The law reports in newspapers contain perhaps the only real history of England that has any relation to truth. Here, too, may be found indications of current thought, more pregnant than the observations of historians. They still afford material for the future short or longer history of the English people by the John Richard Greens of posterity. This was brought home to me by perusing two cases reported in the Morning Post, that of Mrs. Rita Marsh and the disputed will of Miss Browne. I yield to no one in my ignorance of English law, but I have seldom read judgments which seemed so conspicuously unfair, so characteristic of the precise minimum of Æsthetic perception in the English people.
The hostelries of Great Britain are famous for their high charges, their badly-kept rooms, and loathsome cooking; let me add, their warm welcome. In the reign of Edward III. there was legislation on the subject. The colder and cheaper hospitality of the Continent strikes a chill, I am sometimes told by those familiar with both. The hotel selected by a certain Mrs. Rita Marsh was no exception to the ordinary English caravanserai. It was ‘replete with every comfort.’ The garden contained an oubliette, down which Mrs. Marsh, while walking in the evening, inadvertently fell. On the Continent the oubliettes are inside the house, and you are ostentatiously warned of their immediate neighbourhood. These things are managed better in France, if I may say so without offending Tariff Reformers.
The accident disfigured Mrs. Marsh for life; and for the loss of unusual personal attractions an English jury awarded her only 500l. The judge made a joke about it. Mr. Gill was very playful about her photograph, and every one, except, I imagine, Mrs. Marsh, seems to have been satisfied that ample justice was done. The hotel proprietors did not press their counter-claim for a bill of 191l.! Chivalrous fellows! Still, I can safely say that in France Mrs. Marsh would have been awarded at least four times that amount; though if she had been murdered the proprietors would have only been fined forty francs. But beauty to its fortunate possessors is more valuable than life itself, and the story is to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard. To the English mind there is something irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or physically. It is the basis of English Farce. Jokes made about those who have never fallen, ‘too great to appease, too high to appal,’ are voted bad taste. Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury for example; or unpatriotic if they hint that Lord Roberts did not really finish the Boer War when he professed to have done so. After Parnell came to grief I remember the Drury Lane pantomime was full of fire-escapes, and every allusion to the cause cÉlÈbre produced roars of laughter. Mr. Justice Bigham was only a thorough Englishman when he gently rallied the jury for awarding, as he obviously thought, excessive damages. So little is beauty esteemed in England.
The case of Miss Browne was also singular. She left a trust fund ‘for the erection of an ornamental structure of Gothic design, such as a market cross, tall clock, street lamp-stand, or all combined, in a central part of London, the plan whereof shall be offered for open competition, and ultimately decided upon by the Royal Institute of British Architects.’ The President of the Probate Division said he was satisfied that Miss Browne was not of sound mind, and pronounced against the will, with costs out of the estate. I wonder what the Royal Institute thinks of this legal testimonial. It seems almost a pity that some one did not dispute Sir Francis Chantrey’s will years ago on similar grounds. I suggest to Mr. MacColl that it might still be upset. That would settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle Æsthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: ‘no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection.’ Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad? The erection was to be Gothic. I know Gothic is out of fashion just now. Ruskin is quite over; the Seven Lamps exploded long ago; but Miss Browne seems to have attended before her death Mr. MacColl’s lectures, knew all about ‘masses’ and ‘tones’ in architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on ‘the general outline as seen from a good distance.’ This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric. Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheer uglitude (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about ‘general outlines seen from a good distance,’ must have appeared hopelessly insane. The decision of the court is not likely to encourage any further public bequests of this kind. I have cut the British Museum and the National Gallery out of my own will already. And I understand why Mr. MacColl, with his passionate pleading for a living national architecture, for official recognition of past and present English art, is thought by many good people quite odd. How he managed to attract the notice of any but the Lunacy Commissioners I cannot conceive. Valued critic, admired artist, model keeper, I only hope he will attract no further attention.
Since it is clear that the law assists in blackening reputations even in the grave, I claim that other Miss Brownes who take advantage of life, and time by the forelock to put up monuments in the sufficiently hideous thoroughfares should be pronounced non compos mentis. The perpetrators of the erection in High Street, Kensington, hard by St. Mary Abbots, may serve as an example. Inconvenient, vulgar, inapposite, this should debar even the subscribers from obtaining probate for their wills. I invoke posthumous revenge, and claim that at least 500l. damages should be paid as compensation to the nearest hospital for the indignant blind, as my friend Mr. Vincent O’Sullivan calls them in one of his delightful stories.
(1906.)