PATHFINDERS AND SELECTORS.

Hokitika Guardian, 11 September 1920, Page 4

PATHFINDERS AND SELECTORS.

(From Bulletin Bed Page). In the jungle of literature, which is as wide and tangled as human knowledge and human experience, there are two distinct sets of people who deserve all the honors we can give them. The big estate of Milton, with its magnificent buildings, its gardens of flowers and fruit, its stately avenues of cedars and its wide golden meadows, has been a delight for two and a half centuries. The selection of Robert Burns, where every hedge is full of wild roses and every bank bright with red-tipped daisies, has been a place of ploughing and good harvest for a hundred years. Wordsworth took up broad _ pasture lands where the monotony of the landscape is broken by an occasional valley of great beauty. Along a hundred well trodden roads some of them deeply rutted and dusty, there are countless gates opening to such places as these; but the wayfarer knows that the jungle was once supreme, that there were no sure paths through the wilderness, that the rivers were unbridged, the swamps impassable, the mountains a barrier to all progress. Men went through a blazed track and sometimes set up a hut and cleared an acre or two in the remote interior; but the finding of the path occupied most of their time and exhausted most of their energies, and their old homesteads, if they, exist at all, have little attraction for the traveller.

An early pathfinder was Henry. Howard, Earl of Surrey, who discovered blank verse. There is not much to appeal to the literary reader of to-day in tlie work he left behind, but the road he found has been trodden by a great army. His pioneering led to tremendous results, for along Howard’s road you will see some of the finest of Shakespeare’s land, the noblest part of Milton’s estate, and you will touch upon the holdings of Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, Tennyson and dozens of others. But Howard had only a hut and an acre or two planted in Latin translation, and the fences all round the little place are falling into decay. Howard was one of the necessary pioneers who prepared the way for Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe was another. Marlowe took Howard’s blank verse and wedded it to the romantic drama. It seems an ordinary enough thing to do, but it was a revolutionary thing then, for the classic drama—which never developed into anything worth while in the great days of the English theatre— was supposed to have a monopoly of Howard’s medium of expression. Marlowe wrote one great play, “Edward II,” and finished a short and riotous life by violence at the age of 29; but lie had found a path. Shakespeare came down that way and took up. a piece of country so rich and magnificent that no empire on earth can compart with it.

The whole story of literature is full of similar instances of pathfinding and settlement. The modern loose measure, scanning by beat instead of by quantity or accent, found its way into English literature from Ireland, but it is not a very ancient Irish product. Older Irish verse, written between early Celtic times and the . age of Shakespeare, was in exact metres of infinitely complicated rhyming and scansion. Mary MacLeod, who was born in the Scotish Highlands in 1509, altered all ‘this. She discovered the new mode of song, and it became extremely popular because it made its instant appeal to every hearer without special training. Within a century it had captured all Ireland and Western Scotland, and it lias now gone far towards capturing the English reader also. Yet Mary, the inventor of the new and beautiful thing, has no great place in any literature. She was essentially one of the pathfinders and not a possessor of the literary soil, for in social standing she was only the superior nurse in a chief’s family, and it may be that her first ventures were little songs for the ears of children. The field of human emotion and endeavour is so wide that the pathfinder is not yet out of a job. Every note of striking originality is in reality a blaze on one of the trees of the jungle, but it often happens that none except the man who first made them can find those marks again. So there are a lot of short tracks running down to a small clearing and going no further; but who can tell what good land is over the ranges or to what wide holdings some of the tracks of to-day may lead.