One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the
remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of
the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of
mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must
either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the
saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect
can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish
taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of
Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk
in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones,
or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly
about pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly
horsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in
a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by any
chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact
with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's
comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worst
it is never a quotation.
Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity the
ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subject
of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham had never
seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she was asked what
she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is a
piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent and original,
and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with an analogous kinship
which I could never locate; cabbages always remind me of the sea and
the sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veined
mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost dark
red may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue
sea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that
curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy
repetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and
Shakespeare, use a word like “multitudinous” of the ocean. But just
where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to
speak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, and
the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling, and opaque.
Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of the
rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole
sea were one great green plant with one immense white flower rooted in
the abyss.
Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see
the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected
with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and
songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and
philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would
say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To
which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, “I
would you were so honest a man.” The mention of “Hamlet” reminds me, by
the way, that besides the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girl
who had never seen a stage-play. She was taken to “Hamlet,” and she said
it was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial point
which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions. We are so used
to thinking of “Hamlet” as a problem that we sometimes quite forget that
it is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast
and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and green.
But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman
of culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of the
cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view of the sea
is that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it is
quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile was partly created
by exactly the opposite impression, the impression of boundary and of
barrier. The girl thought of it as a field of vegetables, even as a yard
of vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity when
you cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea. So far
from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight line in
Nature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made that
really looks like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud
are chaotic and doubtful, but solid mountains and standing forests may
be said to melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron
line. The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks, is not
a frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head of some genuine
sea-dog, when he was genuinely looking at the sea. For the edge of the
sea is like the edge of a sword; it is sharp, military, and decisive; it
really looks like a bolt or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangs
in heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changeless
in form, behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage
softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even. It hangs, a
perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides behind
all compromises and all legitimate variety; the one straight line; the
limit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world.