roofs. Thinking of these courts, and of all their belongings and associa- tions, here on this day, is like the child already mentioned when he puts his foot into a very cold corner of his bed, that he may pull it back with special sense of what a blessing it is that he is not bodily in that very cold corner."
It cannot be surprising that manifestations of this kind of spirit should make some people feel as Hotspur did at Holmedon :—
"He made me mad
To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet . . .
And telling me the sovereign'st thing on earth Was parmaceti for an inward braise, and but for these vile guns Be would himself have been a soldier."
It is also tolerably evident that the author has less fellow-feeling than he would wish to have for modes of life and character very different from his own, and this want of fundamental sympathy is the reason why his popularity finds a definite limit. We cannot fancy that a very poor, or miserable, or struggling person would find much comfort in most of these essays. There is nothing very bracing about them. To this remark we must allow that the one on "Giving Up and Coming Down" is an exception; but it is the only one in the two volumes. We do not depreciate the value of the essays in general, as we have observed at the outset, by saying that they are addressed to a limited class. But we regret that the class should be limited, as we think it is, not only by intellectual development, but by worldly circumstances. Nothing we have said, however, is meant to deter any one from reading the book, which is tolerably certain to be liked by those who like such reading at all. A very few pages will be sufficient to show its quality, for almost any page is characteristic enough to display the author's idiosyncrasy and power of expression. The essays are, of course, not all of the same merit. The one on "Scylla and Cha- rybdis" was much admired at the time of its appearance, but a great part of it is rather common-place, and the one good point—that on "Secondary Vulgar Errors"—appears to be due to Archbishop Whately. The "Dignity of Dulness" has some truth, but it is put in a very exaggerated way. The extent to which people believe in dulness and its cognate qualities is far too broadly stated, and the amount of justice which such belief involves is missed. "You cannot but feel an inconsistency," says A. K. H. B., "between the ideas of Mr. Disraeli writing Henrietta Temple, and Mr. Disraeli leading the House of Commons. You feel that somehow it costs an effort to feel that there is nothing unbefitting when the author of The Caztons becomes a secretary of state. . . . How can a man befit a dignified office who has interested and cimused you so much?" He explains the feeling by saying that because the jackpudding amuses us, we have a tendency to think that any one who does the like must partake of the character of the jackpudding. This is shallow. There is a real reason for preferring a man with literary antecedents like Sir Cornewall Lewis, or one with no literature at all,' to a novelist or poet. The one has been exercising quite a different set of faculties to the other, and has accustomed himself to the approval of a dif- ferent audience. A man who has been encouraging his imagination, fancy, and style, with the reward of immediate applause, is less likely to be cool and cautious in his measures, less disposed to have faith in the future, to wait the gradual ripening of a policy, less alive to the dead weight of custom and prejudice, too prone to deal wild strokes, to bear down opposition with contempt, to aim at an impracticable symmetry, and to hurry on the development of events. We do not, of course, mean that-an imaginative man must have these defects, but they are such as, prima' faeie,-he may be expected to have; and this substantial ground for distrust is a point which Mr. Helps would have brought out very forcibly, but which seems quite to have escaped the essayist before us.
The best essay in the present volume is the one on "Giving Up and Coming Down," which contrasts the behaviour, under failure, of men who accept the position without losing heart, and of those who consider all lost because one favourite object has not been attained. Another very good essay is the one on "Growing Old ;" but we do not think that any are superior to the paper in the former volume on "The Way of Putting Things," which is the one we should place before a reader to whom we desired to recommend the Country Parson's work.
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