Tag: Maurice Baring

Maurice Baring’s Elegiac Presentation of The Lonely Lady of Dulwich

Dr. Robert Hickson

3 June 2022

Saint Clotilde (d. 545)

West Point Graduation 58 Years Ago (Class of 1964)

Maurice Baring on the Mystery of Mortal Beauty and the Supreme Sacrifice:

The Lonely Lady of Dulwich(1934)

Epigraphs

***

“She was beautiful, in spite of looking listless and pale at the moment. Yes, she was beautiful, more than beautiful, he thought, and he wondered why she was so particularly beautiful; and he wondered for the millionth time at the mystery of mortal beauty.” (Maurice Baring, The Lonely Lady of Dulwich, 1934), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), page 25, chapter three—my bold emphasis added.)

***

“The opportunity had come to her [Zita] at last to make just such a sacrifice as she was longing to make—the supreme sacrifice. Yes, she would face all the consequences, even if it meant leaving Robert [her mixed marriage and longstanding sacramental husband]. It would prove [sic] to Walter [Price] how much she loved him.” (Maurice Baring, The Lonely Lady of Dulwich, 1934, page 130—my bold emphasis added,)

***

“The Harmers [Robert and Zita] were to start on Wednesday, and on the Sunday morning Zita went to Mass at Saint Philippe du Roule. Zita was not, or had not been, until now, a religious woman. She [as a Catholic] was just pratiquante: that is to say, she went to Mass on Sundays and abstained on Fridays. She fulfilled her Easter duties. But that was all.

“The church was crowded and stuffy. Zita was a prey to distractions until a Dominican got into the pulpit and began to preach. She found it was impossible not to listen to him, although she tried. He was eloquent and forcible, and he seemed to be speaking to her personally and individually, as if he was aware of her personal difficulties and secret thoughts. He pointed out among other things how necessary it was that the individual should cheerfully accept sacrifice for the good of the community. The Church might seem hard on the individual; the hardness must be faced and accepted. He [the Dominican] had spoken, too, of the danger of illicit love [as with the efect of “Queen Guinevere” (page 136), given her own betrayal of King Arthur]. Zita listened to this eloquence unmoved. His words applied to her.” (Maurice Baring, The Lonely Lady of Dulwich, 1934—pages 75-76—my bold emphasis added.)

***

“Walter Price [the journalist] had christened her [Zita as] Queen Guinevere because one day she [Zita] had said to him: ‘Robert’s name is Arthur as well as Robert, but he can’t bear the name, and he can’t bear being called Arthur, even in fun,’ and Walter had said: ‘That’s because he doesn’t want you to be Guinevere.’” (Maurice Baring, The Lonely Lady of Dulwich, 1934—page 136—my emphasis added.)

***

One of Maurice Baring’s distinctive and recurrent talents in prose and verse—especially about his fallen comrades and close friends in war—is his heartfelt presentation of dignified elegy, not just of tragedy. His writing vividly conveys in small ways an elegiac atmosphere, also with his subtle tones.

In this brief essay about Baring’s short 1934 novel—The Lonely Lady of Dulwich—we may poignantly and gradually follow much of the life and sorrows of Zita, a Catholic woman and her mixed marriage and her resultant yearnings and their grave consequences, after she had lost, through death, her only child soon after birth.

This essay invites a willing reader to enter into the sorrows and indifferent negligence, or nonchalance, of this haunting woman with her enduringly beautiful (but insufficient) ways. We shall thereby likely come to consider more closely and more fully the meaning and the purposes of “mortal beauty.” We hope that the sequential hints already given above in the Epigraphs will have also already stirred a sincere and searching reader—fostering the desire to acquire and to savor this little novel of much elegiac import.

The novel is a portrait of an increasingly lonely lady, a portrait that is both musical and picturesque, as well as literary. After having been raised for five years in a Catholic convent, Zita as a young woman had to face the impoverishment of her mother due to the somewhat irresponsible way of living of her adventurous and robust father who then had suddenly died. Zita was the youngest of three beautiful sisters. More out of convenience than out of love, she married a wealthy man, Robert Harmer, with whom she then lived for some decades as a couple, living the life of an upper class family in England, traveling and vacationing and enjoying varied entertainments.

She is a formal Catholic, following the Church’s daily precepts with regard to the life of a Catholic. Yet, at the same time, her life seemed not so touched by Grace. While living with her husband in Paris, she is touched by the attentiveness of a poet, Jean, who tried to convince her to go to Algeria with him and leave her husband. Even after hearing at Mass a piercing homily by a Dominican priest, her heart, however, seems not to turn away from her adulterous plan; merely her husband’s urging her to implement what he surmised was her plan made her alter her plans at the last moment.

When she later more deeply fell in love with a younger journalist, Walter Price, she was willing to reveal to him her past history and love story with the now-deceased, but famous poet, only to make, in her eyes, a seemingly “supreme sacrifice” for Price (who then was already secretly engaged to a different and younger woman). Price published then his candid story about her disloyal past that destroyed her current life, with her husband sending her away without a word, never to speak with her or even see her again. Two years later, he died, and she was a widow. This beautiful lady wound up living her last twenty or thirty years alone in the village of Dulwich outside of London.

The way Maurice Baring presents the larger, often implicit, story of Zita, the tones and enduring mysteries are important. Often they are even evocative of the sacraments and of the sacred. It sometimes alluringly included what was also essentially missing. That is to say, what G.K. Chesterton had profoundly called “The Presence of Absence.”

–Finis–

© 2022 Robert D. Hickson

A Sequence of Formative and Cumulative Insights

Dr. Robert Hickson

5 April 2022

Saint Vincent Ferrer O.P. (d. 1419)

Blessed Juliana of Mount Cornillon (d. 1258)

Epigraphs

***

“What then is this Sloth which can merit the extremity of divine punishment? St. Thomas’s answer is both comforting and surprising: tristitia de bono spirituali, sadness in the face of spiritual good. Man is made for joy in the love of God, a love which he expresses in service. If he deliberately turns away from that joy, he is denying the purpose of his existence. The malice of Sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.” (Evelyn Waugh, “Sloth,” from The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, page 573.)

***

“Courage can only come from love, and from unselfishness.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam, page 88.)

***

“Turgenev,” said Yakovlev, “says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard’s kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam, page 225.)

***

“Your ideas [said Yakovlev to Christopher] spring from rage and are spurred by reaction and so may easily turn to sourness instead of balm. And the essence of sacrifice is balm.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam, page 128.)

***

“One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world.”

“I didn’t think about it in that way. I don’t think I rebelled against it, because I thought my father was happier dead and at peace, than alive and in pain; but I was just stunned. Apart from that, I have not experienced real sorrow; only disappointment and disillusion.”

“A priest once said to me, ‘When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.’” (Maurice Baring, Darby and Joan, p. 178)

***

“In the Mass of Paul VI, there is an attenuation of Sacrificium, Sacramentum, and Sacerdotium.” (Arnaud de Lassus’ humble and faithful, private personal words to me, during his visit from France in the 1970s.)

***

“The Gift of Final Perseverance is a “Great Gift” – a “Magnum Donum.” (Council of Trent)

***

“Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam!” – The Jesuit Motto. (Father John A. Hardon, S.J. always accented the COMPARATIVE “Maiorem” – one must always try to give MORE.)

***

While recently preparing to be with a gifted young Catholic Priest and Confessor, I unexpectedly recalled – as I was serenely waiting – some varied insights from which I have cumulatively benefited down the years, both from personal bonds and from good literature. May our readers come to intertwine the meaning of these varied presentations above, as if they were a counterpoint, together with the following comments.

We propose therefore to conclude with two examples: one a Lutheran German once a 1939 exile to the U.S. (Dr. Fritz Kraemer, d. 2003); and an American Jesuit scholar (Father John A. Hardon, S. J., d. 2000).

  1. Fritz Kraemer on his strongly accented concept and perceived practice of “PROVOCATIVE WEAKNESS” whereby someone is so weak – in the Church or State or Culture – that he is “thereby provocative to others.” This concept still has many formidable applications!
  2. Father Hardon: “What we have is Nature; what we need is Grace….We are only as courageous as we are convinced. But what are we truly convinced of?”

–Finis–

© 2022 Robert D. Hickson

Quixote at Oxford: Maurice Baring’s Literary Insights into Foreign Literatures

Dr. Robert Hickson

24 February 2022

Saint Matthias

Epigraphs

***

“The man who has the rooms opposite mine [at Balliol College, Oxford University] is a Spaniard. A nobleman very cultivated and amiable. His name is Quixote. Consulted him last night as to what to do about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Quixote said it was entirely a point of honour.” (Hamlet the Dane’s own words taken from his Lost Diary, as presented by Maurice Baring in his 1913 collection, Lost Diaries (London: Duckworth & CO., 1913), page 213—my emphasis added—(The entire entry of Hamlet’s “Lost Diary” will be found on pages 206-215, which is the last presented piece in the book.)

***

“Yes, but you know I think great men, very great men, are never bitter—men like Goethe and Shakespeare.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), page 59—my emphasis added.)

***

“Shakespeare understood everything. Especially young people. I always think someone must have been unkind to him. He talks so painfully of ingratitude, but although he is sad and tragic he is never bitter, he is sweet. He is like Beethoven. Out of his great sadness there comes a fountain of joy.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam , page 50—my emphasis added.)

***

“Turgenev,” said Yakovlev [the Russian teacher and mentor of Christopher Trevenen], “says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard’s kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam, page 225—my emphasis added.)

***

This brief essay intends to counterpoise two of Maurice Baring’s own sustained literary efforts—one of them in 1913 and one of them in 1929 after the Great War—namely, first an extended parody of variously imagined Lost Diary Entries from different points of history; and then an Historical Novel about varied temporal and sacred matters, to include various moral purifications from disappointed loves.

Moreover, Hamlet and Don Quixote, especially at two points, are vividly presented together and thus thereby become for us even more distinctive and contrasting characters. The contrast clarifies the mind, especially by way of Baring’s unusual contrasts and magnanimously designed ironies.

Let us resume with Yakovlev’s earlier words to Christopher Trevenen and his growing maturity:

“Turgenev [the Russian author]…says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard’s kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous.”

“Don Quixote, fortunately for him, was mad.”

“He was very sane too.”

“You mean that I am neither mad nor sane?”

“Neither mad, nor sane enough.”

“I will try and improve,” said Christopher, and he laughed.

“For a person who is steeped in oriental literature, it is surprising how little of the oriental serenity you have assimilated.”

“I suppose it is my Irish blood.”

“Yes, but I should have thought that would have been tempered by your mother’s common-sense.”

“That is because I am neither one thing nor the other; an exile everywhere.”

“We are all of us exiles,” said Yakovlev, “one must carry one’s country with one. The Kingdom of Heaven is within.”

“Yes, for those who have found it.” (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam (1929),1 pages 225-226)

Before Hamlet records his sudden meeting with Quixote at Oxford, and before this visiting Danish Prince only partly then comes to accept what the chivalrous Spaniard had advised in honour, Prince Hamlet had—in bold script—entitled his own overall selective reflections, with these words:

From the Diary of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, during his Stay at England, whither he was Sent to Study at the University at Oxford, under the Special Care of Polonius. (206)

(In Shakespeare’s dark tragedy, Hamlet, Polonius is the father of Laertes and of Ophilia; moreover, after Polonius himself was later accidentally killed by Hamlet, the desire for vengeance was more widely stirred and spreading, all of which the magnanimity of Maurice Baring has attempted to mollify and mitigate in his Lost Diary.)

An earlier entry of Prince Hamlet’s Balliol Diary reads as follows:

Went to Abingdon for the day. When I came back I found that havoc had been made of my rooms [likely done by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?]: both the [musical] virginals broken to pieces—all the furniture destroyed, and all my pictures including a signed portrait of Ophilia [his beloved].

Have my suspicions as to who has done this. Shall first make certain and then retaliate terribly. In the meantime it will be polite to conceal my annoyance. (207)

Then toward the conclusion of his diary-entry, Hamlet resourcefully and honouably says:

Friday. –Must really settle this business of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [those Danes on a mission] soon. It is beginning to prey upon my mind. They are quite insufferable….Fencing match [against Cambridge University] is to take place next week, here [at Oxford University].

Saturday.–The man who has the rooms opposite mine is a Spaniard. A nobleman very cultivated and amiable. His name is Quixote. Consulted him last night as to what to do about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Quixote said it was entirely a point of honour. That if I were certain they were guilty, and certain likewise that they had purposely insulted me, I should challenge them each, separately, to personal combat, with sword and rapier. I pointed out, however, that whereas I was a champion swordsman, and indeed had been chosen to represent the University, they had no skill at all. Moreover, I considered that to challenge them to fight would be doing them too much honour. Quixote said I must indubitably take action of some kind, or else I would incur the suspicion of cowardice. (213-214)

Then “at that moment” came a stealthy surprise, as was to be seen from their open window:

I [Hamlet] saw in the darkness, walking stealthily along the wall a man whom I took to be Guildenstern. Seizing a bottle of white wine from Xeres with which Quixote had entertained me, I flung it out of the window on to the head of the skulker, but alas! It was not Guildenstern but the [College] Dean himself! (214)

Soon there came some acute and partly comic consequences:

Monday.– [I] Again appeared before a [Balliol] College meeting. Accused of having wantonly wounded, and almost murdered the Dean. Protested my innocence in vain. It was further suggested I was intoxicated. Lost my temper, which was a mistake, and called the Dean a villain, losing control over my epithets.

Sent down [expelled] for the rest of the [academic] term. Polonius is very angry. He has written to my father [King Hamlet the true king, not uncle Claudius the usurper] suggesting that I should not go back to Oxford, nor seek to enter Cambridge either, but to go to Wittenberg instead [where “Mr. Faustus”—Faust—occultly dwells and teaches]. Owing to my abrupt departure the fencing match with Laertes [Polonius’s son] will not come off. No matter, a day will come, when maybe I shall be revenged on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We go to London to-day. (214-215—Finis)

Once again Maurice Baring transposes with subtlety and modest charm a well-known and deftly interwoven literary text, or fragment. In this case, it was the fuller-developed tragedy of Hamlet.

May this deft parody lead us to re-read and more adequately to appreciate the intimate tragedy with its accompanying burdens of revenge.

May we also now better appreciate the clarifying counterpoise of those vivid characters of Prince Hamlet of Denmark and Don Quixote of La Mancha.

–Finis–

© 2022 Robert D. Hickson

1Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929). All further references are to this text, and are placed above in the main body of this brief essay for convenience. See also the earlier 1913 text: Maurice Baring, Lost Diaries (London: Duckworth & CO., 1913). Page references are in parentheses above in main body of the essay.

In My End Is My Beginning: Maurice Baring’s 1931 Novel on Mary Queen of Scots

Dr. Robert Hickson

                                                                                 7 October 2021

Feast of the Holy Rosary

             Epigraphs

“We are to live and die supernaturally alive in a state of sanctifying grace.” (Solemn words often spoken by Father John A. Hardon, S.J. in his searching conversations with  R. D. Hickson down the  years.)

***

“Gratia est Gloria incepta; Gloria est Gratia perfecta.” (A Dominican-Thomistic saying, as employed in the writings and oral words of Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.)

***

“Thereupon the [hostile Protestant] Earl of Kent said to her [who was then still a captive Queen in early February 1587: namely, Mary Queen of Scots (8 December 1542–8 February 1587)]: ‘Your life will be the death, and your death the life of our [Reformed Protestant] religion.’ And the Queen [Mary] said: ‘I was far from thinking myself worthy of such a death, and I humbly receive it as a token. I must trust in the mercy of God to excuse the want of such rites as His Holy Church commandeth.’” (Maurice Baring, In My End Is My Beginning (1931)—(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pages 299-300)—my emphasis added)

***

“I [Ethel Smyth] imagine [as an artist and as a non-Catholic friend of Maurice Baring] this book will have had a resounding success among professors, record compilers, dictionary architects, and members of boards whose duty it is to guard the entrance of Scotch Universities. It might also be invaluable reading for persons marooned on desert islands. But for ordinary mortals it is a stiff proposition until you come to the indescribably harrowing thirty pages ascribed to Jane Kennedy [Queen Mary’s personal servant], who is supposed to have forwarded them to Mary Seton. This report describes the last weeks of [Queen] Mary Stuart’s sojourn in this world, and in its restraint and piercing simplicity is the sort of thing no one but Baring could have written.” (Ethel Smyth, Maurice Baring (London: Heinemann Ltd., 1938), page 288—my emphasis added.)

***

Shortly after first meeting Jesuit Father John A. Hardon in the autumn of 1980, I had occasion to read Maurice Baring’s well-researched historical novel, In My End Is My Beginning (1931) with its mysterious and poetic title. For there soon comes forth, upon greater reflection, the paradox of “endings with beginnings” along with a specific question: “What comes after death?” In other words, “We die and then what?” (Mary Queen of Scots, herself a Catholic, also had much time and occasion to examine and answer these profound and final questions—as did my own Catholic mentors–Father John Hardon and Professor Josef Pieper.)

The Catholic German philosopher Josef Pieper even once discussed some of these final matters during my visit to his home. One of them memorably deals with his active group of friends called the Bona Mors Group, also the Society of a Bonae Mortis –the Society of a Good Death. All of the members of Bona Mors were on the alert for any sudden or protracted dangers of death, to which they were promptly to respond with the organizations and initiatives with good friends: first of all to have a good Priest with offering of the Mass and the Sacraments of Penance and Extreme Unction, with Sanctifying Grace and with the giving of the Viaticum, if possible—as well as some of the more secular assistance to families and other close friends. (We shall now come to see—in the last chapter of Maurice Baring’s vivid yet harrowing historical study–all of the deprivations Mary Queen of Scots was afflicted with as a Roman Catholic in a Reformed Protestant land with an oligarchic government.)

As we shall probably soon come to realize in various ways, Mary Stuart Queen of Scots was herself in English captivity for 19 years, from 1568-1587, before being beheaded on 8 February 1587. She bore herself so well in the preparations for her rapidly announced—carried out early in 1587—Execution by the progressive English Protestants who, as they still manifestly presented it,  strongly reviled how Queen Mary Stuart both loyally believed, and lived out, the Catholic Faith.

An Attentive Reading of the Book’s Last Pages (pages 297-312) Concerned with the Presence and Deprivations of the Catholic Faith and Its Sacramental Culture: “Report Sent by Jane Kennedy to Mary Seton (Fotheringay Castle: 8-19 February 1587.[1])

Our closer attentiveness to the novel’s final section will present the format as it was structured in the original report to Mary Seton, and sent by Jane Kennedy who was herself the intimate, loyal, and longstanding  servant to Queen Mary Stuart even unto the Queen’s unjust death by beheading at the English scaffold at Fotheringay on 8 February 1587, one year before the comparably tragic Spanish Armada of 1588.

Here is how Jane Kennedy begins and sustains her report:

The Earl of Shrewsbury and the Earl of Kent….[among others], arrived at the Castle [Fotheringay] two or three hours before mid-day, and demanded audience [with Mary Queen of Scots] in the afternoon. And the Queen, being indisposed, was preparing to go to bed; but they  answering that it was a matter which would brook no delay, the Queen called for her mantle….Thereupon, …Mr. Beale, after first showing to the Queen a parchment, to which was appended the Great Seal of England in yellow wax, he [Beale, then with “the two Earls” present] began to read to the Queen the Commission, that the next day in the morning they would proceed to the execution, admonishing her to be ready between seven and eight of the clock. (297—my emphasis added)

Immediately Mary Stuart Queen of Scots was to respond, with gratitude, as follows:

The Queen, hearing that with an unchanged countenance, made the sign of the Cross, and said: “I thank you for such welcome news. You will do me a great good in withdrawing me from this world, out of which I am very glad to go, on account of the miseries I see in it, and of being myself in continual affliction. I am of no good and no use to anyone. I have looked to this, and have expected it day by day for eighteen years [of her own various captivities]. I never thought that my sister [half-sister Elizabeth I], the Queen of England, would have consented to my death…; but since her pleasure is such, death to me shall be most welcome and surely that soul were not worthy of the eternal joys of heaven, whose body cannot endure one stroke of a headsman.” And, laying her hand upon an English New Testament which lay upon the table by her, she said most solemnly: “I have never either desired the death of the Queen [Elizabeth I] or endeavoured to bring it about, or that [death] of any person.”

The Earl of Kent objected that it was a Catholic Bible, the Papist version, and therefore the oath was of no avail; whereat the Queen [Mary] replied: “If I swear on the Book which I believe to be the true version, will not your Lordship believe my oath more than if I were to swear upon a translation in which I do not believe?” (297-298—my emphasis added)

Queen Mary then sincerely “entreated” her stern and impatient visitors “to grant her a little space and leisure that she might make her will and give order for her affairs” (298), and the Earl of Shrewsbury at once answered her:

“No, no, Madam, you must die. Make you ready between seven and eight of the clock in the morning. We will not prolong one minute for your pleasure.” And to the Earl of Kent, who was desirous of giving her spirit constancy to affront this death, and who urged her [ironically so] to confess her faults and to embrace the true religion [progressive Protestantism, not Catholicism], she answered that she had no need of solace as coming from him, but she desired of him, if he would administer comfort to the spirit to let her have conference with her [lay] almoner [who, as a distributor of mercy, was here not an Ordained Priest however], so that she might receive the Sacrament of Confession, which would be a favour that would surpass any other; and as for her body, she did not believe them to be so inhuman to deny her the right of sepulture. [….] They denied her [even Kent!] her Confessor, and offered her [instead, a Protestant Bishop, namely] the Dean of Peterborough, one of the most learned in Europe, to comfort her, from whom she might learn regarding her salvation and the mysteries of the true religion [i.e., not Catholicism]. She said, they said, remained in that in which she had been instructed in her youth, for want of someone to show her the truth; and now that she had but a few hours to remain in this world she must think of her  conscience and recognize the true religion, and not remain longer in these follies and abominations of Popery. (298-299—my emphasis added)

To which deft ironies we shall warmly resound, if we savor her pluck and maturity:

And the Queen [of the Scots] said: “I have not only heard or read the words of the most learned men of the Catholic religion, but also of the Protestant religion. I have spoken with them and heard them preach, but I have been unable to find anything in them which would turn me from my first belief. Having lived till now in a true Faith, this is not the time, but, on the contrary, it is the very moment when it is most needful that I should remain firm and constant, as I intend to do. Rather than being unfaithful to it, I would wish to lose ten thousand lives, if I had as many. For my consolation I beg you let me see my own priest, so that he may help me to prepare the better for death. I wish for no other.” Whereupon the Earl of Kent said to her: “It is our duty to prevent such [Catholic] abominations, which offend God.” And he pressed her to see the [Protestant] Dean. (299—my emphasis added)

Queen Mary of Scotland then again promptly replies to the Earl of Kent and his procations:

“I will do no such thing. I having nothing to do with him, and I neither wish to see him nor to listen to him. It surprises me that at the end, when I have most need of my priest, they refuse him to me; I had asked to have him especially to assist me at my last end. The Queen of England had granted my request, and had allowed him to come to me; and since then they [such as William Cecil and his son Robert] have taken him from me, and prevented him coming at the most necessary time.”

Thereupon the Earl of Kent said to her: “Your life will be the death [of our religion], and your death [will be] the life of our [Protestant] religion.” And the Queen said: “I was far from thinking myself worthy of such a death, and I humbly receive it as a token. I must trust in the mercy of God to excuse the want of such rites [hence all of the seven sacraments with their sanctifying grace] as His Holy Church commandeth.”  (299-300—my emphasis added)

A short time later Queen Mary said to one of her servants, Bourgoigne:

“Have you not observed how powerful and great the truth is? For the common report is I am to die for conspiring the Queen of England’s death; but the Earl of Kent told me notwithstanding even now that the fear they have of my [Catholic] religion is the cause of my death.” (301—my emphasis)

After Queen Mary had gone to rest on that night before her own beheading, Jane Kennedy made an observation, and then said:

And when Jane Kennedy came to [reading aloud about] the penitent thief upon the Cross [a passage in the Queen’s Book of Hours], the Queen bade [a further reading and said]….“In truth  he was a great sinner, but not so great as I have been,”….Thereupon her eyes closed, yet the servants who sat round the bed for the last time thought that she slept not, albeit her eyes were closed, and her face was tranquil, and she seemed to be laughing with the angels. And from without [her castle window] came a noise of knocking and hammering, for they were making ready the scaffold. (302—my emphasis added)

Now we may see the Queen’s surprising private disclosure and request:

“And this I give to you,” she said, speaking to Jane Kennedy, “for I would receive this last service from you.” Whereupon she retired into her private oratory, where she received from her own hands a Consecrated Host which the Pope had sent to her to use, should the necessity come about. And when she had ended her prayers, she finished her letter to the [Catholic] King of France. (303—my emphasis added)

Perhaps the Queen, in the emergency, even received the Host from the hand of her own humble servant, Jane Kennedy. Such was her “last service” (303) that she was invited to give to her Queen. (The language of the pronouns here is somewhat ambiguous, do we agree? Both interpretations, however, are deft and gracious.)

Shortly after the presented reception of the Consecrated Host, the Queen makes some further observations of her own history, to include her resolute and distilled principles, and her final actions and sacred affirmations:

When all was arranged [her Legal Will and, for example, various and symbolic little gifts of gratitude], she spoke with her Ladies, and bade them farewell, consoling them and saying that the greatness of this world was as nothing, and that she should serve as an example thereof to all upon earth, from the mightiest unto the most humble; for, having been Queen of France and of Scotland, one by birth and the other by marriage, after having been tossed about in honour and greatness, in triumph and vexation, now enjoying the one, now suffering the other, she was to be put in the hands of the headsman, albeit innocent; and this was nevertheless her solace, that the most capital charge against her was that she was to die for the Catholic religion, which she would never abandon until her latest breath, since she had been baptized in it. (303—my emphasis added)

May we be blessed to have such a prepared-for death, and such a Good Death, with a Viaticum, and in the state of Sanctifying Grace.

Our author, Maurice Baring, has once again deftly taught us many wise things—and he has done them so subtly and modestly and with a sustained, true and grateful humility. On 1 February 1909—on the Vigil of Candlemas–he had become a convert to the Roman Catholic Faith and Sacramental Church. He was also then a very grateful man indeed—as his later autobiography openly displays it and does it also through his many consistent and generous actions of virtue, also in combat—in Far East Russia, in the Balkans, and indispensably so in World War I.

Maurice Baring, in any case, truly and deeply loved Mary Queen of Scots, even from his childhood. We are ourselves now perhaps better able to share those enduring sentiments, at least now more fully—because of Maurice Baring’s own trustworthy presentations and combinations of research.

—Finis—

   © 2021 Robert D. Hickson

[1]    Maurice Baring, In My End Is My Beginning (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931). All references will henceforth be made  to this edition, and placed in parentheses above in the main body of this essay. Some of these references will also often display above my added emphases.

Maurice Baring’s Proposed Addition to The Romance (and Tragedy) of Tristan and Isolde

Dr. Robert Hickson

11 June 2021

Sacred Heart of Jesus

Saint Barnabas (d. 60)

Epigraphs:

“September 19.—To-day I was on the beach with Tristram and he asked me [Isolde of Brittany] if I saw a ship. I said I did. He asked me if the sail was black, and as the doctor had told me to humour him, I said it was. Upon which he got much worse, and I had to call the doctors. They said he was suffering from hypertrophy of the sensory nerves.

“September 20.—Tristram unconscious. The Queen of Cornwall [i.e., Isolde the Fair] just arrived [in Brittany and she had come on the ship with two colors of sail, after all]. Too busy to write.” (Maurice Baring, Lost Diaries (1913), page 20—my emphasis added—Chapter II—“From the Diary of Iseult of Brittany.”)

***

“Standing by the wall [listening to the candidly intimate conversation between her husband Tristan and already his close confident and friend, her own brother, Kaherdin], Isolde of the White Hands had overheard everything. How much she had loved Tristan! [She had just recently married Tristan and she was his legal wife.]…At last she learned of his love for another [Isolde the Fair of Cornwall]. She kept every word in mind: if only some day she could, how she would avenge herself on her [i.e., on Isolde the Fair of Cornwall] whom he loved most in the world. But she hid it all; and when the doors were open again she came to Tristan’s bed and served him with food as a lover should….but all day long she thought upon her vengeance.” (The Romance of Tristan and Isolde (1945 and 1950, pages 165-166—the Hilaire Belloc translation.)

***

“And Tristran trembled [both from his poisoned wound from a hostile spear in battle, together with his yearnings for his beloved soon to arrive from Cornwall, as he still hoped] and said: ‘Beautiful friend, you are sure that the ship is his [brother Kaherdin’s] indeed?’

“’I saw it plain and well. They have shaken it out [the sail] and hoisted it very high, for they have little wind. For its colour, why, it is black.’

“And Tristan turned him [himself] to the wall, and said [to his wife Isolde]: ‘I cannot keep this life of mine any longer.’ He said three times: ‘Isolde, my friend.’ And in saying it the fourth time, he died. ….Near Tristan, Iseult of the White Hands crouched, maddened at the evil she had done [her acts of vengeance], and calling and lamenting over the dead man [her husband]. The other Iseult [the Queen arrived just now from Cornwall] came in and said to her [Tristan’s wife]: ‘Lady, rise and let me come by him; I have more right to mourn him that you have—believe me. I loved him more.‘” (The Romance of Tristan and Isolde (1945, 1960), page 171-172—my emphasis added.)

***

On the premise that contrast clarifies the mind, this brief essay will attempt to present Maurice Baring’s own ironic parody, entitled “From the Diary of Iseult of Brittany,”1 and thereby help us raise many worthy questions about the substance and tone and emotion and seeming omissions of Joseph Bédier’s larger and elaborate composite French text (a narrative poetic tale of some 170 prose pages)—and as largely translated into English by Hilaire Belloc.2 Maurice Baring’s freshly brief and intentionally incomplete excerpt also gives us an alternate version of the end of the romance and tragedy. The longer and variously important last chapter of this poetic “high tale of love and of death” (pages 162-173) presents to us a shuddering (and yet reflective) one-word title: “Death.” Then what?

By reading closely Maurice Baring’s nuanced (and characteristically magnanimous) ten-page literary parody, an attentive reader of The Romance of Tristan and Isolde will see and understand much more about the famous and unmistakably tragic medieval (largely Celtic) legend. And such a reader will also be better able to raise informed questions about what is not present and to be accounted for! There are loose ends in the longer romance, as well: for example, the virtuous character and conduct of King Mark of Cornwall and the Irish Mother’s consequential Irish Potion which she intended for her daughter and her vowed future husband!

Maurice Baring compactly imagines and depicts the reflections of young Isolde of Brittany as a docile daughter and harp-player who will soon be married to the unexpected visitor, Tristan of Lyoness. Baring presents the whole domestic atmosphere and increasing commentary of Isolde over five months from spring to early autumn:

May 1—Mamma sent me up a message early this morning that I was to put on my best white gown with my coral necklace, as guests were expected. She didn’t say who. Nurse was in a fuss….I can’t think why, as there was no hurry. I came down punctually at noon….I was told to get out my harp, and to sit with my back to the light….I was to play only Breton songs. I said I didn’t know any. She [Mamma] said that didn’t matter; but that I could say anything I knew and call it a Breton song. I said nothing, but I thought, and I still think, this was dishonest. (10-11—italics in the original; my bold emphasis added)

After waiting “a long time” during which “Papa and mamma were fidgety,” (10) the seneschal, Morgan, announced the arrival Sir Tristan with his squire, Kurneval. Isolde’s first perceptive impressions of Tristan were expressed in her diary, as follows—about the man who will very soon now be her husband:

Rather an oldish man walked in, with a reddish beard, and many wrinkles. One of his front teeth was broken and the other was black. He was dressed in a coat of mail which was too tight for him. He had nice eyes and seemed rather embarrassed. (12)

Isolde innocently continues her candid descriptions:

Mamma and papa made a great fuss about him and brought me forward [in my white gown and with my cleansed white hands] and said: “This is our daughter Isolde,” and mamma whispered to me: “Show your hands.” I didn’t want to do this….

Sir Tristan bowed deeply, and seemed more and more embarrassed. After a long poise he said: “It’s a very fine day, isn’t it?”

Before I had time to answer, mamma broke in by saying: “Isolde has been up by six with the falconers.” This wasn’t true and I was surprised that mamma should be so forgetful. I hadn’t been out with the hawkers for weeks.

Then dinner was served. It lasted for hours I thought, and the conversation flagged terribly. Kurneval, Sir Tristan’s Squire, had twice of everything and drank more cider than was good for him. After dinner, mamma told me to fetch my harp. (12-13—italics in original; my bold emphasis added)

After Isolde complied with her mother’s request for her “to sing a Breton song,” Isolde admitted:

I was just going to say I didn’t know one, when she frowned at me so severely that I didn’t dare. So I sang a Provençal orchard song about waking up too early….Sir Tristan said: “Charming, charming, that’s German isn’t it; how well taught she is. I do like good singing.” Then he yawned, although he tried not to, and papa said he was sure Sir Tristan was tired, and he would take him to see the stables. Sir Tristan then became quite lively and said he would be delighted. (13-14—my emphasis added)

Sir Tristan, after then reliably learning her name, said to her papa as to his daughter’s name– “Isolde”–“Oh! What a pretty name!” (14)

Five days after the first entry of 1 May, Isolde of Brittany makes another entry in her diary:

May 6—They’ve [Tristan and his Squire Kurneval] been here a week now and I haven’t seen much of them; because Sir Tristan has been riding with papa nearly all day, and every day. But every day after dinner mamma makes me sing the Provençal song, and every time I sing it, Sir Tristan says: “Charming, charming, that’s German, isn’t it?” although I’ve already told him twice now that it isn’t. I like Sir Tristan, only he’s very silent, and after dinner he becomes sleepy directly, just like papa. (15—my emphasis added)

One day later, on 7 May, Isolde was suddenly told by her parents something unexpected:

Then mamma cried and papa tried to soothe her and said: “It’s all right, it’s all right, and then he blurted out that I was to marry Sir Tristan next Wednesday….Sir Tristan [on 8 May one day later!] has gone away—to stay with friends– he is coming back on Tuesday night [on 11 May, shortly before their marriage [on 12 May]….

May 12—. The wedding went off well….After Mass we had a long feast. (15-16—my emphasis added)

Now we come a little closer to conflict and confusion:

Tristan made a speech [at the marriage feast] and got into a muddle about my name [Isolde], and everyone was silent. Then he said I had beautiful hands [“Isolde of the White Hands”] and everybody cheered. After supper we were looking out on the sea, and just as Tristan was becoming talkative I noticed that he wore another ring, besides his wedding ring, a green one made of jasper. I said, “What a pretty ring! Who gave it you?” He said, “Oh, a friend,” and changed the subject. Then he said he was very tired and went away. (17—my emphasis added)

Tristan thus crudely left his marriage feast. Unasked, he just “went away” (17).

What kind of man, after all, is he now increasingly showing himself to be? (That is to say, especially in Maurice Baring’s ironic parody and subtle depiction here!)

In this context, Baring’s Isolde goes on to say, as follows, in her diary entry of 13 May:

In any case Tristan, who has been very gloomy ever since he’s been here, has got to go and fight in a tournament. He says he won’t be away long and that there’s no danger; not any more than crossing the sea in an open boat [such as the sailing from Cornwall to Brittany?], which I do think is dangerous. He starts tomorrow at dawn [14 May]. (17-18—italics in original; my bold emphasis added)

In her 17 May entry, she says: “Tristan was brought back on a litter in the middle of the night” (18) and she is “very anxious” (18). Moreover;

Papa and mamma arrive to-morrow with the doctor. Tristan insists on sleeping out of doors on the beach. The doctor says this is a patient’s whim and must be humoured. I’m sure it’s bad for him, as the nights are very cold. (18-19—my emphasis added)

Isolde added on 1 July that “The doctors say there is no fear of immediate change” (19), but over a month later—on 10 August—“Mamma says that the Queen of Cornwall (whose name is Isolde the same as mine) is coming for a few days, with her husband [King Mark of Cornwall] and some friends.” (19—my emphasis added)

Furthermore, mamma is reported to have said about this untimely and sudden visit:

I do think it’s very inconsiderate, considering how full the house is already; and Tristan being so ill—and insisting on sleeping on the beach—it makes it very difficult for everyone [as of 10 August]. (19—my emphasis added)

Isolde of Brittany, Tristan’s wife, wrote on 1 September in her diary: “Tristan is no better. He keeps on talking about a ship with a black sail.” (19—emphasis added)

Almost three weeks later (on 19 September), with the other Isolde of Cornwall not yet having arrived with her husband and warmly landed, Isolde of the White Hand wrote the following entry:

To-day I was on the beach with Tristan and he asked me if I saw a ship. I said I did. He asked me if the sail was black, and as the doctor told me to humour him, I said it was. Upon which he got much worse, and I had to call the doctors. They said he was suffering from hypertrophy of the sensory nerves. (20—my emphasis added)

One day later—on 20 September — the ship from Cornwall landed safely in Brittany after many dangerous and delaying storms (as some scholars have said, and have written, such as Joseph Bédier). Isolde of the White Hands has this brief and final entry on 20 September: “Tristan unconscious. The Queen of Cornwall [Isolde the Fair] just arrived. Too busy to write.” (20—my emphasis added)

The reader, it is hoped, will now also fittingly read and contrast and savor the tragic end of the famous tale in the longer poetic version in prose: the Bédier-Belloc version and translation. It would also help us appreciate more adequately the evocative tones and allusions and artfulness of our beloved Maurice Baring.

CODA

A Glimpse of the Other Isolde and of Her Husband, King Mark of Cornwall, as quoted from the end of The Romance of Tristan and Isolde (172-173):

And when she [Isolde of Cornwall] had turned to the east and prayed God, she moved the body [of Tristan] a little and lay down by the dead man, beside her friend. She kissed his mouth and his face, and clasped him closely; and so gave up her soul, and died beside him of grief for her lover.

When [the magnanimous and forgiving] King Mark heard of the death of these lovers, he crossed the sea and came into Brittany….And he took their beloved bodies away with him upon his ship to Tintagel, and by a chantry to the left and right of the apse he had their tombs built round….Thrice did the peasants cut it down [the growing, twining “green and leafy” briar], but thrice it grew again as flowered and as strong [“in the scent of its flowers”]. They told the marvel to King Mark, and he forbade them to cut the briar any more.

–FINIS–

© 2021 Robert D. Hickson

1Maurice Baring, Lost Diaries (London: Duckworth & CO., 1913), Chapter II: “From the Diary of Iseult of Brittany,” pages 10-20. The Diary covers the five-month interval from May 1 to September 20, but the year is not given nor otherwise specified. All future references will be to this text and placed in parentheses above in the main body of this short essay.

2The longer literary text that will occasionally be referred to or cited is: The Romance of Tristan and Iseult —as retold by Joseph Bédier and as translated from the French by Hilaire Belloc– (New York: The Heritage Press, 1960; and also the earlier published in 1945—with a copyright in 1945 by Pantheon Books, Inc., from whom permission has been obtained here. All further variant spellings of the name of ISEULT will be henceforth standardized, if possible, as ISOLDE. For example: The Romance of Tristan and Isolde—and both Isoldes will be so written, one of them being from Ireland and then Cornwall, and the other one being of Brittany. The Heritage Press format and text of 173 pages will also be placed in parentheses above, if needed for a convenient reference of comparison. Given the varieties of spellings in use, Tristan will also, when feasible, stand as a preferred spelling and replacement for Tristram.

Maurice Baring’s Multi-Faceted 1912 Travelogue: Round the World in Any Number of Days

Dr. Robert Hickson

9 September 2020

Saint Peter Claver, S.J. (d. 1654)

Epigraphs

“Shortly afterwards [on 21 June 1912], he started on his tour round the world [until October of 1912], the result of which was what seems to me one of the most enchanting, also one of the most unusual travel-books ever written: Round the World in Any Number of Days.” (Dame Ethel Smyth, Maurice Baring (London: William Heinemann LTD, 1938), page 42—my bold emphasis added.)

***

“In October of the same year (1912) The Times sent him to the Balkans, where war had broken out. I think this persistence of newspaper editors in using Baring as War Correspondent is impressive and creditable to both parties….One may conclude it was not only on account of his vivid narrative style, but also because of his enterprise and reliability, that he was once more sent to the seat of war by the foremost English Journal.” (Dame Ethel Smyth, Maurice Baring (1938), pages 42-43—my bold emphasis added.)

***

“And I, for one, in any case, felt that come what might, I had had my dream. I had had a glimpse of Eden, a peep into the earthly paradise.” (Maurice Baring, Round the World in Any Number of Days (London: William Heinemann LTD, 1926), page 97—my emphasis added.)

***

It should be of worth to us yet today to see some of the nourishing perceptiveness and insights of Maurice Baring in his 1912 travel writings less than two years before the outbreak of World War I. Although Baring’s vivid and varied record of his five-month trip was first published in the United States in 1914, we shall now refer to, and often to quote, only from a later publisher’s unified and final 1926 English edition, which is still entitled: Round the World in Any Number of Days.1

From June to October 1912, Maurice Baring (1874-1945) first sailed east from England to Naples, Italy, on to India and Ceylon, then on to Australia and New Zealand, and briefly (but very movingly) through Roratonga and Papeete, Tahiti (mindful also of the beautiful Marquesas Archipelago) and onward to San Francisco, and then winding up by train coming down the Hudson River Coast into New York City (and Long Island), from which he sailed back to England, in order to begin his mission to the Balkans as a trusted War Correspondent.

After this brief introduction and partial summary, let us first consider how Baring concretely presents a fresh mango as it was recommended to him in Ceylon so as to alleviate the “damp heat that saps your very being” (38):

It is when you are dressed for dinner and you come down into the large high dining-room, full of electric fans, that you realize that it is impossible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating damp heat that saps your very being.

The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will it be as good as you are told it is? Yes, it is better. At first you think it is just an ordinary apricot and then you think it is a banana; no, fresher; a peach, a strawberry, and then a delicious, sharp, fresh, aromatic after-taste comes, slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter. Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know that the mango is like nothing else but its own incomparable self.

It has all these different tastes at once, simultaneously. In this it resembles the beatific vision as told of by St. Thomas Aquinas. The point of the beatific vision, says St. Thomas, is its infinite variety. (38—italics in the original)

Baring then immediately elaborates upon his unusual analogy of Beatitude’s “infinite variety” with the concurrent variety of tastes accessible to one who is savouring a fresh mango:

So that those who enjoy it [i.e., the vision of beatitude] have at the same time the feeling that they are looking at a perfect landscape, hearing the sweetest of music, bathing it a cold stream on a hot day, reaching the top of a mountain, galloping on grass on a horse that isn’t running away, floating over tree-tops, reading very good verse, eating toasted cheese, drinking a really good cocktail [or wine!]—and any other nice thing you can think of, all at once. The point, therefore, of the taste of the mango is its infinite variety. It was probably mangoes which grew in Eden on the Tree of Knowledge, only I expect they had a different kind of skin then, and were without that cumbersome and obstinate kernel which makes them so difficult to eat. (38-39—italics in the original; my bold emphasis added)

Such a perceptive and extended passage on beatitude and a mango fruit is a representative instance of Baring’s multi-faceted and unusual pre-World War I travelogue. And there is more to come.

For example, Maurice Baring—the Russian scholar and linguist—then freshly mentions the reliable reports or realities of “ghosts at sea” and he modestly says:

But I have spoiled that story. I have merely told the bare facts; what you want is the whole thing: the dialogue, the details; the technical terms. Ghosts at sea are more frightening than ghosts on shore, but I think the worst of all ghosts are river ghosts or, for instance, the ghosts that haunt the rivers of Russia. They have green, watery eyes, hair made of weeds, and they laugh at you when they see you and then you go mad. This naiad ghost is called Russalka. I have never seen one or any other ghost either, but I have once in the company of a friend [Hilaire Belloc] heard a ghost sing. (47—italics in the original; my bold emphasis added)

Baring at once adds a footnote to this passage in the 1926 edition, where he now more revealingly says: “Now that the age of reticence has gone his name [my friend] can be mentioned. It was H. Belloc.” (47—my emphasis added)

Throughout his Round the World, Maurice Baring mentions and quotes his friend Hilaire Belloc, as well as G.K. Chesterton, and even Dr. Samuel Johnson, the noted, often witty, Lexicographer. For example, Baring says:

So that one wonders [at times] how it happens that any one goes to sea [and thereby also then has “the possibility of drowning”!]; and one is inclined almost to agree with Dr. Johnson’s opinions on the subject.

“A ship,” he said, “is worse than a gaol [jail]. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniences of every kind, and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger [as in drowning!]. When men come to like a sea-life they are not fit to live on land.”

“Then,” said [James] Boswell, “it would be cruel in a father to breed his son to the see.”

“It would be cruel,” said Johnson, “in a father who thinks as I do. Men go to sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession, as, indeed, is generally the case with men when they have once engaged in any particular way of life.” (52—my emphasis added)

In view of these wholehearted and differentiated words, Baring soon again quotes Dr. Johnson who also sincerely said: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier or not having been at sea.” (58)

Maurice Baring also shows his sincere admiration of the poet and scholar, Andrew Lang (59-61).

We thus propose to give only a selection of Baring’s thoughts. First of all, Baring gives us the context for his subsequent personal words about the Scottish poet, scholar, and translator, Andrew Lang himself, who had just died in July of 1912 (having been born in Scotland in 1844):

And yet it happens that many writers [like Belloc and Baring themselves!] write books on different subjects. Andrew Lang, for instance; at Fremantle [a port-city on the west coast of Australia] we heard the sad news of his death. Personally I knew him slightly and he had shown me much kindness. Also we had corresponded about a ghost story. I have literally fed on his books since I was fifteen. When a boy awakens to a love of literature and his enthusiasm for a number of authors is kindled to a white-hot pitch, he wishes to see that enthusiasm confirmed and justified in the writings of older men, and he turns to the critics. The critics pull his favourite poets to pieces, and sniff, and cavil, and patronize, and analyze, and damn with faint praise, and dissect, and blame, and make reservations, and deal out niggard approval. Nothing is so trying to the young as the jaded palate of elder critics. But in Andrew Lang’s criticism (so lightly and beautifully put, so unpedantic and so easy) the boy will find the enthusiasm he expects. (59—my emphasis added)

Baring then remembers other examples of Lang’s admirable qualities:

In a letter to me Andrew Lang once said he appreciated all the poets from Homer to Robert Bridges, with the exception of Byron. I’m sorry he didn’t like Byron. But I didn’t like Byron as a boy, and it was as a boy that Andrew Lang what I most needed, praise of my favourites—Shelley, Keats, William Morris, Dumas; of all the poets I had just discovered and the romantics in whom I was revelling, and of French verse into the bargain.

As a boy, when I began to read the critics, I found that they despised French verse, and I wondered. But Andrew Lang was my solace. He understood. He knew the language….You must be used to the sound of French to appreciate French verse….

Andrew Lang is an author who spent the large capital of his wit, his learning, his wide sympathies, royally and generously without stint; he was a master of English prose, and some of the best pages he ever wrote were flung into leaders in the Daily News….He had a fine and rare appreciation of the world’s good verse; he could write ghost stories, fairy tales, doggerel; he was a supreme dialectician, an amusing parodist, a prince of letter-writers, as well as a poet;—perhaps he was of all things a poet. The following translation [by Andrew Lang] of Rufinus’ lines to Rhodocleia, sending her a wreath, is a good example of his verse. He has turned an exquisite Greek poem into an exquisite English poem: [then the full poetic translation is actually provided on page 61]….

Practically I saw nothing of Australia, but I suppose there is no harm in writing these notes—the mere rough impressions of a fugitive traveller. (59-61—my bold emphasis added)

Such is Maurice Baring’s sincere forthrightness and his modesty.

In September of 1912, Baring was in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and we hear about someone he memorably met:

One of the most interesting people I have met here is a French lady of the highest culture and education, Soeur Marie Joseph, who is at the head of a Home of Compassion for derelict children. She went out to the Crimean War [1853-1856] under Florence Nightingale and looked after the wounded on the battlefield that knew nothings of anaesthetics. She told me that sometimes the doctors, after a day of surgical operations, would be drunk with the fumes of the blood. The wounded had to be tied down to be operated on, and sometimes, where this was not practicable, people had to sit on them.

Soeur Marie Joseph is very fond of New Zealand. She came out, attracted by what she heard of the [native] Maoris, and she knew the Maoris with an intimate thoroughness. She has a great admiration for them; and she gave me many instances of their chivalry and nobility of character….This morning at one of the Catholic churches here the priest preached a most interesting sermon….I have had a glimpse of New Zealand, such as no books and no pictures could give me, and I have consequently enriched my store of experience and extended the frontiers of my outlook. (85-86—my emphasis added)

In mid-September 1912, Baring arrived first in Roratonga en route to Tahiti, and noticed, among other distinctive qualities, that the Tonga natives spoke with special tones:

Their voices are in harmony with the liquid musical quality of their language, which consists of soft open vowels. It is, I suppose, the most melodious of all human languages….

I bathed in the sea, and then…I went on board once more. From Roratonga it only takes two days to get to the island of Tahiti [in French Polynesia], and the steamer anchored at Papeete [the capitol of French Polynesia] on Friday, September 20 [1912].

Roratonga gives you a kind of foretaste of the whole charm and beauty of the South Seas. It is the appetizer, …not the whole meal. Tahiti is the whole thing; the real thing, the thing that one has dreamt about all one’s life; the thing which made Stevenson [Robert Louis Stevenson] leave Europe for ever. All tellers of fairy tales, and all poets from Homer downwards, have always imagined the existence of certain Fortunate islands [“the Happy Isles”] which were so full of magic and charm that they turned man from his duty and from his tasks, labour, or occupation in which he was engaged, and held him a willing captive, who would not sell his captivity for all the prizes of the busy world. (90-91—my emphasis added)

After Baring’s further presentations of Tahiti’s allurements (or perilous temptations?), he says:

I cannot imagine anything more ideal than to possess a schooner fitted with a small motor in case of calm, and to cruise [under sail] about the waters between Tahiti and the Marquesas [the archipelago], which, one is told, are the most beautiful of all….They are things to be seen; they are places to be seen and lived in; not to be written about. The pen can give no idea of their charm….Loath as I was to go, at the end of twenty-four hours I felt it was a good thing that I was going, otherwise I should have been tempted to remain there for the rest of my life….

We left Tahiti in the afternoon, when the greater part of the population came down to the wharf to see us off. We left feeling like Ulysses [Odysseus] when he was driven by force (or by Penelope’s letters) from the island of Calypso. And I, for one, in any case, felt that come what might, I had had my dream. I had had a glimpse of Eden, a peep into the earthly paradise. (95-97—my emphasis added)

Before leaving these varied and inviting samples of Maurice Baring’s 1912 travelogue, I propose to present one scene from his brief time in San Francisco:

The next night I left San Francisco for Chicago. Before leaving San Francisco, I had a dinner at a restaurant called the “New Franks” [run by “a Dalmatian” with “a French cook or cooks”]. It is a small restaurant, and it provides the best food I have ever eaten anywhere….I was not hungry the night I went to the New Franks. I was not inclined to eat, but the sheer excellence of the cooking there excited my greed, and bade my appetite rise from the dead….And I had never tasted anything so good in my life [not even a mango!]….

The trouble about small restaurants, when they are excellent, is, that they become well known, and are then so largely patronized that they become large and ultimately bad.

Once I was walking in Normandy with a friend [perhaps Hilaire Belloc?], and we stopped in a very small town to have luncheon at an hotel. We asked if there was any wine. Yes, there was some wine, some Burgundy, some Beaune. We tried a bottle, and it surprised us. Surprise is, in fact, a mild word to describe the sharpness of our ecstasy.

“Is not this wine very good?” we asked of the host.

“Yes, sirs,” he answered, “it is very good. It is very old, but there is not much of it left.”

Now, my friend was a journalist, who writes about French towns and French wines in the English Press.

“Whatever happens,” I said to him, “if you write about this town and about this wine, which I know you will do, you must not divulge the name of the town.”

He agreed. He wrote an article about the town, he grew lyric over the wine, and looted all the poets of the world from Homer downwards for epithets and comparisons fit for it. He did not mention the name of the place.

The year after he returned to the same place and ordered a bottle of the Burgundy. There was no more left. Some English gentlemen, the host told him, had come on purpose from England to finish it.

Now, I am sure some very intelligent man, and a man who was passionately fond of good wine, read the article and guessed, from the description, the whereabouts of the little French town and the precious liquid.

The moral of this is: “Don’t tell secrets in the newspapers; don’t even tell half a secret.”

The evening I left San Francisco I had a small adventure. I asked a man the way to some street. He told me the way, and then, catching hold of my arm, he said, “You will stand me a drink.”….Then he said, “I’m a bum….I’m a booze-fighter.” He added with engaging frankness that he was half drunk: an under-statement. (114-118—my emphasis added)

Such is the richness and variety of Maurice Baring’s writing, even his travel writing on the eve of the coming and soon spreading War.

“God’s good foison” – “God’s good abundance”—is what the Catholic poet, John Dryden (d. 1700), once generously said of the earlier Catholic poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400).

Such an abundance also characterizes the writing and the heart of Maurice Baring, who, three years before his 1912 voyage, became a Roman Catholic. It was on 1 February 1909 that he was received into the Church, on the Vigil of Candlemas.

–FINIS–

© 2020 Robert D. Hickson

1 See, first of all, Maurice Baring, Round the World in Any Number of Days (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company—The Riverside Press Cambridge, October 1914), 248 pages. The final 1926 edition, with longer dedications added, is published, as follows: Maurice Baring, Round the World in Any Number of Days (London: William Heinemann LTD, 1926 ), pages v-xv, and 1-140. Illustrations are by Basil Blackwood; and Dedications are now to his close friend, Dame Ether Smyth, Doctor (and Composer) of Music; and to his valorous Companion in World War I, Major Bowman, D.S.O., M.C. Henceforth, all references to and quotations of Baring’s text will be to the 1926 edition, and placed above in parentheses in the main body of this brief essay. We shall now accent a representative selection of Baring’s insights.

Maurice Baring, One of God’s Gentlemen, Presents Xantippe: The Wife of Socrates

(Author’s Note: This 2017 essay on Maurice Baring is intended to be a fitting sequel to the recently posted essay on Max Beerbohm’s Parody of some of Maurice Baring’s subtle writings. This essay shows the deep character of Maurice Baring himself, as well as presents an instance of his gifted writing on certain personalities from the Classical Ancient World of Greece.)

Dr. Robert Hickson                                                                                                      9 June 2017

Feast of Mary Mother of Fair Grace

Saint Columba (Saint Columbkille) (d. 597)

Maurice Baring, One of God’s Gentlemen, Presents Xantippe:

The Wife of Socrates

Epigraphs

“On the eve of Candlemas 1909, I was received into the Catholic Church by Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton Oratory [in London and on 1 February]: the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted. Father Sebastian began life as an officer in the Scots Guards. He had served as A.D.C. [Aide-de-Camp] under the same chief and at the same time as my uncle, Lord Cromer. He lived all the rest of his life at the Oratory and died in 1920. He was fond even in old age of riding about London on a cob [his small horse of sturdy build]. His face was stamped with the victory of character over all other elements. He was a sensible Conservative, a patriot, a prime example of an English gentleman in mind and appearance; a prince of courtesy, and a saint; and I regard my acquaintance with him and the friendship and sympathy he gave me as the greatest privilege bestowed on me by Providence.” (Maurice Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1922), pp. 395-396—my emphasis added)

***

“That night [17 May 1915]…there was a rumour that B.K. [Major Basil Barrington-Kennett] had been killed. The next day the rumour was confirmed.

If ever a man deserved a soldier’s death, to die leading his men and the men of his own regiment into battle, it was B.K. But of all the bitter losses one had to bear throughout the war, it was, with one exception [i.e., his cherished long-time friend, Auberon “Bron” Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, d. 3 November 1916 at age 40; and to whom, in 1909, Baring had dedicated his parodic Dead Letters (1911)], this particular loss I felt most, minded most, resented most, and found most difficult to accept.

He [“B.K.”] was not an old friend of mine. I had never seen him before the war. But he was bound up with every moment of my life during the first months of the war, and I had got to know him intimately and to admire him more than others and to delight in his company more than in that of others….But when this particular piece of news [about his death] came I felt the taste of the war turn bitter indeed, and apart from any personal feelings, one rebelled against the waste which had deprived, first the Flying Corps and then the Army, of the services of so noble a character. He was the most completely unselfish man I have ever met: a compound of loyalty and generosity and a gay and keen interest in everything life has to offer.

Not long ago I heard a little boy of eight years old asked if he knew what the word gentleman meant. He said, ‘Yes, of course.’ On being pressed for a definition he said: ‘A gentleman is a man who loves God very much and has beautiful manners.’ This definition exactly fitted B.K.” (Maurice Baring, R.F.C., HQ.–1914-1918 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), pp. 92-93—my emphasis added)

***

“He [General Éduard de Castelnau, 1851-1944] seemed to belong to a nobler epoch than ours [circa 1914-1918], to be [himself] a native of the age of chivalry, of that time [in the 13th Century] when Louis IX, who is known as Saint Louis, dispensed justice under a spreading oak-tree. He had the easy familiarity, the slight play of kindly irony, the little ripple of humour, the keen glance, the foresight and forethought, that politesse du cœur [that deep and sincere politeness of heart], that complete remoteness from what is common, mean, base, self-seeking, which are the foundation and substance of God’s gentlemen.” (Maurice Baring, R.F.C., HQ.—1914-1918, p. 273—my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)

***

This short essay proposes to consider, not only the above-mentioned Major B.K. and General de Castelnau, but also Maurice Baring himself, as “one of God’s gentlemen,” as one whose own generous and chivalrous character is marked by a sincere, deep, and guileless politesse de cœur, even as he presents to us now the volubly scolding (sometimes shrewish) wife of Socrates, Xantippe. Under her eloquent reproaches Socrates himself is shown to be a man of a few words, maybe for a good reason, inasmuch as he expectantly approaches the end of his earthly life, which is already forebodingly endangered—though seemingly unnoticed by his discouraged and hot-tempered wife. (In 399 B.C., five years after the humiliating defeat and capitulation of Athens in the devastating Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) in which he had earlier been a combatant, Socrates himself, after his trial, was to die.)

Baring first published this charming character portrayal of Xantippe and her husband in 1911, three years before the Great War of 1914-1918 was to break out, and only some two years after he had become a Catholic. The Xantippe portrayal was then again later published in his book’s set of 23 short literary presentations, entitled Diminutive Dramas,1 where Baring’s characteristic magnanimity recurrently showed itself. And he expressed it often with “a play of kindly irony” and a warmly sustained, flowing “ripple of humour”—as we may soon come to see, especially if we were–with only two reciters– to read with a fittingly swift pace the entire short play aloud. (Recently, and in the presence of our two young children at home, my German wife herself expressively read the lines and convincingly played Xantippe —with me as the taciturn, somewhat intimidated Socrates in the background as a foil—and she thereby heartily evoked the joy and smiles of the astounded children!)

Now we should present Baring’s own description of the Scene at the opening of the Play:

“A room in SOCRATES’ house. XANTIPPE is seated at a table [in Athens], on which an unappetizing meal, consisting of figs, parsley, and some hashed goat’s meat, is spread.” (177)

We should remember the goat’s meat is, purportedly, one of Socrates’ favorite dishes, at least in Xantippe’s estimation. As Socrates (S) enters his home, Xantippe (X) has the first comment (177):

X: “You’re twenty [sic] minutes late.”

S: “I’m sorry, I was kept—”

X: “Wasting your time as usual, I suppose, and bothering people with questions who have something better to do than to listen to you. You can’t think what a mistake it is by going on like that. You can’t think how much people dislike it. If people enjoyed it, or admired it, I could understand the waste of time—but they don’t. It only makes them angry. Everybody’s saying so.”

S: “Who’s everybody?”

X: “There you are with your questions again. Please don’t try to catch me out with those kind of tricks. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a sophist. I know I’m not clever—I’m only a woman. But I do know the difference between right and wrong and black and white, and I don’t think it’s very kind of you, or very generous either, to be always pointing out my ignorance, and perpetually making me the butt of your sarcasm.”

S: “But I never said a word.”

X: “Oh, please, don’t try to wriggle out of it. We all know you’re very good at that. I do hate that shuffling so. It’s so cowardly. I do like a man you can trust—and depend on—who when he says Yes means Yes, and when he says No means No.”

S: “I’m sorry I spoke.”

X: “I suppose that’s what you call irony. I’ve no doubt it’s very clever, but I’m afraid it’s wasted on me. I should keep those remarks for the market-place and the gymnasia and the workshops. I’ve no doubt they’d be highly appreciated there by that clique of young men who do nothing but admire each other. I’m afraid I’m old-fashioned. I was brought up to think that a man should treat his wife with decent civility, and try, even if he did think her stupid, not to be always showing it.” (177-178—my emphasis added)

Baring’s tonal words show Xantippe to be a more sympathetic figure than we might have originally thought to be so.

In reply to Xantippe’s last set of words, Socrates can only say: “Have I by a word or hint ever suggested that you were stupid?” The pathos now grows.

X: “Oh, of course not—never. However, we won’t discuss that. We will change the subject, if you don’t mind.”

S: “But really—”

X: (ignoring the interruption). Please give me your plate. I will help you to the goat.”

S: “None for me, thank you, to-day”

X: “Why not? I suppose it’s not good enough. I’m afraid I can’t provide the food you get at your grand friends’ houses, but I do think it’s rather cruel of you to sneer at my poor humble efforts.” (178—my emphasis added)

Socrates goes on to reveal only the fact that he is not very hungry: “I’ve really got no appetite for meat to-day. I’ll have some figs, if you don’t mind.” (179) And Xantippe immediately responds:

X: “I suppose that’s the new fad, not to eat meat. I assure you people talk quite enough about you as it is without your making yourself more peculiar. Only yesterday Chrysilla was talking about your clothes. She asked if you made them dirty on purpose. She said the spots on the back couldn’t have got there by accident. Every one notices it—every one says the same thing. Of course they think it’s my fault. No doubt it’s very amusing for people who don’t mind attracting attention and who like being notorious: but it is rather hard on me. And when I hear people saying ‘Poor Socrates! it is a shame that his wife looks after him so badly and doesn’t even mend his sandals‘–I admit I do feel rather hurt. However, that would never enter into your head. A philosopher hasn’t time to think of other people. I suppose unselfishness doesn’t form part of a sophist’s training, does it?”

[SOCRATES says nothing, but eats first one fig and then another.]

X: “I think you might at least answer when spoken to. I am far from expecting you to treat me with consideration or respect; but I do expect ordinary civility.”

[SOCRATES goes on eating figs in silence.]

X: “Oh, I see, you’re going to sulk. First you browbeat, then you’re satirical. Then you sneer at the food, and then you sulk.” (179—my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)

Baring’s presentation now moves on to the specific discussion of food, but only after Socrates shows no larger response to his wife’s more capacious comments. The only reply Socrates chooses to make to her is somewhat impersonal, as well as brief: “I never said a word against the food.” (180—my emphasis added) Nor does Socrates ever thank her for being a good cook who tries to please him!

We may now imagine the different emphases and tones of voice that might be fittingly expressed by the actors in this continuing and somewhat one-sidedly animated dialogue, if this deftly written little domestic drama were also to be performed on stage. Xantippe now resumes (with a touch of irony) her own more loquacious and more differentiated response to her terse husband:

X: “You never said a word against the food. You only kept me waiting nearly half an hour for dinner—not that that was anything new—I’m sure I ought to be used to that by now—and you only refused to look at the dish which I had taken pains to cook with my own hands for you.”

S: “All I said was I wasn’t hungry—that I had no appetite for meat.”

X: “You’ve eaten all the figs. You’ve got quite an appetite for those.”

S: “That’s different.”

X: “Oh, that’s different, is it? One can be hungry enough to eat all the fruit there is in the house, which I was especially keeping for this evening, but not hungry enough to touch a piece of meat. I suppose that’s algebra.”

S: “You know I very rarely eat meat.”

X: “Really? I hadn’t noticed it. I always hear of your eating meat in other people’s houses; but my poor cooking is not good enough for you. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford those spicy messy dishes. If I had a husband who had a real profession, and worked, and did something useful to earn his living and support his house and home, it would be different; only I think the least you could do is not to sneer at one when one is only trying to do one’s best.” (180—my emphasis added)

To this cascade of words and spousal reproaches Socrates only says: “I very rarely eat meat anywhere now.” Perceiving this rarity of meat to be a nutritional deficiency in her husband, Xantippe finds new grounds for her sharp solicitousness:

X: “That’s why you’re looking so ill. All the doctors say it’s a mistake. Some people can do without meat. They don’t need it—but a man who works with his brain like you ought to eat nourishing food. You ought to force yourself to eat meat, even if you don’t feel inclined to.”

S: “I thought you said just now that I did nothing.”

X: “There you are, cross-examining me like a lawyer, and tripping me up. I’ve no doubt it’s very amusing for a professional philosopher to catch out a poor ignorant woman like me. It’s a pity your audience isn’t here. They would enjoy it. However, I’m afraid I’m not impressed. You can twist my words into anything you like. You can prove I meant black when I said white, but you know perfectly well what I mean. You know as well as I do that your eccentricity has made you thoroughly unpopular. And what I say is, it’s just these little things that matter. Now put all that nonsense away and have some goat.”

S: “No, thank you. I really can’t.”

X: “It’s excellent goat, and there’s some garlic in the sauce. I hate garlic, and it’s there on purpose for you—”

S: “Oh!”….

X: “I suppose you had dinner before you came here [i.e. came home], or you’re going to have dinner somewhere else presently.”

S: “I haven’t touched food since I left the house.”

X: “Then it’s quite ridiculous your not eating [even if it were, perhaps, on the threshold of death?]. Let me give you some goat at once.”

S: “I couldn’t, really. Besides, I must go in a minute.” (180-182—my emphasis added)

As we approach the end of Maurice Baring’s diminutive dramatic depiction, we must also consider now the implicit presence of dramatic irony and pathos. For, without Xantippe’s adequate knowledge, Socrates may actually be preparing to leave home in order to face his stern Athenian accusers and, perhaps, never to come home again. Let us therefore consider some of Baring’s sudden hints, or subtle clues.

S: “…Besides, I must go in a minute.”

X: “There! I knew it! You’re going out to dinner.”

S: “You’re mistaken, Xantippe.”

X: “You’d far better tell me the truth at once. I’m quite certain to find it out sooner or later. You can’t think how foolish it is to tell lies and then to be found out afterwards. You can’t think how much a woman despises a man for that—you couldn’t do anything more foolish.”

S: “I promise you by all the gods that I’m not going to dine elsewhere. [A true fact; but what of import are you not telling your wife?!]

X: “I suppose you don’t expect me to fall into that trap! Swearing by all the gods, when every one in Athens knows you are a professed atheist—when you do nothing but mock the gods from morning to night—and, what’s far worse, make other people mock them too; when I scarcely like to have a slave [a possible informant or spy!] in the house because of your impiety—and your blasphemy.” (182—my emphasis added)

Maurice Baring, in this last passage, deftly has Xantippe herself make many of the same charges that are later made by Socrates’ own three accusers, who then successfully condemn him to death.

Moreover, immediately after Xantippe’s grave and bulging charges against her husband, Socrates, in an understated way, merely says to her: “I really think you are rather unfair, Xantippe. You will be sorry for this some day.” (182—my emphasis added)

X: “Then may I ask where you are going?”

S: “I’ve got an important engagement.”

X: “And with whom?”

S: “I would rather not say, for your sake.”

X: “That’s very clever and ingenious to put it on me. But I’m tired of being bullied. Even a worm will turn, and I demand to be treated just for once like a human being, and with the minimum of courtesy and frankness. I don’t ask for your confidence [trust], I know that would be useless. But I do ask to be treated with a grain of straightforwardness and honesty. I insist upon it. I have borne your sneers, your sarcasm, and your sulkiness, your irritability, your withering silence, quite long enough. I will not put up with it any longer.” (182-183—my emphasis added)

After this scorching and humiliating indictment of Socrates’ character and the very conduct of his domestic life with her (without even mentioning their three sons), Socrates decides to open up to her a little:

S: “Very well. Since you will have it, I have been impeached by Lycon, Meletus, and Anytus [Socrates’ three primary Athenian accusers] on some ridiculous [sic] charge, the result of which, however, may be extremely serious—in fact it may be a matter of life and death—and I am obliged to appear before them at once.”

X: “Oh dear, oh dear! I always said so. I knew it would come to this! This is what comes of not eating meat like a decent citizen!” [Xantippe bursts into tears.] —Curtain.—The End (183—my emphasis added)

Socrates was then to face his stern accusers at the public trial in 399 B.C., and he defended himself at some length, but in a not very conciliatory way. He was thus finally condemned to death, and, after thirty days, he drank the hemlock.

After now knowing of, and even having read large portions of, this charming diminutive drama by Maurice Baring, we might also come especially to appreciate and savor a magnificent student “blooper” on an academic test concerning Socrates: “Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock.”

Maurice Baring would have cherished this “blooper,” and I like to think that he might even have composed it himself when he was an antic young student. For, even then, he was known for his magnanimous parodies. He also had a keen sense of pathos (as in the case of Xantippe), and it is to be especially seen in his ennobling elegiac verses and in most of his later heart-searching novels.

CODA

Since Maurice Baring especially admired (and desired to imitate) the moral character and chivalrous standards of the French General Éduard de Castelnau (1851-1944), I propose to end this essay with Baring’s own slightly expanded presentation of that great and deeply admired man, part of which has already been revealed in our Epigraphs above, at the beginning of this essay; but it is worthy of our now repeating Baring’s memorable articulation of those inspiring interwoven qualities:

May 26, 1918….Headquarters, 8th Brigade [in France]….

We [General Trenchard and I] saw General de Castlenau [sic–Castelnau] too, who is charming….Our unique and undefined position [in France] depended, as far as practical results were concerned, entirely on the goodwill of the French. Luckily this goodwill was given to us in an overflowing measure by General de Castelnau, the commander of the Group of Armies of the East. He and the General [Trenchard, for whom Major Baring was the beloved and trusted Aide-de-Camp] understood each other at once after their first conversation.

General de Castelnau’s name and exploits need no comment [at least not in 1918 Europe]. They will be written, and are already written in gold, in the history of France, and in the Gesta Dei per Francos [the Epic High Deeds of God as Enacted by and through the Franks], as the victor of the Grand Couronné and the restorer of the situation at Verdun. But it is perhaps permissible to say a word or two about his personality.

He seemed to belong to a nobler epoch than ours, to be a native of the age of chivalry, of that time when Louis IX [of France], who is known as Saint Louis, dispensed justice under a spreading oak-tree. He has the easy familiarity, the slight play of kindly irony [like Baring with his depiction of Xantippe and Socrates!], the little ripple of humour, the keen glance, the foresight and forethought, that politesse du cœur, that complete remoteness from what is common, mean, base, self-seeking, which are the foundation and substance of God’s gentlemen. His white hair, his keen eyes, his features, which looked as if they had been cut by a master-hand out of a fine block of granite, radiated goodness and courage and cheerfulness, a salt-like sense, and a twinkling humour. And his smile went straight to your heart, and made you feel at home, comfortable, easy and happy. When one had luncheon with him and the orderly said luncheon was ready he used to say:

“A cheval, Messieurs [To Horse, Gentlemen!],

and throughout his conversation there was always a rippling current of good-humoured, delicate and keen chaff [reminding one of Maurice Baring’s “Xantippe and Socrates”]. To hear him talk was like reading, was to breathe the atmosphere in which classic French was born, racy, natural, idiomatic, and utterly free from anything shoddy, artificial or pretentious. He was the salt of the earth, and one felt that if [Edmund] Burke had met him he would have torn up his dirge of the death of the Age of Chivalry [to be found in Burke’s classic 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France], for there [in May of 1918] it [the chivalry] was alive and enjoying life and making others enjoy it. (Maurice Baring, R.F.C., H.Q.—1914-1918 (1920), pages 272-274—my emphasis added)

Is it not desirable that we too try to hold ourselves to the chivalrous standards of General de Castelnau?

May we too–like the generous and magnanimous Maurice Baring himself in his own discerningly compassionate (and comic) depiction of Xantippe (and her laconic husband)—show ourselves to be “one of God’s gentlemen.” Fittingly, we should thus recall how “a little boy of eight years old” himself memorably defined a gentleman: “A gentleman is a man who loves God very much and has beautiful manners.”

Recognizing that courtesy itself is a form of charity, Baring’s beloved friend Hilaire Belloc even wrote in one of his short poems entitled “Courtesy” that “the Grace of God is in Courtesy.”

Maurice Baring’s own deep politesse du cœur was so admirably able to encounter and depict with chivalrous compassion—and with “a ripple of good humour”—the challenges of those increasingly isolated and poignantly elegiac characters: voluble Xantippe and her tersely Philosophizing Husband.

–FINIS–

© 2017 Robert D. Hickson

1Maurice Baring, Diminutive Dramas (London: William Heinemann LTD., 1925), 183 pages. The last of the twenty-three dramatic sketches is entitled “Xantippe and Socrates” (Chapter XXIII, pp. 177-183). Although the book was originally published in late December 1910-early January 1911, it was published again in 1919, and then once again in 1925, by W. Heinemann, as part of “The Works of MAURICE BARING: Collected Uniform Edition.” All further references will be to that 1925 edition of Diminutive Dramas, and the pages quoted will be placed in parentheses above in the main text. In this context, Baring’s Dead Letters—a charming 1910 set of parodies—should also be savored, especially two of them: “From the Mycenae Papers” and “Lady Macbeth’s Trouble.” Maurice Baring, Dead Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company 1925), pp.1-7 and 95-99. See too Paul Horgan, Maurice Baring Restored: Selections from His Work (1970).

Max Beerbohm’s Charming 1950 Parody on Maurice Baring: “All Roads—” As a Christmas Garland Woven for His Gifted Friend

Dr. Robert Hickson                                                                                             14 August 2020

The Vigil of the Assumption of Mary

Saint Eusebius (d. 357)

Saint Maximilian Kolbe (d. 1941)

Epigraphs

“Publisher’s 1950 Note: A Christmas Garland was, when it was first published [in 1912], acclaimed by many writers as the best book of prose parodies in the English language. We venture to think that it still holds this pride of place. A parody on a certain M**R*C* B*R*NG [Maurice Baring] is now included.” (London: William Heinemann, 1950)

***

“Despite the last sentence in the foregoing [Rapallo, 1912] note, I did, in recent years, write one other parody, ‘All Roads–‘. It amused and pleased my old friend, the brilliant, the greatly gifted Maurice Baring. Had he not liked it [Baring was to die on 14 December 1945], I would not include it in this later [1950] edition.” (Max Beerbohm’s own 1949 Rapallo Postscript to the 1950 Heinemann London edition—my emphasis added.)

***

Maurice Baring [d. 1945] had already variously presented his own subtle and multiple talents in writing charming parodies, and it may be seen even in his set of what he called “diminutive dramas.” One may see it, for example, in the deft ironic domestic discourse between an earnest, sometimes shrewish, wife and her meditative, ironical philosopher husband, such as Socrates. That little drama is to be found (and to be read aloud and likely further cherished) in the drama of “Xantippe and Socrates” which is still to be highly recommended to everyone. One may see its subtle presentation in the final chapter of a larger collection in Baring’s 1925 versatile book, entitled Diminutive Dramas (London: William Heinemann LTD., 1925—in Chapter XXIII, on pages 177-183, will be found that timely and timeless little gem, “Xantippe and Socrates.”)

***

As a literary gift to his friend Maurice Baring, Max Beerbohm decided to tell a tale about a young man in the British diplomatic service in Rome who, with the help of a haunting young woman he never spoke to, overcame his longstanding displeasure with Christmas. He was then never to see her again.

Here is how Beerbohm’s narrator, partly aware of Baring’s earlier biography, begins his tale:

Michael Forster reached Rome in the first week of December and drove straight to the Embassy. Every one there was very kind to him. It was rather like being a new boy at a public school and not being bullied. All the same, he could not help wishing himself back at Copenhagen, or at Berne, where he had felt life-sized. Rome dwarfed him. She seemed to say to him, “If you want monuments, look around you! You will know that though you are twenty-five years old you are nobody—and never will be anybody though you live to be a hundred.” But at any rate he was not dreading the advent of Christmas.

Year after year, he had dreaded it ever since his childhood.1

Beerbohm’s hyphenated title, “All Roads–”, may well evoke the saying that “All Roads Lead to Rome”—and maybe also implicitly to the Catholic Faith. However, Beerbohm is more enigmatic when, right under the parody’s title is a chapter heading, namely “Chapter V.” as if there are earlier parts of the prose parody, as well as later ones, too. But let us pass on now to some other and more vivid matters.

After describing an ambiguous (partly unhistorical) set of incidents with Michael’s specially cherished German governess, “Fräulein Schultz” (57, 58), “and though he forgot all about her soon after she went to be a governess somewhere else, he never lost his dislike of Christmas.” (58—my emphasis added)

Nonetheless, “he was glad to be transferred to Rome” (58), but it was:

Not that he had yet felt any definite wavering in regard to the Church in which he had been baptised and confirmed. He was still a Protestant. But he had long since ceased to protest day in, day out, and the prospect of seeing a Christmas passed over lightly was one of the things that cheered him on his journey south….and it was a blow to him when one day Sainson, the Second Secretary, said, “Of course, the Chief will be giving the usual beano [noisy, festive] dinner on Christmas night.” (58—my emphasis added)

“Michael, at this news,” realized that he lacked a born and “real vocation for diplomacy, but he did manage to think out a plausible excuse, and on Christmas night, after he had dressed, he slipped out and dined in an obscure little restaurant in the Via Golfango.” (58—italics in the original)

A new character now comes into the tale, “a friend of his family,” the one who had recommended to him the little restaurant and he will now introduce him to a remarkable woman in her seventies:

When he [Michael] was half-through his meal [Pierre] Frénard himself came in and joined him at his table. Later, while they sat over their coffee, Frénard said he thought of going on to Mme. Yakovlev’s [still on that Christmas night].

Michael asked, “Who is Mme. Yakovlev?”

Frénard laughed and said, “Oh, she’s one of those women who know everybody. Fancy anyone not knowing her. You had better come with me. This is one of her Soirs. She has two a week….”

“Tell me about her,”said Michael.

“There’s not much to tell,” answered Frénard….“Her father was very poor, an Irish landowner, living mostly at home in a tumble-down castle, but sometimes travelling. From one of his journeys he brought back a bride—a young Turkish lady, a niece of Mustapha Pasha. There was one child of the marriage, a daughter; she was christened Clara. Both parents died when she [Clara] was twelve years old. She was then brought up by an aunt in Scotland. The aunt had been a devout Catholic, but there was some kink in her, and she was now a Presbyterian. The girl was not at all happy with her. She ran away when she was sixteen [four years later] and became a postulant in an Ursuline Convent near Glasgow. But she found she had no real vocation.” (59-60—my emphasis added)

After the narrator presents a wide range and variety of her mixed international life (60), we are then told that “Sergius Yakovlev, her third husband, was a trusted adviser of [Tsar] Alexander the Third….She and he [Sergius] are said to have been quite happy while he lived. Anyhow, she never married again. She settled in Rome….She was seventy-three last June. She knows a great deal but seldom says very much. What she says has point.” (60—my emphasis added)

Later at Mme. Yakovlev’s salone, “Michael was piloted by Frénard to Mme. Yakovlev and presented to her. Somehow he had expected her to be tall, but she was quite short.” (61) She asked him a question about a certain “Septimus Forster whom she had known in Algiers” (61), but:

Before he could think of an answer, he had to make way for another fresh arrival. He felt that he had not made a good impression. But afterwards Frénard told him that Mme. Yakovlev had liked him very much. (61-62)

Michael was now suddenly to glimpse the haunting young woman who was to influence him so greatly:

In one of the groups [of “fresh arrivals”] nearest to him he saw a young woman whose face was familiar to him, though he was sure he had never seen her before, and though she was unlike any one he had ever seen….She seemed utterly remote from the group she stood in….How was she here? How could she be? That she was a musician, and an exquisite one, Michael was sure. Her eyes and her hands proclaimed that. (62)

As part of Beerbohm’s deft artfulness, our minds are then presented with a contrasting human form, the robust Jorton himself, another family relation and indeed another “fresh arrival”:

While Michael gazed and wondered, the vast bulk of Professor Jorton suddenly interposed itself between him and the unknown [young woman], and he was affectionately hailed in the booming voice of the famous Alpine climber and Egyptologist, who was an old friend of the [Michael Forster] family and one of his Godfathers. That Jorton should be here was natural enough, for in spite of all his peaks and papyri he was the most social of men, and no capital city was complete without him. Michael felt sure he could learn from Jorton something about the identity of the young woman. (62-63—my emphasis added)

Now we are to hear a part of Professor Jorton’s biographical report on young Eleanor d’Urutsia:

“I don’t wonder that you’re struck by her. Eleanor d’Urutsias don’t grow on every bush….She married out of the schoolroom, as it were. She was only sixteen when young Fernand d’Urutsia came over to London….He was quite poor, and so was she, but they were ideally happy. He died on the first anniversary of their wedding, at Qualva, a fishing-village near Biarritz. It was feared that she would lose her reason. But she is ‘of the stuff that can affront despair.’ She withdrew into solitude for three years—no one knows where. Probably in some conventual [religious] institution, for she became passionately dévote when she was received into the Roman communion. She is now twenty years old….She is very musical. She used to sing charmingly. She plays her own accompaniments. I hope she will sing to-night. Shall I present you to her?”

“Ah, not to-night,” said Michael. “Not here in this crush.” (63—my emphasis added)

But Michael Forster could not keep his eyes off her, and he began to have some affectionate illusions: “With his eyes fixed on her again, he knew in his heart that somehow, mysteriously, not yet, but not a long while hence, his life would be linked with hers.” (64—my emphasis added)

How will Max Beerbohm now deftly, and even elegiacally, present the three concluding paragraphs of his tale, while keeping in mind the large corpus of Maurice Baring’s prose and verse?

After speaking with some of the new arrivals, Michael became more at ease as he spoke to an international set of expressive visitors:

Then he was aware that something was happening. There was movement in the group around Mme. [Eleanor] d’Urutsia, and a murmur of excitement throughout the room, and then a deep hush, as she passed slowly to the pianoforte.

Michael had known that if she sang it would be unlike any singing that he had heard. But he had not known how utterly unlike it would be. The song itself [touching upon the Nativity] was one he had often heard, and had not cared for—Weber’s setting of Bérenger’s “Noel.” She transported it into some sphere of unconjectured beauty in which one could only hold one’s breath, and marvel as best one might. (64—my emphasis added)

The last paragraph of the nuanced prose parody is well worth our repeated savoring and our poignant ironical reflections which distil some of Maurice Baring’s own deeply elegiac themes and also his noble perceptions of human sorrows:

The [musical] notes came and went without melancholy as one knows it, without gaity as one could recognise it, but with an ethereal mingling of both these moods. And they seemed to come not from in the room. One seemed to hear them wafted from a great distance, across the waters of a great lake. This made Michael all the more certain in his heart that his future was indissolubly one with the future of Eleanor d’Urutsia. As it happened, he never saw her again. But she had entirely conquered his dislike of Christmas. He was destined to love it ever after. (65—my emphasis added)

CODA

In his own 1935 novel Darby and Joan, Maurice Baring has memorably said, first through the words of a Catholic priest, that “the acceptance of sorrow is the secret of life.” (Our Lady must have deeply known that intimate wisdom– also at that first Christmas.)

Let us consider what Maurice Baring himself wrote in 1935, in Darby and Joan:2

“One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world.”

“I didn’t think about it in that way. I don’t think I rebelled against it, because I thought my father was happier dead and at peace, than alive and in pain; but I was just stunned. Apart from that, I have not experienced real sorrow; only disappointment and disillusion.”

“A priest once said to me, ‘When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.’”

For our sake now at the end of Max Beerbohm’s warm, often comic, partly exaggerated parody of a friend’s writing and literary style, we may now appreciate, a little, what comes from Maurice Baring’s own sincere heart and its depth.

Such are also the graceful and subtly allusive developments in Max Beerbohm’s interwoven 1950 Christmas Garland, especially his artful parody, “All Roads–” by M**R*CE B*R*NG.

–FINIS–

© 2020 Robert D. Hickson

1Max Beerhohm, “All Roads–”, one of eighteen portraits in A Christmas Garland (London: William Heinemann, 1950), page 57—my emphasis added. Henceforth, all references will be to this text of “All Roads–” and placed above in parentheses in the main body of this brief essay and commentary. Moreover, G.K. Chesterton has a parodic portrait entitled “Some Damnable Errors about Christmas” starting on page 47; and Hilaire Belloc is also parodied by Beerbohm in a portrait merely entitled “On Christmas”–by “H*l**r* B*ll*c starting on page 147. Baring, Belloc, and Chesterton are together once again!

2Maurice Baring, Darby and Joan (London: William Heinemann, 1935), page 178—italics are in the original.

Maurice Baring’s “Xantippe and Socrates” (1925) with Miguel Cervantes’ Teresa and Sancho Panza in Don Quixote (1615): Shedding Comic Light on Married Couples

Dr. Robert Hickson                                                                                           14 January 2020

Saint Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368)

Epigraphs

“Turgenev,” said [the Russian teacher] Yakovlev [when addressing Christopher Trevenen, himself the restless protagonist], says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard’s kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous.”

“Don Quixote, fortunately for him, was mad.”

“He was very sane too.”

“You mean that I am neither mad nor sane?”

“Neither mad nor sane enough.”

“I will try and improve,” said Christopher, and he laughed.

(Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), page 225—italics in the original; my bold emphasis added)

***

“I declare,” cried Sancho, “you [wife Teresa Panza] must have some devil in that body of yours. God bless us, woman, what a power of things you have strung together, one after the other, without head or tail!….Listen, dolt and nincompoop (I’m right to call you this, seeing that you don’t grip my meaning and you go tearing away from good fortune)….why won’t you agree and fall in with what I wish?”

“Do you know why, husband?” answered Teresa….“All give the poor man a hasty glance, but they keep their eyes glued on the rich man, and if the rich man was once poor, then you will hear the sneering and the gossiping and the continued spite of the backbiters in the streets, swarming as thick as bees.”

“Look here, Teresa,” said Sancho, “and pay heed to what I’m going to tell you, for maybe you never heard it all your life. And remember that I’m not airing my own opinion, but those of the reverend father who preached it in this village last Lent and who said, if I remember correctly….” (The remarks of Sancho are another reason for the translator’s former statement that this chapter [chapter five of Part II] is apocryphal, for they are beyond the mental capacity of our honest Sancho.) “Hence it happens, ….rest assured, Teresa, that no one will remember what he was [namely, such a poor man now up from “his low estate”], and all will respect him [as a rich man now] for what he is—that is to say, all except the envious [persons], from whom no prosperous fortune is safe.”

“I can’t make head or tail of you, husband,” answered Teresa. “Do what you will, and don’t break my head with your orating and speechifying. And if you have revolved [sic] to do what you say–”

“Resolved you should say, woman,” said Sancho, “not revolved.”

“Don’t start argufying with me, husband, “ said Teresa. “I speak as God pleases, and I’m content to call a spade a spade….”

“Then we both agree that our daughter [Sancha, or Marisancha or just Marica and Sanchica, as affectionate variants (559, 563)] is to be a countess,” said Sancho.

“The day I see her [our daughter] as a countess,” replied Teresa, “I’ll feel that I’m burying her; but once again I say, do as you please, for such is the burden we women receive at birth, to be obedient to our husbands no matter how doltish they may be.”

And with this she [Teresa] began to weep in real earnest as though she already saw Sanchica dead and buried. Sancho consoled her by saying that since he [as Governor] would have to make her a countess, he would postpone doing it as long as he could. So ended their conversation, and Sancho went back to see Don Quixote and make arrangements for their departure [on their third sally and joint adventure!].” (Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha—Walter Starkie translation (New York: A Signet Classic—New American Library, 1957 and 1964), pages 561-563—Part II, Chapter V—my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)

***

Some time ago now, but I can now reliably remember where I first saw it, Maurice Baring, the graciously cultured author and close friend of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, had one of his educated Russian characters say—it is to be found in Baring’s profound novel The Coat Without Seam (1929)—that a man has a basic disposition toward one of two types: either toward a brooding and vacillating Hamlet or toward a spontaneous and generous and very forgiving Don Quixote.

While recently reading Don Quixote aloud to my wife and our two young and eager children—especially some comic parts about Sancho Panza and his wife Teresa Panza “orating” and “argufying” together—I thought especially of one of Maurice Baring’s own subtly nuanced 1925 Diminutive Dramas, entitled “Xantippe and Socrates.”1 Thus, I thought to present both of these short literary attainments as an enhancement for our own still desirably larger spirit of comic festivity. To counterpoint the artful Miguel Cervantes and the artful Maurice Baring might still give us sparkling delight as well as some wise instruction. (From the first and extended Epigraph above, we may already savor Cervantes’ comic tones and characters, and promised adventurous substance.)

Maurice Baring himself was “a Don Quixote” who, as is fitting, was also “chivalrous” as well as a man of recurrent and manifest “kindness and humility.” He knew many languages and literatures—to include Greek and Latin and Russian—and he could deftly convey poignancy and elegiac tones of language and wounded life in his poetry and in his varied prose, as we shall soon see in his dramatic presentation of “Xantippe and Socrates” in which Socrates himself speaks very few words, while Xantippe shows, though often somewhat shrewish, how just lonely and uncertain she is. (Moreover, in this conversation, there is no mention of their children in Baring’s domestic piece and parody, though scholars speak of their two or three children who helped Xantippe after the death of Socrates, when he took his own life instead of going into a severe exile.)

Although Baring’s “diminutive drama” presents to a reader the few scenes and settings that could—and should—be acted out on stage, even by a resourceful wedded couple, we shall now try to accent the sequence and the actual words of Xantippe herself in her swift and voluble vividness. For example, after setting the scene and entrance of Socrates into a room in his home, here is how the play commences:

(Xantippe—henceforth, for convenience, presented as “X”). You’re twenty minutes late.

(Socrates—henceforth presented as “S”). I’m sorry, I was kept–

X. Wasting your time as usual, I suppose, and bothering people with questions who have got something better to do than to listen to you. You can’t think what a mistake you make by going on like that. You can’t think how much people dislike it. If people enjoyed it, or admired it, I could understand the waste of time—but they don’t. It only makes them angry. Everybody’s saying so.

S. Who’s everybody?

X. There you are with your questions again. Please don’t try to catch me out with those kind of tricks. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a sophist. I know I’m not clever—I’m only a woman. But I do know the difference between right and wrong and black and white, and I don’t think it’s very kind of you, or very generous either, to be always pointing out my ignorance, and perpetually making me the butt of your sarcasm.

S. But I never said a word.

X. Oh, please, don’t try to wiggle out of it. We all know you’re very good at that. I do hate that shuffling so. It’s so cowardly. I do like a man one can trust—and depend on—who when he says Yes means Yes, and when he says No means No.

S. I’m sorry I spoke.

X. I suppose that’s what’s called irony. (177-178)

Before we resume this exchange between husband and wife, it will be good to learn of Baring’s description of the Scene and its implicit atmosphere for their conversation:

A room in Socrates’ house. Xantippe is seated at a table, on which an unappetising meal, consisting of figs, parsley, and some hashed goat’s meat, is spread. (177)

After Xantippe says “I suppose that’s what’s called irony,” she resumes her diatribe:

I’ve no doubt it’s very clever, but I’m afraid it’s wasted on me. I should keep those remarks for the market-place and gymnasia and the workshops. I’ve no doubt they’d be highly appreciated there by that clique of young men who do nothing but admire each other. I’m afraid I’m old-fashioned. I was brought up to think a man should treat his wife with decent civility, and try, even if he did think her stupid, not to be always showing it.

S. Have I by a word or hint ever suggested that you were stupid?

X. Oh, of course not—never. However, we won’t discuss that. We will change the subject, if you don’t mind.

S. But really–

X. (ignoring the interruption) Please give me your plate. I will help you to the goat.

S. None for me, thank you, today.

X. Why not? I suppose it’s not good. I’m afraid I can’t provide the food you get at your grand friends’ houses, but I do think it’s rather cruel of you to sneer at my poor humble efforts. (178)

Then begins a long exchange about food, to include figs, but not meat! “I suppose that’s a new fad, not to eat meat,” Xantippe says promptly (179), and then she adds:

I assure you people talk quite enough about you as it is without your making yourself more peculiar. Only yesterday Chrysilla was talking about your clothes. She asked if you made them dirty on purpose. She said the spots on the back couldn’t have got there by accident. Every one notices it—every one says the same thing. Of course, they think it is my fault. No doubt it’s very amusing for people who don’t mind attracting attention and who like being notorious; but it is rather hard on me. And when I hear people saying “Poor Socrates! It is such a shame that his wife looks after him so badly and doesn’t even mend his sandals”—I admit I do feel rather hurt. However, that would never enter into your head. A philosopher hasn’t the time to think of other people. I suppose unselfishness doesn’t form part of a sophist’s training, does it?

[SOCRATES says nothing, but eats first one fig and then another.]

X. I think you might at least answer when you’re spoken to. I am far from expecting you to treat me with consideration or respect; but I do expect ordinary civility.

[SOCRATES goes on eating figs in silence.]

X. Oh, you’re going to sulk. First you browbeat, then you’re satirical. Then you sneer at the food, and then you sulk. (179—my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)

For the next two pages—180-181—there again the wife and husband have a lively exchange about food. The entire two pages, I believe, ought also be closely read to appreciate the nuanced modulations of tones, as well as its being a preparation for a more serious matter: Socrates’ punitive condemnation by some of the powerful Athenian oligarchs.

At the end of their exchanges about nourishing food and special garlic and roasted goat, Xantippe says: “Then it’s quite ridiculous your not eating. Let me give you some goat at once.” (182)

Socrates then replies and has another surprise: “I couldn’t really. Besides I must go in a minute.”

X. There! I knew it! You’re going out to dinner.

S. You are mistaken, Xantippe.

X. You’d far better tell me the truth at once. I’m quite certain to find it out sooner or later. You can’t think how foolish it is to tell lies and then to be found out afterwards. You can’t think how much a woman despises a man for that—you couldn’t do anything more foolish.

S. I promise you by all the gods that I’m not going to dine elsewhere.

X. I suppose you don’t expect me to fall into that trap! Swearing by all the gods, when every one in Athens knows you are a professional atheist—when you do nothing but mock the gods from morning till night—and what’s far worse, make other people mock them too; when I scarcely like to have a slave in the house because of your impiety—and your blasphemy.

S. I really think you are rather unfair, Xantippe. You will be sorry for this some day. (180—my emphasis added)

As we realize more and more how little Xantippe understood her husband’s principles and eccentricities, we are allowed to see their effectively farewell conversation, which Maurice Baring conveys to us poignantly, drop by drop—except, perhaps, for Xantippe’s trifling and bathetic final sentence about food:

X. Then may I ask where you are going?

S. I’ve got an important engagement.

X. And with whom?

S. I would rather not say, for your sake.

X. That’s very clever and ingenious to put it on me. But I’m tired of being bullied. Even a worm will turn, and I demand to be treated just for once like a human being, and with the minimum of courtesy and frankness. I don’t ask for your confidence, I know that would be useless. But I do ask to be treated with a grain of straightforwardness and honesty. I insist upon it. I have borne your sneers, your sarcasm, and your sulkiness, your irritability, your withering silence, quite long enough. I will not put up with it any longer.

Socrates. Very well, Since you will have it, I have been impeached by Lycon, Meletus, and Anytus on some ridiculous charge, the result of which, however, may be extremely serious–in fact it may be a matter of life or death—and I am obliged to appear before them at once.

Xantippe. Oh dear, oh dear! I always said so, I knew it would come to this! [THEN also cometh her final trifling and bathos:] That is what comes of not eating meat like a decent citizen!

[XANTIPPE bursts into tears.]

CURTAIN

(182-183—my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)

The further comic and elegiac counterpoint of Miguel Cervantes and Maurice Baring will indeed teach us many nourishing things of wisdom, by way of their differentiated artfulness and tones of irony.

–Finis–

© 2020 Robert D. Hickson

1Maurice Baring, Diminutive Dramas ( London: William Heinemann LTD., 1925). “Xantippe and Socrates,” the last chapter of the book, is to be found on pages 177-183 (Chapter XXIII). All future references to this text will be to the William Heinemann edition and they will be placed in parentheses in the main body of this short essay above.