Chapter 14

And may not this prevalence of love in his poetry account for Tennyson's lack of humor? In his conversation, as his son tells us, he was even jocular, loving both to hear and to tell a humorous incident, and his laughter rang out over a good jest, a thing of which we would have next to no intimation in his poetry; for save in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue" and "The Northern Farmer," and possibly in "Amphion," his verse contains scarcely a vestige of humor. Certainly his writings can not presume to be humorous. To Cervantes, chivalry was grotesque; to Tennyson, chivalry was poetry,--there lay the difference. Our laureate caught not the jest, but the real poetry of that episode in the adventure of manhood; and this I take to be the larger and worthier lesson. Cervantes and Tennyson were both right. But Tennyson caught the vision of the surer, the more enduring truth. With love, as with chivalry, he saw not the humor, but the beauty of it; and beauty is always touched with melancholy. I have sat a day through reading all this poet's verse, and confess that all the day I was not remote from tears, but was as one walking in mists along an ocean shore, so that on my face was what might be either rain or tears. In Tennyson,

"Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in its glowing hands; Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight."

And Tennyson is the picture poet. I feel in reading him as if I were either out of doors with pictures seen at first-hand, or in a gallery with picture-crowded walls. He is painter among poets, his art being at once admirably inclusive and exclusive--including essentials, excluding the irrelevant. He is consummate artist, giving pictures of things, and, what is vastly more difficult, pictures of moods. With him, one never feels and sees, but feels because he sees. His ability to recreate moods for us is quite beyond praise, and is such subtle art as defies analysis or characterization, but wakens wonder and will not let it sleep. Poets are, as is affirmed by the lord of all the poets,

"Of imagination all compact;"

and may we be delivered from a colorless world and an unimaginative life; for such is no life at all! God would have men dream and prophesy. Because the poet is artist and dreamer, his word, in one form or another, is "like," a word patented by poets; and all who use it are become, in so far, poets. Now, with Tennyson, all things suggest pictures, as if soul were itself a landscape; wherefore, as has been shown, he riots in nature-scenes. A simile, when full, like a June day of heaven, contains a plethora, an ampleness, for which you shall seek in vain to find rules, much less to make them; which is to say that a perfect simile will betimes do something for which no reason can be assigned, yet so answering to the largest poetry of the occasion as to fill the mind with joy, as if one had discovered some new flower in the woods where he thought he knew them all. One instance shall suffice as illustrative:

"An agony Of lamentation like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world."

Considering the comparison, we must grant that, submitted to the judgment of cold logic, the figure is superfluous and faulty; for, as a simple matter of fact, a wind blowing where no one comes or has come would be not so lonely as one blown across a habitable and inhabited land. From the standpoint of common observation, the simile might be set down as inaccurate. But who so blind as not to see that there is no untruth nor superfluity in the poet's art? He means to give the air of utter loneliness and sadness, and therefore pictures an untenanted landscape, across whose lonely wastes a lonely wind pursues its lonely way; and thus having saturated his thought with sadness, he transfers the loneliness of the landscape to the winged winds. This seems to me the very climacteric of exquisite artistic skill, and I am always delighted to the point of laughter or of tears; for moods run together in presence of such poetry. No poet of my knowledge so haunts the illustrative. In reading him, so perfect are the pictures that your fingers itch to play the artist's part, so you might shadow some beauty on every page. Some painter, working after the manner of Turner's "Rivers of France," might make himself immortal by devoting his life to the adequate illustration of Tennyson. As his verses sing themselves, so his poems picture themselves. He supplies you with painter's genius. A verse or stanza needs but a frame to be a choice painting. When told that the fool

"Danced like a withered leaf before the hall,"

we must see him, so vivid the scene, so lifelike the color.

I will hang some pictures up as in a gallery:

"Ever the weary wind went on, And took the reed-tops as it went"

"I, that whole day, Saw her no more, although I linger'd there Till every daisy slept."

"Love with knit brows went by, And with a flying finger swept my lips."

"Breathed like the covenant of a God, to hold From thence through all the worlds."

"Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind, And in her bosom bore the baby. Sleep."

"The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores."

"And in the fallow leisure of my life."

"Her voice fled always through the summer land; I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days! The flower of each, those moments when we met, The crown of all, we met to part no more."

"Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs Of life."

"The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom. Wait."

"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine."

"Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears By some cold morning glacier; frail at first And feeble, all unconscious of itself, But such as gather'd color day by day."

"I could no more, but lay like one in trance, That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends, And can not speak, nor move, nor make one sign, But lies and dreads his doom."

"Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust; I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'T is better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.

But brooding on the dear one dead, And all he said of things divine, (And dear to me as sacred wine To dying lips is all he said).

And look thy look, and go thy way, But blame not thou the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple break, The tender-pencil'd shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears, Ah me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose muffled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears.

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow.

I can not love thee as I ought, For love reflects the thing beloved; My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought.

From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face.

And while the wind began to sweep A music out of sheet and shroud, We steer'd her toward a crimson cloud That landlike slept along the deep.

Abiding with me till I sail To seek thee on the mystic deeps, And this electric force, that keeps A thousand pulses dancing, fail.

And hear at times a sentinel, Who moves about from place to place, And whispers to the worlds of space, In the deep night, that all is well."

"Brawling, or like a clamor of the rooks At distance, ere they settle for the night."

"In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet."

"That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows."

"But as a man to whom a dreadful loss Falls in a far land, and he knows it not."

"The long way smoke beneath him in his fear."

"Then, after all was done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept beside the way."

"Seam'd with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek, And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom."

"And in the meadows tremulous aspen-trees And poplars made a noise of falling showers."

"No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great."

"Hurt in the side, whereat she caught her breath; Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go."

"Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart, As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long A little bitter pool about a stone On the bare coast."

"Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, And I should evermore be vext with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament, Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair."

"Far off a solitary trumpet blew. Then, waiting by the doors, the war-horse neigh'd As at a friend's voice, and he spake again."

"Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."

"And slipt aside, and like a wounded life Crept down into the hollows of the wood."

"Then Philip, with his eyes Full of that lifelong hunger, and his voice Shaking a little like a drunkard's hand."

"Had he not Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, Surely the man had died of solitude."

"Because things seen are mightier than things heard."

"For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See through the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despair'd of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all."

"And he lay tranced; but when he rose and paced Back toward his solitary home again, All down the narrow street he went, Beating it in upon his weary brain, As though it were the burthen of a song, 'Not to tell her, never to let her know.'"

"Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn In tempest."

"Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end, Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere."

"Prick'd with incredible pinnacles into heaven."

"An out-door sign of all the warmth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud; But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one."

"All the old echoes hidden in the wall."

"Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made In moving, all together down upon him Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North sea, Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, And him that helms it, so they overbore Sir Lancelot and his charger."

"There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapor slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling through the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning; but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas."

"One seem'd all dark and red--a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced forever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon.

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. You seem'd to hear them climb and fall And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, Beneath the windy wall.

And one, a full-fed river winding slow By herds upon an endless plain, The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, With shadow-streaks of rain.

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil. In front they bound the sheaves. Behind Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil, And hoary to the wind.

And one, a foreground black with stones and slags, Beyond, a line of heights, and higher All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags, And highest, snow and fire.

And one, an English home--gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep--all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace."

Each stanza is a picture, bound, not in book nor gold, but in a stanza.

"Like flame from ashes."

"Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away."

"As the crest of some slow-arching wave Heard in dead night along that table-shore Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing."

"Belted his body with her white embrace."

"And out beyond into the dream to come."

"Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home, And glancing on the window, when the gloom Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame That rages in the woodland far below."

Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim for Alfred Tennyson as a painter?

And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualities are in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although from centuries of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that so sensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a lowered standard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especially considering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan, Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where a luxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a high degree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of a commanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as to pollute the living springs from which a generation of men and women drank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moral mood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals of both life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; and purest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar," and be only purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Bible in Tennyson," an article, after his habit, discriminating and appreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the delicious verse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, so native is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believe the larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thought evidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet's life. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in these later centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible than our planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate the moral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years, though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and pure thinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century. That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Browning were given a single race in a single century is abundant cause for giving hearty thanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote days coming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie to the poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to be incompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they have swept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair as the morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is no slightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protest against it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm that bites as acids do:

"Rip your brother's vices open, strip your own foul passions bare: Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward, naked--let them stare. Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer; Send the drain into the fountain lest the stream should issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism, Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too, in the abysm. Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men."

And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger! Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii. Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand of mercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subways being justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservation of a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in the sewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tell all he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knows there are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and let the romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers.

Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career were helped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust and shame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that we blushed for those who had not the modesty to blush for themselves. We are ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid and Elaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others, have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is an incalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates, whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, and that the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a quest worthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobility of soul which can never become out of date.

Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day than Tennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce, "He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts; and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good."

Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye, and prayed, as King Arthur:

"And that which I have done May he within himself make pure!"

And we chant, sending our muse after him,--

"Nor was there moaning of the bar When he set out to sea."

To him saying, "We love him yet, and shall while life endures," borrowing Whittier's God-speed to the dead Bayard Taylor:

"Let the home-voices greet him in the far, Strange land that holds him; let the messages Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas And unmapped vastness of his unknown star! Love's language, heard above the loud discourse, Of perishable fame, in every sphere Itself interprets; and its utterance here, Somewhere in God's unfolding universe, Shall reach our traveler, softening the surprise Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!"

VIII

The American Historians

The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign lands than with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I have known persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things can not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viands worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of value turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language; namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work was immediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuable services was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored the vernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in the schools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and in his translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature.

Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the imported and the remote.

I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs--in saying which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no historians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample and fertile field.

Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history. Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin, Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one might name crude ore rather than refined gold.