Nov. 5, 1892. An Itinerary.
Besides the glorious exclusiveness of it, there is a solid advantage
just now, in not being an aspirant for the Laureateship. You can go
out into the wilderness for a week without troubling to leave an
address. A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who
even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set
out together across Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks, by eccentric
paths over the southern ranges of Wales to the Wye, and homewards by
canoe between the autumn banks of that river. The motto of the voyage
was Verlaine's line--
"Et surtout ne parlons pas littérature"
--especially poetry. I think we felt inclined to congratulate each
other after passing the Quantocks in heroic silence; but were content
to read respect in each other's eyes.
The Return to Literature.
On our way home we fell across a casual copy of the _Globe_
newspaper, and picked up a scrap of information about the Blorenge, a
mountain we had climbed three days before. It is (said the _Globe_)
the only thing in the world that rhymes with orange. From this we
inferred that the Laureate had not been elected during our wanderings,
and that the Anglo-Saxon was still taking an interest in poetry. It
was so.
Public Excursions in Verse.
The progress of this amusing epidemic may be traced in the _Times_.
It started mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The
writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and
transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning--
"Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe,
Where he's gone to I don't know...."
with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the _Times_ was
flooded with other versions by people who remembered the lines more or
less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since
childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord
Sherbrooke, who had seen it on an eighteenth-century tombstone in
several parts of England, and so on. London Correspondents took up
the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country
clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while
others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced
translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local
compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite
a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars.
The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when
the _Times_ quoted a four-lined epigram about Mr. Leech making a
speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough
without; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had
remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardor. The Church,
the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained
on the verge of surpassing feats, should the occasion be given. From
men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord Tennyson died.
He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else,
at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a
Cassowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his
hymn-book too. Who was this somebody? Did he write it at Cambridge
(home of poets)? And what were the "trimmings," as Mr. Job Trotter
would say, with which the missionary was eaten?
Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures
which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and
spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. "All have
got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the
flower in the daily papers. It was not to be expected that our
senators, barristers, stockbrokers, having proved their strength,
would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Cassowary. Very soon a bold
egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave
us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in
_Crossing the Bar_. The whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow
me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are _two_
kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open
the _Times_. And according to the _Globe_ if you need a rhyme
for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real
wants of the public.[A]
They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable
of producing, on the one hand, _Crossing the Bar_--and on the other,
this comment upon it, signed "T.F.W." and sent to the _Times_ from
Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?--
"... a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would
hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion
haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it
not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage 'o'er
life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without
reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond
it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence
was fast the _status_ of the navigator of old days, the
sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains
engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the
daughter of such a man, _un piloto Italiano famoso navigante_.
Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a
_piloto_ by whom his fleet shall be deftly (_sabiamente_)
conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century
(1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain,
commanded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of
Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V.
Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of
merchant vessels--that is, the officers who watch about, take
charge of the deck--_pilotes_, and this designation is not
impossibly reserved to them as representing the _pilote
hauturier_ of former times, the scientific guide of ships _dans
la haute mer_, as distinguished from the _pilote côtier_, who
simply hugged the shore. The last class of pilot, it is almost
superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our ships,
inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no
more. The _hauturier_ has long been replaced in all countries by
the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us
that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the
last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the ship,
which until his arrival was in the hands of the _côtier_, was
well out of harbour. Then our _côtier_ left us."
Prodigious!