POPPIES IN THE CORN.*
IT is a pity that the cultivated, thoughtful clergyman, an Oxford man, who has written these essays—essaylings, he calls them—in London Society, and reprinted them in the present volume, should accustom himself to sentimental and rather gushing titles, or it will inevitably narrow the circle of his readers. He com- plains, properly enough, that feeling, and still more the exhibition of feeling, are too much looked upon as unmanly, so that the affectation of caring nothing for anything is becoming a dangerous disease amongst the rising generation of young men. We think he exaggerates the extent of this evil, but he should take warning by it not to close his books to such men by titles of this sort. Why not have called his book simply, "the pleasant days of life," or, "the holidays of life," instead " poppies ;" or, "glad hours in the grave years "? and he would then have saved himself the necessity of explaining the analogy in almost every essay, and of spoiling his metaphor or losing sight of it altogether ; for the visits of old friends, or thoughts on " unset blossom," or a November ramble alone in the deep, dank, fallen leaves, however pensively enjoy- able, cannot with any appropriateness be said to resemble, either in their rarely exceptional occurrence or in their startling contrast with the ordinary colourlessness of life, the bright scarlet of the occasional poppy amidst the acres of quiet brown or still quieter green corn. The same tendency to sentiment, rather run to seed, is observable all through the book ; more, however, in style than in thought, though the pensiveness sometimes grows a trifle mawkish and is too freely dealt in. In style, the sentimentality exhibits itself, as we have said, in the titles, and in such expressions as "an old book tells us,"—meaning the Bible ; "old friends; leaves yet left upon the thinning tree Old friends. Yes, or we raay call them the chrysanthemums and asters now in one's garden ; Old friends ; as life goes on and wanes we find we have no income of these Old friends ; ah ! well may we class • Poppies in the Corn. By the Author of "The Harvest of a Quiet Eye." London: Tinsley Brothers.
thoughts of them with this handful of bright, short-lived blos- soms." "Let me see, what does a wise man—no parson, only old Aristotle—say ? " "Verily, I'd rather pass some from mine own purse into that of a needy friend," &c. Here is an affectation of quaintness, which spoils the simplicity,—simplicity already suffi- ciently dangered by the too great pensiveness of the thought. There are other faults which we will venture to point out, because we think we see indications that our author is still in the prime of life, and not probably beyond improvement as a writer of essays for our innumerable periodicals ; and he is so cultivated, tasteful, and high-principled a man—if we can judge of him by his writings—and with such a simple and thoroughly
healthy tone of mind—that not only London Society, but society at large, is the gainer by his literary exercises. But he is too didactic, and his pensive moralisings run into repetition and prose before he arrives at length at the ostensible subject of his essay.
The effect is to make one feel that he knows the subject is so slight that, if he is to make out his number of pages, he must take advantage of every leading of thought, and follow it to its conclusion. And so, though he offers us poppies ready gathered, be declines to give them to us till we have followed him through the corn to where they grew. And taking his thoughts in detail, he is a little too heavy. He does not touch the theme lightly enough. He is determined to be exhaustive, or rather, he cannot resist the temptation of being so, and runs the risk of exhausting his readers as well as his subject. Here, again, the impression intrudes itself that he cannot afford to waste material. Take the following passage from the chapter—perhaps the one which most combines interest and instruction—on "Some Annals of a Sketching Club."
He cannot stop himself till he has found a resemblance in the foliage or herbage of nature to every colour in his paint-box ; he must clear it quite out. He reminds us of our grandmother's sharp and humiliating rebuke when our spoon went round and round the plate in search of the minutest fragment of the late lamented pudding,—" The scullerymaid cleans the plates, my
dear ":—
" Well, I was going to say how remarkably nature strikes up an intimate acquaintance, nay, a brotherhood, with the brain's tenant, even though it be a guest that tarrieth but a day.' And this I found to be the case as, in a late summer walk, I was pondering the subject of this paper. There were the fields all being cleared and prepared for a fresh start next year: all earth's wide palette (it seemed to me) being scraped clean from the many colours which had been pinched out in big and little patches about it. That flake-white patch of the may-weed, or ox-eye daisy, which I remember to have noticed laid like a table- cloth (but this is to confuse my simile) over that field, 'tis all swept off, and stacked as pale-brown hay. Then the chrome-yellow of that strip of rape in flower ; the palette-knife has removed that in a clean swoop some time ere this. And now the ochre of the barley, the Indian- yellow of the rich wheat—into which, indeed, the vermilion of that bright poppy-field close by had, you will observe, run and mingled—these are fast disappearing, leaving their place so bare, so bare. And that bright vermilion only lingers in little smears: also the crimson-lake of the saintfoin has departed, and the purple-madder of the clover. The cobalt of the flax is gone ; and the neutral tint of the lucerne ; and where the ultramarine possessed that lavender field there is a dull pig- ment akin to terraverte. Where there are copses there will still be an abundance of sap green ; but here the mars orange of the maples, and the scarlet vermilion of the cherry-trees, and the dragon's blood of the dogwood, and the pale yellow of the hazels, and the deep carmine of the brambles, will soon all ran into the greens, and form that pretty chaos which idle painters sometimes love to make of all the bright pigments which they sweep together on the palette—calling the effect a fine instance of Turner's last manner—just before the thin, limp knife does its final work, and presto! All the pure, vivid hues and colours are gone ! And these will soon be gone till next year : and you shall see earth's palette just clean pale maple where the corn and hay had been ; until the plough again transforms this to rather dull maho- gany; and again the snow to porcelain."
There are similar passages in abundance; before the lawn is swept at Christmas the colours are again enumerated ; the wild animals of the woods are—as it were—ticked off ; also the evergreens for Christmas decorations ; the adjectives for Christmas Day are exhausted—" the sweet Day, the solemn Day, the happy Day, the holy Day "—and the joys of Christmas are catalogued with terrible patience and accuracy—Christmas greetings, Christmas boxes, Christmas fires, Christmas memories, Christmas re-unions, Christmas hopes, Christmas bells—he wisely omits Christmas bills, though, for that matter, even Christmas boxes have a painful side. Then there is an occasional carelessness, some- times leading to mixed metaphors. In the most poetical and fanciful of all the essays the "falling leaves" represents in the same passage, the death of men, and the death of their hopes, and the departure of the young from the parent roof,—" I look at them just ere they are detached from the seclusion of the branch on which they are growing." And friends who were once the crocuses and snowdrops of our spring-time are made the chrysanthemums and asters of • the autumn of life ;
"somehow," as our puzzled author confesses, growing "from the very same roots" that used to produce crocuses, lilacs, roses, &c., according to the time of year and life. Again, there is an occa- sional extravagance of illustration, as where a resemblance is drawn between the ruin left by earthquakes and the loss and pain caused by the death of friends. It is more ridiculous than touching to talk in England, where we know nothing of them, of revisiting the "gaping chasms, the ugly fissures, the rent and naked rocks, the ruined homesteads," the landscape which, "after the earthquake was desolate enough, no doubt, and bare," and finding the gaps and clefts and jagged edges tapestried with grey and orange lichens and screened with ivy and with moss and fern !
We have given undue space to a notice of the faults, but it has been honest fault-finding—not laughing at or cutting up—because the author and the book are worth it. The former does not, it appears, belong to the Liberal party, and we could take exception to his implied criticism of the disestablishment of the Irish Church and other matters ; and in the region of art, to his sneer—if we do not misread it—at Turner ; and in the matter of games, to his placing cricket before boating. But these are matters of opinion, not of authorship, and we have not space to argue them. What we now wish to point out to our readers is that our author is a very pleasant and profitable writer. He is humorous and pathetic ; a poet and an artist by nature and cultivation, for his prose is much of it poetry, and his chapter on art and his passing touches on art subjects, exhibit delicate taste and honest study and true appreciation. Then there is the charm of his strong animal spirits, equal to hard and serious work, and unaffectedly gay enough to enjoy to the full the well-earned holiday, and his graphic power to make us enjoy it with him—and the high principles which he inculcates, as a rule, without dullness—give us confidence and respect. His essay on "Recreation Generally" is a valuable lesson, not unneeded, on earnestness both in work and play—but why does he say even a word in favour of postage-stamp collecting ?—and on the necessity for the greatest moderation in play, mainly, of course, because work is the real purpose of life, but also because it is the only way to enjoy recreation. In the same essay his remarks about early hours, though not new, are strikingly and convincingly put ; indeed the book abounds as much with vigorous common-sense as with the poetry of pensive thought and a keen sense of beauty, external and internal. There is a good deal of old-fashioned narrowness, it seems to us, in our author's objection to theatres, operas, and balls. All amusements may be abused, and lead to sorrow of more than "the meanest thing that breathes ;" but his condemnation of waltzes, 8.c., is a morbid feeling which will lead to twice as much mischief as it guards against. However, the charm of the book is the very one it should have, if we consider the title, namely, its joyousness ; and the charm of its author, his capacity for innocent enjoyment of all sorts. There are delightful passages—nature and fun all over—in the sea-side sketches, in that of the sketching club, in those of the Christmas and Twelfth-Night parties, and in others. And it is these that make us feel how young the author must still be. Imagine his enjoying the prospect of three weeks at the seaside with wife and little ones, the packing and the journey and the lodgings notwithstanding ; and he enjoys the voyage on the steamer ; happy man ! and he likes cutting docks and harbours in the sand with his boys, and blind man's buff, and the like, at Christ- mas. And yet there was a time when we liked these things too, and he writes of them with such reality and vividness and enjoy- ment, that we live our lives over again in his descriptions. Indeed, "Three Weeks at the Sea-side " are our two favourite chapters; and next, "The Annals of a Sketching Club," " Boxhill," "Falling Leaves," and "Recreation Generally." But even the least interesting have much that is both fanciful, and playful, and useful. The papers were worth collecting.
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