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But the Suffolk coast does not show all loss. In the north much land has been gained in the region of Beccles, which was at one time close to the sea, and one of the finest spreads of shingle in England extends from Aideburgh to Bawdry. This shingle has silted up many a Suffolk port, but it has proved a very effectual barrier against the inroads of the sea.
Yet it were not difficult to prove that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty besides that he is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough.
How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey: "In our forefathers' time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.
I had hoped when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was past that it could henceforth count among its patrons only stable boys and scullions; but the same nation that received "Ben Hur" with tears of thankfulness thankfulness for a priceless jewel of spotless purity ablaze with the immortal fire of genius has gone mad with joy over a dirty tale of bawdry that might have been better told by a cheap reporter bordering on the jimjams.
It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defense of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one. Yet it were not difficult to prove that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty.
All his wit reaches but to four lines or six at the most; and if he ever venture farther it tires immediately, like a post-horse, that will go no farther than his wonted stages. Nothing agrees so naturally with his fancy as bawdry, which he dispenses in small pittances to continue his reader still in an appetite for more. St.
Mary Magdalen either walked or rode a mule Aspasia was a "scorcher," but she couldn't "coast." Helen of Troy never saw a pneumatic tire. Semiramis preferred a side-saddle. Cleopatra didn't attract Col Antony's attention by mounting a machine in the market place. The bike is no more an incentive to bawdry than is a wheelbarrow. It doesn't make a woman depraved; it only renders her ridiculous.
He governs all his actions by the drink within him, as a Quaker does by the light within him; has a different humour for every nick his drink rises to, like the degrees of the weather-glass; and proceeds from ribaldry and bawdry to politics, religion, and quarrelling, until it is at the top, and then it is the dog-days with him; from whence he falls down again until his liquor is at the bottom, and then he lies quiet and is frozen up.
There seems to be a notion that "bold bawdry and open manslaughter," as Roger Ascham said, are the staple of Tennyson's sources, whether in the mediaeval French, the Welsh, or in Malory's compilation, chiefly from French sources. Tennyson is accused of "Bowdlerising" these, and of introducing gentleness, courtesy, and conscience into a literature where such qualities were unknown.
Thus far, I hope, I am right in court, without renouncing to my other right of self-defense, where I have been wrongfully accus'd, and my sense wiredrawn into blasphemy or bawdry, as it has often been by a religious lawyer, in a late pleading against the stage; in which he mixes truth with falsehood, and has not forgotten the old rule of calumniating strongly, that something may remain.
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