Listen to my Tale of Woe A Peck of Troubles.
Collected by Daniel George. (Cape. 7s. fici.)
MR. DANIEL GEORGE has assembled (using the arrangement, now becoming popular, of alphabetical order with separate sub-headings) agood and veracious collection of other people's troubles. All are from real life, mostly described in letters ; he has not drawn on fictioned woes, nor needed to, since life offers more than we require of grief. Indeed, he has been moderate ; one might produce many more volumes of various kinds of disasters and sad tales without exhausting them.
But Mr. George has cast his net wide, and here are troubles in plenty. It is an interesting psychological experiment to read them through, and note the effect of this cumulative chagrin on one's -own mind. Does it weigh the reader down withan increased sense of lachrymae mum, making hina view this vale of tears with even more apprehension than be6ire ? Or does it instead set him up, elate him with the sharpened recognition that there is no new grief, and that all men, and not only hirbself, are born to trouble as the sparks fly upward ? I think the latter. Most of the troubles.here set forth we have had always with us. Many woes of travel, for instance, such as customs, fellow-tourists, foreigners, and the Swiss Alps, are the same for ever ; others, such as boats, have greatly lesse. ned with the years. " They be the spitefulleit people in the world;" wrote: John Brierton of the customs officials of the land he was trying to • enter in the sixteenth century. Ailments, too, have changed little ; here we have boils, colds, onen windoWs,the cough h that split Fanny Burney's stays, deafness, tooth,ache (Lady Margaret Hoby's, which was taken away by prayer, De Quiricey's removed by a sirloin of beef, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Aus:ten's young charges at the dentist's : " I think," wrote Jane to Cassandra, he must best lover of teeth and money and mischief ".); headache, Boswell's ingrowing toe-nails,- Carlyle's rheumatic -toe, the wherry-go7nimbles_" of George. IV. There is a good selection of the annoyance inflicted by animals, which makes one cry out again, why do we suffer these creatures near Us ? I like, too, the troubles of Bed, which include Pepys hitting his wife in the face in his sleep, damp sheets, and a sleep-walking butler laying a table for-fourteen on one's bed. Here, too, are children as little nuisances, clergymen (though surely the Bishop who angrily shouted " Damnation" at the celebrant who substi- t uted the milder " condemnation " in reading the exhortation can have given nothing but pleasure to the congregation) ; the woes of country life, with Charles Kingsley complaining, " Around me - are the everlasting hills, and the ever- lasting bores of the country I" doctors, bad dreams (the worst is perhaps that of Mrs. Siddons, who dreamed that all her teeth came- out upon the stage), bad food, untimely laughter .(" tittering is hell itself," said De Quincey), love, matrimony, music, the decadence of the age (its deplorersarsanged chrono- logically, from Roger Ascham to John Addington Symonds, who in 1869, did not know " where we-shall end, with our:over- wrought nerves and irreligiousness and sentiment-"), old age, people, places, quarrels, recreations, relations, the theatre, visitors, the weather, and other of the nuisances which have vexed us down the ages.
They are mainly external nuisances. As Mr. George observes in his preface, " of the nameless discomforts of the spirit, those poisoning little embarrassments which most of us have endured and can recall without effort, few examples are available. Is that because- no diarist however frank, no autobiographer howeVer morbid, is cool enough to record what it makes one hot all over even to think about ? " This is not quite so ; such poisoned moments are on record. There is room for a compilation of Mortification ; more room still for the setting down frankly by autobiographers of the secret humiliations which have wrung their own spirits. These would
indeed cheer and comfort other sufferers.. But such less inti- mate and heartburning annoyances as those collected here are also consoling reading, and the more so because most of the sufferers are well-known and notable figures.
ROSE MACAULAY_
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