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.