Much More Might Be Said Very Easily On This Side; Nevertheless,
I Think I Shall Go On With My Plea
For the small verse-maker
who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a
case
Out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to
extenuate my folly - to say, in the end, that this appears to
be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.
I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of
his poems, the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of
literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some
extent, a matter of association, - and as the story of how this
comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.
In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief
delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find
something about nature in it, especially some expression of
the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case,
inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most
important thing in life. For who could look on earth, water,
sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without
experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In
due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed
books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen
lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me
more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such
subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not
obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas.
There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves
- theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels,
essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was
there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume.
This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana
tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews
her eye to think yon playful kid must die. To my uncultivated
mind - for I had never been at school, and lived in the open
air with the birds and beasts - this seemed intolerably
artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but
kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until
he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite.
Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or
even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a
slight return of that old sensation of nausea. If Shenstone
alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless
have been outlived early in life; but there were many
passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on
the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive. There was
Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate
his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in
my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from
Akenside, who was not "rural." But there were other books in
which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages
which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of
rural sights and sounds.
One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I
discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town,
a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled
German in a long shabby black coat. I remember him well
because he was a very important person to me. It was the
first shop of the kind I had seen - I doubt if there was
another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour
among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped
on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience. The
books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there
were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's
Seasons. I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I
snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding.
It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this
day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is
often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard
to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away
and take it home. If shillings had not been wanted for bread
and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.
Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return
to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow
the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when
I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that
Thomson is no longer read - that he is unreadable.
After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow
in that delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by
the discovery of yet another poem of rural England - the
Farmer's Boy. I was prepared to like it, for although I did
not know anything about the author's early life, the few
passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's and
other old natural history compilations had given me a strong
desire to read the whole poem. I certainly did like it - this
quiet description in verse of a green spot in England, my
spiritual country which so far as I knew I was never destined
to see; and that I continue to like it is, as I have said, the
reason of my being in this place.
While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances
of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made
it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in
England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am
at the same time convinced that this is not the sole reason
for my regard.
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