The Common Reader
men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one.
Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which
permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Æschylus, or Racine, or
Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on
to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means
that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass
the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have
Sappho with her constellations of adjectives, Plato daring extravagant
flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and
contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and
quietly, apparently motionless, and then with a flicker of fins off and
away; while in the _Odyssey_ we have what remains the triumph of
narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of
the fortunes of men and women.
The _Odyssey_ is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive
story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly
in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens
next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty,
subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the
sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little
hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is
true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though
everything is made by hand, are not closely kept at work. They have had
time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an
ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at
once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room;
Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions
seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful,
have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than
children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little
islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in
their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more
aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of
life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own
standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of
existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when
we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and
its consolations, of our own age.
_The Elizabethan Lumber
Room_
These magnificent volumes[2] are not often, perhaps, read through. Part
of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book
as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a
lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments,
huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for
ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the
dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness
to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while
outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.
For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, elephants’ teeth,
wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of
priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of
innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by “apt young men”
from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself.
The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the
river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. “The
Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships
thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mariners they shouted
in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof.” Then, as
the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the
hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his
friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly
England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships
sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and
serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too
was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs
of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their
God against the God of the Turks, who “can speake never a word for
dulnes, much lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . .
But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God
indeed. . .” God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir
Humphrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they
sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the
North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberland’s men,
hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight,
licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and
worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and
claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. “Sir
William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son,
until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees.”
But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk,
or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold
strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One
expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of
uncounted riches lay only a little further up the coast? What if the
known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When,
after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of
the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands,
startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the
trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or
sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw,
far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on
their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for
the Spanish King.
These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country
to decoy “the apt young men” lounging by the harbour-side to leave their
nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the
bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of
English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it
is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from
which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of
producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have
failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose
crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily consumed by the
gallows”. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by
the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds
of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs,
“without which our life were to be said barbarous”, have all come to
England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the
immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for
the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen
surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they
could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in
the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated
company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter
from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw
the Emperor “sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head,
and a staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the ceremony that
he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English
merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and
stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by
millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these
centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the
glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was
bravely dressed for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of
red cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper whereof did
smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect
musk”. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were
eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns and lumps of
ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and
“debates” of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into
vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere
off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild
beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board
to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed
profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later
the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to
his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again,
the savages lived together in perfect chastity.
All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the
adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being
acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize
upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate those
frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon
with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys,
for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and
died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some
silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf lay between the spartan
domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the
Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their
time reading histories, or “writing volumes of their own, or translating
of other men’s into our English and Latin tongue”, while the younger
ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the
enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into
existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and
lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse
and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan
literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities,
and references to that America—“O my America! my new-foundland”—which
was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories
of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in
fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.
But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the
sea and the voyages, of the lumber-room crammed with sea beasts and
horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire
the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so
beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep
the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without
these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable