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Page 19
Here is an example, wherein he desires to express the fact that an
island called Portholme stands in the Ouse at Huntingdon.
Held on with this discourse, she--[that is, Ouse]--not so far hath run,
But that she is arrived at goodly Huntingdon
Where she no sooner views her darling and delight,
Proud Portholme, but becomes so ravished with the sight,
That she her limber arms lascivious doth throw
About the islet's waist, who being embraced so,
Her flowing bosom shows to the enamour'd Brook;
and so on.
That will be enough to show that one really might have too much of the
kind of thing. In Drayton you very soon do; every page begins to
crawl with demonstrative monsters, and there is soon a good deal
more love-making than love. But you may read Drayton for all sorts of
reasons and find some much better than others. He describes Britain
league by league, and is said to have the accuracy of a roadbook. In
thirty books, then, of perhaps 500 lines apiece, he conducts you
from Land's End to Berwick-on-Tweed, naming every river and hill,
dramatising, as it were, every convolution, contact and contour; and
not forgetting history either. That means a mighty piece of work, of
such a scope and purport that we may well grudge him the doing of it
Charles Lamb, who loved a poet because he was bad, I believe, as a
mother will love a crippled child, is more generous to Drayton than I
can be. "That panegyrist of my native earth," he calls him, "who
has gone over her soil, in his _Polyolbion_, with the fidelity of a
herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left a rivulet so
narrow that it may be stept over, without honourable mention; and has
animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams
of old mythology." No more delightful task could be the lifework of a
poet who loved his own land; but it could hardly be done again, nor, I
dare say, ever be done again so well.
To describe, however, the windings and circumfluences of rivers, the
embraces of mountain and rain-cloud in language on the other side
of amorousness may easily be inconvenient or ridiculous, and not
impossibly both; but I shouldn't at all mind upholding in public
disputation, say, at the Poetry Bookshop, that there was no other way
than Drayton's of doing the thing at all. It was the mythopoetic way.
For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are
to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze,
swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise,
length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no
other relation than a sex-relation, and in so describing the relations
of every river in England, he very naturally becomes tedious. Satiety
is the bane of the amorist, and of worse than he. Casanova had that
in front of him when he set out to be immoral, _on ne peut plus_, in
seven volumes octavo. There simply were not enough vices to go round.
He ended, therefore, by being a dull as well as a dirty dog. "Take
back your bonny Mrs. Behn," said Walter Scott's great-aunt to him
after a short inspection, "and if you will take my advice, put her
in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first
novel." The nemesis of the pornographer: he can't avoid boring you to
tears.
THE WELTER
Soused still to the ears in the lees of war, I win a rueful reminder
from a stray volume of _Hours in a Library_. Was the world regenerated
between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed
and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in
the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely
settled? Charles Kingsley (of whom the moralist was writing) seems
really to have believed it, and attributed the exulting affirmative
to--the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal
nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps
any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral
upheaval in the generations concerned. Let us suppose, then, that the
British were seriously turned to domestic politics in 1855; let us
admit that they are so turned to-day, and ask ourselves fairly whether
we are now in a better way of reasonable living than history shows
those poor devils to have been.
If we are, it will not be the fault of the old agencies, in which
Kingsley always believed. Church and State are adrift; organised
Christianity has abdicated; the aristocracy no longer governs
even itself; Parliament has died of a surfeit of its own rules.
If fundamental reform is to come, it will be forced upon us by the
working class, and (at the pinch) opposed tooth and nail by the
privileged. But is it to come? Is the working class deploying for
action? In all the miscellaneous scrapping which we watch to-day is
there one strong man with a sense of direction? It doesn't look like
it.
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