l'Allegro vs. Il Penseroso

BROWNE is an ambitious young student-soldier taking educational work at one of our army hospitals with a view to entering college on his discharge. I had the privilege of guiding him down the great stream of English literature, and enjoyed always his fresh point of view. Whether bored but conscientious, or genuinely enthusiastic, he expressed himself, soldier-boy fashion, briefly and to the point.

‘ Il Penseroso ’ he did not like because the guy that wrote it had a grouch; and he was relieved to exchange the rarified atmosphere of Miltonic heights for the glades of the Faery Queen. Spenser’s frequent tributes to royalty, such as, —

brought forth the comment that ‘the queen sure got the handshake from that poet.’

‘Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music,’ found him in more receptive mood. He plays in the band himself.

Here Browne, with a chuckle exclaims, ‘Soaked!’ anticipating the poet, who goes on more ornately —

I should say, on the whole, that Browne put it over on Dryden.

When he came to Gray’s ‘ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,’ his appreciation of its sombre music and its peerless if stale and hackneyed lines communicated itself to me, and I, too, read it as for the first time, seeing it with his fresh young vision.

Enviable youth, to whom worn coin is still lustrous.

We read Julius Cœsar together, and from the first scene, where the cobbler does the ‘kidding,’ to the last act, we enjoyed it all.

Shelley he called a sissy. ‘I know that kind. I ’ve fought their battles for them in school when the other fellows bullied them. I’m rather a fighter myself. But inwardly I despised them.’ When he found that Shelley was a bit of a radical like himself, he thought better of the poet. ‘But he must of been very little known, for not a man in my barracks had ever heard of him.’ ‘Anyway, he was n’t a good mixer,’ was his final verdict; and we let it go at that.

Many were the graphic phrases my young soldier-pupil ‘ handed out ’ to me in the course of our work together. One very stormy session we had over a paper in the Contributor’s Club called ‘The Reactions of a Radical.’ On it was based one of his daily exercises for drill in commas, spelling, and the like. He sought to demolish that gentle paper. The humor of it passed over his head, and he knocked down arguments where arguments existed not. I think the writer would have enjoyed him.

Well, he has had his discharge now. I get letters from him occasionally that are full of conscientious semicolons, but I miss the color of his spoken word.

Johnson is another of my soldierboys. He has the real student type of mind. ‘Do you know what I would like when I get out of this hospital? A room all to myself where I could study and study and study.’ And he rooted down in the lower story of this bedside table to find his spelling-book. He had asked me to teach him spelling. ‘Please go to the library and get me the hardest speller you can find.’

I brought him a choice, of which he selected one. Now Johnson spells well; but such is his methodical, orderly, and thorough brain that, until he knows every rule and every exception to every rule, he is not content.

I gave him spelling three days in succession, then shunted him onto Latin, which gave him more nearly what he was blindly striving for. He loved words. And words he should have, in their making and from one of their fountain-heads. So we learned agricola, and were charmed to find that it meant a dweller in the fields, and we wrote romances on the blackboard about the sailor and how he loved the daughter of the farmer.

Johnson was slow, inconceivably slow, but of a terrifying thoroughness. However, he will never have the strength to study all he wants to. He, far from feeling that Milton had a grouch when he wrote ‘Il Penseroso,’thinks that is the only point of view to take. Will he, one wonders, ever find out his peaceful hermitage, where he, too, may sit and rightly spell?