_
"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 fashion. 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 _Ayrshire 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. Ellwanger, I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, 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 sunshine and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a dank, sodden season, bleak or shivering. '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. Ellwanger 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. Ellwanger 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 hoard,
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 sex 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 sex and in spite of its irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, 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." Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he considers the Odes to be in many respects the most important division of Keats's poetry. "Had Keats," he says, "left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets would be not lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at least the six most famous of them."
These famous six are: (1) 'Psyche,' (2) 'Melancholy,' (3) 'Nightingale,' (4) 'Grecian Urn,' (5) 'Indolence,' (6) 'Autumn'; and Mr. Bridges is not content until he has them arranged in a hierarchy. He draws up a list in order of merit, and in it gives first place--'for its perfection'--to 'Autumn':--
"This is always reckoned among the faultless masterpieces of English poetry; and unless it be objected as a slight blemish that the words 'Think not of them' in the second line of the third stanza are somewhat awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I do not know that any sort of fault can be found in it." But though 'Autumn' (1) is best as a whole, the 'Nightingale' (2) altogether beats it in splendour and intensity of mood; and, after pointing out its defects, Mr. Bridges confesses, "I could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode." Still, it takes second place, and next comes 'Melancholy' (3). "The perception in this ode is profound, and no doubt experienced;" but in spite of its great beauty "it does not hit so hard as one would expect. I do not know whether this is due to a false note towards the end of the second stanza, or to a disagreement between the second and third stanzas." Next in order come 'Psyche' (4) and, disputing place with it, the 'Grecian Urn' (5). 'Indolence' (6) closes the procession; and I dare say few will dispute her title to the last place.
But with these six odes we must rank (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' immortal on account of the famous passage of inimitable beauty descriptive of the Greek poets--
"'Leaving great verse unto a little clan.'"-- And (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.' Of the latter Mr. Sidney Colvin has written:--
"His later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual." With this Mr. Bridges entirely agrees; but adds:--
"It unfortunately halts in the opening, and the first and fourth stanzas especially are unequal to the rest, as is again the third from the end, 'Young Stranger,' which for its matter would with more propriety have been cast into the previous section; and these impoverish the effect, and contain expressions which might put some readers off. If they would begin at the fifth stanza and omit the third from the end, they would find little that is not admirable." Now, for my part, when in book or newspaper I come upon references to Isaiah lxi. 1-3, or Shakespeare, K. Henry IV., Pt. ii., Act 4, Sc. 5, l. 163, or the like, I have to drop my reading at once and hunt them up. So I hope that these references of Mr. Bridges will induce the reader to take his Keats down from the shelf. And I hope further that, having his Keats in hand, the reader will examine these odes again and make out an order for himself, as I propose to do.
Mr. Bridges's order of merit was: (1) 'Autumn,' (2) the 'Nightingale,' (3) 'Melancholy,' (4) 'Psyche,' (5) 'Grecian Urn,' (6) 'Indolence'; leaving us to rank with these (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' and (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.'
Now of 'Autumn,' to which he gives the first place 'for its perfection,' one may remark that Keats did not entitle it an Ode, and the omission may be something more than casual. Certainly its three stanzas seem to me to exhibit very little of that _progression_ of thought and feeling which I take to be one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from an ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to draw: but I suppose that in theory the lyric deals summarily with its theme, whereas the ode treats it in a sustained progressive manner. But sustained treatment is hardly possible within the limits of three stanzas, and I can discover no progression. The first two stanzas elaborate a picture of Autumn; the third suggests a reflection--
"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too--"
And promptly, with a few added strokes, all pictorial, the poet works that reflection into decoration. A sonnet could not well be more summary. In fact, the poem in structure of thought very closely resembles a sonnet; its first two stanzas corresponding to the octave, and its last stanza to the sestett.
This will perhaps be thought very trivial criticism of a poem which most people admit to be, as a piece of writing, all but absolutely flawless. But allowing that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express, I yet doubt if it deserve the place assigned to it by Mr. Bridges. Expression counts for a great deal: but ideas perhaps count for more. And in the value of the ideas expressed I cannot see that 'Autumn' comes near to rivalling the 'Nightingale' (for instance) or 'Melancholy.' The thought that Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither the rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the thought that:
"In the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung."
To test it in another way:--It is perfect, no doubt: but it has not the one thing that now and then in poetry rises (if I may use the paradox) above perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the Odes contain, what I may call the Great Thrill. It nowhere compels that sudden 'silent, upon a peak in Darien' shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 'Nightingale' or before the closing lines of 'Psyche.' Such verse as:
"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn--"
Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy. Such verse links poetry to Love itself--
"Half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire."
The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of 'Psyche.'
Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height--the mere feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves--gives a poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to 'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it takes two to produce this thrill--the reader as well as the poet. And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will assert this of themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,' 'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.
For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'--
"What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"
Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by the three answering ones--
"And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."
--Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought; since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations."
But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.' Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode."
For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision 'of all Olympus's faded hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:
"Too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"
She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some untrodden region of his mind--
"And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!"
The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche' asserts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun (as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair attitude!') at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make a forcible close.
(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed. The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'--the bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the skull of bald Medusa'--in order to make the genuine Melancholy more effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this. Durer _did_ surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he _did_ evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too, that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his delicate figure of:
"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu . . ."--
Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:--
"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."
So prone was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true insight into human passion. The worst trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'--an opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it betrayed him also into occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost rival Leigh Hunt's--
"The two divinest things the world has got--
A lovely woman in a rural spot."
This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which (I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4). And (6) _longo intervallo_ comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly called an altogether inferior performance.
The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes from _Endymion_ may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,' in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.
But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant, more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us celebrate--
LAYING UP THE BOAT. There arrives a day towards the end of October--or with luck we may tide over into November--when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let pass their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell. We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen, our November visitors--bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long; and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be the next spring-tides.
This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence. _Favete linguis!_ The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession. She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and beneath the shears--the abhorred shears--which lift this too out of its step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus. We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as samite--those heavenly wings!--nor felt her gallant spirit straining to beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.
For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld the birth of a goddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the ship was a framework only until the terrible moment when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realise that she had passed from him? Ere the local artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pass from his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmanship, the immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.
She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our gratitude, since the delicate machine:
"Has like a woman given up its joy;" And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance--land left behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean! Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine--I think at times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call? The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd, I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate? She, too, knows the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together. She is seated now on the lee side of the cockpit, her hands folded on the coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia. Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the impassable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her master, or else--Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds, with mischievous harp?
"That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue;
But whether note of joy or knell
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew."
Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god! For indeed you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings--run out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the shore towards which you revert no glance. Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.
"Sails of silk and ropes of sendal,
Such as gleam in ancient lore,
And the singing of the sailor,
And the answer from the shore--"
These shall pass and leave you younger than romance--a child open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch the gannets diving--
"As Noah saw them dive
O'er sunken Ararat."
Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of a kingdom I must pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part of its charm.
Walter Pater, reading the _Odyssey_, was brought up (as we say) 'with a round turn' by a passage wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, and stepped ashore. It filled him with wonder that so simple an incident--nor to say ordinary --could be made so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the credit between the poet and his fortunate age--a time (said he) in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture 'in the great style' against a sky charged with marvels.
You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which I am telling, and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water--you will discover (and with ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater was entirely mistaken, and the credit belongs neither to Homer nor to his fortunate age. For here are woods with woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with fishermen hauling nets; and all these men, as they go about their work, contrive to make pictures 'in the great style' against a sky charged with marvels, obviously without any assistance from Homer, and quite as if nothing had happened for, say, the last three thousand years. That the immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially 'heroic age'--or that, if it have, that age is yours--you will discover by watching your own yachtsman as he moves about lowering foresail and preparing to drop anchor.
It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as Wilson painted--a broad-bosomed flood between deep and tranquil woods, the main banks holding here and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, but opening into creeks where the oaks dip their branches in the high tides, where the stars are glassed all night long without a ripple, and where you may spend whole days with no company but herons and sandpipers. Even by the main river each separate figure--the fisherman on the shore, the ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing between them--moves slowly upon a large landscape, while, permeating all, 'the essential silence cheers and blesses.' After a week at anchor in the heart of this silence Cynthia and I compared notes, and set down the total population at fifty souls; and even so she would have it that I had included the owls. Lo! the next morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke us in our berths, and, raising the flap of our dew-drenched awning, we 'descried at sunrise an emerging prow' of a peculiarly hideous excursion steamboat. She blew no whistle, and we were preparing to laugh at her grotesque temerity when we became aware of a score of boats putting out towards her from the shadowy banks. Like spectres they approached, reached her, and discharged their complements, until at last a hundred and fifty passengers crowded her deck. In silence--or in such silence as a paddle-boat can achieve--she backed, turned, and bore them away: on what festal errand we never discovered. We never saw them return. For aught I know they may never have returned. They raised no cheer; no band accompanied them; they passed without even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes at most the apparition had vanished around the river-bend seawards and out of sight. We stared at the gently heaving water, turned, and caught sight of Euergetes, his head and red cap above the forecastle hatch. (I call our yachtsman Euergetes because it is so unlike his real name that neither he nor his family will recognise it.) "Why, Euergetes," exclaimed Cynthia, "wherever did they all come from?" "I'm sure I can't tell you, ma'am," he answered, "unless 'twas from the woods,"--giving us to picture these ardent holiday-makers roosting all night in the trees while we slumbered. But the odd thing was that the labourers manned the fields that day, the fishermen the beach that evening, in un-diminished numbers. We landed, and could detect no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, though easy, was startling.
I suppose that 'in the great style' could hardly be predicated of our housekeeping on these excursions; and yet it achieves, in our enthusiastic opinion, a primitive elegance not often recaptured by mortals since the passing of the Golden Age. We cook for ourselves, but bring a fine spirit of emulation both to _cuisine_ and service. We dine frugally, but the claret is sound. From the moment when Euergetes awakes us by washing down the deck, and the sound of water rushing through the scuppers calls me forth to discuss the weather with him, method rules the early hours, that we may be free to use the later as we list. First the cockpit beneath the awning must be prepared as a dressing-room for Cynthia; next Euergetes summoned on deck to valet me with the simple bucket. And when I am dressed and tingling from the _douche_, and sit me down on the cabin top, barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and Euergetes has been sent ashore for milk and eggs, bread and clotted cream, there follows a peaceful half-hour until Cynthia flings back a corner of the awning and, emerging, confirms the dawn. Then begins the business, orderly and thorough, of redding up the cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the lower deck, folding away the awning, and transforming the cockpit into a breakfast-room, with table neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has returned, and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red mullet cooking. Cynthia clatters the cups and saucers, while in the well by the cabin door I perform some acquired tricks with the new-laid eggs. There is plenty to be done on board a small boat, but it is all simple enough. Only, you must not let it overtake you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears!
By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, my pipe is lit, and a free day lies before us--
"All the wood to ransack,
All the wave explore."
We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. The nearest railway lies six miles off, and is likely to deposit no one in whom we have the least concern. The woods are deep, we carry our lunch-basket and may roam independent of taverns. If the wind invite, we can hoist our small sail; if not, we can recline and drift and stare at the heavens, or land and bathe, or search in vain for curlews' or kingfishers' nests, or in more energetic moods seek out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine. Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul out of those delectable waters, remote and enchanted as the lake whence the fisherman at the genie's orders drew fish for the young king of the Black Isles. But such days as these require no filling, and why should I teach you how to fill them?
Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, when the awning has been spread once more, and after long hours in the open our world narrows to the circle of the reading-lamp in the cockpit. Our cabin is prepared. Through the open door we see its red curtain warm in the light of the swinging lamp, the beds laid, the white sheets turned back. Still we grudge these moments to sleep. Outside we hear the tide streaming seawards, light airs play beneath the awning, above it rides the host of heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, we have home--larder, cellar, library, tables, and cupboards; life's small appliances with the human comradeship they serve, chosen for their service after severely practical discussion, yet ultimately by the heart's true nesting-instinct. We are isolated, bound even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of chain only. To-morrow we can lift anchor and spread wing; but we carry home with us.
"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night;
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea."
"I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom;
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night."
You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. Will you think it ridiculous that after such royal days of summer, her inconspicuous obsequies have before now put me in mind of Turner's '_Fighting Temeraire_'? I declare, at any rate, that the fault lies not with me, but with our country's painters and poets for providing no work of art nearer to my mood. We English have a great seafaring and a great poetical past. Yet the magic of the sea and shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and for its finest expression we must still turn to an art in which as a race we are less expert, and stand before that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in 'great English national epic as grand as the _Odyssey_' It may be, but as yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest the excursionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language--not even _The Ancient Mariner_--binds as that picture binds, the--
"Mystic spell,
Which none but sailors know or feel,
And none but they can tell--"
If indeed they _can_ tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together in one triumphant moment the emotional effect of noble shipping and a sentiment as ancient and profound as the sea itself--human regret for transitory human glory. The great warship, glimmering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, moving like a queen to execution; the pert and ignoble tug, itself an emblem of the new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow loveliness it supersedes; the sunset hour, closing man's labour; the fading river-reach--you may call these things obvious, but all art's greatest effects are obvious when once genius has discovered them. I should know well enough by this time what is coming when I draw near that picture, and yet my heart never fails to leap with the old wild wonder. There are usually one or two men standing before it--I observe that it affects women less--and I glance at them furtively to see how _they_ take it. If ever I surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe we shall shake hands. And why not? For the moment we are not strangers, but men subdued by the wonder and sadness of our common destiny: "we feel that we are greater than we know." We are two Englishmen, in one moment realising the glories of our blood and state. We are alone together, gazing upon a new Pacific, 'silent, upon a peak in Darien.'
For--and here lies his subtlety--in the very flush of amazement the painter flatters you by whispering that for _you_ has his full meaning been reserved. The _Temeraire_ goes to her doom unattended, twilit, obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle of the river. You alone have eyes for the passing of greatness, and a heart to feel it.
"There's a far bell ringing," But you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day, the end of deeds.
So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jettymen and stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains are shunting, cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes amid clouds of dust. We and we only assist at the passing of a goddess. Euergetes rests on his oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep shadow of the shore, and with a soft grating noise--ah, the eloquence of it!--takes ground. Silently we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm; silently we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over cabintop and well; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November darkness has settled on the river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell committing her--our treasure 'locked up, not lost'--to a winter over which Jove shall reign genially.
"Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera." As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights. She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been awaiting me.
[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:--
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy--whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull." _