"Sae painfully she clam' the wa',
She clam' the wa' up after him;
Hosen nor shoon upon her feet
She had na time to put them on.
"'Is their ony room at your head, Saunders?
Is there ony room at your feet?
Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain I wad sleep?'"
In that last line the very heart-strings crack. She is to be pitied far
more than Clerk Saunders, lying stark with the cruel wound beneath his
side, the love-kisses hardly cold yet upon his lips.
It may be said that the books of which I have been speaking attain to the
highest literary excellence by favour of simplicity and unconsciousness.
Neither the German nor the Scotsman considered himself an artist. The
Scot sings a successful foray, in which perhaps he was engaged, and he
sings as he fought. In combat he did not dream of putting himself in a
heroic position, or of flourishing his blade in a manner to be admired.
A thrust of a lance would soon have finished him if he had. The pious
German is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into sudden
thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or
groans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad
and German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough and
unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at
least from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might,
with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and
dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicity
and fearlessness, full of its own emotion, and unthinking of others or of
their opinions, which characterise these old writings.
The eighteenth century must ever remain the most brilliant and
interesting period of English literary history. It is interesting not
only on account of its splendour, but because it is so well known. We
are familiar with the faces of its great men by portraits, and with the
events of their lives by innumerable biographies. Every reader is
acquainted with Pope's restless jealousy, Goldsmith's pitted countenance
and plum-coloured coat, Johnson's surly manners and countless
eccentricities, and with the tribe of poets who lived for months ignorant
of clean linen, who were hunted by bailiffs, who smelt of stale punch,
and who wrote descriptions of the feasts of the gods in twopenny
cook-shops. Manners and modes of thought had greatly changed since the
century before. Macbeth, in silk stockings and scarlet coat, slew King
Duncan, and the pit admired the wild force occasionally exhibited by the
barbarian Shakspeare. In those days the Muse wore patches, and sat in a
sumptuous boudoir, and her worshippers surrounded her in high-heeled
shoes, ruffles, and powdered wigs. When the poets wished to paint
nature, they described Chloe sitting on a green bank watching her sheep,
or sighing when Strephon confessed his flame. And yet, with all this
apparent shallowness, the age was earnest enough in its way. It was a
good hater. It was filled with relentless literary feuds. Just recall
the lawless state of things on the Scottish Border in the olden
time,--the cattle-lifting, the house-burning, the midnight murders, the
powerful marauders, who, safe in numerous retainers and moated keep, bade
defiance to law; recall this state of things, and imagine the quarrels
and raids literary, the weapons satire and wit, and you have a good idea
of the darker aspect of the time. There were literary reavers, who laid
desolate at a foray a whole generation of wits. There were literary
duels, fought out in grim hate to the very death. It was dangerous to
interfere in the literary _mêlée_. Every now and then a fine gentleman
was run through with a jest, or a foolish Maecenas stabbed to the heart
with an epigram, and his foolishness settled for ever.
As a matter of course, on this special shelf of books will be found
Boswell's "Life of Johnson"--a work in our literature unique, priceless.
That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly venerating Scottish
gentleman,--that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness,
blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth,--has written the finest
book of its kind which our nation possesses. It is quite impossible to
over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years
disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free
of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your
existence. The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot of
departed English worthies. In virtue of Boswell's labours, we know
Johnson--the central man of his time--better than Burke did, or
Reynolds,--far better even than Boswell did. We know how he expressed
himself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he ate, drank, and slept.
Boswell's unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained.
This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay. Bozzy
is really a wizard: he makes the sun stand still. Till his work is done,
the future stands respectfully aloof. Out of ever-shifting time he has
made fixed and permanent certain years, and in these Johnson talks and
argues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, and Goldsmith,
with hollowed hand, whispers a sly remark to his neighbour. There have
they sat, these ghosts, for seventy years now, looked at and listened to
by the passing generations; and there they still sit, the one voice going
on! Smile at Boswell as we may, he was a spiritual phenomenon quite as
rare as Johnson. More than most he deserves our gratitude. Let us hope
that when next Heaven sends England a man like Johnson, a companion and
listener like Boswell will be provided. The Literary Club sits forever.
What if the Mermaid were in like eternal session, with Shakspeare's
laughter ringing through the fire and hail of wit!
By the strangest freak of chance or liking, the next book on my shelf
contains the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. This
volume, adorned by a hideous portrait of the author, I can well remember
picking up at a bookstall for a few pence many years ago. It seems
curious to me that this man is not in these days better known. A more
singular man has seldom existed,--seldom a more genuine. His first
business speculation failed, but when about forty he commenced again, and
this time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. His
warehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with bars of iron, with a bust
of Shakspeare looking down on the whole. His country-house contained
busts; of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who earned a
competence as an iron-merchant; here is a monomaniac on the Corn-laws,
who loved nature as intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is a
John Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious verse,--Apollo with
iron dust on his face, wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders! If
you wish to form some idea of the fierce discontent which thirty years
ago existed amongst the working men of England, you should read the
Corn-law Rhymes. The Corn-laws are to him the twelve plagues of Egypt
rolled together. On account of them he denounces his country as the
Hebrew prophets were wont to denounce Tyre and Sidon. His rage breaks
out into curses, which are _not_ forgiveness. He is maddened by the
memory of Peterloo. Never, perhaps, was a sane human being so tyrannised
over by a single idea. A skeleton was found on one of the Derbyshire
hills. Had the man been crossed in love? had he crept up there to die in
the presence of the stars? "Not at all," cries Elliott; "he was a victim
of the Corn-laws, who preferred dying on the mountain-top to receiving
parish pay." In his wild poem all the evil kings in Hades descend from
their thrones when King George enters. They only let slip the dogs of
war; he taxed the people's bread. "Sleep on, proud Britoness!" he
exclaims over a woman at rest in the grave she had purchased. In one of
his articles in _Tait's Magazine_, he seriously proposed that tragedies
should be written showing the evils of the Corn-laws, and that on a given
night they should be performed in every theatre of the kingdom, so that
the nation might, by the speediest possible process, be converted to the
gospel of Free-trade. In his eyes the Corn-laws had gathered into their
black bosoms every human wrong: repeal them, and lo! the new heavens and
the new earth! A poor and shallow theory of the universe, you will say;
but it is astonishing what poetry he contrives to extract out of it. It
is hardly possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the rage and
fury which pervade these poems. He curses his political opponents with
his whole heart and soul. He pillories them, and pelts them with dead
cats and rotten eggs. The earnestness of his mood has a certain terror
in it for meek and quiet people. His poems are of the angriest, but
their anger is not altogether undivine. His scorn blisters and scalds,
his sarcasm flays; but then outside nature is constantly touching him
with a summer breeze or a branch of pink and white apple-blossom, and his
mood becomes tenderness itself. He is far from being lachrymose; and
when he is pathetic, he affects one as when a strong man sobs. His anger
is not nearly so frightful as his tears. I cannot understand why Elliott
is so little read. Other names not particularly remarkable I meet in the
current reviews--his never. His book stands on my shelf, but on no other
have I seen it. This I think strange, because, apart from the intrinsic
value of his verse as verse, it has an historical value. Evil times and
embittered feelings, now happily passed away, are preserved in his books,
like Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava. He was a poet of the
poor, but in a quite peculiar sense. Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, were
poets of the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor. Elliott is the poet
of the English artisans,--men who read newspapers and books, who are
members of mechanics' institutes, who attend debating societies, who
discuss political measures and political men, who are tormented by
ideas,--a very different kind of persons altogether. It is easier to
find poetry beneath the blowing hawthorn than beneath the plumes of
factory or furnace smoke. In such uninviting atmospheres Ebenezer
Elliott found his; and I am amazed that the world does not hold it in
greater regard, if for nothing else than for its singularity.
There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but this
gossiping must be drawn to a close. When I began, the wind was bending
the trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, petulant
dashes. For hours now, wind and rain have ceased, the trees are
motionless, the garden walk is dry. The early light of wintry sunset is
falling across my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite is
dipped in tender rose. Less stern he looks, but not less sad, than he
did in the morning. The sky is clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapour
stretches up into its depths. The air is cold with frost, and the rain
which those dark clouds in the east hold will fall during the night in
silent, feathery flakes. When I wake to-morrow, the world will be
changed, frosty forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree branches
will be furred with snows; and to the crumbs which it is my daily custom
to sprinkle on the shrubbery walk will come the lineal descendant of the
charitable redbreast that covered up with leaves the sleeping children in
the wood.