Book: Dreamthorp

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Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and
elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that
melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf
brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys
the beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_
fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the
beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.

Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant emotion is mixed and
deepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have never
encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices
in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply
because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A
mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping
child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it
more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red
cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled
in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. All
great joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexity
and the deepness of its reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enough
from a single key, but the richest music is that in which the whole
force of the instrument is employed, in the production of which every
key is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestic
tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. Pleasures which rise
beyond the mere gratification of the senses are dependant for their
exquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which they
evoke. And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can
include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning
pathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or
less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the
arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place
to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap
for it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly.
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. Into our
commonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan
from the airy void into the ordinary village lake; and just as the
swan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts itself on its wings
and betakes itself to the void again, _it_ leaves us, and our sole
possession is its memory. And it is characteristic of pleasure that we
can never recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone. Happiness
never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse
of its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. From
the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has
been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its
echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.
And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment there
lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which past
happiness dwells is always a regretful memory. This is why the tritest
utterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has always
about it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects.
In the wake of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour. The
finest set of verses of our modern time describes how the poet gazed on
the "happy autumn fields," and remembered the "days that were no more."
After all, a man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is
he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, and
attains thereby a certain picturesqueness. The grim thought stands in
the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thought
of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young man
cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as
the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The
young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just
as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The
most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably
comfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he has
little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his
heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death
as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of
it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine.
In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most
pretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does
the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a
reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the
magnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and
while undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his "Lara," as he
informs us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes in
whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who then
affected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felt
his richest wines powdered with the dust of graves,--of which wine,
notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him,--wrote,

"That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least."

The sleep referred to being death. This was meant to take away the
reader's breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself to
his pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with this
Shakspeare's far out-looking and thought-heavy lines--lines which,
under the same image, represent death--

"To die--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream;--ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come!"

And you see at once how a man's notions of death and dying are deepened
by a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little as
youth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart to
poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or to
stick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure
from the irrelevancy.

The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out of
a great battle. Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seems
to have been charmed. And knowing how it fared with his
friends--perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down,
silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimation
of the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will accept
of it, the day after--a man, as he draws near middle age, begins to
suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in
a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he
anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the
colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out
toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt
to be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is the
pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow of
delight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-plucked
flowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance
of nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occupies a post, and is
in discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illness
and convalescence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be a cruel
interruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person is
harassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength. He
is placed _hors de combat_; all the while he is conscious that the
battle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal a
misfortune. Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced,
he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention
which sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, and
accept them as before as compensation in full. The world is ever with
him; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself in
an intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and a
fatal issue--which in such cases is ever on the cards--would destroy
all these, and bring about more serious matters than the shedding of
tears. In a man's earlier illnesses, too, he had not only no such
definite future to work out, he had a stronger spring of life and hope;
he was rich in time, and could wait; and lying in his chamber now, he
cannot help remembering that, as Mr. Thackeray expresses it, there
comes at last an illness to which there may be no convalescence. What
if that illness be already come? And so there is nothing left for him,
but to bear the rod with patience, and to exercise a humble faith in
the Ruler of all. If he recovers, some half-dozen people will be made
happy; if he does not recover, the same number of people will be made
miserable for a little while, and, during the next two or three days,
acquaintances will meet in the street--"You've heard of poor So-and-so?
Very sudden! Who would have thought it? Expect to meet you at ----'s
on Thursday. Good-bye." And so to the end. Your death and my death
are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be
stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts
close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although
we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are
near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss
us much either.

We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed sayings; we wish to know
how the matter stands; how the whole thing looks to the dying.
Unhappily--perhaps, on the whole, happily--we can gather no information
from these. The dying are nearly as reticent as the dead. The
inferences we draw from the circumstances of death, the pallor, the
sob, the glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. Manfred
exclaims, "Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!" Sterling wrote
Carlyle "that it was all very strange, yet not so strange as it seemed
to the lookers on." And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The world
has lasted six thousand years now, and, with the exception of those at
present alive, the millions who have breathed upon it--splendid
emperors, horny-fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought has
never stirred--_have_ died, and what they have done, we also shall be
able to do. It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our
fears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we
shall be as wise as they--and as taciturn.


[1] Montaigne.

[2] Bacon.




WILLIAM DUNBAR

If it be assumed that the North Briton is, to an appreciable extent, a
different creature from the Englishman, the assumption is not likely to
provoke dispute. No one will deny us the prominence of our cheek-bones,
and our pride in the same. How far the difference extends, whether it
involves merit or demerit, are questions not now sought to be settled.
Nor is it important to discover how the difference arose; how far chiller
climate and sourer soil, centuries of unequal yet not inglorious
conflict, a separate race of kings, a body of separate traditions, and a
peculiar crisis of reformation issuing in peculiar forms of religious
worship, confirmed and strengthened the national idiosyncrasy. If a
difference between the races be allowed, it is sufficient for the present
purpose. _That_ allowed, and Scot and Southern being fecund in literary
genius, it becomes an interesting inquiry to what extent the great
literary men of the one race have influenced the great literary men of
the other. On the whole, perhaps, the two races may fairly cry quits.
Not unfrequently, indeed, have literary influences arisen in the north
and travelled southwards. There were the Scottish ballads, for instance,
there was Burns, there was Sir Walter Scott, there is Mr. Carlyle. The
literary influence represented by each of these arose in Scotland, and
has either passed or is passing "in music out of sight" in England. The
energy of the northern wave has rolled into the southern waters. On the
other hand, we can mark the literary influences travelling from the south
northward. The English Chaucer rises, and the current of his influence
is long afterwards visible in the Scottish King James, and the Scottish
poet Dunbar. That which was Prior and Gay in London, became Allan Ramsay
when it reached Edinburgh. Inspiration, not unfrequently, has travelled,
like summer, from the south northwards; just as, when the day is over,
and the lamps are lighted in London, the radiance of the setting sun is
lingering on the splintered peaks and rosy friths of the Hebrides. All
this, however, is a matter of the past; literary influence can no longer
be expected to travel leisurely from south to north, or from north to
south. In times of literary activity, as at the beginning of the present
century, the atmosphere of passion or speculation envelop the entire
island, and Scottish and English writers simultaneously draw from it what
their peculiar natures prompt--just as in the same garden the rose drinks
crimson and the convolvulus azure from the superincumbent air.

Chaucer must always remain a name in British literary history. He
appeared at a time when the Saxon and Norman races had become fused, and
when ancient bitternesses were lost in the proud title of Englishman. He
was the first great poet the island produced; and he wrote for the most
part in the language of the people, with just the slightest infusion of
the courtlier Norman element, which gives to his writings something of
the high-bred air that the short upper-lip gives to the human
countenance. In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the
Provencal Troubadours, and in his "Flower and the Leaf," and other works
of a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinal
virtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautiful
ladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held beneath the
spreading elm, and metaphysical goldfinches and nightingales, perched
among the branches green, wrangle melodiously about the tender passion.
In these poems he is fresh, charming, fanciful as the spring-time itself:
ever picturesque, ever musical, and with a homely touch and stroke of
irony here and there, suggesting a depth of serious matter in him which
it needed years only to develop. He lived in a brilliant and stirring
time; he was connected with the court; he served in armies; he visited
the Continent; and, although a silent man, he carried with him, wherever
he went, and into whatever company he was thrown, the most observant eyes
perhaps that ever looked curiously out upon the world. There was nothing
too mean or too trivial for his regard. After parting with a man, one
fancies that he knew every line and wrinkle of his face, had marked the
travel-stains on his boots, and had counted the slashes of his doublet.
And so it was that, after mixing in kings' courts, and sitting with
friars in taverns, and talking with people on country roads, and
travelling in France and Italy, and making himself master of the
literature, science, and theology of his time, and when perhaps touched
with misfortune and sorrow, he came to see the depth of interest that
resides in actual life,--that the rudest clown even, with his sordid
humours and coarse speech, is intrinsically more valuable than a whole
forest full of goddesses, or innumerable processions of cardinal virtues,
however well mounted and splendidly attired. It was in some such mood of
mind that Chaucer penned those unparalleled pictures of contemporary life
that delight yet, after five centuries have come and gone. It is
difficult to define Chaucer's charm. He does not indulge in fine
sentiment; he has no bravura passages; he is ever master of himself and
of his subject. The light upon his page is the light of common day.
Although powerful delineations of passion may be found in his "Tales,"
and wonderful descriptions of nature, and although certain of the
passages relating to Constance and Griselda in their deep distresses are
unrivalled in tenderness, neither passion, nor natural description, nor
pathos, are his striking characteristics. It is his shrewdness, his
conciseness, his ever-present humour, his frequent irony, and his short,
homely line--effective as the play of the short Roman sword--which
strikes the reader most. In the "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales"--by
far the ripest thing he has done--he seems to be writing the easiest,
most idiomatic prose, but it is poetry all the while. He is a poet of
natural manner, dealing with out-door life. Perhaps, on the whole, the
writer who most resembles him--superficial differences apart--is
Fielding. In both there is constant shrewdness and common-sense, a
constant feeling of the comic side of things, a moral instinct which
escapes in irony, never in denunciation or fanaticism; no remarkable
spirituality of feeling, an acceptance of the world as a pleasant enough
place, provided good dinners and a sufficiency of cash are to be had, and
that healthy relish for fact and reality, and scorn of humbug of all
kinds, especially of that particular phase of it which makes one appear
better than one is, which--for want of a better term--we are accustomed
to call _English_. Chaucer was a Conservative in all his feelings; he
liked to poke his fun at the clergy, but he was not of the stuff of which
martyrs are made. He loved good eating and drinking, and studious
leisure and peace; and although in his ordinary moods shrewd, and
observant, and satirical, his higher genius would now and then splendidly
assert itself--and behold the tournament at Athens, where kings are
combatants and Emily the prize; or the little boat, containing the
brain-bewildered Constance and her child, wandering hither and thither on
the friendly sea.

Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had,
both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, no
one of them can be compared with him for a moment. The "Moral Gower" was
his friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkle
of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve and
Lydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names are
retained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found a
place in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour,
who although deficient in tenderness and imagination, deserves praise for
his sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. "The Bruce" is really a
fine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas is
a very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poetic
fire in him. He rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, and he
fights the battle of Bannockburn over again with great valour, shouting,
and flapping of standards. In England, nature seemed to have exhausted
herself in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas
Wyatt came, the immediate precursors of Spenser, Shakspeare, and their
companions.

While in England the note of the nightingale suddenly ceased, to be
succeeded by the mere chirping of the barn-door sparrows, the divine and
melancholy voice began to be heard further north. It was during that
most barren period of English poetry--extending from Chaucer's death till
the beginning of Elizabeth's reign--that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly,
splendidly--to be matched only by that other uprising nearer our own
time, equally unexpected and splendid, of Burns and Scott. And it is
curious to notice in this brilliant outburst of northern genius how much
is owing to Chaucer; the cast of language is identical, the literary form
is the same, there is the same way of looking at nature, the same
allegorical forests, the troops of ladies, the same processions of
cardinal virtues. James I., whose long captivity in England made him
acquainted with Chaucer's works was the leader of the poetic movement
which culminated in Dunbar, and died away in Sir David Lindsay just
before the noise and turmoil of the Reformation set in. In the
concluding stanza of the "Quair," James records his obligation to those--

"Masters dear,
Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate
Of retorick, while they were livand here,
Superlative as poets laureate
Of morality and eloquence ornate."

But while, during the reigns of the Jameses, Scottish genius was being
acted upon by the broader and deeper genius of England, Scotland, quite
unconsciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full of all
spiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure nooks and corners, the
Scottish ballads were growing up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules,
rude in structure and expression, yet, at the same time, full of
vitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of rustic festivals,
and the piteousness of domestic tragedies. The stormy feudal time out of
which they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, but they remained,
made brighter by each succeeding summer, like the wildflowers that blow
in the chinks of ruins. And when English poetry had become artificial
and cold, the lucubrations of forgotten Scottish minstrels, full of the
touches that make the whole world kin, brought new life with them.
Scotland had invaded England more than once, but the blue bonnets never
went over the border so triumphantly as when they did so in the shape of
songs and ballads.

James IV., if not the wisest, was certainly the most brilliant monarch of
his name; and he was fortunate beyond the later Stuarts in this, that
during his lifetime no new popular tide had set in which it behooved him
to oppose or to float upon. For him in all its essentials to-day had
flowed quietly out of yesterday, and he lived unperplexed by fear of
change. With something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a merrier
monarch than his dark-featured and saturnine descendant who bore the
appellation. He was fond of martial sports, he loved to glitter at
tournaments, his court was crowded with singing men and singing women.
Yet he had his gloomy moods and superstitious despondencies. He could
not forget that he had appeared in arms against his father; even while he
whispered in the ear of beauty the iron belt of penance was fretting his
side, and he alternated the splendid revel with the cell of the monk. In
these days, and for long after, the Borders were disturbed, and the
Highland clans, setting royal authority at defiance, were throttling each
other in their mists. The Catholic religion was yet unsapped, and the
wealth of the country resided in the hands of the nobles and the
churchmen. Edinburgh towered high on the ridge between Holyrood and the
Castle, its streets reddened with feud at intervals, and its merchants
clustering round the Cathedral of St. Giles like bees in a honeycomb; and
the king, when he looked across the faint azure of the Forth, beheld the
long coast of Fife dotted with little towns, where ships were moored that
traded with France and Holland, and brought with them cargoes of silk and
wines. James was a popular monarch; he was beloved by the nobles and by
the people. He loved justice, he cultivated his marine, and he built the
_Great Michael_--the _Great Eastern_ of that day. He had valiant seamen,
and more than once Barton sailed into Leith with a string of English
prizes. When he fell with all his nobility at Flodden, there came upon
Scotland the woe with which she was so familiar--

"Woe to that realme that haith an ower young king."


A long regency followed; disturbing elements of religion entered into the
life of the nation, and the historical stream which had flowed smoothly
for a series of years became all at once convulsed and turbulent, as if
it had entered upon a gorge of rapids. It was in this pleasant
interregnum of the reign of the fourth James, when ancient disorders had
to a certain extent been repressed, and when religious difficulties ahead
were yet undreamed of, that the poet Dunbar flourished--a nightingale
singing in a sunny lull of the Scottish historical storm.

Modern readers are acquainted with Dunbar chiefly through the medium of
Mr. David Laing's beautiful edition of his works published in 1834, and
by good Dr. Irving's intelligent and admirable compacted "History of
Scottish Poetry," published the other day. Irving's work, if deficient
somewhat in fluency and grace of style, is characterised by
conscientiousness of statement and by the ripest knowledge. Yet, despite
the researches of these competent writers, of the events of the poet's
life not much is known. He was born about 1460, and from an unquotable
allusion in one of his poems, he is supposed to have been a native of the
Lothians. His name occurs in the register of the University of St.
Andrews as a Bachelor of Arts. With the exception of these entries in
the college register, there is nothing authentically known of his early
life. We have no portrait of him, and cannot by that means decipher him.
We do not know with certainty from what family he sprang. Beyond what
light his poems may throw on them, we have no knowledge of his habits and
personal tastes. He exists for the most part in rumour, and the vague
shadows of things. It appears that in early life he became a friar of
the order of St. Francis; and in the capacity of a travelling priest
tells us that "he preached in Derntown kirk and in Canterbury;" that he
"passed at Dover across the Channel, and went through Picardy teaching
the people." He does not seem to have taken kindly to his profession.
His works are full of sarcastic allusions to the clergy, and in no
measured terms he denounces their luxury, their worldly-mindedness, and
their desire for high place and fat livings. Yet these denunciations
have no very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a disappointed
candidate, rather than of a prophet; and, to the last, he seems to have
expected preferment in the Church. Not without a certain pathos he
writes, when he had become familiar with disappointment, and the sickness
of hope deferred--

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