One likes to recall the impression which the purity of this charming book made upon the German Goethe. Fifty years after Goethe had read it—or rather after Herder read to him a translation of the Vicar of Wakefield while he was a law-student at Strasburg—the old poet mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthy influence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of his mental development; and yesterday while reading the just published Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle I found a pleasant pendant to this testimony of Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of the rugged old man in which he describes the far outlook and new wisdom which he managed to conquer from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, after many repulsions.
"Schiller done, I began Wilhelm Meister, a task I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the element, and even of the language, still was. Two years before I had at length, after some repulsion, got into the heart of Wilhelm Meister, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where, for many years, or in my whole life before, have I read such a book?' Which I was now, really in part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translating for my countrymen, if they would read it—as a select few of them have ever since kept doing."
Of the difference between the moral effect of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and the classical works just mentioned I need not waste your time in speaking. No great work in the English novel appears until we reach Scott whose Waverley astonished the world in 1814; and during the intervening period from this book to the Vicar of Wakefield perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentioned in so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of Miss Burney, Evelina and Cecilia, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Caleb Williams of William Godwin—with which he believed he was making an epoch because it was a novel without love as a motive—Miss Edgeworth's moral tales and the quiet and elegant narratives of Jane Austen.
But I cannot help mentioning here a book which occurs during this period, and which attaches itself by the oddest imaginable ties to what was said in a previous lecture, of The Novel, as the true meeting-ground where the poetic imagination and the scientific imagination come together and incorporate themselves. Now, to make the true novel—the work which takes all the miscellaneous products of scientific observation and carries them up into a higher plane and incarnates them into the characters (as we call them) of a book, and makes them living flesh and blood like ourselves—to effect this, there must be a true incorporation and merger of the scientific and poetic faculties into one: it is not sufficient if they work side by side like two horses abreast, they must work like a man and wife with one soul; or to change the figure, their union must not be mechanical, it must be chemical, producing a thing better than either alone; or to change the figure again, the union must be like that which Browning has noticed as existing among the ingredients of a musical chord, when, as he says, out of three tones, we make not a fourth, but a star.
Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty, and the poetic faculty—and no weak faculties either—working along together, not merged, not chemically united, not lighting up matter like a star,—with the result, as seems to me, of producing the very drollest earnest book in our language. It is The Loves of the Plants, by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, to our own grave and patient Charles Darwin. The Loves of the Plants is practically a series of little novels in which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetable world. Linnæus had announced the sexuality of plants, and so had made this idea a principle of classification, the one-stamen class, Monandria, two stamen class, Diandria, etc., etc. Now all this the diligent and truly loving Doctor framed into poetry, and poetry which so far as technical execution goes is quite as good as the very best of the Pope school which it follows. Here are a few specimens of the poem:
"Descend, ye hovering sylphs! aërial quires,
And sweep with little hands your silver lyres;
With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings,
Ye Gnomes! accordant to the tinkling strings:
While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed
Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead;—
From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark,
To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark,
What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their vegetable Loves.
"First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow
Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow;
The virtuous pair, in milder regions born,
Dread the rude blast of Autumn's icy morn;
Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest,
And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast!"
Here, however, a serious case presents itself; in Canna there was one stamen to one pistil, and this was comfortable; but in the next flower he happened to reach—the Genista or Wild Broom—there were ten stamens to one pistil; that is, ten lovers to one lady; but the intrepid Doctor carries it through, all the same, managing the whole point simply by airy swiftness of treatment:
"Sweet blooms Genista[A] in the myrtle shade,
And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid."