THE WOODEN HORSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 3, 25 March 1927, Page 10

THE WOODEN HORSE

AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN (Written for THE SUN.) And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing and forgot his course. —J. E. Flecker. TOt£N EVELYN (1620-1706) has become a best-seller. The "Observer” notes that in the after-Christ-mas slump his “Memories for my rirandson” was the only book in real demand. Perhaps it helps to explain Evelyn’s sudden success that his littie book was reprinted by the Nonesuch Press. Evelyn is one of the great diarists, thrown into shadow by the livelier greatness of Pepys, his contemporary. The diary records the events of over £.O years. Evelyn’s attitude is calm and c lear-headed. He was a moderate in politics, a good churchman, a lover of the arts, dignified, thoughtful, indeed scientific, evidently indisposed to tittletattle and personal revelation, and on that account, perhaps, more than on any other, to modern taste a little dull. He and Pepys were both members of the Royal Society; but Evelyn was a scientist, Pepys had only the limitless curiosity of his intelligent ignorance. Pepys liked watching experiments: “But strange to see now . . .” Evelyn wrote a treatise on the smokeruisance in London, anticipating modern reformers, and recommended for the dissipation of the “inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak” the planting of sweet-smelling trees. Tree-planting was one of his earnest enthusiasms. When the country’s trees were being hacked down to feed the glass-and-iron-furnaces he published “Sylva,” a plea for afforestation, and in the preface, addressed to the King, he was able to say that he had persuaded land-owners to plant millions of trees. Pepys and he were well acquainted, I2 bourgeois et le gentilhomme, there was probably more respect than, liking between the two civil-servants, liven when their tastes led them to enjoyment of the same things, and they had many tastes in common, they enjoyed them differently, by different standards. With a verbal change or two, as Professor Saintsbury says: “mut. mut.,” John Morley’s remark applies to them perfectly: “Men differ not only in their opinions but in the way they hold them.” Evelyn’s house at Sayes Court was Ist to Admiral John Benbow, who in 1698 sublet it to Peter the Great, then studying shipbulding at Deptford Dockyard. Peter’s “stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing black eyes, his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his frown, black with all the stormy rage and hate, of a barbarian tyrant,” so described by Macaulay, “were during some weeks popular topics of conversation.” The tsar would scarcely have been a happy choice of subject for a conversation with Evelyn, whose beautiful gardens l e laid waste in his rather galumphing pleasures. Long ago I read somewhere that it was one of the emperor’s amusements to sit in a wheel-barrow and be run furiously down a slope and “through” a thick holly hedge. This strenuous gaiety is, however, reduced by the Encyclopaedia Britannica to a tame riding “along” the hedge . . . Great men enjoy curious pleasures. Dr. Johnson rolled down-hill and saved i;p orange peel; Burton used to relieve Yis insufferable melancholy by going to the bridge over a canal and listening to the bargees’ swearing. At which be never failed to laugh immoderately. Afterthought: there was something rather cold-blooded about John Evelyn, or was it only an aspect of the scientific spirit? Or was it again only that he showed himself a child of his own age in being less squeamish than we are? Who could to-day record in his diary a scene of deliberate torture and describe the whole gruesome procedure, as Evelyn does, without turning a hair, without a shudder to break the cool level of his prose? 11th March, 1651. I went to the Ohatelet, where a malefactor was to have the question, or torture, given to him . . which was thus: they first bound his wrist with a strong rope or email cable, and one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall, about four feet from the floor, and then his feet with another cable, fastened about f iV e feet farther than his utmost length to another ring on the floor of the room. Thus suspended, and yet lying but aslant, they slid a fiorse of wood, i.e., a wedge, under the rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened it, as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, t rawing him out at length in an extraerdinary manner . . . Not confessing, thev put a higher horse under the rope to increase the torture and extension. In this agony, confessing nothing, the exei utioner with a horn . . . poured the i uantity of two buckets of water down 1 is throat and over him, which so proc igiously swelled him as would have Pitied and affrighted anyone to see it . . .

There was another malefactor to succeed, but the spectacle was so uncomfortable that I was not able to stay the sight of another. “Uncomfortable” is a startlingly pale word. There is not a phrase to hint that Evelyn thought torture anything but a necessary legal process. Pepys pays his shilling for another elegant spectacle: January 21. 1664. Up, and after sending rly wife to my Aunt Wight’s, to get a {.lace to see Turner hanged, I to the ’change; and seeing people flock to the Citj\ I enquired, and found that Turner was not yet hanged. So 1 went among them to Leadenhall Street, at the end cf Lyme Street, near where the- robbery was done; and to St. Mary Axe, where he lived. And there I got, for a shilling, to stand upon the wheel of a cart, in great pain, above an hour before the execution was done; he delaying the time by long discourse, and prayers, one after another, in hopes of a reprieve, but rone come, and at last he was flung off the ladder in his cloak. A comelylooking man he was, and kept his countenance to the end: I was sorry to see I im.

Pepys says there were 12,000 to 14,000 people in the street to see this robber hanged. By 1773 a few reforming milk-sops had begun to think t tat Tyburn had better not be a place of popular amusement; but Dr. Johnson thought the age was running mad when Tyburn itself was not safe from vie ‘fury of innovation.” Sir! Executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don't answer their purpose. 1 he old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away? In Arnold Bennett’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” is a description of an execution by the guillotine which carries more terrible conviction and staring horror t ian any other episode in modern fiction. I like melodrama, and therefore like immensely the tragical end of Hugo’s “Quatre-Vingt-Trvtze.” A man orders his friend’s execuvion, sees it carried out for the good of the Republic, and then shoots himself 'or tie benefit of readers like me who Jjve books to end with a bang. Victor Hugo could put a whole o**c.,ige into bis mouth, cram in about half a pound cf loaf sugar, close his lips, and then crunch all up without oxiening them

again. Of such Nature might indeed stand up and say: “He was a man! Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.” By golly, yes; and if he did stretch things a little far sometimes, what then? I have no sympathy with the timid people who say that he had no right to finish “The Toilers of the Sea” by making the waves close over Gilliat’s head at the very moment when the ship and his love disappeared over the horizon: The fight with the octopus is terrific; the battle with the sea and the storm is sublime; and as for the audacious piece of synchronisation— I can swallow that at least as easily as Hugo his orange, and enjoy it too. —J.H.E.S.