Journeys to Bagdad | Page 9

right kind. In the profusion and variety of its letters it is like a printer's sample book, with tall letters and short letters, dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the text. There are slim letters and again the very progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes on the page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater.
There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. Tickle's set that has come to me, for his name is on the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of Bell, Mr. Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I proclaim him here, and if there be anywhere at this day younger Tickles, even down to the merest titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a greeting from the past.
Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling hospital--sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text. "Where grief is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid slowly on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just expression of it.... Ardent affection is gained by closing both hands warmly, at half arm's length, the fingers intermingling, and bringing them to the breast with spirit.... Folding arms, with a drooping of the head, describe contemplation." I have put it to you and you can judge it.
Let us consider Bell's marginalia of the plays! Every age has importuned itself with words. Reason was such a word, and fraternity, and liberty. Efficiency, maybe, is the latest, though it is sure that when you want anything done properly, you have to fight for it. It is below the dignity of my page to put a plumber on it, yet I have endured occasions! This word efficiency, then, comes from our needs and not from our accomplishment. It is at best a marching song, not a shout of victory. It is when the house is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms.
So Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages echoes a world that is talking about delicacy, about sentiment, about equality. (For a breeze blows up from France.) It was these words that the eighteenth century most babbled when it grew old. It had horror for what was low and vulgar. It wore laces on its doublet front, and though it seldom washed, it perfumed itself. And all this is in Bell, for his notes are a running comment of a shallow, puritanistic prig, who had sharp eyes and a gossip's tongue. This was the time, too, when such words as blanket were not spoken by young ladies if men were about; for it is a bedroom word and therefore immoral. Bell objected from the bottom of his silly soul that Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with it. "Blanket of the dark," he says, "is an expression greatly below our author. Curtain is evidently better." "Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?" Whereat Bell again complains that Lady Macbeth is "unnecessarily indelicate." "Though this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very noble composition, it is highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without proper companions to prevent absurd prejudices."
It must appear from this, that, although one gains no knowledge of Shakespeare, one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his time. And this is just as well. For Bell's light on Shakespeare would be but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that Bell's smoking light goes wandering off.
As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in the pit, in that tinkling time of 'seventy-four. The patched L?titia sits surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress." "The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is the age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, of odes to red heels and epics to