The Poet, the Bramble, and Reconstruction

IN browsing through the delightful fifth volume of Ward’s English Poets, I came, in pensive mood, on the poems of Lord De Tabley. The poet had been, I confess to my shame, little more than a name to me; so, after reading the selections from his work, I turned to the editor’s preface, and there I learned that Lord De Tabley, of Tabley House, Cheshire, was a distinguished bibliophile, numismatist, and botanist; that he was ‘always of secluded habits, spent his later years in close retirement,’ and at last became a ‘leading authority on brambles.’

There is a life for you! Of the numerous hints regarding the peer, none seems to me so significant and delightful as this devotion to the thornier paths of botany. He lived in an age, now, alas, to return no more, when the office of minor poet was by no means hostile to that of a ‘leading authority on brambles.’ Shall we watch it disappear into the past, without even a sigh of regret, that Victorian England, in which the prebendary of the local cathedral was certain to be (or to become) one of the leaders among the many ‘authorities’ on the minor Crustacea of the Dorset coast? The Horatian vicar, who sipped his tawny port after dinner and discoursed of early Saxon architecture and the remains of Roman baths, if he be not gone already, must prepare himself for a decided change. The England of the Shop Stewards and the Soldiers’ Union will make short work of him and his ‘authorities.’ And I suppose that in time it will make way with the brambles, and that every lane in England will be cleared of its blackberry hedge.

Before it has disappeared forever, gentle reader, let us close our volume of Wells or of Galsworthy, and open the Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley; we will send our memories back to that pleasant time when there was leisure aplenty to become a minor poet and an authority on brambles. Here are some verses called ‘Autumn Love,’ which are surely worth attention.

What interests me in these verses is the sudden apparition in English poetry of the blackberry-bush. Lord De Tabley discovering love in the fall of the year is nothing, but the leading authority on brambles discovering poetry in the blackberry is a very bright and beautiful thing; for the bramble has, in general, been unloved by poets. Broad as was Shakespeare’s sympathy, it did not extend to the blackberry; though we may, if we choose, fancy him as inspired with prophetic vision of Lord De Tabley when he described Orlando as ‘hanging odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles.’ This is, I think, his only reference to the bramble, or rubus fruticosus, though he did, in truth, have something to say of it under its more vulgar designation of blackberry; but it is a regrettable fact that his references are as vulgar as the name. ‘Not worth a blackberry’ seems to have been a form of Elizabethan denunciation, if we may trust the language of Thersites to reflect Elizabethan usage. Contemptuous reference is twice made to the blackberry in the First Part of King Henry Fourth. Following the lead of a certain critic who has deduced from the twofold mention of the toothache in Much Ado About Nothing the indubitable fact that the bard was, at the moment of composition, suffering from that malady, we shall, I take it, be justified in suggesting that the jovial play of Henry Fourth was produced in the early autumn, or blackberry season. (See Lord De Tabley, passim). Falstaff’s sneer, ‘If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries,’ points directly to the full-fruited bramble, and to the small boy, crawling unwillingly to school, who is likely to be seduced from the paths of learning by the laden bushes all along the way, to ‘prove a micher and eat blackberries,’ all the morning long. With these few poor words, the lips of the bard close forever on the subject. He, it would seem, preferred that fat bourgeois of the garden, the strawberry— a fruit deemed worthy of being embroidered on Desdemona’s ill-fated bit of lace.

But Shakespeare’s indifference to the ‘ intenser jet' of the brambleberry deepens, in other poets, into a profound dislike and, let me add, distrust. In Chaucer the mild sport of blackberrying is plainly associated with that irregularity of life which, in the eyes of the Pardoner, leads downwards to damnation. Milton is hardly more indulgent. We should not expect to find the bramble thrusting her thorny arms

across the high solemnities of Paradise Lost, nor do we. But in the less dignified flats of prose Milton did permit himself to indulge the common prejudice against it. He, when dreaming of an age of Reconstruction in education, permitted himself these gentle phrases as a summary of the ordinary curriculum of the day: ‘That asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them [young students] as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.’

It is clear that Milton derived his distrust of the bramble, like so much else in his philosophy, from the Old Testament. You will not, I am sure, expect me to pass over the deplorable rôle that is assigned to the bramble in the Book of Judges. Jotham, the son of Jerubbaal, in resisting the encroachments of an era of reconstruction which called for the election of a king, set forth to the Israelites a parable, or fable, in which he revealed the dangers of kingship and all the harshness of the aristocratic system to which the age was tending.

The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us.

But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? . . .

Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us.

And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?

Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us.

And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.

It is clear that, to the Israelite, the bramble was no cheering bush. No figs were to be gathered from thorns, nor grapes from brambles. The spiteful blackberry may well have been to him one of those accursed thorns which sprang from the dust of that first era of reconstruction which ensued upon the Fall of Man. I do not know, nor are the leading authorities on the bramble clear as to the matter. Lord De Tabley might perhaps have told us. But Lord De Tabley is no more. In any case, it is obvious that only those with the traditional dislike of the bramblebush can enter into the full meaning of the ancient satire on Utopian dreamers and their New Era in thought and government.

Long time appears to have elapsed before mankind determined to make the best of a bad bush, and find some practical use for the blackberry bramble. I discover in a mediæval work on leechworts and simples a strange and well-nigh superstitious reference to a certain ‘bramble-cure,’ once employed in country districts for the healing of sundry diseases; but the whole important subject is shrouded in mediæval vagueness, and awaits the patient investigation of Lord De Tabley’s successor among the ‘authorities.’ An all too cursory examination of the subject, however, leads me to the conclusion that the bramble-cure Avas used as a counter-irritant. I find that cows, in certain conditions, were ‘dragged through the bramble-loops’ — a harsh experience, no doubt, for so placid a beast. An attempt to introduce some sort of extract of bramble as a toilet accessory, or hair-wash (guaranteed useful for ‘binding, drying, or dyeing the hair’), came to naught, as do other attempts to make use of its milder properties, until at last the Treasury of Botany informs us that in Cornwall it is now ‘employed only for boils.’

It is not impossible that a careful investigation of the medicinal use of the bramble may in time lead us to some rational explanation of the conduct of that impulsive gentleman who once — causa latet — plunged into a bramblebush, with certain dire results to his eyes. Whether the leap into the bramble was in this case the original cause of his misfortune, or only the first application of the cure, I do not venture to say. To many his conduct will appear volatile, if not desperate; but the more thoughtful may well interpret it as a deliberate act; for an immediate and vigorous application to another bush made good the preliminary loss which he had suffered in the first. Be this as it may, it would seem that the popular imagination, the great heart of the people, has done justice—and something more — to the bramble. There is, perhaps, no more popular utterance with regard to it.

It might have been expected that Wordsworth, with his eye dutifully upon the object, would have had something to say of the blackberry bramble; yet I recall but one reference in his poetry, and that not untouched with contempt: —

And even this line, which, by the way, is somewhat suggestive of the despised manner of the eighteenth-century poet, wastes what little sweetness it has upon the desert air of the ‘ Ecclesiastical Sonnets.’ I fear that, when all is said, Lord De Tabley must be acknowledged as the undisputed monarch of the bramble world. Mr. Ward’s statement that he became a leading authority would seem to imply the existence of other devotees of the blackberry, but it is to be feared that they were not poets.

This rather bleak sketch of the bramble compels us to face the future with misgiving. It is not improbable that the bramble-bush, like many another thing, must feel the scientific touch of an Age of Reconstruction. Her tendency to thrust her gadding vines about the lanes and copses of England will be tamed and trained by future Burbanks in the interests of eugenic fruitfulness. Already there has been a marige forcé between the blackberry and her cousin the raspberry, or raspis-berry (rubus idœus), with results better known to housewives and scientific journals than to readers of poetry.

It may be doubted whether the minor poets of the New Age will care to become authorities on the loganberry. The age of the amateur in botany, architecture, and scholarship is slipping away. And with it there will go, I think, something of the charm of England, something of that ‘fine old leisure’ which had time for reading and for daily evensong in the gray cathedral, time for letter-writing and the sweet intimacies of rural life — time, if you will, for brambles. Lord De Tabley threatens to go the way of his younger brothers, the Horatian vicar and the fox-hunting squire. They still live on in the novels of Mr. Archibald Marshall, the last of the Victorians; but already the pages of Mr. Marshall begin to have the glow of romance. Each year of the Great War lent to the former age more of the cloudlike beauty of distance and enchantment.

The adjective ‘Victorian,’ as a term of cheap denunciation, must now be tossed to the scrap-heap. For, as the sadder years go by, it will be less and less indicative of that contempt which marked the turn of the century, and more and more suggestive of dear memories and old associations never to be renewed. While the great estates of England are in process of cutting up, and the game preserves come under the hammer of the auctioneer (who knows not a tod from a brock), we may surely be permitted to linger a moment in pensive regret at its disappearance. As we bid farewell to the earlier generation, we can afford to forget its puny attempts at social legislation and model housing, and recall instead its mastery of the art of living among the hedgerows and by-paths of Dorset and Surrey. It will be many a long year before we meet a more gracious and attractive class of gentlemen than they who, to their knowledge of Elzevirs and numismatics and ecclesiastical architecture and stone-circles and the poetry of Herrick and a pack of hounds and the versification of Æschylus and the perils of the High-Church movement, joined an abiding love of the English countryside, and could dwell with a large knowledge and a larger affection upon its very brambles.