Milton and His Elm

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE very best of the newer Caroline anthologies is A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, Selected and Edited, with an Introduction, by Felix E. Schelling, Professor of English Literature in the University of Pennsylvania: the compiler of it knows and loves his ground. But as an American, and in the most innocent way, he has fallen foul, in one instance, of no less a person than John Milton. Mr. Schelling quotes, as he was bound to do, songs from Comus and Arcades, fairyland numbers : —

The comment on these glorious descriptive lines about the elm is instructive. “38. vi. Star-proof elm. Cf. Faëry Queene, I., 1, 7. This is one of several of Milton’s trivial inaccuracies in the observation of Nature, as the foliage of the elm is notably light.” The paragraph must seem a cryptic curiosity to any one who has ever noticed in its natural home the dense impervious green of Milton’s tree by day, its black majestic mass at night, triumphantly “ star-proof.” Ah, but Ulmus Americana is “ notably light,” though it was never in the mind or eye of the non-clairvoyant bard. An ensnared editor has made the right remark upon the wrong occasion, has deduced the “trivial inaccuracy” of a master pen, out of his own totally irrelevant landscape. In short (to make a cruel pun), the premises are defective !

The American elm, as we all know, is most graceful, feathery, fountain-like. Even the move ancient trees, immense in girth, and hale in old age, never lose this exquisite character. Far from being “star-proof,” they hang every star in the firmament as a festal lantern in between their spraying midsummer boughs. Meanwhile, on Boston Common itself, stand aligned on the east and west malls some survivors of the sturdy English elms, set there, as imported saplings, while Milton was still young, by his co-Puritans, the first colonists: a noble dogged company, lopped and neglected, which look quite as they might look in the Weald of Kent. Each of these lame giants, holding his ancestral traditions, might claim, with our friend in Pinafore, that, in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman. He puts on leaf in April, ere his native-born colleagues are ready ; he divests himself in the autumn with decency, with gravity, with abhorrence of that gayly golden display dear to those others, and he does so weeks after they have gone to rest. Despite the Subway’s abominable shaking of his vitals, he keeps all the old distinctive and unpopular habits ; this conservative is, of course, “star-proof.” Did Mr. Schelling never raise his eyes, when he went to see his publishers at the Athenæum Press in Boston, to the living witness that Milton sang truly of what he saw ? Familiarity with our own charming woodland sophists has led him, a scholar, to undervalue an immortal report of elms as they are in the British isles.

Indeed, one might follow further, with some profit, such vegetable differences between the transatlantic and the cisatlantic apprehension. On such a topic, it is more civil, perhaps, to criticise ourselves. Mr. Gosse has just announced, with “ a certain condescension in foreigners,” that the landscape of Kentucky, as it lies in Mr. Madison Cawein’s beautiful books, “ would have scandalized neither Spenser nor Keats ! ” Let us not depreciate our mercies. But to return to the argument: the word “ may,” for instance, meaning the blossomed hawthorn bush, in American editions of English poets, is invariably set up, to its lasting damage, with the capital letter ; for the bewitching month of that name is not, like the white hedgerow which everywhere in England gives it the crowning grace, a stranger to our printers. What untraveled reader, under our dazzling sunset sky, can make out what Coleridge was thinking of when he named

The dying day, with us, is orange, is purple, is carmine, opal, and gold; it is everything that is brilliant and exciting, but it certainly is not green. “ Green light ” is the one phrase, however, proper to the tender, even, gradual, melancholy English even-fall, especially in summertime. Meredith, again, uses the same lovely coloring in those lines which seem to some so full of extravagance and affectation : —

Yes, English grass has its racial “ ways.” In the low-lying districts particularly, say in Oxford or in Cambridge, every vista from a bridge (and what vistas they are !) will spread for you, a little beyond, its sward of misted unmistakable blue. Coleridge, again, writes of

It is not our nimbus and cirrus, but the whole firmament of tumbling violet-gray, an endless pageant of shadow, which fills the year in Devon, and which his boyhood knew. Great poets, it may be added, glory in keeping this matter of fact record of the natural world. They are not impressionists, not rhetoricians : they sometimes love a commonplace, because they love truth. Would it not be well, as an international move, to trust them ?