The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864
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But I must not forget that I have brought him into my wet-day galaxy as
a farmer. His energy, his promptitude, his habits of thrift, would have
made him one of the best of farmers. His book on gardening is even now
one of the most instructive that can be placed in the hands of a
beginner. He ignores physiology and botany, indeed; he makes crude
errors on this score; but he had an intuitive sense of the right method
of teaching. He is plain and clear, to a comma. He knows what needs to
be told; and he tells it straightforwardly. There is no better model for
agricultural writers than "Cobbett on Gardening." There is no miserable
waste of words,--no indirectness of talk; what he thinks, he prints.
His "Cottage Economy," too, is a book which every small landholder in
America should own; there is a sterling merit in it which will not be
outlived. He made a great mistake, it is true, in insisting that
Indian-corn could be grown successfully in England. But being a man who
did not yield to influences of climate himself, he did not mean that his
crops should; and if he had been rich enough, I believe that he would
have covered his farm with a glass roof, rather than yield his
conclusion that Indian-corn could be grown successfully under a British
sky.
A great, impracticable, earnest, headstrong man, the like of whom does
not appear a half-dozen times in a century. Being self-educated, he was
possessed, like nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a
self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affecting to teach
grammar, he was ignorant of all the etymology of the language; knowing
no word of botany, he classified plants by the "fearings" of his
turnip-field. He was vain to the last degree; he thought his books were
the best books in the world, and that everybody should read them. He was
industrious, restless, captious, and, although humane at heart, was the
most malignant slanderer of his time. He called a political antagonist a
"pimp," and thought a crushing argument lay in the word; he called
parsons scoundrels, and bade his boys be regular at church.
In June, 1835, while the Parliament was in session, he grew ill,--talked
feebly about politics and farming, (to his household,) "wished for 'four
days' rain' for the Cobbett corn," and on Wednesday, (16th June,)
desired to be carried around the farm, and criticized the work that had
been done,--grew feeble as evening drew on, and an hour after midnight
leaned back heavily in his chair, and died.
* * * * *
I must give a paragraph, at least, to the Rev. James Grahame, the good
Scotch parson, were it only because he wrote a poem called "British
Georgics." They are not so good as Virgil's; nor did he ever think it
himself. In fact, he published his best poem anonymously, and so
furtively that even his wife took up an early copy, which she found one
day upon her table, and, charmed with its pleasant description of
Scottish braes and burn-sides, said, "Ah! Jemmy, if ye could only mak' a
book like this!" And I will venture to say that "Jemmy" never had rarer
or pleasanter praise.
Shall we read a little, and test the worth of good Mistress Grahame's
judgment? It is a bit of the parson's walk in "The Sabbath":--
"Now, when the downward sun has left the glens,
Each mountain's rugged lineaments are traced
Upon the adverse slope, where stalks gigantic
The shepherd's shadow thrown athwart the chasm,
As on the topmost ridge he homeward hies.
How deep the hush! the torrent's channel, dry,
Presents a stony steep, the echo's haunt.
But hark a plaintive sound floating along!
'Tis from yon heath-roofed shieling; now it dies
Away, now rises full; it is the song
Which He who listens to the hallelujahs
Of choiring seraphim delights to hear;
It is the music of the heart, the voice
Of venerable age, of guileless youth,
In kindly circle seated on the ground
Before their wicker door."
Crabbe, who was as keen an observer of rural scenes, had a much better
faculty of verse; indeed, he had a faculty of language so large that it
carried him beyond the real drift of his stories. I do not _know_ the
fact, indeed; but I think, that, notwithstanding the Duke of Rutland's
patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is
strange how many good men do,--losing point and force and efficiency in
a welter of words! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves
all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need
be with the ferule,) it is this,--Be short. It is amazing the way in
which good men lose themselves on Sunday mornings in the lapse of their
own language; and most rarely are we confronted from the pulpit with an
opinion which would not bear stripping of wordy shifts, and be all the
more comely for its nakedness.
George Crabbe wrote charming rural tales; but he wrote long ones. There
is minute observation, dramatic force, tender pathos, but there is much,
of tedious and coarse description. If by some subtile alchemy the better
qualities could be thrown down from the turbid and watery flux of his
verse, we should have an admirable pocket-volume for the country; as it
is, his books rest mostly on the shelves, and it requires a strong
breath to puff away the dust that has gathered on the topmost edges.
I think of the Reverend Mr. Crabbe as an amiable, absent-minded old
gentleman, driving about on week-days in a heavy, square-topped gig,
(his wife holding the reins,) in search of way-side gypsies, and on
Sunday pushing a discourse--which was good up to the "fourthly"--into
the "seventhly."
Charles Lamb, if he had been clerically disposed, would, I am sure, have
written short sermons; and I think that his hearers would have carried
away the gist of them clean and clear.
He never wrote anything that could be called strictly pastoral; he was a
creature of streets and crowding houses; no man could have been more
ignorant of the every-day offices of rural life; I doubt if he ever knew
from which side a horse was to be mounted or a cow to be milked, and a
sprouting bean was a source of the greatest wonderment to him. Yet, in
spite of all this, what a book those Essays of his make, to lie down
with under trees! It is the honest, lovable simplicity of his nature
that makes the keeping good. He is the Izaak Walton of London
streets,--of print-shops, of pastry-shops, of mouldy book-stalls; the
chime of Bow-bells strikes upon his ear like the chorus of a milkmaid's
song at Ware.
There is not a bit of rodomontade in him about the charms of the
country, from beginning to end; if there were, we should despise him. He
can find nothing to say of Skiddaw but that he is "a great creature";
and he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,) on Ambleside, "I
return you condolence for your decaying sight,--not for anything there
is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a
London newspaper."
And again to his friend Manning, (about the date of 1800,)--"I am not
romance-bit about _Nature_. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said)
is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good
liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation,--if they can talk
sensibly, and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the
gilded looking-glass, (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the
purchase,) nor his five-shilling print, over the mantel-piece, of old
Nabbs, the carrier. Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the
furniture of my world,--eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. Streets,
streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops
sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seamstresses,
ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the
street with spectacles, lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and
silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of
coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling
home drunk,--if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of 'Fire!' and
'Stop thief!'--inns of court with their learned air, and halls, and
butteries, just like Cambridge colleges,--old book-stalls, 'Jeremy
Taylors,' 'Burtons on Melancholy,' and 'Religio Medicis,' on every
stall. These are thy pleasures, O London-with-the-many-sins!--for these
may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!"
And again to Wordsworth, in 1830,--"Let no native Londoner imagine that
health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than
altogether odious and detestable."
Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this honesty of speech? Surely
not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith; but, the rather, by such
token of unbounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of
this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the
Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his
heart, for aye. There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts
I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as
coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket Walton, or a White of
Selborne. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the
thin, bent old gentleman--Charles Lamb--to sit over against me, and I
watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering
voice,--between the whiffs of his pipe,--over and over, those always new
stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and
"Mackery End."
(No, you need not put back the book, my boy; 't is always in place.)
I never admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; yet he belongs
of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd,
he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if we may believe
contemporary evidence) was by no means so good as his verse. The Ettrick
Shepherd of the "Noctes Ambrosianae" is, I fancy, as much becolored by
the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua
changed into a nymph. I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing
rebellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading of the Border
minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his fellows were with "mountain-dew,")
and wreaking his vitality on Gaelic rhymes,--which, it is true, have a
certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which never reached
the excellence that he fondly imagined belonged to them. I fancy, that,
when he sat at the laird's table, (Sir Walter's,) and called the laird's
lady by her baptismal name, and--not abashed in any presence--uttered
his Gaelic gibes for the wonderment of London guests,--that he thought
far more of himself than the world has ever been inclined to think of
him. I know that poets have a privilege of conceit, and that those who
are not poets sometimes assume it; but it is, after all, a sorry
quality by which to win the world's esteem; and when death closes the
record, it is apt to insure a large debit against the dead man.
It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick Shepherd was an
agricultural author, and wrote "Hogg on Sheep," for which, as he tells
us, he received the sum of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and
relates to the care, management, and diseases of the black-faced
mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant. It had never a great
reputation; and I think the sheep-farmers of the Cheviots were disposed
to look with distrust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with
"lords" at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse was in "The
Queen's Wake." A British agricultural author, speaking of him in a
pitiful way, says,--"He passed years of busy authorship, and encountered
_the usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life_."[32]
This is good; it is as good as anything of Hogg's.
I approach the name of Mr. Loudon, the author of the Encyclopaedias of
Gardening and Agriculture, with far more of respect. If nothing else in
him laid claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his
indefatigable labor in aid of all that belonged to the progress of
British gardening or farming, would demand it. I take a pride, too, in
saying, that, notwithstanding his literary labors, he was successful as
a farmer, during the short period of his farm-holding.
Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated in Edinburgh, and was
for a time under the tutelage of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of
Leith-Walk. Early in the present century he made his first appearance in
London,--published certain papers on the laying-out of the public
squares of the metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl of
Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gardens at Scone. In 1813 and
'14 he travelled on the Continent very widely, making the gardens of
most repute the special objects of his study; and in 1822 he published
his "Encyclopaedia of Gardening"; that of Agriculture followed shortly
after, and his book of Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors,
enormous as they were, had interludes of other periodical work, and were
crowned at last by his _magnum opus_, the "Arboretum." A man of only
ordinary nerve and diligence would have taken a ten years' rest upon the
completion of only one of his ponderous octavos; and the wonder is the
greater, that London wrought in his later years under all the
disadvantages of appeals from rapacious creditors and the infirmities of
a broken constitution. Crippled, palsied, fevered, for a long period of
years, he still wrought on with a persistence that would have broken
many a strong man down, and only yielded at last to a bronchial
affection which grappled him at his work.
This author massed together an amount of information upon the subjects
of which he treated that is quite unmatched in the whole annals of
agricultural literature. Columella, Heresbach, Worlidge, and even the
writers of the "Geoponica," dwindle into insignificance in the
comparison. He is not, indeed, always absolutely accurate on historical
points;[33] but in all essentials his books are so complete as to have
made them standard works up to a time long subsequent to their issue.
* * * * *
No notice of the agricultural literature of the early part of this
century would be at all complete without mention of the Magazines and
Society "Transactions," in which alone some of the best and most
scientific cultivators communicated their experience or suggestions to
the public. Loudon was himself the editor of the "Gardener's Magazine";
and the earlier Transactions of the Horticultural Society are enriched
by the papers of such men as Knight, Van Mons, Sir Joseph Banks, Rev.
William Herbert, Messrs. Dickson, Haworth, Wedgwood, and others. The
works of individual authors lost ground in comparison with such an array
of reports from scientific observers, and from that time forth
periodical literature has become the standard teacher in what relates to
good culture. I do not know what extent of good the newly instituted
Agricultural Colleges of this country may effect; but I feel quite safe
in saying that our agricultural journals will prove always the most
effective teachers of the great mass of the farming-population. The
London Horticultural Society at an early day established the Chiswick
Gardens, and these, managed under the advice of the Society's Directors,
have not only afforded an accurate gauge of British progress in
horticulture, but they have furnished to the humblest cultivator who has
strolled through their inclosures practical lessons in the craft of
gardening, renewed from month to month and from year to year. It is to
be hoped that the American Agricultural Colleges will adopt some similar
plan, and illustrate the methods they teach upon lands which shall be
open to public inspection, and upon whose culture and its successes
systematic reports shall be annually made. Failing of this, they will
fail of the best part of their proper purpose. Nor would it be a
fruitless work, if, in connection with such experimental farm, a weekly
record were issued,--giving analyses of the artificial manures employed,
and a complete register of every field, from the date of its
"breaking-up" to the harvesting of the crop. Every new implement,
moreover, should be reported upon with unwavering impartiality, and no
advertisements should be received. I think under these conditions we
might almost look for an honest newspaper.
* * * * *
Writing thus, during these in-door hours, of country-pursuits, and of
those who have illustrated them, or who have in any way quickened the
edge with which we farmers rasp away the weeds or carve out our pastoral
entertainment, I come upon the names of a great bevy of poets, belonging
to the earlier quarter of this century, that I find it hard to pass by.
Much as I love to bring to mind, over and over again, "Ivanhoe" and
"Waverley," I love quite as much to summon to my view Walter Scott, the
woodsman of Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound Maida
in attendance. I see him thinning out the saplings that he has planted
upon the Tweed banks. I know how they stand, having wandered by the hour
among them. I can fancy how the master would have lopped away the boughs
for a little looplet through which a burst of the blue Eildon Hills
should come. His favorite seat, overshadowed by an arbor-vitae, (of which
a leaf lies pressed in the "Scotch Tourist" yonder,) was so near to the
Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over its pebbly bottom must
have made a delightful lullaby for the toil-worn old man. But beyond
wood-craft, I could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong
agricultural inclination; nor do I think that the old gentleman had much
eye for the picturesque; no landscape-gardener of any reputation would
have decided upon such a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford: the
spot is low; the views are not extended or varied; the very trees are
all of Scott's planting: but the master loved the murmur of the
Tweed,--loved the nearness of Melrose, and in every old bit of
sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away
scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited
horizon.
Christopher North carried his Scotch love of mountains to his home among
the English lakes. I think he counted Skiddaw something more than "a
great creature." In all respects--saving the pipes and the ale--he was
the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And yet do we love him more? A
stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who
could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the
Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country
fishers,--redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such
exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the
reading of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome
sense of mental indigestion.
Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of plethora, due less
to the frothiness of the condiments than to a certain fulness of blood
and brawn. The broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a
dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) strides away
along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch Lochy with such a tearing pace, and
greets every lassie with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws
such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and amazes us with
such stupendous "strikes" and such a whizzing of his reel, that we
fairly lose our breath.
Not so of the "White Doe of Rylstone"; nay, we more incline to doze over
it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe,
with its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quietude and beauty
of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Wordsworth was bounded by the slaty banks
of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments,
was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely
all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No
angler and no gardener, indeed,--too severely and proudly meditative for
any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight which he ever lifted, I
suspect, was one which he carried with him always,--the immense dignity
of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly
typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material
indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks;
a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher; a
mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy
ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by
graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and
Rydal-Water.
We have to credit him with some rare and tender description, and
fragments of great poems; but I cannot help thinking that he fancied a
profounder meaning lay in them than the world has yet detected.
John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and was most essentially
a poet of the fields. His father was a pauper and a cripple; not even
young Cobbett was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his
birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He wrote verses upon the
lining of his hat-band. He hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's "Seasons,"
and walked seven miles before sunrise to make the purchase. The hardest
field-toil could not repress the poetic aspirations of such a boy. By
dint of new hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own; but
nobody read them. He wrote other verses, which at length made him known.
The world flattered the peasant-bard of Northamptonshire. A few
distinguished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a farm of his
own. The heroine of his love-tales became its mistress; a shelf or two
of books made him rich; but in an evil hour he entered upon some
farm-speculation which broke down; a new poem was sharply criticized or
neglected; the novelty of his peasant's song was over. Disheartened and
gloomy, he was overwhelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of a
mad-house, where for forty years he has staggered idiotically toward the
rest which did not come. But even as I write I see in the British papers
that he is free at last. Poor Clare is dead.
With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest which perhaps its
merit alone would not provoke his little sonnet of "The Thrush's
Nest":--
"Within a thick and spreading hawthorn-bush,
That overhung a mole-hill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns, of rapture, while I drank the sound
With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest,
I watched her secret toils from day to day,--
How true she warped the moss to form her nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay,
And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue;
And there I witnessed, in the summer hours,
A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky."
There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in Hunt's poem of "Rimini,"
where
"sky, earth, and sea
Breathe like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly.
'T is Nature full of spirits, waked and springing:
The birds to the delicious tune are singing,
Darting with freaks and snatches up and down,
Where the light woods go seaward from the town;
While happy faces striking through the green
Of leafy roads at every turn are seen;
And the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with scattery light,
Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay."
This does not sound as if it came from the prince of cockneys; and I
have always felt a certain regard for Leigh Hunt, too, by reason of the
tender story which he gives of the little garden, "_mio picciol orto_,"
that he established during his two years of prisonhood.[34]
But, after all, there was no robustness in his rural spirit,--nothing
that makes the cheek tingle, as if a smart wind had smitten it. He was
born to handle roses without thorns; I think that with a pretty boudoir,
on whose table every morning a pretty maid should arrange a pretty
nosegay, and with a pretty canary to sing songs in a gilded cage, and
pretty gold-fish to disport in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for
dinner, his love for the country would have been satisfied. He loved
Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman of twice his
years,--sighing himself away in pretty phrases that flatter, but do not
touch her; there is nothing to remind, even, of the full, abounding,
fiery, all-conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and marries
a yielding maiden.
In poor John Keats, however, there _is_ something of this; and under its
heats he consumed away. For ripe, joyous outburst of all rural
fancies,--for keen apprehension of what most takes hold of the
susceptibilities of a man who loves the country,--for his coinage of all
sweet sounds of birds, all murmur of leaves, all riot and blossoming of
flowers, into fragrant verse,--he was without a peer in his day. It is
not that he is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets,
not that he sees all, not that he has heard all; but his heart has drunk
the incense of it, and his imagination refined it, and his fancy set it
aflow in those jocund lines which bound and writhe and exult with a
passionate love for the things of field and air.
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