Part 11

At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery, it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical people are always talking about poetical and unpoetical objects, and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”--if he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the railroad,--the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains, filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described, it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic. Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms, because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy terms.

The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The Brute,”--a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:--

“Through his might men work their wills; They have boweled out the hills For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought; And they fling him hour by hour Limbs of men to give him power. Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought. He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”

Quite different is the treatment of “The Lightning Express” by a western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine, yet the poetic note is clearly and surely struck in his stanzas too:--

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “In storm and darkness, night and day, Through mountain gorge or level way, With lightening rein and might unspent, And head erect in scorn of space, Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race, Flame-girt across a continent.

Think not of danger; every wheel Of all that clank and roll below Rings singing answers, steel for steel, Beneath the hammer’s testing blow; And what though fields go swirling round, And backward swims the mazy ground, So swift the herds seem standing still, As scared they dash from hill to hill; And though the brakes may grind to fire The gravel as they grip the tire And holding, strike a startling vein Of tremor through the surging train, The hand of him who guides the rein Is all-controlling and intent; Fear not, although the race you ride Is on the whirlwind, side by side, With time across a continent.”

What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association. The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life--the miner, the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund of human association, who can make the human element in these things paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in, the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water, it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness, racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts; but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our materialistic civilization?

VIII

POETRY AND ELOQUENCE

“Where does eloquence end, where does poetry begin?” inquires Renan in his “Future of Science.” And he goes on to say, “The whole difference lies in a peculiar harmony, in a more or less sonorous ring, with regard to which an experienced faculty never hesitates.”

Is not the “sonorous ring,” however, more characteristic of eloquence than of poetry? Poetry does begin where eloquence ends; it is a higher and finer harmony. Nearly all men feel the power of eloquence, but poetry does not sway the multitude; it does not sway at all,--it lifts, and illuminates, and soothes. It reaches the spirit, while eloquence stops with the reason and the emotions.

Eloquence is much the more palpable, real, available; it is a wind that fills every sail and makes every mast bend, while poetry is a breeze touched with a wild perfume from field or wood. Poetry is consistent with perfect tranquillity of spirit; a true poem may have the calm of a summer day, the placidity of a mountain lake, but eloquence is a torrent, a tempest, mass in motion, an army with banners, the burst of a hundred instruments of music. Tennyson’s “Maud” is a notable blending of the two.

There is something martial in eloquence, the roll of the drum, the cry of the fife, the wheel and flash of serried ranks. Its end is action; it shapes events, it takes captive the reason and the understanding. Its basis is earnestness, vehemence, depth of conviction.

There is no eloquence without heat, and no poetry without light. An earnest man is more or less an eloquent man. Eloquence belongs to the world of actual affairs and events; it is aroused by great wrongs and great dangers, it flourishes in the forum and the senate. Poetry is more private and personal, is more for the soul and the religious instincts; it courts solitude and wooes the ideal.

Anything swiftly told or described, the sense of speed and volume, is, or approaches, eloquence; while anything heightened and deepened, any meaning and beauty suddenly revealed, is, or approaches, poetry. Hume says of the eloquence of Demosthenes, “It is rapid harmony, exactly adjusted to the sense. It is vehement reasoning without any appearance of art; it is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in a continual stream of argument.”

The passions of eloquence and poetry differ in this respect; one is reason inflamed, the other is imagination kindled.

Any object of magnitude in swift motion, a horse at the top of his speed, a regiment of soldiers on the double quick, a train of cars under full way, moves us in a way that the same object at rest does not. The great secret of eloquence is to set mass in motion, to marshal together facts and considerations, imbue them with passion, and hurl them like an army on the charge upon the mind of the reader or hearer.

The pleasure we derive from eloquence is more acute, more physiological, I might say, more of the blood and animal spirits, than our pleasure from poetry. I imagine it was almost a dissipation to have heard a man like Father Taylor. One’s feelings and emotions were all out of their banks like the creeks in spring. But this was largely the result of his personal magnetism and vehemence of utterance.

The contrast between eloquent prose and poetic prose would be more to the point. The pleasure from each is precious and genuine, but our pleasure from the latter is no doubt more elevated and enduring.

Gibbon’s prose is often eloquent, never poetical. Ruskin’s prose is at times both, though his temperament is not that of the orator. There is more caprice than reason in him. The prose of De Quincey sometimes has the “sonorous ring” of which Renan speaks. The following passage from his essay on “The Philosophy of Roman History” is a good sample:--

“The battle of Actium was followed by the final conquest of Egypt. That conquest rounded and integrated the glorious empire; it was now circular as a shield, orbicular as the disk of a planet; the great Julian arch was now locked into the cohesion of granite by its last keystone. From that day forward, for three hundred years, there was silence in the world; no muttering was heard; no eye winked beneath the wing. Winds of hostility might still rave at intervals, but it was on the outside of the mighty empire, it was at a dreamlike distance; and, like the storms that beat against some monumental castle, ‘and at the doors and windows seem to call,’ they rather irritated and vivified the sense of security, than at all disturbed its luxurious lull.”

Contrast with this a passage from Emerson’s first prose work, “Nature,” wherein the poetic element is more conspicuous:--

“The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils,--in the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands.”

Or this passage from Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” shall we call it eloquent prose or poetic prose?

“In this manner, however, has the Day bent downwards. Wearied mortals are creeping home from their field labors; the village artisan eats with relish his supper of herbs, or has strolled forth to the village street for a sweet mouthful of air and human news. Still summer eventide everywhere! The great sun hangs flaming on the uttermost northwest; for it is his longest day this year. The hilltops, rejoicing, will ere long be at their ruddiest, and blush good-night. The thrush in green dells, on long-shadowed leafy spray, pours gushing his glad serenade, to the babble of brooks grown audible; silence is stealing over the Earth.”

What noble eloquence in Tacitus! Indeed, eloquence was natural to the martial and world-subduing Roman; but his poetry is for the most part of a secondary order. It is often said of French poetry that it is more eloquent than poetic. Of English poetry the reverse is probably true, though of such a poet as Byron it seems to me that eloquence is the chief characteristic.

Byron never, to my notion, touches the deeper and finer poetic chords. He is witty, he is brilliant, he is eloquent, but is he ever truly poetical? He stirs the blood, he kindles the fancy, but does he ever diffuse through the soul the joy and the light of pure poetry? Goethe expressed almost unbounded admiration for Byron, yet admitted that he was too worldly-minded, and that a great deal of his poetry should have been fired off in Parliament in the shape of parliamentary speeches. Wordsworth, on the other hand, when he was not prosy and heavy, was poetical; he was never eloquent.

A fine sample of eloquence in poetry is Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” Of its kind there is nothing in the language to compare with it. One needs to read such a piece occasionally as a moral sanitary measure; it aerates his emotions as a cataract does a creek. Scott’s highest excellence as a poet is his eloquence. The same is true of Macaulay and of Campbell, though the latter’s “To the Rainbow” breathes the spirit of true poetry.

Among our own poets Halleck’s “Marco Bozzaris” thrills us with its fiery eloquence. Dr. Holmes’s “Old Ironsides” also is just what such a poem should be, just what the occasion called for, a rare piece of rhymed eloquence.

Eloquence is so good, so refreshing, it is such a noble and elevating excitement, that one would fain have more of it, even in poetry. It is too rare and precious a product to be valued lightly.

Here is a brief example of Byron’s eloquence:--

“There, where death’s brief pang was quickest. And the battle’s wreck lay thickest, Strewed beneath the advancing banner Of the eagles’ burning crest,-- There with thunder-clouds to fan her Victory beaming from her breast! While the broken line enlarging Fell, or fled along the plain;-- There be sure _Murat_ was charging! There he ne’er shall charge again!”

This from Tennyson is of another order:--

“Thy voice is heard through rolling drums That beat to battle where he stands; Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire, he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.”

The chief value of all patriotic songs and poems, like Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or Mr. Stedman’s John Brown poem, or Randall’s “Maryland,” or Burns’s “Bannnockburn,” or Whitman’s “Beat! Beat! Drums,” is their impassioned eloquence. Patriotism, war, wrong, slavery, these are the inspirers of eloquence.

Of course no sharp line can be drawn between eloquence and poetry; they run together, they blend in all first-class poems; yet there is a wide difference between the two, and it is probably in the direction I have indicated. Power and mastery in either field are the most precious of human gifts.

IX

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN

One of the few books which I can return to and re-read every six or seven years is Gilbert White’s Selborne. It has a perennial charm. It is much like country things themselves. One does not read it with excitement or eager avidity; it is in a low key; it touches only upon minor matters; it is not eloquent, or witty, or profound; it has only now and then a twinkle of humor or a glint of fancy, and yet it has lived an hundred years and promises to live many hundreds of years more. So many learned and elaborate treatises have sunk beneath the waves upon which this cockle-shell of a book rides so safely and buoyantly! What is the secret of its longevity? One can do little more than name its qualities without tracing them to their sources. It is simple and wholesome, like bread, or meat, or milk. Perhaps it is just this same unstrained quality that keeps the book alive. Books that are piquant and exciting like condiments, or cloying like confectionery or pastry, it seems, have much less chance of survival. The secret of longevity of a man--what is it? Sanity, moderation, regularity, and that plus vitality, which is a gift. The book that lives has these things, and it has that same plus vitality, the secret of which cannot be explored. The sensational, intemperate books set the world on fire for a day, and then end in ashes and forgetfulness.

White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England atmosphere through the mind. It is not the work of a city man who went down into the country to write it up, but of a born countryman,--one who had in the very texture of his mind the flavor of rural things. Then it is the growth of a particular locality. Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, “This is home,” and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined. This is one secret of White’s charm. His work has a home air, a certain privacy and particularity. The great world is afar off; Selborne is as snug and secluded as a chimney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the real life of one man there; we see him going about intent, lovingly intent, upon every phase of nature about him. We get glimpses into humble cottages and into the ways and doings of the people; we see the bacon drying in the chimneys; we see the poor gathering in Wolmer Forest the sticks and twigs dropped by the rooks in building their nests; we see them claiming the “lop and top” when the big trees are cut. Indeed, the human touches, the human figures here and there in White’s pages, add much to the interest. The glimpses we get of his own goings and comings--we wish there were more of them. We should like to know what took him to London during that great snowstorm of January, 1776, and how he got there, inasmuch as the roads were so blocked by the snow that the carriages from Bath with their fine ladies on their way to attend the Queen’s birthday, were unable to get through. “The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to London, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed.” The parson found the city bedded deep in snow, and so noiseless by reason of it that “it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation.”

When one reads the writers of our own day upon rural England and the wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of the Selborne naturalist; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate intent to write up nature. They choose their theme; the theme does not choose them. They love the birds and flowers for the literary effects they can produce out of them. It requires no great talent to go out in the fields or woods and describe in graceful sentences what one sees there,--birds, trees, flowers, clouds, streams; but to give the atmosphere of these things, to seize the significant and interesting features and to put the reader into sympathetic communication with them, that is another matter.

Hence back of all, the one thing that has told most in keeping White’s book alive is undoubtedly its sound style--sentences actually filled with the living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to face with something genuine and real; objects, ideas, stand out on the page; the articulation is easy and distinct. White had no literary ambitions. His style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to natural knowledge. There was evidently something winsome and charming about the man personally, and these qualities reappear in his pages.

He was probably a parson who made as many calls afield as in the village, if not more. An old nurse in his family said of him, fifty years after his death, “He was a still, quiet body, and that there was not a bit of harm in him.”

White was a type of the true observer, the man with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his own thoughts and theories into Nature, but submitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and delighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the birds and the wild life around him. To see the thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his ambition. He could resist the tendency of his own mind to believe without sufficient evidence. Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion current during the last century, that swallows hibernated in the mud in the bottoms of streams and ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It was not enough that a few belated specimens were seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or again hovering over them early in spring; or that some old grandfather had seen a man who had taken live swallows out of the mud. Produce the man and let us cross-question him,--that was White’s attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that swallows did thus pass the winter in the mud “conglobulated into a ball,” but Johnson had that literary cast of mind that prefers a picturesque statement to the exact fact. White was led astray by no literary ambition. His interest in the life of nature was truly a scientific one; he must know the fact first, and then give it to the humanities. How true it is in science, in literature, in life, that any secondary motive vitiates the result! Seek ye the kingdom of truth first, and all things shall be added.

But White seems finally to have persuaded himself that at least a few swallows passed the winter in England in a torpid state--if not in the bottom of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks. He reasoned from analogy, though he had expressed his distrust of that mode of reasoning. If bats, insects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can thus pass the winter, why not swallows? On many different occasions, during mild days late in the fall and early in the spring, he saw house-martins flying about; the weather suddenly changing to colder, they quickly disappeared. Bats and turtles came forth, then vanished in the same way. White finally concluded that the mystery was the same in both cases,--that the creatures were brought from their winter retreats by the warmth, only to retire to them again when it changed to cold. If he had adhered to his usual caution he would have waited for actual proof of this fact,--the finding of a torpid swallow. He made frequent search for such, but never found any.

This notion so long current about the swallows probably had its origin in two things: first, their partiality for mud as nesting material; and secondly, the habit of these birds, after they have begun to collect into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to their migrations, of passing the night in vast numbers along the margins of streams and ponds. White knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to see in the fact presumptive evidence of the truth of the notion that, though they may not retire into the water itself, yet that they “may conceal themselves in the banks of pools and rivers during the uncomfortable months of the year.” One midsummer twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds of swallows--barn and cliff--settled for the night upon some low alders that grew upon the margin of a deep, still pool in the river. The bushes bent down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This attraction for the water on the part of the swallow family is certainly a curious one, and is not easily explained.