The smell of grain or tedded grass or kine,
Or daisy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
and the phrase is employed to illustrate the sentiments of a being whose enjoyment of paradise was certainly enhanced by a sufficiently contrasted experience.
I do not wish to pursue the good old moral saws expounded by so many preachers and poets. I am only suggesting a possible ground of apology for one who prefers the ideal mode of rustication; who can share the worthy Johnson's love of Charing Cross, and sympathise with his pathetic remark when enticed into the Highlands by his bear-leader that it is easy 'to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths, and waterfalls.' Some slight basis of experience must doubtless be provided on which to rear any imaginary fabric; and the mental opiate, which stimulates the sweetest reverie, is found in chewing the cud of past recollections, but with a good guide, one requires small external aid. Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's parlour, and bestow crumbs from his groaning table upon three generations of Peppers and Mustards; or to drop into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams. When I lift my eyes to realities, I can dimly descry across the street a vision of my neighbour behind his looking-glass adjusting the parting of his back hair, and achieving triumphs with his white tie calculated to excite the envy of a Brummel. It is pleasant to take down one of the magicians of the shelf, to annihilate my neighbour and his evening parties, and to wander off through quiet country lanes into some sleepy hollow of the past.
Who are the most potent weavers of that delightful magic? Clearly, in the first place, those who have been themselves in contact with rural sights and sounds. The echo of an echo loses all sharpness of definition; our guide may save us the trouble of stumbling through farmyards and across ploughed fields, but he must have gone through it himself till his very voice has a twang of the true country accent. Milton, as Mr. Pattison has lately told us, 'saw nature through books,' and is therefore no trustworthy guide. We feel that he has got a Theocritus in his pocket; that he is using the country to refresh his memories of Spenser, or Chaucer, or Virgil; and, instead of forgetting the existence of books in his company, we shall be painfully abashed if we miss some obvious allusion or fail to identify the passages upon which he has moulded his own descriptions. And, indeed, to put it broadly, the poets are hardly to be trusted in this matter, however fresh and spontaneous may be their song. They don't want to offer us a formal sermon, unless 'they' means Wordsworth; but they have not the less got their little moral to insinuate. Shelley's skylark and Keats's nightingale are equally determined that we shall indulge in meditations about life and death and the mysterious meaning of the universe. That is just what, on these occasions, we want to forget; we want the bird's song, not the emotions which it excites in our abnormally sensitive natures. I can never read without fresh admiration Mr. Arnold's 'Gipsy Scholar,' but in this sense that delightful person is a typical offender. I put myself, at Mr. Arnold's request, in the corner of the high half-reaped field; I see the poppies peeping through the green roots and yellowing stems of the corn; I lazily watch the scholar with 'his hat of antique shape,' roaming the countryside, and becoming the living centre of one bit of true old-fashioned rustic scenery after another; and I feel myself half persuaded to be a gipsy. But then, before I know how or why, I find that I am to be worrying myself about the strange disease of modern life; about 'our brains o'ertaxed and palsied hearts,' and so forth; and instead of being lulled into a delicious dream, I have somehow been entrapped into a meditation upon my incapacity for dreaming. And, more or less, this is the fashion of all poets. You can never be sure that they will let you have your dream out quietly. They must always be bothering you about the state of their souls; and, to say the truth, when they try to be simply descriptive, they are for the most part intolerably dull.
Your poet, of course, is bound to be an interpreter of nature; and nature, for the present purpose, must be regarded as simply a nuisance. The poet, by his own account, is condescending to find words for the inarticulate voices of sea, and sky, and mountain. In reality nature is nothing but the sounding-board which is to give effect to his own valuable observations. It is a general but safe rule that whenever you come across the phrase 'laws of nature,' in an article—especially if it is by a profound philosopher—you may expect a sophistry; and it is still more certain that when you come across nature in a poem you should prepare to receive a sermon. It does not in the least follow that it will be a bad one. It may be exquisite, graceful, edifying, and sublime; but, as a sermon, the more effective the less favourable to the reverie which one desires to cultivate. Nor, be it observed, does it matter whether the prophet be more or less openly and unblushingly didactic. A good many hard things have been said about poor Wordsworth for his delight in sermonising; and though I love Wordsworth with all my heart, I certainly cannot deny that he is capable of becoming a portentous weariness to the flesh. But, for this purpose, Wordsworth is no better and no worse than Byron or Shelley, or Keats or Rousseau, or any of the dealers in praises of 'Weltschmerz,' or mental dyspepsia. Mr. Ruskin has lately told us that in his opinion ninety-nine things out of a hundred are not what they should be, but the very opposite of what they should be. And therefore he sympathises less with Wordsworth than with Byron and Rousseau, and other distinguished representatives of the same agreeable creed. From the present point of view the question is irrelevant. I wish to be for the nonce a poet of nature, not a philosopher, either with a healthy or a disturbed liver, delivering a judicial opinion about nature as a whole or declaring whether I regard it as representing a satisfactory or a thoroughly uncomfortable system. I condemn neither opinion; I will not pronounce Wordsworth's complacency to be simply the glow thrown from his comfortable domestic hearth upon the outside darkness; or Byron's wrath against mankind to be simply the crying of a spoilt child with a digestion ruined by sweetmeats. I do not want to think about it. Preaching, good or bad, from the angelic or diabolical point of view, cunningly hidden away in delicate artistic forms, or dashed ostentatiously in one's face in a shower of moral platitudes, is equally out of place. And, therefore, for the time, I would choose for my guide to the Alps some gentle enthusiast in 'Peaks and Passes,' who tells me in his admirably matter-of-fact spirit what he had for lunch and how many steps he had to cut in the mur de la côte, and catalogues the mountains which he could see as calmly as if he were repeating a schoolboy lesson in geography. I eschew the meditations of Obermann, and do not care in the least whether he got into a more or less maudlin frame of mind about things in general as contemplated from the Col de Janan. I shrink even from the admirable descriptions of Alpine scenery in the 'Modern Painters,' lest I should be launched unawares into ethical or æsthetical speculation. 'A plague of both your houses!' I wish to court entire absence of thought—not even to talk to a graceful gipsy scholar, troubled with aspirations for mysterious knowledge; but rather to the genuine article, such as the excellent Bamfylde Moore Carew, who took to be a gipsy in earnest, and was content to be a thorough loafer, not even a Bohemian in conscious revolt against society, but simply outside of the whole social framework, and accepting his position with as little reflection as some wild animal in a congenial country.
Some kind philosopher professes to put my thoughts into correct phraseology by saying that for such a purpose I require thoroughly 'objective' treatment. I must, however, reject his suggestions, not only because 'objective' and 'subjective' are vile phrases, used for the most part to cover indolence and ambiguity of thought, but also because, if I understand the word rightly, it describes what I do not desire. The only thoroughly objective works with which I am acquainted are those of which Bradshaw's Railway Guide is an accepted type. There are occasions, I will admit, in which such literature is the best help to the imagination. When I read in prosaic black and white that by leaving Euston Square at 10 A.M. I shall reach Windermere at 5.45 P.M., it sometimes helps me to perform an imaginary journey to the lakes even better than a study of Wordsworth's poems. It seems to give a fixed point round which old fancies and memories can crystallise; to supply a useful guarantee that Grasmere and Rydal do in sober earnest belong to the world of realities, and are not mere parts of the decaying phantasmagoria of memory. And I was much pleased the other day to find a complimentary reference in a contemporary essayist to a lively work called, I believe, the 'Shepherd's Guide,' which once beguiled a leisure hour in a lonely inn, and which simply records the distinctive marks put upon the sheep of the district. The sheep, as it proved, was not a mere poetical figment in an idyll, but a real tangible animal, with wool capable of being tarred and ruddled, and eating real grass in real fells and accessible mountain dales. In our childhood, when any old broomstick will serve as well as the wondrous horse of brass
On which the Tartar king did ride,
in the days when a cylinder with four pegs is as good a steed as the finest animal in the Elgin marbles, and when a puddle swarming with tadpoles or a streamlet haunted by water-rats is as full of romance as a jungle full of tigers, the barest catalogue of facts is the most effective. A child is deliciously excited by 'Robinson Crusoe' because De Foe is content to give the naked scaffolding of direct narrative, and leaves his reader to supply the sentiment and romance at pleasure. Who does not fear, on returning to the books which delighted his childhood, that all the fairy-gold should have turned to dead leaves? I remember a story told in some forgotten book of travels, which haunted my dreams, and still strikes me as terribly impressive. I see a traveller benighted by some accident in a nullah where a tiger has already supped upon his companion, and listening to mysterious sounds, as of fiendish laughter, which he is afterwards cruel enough to explain away by some rationalising theory as to gases. How or why the traveller got into or emerged from the scrape, I know not; but some vague association of ferocious wild beasts and wood-demons in ghastly and haunted solitudes has ever since been excited in me by the mention of a nullah. It is as redolent of awful mysteries as the chasm in 'Kubla Khan.' And it is painful to reflect that a nullah may be a commonplace phenomenon in real life; and that the anecdote might possibly affect me no more, could I now read it for the first time, than one of the tremendous adventures recorded by Mr. Kingston or Captain Mayne Reid.
As we become less capable of supplying the magic for ourselves, we require it from our author. He must have the art—the less conscious the better—of placing us at his own point of view. He should, if possible, be something of a 'humourist,' in the old-fashioned sense of the word; not the man who compounds oddities, but the man who is an oddity; the slave, not the master, of his own eccentricities; one absolutely unconscious that the strange twist in his mental vision is not shared by mankind, and capable, therefore, of presenting the fancies dictated by his idiosyncrasy as if they corresponded to obvious and generally recognised realities; and of propounding some quaint and utterly preposterous theory, as though it were a plain deduction from undeniable truths. The modern humourist is the old humourist plus a consciousness of his own eccentricity, and the old humourist is the modern humourist minus that consciousness. The order of his ideas should not (as philosophers would have it) be identical with the order of things, but be determined by odd arbitrary freaks of purely personal association.
This is the kind of originality which we specially demand from an efficient guide to the country; for the country means a region where men have not been ground into the monotony by the friction of our social mill. The secret of his charm lies in the clearness with which he brings before us some quaint, old-fashioned type of existence. He must know and care as little for what passes in the great world of cities and parliaments as the family of Tullivers and Dodsons. His horizon should be limited by the nearest country town, and his politics confined to the disputes between the parson and the Dissenting minister. He should have thoroughly absorbed the characteristic prejudices of the little society in which he lives, till he is unaware that it could ever enter into any one's head to doubt their absolute truth. He should have a share of the peculiarity which is often so pathetic in children—the unhesitating conviction that some little family arrangement is a part of the eternal and immutable system of things—and be as much surprised at discovering an irreverent world outside as the child at the discovery that there are persons who do not consider his papa to be omniscient. That is the temper of mind which should characterise your genuine rustic. As a rule, of course, it condemns him to silence. He has no more reason for supposing that some quaint peculiarity of his little circle will be interesting to the outside world than a frog for imagining that a natural philosopher would be interested by the statement that he was once a tadpole. He takes it for granted that we have all been tadpoles. In the queer, outlying corners of the world where the father goes to bed and is nursed upon the birth of a child (a system which has its attractive side to some persons of that persuasion), the singular custom is so much a matter of course that a village historian would not think of mentioning it. The man is only induced to exhibit his humour to the world when, by some happy piece of fortune, he has started a hobby not sufficiently appreciated by his neighbours. Then it may be that he becomes a prophet, and in his anxiety to recommend his own pet fancy, unconsciously illustrates also the interesting social stratum in which it sprung to life. The hobby, indeed, is too often unattractive. When a self-taught philosopher airs some pet crotchet, and proves, for example, that the legitimate descendants of the lost tribes are to be found amongst the Ojibbeways, he doubtless throws a singular light upon the intellectual peculiarities of his district. But he illustrates chiefly the melancholy truth that a half-taught philosopher may be as dry and as barren as the one who has been smoke-dried according to all the rules of art in the most learned academy of Europe.