AFTER the family dinner, at which the farmer’s guest displayed more
than his usual powers of appetite, Kenelm followed his host towards the
stackyard, and said,--
“My dear Mr. Saunderson, though you have no longer any work for me to
do, and I ought not to trespass further on your hospitality, yet if I
might stay with you another day or so, I should be very grateful.”
“My dear lad,” cried the farmer, in whose estimation Kenelm had risen
prodigiously since the victory over Tom Bowles, “you are welcome to stay
as long as you like, and we shall be all sorry when you go. Indeed, at
all events, you must stay over Saturday, for you shall go with us to
the squire’s harvest-supper. It will be a pretty sight, and my girls are
already counting on you for a dance.”
“Saturday,--the day after to-morrow. You are very kind; but merrymakings
are not much in my way, and I think I shall be on my road before you set
off to the Squire’s supper.”
“Pooh! you shall stay; and, I say, young ‘un, if you want more to do, I
have a job for you quite in your line.”
“What is it?”
“Thrash my ploughman. He has been insolent this morning, and he is the
biggest fellow in the county, next to Tom Bowles.”
Here the farmer laughed heartily, enjoying his own joke.
“Thank you for nothing,” said Kenelm, rubbing his bruises. “A burnt
child dreads the fire.”
The young man wandered alone into the fields. The day was becoming
overcast, and the clouds threatened rain. The air was exceedingly still;
the landscape, missing the sunshine, wore an aspect of gloomy solitude.
Kenelm came to the banks of the rivulet not far from the spot on which
the farmer had first found him. There he sat down, and leaned his cheek
on his hand, with eyes fixed on the still and darkened stream lapsing
mournfully away: sorrow entered into his heart and tinged its musings.
“Is it then true,” said he, soliloquizing, “that I am born to pass
through life utterly alone; asking, indeed, for no sister-half of
myself, disbelieving its possibility, shrinking from the thought
of it,--half scorning, half pitying those who sigh for it?--thing
unattainable,--better sigh for the moon!
“Yet if other men sigh for it, why do I stand apart from them? If the
world be a stage, and all the men and women in it merely players, am I
to be the solitary spectator, with no part in the drama and no interest
in the vicissitudes of its plot? Many there are, no doubt, who covet as
little as I do the part of ‘Lover,’ ‘with a woful ballad, made to his
mistress’s eyebrow;’ but then they covet some other part in the drama,
such as that of Soldier ‘bearded as a pard,’ or that of Justice ‘in fair
round belly with fat capon lined.’ But me no ambition fires: I have no
longing either to rise or to shine. I don’t desire to be a colonel, nor
an admiral, nor a member of Parliament, nor an alderman; I do not yearn
for the fame of a wit, or a poet, or a philosopher, or a diner-out, or
a crack shot at a rifle-match or a _battue_. Decidedly, I am the one
looker-on, the one bystander, and have no more concern with the active
world than a stone has. It is a horrible phantasmal crotchet of Goethe,
that originally we were all monads, little segregated atoms adrift in
the atmosphere, and carried hither and thither by forces over which we
had no control, especially by the attraction of other monads, so
that one monad, compelled by porcine monads, crystallizes into a pig;
another, hurried along by heroic monads, becomes a lion or an Alexander.
Now it is quite clear,” continued Kenelm, shifting his position and
crossing the right leg over the left, “that a monad intended or
fitted for some other planet may, on its way to that destination, be
encountered by a current of other monads blowing earthward, and be
caught up in the stream and whirled on, till, to the marring of
its whole proper purpose and scene of action, it settles
here,--conglomerated into a baby. Probably that lot has befallen me: my
monad, meant for another region in space, has been dropped into this,
where it can never be at home, never amalgamate with other monads nor
comprehend why they are in such a perpetual fidget. I declare I know
no more why the minds of human beings should be so restlessly agitated
about things which, as most of them own, give more pain than pleasure,
than I understand why that swarm of gnats, which has such a very short
time to live, does not give itself a moment’s repose, but goes up and
down, rising and falling as if it were on a seesaw, and making as much
noise about its insignificant alternations of ascent and descent as if
it were the hum of men. And yet, perhaps, in another planet my monad
would have frisked and jumped and danced and seesawed with congenial
monads, as contentedly and as sillily as do the monads of men and gnats
in this alien Vale of Tears.”
Kenelm had just arrived at that conjectural solution of his perplexities
when a voice was heard singing, or rather modulated to that kind of
chant between recitative and song, which is so pleasingly effective
where the intonations are pure and musical. They were so in this
instance, and Kenelm’s ear caught every word in the following song:--
CONTENT.
“There are times when the troubles of life are still;
The bees wandered lost in the depths of June,
And I paused where the chime of a silver rill
Sang the linnet and lark to their rest at noon.
“Said my soul, ‘See how calmly the wavelets glide,
Though so narrow their way to their ocean vent;
And the world that I traverse is wide, is wide,
And yet is too narrow to hold content’
“O my son, never say that the world is wide;
The rill in its banks is less closely pent:
It is thou who art shoreless on every side,
And thy width will not let thee enclose content.”
As the voice ceased Kenelm lifted his head. But the banks of the brook
were so curving and so clothed with brushwood that for some minutes the
singer was invisible. At last the boughs before him were put aside, and
within a few paces of himself paused the man to whom he had commended
the praises of a beefsteak, instead of those which minstrelsy in its
immemorial error dedicates to love.
“Sir,” said Kenelm, half rising, “well met once more. Have you ever
listened to the cuckoo?”
“Sir,” answered the minstrel, “have you ever felt the presence of the
summer?”
“Permit me to shake hands with you. I admire the question by which you
have countermet and rebuked my own. If you are not in a hurry, will you
sit down and let us talk?”
The minstrel inclined his head and seated himself. His dog--now emerged
from the brushwood--gravely approached Kenelm, who with greater gravity
regarded him; then, wagging his tail, reposed on his haunches,
intent with ear erect on a stir in the neighbouring reeds, evidently
considering whether it was caused by a fish or a water-rat.
“I asked you, sir, if you had ever listened to the cuckoo from no
irrelevant curiosity; for often on summer days, when one is talking with
one’s self,--and, of course, puzzling one’s self,--a voice breaks out,
as it were from the heart of Nature, so far is it and yet so near; and
it says something very quieting, very musical, so that one is tempted
inconsiderately and foolishly to exclaim, ‘Nature replies to me.’ The
cuckoo has served me that trick pretty often. Your song is a better
answer to a man’s self-questionings than he can ever get from a cuckoo.”
“I doubt that,” said the minstrel. “Song, at the best, is but the echo
of some voice from the heart of Nature. And if the cuckoo’s note seemed
to you such a voice, it was an answer to your questionings perhaps more
simply truthful than man can utter, if you had rightly construed the
language.”
“My good friend,” answered Kenelm, “what you say sounds very prettily;
and it contains a sentiment which has been amplified by certain critics
into that measureless domain of dunderheads which is vulgarly called
BOSH. But though Nature is never silent, though she abuses the privilege
of her age in being tediously gossiping and garrulous, Nature never
replies to our questions: she can’t understand an argument; she has
never read Mr. Mill’s work on Logic. In fact, as it is truly said by a
great philosopher, ‘Nature has no mind.’ Every man who addresses her is
compelled to force upon her for a moment the loan of his own mind. And
if she answers a question which his own mind puts to her, it is only
by such a reply as his own mind teaches to her parrot-like lips. And as
every man has a different mind, so every man gets a different answer.
Nature is a lying old humbug.”
The minstrel laughed merrily; and his laugh was as sweet as his chant.
“Poets would have a great deal to unlearn if they are to look upon
Nature in that light.”
“Bad poets would, and so much the better for them and their readers.”
“Are not good poets students of Nature?”
“Students of Nature, certainly, as surgeons study anatomy by dissecting
a dead body. But the good poet, like the good surgeon, is the man who
considers that study merely as the necessary A B C, and not as the
all-in-all essential to skill in his practice. I do not give the fame
of a good surgeon to a man who fills a book with details, more or less
accurate, of fibres and nerves and muscles; and I don’t give the fame of
a good poet to a man who makes an inventory of the Rhine or the Vale of
Gloucester. The good surgeon and the good poet are they who understand
the living man. What is that poetry of drama which Aristotle justly
ranks as the highest? Is it not a poetry in which description of
inanimate Nature must of necessity be very brief and general; in which
even the external form of man is so indifferent a consideration that it
will vary with each actor who performs the part? A Hamlet may be fair
or dark. A Macbeth may be short or tall. The merit of dramatic poetry
consists in the substituting for what is commonly called Nature (namely,
external and material Nature) creatures intellectual, emotional, but
so purely immaterial that they may be said to be all mind and soul,
accepting the temporary loans of any such bodies at hand as actors may
offer, in order to be made palpable and visible to the audience, but
needing no such bodies to be palpable and visible to readers. The
highest kind of poetry is therefore that which has least to do with
external Nature. But every grade has its merit more or less genuinely
great, according as it instils into Nature that which is not there,--the
reason and the soul of man.”
“I am not much disposed,” said the minstrel, “to acknowledge any one
form of poetry to be practically higher than another; that is, so far as
to elevate the poet who cultivates what you call the highest with some
success above the rank of the poet who cultivates what you call a very
inferior school with a success much more triumphant. In theory, dramatic
poetry may be higher than lyric, and ‘Venice Preserved’ is a very
successful drama; but I think Burns a greater poet than Otway.”
“Possibly he may be; but I know of no lyrical poet, at least among the
moderns, who treats less of Nature as the mere outward form of things,
or more passionately animates her framework with his own human heart,
than does Robert Burns. Do you suppose when a Greek, in some perplexity
of reason or conscience, addressed a question to the oracular oak-leaves
of Dodona that the oak-leaves answered him? Don’t you rather believe
that the question suggested by his mind was answered by the mind of
his fellow-man, the priest, who made the oak-leaves the mere vehicle
of communication, as you and I might make such vehicle in a sheet of
writing-paper? Is not the history of superstition a chronicle of the
follies of man in attempting to get answers from external Nature?”
“But,” said the minstrel, “have I not somewhere heard or read that the
experiments of Science are the answers made by Nature to the questions
put to her by man?”
“They are the answers which his own mind suggests to her,--nothing more.
His mind studies the laws of matter, and in that study makes experiments
on matter; out of those experiments his mind, according to its previous
knowledge or natural acuteness, arrives at its own deductions, and
hence arise the sciences of mechanics and chemistry, etc. But the matter
itself gives no answer: the answer varies according to the mind that
puts the question; and the progress of science consists in the perpetual
correction of the errors and falsehoods which preceding minds conceived
to be the correct answers they received from Nature. It is the
supernatural within us,--namely, Mind,--which can alone guess at the
mechanism of the natural, namely, Matter. A stone cannot question a
stone.”
The minstrel made no reply. And there was a long silence, broken but by
the hum of the insects, the ripple of onward waves, and the sigh of the
wind through reeds.