XVIII

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INEPT CRITICISM

Directly the river Wey is crossed, either in leaving or entering Guildford, the road begins to rise steeply. Going towards Godalming, it brings the traveller in a mile’s walk to the ruined chapel of St. Catherine, standing on a sandstone hill beside the highway, whose red sides are burrowed by rabbits and sand-martins. The chapel has been ruined time out of mind, and is to-day but a motive for a sketch. One of Turner’s best plates in his “Liber Studiorum” has St. Catherine’s Chapel for its subject, and to the criticism of Turner’s work comes the Rev. Mr. Stopford Brooke, in this wise:—“It is no picturesque place. Turner painted English life as it was; and the struggle of the poor is uppermost in his mind in all these rustic subjects ... pathetic feeling is given them by Turner’s anxious kindness.”

No picturesque place! Where, then, do you find picturesqueness if not here? And as for Turner, the man who dares to say that he “painted English life as it was,” dares much. It is the chiefest glory of Turner that he painted or drew or etched things, not as they were, but as they might, could, should, or would be under an artist’s direction. He was, in short, an idealist, and cared nothing for “actuality,” and perhaps even less for the “struggle of the poor.” It is possible to read anything you please into Turner’s work, for it is chiefly of the frankest impressionism; but to say that he felt and did all these things is criticism of the most inept Penny Reading order. Turner was an artist of the rarest and most generous equipment, and he had to do what he did, and never reasoned why he did it. Ruskin surprised him with what he read into his work; how much more, then, would he have been astonished at Mr. Stopford Brooke’s “Notes on the Liber Studiorum,” had he lived to read them! But angels and ministers of grace defend us from ministers of religion who essay art criticism!

And now, having descanted upon the wisdom of the cobbler sticking to his last, or of the clergyman adhering rigorously to his spiritual functions, let us proceed to Godalming on foot.

“Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows,” says Cobbett, “that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild and bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me.”

ST CATHERINE’S CHAPEL. After J. M. W. Turner.There! is that not a pretty testimony in favour of this stretch of road? And it is all the prettier, seeing from what source it comes; a source, to be sure, whence proceeded cursings and revilings, depreciations, and a thorough belittling of most things. Cobbett, you see, was a man with an infinite capacity for scorn and indignation, and that bias very frequently led him to take no account of things that a more evenly-balanced temper would have found delight in. But here is an altogether exceptional passage, and therefore let us treasure it.

GODALMING DERIVATIVES

When within sight of Godalming, the road descends suddenly and proceeds along level lands through which runs the winding Wey. All around, a bold amphitheatre of hills closes the view, and the queer little town is set down by the meadows beside the river in the most moist and damp situation imaginable. It is among the smallest and least progressive of townships; with narrow streets, the most tortuous and deceptive, paved with granite setts and cobble-stones in varied patches. Godalming is a town as old as the Kingdom of the South Saxons, and indeed derives its name from some seventh-century Godhelm, to whom this fair meadowland (or “ing”) then belonged. Godhelm’s Ing remains in, probably, almost the same condition now as when, a thousand years and more ago, the Saxon chieftain squatted down beside the Wey in this break of the hills and reared his flocks and herds, and was, in the fashion of those remote times, the father of his people. The little river runs its immemorial course, gnawed by winter flood and summer spate, through the alluvial soil of the valley; the grass grows green as ever, and the kine thrive as they have always done upon its succulent fare; the hoary hills look down upon the lowlands in these days, when agitators would restore the Heptarchy, just as they did when the strife of the Eight Kingdoms watered the island with blood. Only Godhelm and his contemporaries, with his descendants and many succeeding generations, are gone and have left no trace, save perhaps in the ancient divisions and hedges of the fields, like those of the greater part of England, old beyond the memory of man, or the evidence of engrossed parchments. Where the Saxon chieftain’s primitive village arose, on a spot ever so little elevated above the grazing grounds beside the river, there run Godalming streets to-day; their plan, if not so old as the days of this patriarch farmer, at least as ancient as the Norman Conquest, when the invaders dispossessed his descendants and kept them overawed by the strong castle of Guildford, perched in a strategic position, four miles up the road.

Not that those stolid agriculturists required much repression. Malcontents there might be elsewhere, but here, upon the borders of the great Andredwald—the dense forest that stretched almost continuously from the Thames to the South Coast—the peaceful herdsmen were content to acknowledge their new masters, so only they might be left undisturbed.

GODALMING

And respectable obscurity has ever been the distinguishing characteristic of Godalming. At intervals, indeed, we hear of it as the site of a hunting-lodge of the Merry Monarch; and once, in 1726, “Godliman” (as the vulgar tongue had it then)[3] was the scene of a most remarkable imposture; but, generally speaking, the town lived on, the world forgetting and by the world forgot, saving only those whose business carried them here by coach on their way to or from Portsmouth; and Godalming remained in their memories chiefly, no doubt, by reason of the excellent fare dispensed at the “King’s Arms,” where the coaches stopped. The “King’s Arms” is there to this day, in one of the passage-like streets by the Market House; this last quite a curiosity in its way. The “King’s Arms,” doubtless so called from the frequent visits of Charles II. and his Court on their hunting expeditions, has a quite wonderful range of stables and outhouses, reached through a great doorway from the street, through which the mails and stages passed in days when road-travel was your only choice who journeyed to and fro in the land. It is a matter of sixty years since those capacious stalls and broad-paved yards witnessed the stir and bustle of the stablemen, coachmen, post-boys, and all the horsey creatures who found employment in the care of coach and horses, and they are so many lumber-rooms to-day.

MARKET-HOUSE, GODALMING.

But Godalming was a place notorious in the eighteenth century as the scene of one of the most impudent frauds ever practised upon the credulity of mankind. There have been those who have said that such trickery as that to which Mary Tofts, the “rabbit-breeder” of Godalming, lent herself, would meet with no success in so enlightened an age as this; but in so saying those folk have done a little less than justice to the eighteenth century, and have been particularly lenient to the nineteenth, which has proved itself, in the matter of Mahatmas, at least as credulous as by-gone ages were.

MARY TOFTS

The story of Mary Tofts, if not edifying, is at least interesting. She was the wife of Joshua Tofts, a poor journeyman cloth-worker of this little town, and was described as of “a healthy, strong constitution, small size, fair complexion, a very stupid and sullen temper, and unable to write or read.” Stupid or not, she possessed sufficient cunning to maintain her fraud for some time, and even to delude some eminent surgeons of the day into a firm belief in her pretended births of rabbits. For this was the preposterous nature of the imposition, and she claimed to have given birth to no less than eighteen of them. She attempted to account for this remarkable progeny by recounting how, “when she was weeding a field, she saw a rabbit spring up near her, after which she ran, with another woman that was at work just by her: this set her a-longing for rabbits.... Soon after, another rabbit sprang up near the same place, which she likewise endeavoured to catch. The same night she dreamt that she was in a field with those two rabbits in her lap, and awoke with a sick fit, which lasted till morning; from that time, for above three months, she had a constant and strong desire to eat rabbits, but being very poor and indigent, could not procure any.” A Mr. Howard, a medical man of Guildford, who claimed to have assisted Mary Tofts in giving birth to eighteen rabbits, seems, from the voluminous literature on this subject, to have been something of a party to the cheat; and even if we did not find him a guilty accomplice, there would remain the scarce more flattering designation of egregious dupe. But Mr. Howard, dupe or rogue, was extremely busy in publishing to the world the particulars of this extraordinary case. The woman was brought over from Godalming to Guildford, so that she might be under his more immediate care, and he wrote a letter to Dr. St. AndrÉ, George I.’s surgeon and anatomist, asking him to come and satisfy himself of the truth of this marvel. St. AndrÉ went to Guildford post-haste, and returned to London afterwards with portions of these miraculous rabbits, and with so firm a belief in the story that he wrote and published a pamphlet setting forth full details of these wonders—the first of a long series of tracts, serious and humorous, for and against the good faith of this story.

Public attention was now roused in the most extraordinary degree, and the subject of Mary Tofts and her rabbits was in every one’s mouth. The caricaturists took the matter up, and Hogarth has left two engravings referring to it: a small plate entitled “Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman,” and another, a very large and most elaborate print, full of symbolism and cryptic allusions, entitled “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism.”

Even the clergymen of the time rushed into the fray, and one went so far as to assert that Mary Tofts was the fulfilment of a prophecy in Esdras.

MARY TOFTS.

DUPE OR ROGUE?

The King, too, was numbered among the believers, and things came to such a pass that ladies began to be alarmed with apprehensions of bringing into the world some unnatural progeny. “No one presumed to eat a rabbit,” and the rent of rabbit-warrens sank to nothing. But a German Court physician—a Dr. Ahlers—who had proceeded to Guildford in order to report upon the matter to his Majesty, was rendered sceptical as much by the behaviour of Mr. Howard as by that of his interesting patient. He returned to town, convinced of trickery, and finally Mary Tofts and her medical adviser were brought to London and lodged in the Bagnio, Leicester Fields, where, in fear of combined threats of punishment and an artfully-pictured operation darkly hinted at by Sir Richard Manningham, she confessed that the fraud had been suggested to her by a woman, a neighbour at Godalming, who, with the showman’s instinct of Barnum, told her that here was a way to a good livelihood without the necessity of working for it. The part taken by Mr. Howard has never been satisfactorily explained, but as he was particularly insistent that Mary Tofts deserved a pension from the King on account of her rabbits, his part in the affair has, naturally, been looked upon with considerable suspicion. Doctor and patient were, however, committed to Tothill Fields, Bridewell.

Mary Tofts died many years later, in 1763, but a considerable time elapsed before she was forgotten, and portraits and pamphlets relating to her imposition found a ready sale. A rare tract, in which she is supposed to state her own case, still affords amusement to those who care to dig it up from the dusty accumulations of the British Museum. In it the interviewer of that age says, “It was thought fit to print her opinions in puris naturalibus, (i. e.) in her own Stile and Spelling”; and a taste of her “stile” may be had from the following elegant extract:—

“Thof I be ripurzentid as an ignirunt littirat Wuman, as can nethur rite nor rede, yet I thank God I can do both; and thof mahaps I cant spel as well as sum peple as set up for authurs, yet I can rite trooth, and plane Inglish, wich is mor nor ani of um all has dun. As for settin my Mark to a papur, it was wen I wont well, and wos for goin the shortist wa to work: if tha had axt me to rite my name, I wood hav dun it; but tha onli bid me set my mark, as kunclooding I cood not rite my nam, but tha was mistakn.”

And here is emphasis indeed!—

“All as has bin sad, except what I have here written, is a damd kunfounded ly.

Merry Tuft.

Mary Tofts made one more public appearance before she joined the great majority, and that was an occasion as little to her credit as the other. Thus we read that, in 1740, she was committed to Guildford Gaol for receiving stolen goods!


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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