verging on the blasphemous--that about riding on the whirlwind and
directing the storm,” remarked Friswell; he had a good memory for things
verging on the blasphemous.
“The best war poem is the one that puts into literary form the man in
the street yelling 'hurrah!'” said I. “If the shout is not spontaneous,
it sounds stilted and it is worthless.”
“I believe you,” said Friswell. “If your verse does not find an echo in
the heart of the rabble that run after a soldiers' band, it is but as
the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals that crash on the empty air. But
touching the poets of past campaigns----”
“I was thinking of Scott's _Waterloo_,” said I; “yes, and Byron's
stanzas in _Childe Harold_, and somebody's '_Twas in Trafalgar's Bay, We
saw the Frenchmen lay_--'the Frenchmen lav,' mind you--that's the most
popular of all the lays, thanks to Braham's music and Braham's tenor
that gave it a start. I think we have done better than any of those.”
“But have you done better than _Scot's what hae act Wallace hied? or of
Nelson and the North, Sing the glorious day's renown? or Ye Mariners
of England, That guard our native seas? or not a drum was heard or a
funeral note?_--I doubt it. And to come down to a later period, what
about the lilt of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, by one Tennyson? Will
any of the poems of 1914 show the same vitality as these?”
“The vital test of poetry is not its vitality,” said I, “any more than
being a best-seller is a test of a good novel. But I think that when a
winnowing of the recent harvest takes place in a year or two, when we
become more critical than is possible for a people just emerging from
the flames that make us all see red, you will find that the harvest
of sound poetry will be a record one. We have still the roar of the
thunderstorm in our cars; when an earthquake is just over is not
the time for one to be asked to say whether the _Pathétique_ or the
_Moonlight_ Sonata is the more exquisite.”
“Perhaps,” said Friswell doubtfully. “But I allow that you have 'jined
your flats' better than Tennyson did. The unutterable vulgarity of
that 'gallant six hunderd,' because it happened that 'some one had
blundered,' instead of 'blundred,' will not be found in the Armageddon
band of buglers. But I don't believe that anything so finished as
Wolfe's _Burial of Sir John Moore_ will come to the surface of the
melting-pot--I think that the melting-pot suggests more than
your harvest. Your harvest hints at the swords being turned into
ploughshares; my melting-pot at the bugles being thrown into the
crucible. What have you to say about 'Not a drum was heard'?”
“That poem is the finest elegy ever written,” said I definitely.
“The author, James Wolfe, occupies the place among elegists that
single-speech Hamilton does among orators, or Liddell and Scott in a
library of humour. From the first line to the last, no false note is
sounded in that magnificent funeral march. It is one grand monotone
throughout. It cannot be spoken except in a low monotone. It never rises
and it never falls until the last line is reached, 'We left him alone in
his glory.'”
“And the strangest thing about it is that it appeared first in
the poets' corner of a wretched little Irish newspaper--the _Newry
Telegraph_, I believe it was called,” said Dorothy--it was Dorothy's
reading of the poem that first impressed me with its beauty.
“The more obscure the crypt in which its body was burned, the more--the
more--I can't just express the idea that I'm groping after,” said
Friswell.
“I should like to help you,” said Dorothy. “Strike a match for me, and
I'll try to follow you out of the gloom.”
“It's something like this: the poem itself seems to lead you into
the gloom of a tomb, so that there is nothing incongruous in its
disappearing into the obscurity of a corner of a wretched rag of a
newspaper--queer impression for any one to have about such a thing,
isn't it?”
“Queer, but--well, it was but the body that was buried, the soul of the
poetry could not be consigned to the sepulchre, even though 'Resurgam'
was cut upon the stone.”
“You have strolled away from me, said I. All that I was thinking about
Wolfe and that blessed _Newry Telegraph_, was expressed quite adequately
by the writer of another Elegy:--
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
That was a trite reflection; and as apposite as yours, Friswell; unless
you go on to assume that through the desert air there buzzed a bee to
carry off the soul of the blushing flower and cause it to fertilise a
whole garden, so that the desert was made to blossom like the rose.”
“Who was the bee that rescued the poem from the desert sheet that
enshrouded it?” asked Dorothy.
“I have never heard,” I said, nor had Friswell.
There was a long pause before he gave a laugh, saying--
“I wonder if you will kick me out of your garden when I tell you the
funny analogy to all this that the mention of the word desert forced
upon me.”
“Try us,” said 1. “We know you.”
“The thought that I had was that there are more busy bees at work than
one would suppose; and the mention of the desert recalled to my mind
what I read somewhere of the remarkable optimism of a flea which a man
found on his foot after crossing the desert of the Sahara. It had lived
on in the sand, goodness knows how long, on the chance of some animal
passing within the radius of a leap and so carrying it back to a
congenial and not too rasorial a civilisation. How many thousand million
chances to one there were that it should not be rescued; yet its chance
came at last.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, my flea is your bee, and where there are no bees there may be
plenty of fleas.”
“Yes; only my bee comes with healing in its wings, and your flea is the
bearer of disease,” said I; and I knew that I had got the better of him
there, though I was not so sure that he knew it.
Friswell is a queer mixture.
After another pause, he said,--
“By the way, the mention of Campbell and his group brought back to
me one of the most popular of the poems of the period--_Lord Ullin's
Daughter_.--You recollect it, of course.”
“A line or two.”
“Well, it begins, you know:--
“A chieftain to the Highlands bound,
Cries, 'Boatman, do not tarry,
And I'll give thee a silver pound,
To row us o'er the ferry.'
Now, for long I felt that it was too great a strain upon our credulity
to ask us to accept the statement that a Scotsman would offer a ferryman
a pound for a job of the market value of a bawbee; but all at once the
truth flashed upon me: the pound was a pound Scots, or one shilling and
eightpence of our money. You see?”
“Yes, I see,” said Dorothy; “but still it sounds extravagant. A Highland
Chief--one and eight-pence! The ferryman never would have got it.”
I fancied that we had exhausted some of the most vital questions bearing
upon the questionable poetry of the present and the unquestionable
poetry of the past; but I was mistaken; for after dinner I had a visit
from Mr. Gilbert.
But I must give Mr. Gilbert a little chapter to himself.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST
Of course I had known for a long time that Mr. Gilbert was “quite a
superior man”--that was the phrase in which the Rural Dean referred to
him when recommending me to apply to him for information respecting a
recalcitrant orchid which had refused one year to do what it had been
doing the year before. He was indeed “quite a superior man,” but being
a florist he could never be superior to his business. No man can be
superior to a florist, when the florist is an orchidtect as well. I went
to Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Gilbert came to me, and all was right. That was
long ago. We talked orchids all through that year and then, by way
of lightening our theme, we began to talk of roses and such like
frivolities, but everything he said was said in perfect taste. Though
naturally, living his life on terms of absolute intimacy with orchids,
he could not regard roses seriously, yet I never heard him say a
disrespectful word about them: he gave me to understand that he regarded
the majority of rosarians as quite harmless--they had their hobby, and
why should they not indulge in it, he asked. “After all, rosarians are
God's creatures like the rest of us,” he said, with a tolerant smile.
And I must confess that, for all my knowledge of his being a superior man,
he startled me a little by adding,--
“The orchid is epic and the rose lyric, sir; but every one knows how
an incidental lyric lightens up the hundred pages of an epic. Oh, yes,
roses have their place in a properly organised horticultural scheme.”
“I believe you are right, now that I come to look at the matter in that
light,” said I. “You find a relaxation in reading poetry?” I added.
“I have made a point of reading some verses every night for the past
twenty-five years, sir,” he replied. “I find that's the only way by
which I can keep myself up to the mark.”
“I can quite understand that,” said I. “Flowers are the lyrics that, as
you say, lighten the great epic of Creation. Where would our poets be
without their flowers?”
“They make their first appeal to the poet, sir; but the worst of it
is that every one who can string together a few lines about a flower
believes himself to be a poet. No class of men have treated flowers
worse than our poets even the best of them are so vague in their
references to flowers as to irritate me.”
“In what way, Mr. Gilbert?”
“Well, you know, sir, they will never tell us plainly just what they are
driving at. For instance we were speaking of roses, just now--well, we
have roses and roses by the score in poems; but how seldom do we find
the roses specified! There's Matthew Arnold, for example; he wrote
“Strew on her roses, roses”; but he did not say whether he wanted her
to be strewn With hybrid teas, Wichuraianas, or poly-anthas. He does not
even suggest the colour. Now, could anything be more vague? It makes
one believe that he was quite indifferent on the point, which would,
of course, be doing him a great injustice: all these funeral orders are
specified, down to the last violets and Stephanotis. Then we have, “It
was the time of roses”--now, there's another ridiculously vague phrase.
Why could the poet not have said whether he had in his mind the ordinary
brier or an autumn-flowering William Allen Richardson or a Gloire de
Dijon? But that is not nearly so irritating as Tennyson is in places.
You remember his “Flower in the crannied wall.” There he leaves a
reader in doubt as to what the plant really was. If it was Saracta
Hapelioides, he should have called it a herb, or if it was simply the
ordinary Scolopendrium marginatum he should have called it a fern. If
it was one of the _Saxifrageo_ he left his readers quite a bewildering
choice. My own impression is that it belonged to the _Evaizoonia_
section--probably the _Aizoon sempervivoides_. though it really might
have been the _cartilaginea_. Why should we be left to puzzle over
the thing? But for that matter, both Shakespeare and Milton are most
flagrant offenders, though I acknowledge that the former now and again
specifies his roses: the musk and damask were his favourites. But why
should he not say whether it was _Thymus Scrpyllum or atropurpureus_ he
alluded to on that bank? He merely says, “Whereon the wild thyme blows.”
It is really that vagueness, that absence of simplicity--which has made
poetry so unpopular. Then think of the trouble it must be to a foreigner
when lie comes upon a line comparing a maiden to a lily, without
saying what particular _lilium_ is meant. An Indian squaw is like a
lily--_lilium Brownii_; a Japanese may appropriately be said to be like
the _lilium sulphureum_. Recovering from a severe attack of measles a
young woman suggests _lilium speciosum_; but that is just the moment
when she makes a poor appeal to a poet. To say that a maiden is like a
lily conveys nothing definite to the mind; but that sort of neutrality
is preferable to the creation of a false impression, so doing her a
great injustice by suggesting it may be that her complexion is a bright
orange picked out with spots of purple.”
That was what our Mr. Gilbert said to me more than a year ago; and now
he comes to me before I have quite recovered from the effects of
that discussion with Friswell, and after a few professional remarks
respecting a new orchid acquisition, begins: “Might I take the liberty
of reading you a little thing which I wrote last night as an experiment
in the direction of the reform I advocated a year ago when referring to
the vagueness of poets' flowers? I don't say that the verses have any
poetical merit; but I claim for them a definiteness and a lucidity that
should appeal to all readers who, like myself, are tired of slovenly and
loose way in which poets drag flowers into their compositions.”
1 assured him that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to hear
his poem; and he thanked me and said that the title was, _The Florist to
his Bride._ This was his poem:--
Do you remember, dearest, that wild eve,
When March came blustering; o'er the land?
We stood together, hand in hand,
Watching the slate-gray waters heave--
Hearing despairing boughs behind us grieve.
It seemed as I, no forest voice was dumb.
All Nature joining in one cry;
The Ampélopsis Veitchii,
Giving gray hints of green to come,
Shrank o'er the leafless Prunus Avium.
Desolate seemed the grove of Comferia,
Evergreen as deciduous;
Hopeless the hour seemed unto us;
Helpless our beauteous Cryptomeria--
Helpless in Winter's clutch our Koelreuteria.
We stood beneath our Ulmus Gracilis,
And watched the tempest-tom Fitzroya,
And shaken than the stout Sequoia;
And yet I knew in spite of this,
Your heart was hopeful of the Springtide's kiss.
Yours was the faith of woman, dearest child.
Your eyes--Centaurea Cyavus--
Saw what I saw not nigh to us,
And that, I knew, was why you smiled,
When the Montana Pendula swung wild.
I knew you smiled, thinking of suns to come,
Seeing in snowflakes on bare trees
Solanum Jasminoïdes--
Seeing ere Winter's voice was dumb,
The peeping pink Mesembrianthium.
I knew you saw as if they flowered before us,
The sweet Rhoilora Canadensis,
The lush Wistaria Sinensis,
The Lepsosiphon Densifiorvs--
All flowers that swell the Summer's colour-chorus.
And, lightened by your smile, I saw, my Alice,
The modest Résida Odorata--
Linaria Reticulata--
I drank the sweets of Summer's chalice,
Sparkling Calendula Officinalis.
To me your smile brought sunshine that gray day,
The saddest Salex Babylonien
Became Anemone Japonica
And the whole world beneath its ray,
Bloomed one Escholtzia Californico.
Still in thy smile the summer airs caress us;
And now with thee my faith is sure:
The love that binds us shall endure--
Nay, growing day by day to bless us,
Ti'l o'er us waves Supervirens Cupressus.
“I hope I haven't bored you, sir. I don't pretend to be a poet; but you
see what my aim is, I'm sure--lucidity and accuracy--strict accuracy,
sir. Something that every one can understand.”
I assured him that he had convinced me that he understood his business:
he was incomparable--as a florist.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
Among the features of our gardens for which I am not responsible, is
the grass walk alongside the Castle Wall, where it descends on one side,
by the remains of the terraces of the Duke's hanging gardens, fifty feet
into the original fosse, while on the other it breasts the ancient Saxon
earthwork, which reduces its height to something under fifteen, so that
the wall on our side is quite a low one, but happily of a breadth that
allows of a growth of wild things--lilacs and veronicas and the like--in
beautiful luxuriance, while the face is in itself a garden of crevices
where the wallflowers last long enough to mix with the snapdragons and
scores of modest hyssops and mosses and ferns that lurk in every cranny.
Was it beneath such a wall that Tennyson stood to wonder how he should
fulfil the commission he had received from _Good Words_--or was it _Once
a Week?_--for any sort of poem that would serve as an advertisement
of magazine enterprise, and he wrote that gem to which Mr. Gilbert had
referred?--
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, stem and all in my hand.
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, stem and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is,”
I should like equal immortality to be conferred upon the parody which is
of far greater merit than the original:--
'Terrier in my granny's hall,
I whistle you out of my granny's;
Hold you here, tail and all in my hand.
Little terrier; but if I could understand
What you are, tail and all and all in all,
I should know what black-and-tan is.”
I could understand the inspiration that should result in sermons from
stones--such as the poet's forgetting that his mission was not that
of the sermonising missionary, but of the singer of such creations of
beauty as offer themselves to nestle to the heart of man--when walking
round the gracious curve that the grass path makes till it is arrested
by the break in the wall where the postern gate once hung, guarded by
the sentinel whose feet must have paced this grass path until no blade
of grass remained on it.
Early every summer the glory of the snapdragons and the wallflowers is
overwhelmed for a time by the blossom of the pear-trees and the plums
which spread themselves abroad and sprawl even over the top of the wall.
By their aid the place is transformed for a whole month in a fruitful
year. In 1917 it was as a terrific snowstorm had visited us. It was with
us as with all our neighbours, a wonderful year for pears, apples, and
plums. Pink and white and white and pink hid the world and all that
appertained to it from our eyes, and when the blossoms were shed we
were afraid to set a foot upon the grass path: it would have been a
profanity to crush that delicate embroidery. It seemed as if Nature had
flung down her copious mantle of fair white satin before our feet; but
we bowed our heads conscious of our unworthiness and stood motionless in
front of that exquisite carpeting.
[Illustration: 0304]
And then day after day the lovely things of the wall that had been
hidden asserted themselves, and a soft wind swept the path till all the
green of the new grass path flowed away at our feet, and Nature
seemed less virginal. Then came the babes--revealed by the fallen
blossoms--plump little cherubic faces of apples, graver little papooses
of the russet Indian tint, which were pears, and smaller shy things
peeping out from among the side shoots, which we could hardly recognise
as plums; rather a carcanet of chrysoprase they seemed, so delicately
green in their early days, before each of them became like the ripe
Oriental beauty, the _nigra sed formoasa_, of the Song of Solomon, and
for the same reason: “Because the sun hath looked upon me,” she cried.
When the sun had looked upon the fruit that clustered round the clefts
in our wall, he was as one of the sons of God who had become aware for
the first time of the fact that the daughters of men were fair; and the
whole aspect of the world was changed.
Is there any part of a garden that is more beautiful than the orchard?
At every season it is lovely. I cannot understand how it is that the
place for fruitgrowing is in so many gardens kept away from what is
called the ornamental part. I cannot understand how it has come about
that flowering shrubs are welcomed and flowering apples discouraged in
the most favoured situations. When a considerable number of the
former have lost their blossoms, they are for the rest of the year as
commonplace as is possible for a tree to be; but when the apple-blossom
has gone, the houghs that were pink take on a new lease of beauty, and
the mellow glory of the season of fruitage lasts for months. The berry
of the gorse which is sometimes called a gooseberry, is banished like
a Northumberland cow-pincher of the romantic period, beyond the border;
but a well furnished gooseberry bush is as worthy of admiration as
anything that grows in the best of the borders, whether the fruit is
green or red. And then look at the fruit of the white currant if you
give it a place where the sun can shine through it--clusters shining
with the soft light of the Pleiades or the more diffuse Cassiopea; and
the red currants--well, I suppose they are like clusters of rubies; but
everything that is red is said to be like a ruby; why not talk of the
red currant bush as a firmament that holds a thousand round fragments of
a fractured Mars?
There was a time in England when a garden meant a place of fruit rather
than flowers, but by some freak of fashion it was decreed that anything
that appealed to the sense of taste was “not in good taste”--that was
how the warrant for the banishment of so much beauty was worded--“not in
good taste.” I think that the decree is so closely in harmony with
the other pronouncements of the era of _mauvaise honte_--the era of
affectations--when the “young lady” was languid and insipid--“of dwarf
habit,” as the catalogues describe such a growth, and was never
allowed to be a girl--when fainting was esteemed one of the highest
accomplishments of the sex, and everything that was natural was
pronounced gross--when the sampler, the sandal, and the simper wexe the
outward and visible signs of an inward and affected femininity: visible?
oh, no; the sandal was supposed to be invisible; if it once appeared
even to the extent of a taper toe, and attention was called to its
obtrusion, there was a little shriek of horror, and the “young lady” was
looked at askance as demie-vierge. It was so much in keeping with the
rest of the parcel to look on something that could be eaten as something
too gross to be constantly in sight when growing naturally, that I think
the banishment of the apple and the pear and the plum and the gooseberry
to a distant part of the garden must be regarded as belonging to the
same period. But now that the indelicacy of the super-delicacy of
that era has passed--now that the shy sandal has given place to the
well-developed calf above the “calf uppers” of utilitarian boots--now
that a young man and a young woman (especially the young woman) discuss
naturally the question of eugenics and marriage with that freedom which
once was the sole prerogative of the prayerbook, may we not claim an
enlargement of our borders to allow of the rehabilitation of the apple
and the repatriation of the pear in a part of the garden where all
can enjoy their decorative qualities and anticipate their gastronomic
without reproach? Let us give the fruit its desserts and it will return
the compliment.
The Saxon earthwork below the grass walk is given over to what is
technically termed “the herbaceous border,” and over one thousand eight
hundred square feet there should be such a succession of flowers growing
just as they please, as should delight the heart of a democracy. The
herbaceous border is the democratic section of a garden. The autocrat of
the Dutch and the Formal gardens is not allowed to carry out any of
his foul designs of clipping or curtailing the freedom of Flora in this
province. There should be no reminiscences of the tyrant stake which in
far-distant days of autocracy was a barrier to the freedom of growth,
nor should the aristocracy of the hot-house or even the cool greenhouse
obtrude its educated bloom among the lovers of liberty. They must
be allowed to do as they damplease, which is a good step beyond the
ordinary doing as they please. The government of the herbaceous border
is one whose aim is the glorification of the Mass as opposed to the
Individual.
It is not at all a bad principle--for a garden--this principle which
can best be carried out by the unprincipled. English democracy includes
princes and principles: but there is a species which will have nothing
to do with principles because they reckon them corrupted by the first
syllable, and hold that the aristocrat is like Hamlet's stepfather,
whose offence was “_rank_ and smells to heaven.” I have noticed,
however, in the growth of my democratic border that there are invariably
a few pushing and precipitate individuals who insist on having their
own way--it is contrary to the spirit of Freedom to check them--and the
result is that the harmony of the whole ceases to exist. But there are
some people who would prefer a Bolshevist wilderness to any garden.