Read Ebook: The Treasure Trail by Pollock Frank Lillie Gowing Louis D Illustrator

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Ebook has 1441 lines and 80689 words, and 29 pages

And there behold a bloomy mead, A silver stream, a willow shade, Beneath the shade a fisher stand, Who, with the angle in his hand, Swings the nibbling fry to land.

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main, , Sees on the naked hill, or valley low, The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast assembly moving to and fro; Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show.

Many who are familiar with this simile have never been at the pains to remember, or enquire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appearance in the poem is almost startling, as if it were there for no purpose but to prophesy of the coming glories of English poetry. The visitors to the Castle of Indolence are met at the gate by the porter, who supplies them with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to take their ease. They then stroll off to various parts of the spacious grounds, and their disappearance is the occasion for this wonderful verse. Thomson cared no more than his readers for the application of the figure; what possessed him was his memory of the magic twilight on the west coast of Scotland.

Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades; Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Equal your varied wonders! save This difference we see, One would no other painter have-- No other would have thee.

From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Burlington. He helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid, St. Augustine's cave , the Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves, persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his neighbors. "In time," says Johnson, "his expenses brought clamours about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies."

The chief of Kent's successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called "Capability Brown" from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis--"It has capabilities; it has capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture,--"Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me." He certainly imposed himself upon his own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. Brown," said Richard Owen Cambridge, "I very earnestly wish that I may die before you." "Why so?" said Brown with some surprise. "Because," said he, "I should like to see Heaven before you had improved it." Among the romantic writers who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford.

The dignities of plain occurrence then Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.

But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him--

I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever.

Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur teaching did leave its mark on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from Wordsworth's early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey, the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands--these were the favored places of the apostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places in our poetic history.

All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced Romantic. He has two descriptions of the Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs on the occasion of Raphael's entry, and merely resumes the earlier and fuller account:

Their glittering tents they passed, and now is come Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe, And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme; A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature here Wantoned as in her prime and plaid at will Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss.

"It occurred to me that this must be another commissary fraud, but when I tried to move the case it seemed heavy as lead. I poked my arm down into the grass and rummaged around. At last I struck something hard and square down near the middle, but it didn't feel like a meat tin. I worked it out, and lit a match. It was a gold brick, and it must have weighed ten pounds."

"Solid, real gold?" cried Elliott, with a sudden memory of Salt Lake.

"The real thing. It didn't take me long to gut that box, and I dug out nineteen more bricks, nearly fifty thousand dollars' worth, I reckoned. No wonder it was heavy. Then I looked over the rest of the cases, and they all looked just alike, and there were twenty-three of them, so I figured up that there must be considerably over a million in those boxes."

"Stolen from the Pretoria treasury!" Elliott exclaimed.

"I believe it was, but what made you think of that?"

"Never mind; I'll tell you later. Go on."

The weaker side of modern Romance, the play-acting and pretence that has always accompanied it, may be seen in the gardening mania. It was not enough to be a country gentleman; the position must be improved by the added elegances of a hermit's cell and an Egyptian pyramid. It is like children's play; the day is long, the affairs of our elders are tedious, we are tired of a life in which there is no danger and no hunger; let us pretend that we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature imagination interprets the facts; this kind of imagination escapes from the facts into a world of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause and effect is no longer felt. It is not a hard word to call it childish; the imagination of these early Romantics had a child's weakness and a child's delightful confidence and zest.

Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, Where thro' some western window the pale moon Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp, Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green Invests some wasted tow'r. . . . Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close, Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam The dying embers scatter, far remote From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd roof Resound with festive echo, let me sit, Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . . O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought! O come with saintly look, and steadfast step, From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew, Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son.

Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand With thee lead a buxom band; Bring fantastic-footed Joy, With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy: Leisure, that through the balmy sky Chases a crimson butterfly. Bring Health, that loves in early dawn To meet the milk-maid on the lawn; Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace, Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess!

It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Perhaps no verses in English were ever made so exactly in the approved fashion of modern Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his cento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing comes of it. His work suggests the doubt whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient Rome.

The strange thing about the Romantic Revival is that an epidemic of this sort of imitation at last produced real poetry and real romance. The industrious simulation of the emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is there not a story told of a young officer who, having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly to the professional? That, at any rate, is very much what happened to the Romantic impersonators.

Another parallel may perhaps be found in the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. Take, for instance, the question of manners. Politeness is a codification of the impulses of a heart that is moved by good will and consideration for others. If the impulses are not there, the politeness is so far unreal and insincere--a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they imitated.

These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern civilization. Its most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University, were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly from himself.

The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy." He was a boy at the time of England's greatest naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the forest, says Keats,

He would swear, for all his oaks Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas.

His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.

So with this earthly paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea, Where tossed about all hearts of men must be, Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay, Not the poor singer of an empty day.

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty.

And this power cannot be won by those who shirk the challenge of ugly facts.

O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty.

As if to enforce his thought by repetition, Keats made an allegorical framework for his revised version of the poem. There he exhibits himself as wandering among the delights of the garden of this life, and indulging himself to the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the temple of fame. He is told he must climb or die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to the top, and has speech there with a veiled figure, who tells him that this temple is all that has been spared in the war between the rival houses of the Gods. When he asks why he has been saved from death, the veiled figure makes reply:

In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself. A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning- fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect--the discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry.

Footnotes:

"Comoro, Mohilla, Mayotta, St. Lazarus Bank," read Hawke, under his breath. "It must be one of these."

"Glorioso, Farquahar!" murmured Hawke. "They surely couldn't have run so far out of their course as that. St. Lazarus is my choice, and, if I'm right, we'll make it St. Dives."

"We don't know enough yet to make this any use," said Henninger, suddenly. "Let's get out."

The sight of the map and its hundreds of miles of islands and seas did in fact bring the problem into concrete reality, and forcibly emphasized the difficulties. They all felt somewhat downcast and vaguely disappointed, but, as they were going down the steps, Elliott had an inspiration.

"It occurs to me," he said, "that if anybody escaped in the boats, they must have been picked up somewhere at sea. In that case, the fact is likely to be reported in some newspaper, isn't it?"

The papers were bound up by months, and each man took a volume and sat down to run through the shipping news. Elliott finished his without finding anything, and obtained another file. He was half through this when Hawke tiptoed over to him.

"Here's where Bennett appears," he whispered.

There was nothing new in this, but it seemed somehow encouraging, and while Elliott was reading it, Henninger came over to them. His eyes were sparkling, and he looked as if holding some strong emotion in check. He laid down his file before them, and put his finger on a paragraph, dated more than a fortnight earlier than the despatch from Sydney.

"Bombay, March 19.

"We've got a line on it at last," he said, when they were in the open air, and there was a keen eagerness in his usually impassive voice.

"It's clear that the mate was saved, but it don't help us to find the island, so far as I can see," Hawke objected.

"Oh, the island--confound it!" as they came into the crowds of Church Street. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk." And he shut his mouth and did not open it again till they were placed comfortably in a small German caf?, which happened to be almost empty.

"You don't seem to understand," he then resumed. "The mate lied,--said the ship sunk in deep water, didn't he? He told the same story as Bennett. Why? For the same reason. He must have known the bullion was there, after all. He took chances on being the only survivor of the wreck, and he wanted to choke off any inquiry. There's never any search for a wreck that goes down in a hundred fathoms."

"But there were other survivors," said Elliott. "There were others in that boat with him when Bennett saw them sailing away. That must have been the mate's boat, and what became of the others?"

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