Excursionists In Poetry

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Title:     Excursionists In Poetry
Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch [More Titles by Quiller-Couch]

Nov. 5, 1892. An Itinerary.

Besides the glorious exclusiveness of it, there is a solid advantage just now, in not being an aspirant for the Laureateship. You can go out into the wilderness for a week without troubling to leave an address. A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set out together across Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks, by eccentric paths over the southern ranges of Wales to the Wye, and homewards by canoe between the autumn banks of that river. The motto of the voyage was Verlaine's line--

"Et surtout ne parlons pas littérature"

--especially poetry. I think we felt inclined to congratulate each other after passing the Quantocks in heroic silence; but were content to read respect in each other's eyes.

The Return to Literature.

On our way home we fell across a casual copy of the _Globe_ newspaper, and picked up a scrap of information about the Blorenge, a mountain we had climbed three days before. It is (said the _Globe_) the only thing in the world that rhymes with orange. From this we inferred that the Laureate had not been elected during our wanderings, and that the Anglo-Saxon was still taking an interest in poetry. It was so.

Public Excursions in Verse.

The progress of this amusing epidemic may be traced in the _Times_. It started mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning--

"Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe,
Where he's gone to I don't know...."

with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the _Times_ was flooded with other versions by people who remembered the lines more or less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord Sherbrooke, who had seen it on an eighteenth-century tombstone in several parts of England, and so on. London Correspondents took up the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars.

The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when the _Times_ quoted a four-lined epigram about Mr. Leech making a speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough without; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardor. The Church, the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained on the verge of surpassing feats, should the occasion be given. From men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord Tennyson died. He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else, at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a Cassowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his hymn-book too. Who was this somebody? Did he write it at Cambridge (home of poets)? And what were the "trimmings," as Mr. Job Trotter would say, with which the missionary was eaten?

Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. "All have got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the flower in the daily papers. It was not to be expected that our senators, barristers, stockbrokers, having proved their strength, would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Cassowary. Very soon a bold egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in _Crossing the Bar_. The whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are _two_ kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open the _Times_. And according to the _Globe_ if you need a rhyme for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real wants of the public.[A]

They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable of producing, on the one hand, _Crossing the Bar_--and on the other, this comment upon it, signed "T.F.W." and sent to the _Times_ from Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?--

"... a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage 'o'er life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence was fast the _status_ of the navigator of old days, the sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the daughter of such a man, _un piloto Italiano famoso navigante_. Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a _piloto_ by whom his fleet shall be deftly (_sabiamente_) conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century (1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain, commanded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V. Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of merchant vessels--that is, the officers who watch about, take charge of the deck--_pilotes_, and this designation is not impossibly reserved to them as representing the _pilote hauturier_ of former times, the scientific guide of ships _dans la haute mer_, as distinguished from the _pilote côtier_, who simply hugged the shore. The last class of pilot, it is almost superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our ships, inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no more. The _hauturier_ has long been replaced in all countries by the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the ship, which until his arrival was in the hands of the _côtier_, was well out of harbour. Then our _côtier_ left us."

Prodigious!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Note, Oct. 21, 1893.--The nuisance revived again when Mr. Nettleship the younger perished on Mont Blanc. And again, the friend of Lowe and Nettleship, the great Master of Balliol, had hardly gone to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage (about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest expense of time and trouble), but over an unusually pointless epigram that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on his father, but on an entirely different Jowett, _Semper ego auditor tantum?_--

If a funny "Cantab" write a dozen funny rhymes,
Need a dozen "Cantabs" write about it to the _Times_?
Need they write, at any rate, a generation after,
Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter?

[The end]
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's essay: Excursionists In Poetry

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