Rustic Sounds Part 3

If we take the wide view of memory which has been set forth by S. Butler {51a} and by Hering, we shall be forced to believe that plants, like all other living things, have a kind of memory. For these writers make memory cover the whole phenomena of life. Inheritance with them is a form of memory, or memory a kind of inheritance. A plant or an animal grows into the form inherited from its ancestors by pa.s.sing through a series of changes, each change being linked to the preceding stage as the notes of a tune are linked together in the nervous system of one who plays the piano. Or we may compare the development of an animal or plant to the firing of a train of gunpowder, which completes itself by a series of explosions, each leading to a new one. To use the language I have been employing, each stage in development acts as a signal to the next.

In the same way the characteristic element in what is done by memory, or by that "unconscious memory" {51b} known as habit, is the a.s.sociation of a chain of thoughts or actions each calling forth the next.

What I wish to insist on is, that the process I have called action-by-signal is of the same type as action-by-a.s.sociation, and therefore allied to habit and memory. The plants alive to-day are the successful ones who have inherited from successful ancestors the power of curving in certain ways, when, by accidental deviations from their normal att.i.tude, some change of pressure is produced in their protoplasm. With the pianist the playing of A has become tied to, entangled or a.s.sociated with, the playing of B, so that the striking of note A has grown to be a signal to the muscles to strike B. Similarly in the plant, the act of bending has become tied to, entangled or a.s.sociated with, that change in the protoplasm due to the altered position. There is no mechanical necessity that B should follow A in the tune; the sequence is owing to the path built by habit in the man's brain. And this is equally true of the plant, in which an hereditary habit has been built up in a brain-like root-tip.

The capacities of plants of which I have spoken have been compared to instincts, and if I prefer to call them reflexes it is because instinct is generally applied to actions with something of an undoubted mental basis. I do not necessarily wish it to be inferred that there can be nothing in plants which may possibly be construed as the germ of consciousness-nothing psychic, to use a convenient term; but it is clearly our duty to explain the facts, if possible, without a.s.suming a psychological resemblance between plants and human beings, lest we go astray into anthropomorphism or sentimentality, and sin against the law of parsimony, which forbids us to a.s.sume the action of higher causes when lower will suffice.

The problem is clearly one for treatment by evolutionary method-for instance, by applying the principle of continuity. {53a} Man is developed from an ovum, and since man has consciousness it is allowable to suppose that the speck of protoplasm from which he develops has a quality which can grow into consciousness, and, by a.n.a.logy, that other protoplasmic bodies, for instance those found in plants, have at least the ghosts of similar qualities. But the principle of continuity may be used the other way up; it may be argued that if a lump of protoplasm can perform the essential functions of a living thing, to all appearances without consciousness, the supposed value of consciousness in Man is an illusion. This is the doctrine of animal automatism so brilliantly treated by Huxley. {53b} He is chiefly concerned with the value of consciousness to an organism-a question into which I cannot enter. What concerns us now is, that however we use the doctrine of continuity, it gives support to belief in a psychic element in plants. All I contend for at the moment is, that there is nothing unscientific in cla.s.sing animals and plants together from a psychological standpoint. For this contention I may quote a well-known psychologist, Dr. James Ward, {53c} who concludes that mind "is always implicated in life." He remarks, too (_ibid._ p. 287): "It would be hardly going too far to say that Aristotle's conception of a plant-soul . . . is tenable even to-day, at least as tenable as any such notion can be at a time when souls are out of fashion."

This is a path of inquiry I am quite incapable of pursuing. It would be safer for me to rest contented with a.s.serting that plants are vegetable automata, as some philosophers are content to make an automaton of Man.

But I am not satisfied with this resting-place. And I hope that other biologists will not be satisfied with a point of view in which consciousness is no more than a bye-product of automatic action, and that they will in time gain a definite conception of the value of consciousness in the economy of living organisms. Nor can I doubt that the facts discussed in these pages must contribute to the foundation of this wider psychological outlook.

IV A LANE IN THE COTSWOLDS

Early in May I walked up from the valley to the extreme rim of the Cotswolds, just above our house. The lower country is all pasture, where we can wander at will, and delight in the many beautiful trees: the fresh green elms, the vernal yellow of the oak (which lingers in varying degrees behind some of its companions, but does not deserve Tolstoy's epithet 'maussade'), and the grey anatomy of the timid ash, whose black buds are still getting up their courage. We do not owe the trees in the meadows to landowners with a taste for natural beauty, but to the cattle that must have shade.

The b.u.t.tercups are beginning their golden show, and there is not much else to decorate the fields, except daisies and the cheerful dandelions.

These last are still growing obliquely, and not yet staring boldly up at the sky, as in later life. There is also an occasional patch of bugle-st.u.r.dy little blue sentinels, and a few purple orchids. In the upper meadows where the wind is cold the daisies bend their stalk and lay their heads on the ground (as they do at night), and their little noses look red like poor Marian's in Shakespeare's winter song. In the daisy it is the pink-tipped petals {56} huddling together that make this chilly symbol a contrast to the happy star that sunshine shows.

Near the top of the hill is a bare pasture covered with cowslips, all pointing their pretty heads one way. At first it seemed that they were simply yielding to the fresh wind, but on picking them it was made clear that they bent their stalks wilfully, not on compulsion. On the whole it seemed that they were nodding towards the brighter light, but I could not perceive that the quarter to which they turned had any advantage in luminosity.

Close to the top of the hill is a little wood of nut-trees, and I looked down into it over the hedge with a shock of pleasure at the chequer-work of white and blue, a conspiracy of wild garlick and blue-bells. In this land I have not seen the blue haze covering acres of cleared woodland such as we have in Kent. But this colour-dance of the two plants is beautiful in its own way. Now we have reached the rim of the valley, and look over into a new country, with many red patches of ploughed land, and sheep in the treeless fields instead of cattle. Here the skylark sings, who is something of a stranger to us dwellers in the valley. The same is true of the yellow-hammer, whose hot and dusty voice is less familiar there. To one inland bred the seagulls feeding in the ploughed lands are a delight. They seem an echo from the salt sea, or a variation (in a musical sense) on the far away silver strip which is the Severn shining down to the Bristol Channel.

We now come to a little wandering road, called for reasons unknown to me Seven Leases Lane, and after a time end our wanderings at a point whence we can look down on misty Gloucester and its cathedral; and this is a historic spot if the rumour is to be trusted, that from here King Charles watched the siege. The lane is pleasant with its plashed hedges beset with traveller's joy (clematis) and bryony. Clematis likes to climb up trees, but it seems quite happy ramping over the hedges. It is now in its freshest youth, and the careless way in which the young stems toss themselves. .h.i.ther and thither gives an impression of endless living things dancing with complete abandon on the hedge as on an airy floor.

The traveller's joy climbs by seizing hold of the branches of plants more solid than itself. It grips them with its leaf-stalks, which serve as tendrils and support the weakling stem aloft in the clear air. But as yet they have hardly begun to fix themselves; though some I saw which had caught each other, giving themselves a gay aspect by seeming to dance hand in hand.

The white bryony is there also, and its tendrils have fastened on to the hazel, beech and dog-wood, which make up the ma.s.s of the hedge. Their tendrils are but delicate ropes, and when they have seized a twig they would break away in the first fresh breeze. But this is prevented by the fact that the tendrils contract into spiral springs, and by the give-and-take of its elastic coils the cable becomes almost unbreakable and the ship rides out the stiffest gale. {58a}

Two other types of climbing plants are common in our lane, which have neither the grasping leafstalks of clematis nor the delicate tendrils of white bryony. Black bryony is a twining plant, and can travel spirally up the hazel stems, just as a hop ascends its pole. But here in our lane there is but little to climb up, and its livid pink stems, often twisted with one or more brother-strands, lie along the hedge or sway in the air like discontented snakes. Just now they hardly show any leaves, but later in the spring they will have finely polished ones, and later still bunches of red berries, which do not seem to be popular with birds, and hang on their branches till winter comes. Another type of climber which shows itself early is the goose-gra.s.s. {58b} This is a humble personage, probably looked down on by the superior climbers above described, as able neither to swarm spirally nor to ascend by the aid of tendrils or other gripping apparatus. The goose-gra.s.s depends on the possession of delicate little hooks covering stem and leaves. These can be perceived by stroking the plant from the base upwards, but not in the other direction. The hooks being directed downwards do not hinder the upward push of the growing plant, but they prevent it from slipping downwards.

If one disentangles a goose-gra.s.s from its position it will fall weakly over and lie along the ground. In its simple way it gains the object aspired to by all climbers, namely the possession of a satisfactory position in the world without going to the expense of building a stem stiff enough to stand alone. To children goose-gra.s.s is valuable as the ideal material for the making of sham birds' nests, since the hooked p.r.i.c.kles hold the stems in position and make the art of nest-building a singularly easy one.

The great revolution that breaks out in the spring, when the store-houses of the plant pour nutriment into the numberless awakening buds is a miracle annually repeated in the endless procession of life. We know something of the mechanism by which mobilisation is effected. We know for instance that the starch-grains guarded by the dormant plant during the idle days of winter are liquified, or rather, that the starch is converted into sugar, and being soluble in water can flow from the magazines of the plant to where growth, implying the creation of millions of newly born cells, demands material. We are gradually learning to understand something of that seething cauldron of life which we can dimly watch in living things. The ferment diastase is one of the tools with which plants perform their miracles of chemical activity. This diastase and its brother-ferments have qualities resembling those of living creatures. They may, like seeds, be dried and kept in a bottle until they are awakened by giving them water. Perhaps this is talking in a circle, and that ferments only resemble living things because organisms contain so many of these mysterious bodies. I like to fancy that there is something more than this, and that a ferment is an automaton which the plant compels to labour for it-a Frankenstein monster having semi-living qualities, being no more than a parody of life. But I am getting beyond the questions that are in tune with a spring day.

V JANE AUSTEN

The most obvious characteristic of English country life as described by Jane Austen, is a quietness such as even the elder generation now living have not experienced. A quietness which many would call dull and some few peaceful. It is, indeed, hard to believe that life was once so placid, so stay-at-home, so domestic, so devoid, not merely of excitement, but of any change whatever.

The life of Emma Woodhouse (to take a single instance) has all the characteristics of this deep repose. At Hartfield there was certainly no changing "from the blue chamber to the green," a revolution which would have made Mr. Woodhouse seriously unwell.

Emma never seems to leave home, she had not seen the sea, nor indeed had she (before a memorable occasion) explored Box Hill, a few miles away, although her father kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Nor is there any evidence of her going to London, a distance of sixteen miles. She did not engage in good works; there were no committees or meetings except those held at the 'Crown' at which Mr. Knightly and Mrs. Elton's _cara sposo_ were the leaders, and where no ladies were admitted.

In comparison with the hurried unsheltered life of the modern girl, Emma seems a princess shut in a tower of bra.s.s or an enchanted garden. And although in the course of the story she escapes this particular tower, it is only to fall into the castle of Mr. Knightly, who (with his squire William Larkins) plays the part of knight errant.

And Emma was not dull, but full of happy animation, and her quiet life encouraged the growth of an educated, or at least a cultivated, condition which re-appears in the other novels. This placid life is all the more striking in contrast to the great contemporary struggle of the Napoleonic wars, hardly a sound of which reaches Miss Austen's readers, although in _Persuasion_ we do hear something of Captain Wentworth's prize money.

George Eliot knew the flavour of this quietude, and reproduces it in the introduction to _Felix Holt_. But even in these pre-reform days the quiet is beginning to be broken; the stage-coachman is beginning to dread the railway train, and looks on Mr. Huskisson's death as a proof of G.o.d's anger against Stephenson. Again, in _Middlemarch_ we see the country stirring in its sleep, and poor Dorothea suffering in the process of awakening. There is nothing of this in Miss Austen; it is true that the Miss Bennets sometimes experienced the blankness of female existence, but they could imagine nothing blanker than the departure of the militia from Meryton.

Jane Austen's books have something of the quiet atmosphere of Cowper's _Letters_. Mr. Austen Leigh in his _Memoir_ speaks of her love for the writings of Cowper and of Crabbe (the latter indeed she proposed to herself to marry). We know that Marianne Dashwood (that type of sensibility) was very far from finding Cowper too quiet. For when Edward Ferrars failed to read him aloud with spirit, Marianne remarks, "Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!"

Bagehot {63a} in his article on the _Letters of Cowper_ unconsciously describes the life at Hartfield or Mansfield Park. Of Cowper he writes: "Detail was his forte and quietness his element. Accordingly his delicate humour plays over perhaps a million letters mostly descriptive of events which no one else would have thought worth narrating, and yet which, when narrated, show to us, and will show to persons to whom it will be yet more strange, the familiar, placid, easy, ruminating, provincial existence of our great grandfathers."

The domestic and intimate parts of life are the most lastingly happy, and thus it is that an imaginary existence, which in some moods seems to be unbearably humdrum, harmonises with the best parts of our own life. The quiet winds that blow through Miss Austen's imagined land cannot turn windmills or overset tall trees, but they can set going those tunelike chains of simple experiences written on our memories by the quiet and happy parts of life.

Imaginative writing is often compared to painting, and Miss Austen has spoken {63b} of "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour."

But this gives a false impression, suggesting a niggling character from which her work is free. What strikes one is rather how much she conveys by touches which seem trifling until we realise the triumph of the result. The effect is not a miniature, as the author suspects, but something essentially broad in spite of its detail, like a picture by Jan Steen.

To discuss why Jane Austen's humour is admirable, or how she reaches such perfection in the drawing of character, seems to me as hopeless as to ask by what means Bach or Beethoven wrote such divinely beautiful tunes. Her powers are rendered even more admirable by the fact {64a} that she did not draw portraits, so that no one could say _A_ is Mr. Collins and _B_ is Mrs. Palmer.

I think it is true, but not easily explained, that the simplest people in her books give us most pleasure. Why is Admiral Croft so delightful, and why do we read again and again the speech about his wife, who suffered from sharing the exercise prescribed for her husband's gout? "She, poor soul, is tied by the leg with a blister on one of her heels as big as a three-shilling piece." Why do we delight in Mr. Woodhouse's perambulation among his guests, and his words to Jane Fairfax, "My dear, did you change your stockings?" In this respect we have advanced beyond the _Quarterly_ reviewer of 1815, {64b} who says: "The faults of these works arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends.

Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward, or too long dwelt on, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society." If ever a reviewer "d.a.m.ned himself to everlasting fame," surely this writer did so; but, indeed, we need not have quoted so much, since (in the words of Corporal Trim) "he is d.a.m.ned already" for leaving out the 'Mr.' before the name Woodhouse.

But six years later (1821) another _Quarterly_ reviewer (said to be Archbishop Whately) reversed the above unfortunate judgment by singling out the drawing of Miss Austen's fools as shining examples of her skill.

Jane Austen must surely be the most re-read author of the last hundred years. Lord Holland is said to have read her books when he had the gout, and in that case he must have experienced what smaller people have suffered during less picturesque complaints, viz., from not being able to determine which of her books they have most nearly forgotten. In this frame of mind one longs for a new Miss Austen more than for a new symphony of Beethoven, or a play of Shakespeare, and much more than for the lost books of Livy, which, indeed, I, for one, do not desire at all.

The power of endlessly re-reading the novels of Miss Austen is the only advantage conferred by a bad memory. I do not imagine that Macaulay, greatly as he admired her, could have endured to read her as often as I have. Nor am I willing to allow that this is intellectual idleness, for her works like those of Nature, always yield something new to the faithful student.

And she, like Nature, has the power of creating in her devotees a minute interest which I rarely experience in other writers. It does not seem to Austenites a foolish thing to inquire what was Mr. Woodhouse's Christian name, a problem only soluble by remembering that he thought it "very pretty" of poor Isabella to call her eldest little boy Henry, and by implication proving that the child, who should have been christened John after his father, was named after his grandfather. And I am proud to remember that when the problem of Mr. Woodhouse's name was propounded to my mother, she solved it at once, and as though it were a question too simple to be asked. Nor does it seem to us trivial that the word given by Frank Churchill to Jane during the "word-game" at Hartfield was 'Pardon.' This was traditionally known in the author's family, indeed Mr. Austen Leigh {66} says that she was always ready to reveal such valuable facts as that Mrs. Norris' "considerable sum" given as a present to William in _Mansfield Park_ was one pound; that Miss Steele never caught the Doctor, and that Mary Bennet married an unfortunate clerk of her uncle Philip's. These revelations lend an air of history to her romance, they give the exciting quality of treasure-trove to the secrets she shares with us. "And here," as children's books say, "a very pretty game may be played by each child saying" what question he would put to the ghost of Jane Austen. For myself I believe I should ask, "Would f.a.n.n.y Price really have married Crawford if he had not eloped with Miss Bertram?" If in the words of Captain Price there had not been "the devil to pay" in Wimpole Street. Then, too, I should have liked some eugenic information about Elizabeth's (Mrs. Darcy's) children. Because if there was reversion to the type of Lydia it would have been serious. One can fancy Elizabeth retorting that if he said another word about the Lydia type she would pray for an infant possessing all the qualities of Lady Catherine de Burgh, a gift well within the powers of the G.o.ds who rule heredity.

I doubt whether Jane Austen consciously painted the results of heredity; rather, I suppose that her memory working instinctively, made, for instance, the Bennet family consist of types recalling the father or mother. She could hardly have known of the questionable theory that the eldest child is commonly inferior to the second, and nevertheless she makes Jane Bennet inferior in capacity to Elizabeth, although so greatly superior to the younger children of Mrs. Bennet's type.

There are other cases of heredity among her characters; for instance, in _Persuasion_, the sn.o.bbery and selfishness of Miss Elliott clearly reproduces her father, while Anne, as we know from Lady Russell, was a true child of her mother. I like to fancy that the querulousness and weakness of Mary (Mrs. Charles) was a perverted gentleness coming from her mother, while her vulgarity came from Sir Walter. Then again, Emma had none of Mr. Woodhouse's qualities, and we must suppose her to be a repet.i.tion of her mother. Unless, indeed, her general kindliness came from her father, and possibly also the stupidity which wrecked her matrimonial agency. We must, I think, believe that Mrs. Woodhouse had been a managing woman, who probably insisted on Mr. Woodhouse marrying her; thus her instinct for matrimonial scheming was confined (we may fancy) to her own interests. It is too fanciful to suggest that Mrs.

Woodhouse had a tinge of hardness in her which came out in Emma's celebrated rudeness to Miss Bates. At any rate, it is certain that it was not a heritage from her father. I knew a lady who could never forgive this slip of poor Emma. And the vividness of this feeling was not a symptom of that want of literary sense which makes the gallery hiss the villain on the stage, but must be taken as a proof of the vitality of the character. Isabella Woodhouse is obviously of her father's type, with hardly a mental feature to remind us of Emma.

In the Bertram family the inheritance is not very clear; the Miss Bertrams seem to show the hard narrowness of Mrs. Norris, and none of the sheep-like good nature and futility of Lady Bertram. I suspect that in Mrs. Norris, hardness and business tendency were an inheritance from her uncle, the Huntingdon solicitor, for we know that he made the harsh and commercial statement that his niece was at least 3000 short of any equitable claim to the hand of Sir Thomas. We do not know anything of the parents of Lady Bertram, but we may suspect that her Ladyship inherited from her mother the soft and cushiony character of which she is a great example. Mrs. Price, with her small income and large family, was unfortunately of the same easy and futile temper. Edward Bertram is obviously his father the Baronet over again, with all his kindness and extreme respectability, while what will ultimately grow into Sir Thomas'

pomposity is like the delicate tissues of the sucking pig in Charles Lamb's essay, not to be described by the gross terms applicable to the adult, "Oh, call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it," etc. The elder brother, Tom, who began life as a cheerful, irresponsible person, falls under the family curse in consequence of a mysterious fever, so that he doubtless inherited the fatal tendency from Sir Thomas, together with a certain insouciance and want of heart, which one can imagine to be forms of Lady Bertram's emptiness and Mrs. Norris's hardness.

This is a subject on which a Mendelian inquirer might endlessly speculate, but the characters in fiction being even less susceptible to experiment than our living friends and acquaintance, the interest of the matter is soon exhausted.

It is to be regretted that Miss Austen did not allow the characters of one novel to appear in the next. It is true that this would have upset plots in an absurd way, but I should like to know what would have happened if, when Henry Tilney had made up his mind that he was in love with Catherine, Elizabeth Bennet had appeared? He would surely have repented of his entanglement with Catherine. There is, however, this to be said, that I strongly suspect Elizabeth of being his first cousin.

She is so like him that she might have failed to please him, or he may have known her from a little girl and looked on her as a sister. Or the marriages of cousins may have been as impossible among the Tilneys as in the Royal Family of Crim Tartary, where Bulbo's beautiful Circa.s.sian cousin simply had to be allowed to die of love for him.

There are many possibilities in the combination of characters now separated by inexorable paper and ink. One can imagine a meeting at Bath between General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott; they would clearly sympathise, and unless the General has injured his complexion by incautious zeal on active service, which seems unlikely, Sir Walter would have had "no objection to being seen with him anywhere"; he might even have walked arm-in-arm with him as he did with Colonel Wallis, who "was a fine military figure, though sandy haired." Again, Mr. Collins would have been charmed with Mr. Dashwood in _Sense and Sensibility_, for although the two characters are not quite similarly compounded of sn.o.bbery and folly, yet there is a common substratum of meanness that must have served as a bond.

It would be interesting to treat the whole of Miss Austen's characters as the flora of a given land is dealt with, to divide them into genera and species, and to provide an a.n.a.lytical key. Take, for instance, the young men: these would correspond to a Natural Order, say the Ranunculaceae, and may be divided, as the following table shows, into two groups, Attractive and Unattractive, and these are subdivided again into four groups which correspond to genera. No. 1, which we should call Brandonia, possesses the three species _Brandonia brandoni_, _ferrarsi_, and _bertrami_, and so on with the rest.

[Picture: Table of characters]

Brandon, Dashwood, Ferrars, R. Ferrars, Willoughby are in _Sense and Sensibility_; E. Bertram, Crawford, Rushworth in _Mansfield Park_; Mr.

Collins, Darcy, Wickham in _Pride and Prejudice_; Tilney and Thorpe in _Northanger Abbey_; Mr. Elton, F. Churchill and Knightley in _Emma_; Wentworth and Mr. Elliot in _Persuasion_.

Then of course we should need descriptions to distinguish the species, thus in genus (ii) Darcy would be known by pride, Knightley by calm sense, Tilney by light-hearted cheerfulness, while Wentworth would be easily recognised by his sub-dull character. Naturalists would dispute whether Mr. Elton should be in the same genus as Wickham, or in the quite distinct genus (iv); or again, whether F. Churchill should not be placed with Darcy and Knightley. In the same way Captain Wentworth might perhaps be placed in the dull group with Brandon, Edward Ferrars and Edward Bertram.