Part 24
Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth time to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pronounce it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that it was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. “Unglung!” said he, “who ever heard of such a name?—anglang, angerlang—_that_ can’t be the name of your country; you are playing with us.” Then he tried to give a convincing illustration. “My country is Wanumbai—anybody can say Wanumbai. I’m an orang-Wanumbai; but N-glung! who ever heard of such a name? Do tell us the real name of your country, and when you are gone we shall know how to talk about you.” To this luminous argument and remonstrance I could oppose nothing but assertion, and the whole party remained firmly convinced that I was for some reason or other deceiving them.
A. R. WALLACE (_The Malay Archipelago_).
* * * * *
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
LONGFELLOW (_Tales of a Wayside Inn_).
This was written in 1863, but ten years earlier Alexander Smith, in “A Life Drama,” had written:
We twain have met like the ships upon the sea, Who hold an hour’s converse, so short, so sweet; One little hour! and then away they speed On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam, To meet no more.
Other writers have also used the same simile. See next poem.
* * * * *
QUA CURSUM VENTUS
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay With canvas drooping, side by side, Two towers of sail at dawn of day Are scarce long leagues apart descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so—but why the tale reveal Of those, whom year by year unchanged, Brief absence joined anew to feel Astounded, soul from soul estranged?
At dead of night their sails were filled, And onward each rejoicing steered— Ah, neither blame, for neither willed, Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!
To veer, how vain! On, onward strain, Brave barks! In light, in darkness too, Through winds and tides one compass guides— To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze! and O great seas, Though ne’er, that earliest parting past, On your wide plain they join again, Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where’er they fare,— O bounding breeze, O rushing seas! At last, at last, unite them there!
A. H. CLOUGH.
Two friends, who through absence have become “soul from soul estranged,” are compared to two ships, which unconsciously draw apart during the night and must continue a diverging course; but, being both bound for the same port, will at the end of their life-voyage be re-united.
* * * * *
Speak to Him thou, for He hears—and Spirit with Spirit can meet— Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
TENNYSON (_The Higher Pantheism_).
Tennyson, here and elsewhere (see, for example, the king’s beautiful speech in “The Passing of Arthur”) urges us to _prayer_, and adds his belief in a personal intercourse with an ever-present and loving God. Innumerable men of the highest character during nineteen centuries have testified to the same direct communion with the Almighty.
* * * * *
A third in sugar with unscriptural hand Traffics and builds a lasting house on sand.
ALFRED AUSTIN (_The Golden Age_).
* * * * *
Thou canst not in life’s city Rule thy course as in a cell: There are others, all thy brothers, Who have work to do as well.
Some events that mar thy purpose May light _them_ upon their way; Our sun-shining in declining Gives earth’s other side the day.
R. A. VAUGHAN (_Hours with the Mystics_).
* * * * *
My little craft sails not alone; A thousand fleets from every zone Are out upon a thousand seas; And what for me were favouring breeze Might dash another, with the shock Of doom, upon some hidden rock. And so I do not dare to pray For winds to waft me on my way.
CATHERINE ATHERTON MASON.
* * * * *
A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin’s lining: rumple the one, you rumple the other.
STERNE (_Tristram Shandy_).
* * * * *
Il (Boucher) trouvait la nature trop verte et mal éclairée. Et son ami, Lancret, le peintre des salons à la mode, lui répondait: “Je suis de votre sentiment, la nature manque d’harmonie et de séduction.”
(He, Boucher, found nature too green and badly lit. And his friend, Lancret, the fashionable painter of the day, replied to him, “I am of your opinion, nature is wanting in harmony and seductiveness.”)
CHARLES BLANC.
See following quotation.
* * * * *
If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show ... either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. Nothing is more remarkable than the general conception of the country merely as a series of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime scenery. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of the age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_, in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which might not as well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
JOHN RUSKIN (_Architecture and Painting_).
* * * * *
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”
CHARLES DICKENS (_David Copperfield_).
* * * * *
And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams Call to the soul, when man doth sleep, So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, And into glory peep.
HENRY VAUGHAN (_Friends Departed_).
This is Vision.
* * * * *
... The trial-test Appointed to all flesh at some one stage Of soul’s achievement—when the strong man doubts His strength, the good man whether goodness be, The artist in the dark seeks, fails to find Vocation, and the saint forswears his shrine.
R. BROWNING (_The Inn Album_).
* * * * *
I sits with my toes in a brook; If anyone asks me for why, I hits him a rap with my crook— ’Tis sentiment kills me, says I.
HORACE WALPOLE.
This was written in a game of _bouts rimés_ (rhymed ends). Four lines had to be composed ending with “brook,” “why,” “crook,” “I.”
* * * * *
Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west. And I said in underbreath,—all our life is mixed with death, And who knoweth which is best?
Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west, And I smiled to think God’s greatness flowed around our incompleteness— Round our restlessness, His rest.
E. B. BROWNING (_Rhyme of the Duchess May_).
* * * * *
I go to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send his hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time!
R. BROWNING (_Paracelsus_).
Referring to Bryant’s poem, “To a Waterfowl”:—
He who from zone to zone Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright.
* * * * *
Souvent femme varie, Bien fol est qui s’y fie!
(Woman is very fickle, Great fool he who trusts in her!)
VICTOR HUGO (_Le Roi s’amuse_).
In the play Francis I (1494-1547) enters singing these lines. (Francis wrote on the walls of the royal apartments at Chambord _Toute femme varie_, “Every woman is fickle.”) One finds this never-ending theme of poets and cynics in Virgil’s _Varium et mutabile semper Femina_, “Woman is a fickle and changeable thing” (_Aeneid_ iv, 569), _La donna è mobile_ (_Rigoletto_), and countless other passages.
* * * * *
Crowned with flowers I saw fair Amaryllis By Thyrsis sit, hard by a fount of Chrystal, And with her hand more white than snow or lilies, On sand she wrote “My faith shall be immortal”: And suddenly a storm of wind and weather Blew all her faith and sand away together.
ANON.
* * * * *
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and infirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, Than women’s are.
_Twelfth Night_, II, 4.
* * * * *
If Thou be’st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights Till Age snow white hairs on thee; Thou, when thou return’st, will tell me All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear No where Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find’st one, let me know: Such a pilgrimage were sweet. Yet do not; I would not go, Though at next door we might meet. Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two or three.
JOHN DONNE (_Song_).
* * * * *
In his broken fashion Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs and great people generally were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides it was very convenient on an excursion—much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks. Upon occasion a chief would call his attendant, and desire him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree—perhaps in some damp marshy place.
HERMAN MELVILLE (_Moby Dick_).
* * * * *
Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde: Hae mercy o’ my soul, Lord God; As I wad do, were I Lord God, And ye were Martin Elginbrodde.
G. MACDONALD (_David Elginbrod_).
* * * * *
Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.
(God will pardon me; that is His business.)
HEINE.
* * * * *
O Lord, it broke my heart to see his pain! I thought—I dared to think—if _I_ were God, Poor Caird should never gang so dark a road; I thought—ay, dared to think, the Lord forgie!— The Lord was crueller than I could be; Forgetting God is just and knoweth best What folk should burn in fire, what folk be blest.
R. BUCHANAN (_A Scottish Eclogue_).
* * * * *
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA.
Thoughts and tears as I turn away, Tears for a long ago: She looks out on a summer day, I on a night of snow. But I see some ferns and a rushing rill And my love that promised me, And a day we spent on God’s great hill On the other side of the sea, My heart, On the other side of the sea.
Ay! the hill was green and the sky was blue, And the path was dappled fair, But a light from loving eyes shone through Beyond the sunlight there. And I gave my life—and who’s to blame?— As over the hill went we: But the sky and the hill and the way we came Are the other side of the sea, Sad heart, Are the other side of the sea....
’Mid trees and grass and a tangled wall We wandered merrily down, Through the homeless boughs and the forest fall Of the dead leaves thick and brown. But faith is broken and life is pain And oh! it can never be That I gather those golden hours again On the other side of the sea, Poor heart, On the other side of the sea.
Though the sea is wild and the sea is dark, It will sink and slip away At the bounding scorn of my speeding bark To the land of that dear day; But never the Love of my soul be seen, The light of that day to me, For I know there is lying our hearts between A wilder and darker sea, O God! The depth of a bitterer sea.
RICHARD HODGSON.
This was written in March, 1879, after Hodgson had left Australia for England. The love-episode is imaginary.
* * * * *
They eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod, And go to church on Sunday; And many are afraid of God— And more of Mrs. Grundy.
F. LOCKER-LAMPSON (_The Jester’s Plea_).
* * * * *
Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.
SHELLEY (_Hellas_).
It is very true that the amazing intellectual power of the Greeks in a primitive age ensures them an immortality of fame; and this is finely expressed _in the last two lines_. But those two splendid lines are utterly spoilt by the two that precede them. One asks, Why “Greece _and_ her foundations”? One does not say “a house _and_ its foundations” are built somewhere or other. This by itself would be trivial, but next comes the question, What is the meaning of the second line? We know what Shelley intended—that the memory and influence of Greece will withstand its destruction by war—but why in that case should she not be built _above_, instead of submerged _below_ the tide of war? Later on, in lines 836-7, the Emperor Palæologus, at the siege of Constantinople, is said to have cast himself “_beneath_ the stream of war”; that is to say, he was overwhelmed and killed. The words, in fact, do not express the poet’s meaning. The third and fatal defect of the lines is the juxtaposition of “tide” and “sea” —the city is _built below a tide_, and also _based on a sea_. Not only is this combination absurd in itself, but it also destroys the beauty of the last two magnificent lines. The moving unstable water is scarcely a foundation to build upon, yet this meaning is forcibly impressed upon the word “sea” by the previous mention of a “tide.” What Shelley meant was an immense broad, deep, expanse of _solid crystal_—the “sea of glass like unto crystal” of Revelations (iv, 6) and the _Mer de Glace_ (“sea of ice”), the great Alpine glacier.[34] Therefore, anyone who had exactness of thought or perception of poetry would omit the first two lines and give only the last two as a quotation.
Mrs. Shelley in her note on “Hellas” specially refers to this verse as a beautiful example of Shelley’s style, and she quotes _all four_ lines. We may assume, therefore, that Shelley himself thought highly of the verse, and we thus have an illustration of the curious fact that a great poet is often a poor judge of his own poetry. (Almost certainly Shakespeare himself did not realize how god-like he stood above all other poets.) However, it is not only for this reason that I have included the above quotation, but because with it I propose to make a flank attack upon Mr. R. W. Livingstone, the author of _The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us_. I do this, of course, with a special object in view.
Mr. Livingstone’s book is important, valuable, and highly interesting—and is especially admirable because the author does not envelope his subject in the usual glamour, born of enthusiasm. He is, indeed, most exceptional in this respect, that he endeavours to look at the Greeks from an ordinary commonsense point of view. But he makes the mistake, not unusual with classical men, of supposing that he is a qualified critic of poetry; and he, therefore, gives us a special dissertation upon the comparative values of English and Greek poetry.
Apart from this dissertation, he quotes three or four passages from English poets in the course of the book. Of these the most prominent is the above verse of Shelley’s, and he quotes _all four_ lines without comment. Thus we see an able man, in whom classical study should have induced exactness of thought, failing to analyse and understand what he is quoting. But, more than this, the question is one of poetic perception. The imagery in the last _two_ lines is sublime—in the _four_ lines it is ludicrous. Therefore, we begin with the fact that our literary critic was unable to see palpable and grave defects in one of the few verses he himself quotes. (I might give other illustrations, as where he admires poor verse of Dryden’s, but I must be brief.)
Mr. Livingstone’s point is that the “direct” and “truthful” character of Greek poetry is superior to the “imaginative” quality of English verse. He goes so far as to say that “Sappho and Simonides _with four words_ make him see a nightingale and give him a greater and far saner pleasure” than Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark.” I take his quotation from Simonides, as it involves less discussion than that from Sappho.[35] It is (Fr, 73) ἀὴδονες πολυκώτιλοι χλωραύχενες εἰαριναί, “The warbling nightingales with olive necks, the birds of spring.”
As Mr. Livingstone is not discussing beauty of expression we can leave this out of consideration.[36] He is discussing the _substance_ of poetry, comparing the “directness” and “truthfulness” of Simonides (in this case) with the imaginative element in Shelley’s poem. He would apparently discard the latter element altogether, and prefers a simple description of the nightingale—that it sings, has an olive neck, and appears in spring. The first suggestion that occurs to one is that if, say, an auctioneer’s catalogue of farm stock—without any addition whatever to its contents—could be worded prettily and made metrical, it would afford huge enjoyment to our literary critic.
The whole question is as to the value of the imaginative element which to our minds makes Shelley’s poem one of the most beautiful lyrics—possibly the most beautiful—in all literature. In sweeping away this element, Mr. Livingstone tells us how much of English poetry must be cast aside. But he does not realize that much else has also to be flung on the scrap-heap. Imagination, in its true sense, includes all those aesthetic, moral, and spiritual faculties which are higher than the intellect—all, in fact, that raises man above his material existence. (See pp. 39, 40, 358.) With the immense deal of English poetry which Mr. Livingstone proposes to “scrap” must go all our most beautiful music, all that is great in painting (which is never “direct” and “truthful” in this sense, or it would not be great), _all Greek statuary_, and all that expresses high moral and spiritual truths in our literature. I do not think that Mr. Livingstone will find many adherents to his new creed.
This critic also discusses _style_, and we find that he speaks of Pope as a “great poet,” and apparently revels in his monotonous verse! When pointing out that English verse, unlike what we have left of Greek poetry, includes much unequal and ill-finished work, he says, “Of all our great poets, perhaps only Milton and Pope can boast unfailing excellence of style.”
As regards this inequality in the work of English poets the answer is very simple. Mr. Livingstone forgets the fact—a very important fact in any speculation upon the scheme of the universe—that only the good things ultimately survive. How very little we have left of many Greek poets! Of Sophocles only seven plays remain out of one hundred and twenty-seven, _and the Fragments collected are said to be very poor_ (many, of course, are only grammatical illustrations)—and more than half of Homer must have been dropped. We probably still have everything that is _best_ in Greek literature. Again, it is not in fact _desirable_ to restrict publication to work of the highest importance, and the facilities afforded by printing have made it _unnecessary_ thus to restrict it—so that even _My Commonplace Book_ is now, at least temporarily, part of English literature!
Greatly as I admire Mr. Livingstone’s book, I feel bound to call attention to a view of poetry that must do great harm to University students and others. I am also bound to mention him as an illustration of the fact that classical men usually imagine that their study of the Greek and Latin languages and literature qualifies them to become literary critics.[37] This fact has impressed itself upon me from youth upwards. One of my teachers, a man of some weight in the classical world, was in the habit of saying that only through study of Latin and Greek could a man learn to write good English![38] His own English was simply execrable.