We who read are very far from wishing for anything more. With the Ettrick Shepherd, we are fain to remember that old tunes, and old songs, and well-worn fancies are best fitted for so simple and so ancient a theme:—
“A’ the world has been in love at ae time or ither o’ its life, and kens best hoo to express its ain passion. What see you ever in love-sangs that’s at a’ new? Never ae single word. It’s just the same thing over again, like a vernal shower patterin’ amang the buddin’ words. But let the lines come sweetly, and saftly, and a wee wildly too, frae the lips of Genius, and they shall delight a’ mankind, and womankind too, without ever wearyin’ them, whether they be said or sung. But try to be original, to keep aff a’ that ever has been said afore, for fear o’ plagiarism, or in ambition o’ originality, and your poem ’ill be like a bit o’ ice that you hae taken into your mouth unawares for a lump o’ white sugar.”
Burns’s unrivaled songs come the nearest, perhaps, to realizing this charming bit of description; and the Shepherd, anticipating Schopenhauer’s philosophy of love, is quite as prompt as Burns to declare its promise sweeter than its fulfillment:—
“Love is a soft, bright, balmy, tender, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which nature offers us in mockery, during a’ the rest o’ our lives, the puir, paltry, pitiful, fusionless, faded, cauldrified, and chittering substitute, Truth!”
This is not precisely the way in which we suffer ourselves nowadays to talk about truth, but a few generations back, people still cherished a healthy predilection for the comfortable delusions of life. Mingling with the music of the sweet old love-songs, lurking amid their passionate protestations, there is always a subtle sense of insecurity, a good-humored desire to enjoy the present, and not peer too closely into the perilous uncertainties of the future. Their very exaggerations, the quaint and extravagant conceits which offend our more exacting taste, are part of this general determination to be wisely blind to the ill-bred obtrusiveness of facts. Accordingly there is no staying the hand of an Elizabethan poet, or of his successor under the Restoration, when either undertakes to sing his lady’s praises. Sun, moon, and skies bend down to do her homage, and to acknowledge their own comparative dimness.
“Stars, indeed, fair creatures be,”
admits Wither indulgently, and pearls and rubies are not without their merits; but when the beauty of Arete dawns upon him, all things else seem dull and vapid by her side. Nay, his poetry, even, is born of her complaisance, his talents are fostered by her smiles, he gains distinction only as her favor may permit.
“I no skill in numbers had,
More than every shepherd’s lad,
Till she taught me strains that were
Pleasing to her gentle ear.
Her fair splendour and her worth
From obscureness drew me forth.
And, because I had no muse,
She herself deigned to infuse
All the skill by which I climb
To these praises in my rhyme.”
Donne, the most ardent of lovers and the most crabbed of poets, who united a great devotion to his fond and faithful wife with a remarkably poor opinion of her sex in general, pushed his adulations to the extreme verge of absurdity. We find him writing to a lady sick of a fever that she cannot die because all creation would perish with her,—
“The whole world vapours in thy breath.”