On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2)

This is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony, whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manner as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away utterly. "When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that the human wishes, which are summed in that one—"Thy kingdom come"—are vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial.

46. For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim hope of yet once more Eurydice,—the Philomela song—granted after the cruel silence,—the Halcyon song—with its fifteen days of peace, were all sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But the Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to Johnson—accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope—triumphantly and with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed for the glorious discovery of the civilized ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not invented gunpowder?—who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[68 - "Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, and what has given such a superiority to civilized nations over barbarous"! ("Evenings at Home"—fifth evening.) No man can owe more than I both to Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in the substance of what they wisely said, they had been more listened to. Nevertheless, the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting manufacture and industry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are concentrated in "Evenings at Home" and "Harry and Lucy"—being all the while themselves works of real genius, and prophetic of things that have yet to be learned and fulfilled. See for instance the paper, "Things by their Right Names," following the one from which I have just quoted ("The Ship"), and closing the first volume of the old edition of the "Evenings."] There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in which our worships were born. And there is no gospel, but only, whatever we've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And are not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled of, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century song of praise?

47. The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astræa returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious triplet of Amphisbænic ryme, "Ça ira."

Amphisbænic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's precept, "Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye," to the syllable.—Don Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted "Andiam, andiam," become suddenly impersonal and prophetic: It shall go, and you also. A cry—before it is a song, then song and accompaniment together—perfectly done; and the march "towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty thousand—they to the sound of stringed music—preceded by young girls with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldierwise their shovels and picks, and with one throat are singing Ça ira."[69 - Carlyle, "French Revolution" (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p. 70; conf. p. 25, and the Ça ira at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276.]

Through all the springtime of 1790, from Brittany to Burgundy, on most plains of France, under most city walls, there march and constitutionally wheel to the Ça-iraing mood of fife and drum—our clear glancing phalanxes;—the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand, virgin-led, is in the long light of July. Nevertheless, another song is yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers having gone—amphisbænic,—on the 28th of August, 1792, "Dumouriez rode from the camp of Maulde, eastwards to Sedan."[70 - Ibid. iii. 26.]

48. "And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king will beleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in over the northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same night Dumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan. Prussians here, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to Paris and little hindrance—we scattered, helpless here and there—what to advise?" The generals advise retreating, and retreating till Paris be sacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent, dismisses them,—keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent thus, when needful, yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor quality, of a rare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to the fastidious ears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne follows—the cannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris this time, the autumnal hours of fate pass on—ça ira—and on the 6th of November, Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. "Dumouriez wide-winged, they wide-winged—at and around Jemappes, its green heights fringed and maned with red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept back on that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when he rushes up in person, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with clear tenor-pipe, uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand tenor or bass pipes joining, or say some forty thousand in all, for every heart leaps up at the sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody, they rally, they advance, they rush death-defying, and like the fire whirlwind sweep all manner of Austrians from the scene of action." Thus, through the lips of Dumouriez, sings Tyrtæus, Rouget de Lisle.[71 - Carlyle, "French Revolution," iii. 106, the last sentence altered in a word or two.] "Aux armes—marchons." Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe here beginning—in what unthought-of antistrophe returning to that council chamber in Sedan!

49. While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, and danced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our less giddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and of idleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper. Different also themselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord, and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in this main point—that while the Ca ira and Marseillaise were essentially songs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, always songs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On the contrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to the priests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists, of their day;—not without latent cause. For they are all of them, with the most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan and monk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could not but appear to the religious persons around them as respectively and specifically the praisers—Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, and Byron of the devil.

To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having long ago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, and finding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from their native trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather than religious, verses of the school recognized as that of the English Lakes; very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observing the errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tender indignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuable principles of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, and of corresponding depth.[72 - I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our most majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the unfathomable.]

50. I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we must not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes, all the while.

Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in a single exclamation:

"What was the great Parnassus' self to thee,
Mount Skiddaw?"

Answer his question faithfully, and you have the relation between the great masters of the Muse's teaching and the pleasant fingerer of his pastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal.

Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably less shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense of humor: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far as they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted life around him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but do not let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I much doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards; but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who were inferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselves talk.

With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a series of studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country, which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; but they are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways more beautiful than its picture.

51. But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of one of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. "Why do not you go to the nearer church?" I asked. "Don't you like the clergyman?" "Oh no, sir," she answered, "it isn't that; but you know I couldn't leave my mother." "Your mother! she is buried at H– then?" "Yes, sir; and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else."

That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not of Cumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruit for the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been, to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworth had been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people, not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind to the parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson had tilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on the stronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by the spirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered that heaven rymed to seven, and Foy to boy.

52. Tuneful nevertheless at heart, and of the heavenly choir, I gladly and frankly acknowledge him; and our English literature enriched with a new and a singular virtue in the aërial purity and healthful rightness of his quiet song;—but aërial only,—not ethereal; and lowly in its privacy of light.

A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinless creatures and scathless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful at least, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such as may be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children—incurious to see in the hands the print of the Nails.

A gracious and constant mind; as the herbage of its native hills, fragrant and pure;—yet, to the sweep and the shadow, the stress and distress, of the greater souls of men, as the tufted thyme to the laurel wilderness of Tempe,—as the gleaming euphrasy to the dark branches of Dodona.

[I am obliged to defer the main body of this paper to next month,—revises penetrating all too late into my lacustrine seclusion; as chanced also unluckily with the preceding paper, in which the reader will perhaps kindly correct the consequent misprints [now corrected, Ed.], p. 203, l. 23, of "scarcely" to "securely," and p. 206, l. 6, "full," with comma to "fall," without one; noticing besides that "Redgauntlet" has been omitted in the list, pp. 198, 199; and that the reference to note should not be at the word "imagination," p. 198, l. 6, but at the word "trade," l. 15. My dear old friend, Dr. John Brown, sends me, from Jamieson's Dictionary, the following satisfactory end to one of my difficulties:—"Coup the crans." The language is borrowed from the "cran," or trivet on which small pots are placed in cookery, which is sometimes turned with its feet uppermost by an awkward assistant. Thus it signifies to be completely upset.]

    "Abbotsford: April 21, 1817.

"Dear Sir,—Nothing can be more obliging than your attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself." [The sundial had just been erected.] "Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again on the 12th of May. Your former favors (which were weighty as acceptable) have come safely out here, and will be disposed of with great effect."

    "Abbotsford: July 30th.

"I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soon descend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for the niche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche in the Tolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever got a niche out of it on such an occasion. For which I have to thank your kindness, and to remain very much your obliged humble servant,

    "Walter Scott."

    "August 16.

"My Dear Sir,—I trouble you with this [sic] few lines to thank you for the very accurate drawings and measurements of the Tolbooth door, and for your kind promise to attend to my interest and that of Abbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de Lis. Most of our scutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as the house is something after the model of an old hall (not a castle), where such things are well in character." [Alas—Sir Walter, Sir Walter!] "I intend the old lion to predominate over a well which the children have christened the Fountain of the Lions. His present den, however, continues to be the hall at Castle Street."

    "September 5.

"Dear Sir,—I am greatly obliged to you for securing the stone. I am not sure that I will put up the gate quite in the old form, but I would like to secure the means of doing so. The ornamental stones are now put up, and have a very happy effect. If you will have the kindness to let me know when the Tolbooth door comes down, I will send in my carts for the stones; I have an admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself" [he means the wooden one] "will be kept for the new jail; if not, and not otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it. Certainly I hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the celebrated door when in my possession as heretofore."

    "September 8.

"I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also, though I suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time of Porteous-mob.

"I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains of the Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intended possessor."

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

III.[73 - September, 1880.]

[Byron]

"Parching summer hath no warrant
To consume this crystal well;
Rains, that make each brook a torrent,
Neither sully it, nor swell."

53. So was it year by year, among the unthought-of hills. Little Duddon and child Rotha ran clear and glad; and laughed from ledge to pool, and opened from pool to mere, translucent, through endless days of peace.

But eastward, between her orchard plains, Loire locked her embracing dead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale, Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, and their father's house.

Nor unsullied, Tiber; nor unswoln, Arno and Aufidus; and Euroclydon high on Helle's wave; meantime, let our happy piety glorify the garden rocks with snowdrop circlet, and breathe the spirit of Paradise, where life is wise and innocent.

Maps many have we, nowadays clear in display of earth constituent, air current, and ocean tide. Shall we ever engrave the map of meaner research, whose shadings shall content themselves in the task of showing the depth, or drought,—the calm, or trouble, of Human Compassion?

54. For this is indeed all that is noble in the life of Man, and the source of all that is noble in the speech of Man. Had it narrowed itself then, in those days, out of all the world, into this peninsula between Cockermouth and Shap?

Not altogether so; but indeed the Vocal piety seemed conclusively to have retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above Little Langdale. The Unvocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man, may have a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but history disregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorous religion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon, east of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, or by Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets, stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentary addresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise, over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines of Hartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keats discourses of Endymion, Shelley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, and Burger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death—while even Puritan Scotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrels of doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the "unco guid," put but limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinching frankness the Morgante Maggiore.[74 - "It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse for verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and a bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion—and so tell those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy."I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet—but the masquing goes on the same." (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1820.) "A dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except your neighbor's."]

55. Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it, might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of the period—dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible that the dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it were, from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, of angels,—again I say—hesitatingly—is it possible that the goodness of the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr. Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of God, the gift of God, nor the word of God: but that in the much blotted and broken efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves despised,[75 - See quoted infra the mock, by Byron, of himself and all other modern poets, "Juan," canto iii. stanza 80, and compare canto xiv. stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for line.] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the desert found them, and slew.

This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though all her other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair, and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had been able to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line of these, her despised.

56. I take one at mere chance:

"Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?"[76 - "Island," ii. 16, where see context.]

Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, with truth, that its clouds took a sober coloring in consequence of his experiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and our eyes have kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found it difficult to make anyone nowadays believe that such sobriety can be; and that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau. But that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's Immortality instead of dulled by his death,—and, gazing on the sky, look for the day when every eye must gaze also—for behold, He cometh with clouds—this it is no more possible for Christian England to apprehend, however exhorted by her gifted and guid.

57. "But Byron was not thinking of such things!"—He, the reprobate! how should such as he think of Christ?