Every year a 'flower-sermon' is preached in London, in accordance with
an admirable custom; and the orator, we may be sure, has no difficulty
in 'improving the occasion.' The materials lie rich and ready to his
hand. The Laureate, indeed, has asked to what uses we shall put the
wildweed flower which simply blows, and has inquired further if there be
any moral shut within the bosom of the rose. He was answered long ago by
Horace Smith:
'Your voiceless lips, O Flowers! are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book;'
and a living poetess has assured us, likewise, that flowers will preach
to us if we will hear, the rose telling us that all her loveliness is
born upon a thorn, and the poppy urging that, though her scarlet head
is held in scorn,
'Yet juice of subtle virtues lies
Within my cup of curious dyes.'
There is one lesson which the flowers have been made to teach with
rather wearisome iteration. The poets have never been tired of dwelling
upon their brief existence and seeing in it a reflection of our own.
This rather trite melody has been sounded from the earliest to the
latest times. Drummond of Hawthornden draws attention to the flower
'which lingeringly doth fade,' and sees in it a type of his own life,
which 'scarce shows now what it hath been.' Herrick, apostrophizing
blossoms, deduces from them the fact that all things have their end,
though ne'er so brave. 'Fade, flowers, fade!' cries Waller; ''Tis but
what we must in our autumn do.' And so Dryden:
'The rose is fragrant, but it fades in time...
Such is your blooming youth, and withering so.'
'Youth's withered flowers' made John Clare sigh to think that in him
they would never bloom again.
But this, which may be said to be the orthodox teaching of the flowers,
has found many influential questioners, who have dwelt upon the brighter
side of the contention. And it is pleasant to listen to their more
cheerful voices. 'Not an opening blossom breathes in vain,' wrote
Thomson; and the sentiment is heartily corroborated by Mr. Lowell:
'There never yet was flower fair in vain;
Let classic poets rhyme it as they will.'
If the flowers have a short career, they make no complaint of it, says
Landor:
'Fast fall the leaves; this never says
To that, "Alas! how brief our days!"
All have alike enjoyed the sun,
And each repeats, "So much is won."'
They enjoy life, and they help to make it enjoyable for others.
'Gay without toil and lovely without art,
They spring to clear the sense and glad the heart.'
So Mrs. Barbauld; while Mrs. Howitt similarly proclaims it to be their
business as well as pleasure to minister delight to man, to beautify the
earth.
The present Lord Lytton has remarked of flowers that their scent
outlives their bloom, and has expressed the aspiration that, in like
manner, his mortal hours may 'grow sweeter towards the tomb.' But the
main point made by the more optimistic observers of Nature is that,
though blossoms fade, they revive again, in equal beauty, by-and-by. 'Ye
are to me,' wrote Horace Smith, 'a type of resurrection and second
birth.' To W. C. Bryant the delicate flower, arising from the shapeless
mould, seemed
'An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe.'
Mrs. Hemans--a little unnecessarily, perhaps--dwells upon the fact that
though the flowers sleep in dust through the wintry hours, they break
forth in glory in the spring. For Longfellow, as for Horace Smith, they
are 'emblems of our own great resurrection.' George Morine, in verses
little known, reminds us that while cities fall away, and arts flourish
and decay, these 'frailer things' will continue to adorn the world
'unchangingly the same.' Though covered for a time by 'the wee white
fairies of the snow,' they come back, says Gerald Massey, 'with their
fragrant news,' and tell in a thousand hues their dream of beauty. For
their annual disappearance from our midst, Thomas Westwood gives a
poetical explanation:
'Wearied out with shine and shade,
It rejoiced them, one and all,
To escape from daylight's ken
To their chambers subterrain,
There to rest awhile, and then
Weave them fresh, and weave them fair,
And their fragrant spells prepare.'
Alas! there are those who must needs draw a melancholy moral from the
most consolatory phenomena. And so Charlotte Smith, while admitting that
'Another May new buds and flowers shall bring,'
must needs exclaim,
'Ah! why has happiness no second Spring?'
And the dismal reflection finds an echo in the heart of D. M. Moir:
'Green Spring again shall bid
Your boughs with bloom be crown'd;
But alas! to Man,
In earth's brief span,
No second Spring comes round!'
The truth is, the imagination derives from Nature precisely what the
former's capacity and quality admit of. As the Laureate said, years ago,
any man may find in bud, or blade, or bloom, a meaning suited to his
mind. Spenser, pondering on the rose and its thorns, and other such
floral combinations, was led to remark that
'Every sweet with sour is tempered still.'
Equally impressed was he by the bounteous ease with which Nature
scatters flowers all over the world. In Barry Cornwall's view, this
facile profusion is Earth's expression of gratitude for the effulgence
of the Sun:
'When on earth he smileth, she bursts forth
In beauty like a bride, and gives him back,
In sweet repayment for his warm bright love,
A world of flowers.'
Beddoes had a quaint and curious fancy that 'when the dead awake or talk
in sleep' the flowers 'hear their thoughts, and write them on their
leaves, for heaven to look on.' Campbell seems to have loved flowers
most for the associations they called up. 'I dote upon you,' he wrote,
in an address to them, 'for ye waft me to summers of old;'
'I love you for lulling me back into dreams
Of the blue Highland mountains and echoing streams.'
And we find another Scotchman, William Anderson, giving utterance to a
similar expression of feeling.
There is a lesson which the flowers have taught to at least two of our
poets, which, though it may have sympathizers, will scarcely find many
practical adherents. It is embodied in a little lyric by Mrs. Webster,
in which that lady, celebrating the beauty of a solitary blossom,
describes how it is seen and gathered, and adds, ironically:
'Why should a flower be fair for its own?
Choose it, pluck it to die.'
But the moral has been pointed even more effectively by the Rev. Gerard
Lewis in some excellent verses. 'A gathered flower,' he says, 'is but a
fading thing':
'Let woman's beauty wear the sterling gold,
The imperishable gem.
They give to her a brightness manifold,
She adds a charm to them.
'But flowers that strew the earth with fragrant grace,
As stars the welkin fill,
Look loveliest, live the longest, in their place;
To pluck them is to kill.'
That is true, and yet the gathering of flowers will go on. And, after
all, what more can a blossom desire than to 'exist beautifully' and
exhale its sweetness, whether it lies hidden by the wayside hedge, or
decks the bosom of a woman as sweet and beautiful as itself?
'DON QUIXOTE' IN ENGLAND.
The announcement that Mr. W. G. Wills had completed his dramatic version
of 'Don Quixote' naturally excited much interest, and no doubt set many
minds at play upon the general subject of the history of 'Don Quixote'
in this country. That the renowned romance has appeared in many prose
translations, from that of Shelton in 1620 to that of Mr. Ormsby only
two or three years ago, is known to most people. It will be remembered
that an early English version was prepared by the nephew of Milton; the
once-famous Peter Motteux made himself responsible for one 'by several
hands'; that by Jarvis, which dates from the middle of last century, has
lately been reproduced by Professor Morley; and then there are those by
Smollett, the novelist, and Mr. A. J. Duffield. There is no lack of
them, any more than there has been of pictorial illustrations. Shelton's
translation, revised by Stevens, was republished with 'cuts' by Coypel.
When Lockhart prefixed his well-known essay to Motteux's version, the
work was accompanied by etchings by De Los Rios. Jarvis's rendering
exercised successively the skill of Westall, Cruickshank, Johannot,
Dore, and Mr. A. B. Houghton; another was illuminated by R. Smirke,
R.A.; and in later years there have been the drawings contributed by Sir
John Gilbert and by Kenny Meadows.
So much for the story as it has been read in English and adorned by
English (and other) artists. But how about Mr. Wills's predecessors? How
about 'Don Quixote's' previous connection with the English stage? Well,
it was scarcely to be expected that so popular a tale would never excite
the attention of the playwright or the musician. Sooner or later,
everything which has vogue finds its way, somehow, to the boards, and
it is a little surprising that seventy-four years should have elapsed,
after the publication of the first English translation, before 'Don
Quixote' received the distinction of dramatization. Was it, indeed, a
distinction? There's the rub. The dramatist was Thomas d'Urfey; and what
could be looked for from that free-speaking worthy? The original is not
without a certain breadth in certain passages, and what Cervantes made
broad D'Urfey might be trusted to make broader. That, again, was only
according to the practice of the day; and if the virtuous Collier
fulminated against the trilogy which D'Urfey wrought out of the epical
extravaganza--if some ladies of the time were found to object to the
coarser humours of Mary the Buxom (a creation on which D'Urfey prided
himself)--there can be no doubt of the success of the venture. The third
of the three plays had not, it seems, quite the acceptability of the
other two, but the author's explanation of its virtual failure--that the
piece was not adequately presented--was possibly, for once, well
founded, and the fact that the third play was produced at all speaks
volumes for the triumphs of its precursors.
A 'Don Quixote'--probably D'Urfey's 'second part'--held the stage, more
or less firmly, till the eighteenth century was well upon its way; and
then there suddenly appeared a rival, in the shape of a farce or
vaudeville by Fielding, entitled 'Don Quixote in England,' and bringing
both the Don and Sancho upon English soil. The author was well aware of
his temerity, and, indeed, apologized for it. The piece, he pleaded, was
'originally writ for his private amusement, as it would, indeed,
have been little less than Quixotism itself to hope any other
fruits from attempting characters wherein the inimitable Cervantes
so far excelled.'
He found it, he says, infinitely more difficult than he imagined to give
his knight an opportunity of displaying himself in a different manner
from that wherein he appears in the romance. However, he was induced to
allow his work to be performed, and then it was seen that he had
brought the Don and Sancho to an English inn, where the landlord,
Guzzle, tries in vain to get the former to pay his bill, and whither
comes one Dorothea Loveland to meet her sweetheart, Fairlove, spending
the interval between her coming and his arrival in persuading the Don
that she is a persecuted princess and that her maid Jezebel is Dulcinea.
Dorothea is promised by her father to one Squire Badger, but the squire
proves to be a sot, and at the Don's especial request the lady and her
lover are united. The piece is by no means without humour, and it would
deserve to live in remembrance if only because it was for 'Don Quixote
in England' that Fielding wrote the song of 'The Roast Beef of Old
England,' which consisted of two verses only until Richard Leveridge
added five more and wrote the music for the whole.
'Don Quixote' has made other appearances on the English boards, but none
of any very great importance. There was an entertainment written in
verse, and 'sung at Marybone Gardens,' for which Dr. Arnold wrote the
music, and in which the Don, Sancho, Nicholas, Teresa, and Maritornes
figure. There was a pantomime at Covent Garden, 'Harlequin and Quixote;
or, The Magic Arm,' for which Reeve composed the melodies, and in which
Harlequin, the son of Inca, carries off Columbine, the daughter of a
Spanish grandee, to whom Don Quixote is affianced. There was, too, a
'ballad-farce' called 'Don Quixote in Barcelona; or, The Beautiful
Moor,' which, however, was never represented; and there were at least
two other efforts of the kind, an 'opera-comedy' and a 'farce-comedy,'
which had the illustrious Sancho for their hero, portraying him in the
character of 'the mock Governor' of Barataria.
It was, no doubt, inevitable that 'Don Quixote,' having been translated
into English prose, should make its appearance also in English verse.
And so it did--early in the eighteenth century--in the form of 'The
Life and Notable Adventures of that Renown'd Knight, Don Quixote de la
Mancha, Merrily translated into Hudibrastick Verse.' Mr. Edward Ward was
the perpetrator of this work, in which various episodes of the original
were reproduced with a vulgarity, not to say a coarseness, not unworthy
of the great D'Urfey himself. The bard was tolerable enough in such
passages as this, descriptive of the knight's appearance:
'The Don himself that rul'd the Roast
(Whose Fame we are about to Boast),
Did by his solid Looks appear
Not much behind his Fiftieth year.
In Stature he was Lean and Tall,
Big Bon'd, and very Strong withall;
Sound Wind and Limb, of healthful Body,
Fresh of Complection, somewhat Ruddy;
Built for a Champion ev'ry way,
But turn'd with Age a little Grey.'
But, as a whole, 'Don Quixote,' as rendered into rhyme by Mr. Ward,
cannot be recommended for general perusal.
There is, however, a 'Quixote' literature apart from 'Don Quixote'
itself. The great romance suggested more than one English counterpart,
such as 'The Spiritual Quixote,' by Richard Graves, and 'The Female
Quixote,' by Mrs. Lennox. The latter, published in the middle of last
century, was devoted to the adventures of one Arabella. Of her we read
that, supposing the fictions of the Scuderi school to be 'real pictures
of life,' 'from them she drew all her notions and expectations.' She
became, in fact, quite a monomaniac upon the subject, and, as a sample,
is for ever expecting that her lover, Glanville, will speak and act like
the heroes of her favourite tales. In the end she throws herself into a
river, gets brain-fever, and is brought back to sanity by a benevolent
divine. Then there is 'The Amiable Quixote; or, The Enthusiasm of
Friendship,' a novel issued later in the century, and having for central
figure a young gentleman named Bruce, who
'found in the slightest acquaintance some virtue or some
recommendation. As soon as the enthusiasm of friendship was
excited, it overwhelmed his discretion and clouded his
perspicacity.'
But this work owed very little to 'Don Quixote'--not more than did
'Tarrataria; or, Don Quixote the Second,' a romantic poetical medley in
two cantos, which appeared in the interval between the two stories just
noticed. Early in this century there was issued, for a short space, a
literary miscellany, called _The Knight Errant_, edited by 'Sir Hercules
Quixote, K.E.,' who, said the prospectus,
'following the example of his illustrious namesake and ancestor of
La Mancha, has, with the assistance of his friends, commenced an
era of Civil Knight Errantry, and zealously devoted himself to the
comforting of distressed Damsels and disconsolate Widows, the
fathering of wronged and destitute Orphans, the promotion of Virtue
and chivalrous feeling generally'--
and so on, and so on. To 'Don Quixote,' in some form or other, there
will, of course, be literary allusions to the end of time.