ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
SÖREN KIERKEGAARD.
Remembered are in some ways lovelier than actual goddesses; the recollection of loosened girdles more intoxicating than the act of loosening. It is just because they come to us wild with regret, just because we feel them to be a death in life, that memories take on their unearthly quality of sunset richness.
The mind purifies the experiences with which it is stored, composes and informs the chaos. Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.
There was a boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands,
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
The boy is spoken of in the third person, and is said to have died before he was twelve. But I like to think that this is a poetic fiction, and that it was really little William himself who stood there at the lake’s edge, hooting and hooting with the indefatigable persistence of childhood, while the yet more persistent, because even less grown-up, owls hallooed and screamed their answer: hoot! halloo! hoot, hoot, halloo!—while the echoes bounced back and forth from wall to wall of the mountains—hour after hour; boy communing with bird and both profoundly, indescribably happy; happy with the deep mindless happiness of living creatures rejoicing in their life; hour after hour, until either some infuriated adult came out with a stick to stop the din, or else, in a silence, as Wordsworth has described, the child was suddenly made aware again of his forgotten self-consciousness, his momentarily obliterated mind and, along with these, of the outer world and of its strangeness. And the shock, I believe, was a shock of more than mild surprise. It was of some obscure and nameless terror.
O litus vita mihi dulcius, O mare! felix cui licet ad terras ire subinde meas!
O formosa dies! hoc quondam rure solebam Naiadas alterna sollicitare manu!
Hic fontis lacus est, illic sinus egerit algas; haec statio est tacitis fida cupidinibus.
Pervixi: neque enim fortuna malignior unquam eripiet nobis quod prior hora dedit.
PETRONIUS ARBITER.
I am always rather astonished when I find that Romans liked their country homes, went swimming in the sea and remembered their boyhood with pleasure. That is the result of a liberal education. After ten years among the best classical authors, the English schoolboy emerges with a firm conviction of the radical non-humanity of Greeks and Romans. Even now I receive a sudden, pleasurable shock each time I make the discovery that they were, after all, real people. Petronius seems rather realer than most, for the good reason that one never read him at school.
Pervixi . . . The last couplet rumbles with a noble music.
I have lived; nor shall maligner fortune ever
Take from me what an earlier hour once gave.
But sometimes, alas, do we not wish that it would take away our memory along with our happiness?
Ed ella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria: e ciò sa il tuo dottore.”
Tired Memory
The stony rock of death’s insensibility
Welled yet awhile with honey of thy love
And then was dry;
Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,
Nor all thy kind long letters, nor the band
Which really spanned
Thy body chaste and warm,
Thenceforward move
Upon the stony rock their wearied charm.
At last, then, thou wast dead.
Yet would I not despair,
But wrought my daily task, and daily said
Many and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,
To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm.
In vain.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
England
O England, full of sin, but most of sloth!
Spit out thy phlegm and fill thy breast with glory.
Thy gentry bleats, as if thy native cloth
Transfused a sheepishness into thy story;
Not that they all are so, but that the most
Are gone to grass and in the pasture lost.
GEORGE HERBERT.
Accurate and prophetic poet! The gentry still bleats. With how refined and tremulous a note! A baaing, not of adult ewes and rams, but of lammikins. In Herbert’s time the sheep were at least full grown. But then the native cloth was still the genuine woollen. To-day it is mostly viscose and acetate. Peter Pan came in with artificial silk, his revolting uncles, the Cheerybles, with Roberts’ Self-Acting Mule. Infantilism would seem to be a direct product of industrialism.
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began
That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes and furious lust begot
Between a painted Briton and a Scot;
Whose gendering offspring quickly learnt to bow
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough;
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name nor nation, speech or fame;
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infused between a Saxon and a Dane;
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Received all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.
DANIEL DEFOE.
Excellent Nordic propaganda! Defoe was, at moments, a first-rate satirical poet. It is possible to pick out from “The True-Born Englishman” a number of admirably witty lines. Witness these on Charles ii.
The royal refugee our breed restores
With foreign courtiers and with foreign whores,
And carefully repeoples us again,
Throughout the lazy, long, lascivious reign,
With such a blest and true-born English fry
As much illustrates our nobility. . . .
Six bastard dukes survive his luscious reign,
The labours of Italian Castlemaine,
French Portsmouth, Tabby Scot and Cambrian.
But the good lines lie deeply buried in a great mass of rubbish. Like so many of even our best poets, Defoe had very little artistic conscience.
We have offended, Oh my countrymen,
We have offended very grievously,
And been most tyrannous. From East to West
A groan of accusation pierces Heaven!
The wretched plead against us; multitudes
Countless and vehement, the sons of God,
Our brethren. Like a cloud that travels on,
Steamed up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence,
Even so, my countrymen, have we gone forth
And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs,
And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint,
With slow perdition murders the whole man,
His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home,
All individual dignity and power
Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions,
Associations and Societies,
A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild,
One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery,
We have drunk up, demure as at a grace,
Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
The modern conscience is inclined to endorse Coleridge’s judgment rather than Kipling’s. Hence the present policy in India, hence the white ruler’s new and altogether humaner attitude towards the African, the Dyak, the Melanesian.
He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire.
And when, at eight years old, Lob-lie-by-the-fire
Came in my books, this was the man I saw.
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-Idleness;
And, while he walked from Exeter to Leeds
One April, called all cuckoo-flowers Milkmaids.
For reasons of his own, to him the wren
Is Jenny Pooter. Before all other men
’Twas he first called the Hog’s Back the Hog’s Back.
That Mother Dunch’s Buttocks should not lack
Their name was his care. He too could explain
Totteridge and Totterdown and Juggler’s Lane;
He knows if any one. Why Tumbling Bay
Inland in Kent is called so he might say.
EDWARD THOMAS.
Progress
The first and riper world of men and skill
Yields to our later world for three inventions;
Miraculously we write, we sail, we kill,
As neither ancient scroll nor story mentions.
The first hath opened learnings old concealed
And obscure arts restorèd to the light;
The second hidden countries hath revealed,
And sent Christ’s Gospel to each living wight.
These we commend; but oh, what needeth more,
To teach Death more skill than he had before!
THOMAS BASTARD.
Progress is a very recent invention. In the age of Thomas Bastard, which was also, incidentally, the age of Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare, men believed that the race was in a state of chronic decay. In spite of printing, the compass and gunpowder, the earlier was considered the riper world. Those who actually lived through what we have learnt to regard as one of the most brilliant and progressive epochs of all history regarded themselves as men of the decadence. We, on the contrary, regard ourselves as men of the dawn and the threshold, an army in advance, not in retreat. It remains to be seen what the judgment of future historians will be.
Abstraction
Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning meal!
The poor wretch who has learned his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeats,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no meaning and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound:
As if the fibres of this
