One of my favorite literary analogies:
“The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”
The word awful has been debased, like its cousin awesome. Dr. Johnson in his “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) uses the adjective to mean “filled with a feeling of awe,
dread, or deep reverence,” in one of eighteen definitions given by the OED. Gardens are beautiful, a pleasure
to work in and contemplate, but a forest, untended, is disorderly and bountiful,
defying the human urge to impose pattern. Looked at closely, however, a forest is not chaos. It can be frightening (think of the fairy tales set in forests) but its
parts from the naturalist’s point of view fit together and complement each
other -- an ecosystem. Think of Dante’s forest at the start of the Inferno, in C.H. Sisson’s translation: “Half way along the road we
have to go, / I found myself obscured in a great forest, / Bewildered, and I
knew I had lost the way.” Johnson continues with a new analogy, taking on those
critics, often French, who find Shakespeare too wild and non-Aristotelian:
“Other poets
display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape,
and polished unto brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and
diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by
impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”
I’m reading As You Like It again. It’s not a favorite but the language, as always, is a delight. The word forest appears twenty-three times in the play, more than in any other. Duke Senior in Act II, Scene 1 says: “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?” and in the same speech he exalts:
“And this
our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change
it.”
3 comments:
A well gathered post. Your words brought to mind another poet and his forest primeval. Here are the lines:
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Mr. Longfellow's Evangeline, of course. Read in grade school which should give my minimum age...has not been required reading in grade school for generations. Just the use of "bosoms" might make it off-limits as Anne Frank has become... sorry about the ramble
Harpo -- this?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anne-frank-diary-banned-texas/
LRB (I think) had an interesting article some years ago about the "forest" vs. "the wood." The actual dangerous things usually take place in a "wood," like Dante's finding himself in a "dark wood" (not forest). The "forest" was traditionally in England a private hunting preserve of the king's, carefully maintained so it was not as traditional a place of danger as "the wood" (unless you were a peasant caught poaching there, as in Sherwood Forest). One exception it cited was the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare, which is dangerous and magical. Over the centuries I think the distinction between wood and forest has been blurred, especially in America.
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