Chapter 11

Passing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of a part of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic; farther is Eudora (a word of Greek genesis, and meaning a good gift, though likely enough he who christened this village may have known as little of Greek as a kitten); on is Lawrence, named for a famous anti-slavery agitator and philanthropist of Massachusetts--for Lawrence is a New England colony, as is Manhattan, farther up the Kansas River, familiarly known as the "Kaw," which is the leading river of Kansas; here is Lecompton, which keeps alive the memory of Lecompte, the Indian chief; then comes Tecumseh, as clearly an Indian name as the former; then Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and wearing an Indian sobriquet; then comes Wakarusa (Indian, meaning "hip deep," the depth of the stream in crossing); then Carbondale, so called because of the coal deposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautiful hamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, so dubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlier days; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because this village is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the original promoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend the Arkansas River makes at this place; Pawnee Rock, from a local rallying-point of the Pawnees when this was an Indian hunting-ground; Garden City, so named because, by irrigation, this locality was redeemed from comparative barrenness; Granada, and Las Animas, and La Junta, reminiscent words from the Spanish march into Kansas; Puebla, clearly designating that strange people whose cliff dwellings are at this hour one of the rarest studies in American archaeology. On another branch of this same road: Olathe, an Indian name; Ottawa; Algonquin, for "trader," Chanute, from an Indian chief, who was a local celebrity; Elk Falls, referring to those days when this river (the Elk) was famous for that species of graceful motion called the elk; farther are Indian Chief and White Deer, names of evident paternity. I have taken this time to run along this railroad line so as to show the possibilities in this direction anywhere. To learn to read history from the stations as we pass is surely an art worth learning. In passing across the continent I have found it as if a guide had prepared that way before us. The natural history of a region may thus be read without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit--can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but need not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, Spring Lake, Hackberry, Cottonwood Falls, Sand Hills, Poplar Hill, Cold Springs, Oak Hill, Cavalry Creek, Bluff Creek, Peace Creek, Cedar Bluff, Council Bluffs, Punished Woman's Lake, Highbank Creek, Big Knife, Black River, Cypress Creek, Black Raven, Brier Creek, Big Lick, Laurel, Hurricane Inlet, Dead Man's Bay, Pine Hill, Magnolia, Mountain Meadow, Medicine Woods, Rush Creek, Salt Plain, Saline River, Lava Bed, Wild Horse, Sinking Creek, Nameless, Grassy Trail (in the desert), Azure Cliffs, Miry Bottom, Sand Dune Plateau, Grouse Creek,--these are names as communicative of secrets as a child. Heath, Rock Lake, Wood Lake, Grand Prairie, Lily Creek, Swift Falls, Calamus River, Evergreen Lake, Lone Tree (a prairie locality), Spring Bank, Fort Defiance, Pontiac, Smoky Hill River (these hills are always as if smoky),--what a light these names shed on the region in which they occur!

And you can recapitulate American history in its most salient details from a reading of our geography. Great names stay, and will not be gone. As moss clings to the rock, so do great memories cling to localities. Nature conspires to keep illustrious men from death. Witness such names as follows: Lincoln (General Lincoln of Revolutionary fame), Madison, Pulaski (the brave Pole who fought for our freedom), Webster, Sumner, Henry (Patrick), Jackson (doughty general and President), Breckinridge, Hancock (signer of the Declaration of Independence), Lafayette, Clay, Pocahontas, Calhoun, Randolph, Monroe, Franklin, Jefferson, Clark (the explorer), Douglas (the "Little Giant"), Adams, Whitman (the Presbyterian missionary, who saved to the United States Washington and Oregon, by a heroic episode which deserves the perpetual gratitude of those States), Custer (the general slain in Indian warfare), Union (to commemorate the preservation of our Union), Benton (Thomas H., of Missouri, whose daughter was wife of General John C. Fremont), Lewis and Clark (discoverers), Garfield, Kane (Arctic explorer), Lincoln (the emancipator), Polk, Houston, Lee (General Robert E.), Tyler, Van Buren, Scott (General Winfield, of the Mexican War), Pike (the discoverer of Pike's Peak), Marshall (Chief-Justice), Berkely, Hamilton (Alexander, our first lord of the Treasury), Gadsden (he of "the Gadsden Purchase"), Marion, Sumter (both of Revolutionary fame), Carteret, Columbus, Stanton, Colfax, Greeley, Chase, Sherman, Seward, Fillmore, Harlan (Senator), Butler (Ben), Johnson (obstreperous "Andy"), Grant (our chiefest military hero), Polk (General), Brown (John Brown, of Ossawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John (Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, of Kansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas, Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hancock, Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren (General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan, St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe,--to be acquainted with these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers of America in the range of statesmanship and military achievement.

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America, the Indian, has left "his mark" across and through this Nation. He never, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and fought across it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, he did not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it implies improvement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out by sweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, never possessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by his cunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us names of lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian, though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with other nomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like those of the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful, sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music, liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing a mountain side. Minnehaha, "laughing water"--does not the word seem laughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguished philologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in any tongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, but music. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun: Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha, Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton ("meeting of waters"), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Penobscot, Narragansett, Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession. Indian names cling with peculiar tenacity to lakes and rivers; for those hunters knew all waters, and hunted beside all streams and lakes. They were not seamen, and have left scant memorials of themselves in names that fringe the sea; but to lakes they cling with tireless tenacity.

Let these words suffice. As one who journeys in circles finds no end of journeying, so I. This theme runs on, nor stops to catch breath. I make an end, therefore, not because the subject is exhausted, but because it is dismissed. But this study in geography is journeying among dead peoples as certainly as it the land were crowded with obelisk and tomb. To those who were and are not, say, Vale! Vale!

"Ye who love the haunts of Nature, Love the sunshine of the meadow, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the wind among the branches, And the rain-shower and the snowstorm, And the rushing of great rivers Through their palisades of pine-trees, And the thunder in the mountains, Whose innumerable echoes Flap like eagles in their eyries,-- Listen to these wild traditions. Ye who love a nation's legends, Love the ballads of a people, That like voices from afar off Call to us to pause and listen, Speak in tones so plain and childlike, Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether they are sung or spoken,-- Listen to this Indian Legend. Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened,-- Listen to this simple story. Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles Through the green lanes of the country, Where the tangled barberry-bushes Hang their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For awhile to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter,-- Stay, and read this rude inscription."

Only saying, Read not the "Song of Hiawatha," but the story of dead peoples by the ashes of their campfires,--these names they have left, clinging to places like blue to distant hills.

VI

Iconoclasm in Nineteenth Century Literature.

That history repeats itself is an apothegm which has descended to us from a dateless antiquity. It has been made to serve so often as to become trite; and yet its use is a necessity, inasmuch as it embodies a verity, which to ignore were ignorance and folly linked together; and as we stand on our eminence and scan the way humanity has worn with its multitudinous feet, as the events of the world pass in review before us, some so closely resemble others as that the one seems the echo of the other; and there appears reason for that fascinating generalization of the ancient philosopher, that the epochs and events of the physical realm and history were a fixed and limited quantity, which, revolving in a vast cycle, would bring from time to time the reiteration of the facts or doings of an ancient era. There was no new thing thinkable, only a reintroduction of the old. To illustrate this fact in brief, we have but to note the history of philosophy. You read the names of those who figure as founders of philosophical systems, and those systems seem many. Read the systems as founded, and you find an old-time philosophy, rejuvenated with some little addition of cap or bell better to adapt it to the modern time. The much-lauded Hegelian philosophy is the system of Democritus, with the addition of a little more absurdity in the assertion of the identity of contradictories. The multitudinous philosophies may thus be reduced to a single quaternion, and the reputed inaugurator of a new philosophy is like to be a charlatan. So history seems but a plagiarist.

There is an epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of the Iconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpired before, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias of humanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by heredity a breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not be surprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or any era. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, statecraft, economic science, or literature, can be of little moment. The fact is the matter of paramount importance. Christianity was the iconoclast which broke in pieces the images of decrepit polytheism, and hewed out a way where progress might march to fulfill her splendid destiny. Luther was the iconoclast whose giant strokes demolished the castle doors of Romish superstition, and broke to fragments the images of Mariolatry. The practical induction of Bacon, Earl of Verulam, was the death-warrant of the fruitless deductive philosophy which had culminated in the vagaries of Scholasticism. The Declaration of Independence and the Federation of the States were the iconoclast which slew the phantom of the divine necessity of kings. It is thus evident that iconoclasm abounds, and there will be no marvel if it have a place in literature.

Innovation is a practical synonym of iconoclasm; for an innovation is putting the new in the place of the old. In ancient literature and literatures, prose was an innovation as regards poetry; and later, rhyme was an innovation in the domain of poesy, and an innovation of such a sort that against it the master-poet, Milton, lifted up his voice in solemn protest, and the solitary epic in English literature is a perpetual protestation against the custom. Shakespeare was an innovator of the laws of the drama when he violated unities of time and place; and in a sense the drama was an innovation on narrative poetry, and the novel an iconoclast in its attitude to the drama.

The iconoclasm in literature in our time is objective rather than subjective; and attention to the spirit of the age will give a practical comprehension of this iconoclastic spirit.

It must be observed that the literature of an age is largely the product of that age. Times create literatures. The literature of any period, in an emphatic sense, will be directly and easily traceable to something in that age for its peculiarity.

The Iliad and Odyssey were necessities of the age which gave them birth. In so far as a literature is purely human, in so far will it be stamped with the seal of the times, customs, and thoughts in the midst of which it bloomed into beauty. In early Greek times an epic without its gods and demigods, without resounding battle-shout and din of mighty conflict, had been an anachronism for which there could have been offered no apology. The splendid era of Pericles demanded the tragedy, and such a tragedy as only Aeschylus and Sophocles could originate; while the foibles of an earlier era made the comedy imperative. On like principles, the writings of Lucretius are not enigmatical, but easy of explanation.

The age which made possible the revels of Kenilworth, made possible also the splendor, like that of setting suns, which characterizes the "Faerie Queen." And the prowess, the achievement, the discovery, the colonization, the high tide of life, which ran like lightning through the Nation's arteries, made the drama, not only a possibility, but a fact. It was the embodiment of the mighty activities of a mighty age. The tragedy, to use the splendid figure of Milton, "rose like an exhalation." A solitary lifetime brought it from sunrise to high noon; and from that hour what could the sun do but sink?

Our century is one of general iconoclasm. It is the Ishmael among the ages. Its hand is against every man. It has reversed the old-time order, that what was believed by our fathers and received by them should be received by us. It takes no truth second-hand. It goes to sources. Its motto is, "I came, I saw, I investigated." It found many things believed of old, which were founded on the sand. Physical science discovered the vast domain of physical law, and that science began to legislate for the universe, forgetting sometimes that it was not a law enactor, but a law discoverer. Investigation found that many ideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, were false and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision." Things received as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. The tendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding many previously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficient to substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that all these systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has formulated this thought into speech, but that the trend of the intellect in our century has been such as is explicable only on this theory. In many instances the motto of investigation in the domain of history, criticism, and science has been, "Believe all things false until you prove them true." If such is the spirit of the age, and if literature be colored with the light of the century which produces it, shall we wonder if the nineteenth-century literature is distinctively an iconoclastic one?

All about us is the battle of the books. War rages along the entire line. No work of antiquity is free from this belligerency. Mars has the field. The investigation has been crucial. In so far as it has been learning coupled with wisdom, this is well. Truth never flinches before the charge of a wise investigation. But no truth can stand as such before a system of inquiry the canons of which are empirical, fallacious, and false. The task of demolition is a fascinating one. It possesses a charm impossible to explain, and impossible to fail to perceive. When one has a taste, it is much as with the tiger which has tasted blood. Such procedure seems to open vistas before men. Here are open doors, from behind which seems to come a voice crying, "Enter."

It will be chronologically accurate if we shall first notice the iconoclastic spirit as exemplified in the attack on the unity of the Iliad; and I class this with the nineteenth-century doings because it belongs to the spirit of that century, and was almost within its borders. The Iliad had been the glory of international literature for centuries. Greece held it in veneration from the beginning of its authentic history; and that work had blazed with a solar luster out of the Stygian darkness of prehistoric times. The book had made an epoch in literature. The cyclic poets, who, for centuries after the appearance of the Iliad and Odyssey, were the only Greek bards, were confessedly disciples of one Homer, the reputed author of the poems which embody the fact of the war of the races. The judgment of antiquity was: (_a_) These two works were ascribed to a single author. (_b_) This author was the master at whose wave of wand these revels had begun. In other words, Homer wrote the books which bear his name. However much they might discuss the location of the half-fabled Ilium, or marvel over the battles fought "far on the ringing plains of windy Troy," it was not doubted that a sublime and solitary bard conceived and wrought the wondrous work ascribed to him. It is not shown that this question was even mooted in the former times. Cities contended for the honor of having given this man birth. He was as much a verity as Pericles. Such was the status of the case when our century beheld it first. Bentley had hinted at the probability or possibility of separate authorship; but it remained for German criticism, in the person of Wolf, to make the onslaught on the time-honored belief. The attack was as impetuous as the charge of the Greeks across the plain of the Scamander. It astonished the world. It abashed scholarship. Grave philosophers and gifted poets were carried away in the rush of the attack. Goethe gave and Schiller withheld allegiance. The Atomist and Separatist for a time held the field. Wolf showed, by reasoning which he deemed irrefutable, that the Iliad could not have been composed by a single man. Writing did not exist. The story had many repetitions, contradictions, and inferiorities. Later, the philological argument was used against it. These statements summarize the Wolfian theory. The contrariety in dialect form was thought to be an invulnerable argument against the unity of authorship; and for a time the epic of the ancient world was declared to be the work of many hands, the ballads sung by rhapsodists of many names; and the Iliad, with its astonishing display of genius, was declared to be authorless. Less than a century has elapsed since the theory was propounded. The subject has received a wealth of attention and study unknown before. Discoveries have been made in philology which have practically raised it to the rank of a science; and to-day the atomistic theory of Wolf is not received. Grote and Mahaffy have theories which vary markedly from the great original; and the result of a century of investigation is, that scholars do now generally believe that some one author, or two at most, did give shape to the great epic of the Greek people. Wolf, Lachmann, and Bert have shown the follies of men of genius when pursuing a line of evidence to prove a favorite theory. Their assumptions are often absurd, and their conclusions, once admitting their premises, are a logical necessity. The spirit of iconoclasm rested, not with the authority of the book, but assailed the geographic and topographical features. Troy was declared a dream. The Trojan War had never been. But Schliemann has proven to virtual demonstration the existence of, not only a Troy, but the Troy about which Hector and Achilles fought.