From a Cornish Window Part 25

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting; So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.

Tell the gra.s.sy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.'

"And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but you will wrestle through them in the hope of hearing that voice again, or even an echo of it.

"'Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day of the Daughter of Hades,'

'The Empty Purse,' 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phoebus with Admetus'--you come back to each again and again, compelled by the wizardry of single lines and by a certain separate glamour which hangs about each of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in its own way a superb performance; lines here and there so haunt you with their beauty that you must go back and read the whole poem over for the sake of them. Other lines you boggle over, and yet cannot forget them; you hope to like them better at the next reading; you re-read, and wish them away, yet find them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your memory that you cannot do without them. Take, for instance, the last stanza of 'Phoebus with Admetus':--

"'You with sh.e.l.ly horns, rams! and promontory goats, You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!

Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flas.h.i.+ng coats!

Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!

You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays, You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent; He has been our fellow, the morning of our days; Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.'

"The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable was the glorious third line: almost as soon 'promontory goats' fastened itself on memory; and almost as soon the last two lines were perceived to be excellent, and the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them, to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely and almost fantastically expressed. Having once pa.s.sed it in, I find 'You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate l.a.b.i.al pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to admit, it has become one of the best liked, I am forced in fairness to ask myself if hundreds of lines of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or fantastic may not justify themselves after many readings.

"The greatest mistake, at all events, is to suppose him ignorant or careless of the persuasiveness which lies in technical skill; though we can hardly be surprised that he has not escaped a charge which was freely brought against Browning, than whom, perhaps, no single poet was ever more untiring in technical experiment. Every poem of Browning's is an experiment--sometimes successful, sometimes not--in wedding sense with metre; and so is every poem of Mr. Meredith's (he has even attempted galliambics), though he cannot emulate Browning's range. But he, too, has had his amazing successes--in the long, swooping lines of 'Love in the Valley':--

"'Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, Swift as the swallow along the river's light, Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.'

"--In the 'Young Princess,' the stanzas of which are a din of nightingales' voices; in 'The Woods of Westermain' and 'The Nuptials of Attila,' where the ear awaits the burthen, as the sense awaits the horror, of the song, and the poet holds back both, increasing the painful expectancy; or in the hammered measure of 'Phoebus with Admetus'--a real triumph. Of each of these metres you have to admit at once that it is strange and arresting, and that you cannot conceive the poem written in any other. And, as I have said, their very asperities tend, with repet.i.tion, to pa.s.s into beauties.

"But, in the end, he is remembered best for his philosophy, as the poet who tells us to have courage and trust in nature, that thereby we may attain whatever heaven may be. 'Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or Lo, there! for behold the kingdom of heaven is within you'--yes, and h.e.l.l, too, Mr. Meredith wants us:--

"'In tragic life, G.o.d wot, No villain need be! Pa.s.sions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.'

"So, again, in 'The Woods of Westermain,' we are warned that the worst betrayal for man lies in the cowardice of his own soul:--

"'But have care.

In yourself may lurk the trap.'

"Are you at heart a poltroon or a palterer, cruel, dull, envious, full of hate? Then Nature, the mother of the strong and generous, will have no pity, but will turn and rend you with claws. 'Trust her with your whole heart,' says Mr. Meredith, 'and go forward courageously until you follow:"

"'Where never was track On the path trod of all.'

"The fight is an enn.o.bling one, when all is said: rejoice in it, because our children shall use the victory.

"'Take stripes or chains; Grip at thy standard reviled.

And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?

Our spoken in protest remains.

A younger generation reaps.'"

FROM A CORNISH WINDOW, _Thursday, Sept. 2nd_.

"Hoist up sail while gale doth last. . . ."

I do not call this very sound advice: but we followed it, and that is the reason why I am able to send off my monthly packet from the old address.

Also it came very near to being a reason why I had no letter to send. The wind blew as obstinately as ever on the Tuesday morning; but this time we arranged our start more carefully, and beat out over the bar in comparatively smooth water. The seas outside were not at all smooth, but a Newlyn-built boat does not make much account of mere seas, and soon after midday we dropped anchor in Plymouth Cattewater, and went ash.o.r.e for our letters.

We were sworn to reach home next day, and somehow we forgot to study the barometer, which was doing its best to warn us. The weather was dirtier than ever and the wind harder. But we had grown accustomed to this: and persuaded ourselves that, once outside of the Rame, we could make a pretty fetch of it for home and cover the distance at our best speed--which indeed we did. But I confess that as we pa.s.sed beyond the breakwater, and met the Plymouth trawlers running back for shelter, I began to wonder rather uneasily how the barometer might be behaving, and even dallied with the resolution to go below and see. We were well dressed down, however-- double-reefed mainsail, reefed mizzen, foresail and storm jib--and after our beating at Salcombe none of us felt inclined to raise the question of putting back. There was nothing to hurt, as yet: the boat was shaking off the water like a duck, and making capital weather of it; we told each other that once beyond the Rame, with the sea on our quarter, we should do handsomely. And the gale--the newspapers called it a hurricane, but it was merely a gale--waited patiently until we were committed to it. Half an hour later we took in the mizzen, and, soon after, the foresail: and even so, and close-hauled, were abreast of Looe Island just forty-seven minutes after pa.s.sing the Rame--nine miles. For a 28-ton cruiser this will be allowed to be fair going. For my own part I could have wished it faster: not from any desire to break 'records,' but because, should anything happen to our gear, we were uncomfortably close to a lee-sh.o.r.e, and the best behaved of boats could not stand up against the incessant sh.o.r.eward thrust of the big seas crossing us. Also, to make matters worse, the sh.o.r.e itself now and then vanished in the 'dirt.' On the whole, therefore, it was not too soon for us that we opened the harbour and:

"Saw on Palatinus The white porch of our home,"

Though these were three or four times hidden from us by the seas over which we toppled through the harbour's mouth and into quiet water.

While the sails were stowing I climbed down the ladder and sat in front of the barometer, and wondered how I should like this sort of thing if I had to go through it often, for my living.

OCTOBER.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. . . ."

I have been planting a perennial border in the garden and consulting, with serious damage to the temper, a number of the garden-books now in fas.h.i.+on. When a man drives at practice--when he desires to know precisely at what season, in what soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon lilies, to decide between _Ayrs.h.i.+re Ruga_ and _Fellenberg_ for the pillar that requires a red rose, to fix the right proportion of sand and leaf-mould to suit his carnations--when 'his only plot' is to plant the bergamot--he resents being fobbed off with prattle:--

"My squills make a brave show this morning, and the little petticoated Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower rock-garden (surely Narcissus ought to have been a girl!) begins to 'take the winds of March with beauty.' I am expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will benefit the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower before Billy comes home from school," etc.

But the other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellw.a.n.ger, I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellw.a.n.ger, a great American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the still air and suns.h.i.+ne and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a dank, sodden season, bleak or s.h.i.+vering. 'The sugar and scarlet maple, the dogwood and sumac, are wanting to impart their warmth of colour; and St. Martin's summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence' comparable with that of the Indian summer over there. The Virginia creeper which reddens our Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an importation of no very long standing--old enough to be accepted as a feature of the place, not yet old enough to be inseparably connected with it in song.

Yet--

"Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most universally admired. This might almost answer to our own fall of the leaf, and is far less sombre than many apostrophes to the season that occur throughout English verse."

From this Mr. Ellw.a.n.ger proceeds to compare Keats's with the wonderful 'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the magnificent opening:--

"I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . . ."

I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing the two odes until Mr.

Ellw.a.n.ger invited me. He notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds throughout Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, that the two poets were contemplating two different stages of autumn. Keats, more sensuous, dwells on the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close 'on the birth of trembling winter': he sings more austerely of November's desolation:--

"Where is the pride of Summer--the green prime-- The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling,--and one upon the old oak tree!

Where is the Dryad's immortality?

Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew, Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through In the smooth holly's green eternity.

"The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished h.o.a.rd, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.

Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . . ."

The last image involves a change of s.e.x in personified Autumn: an awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be excused, Hood's lines excuse it:--

"O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded Under the languid downfall of her hair; She wears a coronal of flowers faded Upon her forehead, and a face of care; There is enough of wither'd everywhere To make her bower,--and enough of gloom. . . ."

In spite of its ambiguity of s.e.x and in spite of its irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellw.a.n.ger, more force of poetry in Hood's ode than in Keats's; and this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore to find that Mr. Bridges, in his already famous Essay on Keats, ranks 'Autumn' as the very best of all Keats's Odes.

Now whether one agrees with him or not, there is no loose talk in Mr.

Bridges's criticism. He tells us precisely why he prefers this poem to that other: and such definiteness in critical writing is not only useful in itself but perhaps the severest test of a critic's quality. No task can well be harder than to take a poem, a stanza, or a line, to decide "Just here lies the strength, the charm; or just here the looseness, the defect." In any but the strongest hands these methods ensure mere niggling ingenuity, in which all appreciation of the broader purposes of the author--of Aristotle's 'universal'--disappears, while the critic reveals himself as an industrious pick-thank person concerned with matters of slight and secondary importance. But if well conducted such criticism has a particular value. As Mr. Bridges says:--

"If my criticism should seem sometimes harsh, that is, I believe, due to its being given in plain terms, a manner which I prefer, because by obliging the writer to say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes easier to point out, and in this way the true business of criticism may be advanced; nor do I know that, in a work of this sort, criticism has any better function than to discriminate between the faults and merits of the best art: for it commonly happens, when any great artist comes to be generally admired, that his faults, being graced by his excellences, are confounded with them in the popular judgment, and being easy of imitation, are the points of his work which are most liable to be copied."