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Tamoskaro-2 Directory 02
Page 06
It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that, art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty, and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that expression. Architecture, for instance, and music, are alike based upon instinctive preferences in human beings, the one for geometrical form, the other for the combination of vibrations. It is a law of music, for instance, that the human being prefers an octave in absolute unison, and not an octave of which one note is a semitone flat. That is not a rule invented by critics; it is a law of human perception and preference. Similarly there is undoubtedly a law which determines human preferences in poetry, though a far more complicated law, and not yet analysed. The new poet is not a man who breaks the law, but one who discovers a real extension of it.
Almost three hundred years later Captain Hall, the American explorer, visited the Countess's Island and Sound. Among the Eskimos, from 1860 to 1862, he learned the tradition of Frobisher's visits, which had been preserved and handed down. They knew the number of ships; they spoke of the three times that white men had come; how five of these strangers had been taken captive, and how, after remaining through the winter, they had been allowed to build a boat, and to launch themselves upon the icy seas, never to be heard of more. Captain Hall was shown many relics of Frobisher's voyages, some of which he sent to the Royal Geographical Society of London, a part to the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. The small English house of lime and stone on this island was still standing in good condition, and there was also a trench where they had built their ill-fated boat.
And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells; so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness; yea though it be in a morning's dew. Bays likewise yield no smell as they grow. Rosemary little; nor sweet marjoram. That which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, specially the white double violet, which comes twice a year; about the middle of April, and about Bartholomew-tide. Next to that is the musk-rose. Then the strawberry-leaves dying, which yield a most excellent cordial smell. Then the flower of vines; it is a little dust, like the dust of a bent, which grows upon the cluster in the first coming forth. Then sweet-briar. Then wall-flowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlor or lower chamber window. Then pinks and gilliflowers, especially the matted pink and clove gilliflower. Then the flowers of the lime-tree. Then the honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off. Of beanflowers I speak not, because they are field flowers. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three; that is, burnet, wildthyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.
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