Whose sluggish herds before him wind,
Whose tattered plaid and rugged cheek
His Northern clime and kindred speak;
Through England’s laughing meads he goes,
And England’s wealth around him flows;
Ask if it would content him well,
At ease in those gay plains to dwell,
Where hedgerows spread a verdant screen,
And spires and forests intervene,
And the neat cottage peeps between?
No, not for these would he exchange
His dark Lochaber’s boundless range,
Not for fair Devon’s meads forsake
Ben Nevis grey and Garry’s lake.’
‘Thus while I ape the measures wild
Of tales that charmed me yet a child,
Rude though they be, still, with the chime,
Return the thoughts of early time;
And feelings roused in life’s first day,
Glow in the line and prompt the lay.
Then rise those crags, that mountain tower,
Which charmed my fancy’s wakening hour.
Though no broad river swept along,
To claim perchance heroic song;
Though sighed no groves in summer gale,
To prompt of love a softer tale;
Though scarce a puny streamlet’s speed
Claimed homage from a shepherd’s reed,
Yet was poetic impulse given
By the green hill and clear blue heaven.
It was a barren scene and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled,
But ever and anon between,
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
And well the lonely infant knew
Recesses where the wallflower grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruined wall.
...
From me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask
The classic poet’s well-conned task?
Nay, Erskine, nay—On the wild hill
Let the wild heathbell flourish still;
Cherish the tulip, prune the vine,
But freely let the woodbine twine,
And leave untrimmed the eglantine.
Nay, my friend, nay—Since oft thy praise
Hath given fresh vigour to my lays,
Since oft thy judgment could refine
My flattened thought or cumbrous line,
Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,
And in the minstrel spare the friend.
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale.’
And this is wise, for there is beauty in the North as well as in the
South. Only it is to be remembered that the beauty of the Trosachs is the
result of but a few elements—say birch and brushwood, rough hills and
narrow dells, much heather and many stones—while the beauty of England
is one thing in one district and one in another; is here the combination
of one set of qualities, and there the harmony of opposite ones, and is
everywhere made up of many details and delicate refinements; all which
require an exquisite delicacy of perceptive organisation, a seeing eye, a
minutely hearing ear. Scott’s is the strong admiration of a rough mind;
Shakespeare’s, the nice minuteness of a susceptible one.
A perfectly poetic appreciation of nature contains two elements,—a
knowledge of facts, and a sensibility to charms. Everybody who may have
to speak to some naturalists will be well aware how widely the two may
be separated. He will have seen that a man may study butterflies and
forget that they are beautiful, or be perfect in the ‘Lunar theory’
without knowing what most people mean by the moon. Generally such people
prefer the stupid parts of nature—worms and Cochin-China fowls. But
Shakespeare was not obtuse. The lines—
‘Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath,’
seem to show that he knew those feelings of youth, to which beauty is
more than a religion.
In his mode of delineating natural objects Shakespeare is curiously
opposed to Milton. The latter, who was still by temperament, and a
schoolmaster by trade, selects a beautiful object, puts it straight out
before him and his readers, and accumulates upon it all the learned
imagery of a thousand years; Shakespeare glances at it and says something
of his own. It is not our intention to say that, as a describer of the
external world, Milton is inferior; in _set_ description we rather think
that he is the better. We only wish to contrast the mode in which the
delineation is effected. The one is like an artist who dashes off any
number of picturesque sketches at any moment; the other like a man who
has lived at Rome, has undergone a thorough training, and by deliberate
and conscious effort, after a long study of the best masters, can produce
a few great pictures. Milton, accordingly, as has been often remarked,
is careful in the choice of his subjects; he knows too well the value of
his labour to be very ready to squander it; Shakespeare, on the contrary,
describes anything that comes to hand, for he is prepared for it
whatever it may be, and what he paints he paints without effort. Compare
any passage from Shakespeare—for example, those quoted before—and the
following passage from Milton:—
‘Southward through Eden went a river large,
Nor changed its course, but through the shaggy hill
Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown
That mountain as his garden mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous earth, with kindly thirst up-drawn
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from its darksome passage now appears:
And now divided into four main streams
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country, whereof here needs no account;
But rather to tell how,—if art could tell,—
How from that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades
Ran nectar, visiting each plant; and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noontide bowers. Thus was this place
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable (Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only), and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed:
Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store;
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.’
Why, you could draw a map of it. It is _not_ ‘Nature boon,’ but ‘nice
art in beds and curious knots;’ it is exactly the old (and excellent)
style of artificial gardening, by which any place can be turned into trim
hedgerows, and stiff borders, and comfortable shades; but there are no
straight lines in nature or Shakespeare. Perhaps the contrast may be
accounted for by the way in which the two poets acquired their knowledge
of scenes and scenery. We think we demonstrated before that Shakespeare
was a sportsman, but if there be still a sceptic or a dissentient, let
him read the following remarks on dogs:—
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flewed, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew,
Crook-kneed and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls;
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tunable
Was never holloa’d to nor cheered with horn
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.’
‘Judge when you hear.’ It is evident that the man who wrote this was
a judge of dogs, was an out-of-door sporting man, full of natural
sensibility, not defective in ‘daintiness of ear,’ and above all things,
apt to cast on Nature random, sportive, half-boyish glances, which reveal
so much, and bequeath such abiding knowledge. Milton, on the contrary,
went out to see nature. He left a narrow cell, and the intense study
which was his ‘portion in this life,’ to take a slow, careful, and
reflective walk. In his treatise on education he has given us his notion
of the way in which young people should be familiarised with natural
objects. ‘But,’ he remarks, ‘to return to our institute; besides these
constant exercises at home, there is another opportunity of gaining
pleasure from pleasure itself abroad; in those vernal seasons of the
year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness
against nature, not to go out and see her riches and partake in her
rejoicing in heaven and earth. I should not therefore be a persuader to
them of studying much in these, after two or three years, that they have
well laid their grounds, but to ride out in companies, with prudent and
staid guides, to all quarters of the land; learning and observing all
places of strength, all commodities of building and of soil, for towns
and tillage, harbours and ports of trade. Sometimes taking sea as far as
our navy, to learn there also what they can in the practical knowledge
of sailing and of sea-fight.’ Fancy ‘the prudent and staid guides.’ What
a machinery for making pedants. Perhaps Shakespeare would have known
that the conversation would be in this sort:—‘I say, Shallow, that mare
is going in the knees. She has never been the same since you larked her
over the fivebar, while Moleyes was talking clay and agriculture. I do
not hate Latin so much, but I hate “argillaceous earth;” and what use is
_that_ to a fellow in the Guards, _I_ should like to know?’ Shakespeare
had himself this sort of boyish buoyancy. He was not ‘one of the staid
guides.’ We might further illustrate it. Yet this would be tedious
enough, and we prefer to go on and show what we mean by an experiencing
nature in relation to men and women, just as we have striven to indicate
what it is in relation to horses and hares.
The reason why so few good books are written, is that so few people
that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in
a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the
style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of
employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to
see. His life is a vacuum. The mental habits of Robert Southey, which
about a year ago were so extensively praised in the public journals,
are the type of literary existence, just as the praise bestowed on them
shows the admiration excited by them among literary people. He wrote
poetry (as if anybody could) before breakfast; he read during breakfast.
He wrote history until dinner; he corrected proof sheets between dinner
and tea; he wrote an essay for the ‘Quarterly’ afterwards; and after
supper by way of relaxation composed the ‘Doctor’—a lengthy and elaborate
jest. Now, what can anyone think of such a life—except how clearly it
shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information, formed
with the best care, and daily regulated by the best motives, are exactly
the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to
communicate. Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house
and allowed him pocket-money, just as if he had been a German professor
devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of Horace’s amours. And it
is pitiable to think that so meritorious a life was only made endurable
by a painful delusion. He thought that day by day, and hour by hour,
he was accumulating stores for the instruction and entertainment of a
long posterity. His epics were to be in the hands of all men, and his
history of Brazil the ‘Herodotus of the South American Republics.’ As if
his epics were not already dead, and as if the people who now cheat at
Valparaiso care a _real_ who it was that cheated those before them. Yet
it was only by a conviction like this that an industrious and caligraphic
man (for such was Robert Southey), who might have earned money as a
clerk, worked all his days for half a clerk’s wages, at occupation much
duller and more laborious. The critic in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ lays
down that you should _always_ say that the picture would have been better
if the painter had taken more pains; but in the case of the practised
literary man, you should often enough say that the writings would have
been much better if the writer had taken less pains. He says he has
devoted his life to the subject—the reply is, ‘Then you have taken the
best way to prevent your making anything of it.’ Instead of reading
studiously what Burgersdicius and Ænœsidemus said men were, you should
have gone out yourself, and seen (if you can see) what they are.
After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best.
The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books,
since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for
himself. Anyhow the modern system fails, for where are the amusing books
from voracious students and habitual writers? Not that we mean exactly
to say that an author’s hard reading is the cause of his writing that
which is hard to read. This would be near the truth, but not quite the
truth. The two are concomitant effects of a certain defective nature.
Slow men read well, but write ill. The abstracted habit, the want of
keen exterior interests, the aloofness of mind from what is next it, all
tend to make a man feel an exciting curiosity and interest about remote
literary events, the toils of scholastic logicians, and the petty feuds
of Argos and Lacedæmon; but they also tend to make a man very unable to
explain and elucidate those exploits for the benefit of his fellows.
What separates the author from his readers, will make it proportionably
difficult for him to explain himself to them. Secluded habits do not tend
to eloquence; and the indifferent apathy which is so common in studious
persons is exceedingly unfavourable to the liveliness of narration and
illustration which is needed for excellence in even the simpler sorts of
writing. Moreover, in general, it will perhaps be found, that persons
devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness.
They wish to produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having
relinquished everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on
trial that this is impossible. They wish to write, but nothing occurs
to them. Therefore they write nothing, and they do nothing. As has been
said, they have nothing to do. Their life has no events, unless they are
very poor. With any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to
rouse them from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his
bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered. But a student may
know nothing of time and be too lazy to wind up his watch. In the retired
citizen’s journal in Addison’s _Spectator_, we have the type of this way
of spending the time:—Mem. Morning 8 to 9, ‘Went into the parlour and
tied on my shoe-buckles.’ This is the sort of life for which studious men
commonly relinquish the pursuits of business and the society of their
fellows.
Yet all literary men are not tedious, neither are they all slow. One
great example even these most tedious times have luckily given us, to
show us what may be done by a really great man even now, the same who
before served as an illustration—Sir Walter Scott. In his lifetime
people denied he was a poet, but nobody said that he was not ‘the best
fellow’ in Scotland—perhaps that was not much—or that he had not more
wise joviality, more living talk, more graphic humour, than any man in
Great Britain. ‘Wherever we went,’ said Mr. Wordsworth, ‘we found his
name acted as an _open sesame_, and I believe that in the character of
the _sheriff’s_ friends, we might have counted on a hearty welcome under
any roof in the border country.’ Never neglect to talk to people with
whom you are casually thrown, was his precept, and he exemplified the
maxim himself. ‘I believe,’ observes his biographer, ‘that Scott has
somewhere expressed in print his satisfaction, that amid all the changes
of our manners, the ancient freedom of personal intercourse may still be
indulged between a master and an _out-of-door_ servant; but in truth he
kept by the old fashion, even with domestic servants, to an extent which
I have hardly ever seen practised by any other gentleman. He conversed
with his coachman if he sat by him, as he often did, on the box—with his
footman, if he chanced to be in the rumble. Indeed, he did not confine
his humanity to his own people; any steady-going servant of a friend of
his was soon considered as a sort of friend too, and was sure to have a
kind little colloquy to himself at coming or going.’ ‘Sir Walter speaks
to every man as if he was his blood relation,’ was the expressive comment
of one of these dependents. It was in this way that he acquired the great
knowledge of various kinds of men, which is so clear and conspicuous
in his writings; nor could that knowledge have been acquired on easier
terms, or in any other way. No man could describe the character of
Dandie Dinmont, without having been in Lidderdale. Whatever has been
once in a book may be put into a book again; but an original character,
taken at first hand from the sheepwalks and from nature, must be seen in
order to be known. A man, to be able to describe—indeed, to be able to
know—various people in life, must be able at sight to comprehend their
essential features, to know how they shade one into another, to see how
they diversify the common uniformity of civilised life. Nor does this
involve simply intellectual or even imaginative prerequisites, still
less will it be facilitated by exquisite senses or subtle fancy. What is
wanted is, to be able to appreciate mere clay—which mere mind never will.
If you will describe the people,—nay, if you will write for the people,
you must be one of the people. You must have led their life, and must
wish to lead their life. However strong in any poet may be the higher
qualities of abstract thought or conceiving fancy, unless he can actually
sympathise with those around him, he can never describe those around
him. Any attempt to produce a likeness of what is not really _liked_ by
the person who is describing it, will end in the creation of what may
be correct, but is not living—of what may be artistic, but is likewise
artificial.
Perhaps this is the defect of the works of the greatest dramatic
genius of recent times—Goethe. His works are too much in the nature of
literary studies; the mind is often deeply impressed by them, but one
doubts if the author was. He saw them as he saw the houses of Weimar
and the plants in the act of metamorphosis. He had a clear perception
of their fixed condition and their successive transitions, but he did
not really (if we may so speak) comprehend their motive power. So to
say, he appreciated their life, but not their liveliness. Niebuhr, as is
well known, compared the most elaborate of Goethe’s works—the novel of
Wilhelm Meister—to a menagerie of tame animals, meaning thereby, as we
believe, to express much the same distinction. He felt that there was a
deficiency in mere vigour and rude energy. We have a long train and no
engine—a great accumulation of excellent matter, arranged and ordered
with masterly skill, but not animated with over-buoyant and unbounded
play. And we trace this not to a defect in imaginative power, a defect
which it would be a simple absurdity to impute to Goethe, but to the
tone of his character and the habits of his mind. He moved hither and
thither through life, but he was always a man apart. He mixed with
unnumbered kinds of men, with courts and academies, students and women,
camps and artists, but everywhere he was with them yet not of them. In
every scene he was there, and he made it clear that he was there with
a reserve and as a stranger. He went there _to experience_. As a man
of universal culture and well skilled in the order and classification
of human life, the fact of any one class or order being beyond his
reach or comprehension seemed an absurdity, and it was an absurdity.
He thought that he was equal to moving in any description of society,
and he was equal to it; but then on that exact account he was absorbed
in none. There were none of surpassing and immeasurably preponderating
captivation. No scene and no subject were to him what Scotland and Scotch
nature were to Sir Walter Scott. ‘If I did not see the heather once a
year, I should die,’ said the latter; but Goethe would have lived without
it, and it would not have cost him much trouble. In every one of Scott’s
novels there is always the spirit of the old moss trooper—the flavour of
the ancient border; there is the intense sympathy which enters into the
most living moments of the most living characters—the lively energy which
_becomes_ the energy of the most vigorous persons delineated. Marmion was
‘written’ while he was galloping on horseback. It reads as if it were so.
Now it appears that Shakespeare not only had that various commerce with,
and experience of men, which was common both to Goethe and to Scott, but
also that he agrees with the latter rather than with the former in the
kind and species of that experience. He was not merely with men, but of
men; he was not a ‘thing apart,’ with a clear intuition of what was in
those around him; he had in his own nature the germs and tendencies of
the very elements that he described. He knew what was in man, for he felt
it in himself. Throughout all his writings you see an amazing sympathy
with common people, rather an excessive tendency to dwell on the common
features of ordinary lives. You feel that common people could have
been cut out of him, but not without his feeling it; for it would have
deprived him of a very favourite subject—of a portion of his ideas to
which he habitually recurred.
‘_Leon._ What would you with me, honest neighbour?
_Dog._ Marry, sir, I would have some confidence with you, that
decerns you nearly.
_Leon._ Brief, I pray you; for you see ’tis a busy time with me.
_Dog._ Marry, this it is, sir.
_Verg._ Yes, in truth it is, sir.
_Leon._ What is it, my good friends?
_Dog._ Goodman Verges, sir, speaks a little off the matter:
an old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt, as, God help,
I would desire they were; but, in faith, honest as the skin
between his brows.
_Verg._ Yes, I thank God, I am as honest as any man living,
that is an old man, and no honester than I.
_Dog._ Comparisons are odorous:—_palabras_, neighbour Verges.
_Leon._ Neighbours, you are tedious.
_Dog._ It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor
duke’s officers; but, truly, for mine own part, if I were as
tedious as a king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all of
your worship.
...
_Leon._ I would fain know what you have to say.
_Verg._ Marry, sir, our watch to-night, excepting your
worship’s presence, have ta’en a couple of as arrant knaves as
any in Messina.
_Dog._ A good old man, sir; he will be talking; as they say,
When the age is in, the wit is out; God help us! it is a world
to see!—Well said, i’faith, neighbour Verges:—well, God’s a
good man; an two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind:—An
honest soul, i’faith, sir; by my troth he is, as ever broke
bread; but God is to be worshipped: All men are not alike;
alas, good neighbour!
_Leon._ Indeed, neighbour, he comes too far short of you.
_Dog._ Gifts that God gives,’—&c. &c.
* * * * *
‘_Stafford._ Ay, sir.
_Cade._ By her he had two children at one birth.
_Staff._ That’s false.
_Cade._ Ay, there’s the question; but, I say,’tis true:
The elder of them, being put to nurse,
Was by a beggar-woman stol’n away:
And, ignorant of his birth and parentage,
Became a bricklayer, when he came to age;
His son am I; deny it, if you can.
_Dick._ Nay, ’tis too true; therefore he shall be king.
_Smith._ Sir, he made a chimney in my father’s house, and the
bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore, deny it
not.’