With a hole behind for his tail to come through.'
At such matters we can smile contemptuously; but in earlier centuries, when the Pagan superstition had still some vitality left in it, it was a serious matter to the Christian convert. Pan might meet him at the corner of a lonely woodland, and strike him with a panic dread. Worse than all he might be allured by the terrible enticements of Venus. To this day, Friday has a tradition of ill-luck, because it is dies veneris—vendredi. That the goddess of evil pleasure still came among men as a female fiend was a firm belief of the Middle Ages. Hence have we the legend of the Venusberg, chosen as a theme by more than one living poet, the version we prefer being unquestionably Lord Houghton's; hence also that of the betrothal ring inadvertently placed by a bridegroom on the finger of a statue of Venus, which finger, on his return, he finds bent, and the ring irremovable. This latter story is told with prosaic prolixity in the final volume of Mr. Morris's 'Earthly Paradise.' It must be remembered that the change from Paganism to Christianity was often effected in curious ways; that the worship of Apollo, the sun-god, was, by a play upon words, diverted to Elias the prophet; that temples of Venus were, as a rule, dedicated to the Virgin. Probably that worship of the Virgin Mary to which Romanists cling so fondly originated in a weak desire to satisfy proselytes by giving them one goddess in exchange for another. Any way, the belief in Venus endured so long that, in 1614, in the good city of Frankfort, a learned lawyer named Kornman, published a work called 'Mons Veneris,' which dealt with the legends about her as if they were based on fact. Of such legends let us name one only; an English story, told by William of Newbury. In the reign of Henry I., a peasant passed at midnight, near a hill, not far from the town of Burlington. To his amazement, he heard sounds of revelry therefrom, and saw a door open in the hillside, and, entering, beheld a vast chamber, where men and women held high festival. A cup was handed him, full of some liquid, which doubtless would have the effect of Circe's magic wine: with singular presence of mind, our peasant threw away the wine, and ran off with the cup. All the rabble rout of Venus pursued him, but the swift-footed ploughman brought his prize safely to Burlington. Somebody (probably the mayor, who should have been knighted for it) sent the cup to the King, and the King made it a present to the Queen of King David of Scotland; but King William of Scotland returned it to Henry II. of England. Whether it is still among the royal plate is a point to be determined by 'Notes and Queries.'
The growth of letters and of science changes all this; just as Venus vanished a few centuries ago, Old Bogy also—the foe of our infancy—has vanished from modern nurseries, nor do very many children of elder growth believe in an archdemon of the graminivorous type. Hence the fun of 'Ingoldsby' that ridiculed superstition of this sort is likely to lose its interest in time. We fear, however, that his laughing caricature of Romish absurdities—as in 'The Jackdaw of Rheims'—will scarcely lose its point at present. The Pope may be reduced to 'the Vatican, and a garden,' but the Papal superstition still clings closely to multitudes of men, especially of the Celtic race. That race, as M. John Lemoinne has just said of his French kindred, is feminine, and seems unable to accept a manly religion.
The 'Ingoldsby Legends' are peculiarly adapted to the palate of youth. They make fun out of trifles and vulgarities. One can hardly understand a man of high culture caring much about them after forty. Then the humour of Shakspeare's clowns, of Cervantes, and Sterne, and Elia, becomes more enjoyable than the 'Ingoldsby Legends' or the 'Pickwick Papers.' Then you prefer Autolycus to Sam Weller. The strong point of Ingoldsby is his gay high-spirited boyishness; but this quality is only attractive under certain conditions. It may, perhaps, be roughly stated that a man will care to read Ingoldsby so long as he cares to play cricket. It is, in fact, the eager buoyancy and rather perspiring fun of the cricket-field which one finds in the rollicking strophes of the 'Legends.' When their writer knocks over a saint or a demon as if he were a wicket, you almost expect to hear the shout of, 'How's that, umpire?' Indeed, the book is a loud book, scarcely to be tolerated, one might think, in a quiet library. Yet was its author a quiet haunter of libraries, and we find in one of his letters how he received in one a royal visitor:—
'What think you of a visit from, and confabulation with, the Queen of the Belgians. On Saturday, I was in the library at St. Paul's, my custom always in an afternoon, with a book-binder's 'prentice and a printer's devil, looking out fifty dilapidated folios for rebinding. I had on a coat which, from a foolish prejudice in the multitude against patched elbows, I wear nowhere else, my hands and face encrusted with the dust of years, and wanting only the shovel—I had the brush—to sit for the portrait of a respectable master chimney sweeper, when the door opened, and in walked the Cap of Maintenance, bearing the sword of, and followed by, the Lord Mayor in full fig, with the prettiest and liveliest little Frenchwoman leaning on his arm. Nobody could get at the lions but myself. I was fairly in for it, and was thus presented in the most recherché, if not the most expensive, court-dress that I will venture to say the eyes of royalty were ever greeted withal. Heureusement pour moi, she spoke excellent English, however, and rattled on with a succession of questions which I answered as best I might. They were sensible, however, showed some acquaintance with literature, and a very good knowledge of dates.'
Her lively Majesty might have been felicitated on finding Tom Ingoldsby as a guide to the library of the great cathedral. But to return to the 'Legends.' Besides their extreme boyishness, their redundancy of pulsation, there is a deficiency in them which must prevent their becoming classic. They are devoid of poetry. Master of the grotesque as he was, Barham had no mastery of the picturesque. Keen to see and seize the humorous aspects of affairs, he had none of that deeper humour which creates character. A real poet who had written some fifty or more eccentric legends, could not have helped inventing or describing certain individual characters in the course of his work. He must have done it unconsciously, must have done it if even he had tried to avoid it. There are two tests on the very surface of the true poet. If he describes a scene, you see it; if he describes a man, you know him. Barham's grotesque descriptions are often remarkable; indeed, his legends somewhat remind us of the hideous gurgoyles of old churches, wherein tradition sayeth the old ecclesiastic architects depicted their enemies, making of them waterspouts, that during rain they might seem to vomit. The men who carved those gurgoyles could not have sculptured an Apollo; and of Barham it may be said that, though he wrote laughable stories with supreme felicity, he never produced a line of poetry. He appears, indeed, to have regarded only the surface of life. There is nothing in his published works to show that he had an original idea, or that he cared about ideas. Of course, having given us the 'Ingoldsby Legends'—a piece of work absolutely unique, and quite unlikely to meet with a readable rival—he will be forgiven if he had a contempt for ideas; but one feels some desire to know whether such fertility of fun was not the upper stratum of something stronger and finer. Tom Hood's fun, for example, grows out of his profound melancholy, as under Etna's laughing vines the volcanic fire is sleeping. Shakspeare's fun grows out of his masterful knowledge of the world, of men, of women. In a play of his you seem in some city of chivalry and romance, where the great knight passes to deeds of high emprise, and the lovely lady smiles on him from her balcony, and the troubadour sings of 'the Lord of Oc and No;' and all the while you hear the chaffer of the market-place, the chatter of street gossips, the insignificant laughter of loitering louts. Fun that has no root in something deeper seems morbid and hysterical; and we cannot help believing that there was more in Barham than his writings reveal, than his most intimate friends knew, than perhaps he knew or even guessed himself.
Dr. Maginn, a man like yet unlike Tom Ingoldsby, wrote these four lines—part of a poem which we have no means of obtaining:—
'For those who read aright are well aware
That Falstaff, revelling his rough mates between,
Oft in his heart felt less the load of care,