Читать книгу My Life as an Author - Martin Farquhar Tupper - Страница 17

One of the apparent calamities of my life (overruled, as I have long since seen, for good) was the before-mentioned affliction of a very bad impediment of speech, which blighted my youth and manhood from fifteen to thirty-five, obliging me to social humiliations of many kinds, to silence in class and on examination occasions (hence my written poetries in lieu of spoken prose), and in early manhood preventing me from taking orders, and thereafter from speaking in the law courts. But I was hopelessly and practically a dumb man, except under special excitations, when I could burst into eloquent speech which surprised third persons more than myself; for when quite alone I could spout like Demosthenes; it was only nervous fear that paralysed my tongue. Accordingly, my good father placed me from time to time with well-meaning and well-paid pretenders to make a perfect cure of my affliction, and I did many things and suffered much from such false physicians. I am sure no one can truly say what I can, viz., that in a purposely monotonous note and syllable by syllable, with a crutch under my chin, and a sort of gag on the rebellious tongue, I have read all through in a loud voice Milton's whole Paradise Lost and Regained, and the most of Cowper's poems! That was the sort of tongue-drill and nerve-quieting recommended and enforced for many hours a day, through weary months, by a certain Mr. C., while Dr. P., his successor to the well-named "patient," gave, first, emulcents, and then styptics, and was fortunately prevented in time by my father from some surgical experiments on the muscles of lip and tongue. However, nobody could cure me, until I cured myself; rather, let me gratefully and humbly confess, until God answered constant prayer, and granted stronger bodily health, and gave me good success in my literary life, and made me to feel I was equal in speech, as now, to the most fluent of my fellows. So let any stammerer (and there are many such) take comfort from my cure, and pray against the trouble as I did, and courageously stand up against the multitude to claim before heaven and earth man's proudest prerogative—the privilege of speech. In my Proverbial Essay "Of Speaking" will be found two contrasted pictures drawn from my own experiences: one of the stifled stammerer, the other of the unbridled orator: which you can turn to as you will. As, however, some of my old groanings after utterance are not equally accessible, I will here give a few lines of mine from the "Stammerer's Complaint," printed in the medical book of one of my Galens:—

" … And is it not in truth

A poisoned sting in every social joy,

A thorn that rankles in the writhing flesh,

A drop of gall in each domestic sweet,

An irritating petty misery—

That I can never look on one I love

And speak the fulness of my burning thoughts?

That I can never with unmingled joy

Meet a long-loved and long-expected friend

Because I feel, but cannot vent my feelings—

Because I know I ought, but must not, speak—

Because I mark his quick impatient eye

Striving in kindness to anticipate

The word of welcome strangled in its birth?

Is it not sorrow, while I truly love

Sweet social converse, to be forced to shun

The happy circle, from a nervous sense—

An agonising poignant consciousness—

That I must stand aloof, nor mingle with

The wise and good in rational argument,

The young in brilliant quickness of reply,

Friendship's ingenuous interchange of mind,

Affection's open-hearted sympathies?

But feel myself an isolated being,

A very wilderness of widowed thought!"

All this is only sad stern truth; nothing morbid here: let any poor stammerer testify to my faithfulness. Amongst others afflicted like myself was Charles Kingsley, whom I knew well at a time when I had overcome my calamity; whereas he carried his to the grave with him; though he had frequent gleams of a forced and courageous eloquence, preaching energetically in a somewhat artificial voice—in private he stammered much, as once I used to do, no doubt to his mortification, though humbly acquiescing in God's will.

Chess is a chief intellectual resource to the stammerer; for therein he can conquer in argument without the toil of speech, and prove himself practically more eloquent than the men full of talk whom he so much envies. Accordingly, in days gone by (for of late years I have given it up, as too toilsome a recreation) I played often at that royal game. In these times it is no game at all—but a wearisome if seductive science; just as cricket is an artillery combat now, and football a most perilous conflict, and boating breaks the athlete's heart, and billiards can only be played by a bar-spot professional, and tranquil whist itself has developed into a semi-fraudulent system of open rules and secret signs; even so the honest common-sense old game of chess has come to be so encumbered with published openings and gambits and other parasitic growths upon the wholesome house-plant, that I for one have renounced it, as a pursuit for which life is too short and serious (give me a farce or a story instead), and one moreover in which any fool well up to crammed book games may crow over the wisest of men in an easy, because stereotyped, checkmate. However, in this connection, I recollect a small experience which proves that positive ignorance of famous openings may sometimes be an advantage; just as the skilled fencer will be baffled by a brave boor rushing in against rules, and by close encounter unconventionally pinning him straight off. When a youth, just before matriculation, I was a guest at Culham of the good rector there, a chess-player to his own thinking indomitable, for none of the neighbours could checkmate him: so he thought to make quick work of a silent but thoughtful boy-stammerer—by tempting him at an early period of the game to take, seemingly for nothing but advantage, a certain knight (his usual dodge, it appeared) which would have ensured an ultimate defeat. However, I declined the generous offer, which began to nettle my opponent; but when afterwards I refused to answer divers moves by the card (as he protested I ought), and finally reduced him to a positive checkmate, he flew into such an unclerical rage that I would not play again; his "revenge" might be too terrible. For another trivial chess anecdote: a very worthy old friend of mine, a rector too, was fond of his game, and of winning it: and I remember one evening that his ancient servitor, bringing in the chessboard, whispered to me, "Please don't beat him again, sir—he didn't sleep a wink last night;" accordingly, after a respectably protracted struggle, some strange oversights were made, and my reverend host came off conqueror: so he was enabled to sleep happily. I remember too playing with pegged pieces in a box-board at so strange a place as outside the Oxford coach; and I think my amiable adversary then was one Wynell Mayow, who has since grown into a great Church dignitary. If he lives, my compliments to him.

One of the best private chess-players I used often to encounter—but almost never to beat, is my old life-friend, Evelyn of Wotton, now the first M.P. for his own ancestral Deptford. It was to me a triumph only to puzzle his shrewdness, "to make him think," as I used to say—and if ever through his carelessness I managed a stale, or a draw—very seldom a mate—that was glory indeed. If he sees this, his memory will countersign it.

Let so much suffice, as perhaps a not inappropriate word about the Literary Life's frequent mental recreation, especially, where the player is, like Moses, "not a man of words."

One day, by the by, this text in the original, "lo ish devarim anochi" (Exod. iv. 10), came to my lot in Pusey's Hebrew class, to my special confusion: but every tutor was very considerate and favoured the one who couldn't speak, and Mr. Biscoe in particular used to say when my turn came to read or to answer—"Never mind, Mr. Tupper, I'm sure you know it—please to go on, Mr. So-and-So." This habitual confidence in my proficiency had the effect of forcing my consciousness to deserve it; and it usually happened that I really did know, silently, like Macaulay's cunning augur, "who knew but might not tell."

Speaking of recreation, Izaak Walton's joy as a contemplative man has been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my piscatorial friends Kingsley and Leech in old days, and will not be unacceptable to Attwood Matthews, Cholmondeley Pennell, and the Marstons with their friend Mr. Senior in these. I have had various luck as an angler from Stennis Lake to the Usk, from Enniskillen to Killarney, from Isis to Wotton—and so it would be a pity if I omitted such an authorial characteristic; especially as my stammering obliged me to "study to be quiet."

I.

"Look, like a village Queen of May, the stream

Dances her best before the holiday sun,

And still, with musical laugh, goes tripping on

Over these golden sands, which brighter gleam

To watch her pale-green kirtle flashing fleet

Above them, and her tinkling silver feet

That ripple melodies: quick—yon circling rise

In the calm refluence of this gay cascade

Marked an old trout, who shuns the sunny skies,

And, nightly prowler, loves the hazel shade:

Well thrown!—you hold him bravely—off he speeds,

Now up, now down—now madly darts about—

Mind, mind your line among those flowering reeds—

How the rod bends—and hail, thou noble trout!"

II.

"O, thou hast robbed the Nereids, gentle brother,

Of some swift fairy messenger; behold—

His dappled livery prankt with red and gold

Shows him their favourite page: just such another

Sad Galatæa to her Acis sent

To teach the new-born fountain how to flow,

And track with loving haste the way she went

Down the rough rocks, and through the flowery plain,

Ev'n to her home where coral branches grow,

And where the sea-nymph clasps her love again:

We the while, terrible as Polypheme,

Brandish the lissom rod, and featly try

Once more to throw the tempting treacherous fly

And win a brace of trophies from the stream."

III.

"Come then, coy Zephyr, waft my feathered bait

Over this rippling shallow's tiny wave

To yonder pool, whose calmer eddies lave

Some Triton's ambush, where he lies in wait

To catch my skipping fly; there drop it lightly:

A rise, by Glaucus!—but he missed the hook—

Another—safe! the monarch of the brook,

With broadside like a salmon's, gleaming brightly:

Off let him race, and waste his prowess there;

The dread of Damocles, a single hair,

Will tax my skill to take this fine old trout;

So—lead him gently; quick, the net, the net!

Now gladly lift the glittering beauty out,

Hued like a dolphin, sweet as violet."