preachers and poets. I am only suggesting a possible ground of apology
for one who prefers the ideal mode of rustication; who can share
the worthy Johnson's love of Charing Cross, and sympathise with his
pathetic remark when enticed into the Highlands by his bear-leader
that it is easy 'to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths, and
waterfalls.' Some slight basis of experience must doubtless be
provided on which to rear any imaginary fabric; and the mental opiate,
which stimulates the sweetest reverie, is found in chewing the cud of
past recollections, but with a good guide, one requires small external
aid. Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate;
to hear Mrs. Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled
into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in
Dandie Dinmont's parlour, and bestow crumbs from his groaning table
upon three generations of Peppers and Mustards; or to drop into the
kitchen of a good old country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones
or listen to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams. When I lift
my eyes to realities, I can dimly descry across the street a vision
of my neighbour behind his looking-glass adjusting the parting of his
back hair, and achieving triumphs with his white tie calculated to
excite the envy of a Brummel. It is pleasant to take down one of the
magicians of the shelf, to annihilate my neighbour and his evening
parties, and to wander off through quiet country lanes into some
sleepy hollow of the past.
Who are the most potent weavers of that delightful magic? Clearly,
in the first place, those who have been themselves in contact with
rural sights and sounds. The echo of an echo loses all sharpness of
definition; our guide may save us the trouble of stumbling through
farmyards and across ploughed fields, but he must have gone through it
himself till his very voice has a twang of the true country accent.
Milton, as Mr. Pattison has lately told us, 'saw nature through
books,' and is therefore no trustworthy guide. We feel that he has
got a Theocritus in his pocket; that he is using the country to
refresh his memories of Spenser, or Chaucer, or Virgil; and, instead
of forgetting the existence of books in his company, we shall be
painfully abashed if we miss some obvious allusion or fail to identify
the passages upon which he has moulded his own descriptions. And,
indeed, to put it broadly, the poets are hardly to be trusted in this
matter, however fresh and spontaneous may be their song. They don't
want to offer us a formal sermon, unless 'they' means Wordsworth; but
they have not the less got their little moral to insinuate. Shelley's
skylark and Keats's nightingale are equally determined that we shall
indulge in meditations about life and death and the mysterious
meaning of the universe. That is just what, on these occasions, we
want to forget; we want the bird's song, not the emotions which it
excites in our abnormally sensitive natures. I can never read without
fresh admiration Mr. Arnold's 'Gipsy Scholar,' but in this sense
that delightful person is a typical offender. I put myself, at Mr.
Arnold's request, in the corner of the high half-reaped field; I see
the poppies peeping through the green roots and yellowing stems of
the corn; I lazily watch the scholar with 'his hat of antique shape,'
roaming the countryside, and becoming the living centre of one bit of
true old-fashioned rustic scenery after another; and I feel myself
half persuaded to be a gipsy. But then, before I know how or why,
I find that I am to be worrying myself about the strange disease
of modern life; about 'our brains o'ertaxed and palsied hearts,'
and so forth; and instead of being lulled into a delicious dream, I
have somehow been entrapped into a meditation upon my incapacity for
dreaming. And, more or less, this is the fashion of all poets. You can
never be sure that they will let you have your dream out quietly. They
must always be bothering you about the state of their souls; and, to
say the truth, when they try to be simply descriptive, they are for
the most part intolerably dull.
Your poet, of course, is bound to be an interpreter of nature;
and nature, for the present purpose, must be regarded as simply a
nuisance. The poet, by his own account, is condescending to find
words for the inarticulate voices of sea, and sky, and mountain. In
reality nature is nothing but the sounding-board which is to give
effect to his own valuable observations. It is a general but safe
rule that whenever you come across the phrase 'laws of nature,' in an
article—especially if it is by a profound philosopher—you may expect
a sophistry; and it is still more certain that when you come across
nature in a poem you should prepare to receive a sermon. It does not
in the least follow that it will be a bad one. It may be exquisite,
graceful, edifying, and sublime; but, as a sermon, the more effective
the less favourable to the reverie which one desires to cultivate.
Nor, be it observed, does it matter whether the prophet be more or
less openly and unblushingly didactic. A good many hard things have
been said about poor Wordsworth for his delight in sermonising; and
though I love Wordsworth with all my heart, I certainly cannot deny
that he is capable of becoming a portentous weariness to the flesh.
But, for this purpose, Wordsworth is no better and no worse than Byron
or Shelley, or Keats or Rousseau, or any of the dealers in praises of
'Weltschmerz,' or mental dyspepsia. Mr. Ruskin has lately told us that
in his opinion ninety-nine things out of a hundred are not what they
should be, but the very opposite of what they should be. And therefore
he sympathises less with Wordsworth than with Byron and Rousseau,
and other distinguished representatives of the same agreeable creed.
From the present point of view the question is irrelevant. I wish to
be for the nonce a poet of nature, not a philosopher, either with a
healthy or a disturbed liver, delivering a judicial opinion about
nature as a whole or declaring whether I regard it as representing a
satisfactory or a thoroughly uncomfortable system. I condemn neither
opinion; I will not pronounce Wordsworth's complacency to be simply
the glow thrown from his comfortable domestic hearth upon the outside
darkness; or Byron's wrath against mankind to be simply the crying
of a spoilt child with a digestion ruined by sweetmeats. I do not
want to think about it. Preaching, good or bad, from the angelic or
diabolical point of view, cunningly hidden away in delicate artistic
forms, or dashed ostentatiously in one's face in a shower of moral
platitudes, is equally out of place. And, therefore, for the time, I
would choose for my guide to the Alps some gentle enthusiast in 'Peaks
and Passes,' who tells me in his admirably matter-of-fact spirit what
he had for lunch and how many steps he had to cut in the _mur de la
côte_, and catalogues the mountains which he could see as calmly as
if he were repeating a schoolboy lesson in geography. I eschew the
meditations of Obermann, and do not care in the least whether he got
into a more or less maudlin frame of mind about things in general as
contemplated from the Col de Janan. I shrink even from the admirable
descriptions of Alpine scenery in the 'Modern Painters,' lest I should
be launched unawares into ethical or æsthetical speculation. 'A plague
of both your houses!' I wish to court entire absence of thought—not
even to talk to a graceful gipsy scholar, troubled with aspirations
for mysterious knowledge; but rather to the genuine article, such
as the excellent Bamfylde Moore Carew, who took to be a gipsy in
earnest, and was content to be a thorough loafer, not even a Bohemian
in conscious revolt against society, but simply outside of the whole
social framework, and accepting his position with as little reflection
as some wild animal in a congenial country.
Some kind philosopher professes to put my thoughts into correct
phraseology by saying that for such a purpose I require thoroughly
'objective' treatment. I must, however, reject his suggestions, not
only because 'objective' and 'subjective' are vile phrases, used for
the most part to cover indolence and ambiguity of thought, but also
because, if I understand the word rightly, it describes what I do not
desire. The only thoroughly objective works with which I am acquainted
are those of which Bradshaw's Railway Guide is an accepted type. There
are occasions, I will admit, in which such literature is the best
help to the imagination. When I read in prosaic black and white that
by leaving Euston Square at 10 A.M. I shall reach Windermere at 5.45
P.M., it sometimes helps me to perform an imaginary journey to the
lakes even better than a study of Wordsworth's poems. It seems to give
a fixed point round which old fancies and memories can crystallise; to
supply a useful guarantee that Grasmere and Rydal do in sober earnest
belong to the world of realities, and are not mere parts of the
decaying phantasmagoria of memory. And I was much pleased the other
day to find a complimentary reference in a contemporary essayist to
a lively work called, I believe, the 'Shepherd's Guide,' which once
beguiled a leisure hour in a lonely inn, and which simply records the
distinctive marks put upon the sheep of the district. The sheep, as
it proved, was not a mere poetical figment in an idyll, but a real
tangible animal, with wool capable of being tarred and ruddled, and
eating real grass in real fells and accessible mountain dales. In our
childhood, when any old broomstick will serve as well as the wondrous
horse of brass
On which the Tartar king did ride,
in the days when a cylinder with four pegs is as good a steed as the
finest animal in the Elgin marbles, and when a puddle swarming with
tadpoles or a streamlet haunted by water-rats is as full of romance
as a jungle full of tigers, the barest catalogue of facts is the
most effective. A child is deliciously excited by 'Robinson Crusoe'
because De Foe is content to give the naked scaffolding of direct
narrative, and leaves his reader to supply the sentiment and romance
at pleasure. Who does not fear, on returning to the books which
delighted his childhood, that all the fairy-gold should have turned
to dead leaves? I remember a story told in some forgotten book of
travels, which haunted my dreams, and still strikes me as terribly
impressive. I see a traveller benighted by some accident in a nullah
where a tiger has already supped upon his companion, and listening to
mysterious sounds, as of fiendish laughter, which he is afterwards
cruel enough to explain away by some rationalising theory as to
gases. How or why the traveller got into or emerged from the scrape,
I know not; but some vague association of ferocious wild beasts and
wood-demons in ghastly and haunted solitudes has ever since been
excited in me by the mention of a nullah. It is as redolent of awful
mysteries as the chasm in 'Kubla Khan.' And it is painful to reflect
that a nullah may be a commonplace phenomenon in real life; and that
the anecdote might possibly affect me no more, could I now read it for
the first time, than one of the tremendous adventures recorded by Mr.
Kingston or Captain Mayne Reid.
As we become less capable of supplying the magic for ourselves, we
require it from our author. He must have the art—the less conscious
the better—of placing us at his own point of view. He should, if
possible, be something of a 'humourist,' in the old-fashioned sense
of the word; not the man who compounds oddities, but the man who is
an oddity; the slave, not the master, of his own eccentricities; one
absolutely unconscious that the strange twist in his mental vision
is not shared by mankind, and capable, therefore, of presenting
the fancies dictated by his idiosyncrasy as if they corresponded to
obvious and generally recognised realities; and of propounding some
quaint and utterly preposterous theory, as though it were a plain
deduction from undeniable truths. The modern humourist is the old
humourist _plus_ a consciousness of his own eccentricity, and the
old humourist is the modern humourist _minus_ that consciousness.
The order of his ideas should not (as philosophers would have it) be
identical with the order of things, but be determined by odd arbitrary
freaks of purely personal association.
This is the kind of originality which we specially demand from an
efficient guide to the country; for the country means a region
where men have not been ground into the monotony by the friction
of our social mill. The secret of his charm lies in the clearness
with which he brings before us some quaint, old-fashioned type of
existence. He must know and care as little for what passes in the
great world of cities and parliaments as the family of Tullivers
and Dodsons. His horizon should be limited by the nearest country
town, and his politics confined to the disputes between the parson
and the Dissenting minister. He should have thoroughly absorbed the
characteristic prejudices of the little society in which he lives,
till he is unaware that it could ever enter into any one's head to
doubt their absolute truth. He should have a share of the peculiarity
which is often so pathetic in children—the unhesitating conviction
that some little family arrangement is a part of the eternal and
immutable system of things—and be as much surprised at discovering
an irreverent world outside as the child at the discovery that there
are persons who do not consider his papa to be omniscient. That is
the temper of mind which should characterise your genuine rustic. As
a rule, of course, it condemns him to silence. He has no more reason
for supposing that some quaint peculiarity of his little circle will
be interesting to the outside world than a frog for imagining that
a natural philosopher would be interested by the statement that he
was once a tadpole. He takes it for granted that we have all been
tadpoles. In the queer, outlying corners of the world where the father
goes to bed and is nursed upon the birth of a child (a system which
has its attractive side to some persons of that persuasion), the
singular custom is so much a matter of course that a village historian
would not think of mentioning it. The man is only induced to exhibit
his humour to the world when, by some happy piece of fortune, he has
started a hobby not sufficiently appreciated by his neighbours. Then
it may be that he becomes a prophet, and in his anxiety to recommend
his own pet fancy, unconsciously illustrates also the interesting
social stratum in which it sprung to life. The hobby, indeed, is too
often unattractive. When a self-taught philosopher airs some pet
crotchet, and proves, for example, that the legitimate descendants of
the lost tribes are to be found amongst the Ojibbeways, he doubtless
throws a singular light upon the intellectual peculiarities of his
district. But he illustrates chiefly the melancholy truth that a
half-taught philosopher may be as dry and as barren as the one who has
been smoke-dried according to all the rules of art in the most learned
academy of Europe.
There are a few familiar books in which a happy combination of
circumstances has provided us with a true country idyll, fresh and
racy from the soil, not consciously constructed by the most skilful
artistic hand. Two of them have a kind of acknowledged pre-eminence
in their own department. The man is not to be envied who has not in
his boyhood fallen in love with Izaak Walton and White of Selborne.
The boy, indeed, is happily untroubled as to the true source of
the charm. He pores over the 'Compleat Angler' with the impression
that he will gain some hints for beguiling, if not the wily carp,
who is accounted the water-fox, at least the innocent roach, who
'is accounted the water-sheep for his simplicity or foolishness.'
His mouth waters as he reads the directions for converting the
pike—that compound of mud and needles—into 'a dish of meat too good
for any but anglers or very honest men;' a transformation which, if
authentic, is little less than miraculous. He does not ask what is
the secret of the charm of the book even for those to whom fishing
is an abomination—a charm which induced even the arch-cockney Dr.
Johnson, in spite of his famous definition of angling, to prompt the
republication of this angler's bible. It is only as he grows older,
and has plodded through other sporting literature, that he can at all
explain why the old gentleman's gossip is so fascinating. Walton,
undoubtedly, is everywhere charming for his pure simple English,
and the unostentatious vein of natural piety which everywhere lies
just beneath the surface of his writing. Now and then, however, in
reading the 'Lives,' we cannot quite avoid a sense that this excellent
tradesman has just a touch of the unctuous about him. He is given—it
is a fault from which hagiographers can scarcely be free—to using
the rose-colour a little too freely. He holds towards his heroes the
relation of a sentimental churchwarden to a revered parish parson.
We fancy that the eyes of the preacher would turn instinctively
to Walton's seat when he wished to catch an admiring glance from
an upturned face, and to assure himself that he was touching the
'sacred fount of sympathetic tears.' We imagine Walton lingering near
the porch to submit a deferential compliment as to the 'florid and
seraphical' discourse to which he has been listening, and scarcely
raising his glance above the clerical shoe-buckles. A portrait taken
from this point of view is apt to be rather unsatisfactory. Yet,
in describing the 'sweet humility' of a George Herbert or of the
saintly Mr. Farrer, the tone is at least in keeping, and is consistent
even with an occasional gleam of humour, as in the account of poor
Hooker, tending sheep and rocking the cradle under stringent feminine
supremacy. It is less satisfactory when we ask Walton to throw some
light upon the curiously enigmatic character of Donne, with its
strange element of morbid gloom, and masculine passion, and subtle and
intense intellect. Donne married the woman he loved, in spite of her
father and to the injury of his own fortunes. 'His marriage,' however,
observes the biographer, 'was the remarkable error of his life;
an error which, though he had a wit able and very apt to maintain
paradoxes, yet he was very far from justifying it.' From our point of
view, the only error was in the desire to justify an action of which
he should have been proud. We must make allowance for the difference
in Walton's views of domestic authority; but we feel that his
prejudice disqualifies him from fairly estimating a character of great
intrinsic force. A portrait of Donne cannot be adequately brought
within the lines accepted by the writer of orthodox and edifying
tracts.
In spite of this little failing, this rather excessive subservience
to the respectabilities, the 'Lives' form a delightful book; but we
get the genuine Walton at full length in his 'Angler.' It was first
published in dark days; when the biographer might be glad that his
pious heroes had been taken from the sight of the coming evil; when
the scattered survivors of his favourite school of divines and poets
were turned out of their well-beloved colleges and parsonages, hiding
in dark corners or plotting with the melancholy band of exiles in
France and Holland; when Walton, instead of listening to the sound
and witty discourses of Donne, would find the pulpit of his parish
church profaned by some fanatical Puritan, expounding the Westminster
Confession in place of the Thirty-nine Articles. The good Walton
found consolation in the almost religious pursuit of his hobby. He
fortified himself with the authority of such admirable and orthodox
anglers as Sir Henry Wotton and Dr. Nowel, Dean of St. Paul's. Dr.
Nowel had, 'like an honest angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed
Catechism which is printed with our good old service-book;' for an
angler, it seems, is most likely to know that the road to heaven is
not through 'hard questions.' The dean died at the age of ninety-five,
in perfect possession of his faculties; and ''tis said that angling
and temperance were great causes of those blessings.' Evidently
Walton had somehow taken for granted that there is an inherent
harmony between angling and true religion, which of course for him
implies the Anglican religion. He does not trust himself in the evil
times to grumble openly, or to indulge in more than an occasional
oblique reference to the dealers in hard questions and metaphysical
dogmatism. He takes his rod, leaves the populous city behind him,
and makes a day's march to the banks of the quiet Lea, where he can
meet a likeminded friend or two; sit in the sanded parlour of the
country inn, and listen to the milkmaid singing that 'smooth song
made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago,' before English
fields had been drenched with the blood of Roundheads and Cavaliers;
or lie under a tree, watching his float till the shower had passed,
and then calling to mind what 'holy Mr. Herbert says of such days
and flowers as these.' Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright!—but
everybody has learnt to share Walton's admiration, and the quotation
would now be superfluous. It is nowhere so effective as with Walton's
illustrations. We need not, indeed, remember the background of storm
to enjoy the quiet sunshine and showers on the soft English landscape,
which Walton painted so lovingly. The fact that he was living in the
midst of a turmoil, in which the objects of his special idolatry had
been so ruthlessly crushed and scattered, may help to explain the
intense relish for the peaceful river-side life. His rod was the magic
wand to interpose a soft idyllic mist between his eyes and such scenes
as were visible at times from the windows of Whitehall. He loved his
paradise the better because it was an escape from a pandemonium. But
whatever the cause of his enthusiasm, its sincerity and intensity are
the main cause of his attractiveness. Many poets of Walton's time
loved the country as well as he, and showed it in some of the delicate
lyrics which find an appropriate setting in his pages. But we have to
infer their exquisite appreciation of country sights and sounds from
such brief utterances, or from passing allusions in dramatic scenes.
Nobody can doubt that Shakespeare loved daffodils, or a bank of wild
thyme, or violets, as keenly as Wordsworth. When he happens to mention
them, his voice trembles with fine emotion. But none of the poets of
the time dared to make a passion for the country the main theme of
their more pretentious song. They thought it necessary to idealise
and transmute; to substitute an indefinite Arcadia for plain English
fields, and to populate it with piping swains and nymphs, Corydons
and Amorets and Phyllises. Poor Hodge or Cis were only allowed to
appear when they were minded to indulge in a little broad comedy. The
coarse rustics had to be washed and combed before they could present
themselves before an aristocratic audience; and plain English hills
and rivers to be provided with tutelary gods and goddesses, fitted for
the gorgeous pageantry of a country masque. Far be it from me—with the
fear of æsthetic critics before my eyes—to say that very beautiful
poems might not be produced under these conditions. It is proper, as
I am aware, to admire Browne's 'Britannia's Pastorals,' and to speak
reverently of Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' and Ben Jonson's 'Sad
Shepherd.' I only venture to suggest here that such work is _caviare_
to the multitude; that it requires a fine literary sense, a happy
superiority to dull realistic suggestion, and a power of accepting
the conventional conditions which the artist has to accept for his
guidance. Possibly I may go so far as to hint without offence that
the necessity of using this artificial apparatus was not in itself
an advantage. A great master of harmony, with a mind overflowing
with majestic imagery, might achieve such triumphs as 'Comas' and
'Lycidas,' in which even the Arcadian pipe is made to utter the true
organ-tones. We forgive any incongruities or artificialities when they
are lost in such a blaze of poetry. The atmosphere of Arcadia was not
as yet sickly enough to asphyxiate a Milton; but it was ceasing to
be wholesome; and the weaker singers who imbibed it suffered under
distinct attacks of drowsiness.