Of three poets, each the most original in his language, and each
peculiarly susceptible of impressions from external nature--Horace,
Shakspeare, and Burns--not one seems to have appreciated the beauty,
the majestic sublimity, the placid loveliness, alternating with the
terrific grandeur, of the 'many-sounding sea.' Judging from their
incidental allusions to it, and the use they make of it in metaphor
and imagery, it would seem to have presented itself to their
imaginations only as a fierce, unruly, untamable, and unsightly
monster, to be loathed and avoided--a blot on the fair face of
creation--a necessary evil, perhaps; but still an evil, and most
certainly suggestive of no ideas poetic in their character.
It is marvellous, for there is not one of these poets who does not
discover a lively sense of the varied charms of universal nature, and
has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master.
Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a
nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English
flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England,
before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods?
How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature
of his native landscape, till
---- 'Auld Coila's plains and fells,
Her muirs, red-brown wi' heather-bells,
Her banks and braes, her dens and dells,'
live again in the magic of his song. And Horace--with what charming
playfulness, with what exquisite grace, has he not figured the
olive-groves of Tibur, the pendent vines ruddy with the luscious
grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of
fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these
poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that
none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty of a
sea-prospect?
First, as to Horace. When climbing the heights of Mount Vultur, that
Lucanian hill where once, when overcome by fatigue, the youthful poet
lay sleeping, and doves covered his childish and wearied limbs with
leaves--Horace must have often viewed, with their wide expanse
glittering in the sun, the waters of the Adriatic--often must he have
hailed the grateful freshness of the sea-breeze and the invigorating
perfumes of
---- 'the early sea-smell blown
Through vineyards from some inland bay.'
Yet about this sea, which should have kindled his imagination and
inspired his genius, this thankless bard poetises in a vein such as a
London citizen, some half-century back, might have indulged in after a
long, tedious, 'squally' voyage in an overladen Margate hoy.
No such spirit possessed him as that which dictated poor Campbell's
noble apostrophe to the glorious 'world of waters:'
---- 'Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in;
The lightning's glance, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it, like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.'
Horace, indeed, has sung the praises of Tarentum--that beautiful
maritime city of the Calabrian Gulf, whose attractions were such as to
make _the delights of Tarentum_ a common proverbial expression. But
what were these delights as celebrated by our poet?--the perfection of
its honey, the excellence of its olives, the abundance of its grapes,
its lengthened spring and temperate winter. For these, its merits, did
Horace prefer, as he tells us, Tarentum to every other spot on the
wide earth--his beloved Tibur only and ever excepted. In truth, Horace
valued and visited the sea-side only in winter, and then simply
because its climate was milder than that to be met with inland, and
therefore more agreeable to the dilapidated constitution of a
sensitive valetudinarian. His commentators suppose he produced nothing
during his marine hybernations: if the inclement season froze 'the
genial current of his soul,' the aspect of the sea did not thaw it.
His motive for his sea-side trips is amusingly set forth in one of the
most lively and characteristic of his Epistles--the fifteenth of the
first book. In this he inquires of a friend what sort of winter
weather is to be found at Velia and Salernum; two cities, one on the
Adriatic, the other on the Mediterranean seaboard of Italy--what
manner of roads they had--whether the people there drank tank-water or
spring-water--and whether hares, boars, crabs, and fish were with them
abundant. He adds, he is not apprehensive about their wines--knowing
these, as we may infer, to be good--although usually, when from home,
he is scrupulous about his liquors; whilst, when at home, he can put
up almost with anything in the way of potations. It is quite plain
Horace went down to the sea just in the spirit in which a turtle-fed
alderman would transfer himself to Cheltenham; or in which a fine
lady, whose nerves the crush, hurry, and late hours of a London season
had somewhat disturbed, would exchange the dissipations of Mayfair for
the breezy hills of Malvern, or the nauseous waters of Tunbridge
Wells.
This certainly explains, and perhaps excuses, the grossly uncivil
terms in which alone he notices the sea. One of the worst of Ulysses'
troubles was, according to him, the numerous and lengthy sea-voyages
which that Ithacan gadabout had to take. Horace wishes for Mævius, who
was his aversion, no worse luck than a rough passage and shipwreck at
the end of it. His notion of a happy man--_ille beatus_--is one who
has not to dread the sea. Augustus, whose success had blessed not only
his own country, but the whole world, had--not the least of his
blessings--given to the seamen a calmed sea--_pacatum mare_. Lamenting
at Virgil's departure for Athens, he rebukes the impiety of the first
mariner who ventured, in the audacity of his heart, to go afloat and
cross the briny barrier interposed between nations. He esteems a
merchant favoured specially by the gods, should he twice or thrice a
year return in safety from an Atlantic cruise. He tells us he himself
had known the terrors of 'the dark gulf of the Adriatic,' and had
experienced 'the treachery of the western gale;' and expresses a
charitable wish, that the enemies of the Roman state were exposed to
the delights of both. He likens human misery to a sea 'roughened by
gloomy winds;' 'to embark once more on the mighty sea,' is his
figurative expression for once more engaging in the toils and troubles
of the world; Rome, agitated by the dangers of civil conflict,
resembles an ill-formed vessel labouring tempest-tossed in the waves;
his implacable Myrtale resembles the angry Adriatic, in which also he
finds a likeness to an ill-tempered lover. All through, from first to
last, the gentle Horace pelts with most ungentle phrases one of the
noblest objects in nature, provocative alike of our admiration and our
awe, our terror and our love.
And even Shakspeare must be ranged in the same category. The most
English of poets has not one laudatory phrase for
---- 'The seas
Which God hath given for fence impregnable'
to the poet's England. It is idle to say that Shakspeare was
inland-bred--that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared
nothing about the matter--seeing that, insensible as he might have
been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even
in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to
that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour. He
uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder
is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison,
declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds
wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells
Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'--a technical
expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has
recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage
in _King Lear_, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm
that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat,
and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the
relative proportions of the objects named. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_,
_The Tempest_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Comedy of Errors_,
_Twelfth Night_, _Winter's Tale_, _Measure for Measure_, and
_Pericles_, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the
plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which
forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes:
however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare
uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.'