time I ever heard a woman speak blank verse with any kind of decency.’
‘She was walking alone?’
‘Yes. On the way back we met old Yule; he seemed rather grumpy, I thought. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl to make a paying business of literature. Her qualities are personal. And it’s pretty clear to me that the valley of the shadow of books by no means agrees with her disposition. Possibly old Yule is something of a tyrant.’
‘He doesn’t impress me very favourably. Do you think you will keep up their acquaintance in London?’
‘Can’t say. I wonder what sort of a woman that mother really is? Can’t be so very gross, I should think.’
‘Miss Harrow knows nothing about her, except that she was a quite uneducated girl.’
‘But, dash it! by this time she must have got decent manners. Of course there may be other objections. Mrs Reardon knows nothing against her.’
Midway in the following morning, as Jasper sat with a book in the garden, he was surprised to see Alfred Yule enter by the gate.
‘I thought,’ began the visitor, who seemed in high spirits, ‘that you might like to see something I received this morning.’
He unfolded a London evening paper, and indicated a long letter from a casual correspondent. It was written by the authoress of ‘On the Boards,’ and drew attention, with much expenditure of witticism, to the conflicting notices of that book which had appeared in The Study. Jasper read the thing with laughing appreciation.
‘Just what one expected!’
‘And I have private letters on the subject,’ added Mr Yule.
‘There has been something like a personal conflict between Fadge and the man who looks after the minor notices. Fadge,more suo, charged the other man with a design to damage him and the paper. There’s talk of legal proceedings. An immense joke!’
He laughed in his peculiar croaking way.
‘Do you feel disposed for a turn along the lanes, Mr Milvain?’
‘By all means.—There’s my mother at the window; will you come in for a moment?’
With a step of quite unusual sprightliness Mr Yule entered the house. He could talk of but one subject, and Mrs Milvain had to listen to a laboured account of the blunder just committed by The Study. It was Alfred’s Yule’s characteristic that he could do nothing lighthandedly. He seemed always to converse with effort; he took a seat with stiff ungainliness; he walked with a stumbling or sprawling gait.
When he and Jasper set out for their ramble, his loquacity was in strong contrast with the taciturn mood he had exhibited yesterday and the day before. He fell upon the general aspects of contemporary literature.
‘… The evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides. Hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of criticism, out of all proportion to the supply of even tolerable work. The men who have an aptitude for turning out this kind of thing in vast quantities are enlisted by every new periodical, with the result that their productions are ultimately watered down into worthlessness… . Well now, there’s Fadge. Years ago some of Fadge’s work was not without a certain—a certain conditional promise of—of comparative merit; but now his writing, in my opinion, is altogether beneath consideration; how Rackett could be so benighted as to give him The Study— especially after a man like Henry Hawkridge—passes my comprehension. Did you read a paper of his, a few months back, in The Wayside, a preposterous rehabilitation of Elkanah Settle? Ha!
ha! That’s what such men are driven to. Elkanah Settle! And he hadn’t even a competent acquaintance with his paltry subject. Will you credit that he twice or thrice referred to Settle’s reply to “Absalom and Achitophel” by the title of “Absalom Transposed,” when every schoolgirl knows that the thing was called “Achitophel Transposed”! This was monstrous enough, but there was something still more contemptible. He positively, I assure you, attributed the play of “Epsom Wells” to Crowne! I should have presumed that every student of even the most trivial primer of literature was aware that “Epsom Wells” was written by Shadwell… . Now, if one were to take Shadwell for the subject of a paper, one might very well show how unjustly his name has fallen into contempt. It has often occurred to me to do this. “But Shadwell never deviates into sense.” The sneer, in my opinion, is entirely unmerited. For my own part, I put Shadwell very high among the dramatists of his time, and I think I could show that his absolute worth is by no means inconsiderable. Shadwell has distinct vigour of dramatic conception; his dialogue… .’
And as he talked the man kept describing imaginary geometrical figures with the end of his walking-stick; he very seldom raised his eyes from the ground, and the stoop in his shoulders grew more and more pronounced, until at a little distance one might have taken him for a hunchback. At one point Jasper made a pause to speak of the pleasant wooded prospect that lay before them; his companion regarded it absently, and in a moment or two asked:
‘Did you ever come across Cottle’s poem on the Malvern Hills? No?
It contains a couple of the richest lines ever put into print:
It needs the evidence of close deduction To know that I shall ever reach the top.
Perfectly serious poetry, mind you!’
He barked in laughter. Impossible to interest him in anything apart from literature; yet one saw him to be a man of solid understanding, and not without perception of humour. He had read vastly; his memory was a literary cyclopaedia. His failings, obvious enough, were the results of a strong and somewhat pedantic individuality ceaselessly at conflict with unpropitious circumstances.
Towards the young man his demeanour varied between a shy cordiality and a dignified reserve which was in danger of seeming pretentious. On the homeward part of the walk he made a few discreet inquiries regarding Milvain’s literary achievements and prospects, and the frank self-confidence of the replies appeared to interest him. But he expressed no desire to number Jasper among his acquaintances in town, and of his own professional or private concerns he said not a word.
‘Whether he could be any use to me or not, I don’t exactly know,’ Jasper remarked to his mother and sisters at dinner. ‘I suspect it’s as much as he can do to keep a footing among the younger tradesmen. But I think he might have said he was willing to help me if he could.’
