the serpent still survives in this country, although it can hardly be
said to flourish. Sometimes, walking by a hedge-side, a slight rustling
sound and movement of the grass betrays the presence of the common or
ring snake; then, if chance favours and eyes are sharp, a glimpse may
be had of the shy creature, gliding with swift sinuous motions out of
harm’s way. Or on the dry open common one may all at once catch sight
of a strip of coppery-red or dull brown colour with a curious black
mark on it--an adder lying at ease in the warm sunshine! Not sleeping,
but awake; a little startled at the muffled thunder of approaching
footfalls, with crackling of dead leaves and sticks, as of a coming
conflagration; then, perhaps, the appearance of a shape, looming vast
and cloudlike on its dim circumscribed field of vision; but at the same
time lethargic, disinclined to move, heavy with a meal it will never
digest, or big with young that, jarred with their parent, have some
vague sense of peril within the living prison from which they will
never issue.
Or a strange thing may be seen--a cluster of hibernating adders,
unearthed by workmen in the winter time when engaged in quarrying stone
or grubbing up an old stump. Still more wonderful it is to witness a
knot or twined mass of adders, not self-buried, semi-torpid, and of the
temperature of the cold ground, but hot-blooded in the hot sun, active,
hissing, swinging their tails. In a remote corner of this island there
exists an extensive boggy heath where adders are still abundant, and
grow black as the stagnant rushy pools, and the slime under the turf,
which invites the foot with its velvety appearance, but is dangerous
to tread upon. In this snaky heath-land, in the warm season, when
the frenzy takes them, twenty or thirty or more adders are sometimes
found twined together; they are discovered perhaps by some solitary
pedestrian, cautiously picking his way, gun in hand, and the sight
amazes and sends a sharp electric shock along his spinal cord. All at
once he remembers his gun and discharges it into the middle of the
living mass, to boast thereafter to the very end of his life of how he
killed a score of adders at one shot.
To witness this strange thing, and experience the peculiar sensation
it gives, it is necessary to go far and to spend much time in seeking
and waiting and watching. A bright spring morning in England no longer
“craves wary walking,” as in the days of Elizabeth. Practically the
serpent hardly exists for us, so seldom do we see it, so completely has
it dropped out of our consciousness. But if we have known the creature,
at home or abroad, and wish in reading to recover the impression of
a sweet summer-hot Nature that invites our caresses, always with a
subtle serpent somewhere concealed in the folds of her garments, we
must go to literature rather than to science. The poet has the secret,
not the naturalist. A book or an article about snakes moves us not
at all--not in the way we should like to be moved--because, to begin
with, there is too much of the snake in it. Nature does not teem with
snakes; furthermore, we are not familiar with these creatures, and do
not handle and examine them as a game-dealer handles dead rabbits. A
rare and solitary being, the sharp effect it produces on the mind is
in a measure due to its rarity--to its appearance being unexpected--to
surprise and the shortness of the time during which it is visible.
It is not seen distinctly as in a museum or laboratory, dead on a
table, but in an atmosphere and surroundings that take something from
and add something to it; seen at first as a chance disposition of
dead leaves or twigs or pebbles on the ground--a handful of Nature’s
mottled riff-raff blown or thrown fortuitously together so as to form
a peculiar pattern; all at once, as by a flash, it is seen to be no
dead leaves or twigs or grass, but a living active coil, a serpent
lifting its flat arrowy head, vibrating a glistening forked tongue,
hissing with dangerous fury; and in another moment it has vanished
into the thicket, and is nothing but a memory--merely a thread of
brilliant colour woven into the ever-changing vari-coloured embroidery
of Nature’s mantle, seen vividly for an instant, then changing to dull
grey and fading from sight.
It is because the poet does not see his subject apart from its
surroundings, deprived of its atmosphere--a mere fragment of beggarly
matter--does not see it too well, with all the details which become
visible only after a minute and, therefore, cold examination, but
as a part of the picture, a light that quivers and quickly passes,
that we, through him, are able to see it too, and to experience the
old mysterious sensations, restored by his magic touch. For the poet
is emotional, and in a few verses, even in one verse, in a single
well-chosen epithet, he can vividly recall a forgotten picture to the
mind and restore a lost emotion.
Matthew Arnold probably knew very little about the serpent
scientifically; but in his solitary walks and communings with Nature
he, no doubt, became acquainted with our two common ophidians, and was
familiar with the sight of the adder, bright and glistening in its
renewed garment, reposing peacefully in the spring sunshine; seeing it
thus, the strange remoteness and quietude of its silent life probably
moved him and sank deeply into his mind. This is not the first and most
common feeling of the serpent-seer--the feeling which Matthew Arnold
himself describes in a ringing couplet:
Hast thou so rare a poison?--let me be
Keener to slay thee lest thou poison me.
When no such wildly improbable contingency is feared as that the small
drop of rare poison in the creature’s tooth may presently be injected
into the beholder’s veins to darken his life; when the fear is slight
and momentary, and passing away gives place to other sensations, he
is impressed by its wonderful quietude, and is not for the moment
without the ancient belief in its everlastingness and supernatural
character; and, if curiosity be too great, if the leaf-crackling and
gravel-crunching footsteps approach too near, to rouse and send it into
hiding, something of compunction is felt, as if an indignity had been
offered:
O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumberous solitude?
In those who have experienced such a feeling as this at sight of
the basking serpent it is most powerfully recalled by his extremely
beautiful “Cadmus and Harmonia”:
Two bright and aged snakes,
Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia,
Bask in the glens and on the warm sea-shore,
In breathless quiet after all their ills;
Nor do they see their country, nor the place
Where the Sphinx lived among the frowning hills,
Nor the unhappy palace of their race,
Nor Thebes, nor the Ismenus any more.
There those two live far in the Illyrian brakes,
They had stayed long enough to see
In Thebes the billows of calamity
Over their own dear children rolled,
Curse upon curse, pang upon pang,
For years, they sitting helpless in their home,
A grey old man and woman.
· · · · · · · · · ·
Therefore they did not end their days
In sight of blood; but were rapt, far away,
To where the west wind plays,
And murmurs of the Adriatic come
To those untrodden mountain lawns; and there
Placed safely in changed forms, the pair
Wholly forget their first sad life, and home,
And all that Theban woe, and stray
Forever through the glens, placid and dumb.
How the immemorial fable--the vain and faded imaginings of thousands of
years ago--is freshened into life by the poet’s genius, and the heart
stirred as by a drama of the day we live in! But here we are concerned
with the serpentine nature rather than with the human tragedy, and
to those who are familiar with the serpent, and have been profoundly
impressed by it, there is a rare beauty and truth in that picture
of its breathless quiet, its endless placid dumb existence amid the
flowery brakes.
But the first and chief quality of the snake--the sensation it excites
in us--is its _snakiness_, our best word for a feeling compounded of
many elements, not readily analysable, which has in it something of
fear and something of the sense of mystery. I doubt if there exists in
our literature, verse or prose, anything that revives this feeling so
strongly as Dr. Gordon Hake’s ballad of the dying serpent-charmer. “The
snake-charmer is a bad naturalist,” says Sir Joseph Fayrer, himself
a prince among ophiologists; it may be so, and perhaps he charms all
the better for it, and it is certainly not a lamentable thing, since
it detracts not from the merit of the poem, that Dr. Hake is a bad
naturalist, even as Shakespeare and Browning and Tennyson were, and
draws his snake badly, with venomous stinging tongue, and flaming eyes
that fascinate at too great a distance. Fables notwithstanding, he has
with the poet’s insight, in a moment of rare inspiration, captured the
very illusive spirit of Nature, to make it pervade and glorify his
picture. The sunny, brilliant, declining day, the joyous wild melody of
birds, the low whispering wind, the cool greenness of earth, where
The pool is bright with glossy dyes
And cast-up bubbles of decay:
and everywhere, hidden in grass and brake, released at length from the
spell that made them powerless, coming ever nearer and nearer, yet as
though they came not, the subtle, silent, watchful snakes. Strangely
real and vivid is the picture conjured up; the everlasting life and
gladness at the surface, the underlying mystery and melancholy--the
failing power of the old man and vanishing incantation; the tremendous
retribution of Nature, her ministers of vengeance ever imperceptibly
gliding nearer.
_Yet where his soul is he must go_,
albeit now only to be mocked on the scene of his old beloved triumphs:
For all that live in brake and bough--
All know the brand is on his brow.
Even dying he cannot stay away; the fascination of the lost power is
too strong on him; even dying he rises and goes forth, creeping from
tree to tree, to the familiar sunlit green spot of earth, where
Bewildered at the pool he lies,
And sees as through a serpent’s eyes;
his tawny, trembling hand still fingering, his feeble lips still
quivering, on the useless flute. He cannot draw the old potent music
from it:
The witching air
That tamed the snake, decoyed the bird,
Worried the she-wolf from her lair.
It is all fantasy, a mere juggling arrangement of brain-distorted fact
and ancient fiction; the essence of it has no existence in Nature and
the soul for the good naturalist, who dwells in a glass house full of
intense light without shadow; but the naturalists are not a numerous
people, and for all others the effect is like that which Nature itself
produces on our twilight intellect. It is snaky in the extreme; reading
it we are actually there in the bright smiling sunshine; ours is the
failing spirit of the worn-out old man, striving to drown the hissing
sounds of death in our ears, as of a serpent that hisses. But the lost
virtue cannot be recovered; our eyes too
are swimming in a mist
That films the earth like serpent’s breath;
and the shadows of the waving boughs on the sward appear like hollow,
cast-off coils rolled before the wind; fixed, lidless eyes are
watching us from the brake; everywhere about us serpents lie matted on
the ground.
If serpents were not so rare, so small, so elusive, in _our_ brakes
we should no doubt have had other poems as good as this about them
and the strange feelings they wake. As it is, the poet, although
he has the secret of seeing rightly, is in most cases compelled to
write (or sing) of something he does not know personally. He cannot
go to the wilds of Guiana for the bush-master, nor to the Far East
in search of the hamadryad. Even the poor little native adder as a
rule succeeds in escaping his observation. He must go to books for
his serpent or else evolve it out of his inner consciousness. He is
dependent on the natural historians, from Pliny onwards, or to the
writer of fairy-tales: a Countess d’Aulnoy, for example, or Meredith,
in _The Shaving of Shagpat_, or Keats his Lamia, an amazing creature,
bright and cirque-couchant, vermilion-spotted and yellow and green and
blue; also striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, eyed like a
peacock, and barred with crimson and full of silver moons. Lamia may
be beautiful and may please the fancy with her many brilliant colours,
her moons, stars, and what not, and she may even move us with a sense
of the supernatural, but it is not the same kind of feeling as that
experienced when we _see_ a serpent. That comes of the mythical faculty
in us, and the poet who would reproduce it must himself go to the
serpent, even as the Druids did for their sacred nadder-stone.
In prose literature the best presentation of serpent life known to me
is that of Oliver Wendell Holmes: and being the best, in fiction at all
events, I am tempted to write of it at some length.
Now, very curiously, although, as we have just seen, the incorrect
drawing takes nothing from the charm and, in one sense, from the
truth of Dr. Hake’s picture, we no sooner turn to _Elsie Venner_ than
we find ourselves crossing over to the side of the good naturalist,
with apologies for having insulted him, to ask the loan of his fierce
light--for this occasion only. Ordinarily in considering an excellent
romance, we are rightly careless about the small inaccuracies with
regard to matters of fact which may appear in it; for the writer who is
able to produce a work of art must not and cannot be a specialist or
a microscopist, but one who views Nature as the ordinary man does, at
a distance and as a whole, with the vision common to all men, and the
artist’s insight added. Dr. Holmes’s work is an exception; since it is
a work of art of some excellence, yet cannot be read in this tolerant
spirit; we distinctly refuse to overlook its distortions of fact and
false inferences in the province of zoology; and the author has only
himself to blame for this uncomfortable temper of mind in his reader.
The story of the New England serpent-girl is in its essence a romance;
the author thought proper to cast it in the form of a realistic novel,
and to make the teller of the story a clear-headed, calm, critical
onlooker of mature age, one of the highest attainments in biological
science who is nothing if not philosophical.
How strange that this superior person should select and greatly
exaggerate for the purposes of his narrative one of the stupid
prejudices and superstitions of the vulgar he is supposed to despise!
Like the vulgar who are without light he hates a snake, and it is to
him, as to the meanest peasant, typical of the spirit of evil and a
thing accurst. This unphilosophical temper (the superstitious belief
in the serpent’s enmity to man), with perhaps too great a love of the
picturesque, have inspired some of the passages in the book which make
the snakist smile. Let me quote one, in which the hero’s encounter with
a huge Crotalus in a mountain cave is described.
His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp,
cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth and
steady motion towards the light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck
dumb, staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness
of fear that cannot move, as in a terror of dreams. The two sparks
of fire came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all
at once lifted themselves up in angry surprise. Then for the first
time trilled in Mr. Barnard’s ears the dreadful sound which nothing
that breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved--the loud, long
stinging whir, as the huge thick-bodied reptile shook his many-jointed
rattle, and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were
drawn as with magnets towards the circle of flame. His ears rung as in
the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform.
And so on, until Elsie appears on the scene and rescues the too easily
fascinated schoolmaster.
The writing is fine, but to admire it one must be unconscious of its
exaggeration; or, in other words, ignorant of the serpent as it is
in Nature. Even worse than the exaggerations are the half-poetic,
half-scientific tirades against the creature’s ugliness and malignity.
It was surely one of destiny’s strange pranks to bestow such a subject
on the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” and, it may be added, to put
it in him to treat it from the scientific standpoint. I cannot but wish
that this conception had been Hawthorne’s; for though Hawthorne wrote
no verse, he had in large measure the poetic spirit to which such a
subject appeals most powerfully. Possibly it would have inspired him
to something beyond his greatest achievement. Certainly not in _The
Scarlet Letter_, _The House of the Seven Gables_, nor in any of his
numerous shorter tales did he possess a theme so admirably suited
to his sombre and beautiful genius as the tragedy of Elsie Venner.
Furthermore, the exaggerations and inaccuracies which are unpardonable
in Holmes would not have appeared as blemishes in Hawthorne; for he
would have viewed the animal world and the peculiar facts of the
case--the intervolved human and serpentine nature of the heroine--from
the standpoint of the ordinary man who is not an ophiologist; the true
and the false about the serpent would have been blended in his tale as
they exist blended in the popular imagination, and the illusion would
have been more perfect and the effect greater.
Elsie’s biographer appears to have found his stock of materials bearing
on the main point too slender for his purpose, and to fill out his
work he is obliged to be very discursive. Meanwhile, the reader’s
interest in the chief figure is so intense that in following it the
best breakfast-table talk comes in as a mere impertinence. There is no
other interest; among the other personages of the story Elsie appears
like a living palpitating being among shadows. One finds it difficult
to recall the names of the scholarly father in his library; the good
hero and his lady-love; the pale schoolmistress, and the melodramatic
villain on his black horse, to say nothing of the vulgar villagers
and the farmer, some of them supposed to be comic. If we except the
rattlesnake mountain, and the old nurse with her animal-like affection
and fidelity, there is no atmosphere, or, if an atmosphere, one which
is certainly wrong and produces a sense of incongruity. A better
artist--Hawthorne, to wit--would have used the painful mystery of
Elsie’s life, and the vague sense of some nameless impending horror,
not merely to put sombre patches here and there on an otherwise sunny
landscape, but to give a tone to the whole picture, and the effect
would have been more harmonious. This inability of the author to mix
and shade his colours shows itself in the passages descriptive of
Elsie herself; he insists a great deal too much on her ophidian, or
crotaline, characteristics--her stillness and silence and sinuous
motions; her bizarre taste in barred gowns; her drowsy condition in
cold weather, with intensity of life and activity during the solstitial
heats--even her dangerous impulse to strike with her teeth when
angered. These traits require to be touched upon very lightly indeed;
as it is, the profound pity and love, with a mixture of horror which
was the effect sought, come too near to repulsion. While on this point
it may be mentioned that the author frequently speaks of the slight
sibilation in Elsie’s speech--a strange blunder for the man of science
to fall into, since he does not make Elsie like any snake, or like
snakes in general, but like the _Crotalus durissus_ only, the New
England rattlesnake, which does not hiss, like some other venomous
serpents that are not provided with an instrument of sound in their
tails.
After all is said, the conception of Elsie Venner is one so unique
and wonderful, and so greatly moves our admiration and pity with her
strange beauty, her inarticulate passion, her unspeakably sad destiny,
that in spite of many and most serious faults the book must ever remain
a classic in our literature, among romances a gem that has not its
like, perennial in interest as Nature itself, and Nature’s serpent.
If it had only been left for ever unfinished, or had ended differently!
For it is impossible for one who admires it to pardon the pitifully
commonplace and untrue _dénouement_. Never having read a review of
the book I do not know what the professional critic or the fictionist
would say on this point; he might say that the story could not properly
have ended differently; that, from an artistic point of view, it was
necessary that the girl should be made to outgrow the malign influence
which she had so strangely inherited; that this was rightly brought
about by making her fall in love with the good and handsome young
schoolmaster--the effect of the love, or “dull ache of passion,” being
so great as to deliver and kill her at the same time.
If the interest of the story had all been in the dull and pious
villagers, their loves and marriages and trivial affairs, then it would
have seemed right that Elsie, who made them all so uncomfortable,
should be sent from the village, which was no place for her, to Heaven
by the shortest and most convenient route. Miserably weak is that
dying scene with its pretty conventional pathos; the ending somewhat
after the fashion set by Fouqué, which so many have followed since
his time--the childish “Now-I-have-got-a-soul” transformation scene
with which Fouqué himself spoilt one of the most beautiful things ever
written. The end is not in harmony with the conception of Elsie, of
a being in whom the human and serpentine natures were indissolubly
joined; and no accident, not assuredly that “dull ache of passion,”
could have killed the one without destroying the other.
The author was himself conscious of the inadequacy of the reason
he gave for the change and deliverance. He no doubt asked himself
the following question: “Will the reader believe that a fit of dumb
passion, however intense, was sufficient to cause one of Elsie’s
splendid physique and vitality to droop and wither into the grave
like any frail consumptive schoolgirl who loves and whose love is not
requited?” He recognises and is led to apologise for its weakness; and,
finally, still unsatisfied, advances an alternative theory, which is
subtle and physiological--a sop thrown to those among his readers who,
unlike the proverbial ass engaged in chewing hay, meditate on what they
are taking in. The alternative theory is, that an animal’s life is of
short duration compared with man’s; that the serpent in Elsie, having
arrived at the end of its natural term, died out of the human life with
which it had been intervolved, leaving her still in the flower of youth
and wholly human; but that this decay and death in her affected her
with so great a shock that her own death followed immediately on her
deliverance.
If the first explanation was weak the second will not bear looking at.
Some animals have comparatively short lives, as, for instance, the
earthworm, canary, dog, mouse, etc.; but the serpent is not of them;
on the contrary, the not too numerous facts we possess which relate
to the comparative longevity of animals give support to the universal
belief that the reptilians--tortoise, lizard, and serpent--are
extremely long-lived.