The Captain's Death Bed & Other Essays. Virginia Woolf
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is perfect of its kind we cannot stop, under that spell, to pick our flower to pieces. There is a unity about it which forbids us to dismember it.
Yet even so, in the midst of this harmony and completeness we hear now and again another note. “But they are dead, and their sorrows are over.”
“Life at its greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.”
“No sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance.” A poet seems hidden on the other side of the page anxious to concentrate its good-humoured urbanity into a phrase or two of deeper meaning. And Goldsmith was a true poet, even though he could not afford to entertain the muse for long. “And thou, sweet Poetry,” he exclaimed,
My shame in crowds,my solitary pride,
Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,
That found’ st me poor at first, and keep’st me so;
—that “dear charming nymph” fluttered her wings about him even if she made no very long stay. It is poetry of course at one remove from prose: poetry using only the greys and browns upon her palette: poetry clicking her heels together at the end of the line as though executing the steps of a courtly dance: poetry with such a sediment of good sense that it naturally crystallizes itself into epigram:—
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;
or:—
How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
The argument of his poems has already been stated in prose. Kingdoms grow to an unwieldy size; empires spread ruin round them; nothing is more to be valued than “a happy human face”; power and independence are to be dreaded. It has all been said before; but here the village is Auburn; the land is Ireland; all is made concrete and visualized, given a voice and a name. The world of Goldsmith’s poetry is, of course, a flat and eyeless world; swains sport with nymphs, and the deep is finny. But pathos is the more moving in the midst of reserve, and the poet’s sudden emotion tells the more when it is obviously not good manners to talk about oneself. If it is objected that Goldsmith’s imagination is too narrowly and purely domestic, that he ignores all the rubs and struggles of life to dwell upon
… the gentler morals, such as play.
Through life’s more cultured walks, and charm the way,it is also undeniable that what he loves is not an artificial and foppish refinement. “Those calm desires that ask’d but little room” are the pith of life, the essence that he has pressed out from the turbulent and unsatisfying mass.
Yet Goldsmith has a peculiar reticence which forbids us to dwell with him in complete intimacy. It is partly no doubt that he has no such depths to reveal as some of our essayists—the solitudes and sublimities are not for him, rather the graces and amenities. And also we are kept at arm’s length by the urbanity of his style, just as good manners confer impersonality upon the well-bred. But there may be another reason for his reserve. Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne talk openly about themselves because their faults are not small ones; Goldsmith was reserved because his foibles are the kind that men conceal. Nobody at least can read Goldsmith in the mass without noticing how frequently, yet how indirectly, certain themes recur—dress, ugliness, awkwardness, poverty and the fear of ridicule. It is as if the genial man were haunted by some private dread, as if he were conscious that besides the angel there lived in him a less reputable companion, resembling perhaps Poor Poll. It is only necessary to open Boswell to make sure. There, at once, we see our serene and mellifluous writer in the flesh. “His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman.” With touch upon touch the unprepossessing portrait is built up. We are shown Goldsmith writhing upon the sofa in an agony of jealousy: Goldsmith thrusting himself into the talk and floundering on “without knowing how to get off”: Goldsmith full of vanities and jealousies: Goldsmith dressing up his ugly pockmarked body in a smart bloom-coloured coat. The portrait is painted without sympathy save, indeed, of that inverted kind which comes from knowing from your own experience the sufferings which you describe. Boswell, too, was jealous, and seized upon his sitter’s foibles with the malicious insight of a rival.
Yet, like all Boswell’s portraits, it has the breath of life in it. He brings the other Goldsmith to the surface—he combines them both. He proves that the silver-tongued writer was no simple soul, gently floating through life from the honeysuckle to the hawthorn hedge. On the contrary, he was a complex man, a man full of troubles, without “settled principle”; who lived from hand to mouth and from day to day; who wrote his loveliest sentences in a garret under pressure of poverty. And yet, so oddly are human faculties combined, he had only to take his pen and he was revenged upon Boswell, upon the fine gentleman who sneered at him, upon his own ugly body and stumbling tongue. He had only to write and all was clear and melodious; he had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene.
[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 1, 1934]
White’s Selborne.
“… there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.” Gilbert White is talking, of course, about birds; the good ornithologist, he says, should be able to distinguish them by their air—“on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.” But when the bird happens to be Gilbert White himself, when we try to discriminate the colour and shape of this very rare fowl, we are at a loss. Is he, like the bird so brightly coloured by hand as a frontispiece to the second volume, a hybrid—something between a hen that clucks and a nightingale that sings? It is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story, the Natural History of Selborne, and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author’s has a door left open, through which we hear distant sounds, a dog barking, cart wheels creaking, and see, when “all the fading landscape sinks in night”, if not Venus herself, at least a phantom owl.
His intention seems plain enough—it was to impart certain observations upon the fauna and flora of his native village to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. But it was not for the benefit of those gentlemen that he composed the sober yet stately description of Selborne with which the book opens. There it is before us, the village of Selborne, lying in the extreme eastern corner of the county of Hampshire, with its hanger and its sheep walks and those deep lanes “that affright the ladies and make timid horsemen shudder”. The soil is part clay, part malm; the cottages are of stone or brick; the men work in the hop gardens and in the spring and summer the women weed the corn. No novelist could have opened better. Selborne is set solidly in the foreground. But something is lacking; and so before the scene fills with birds, mice, voles, crickets, and the Duke of Richmond’s moose, before the page is loud with the chirpings, bleatings, lowings, and gruntings of their familiar intercourse, we have Queen Anne lying on the bank to watch the deer driven past. It was an anecdote, he casually remarks, that he had from an old keeper, Adams, whose greatgrandfather, father and self were all keepers in the forest. And thus the single straggling street is allied with history, and shaded by tradition. No novelist could have given us more briefly and completely all that we need to know before the story begins.
The story of Selborne is a vegetable, an animal story. The gossip is about the habits of vipers and the love interest is supplied chiefly by frogs. Compared with Gilbert White the most realistic of novelists is a rash romantic. The crop of the cuckoo is examined; the viper is dissected; the grasshopper is sought with a pliant grass blade in its hole; the mouse is measured and found to weigh one copper halfpenny. Nothing can exceed the minuteness of these observations, or the scrupulous care with which they are conducted. The chief question in dispute—it is indeed the theme of the book—is the migration of swallows. Barrington believed that the swallow