Journeys to Bagdad | Page 9

of the rich diet that shall
follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go within that booth that has most
allurement on its canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest
voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the
door, my money is already in my palm. Thus of a book I demand an
earnest on the title-page.
Bell's title-page is of the 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 Lætitia sits
surrounded by her beaux. It