Wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door.
Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildest
sentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made a
good wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power," the
probable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been a
constant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at his
receptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agricultural
girlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe which
urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girl
for an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, do not
fit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the social
demands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn in
the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of cold
water, a pretty, barefoot girl--the mood is compounded. An uneducated
farmer's daughter for a wife--the reality is accomplished.
And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would not
eventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her pies
instead of criticising her grammar?
So to each of them--barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probably
was bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best,
and the school children for several generations have been taught to
waste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated with
a false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far more
happiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they could
have found in the realization; for each of them this dream brought
undoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, the
sadness, that is, which comes over all of us when "we realize that
though we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able to
recall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetful
clods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. We
live with these people as one of them, of course, but we might have
been so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a great
comfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. They
reconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings of
that secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and of
which is born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism."
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. The
good people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance of
the _Andromeda_ of Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever.
This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about a
week's time, according to the course of the disease, by an
uncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera was
surprising. The people walked about in the streets day and night
reciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a return
of the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the
European and English-speaking world to-day is about in this condition
regarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell.
A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom by
a gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to think
great, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, while
he fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett.
There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Without
holding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the author
of _What Is Art?_, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty per
cent of the "familiar quotations" we children laboriously copied into
ruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded as
nuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond the
fact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed over
Europe and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in the
Children's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day are
hypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberless
couplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry at
all. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the belief
that they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion for
the very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition.
In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciation
cannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book.
How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I was
compelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole of _The Psalm
of Life_, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so.
Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.--
My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little
brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some
tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem.
If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an
Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of
imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not
have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single
poem voluntarily. And I should not have detested _The Psalm of Life_
all the rest of my days--at least I don't think I should. Longfellow
when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems,
running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a
teacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as
great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling,
Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived
before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his
limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily
informed that--
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight.--
Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in
tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion
of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom,
and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel
rise--"Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone
cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.