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.
This iconoclasm has nowhere more fully displayed itself than in its attitude toward the Bible. That book comes properly under the head of literature, for the reason that the general line of attack during this century has been made from a literary standpoint. Of course, there has always been, whether easily discoverable or not, an undertone of skepticism of the rank sort. Oftentimes the battle has been avowedly against the book as a professed inspiration. Strauss and Rénan made no cloak for their deed. But in many instances the method of procedure has been to study, as under a calcium light, the literary style, the linguistic peculiarities, the whole work as a literary composition. In this regard the method of criticism was such as was used in dissecting Homer's works. Each author laid down canons of criticism by which to measure the book in question. He cut the work into fragments. He stated such and such parts were the work of an early writer, while certain others were the additions of men unknown, far removed in time and place. For the most part these assumptions were wholly arbitrary, as may be seen by reading the authors on the various books. The thing which is the most observable is their lack of agreement, while the method used is the dogmatic. They all agree that the book is not of the date nor authorship usually assigned to it; but what the date and who the author, is very seldom agreed between any two. The criticism is largely of theipse dixitsort, and the grounds of attack are, though rationalistic, seldom rationally taken. In the vaunted name of reason, the most monstrous absurdities are perpetrated. The line of argument professed to be used is inductive; but in reality the inductive element in this criticism stands second, and the deductive element has the chief seat in the synagogue. The assumption in the case, thea priori, sine qua non("without which nothing")—these are the all-important elements in the discussion. It is the Homeric argument restated. Each man professes to find his hypothesis in the structure and language of the book. In fact, the author usually began with his hypothesis, and seeks to find proofs for the staying his assumptions up. The Scriptures are open to investigation. They challenge it. No one need offer an objection to the most scrutinizing inquiry. The book is here, and must stand upon its merits. Its high claims need not deter scholarship from its investigation. Only, to use the language of Bishop Butler in regard to another matter, "Let reason be kept to." If we are to be regaled with flights of imagination, let them be thus denominated; but let men not profess to be following the leadership of scholarship and scientific candor, when they are in reality dealing in imagination and scientific dogmatism, and appealing to philology to give them much needed support. After these years of attack from a literary standpoint, the books of the Bible are less affected than the Iliad. The Atomist has signally failed to make a single case. Iconoclasm has performed its task as best it could, and finds its labor lost. The criticism of to-day is, even in Germany, professedly in favor of the integrity of the Scripture.
But I pass to another part of the literary field. From the Bible to Shakespeare. This, at first thought, may seem a long journey. There appears but little congruity between the two. The only needed connection is the similarity of attack. The same spirit has whetted its sword against each; but the lack of similarity is more apparent than real. The Bible is God's exhibit of human nature and its relation to the Divine personality and plans. Shakespeare is man's profoundest exhibit of man in his relation to present and future. The fields are the same. They differ in extent. The profoundness of Shakespeare seems a shoreward shallow when viewed alongside the Bible. The Bible and Shakespeare have a further similarity, not one of character, but of results.
Each has been a potential factor in the stability of the English language. They each present the noble possibilities of the speech of the Anglo-Saxon. Each has left its indelible impress on speech and literature. Kossuth's mastery of English is by him attributed to the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's Dictionary. These were his sole masters, and sufficed to give him a command of language which ranks him among the princes of our English speech. That the authorship of the Iliad and the books of the Bible should be attacked is cause for little surprise. They were works of antiquity. It is an observable tendency of the mind to doubt a thing far removed in time. We lose sight of evidence. We dispense with the leadership of reason, and let inclination and imagination guide. This is a bias which antiquity must meet and, if it may, master. If the Iliad and the Bible were vulnerable in this regard, Shakespeare was not. He was a modern. His thought is neither ancient nor mediaeval. He has the characteristics of modern life, begotten of the hot-blooded era in which he lived. The modern Shakespeare is a target for the iconoclast. It seems but a stone's-cast from our time to the reign of Elizabeth and the day of the English drama. The time was one of action in every department of society. Conquest, colonization, literature, were beginning to render the Saxon name illustrious. It was the epoch of chivalry and chivalrous procedure, such as to create a species of literature and bring it to a perfection which half-wrested the scepter of supremacy from the hand of the Attic tragedy. In this literature there is a name which dwarfs all others. Otway, Ford, Massinger, Webster, Ben Jonson, Green, and Marlowe (some of these men of surprising genius) must take a lower place, for the master of revels is come. William Shakespeare is here. His life is not lengthily but plainly writ. He might have said, as did Tennyson's Ulysses, "I am become a name." It would seem that a man at such a time, with such a reputation, would have naught to fear from iconoclasm, however fierce. He, in a sense, was known as Raleigh or Essex were not. He has put himself into human history, and made the world his debtor. The existence of a man whose personality was admitted by his contemporaries must be believed in. Stories concerning him haunted the byways of London and literature. Ben Jonson paid him a tardy tribute. Men received him as they received Chaucer. But the spirit of the age finds him vulnerable. Delia Bacon, Smith, O'Connor, Holmes, and Donnelly are leaders who deny Shakespeare's identity. I may note Donnelly, an American gentleman of research and painstaking which would be creditable to a German scholar. He must be allowed to be a man of ingenuity. His method of discovering that Shakespeare was not himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not with generalities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, covered with hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher which he thinks the plays contain—such sample page is certainly a marvel, even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and "Looking Backward." A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanation makes marvelous doubly so. To believe that a man should have hidden his authorship of such works as the plays of Shakespeare makes a draft on the credulity of men too great to be borne. Why Junius should not have revealed himself is not difficult to discover. His life was at stake. But why the author of "The Tempest," or "King Lear," or "The Merchant of Venice," should have concealed his personality so carefully that three centuries have elapsed before men could discover it—this is an enigma no man can solve. In general, it is objected by non-believers in Shakespeare that it is impossible to conceive of a man whose rearing possessed so few advantages as did that of Shakespeare, having written the plays attributed to him. This is really the strong point in the whole discussion. All other arguments are subordinate. It is admitted that it does seem impossible for the poacher and wild country lad to become the poet pre-eminent in English literature. But this question is not to be decided bya priorireasoning. The genius displayed in the dramatic works under consideration is little less than miraculous. This all concede. Now, history has shown that to genius there is a sense in which "all things are possible." Genius can cross the Alps, can conquer Europe, can dumfound the world. Genius knows no rules. Once allow genius, and the problem is solved. It is conceded that for a common man, or even for one of exceptional ability, to have acquired without help the learning which characterizes the works of Shakespeare is impossible. But the man who wrote Hamlet was no mediocre, be he Bacon or Shakespeare. He was a superlative genius. This fact admitted, we need have no difficulty with the problem. It becomes a question a child can answer. The "myriad-minded Shakespeare" could do what to an ordinary, or even extraordinary, man would be an absolute impossibility. One critic discovers Shakespeare to be a musician; another, a classical scholar; and so he has been claimed in almost every field. He was not all. So critics confound us. They also confound themselves. The genius which could write the plays could master all these, though he squandered his youth. Let the history of genius guide from this labyrinth. Was not Caesar orator, general, historian? Was not Napoleon the same? Does not genius destroy all demonstrations with reference to itself? Do not Pascal, Euler, Da Vinci, and Angelo confound us? How dare we dogmatize as to the doings of genius? Read Shakespeare, and find you can not discover the characteristic of the man. You can not in his writings read his interior life. David Copperfield may display Dickens, and Byron's poems may give us the author's autobiography, and Shelley's writings may give a photograph of his intellectual self; but Shakespeare's plays give no clew to his character. He is all. He grovels in Falstaff; he towers in Prospero. He smites all strings that have music in them. He baffles us like a spirit, hiding himself in darkness. To attribute the authorship of the plays to Bacon is, to my thought, not to rid us of our difficulty, but rather to increase difficulty. Bacon we know. He was jurist, statesman, natural philosopher. Add to these the possibility of his having written Shakespeare, and the magnificence of his achievement would dwarf that of Shakespeare. Space forbids dwelling on this longer, though the theme is fascinating to any lover of letters. The thought in this paper (and that goes without the saying) is, not to discuss thoroughly these various phases of literary iconoclasm, but rather to call attention to them and to co-ordinate them.
I desire to show that these phases of criticism are not difficult of explanation. These are natural, and are the outgrowth of an image-making age. Study the age, understand it thoroughly, and the literature of that period can hardly be a puzzling question. The nineteenth century will stand in history as the chiefest iconoclast which has arisen in the world's first six thousand years. And its science, statecraft, art, and literature will be looked upon as segments of the one circle, and that circle the century.
Tennyson the Dreamer
My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are associated with the old Harper's volume, green-bound, large-paged, and frontispieced with two pictures of the poet—one of them, a face bearded, thoughtful, with eyes seeming not to see the near, but the remote; a head well-poised and noble, with hair tangled as if matted by the wind; the face, as I a lad thought, of a dreamer and a poet; and my first impressions, I think, were right, since the years are confirmatory of this first conviction. The second portrait pictured the poet wrapped in his cloak, standing, lost in thought, alone upon a cliff, gazing solitary at the sea, and listening. If I do not mistake, these pictures caught the poet's spirit in so far as pictures can portray spirit. Tennyson was always alone beside a sea, looking, listening, dreaming; and as dreamer this article purposes portraying him.
Tennyson was, his life through, a recluse. He dwelt apart. He was as one who stands afar oft and listens to the shock of battle, hears the echo of cannon's roar, and so conceives a remote picture of the tragedy of onset. English poetry began with Chaucer, outrider to a king, associate with State affairs, participant in those turbulencies recorded in Froissart's voluble "Chronicles." He was a courtier. Camp and king's antechamber and embassage and battle made the arsis and thesis of his poetry, and his poems are a picture of Edward III's age, accurate as if a king's pageant passing flung shadow in a stream along whose bank it marched. Spenser was a recluse, looking on the world's movement as an Oriental woman watches the street from her latticed window. Shakespeare wasbon vivant, a player, therefore a brief chronicler of that time and of all times. He floated in people as birds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as a sculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications for dramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literary debauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courts and society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it. Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who lives far from a public thoroughfare, where neither the dust nor bustle of travel can touch his bower of quiet; in its quality of isolation, Grasmere was an island in remote seas. Keats was a lad, dreaming in some dim Greek temple, listening to a fountain's plash at midnight which never whitened into dawn.
Nor does there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, aside from the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of Bayard Taylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could write dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, diplomat, poet,—in every department distinguished. His essay on Dante ranks him among the great expositors of that melancholy Florentine. Yet who of us has not wished he might have consecrated himself to poetry as priest to the altar? We gained in the publicist and essayist, but lost from the poet. And our ultimate loss out-topped our gain; for essayists and ambassadors are more numerous than poets. Had Lowell been a man of one service, and that service poetry, what might he not have left us as a poet's bequest? Would he had lived in some forest primeval, from whose shadows mountains climbed to meet the dawns, and streams stood in silver pools or broke into laughter on the stones, and where winds among the pines were constant ministrants of melody! Solitudes minister to poets. You can hear a fountain best at midnight, because then quiet rules.
Tennyson was a solitary. Hallam Tennyson's biography of the laureate resents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves the commonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love of contemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man of the people. He fled from tourists as if they brought a plague with them. He did nothing but dream. You might as easily catch the whip-poor-will, whose habitation changes at an approaching step, as Tennyson. His was not in the widest sense a companionable nature. He cared to be alone and to be let dream, and resented intrusion and a disturbance of his solitude. Some have dreamless sleep, like the princess in "The Sleeping Beauty;" others sleep to dream, and to wake them by a hand's touch or a voice, however loved, would be to break the sweet continuity of their dreams. Seeing Tennyson was as he was, his solitude helped him. I think moonlight was wine to his spirit, and the dim voices of rolling breakers heard afar woke his passion and his poetry. The
"Break, break, break,On thy cold, gray stones, O sea!"
was what his spirit needed as qualification to
"Utter the thoughts that arise in me."
A dramatist needs the touching of living hands and sound of living human voices, the uproar of the human sea; for is he not poet of street and court and market-place and holiday? But there is a poetry which needs these accessories as little as a lover needs a throng to keep him company. Tennyson's poetry was such. We are not to conceive him as Lord Tennyson and inhabitant of the House of Lords. He did not belong there save as a recognition of splendid ability. If we are to get a clew to his genius, he must always be conceived as a recluse, who truly heard the world's words, but at a dim remove. There is remoteness in his poetry. The long ago was the day whose sunlight flooded his path. The illustrious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where his hosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's noblest poetry belongs to his own era. "The May Queen;" "Locksley Hall," and its complement, "Sixty Years After;" "In a Hospital Ward;" "The Grandmother;" his patriotic effusions; "Maud;" and "In Memoriam," sum up the modern contributions; nor is all of this impregnated with a genuinely modern spirit. "Enoch Arden" might have belonged to a lustrum of centuries ago, and "The May Queen" to remote decades. He writes in the nineteenth century, rarelyofit, though, as is inevitable, he colors his thoughts of long-ago yesterdays with the colors of to-day. He is not strictly a contemporaneous poet. "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter," and others of the sort, have no time ear-marks. "The Princess" discusses a living problem, but from the artistic background of a knightly era. "Locksley Hall," earlier and later, "Maud" and "In Memoriam" are about the only genuinely contemporaneous poems. My suggestion is, Tennyson hugs the shadows of yesterdays; nor need we go far to find the philosophy of this seizure of the past. Romance gathers in twilights. It is hard to persuade ourselves that those heroisms which make souls mighty as the gods, belong to here and now. Imagination fixes this golden age in what Tennyson would call "the underworld" of time. Greek mythology was the essential poetry of nature, and mediaevalism the essential poetry of manhood. Nothing, as appears to me, was more accurate and in keeping with Tennysonian genius than this choosing Greek antiquity and mediaevalism as the theater for his poetry; for he was the chief romance poet since Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Tennyson are the poets laureate of chivalry. What Spenser did in his age, that Tennyson did in his. So recall the chronological location of Tennyson's poetry. "Tithonus," "Oenone," "Ulysses," "Tiresias," "Amphion," "The Hesperides," "The Merman," "Demeter and Persephone." Do we not seem rather reading titles from some classic poet than from a poet of the nineteenth century?
The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; "Harold," "à Becket," and "Queen Mary" are of yesterday. Tennyson reached backward, as a child reaches over toward its mother. "Boadicea" belongs to a still earlier age of English history; and certainly "The Idyls of the King" "Sir Galahad," "St. Simeon Stylites," "St. Agnes," "The Mystic," "Merlin and the Gleam," belong to the romantic, half-hidden era of history and of thought. "Sir John Oldcastle" and "Columbus" belong to the visible historic era, while in his wonderful "Rizpah" the poet has knit the present to dim centuries of the remotest past; and the tragic "Lucretius" takes us once more into the classic period. To the purely romantic belong "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Talking Oak," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "Godiva." Now subtract these poems and their kin from the bulk of Tennyson's poetry, and the remainder will appear comparatively small. Certainly we may affirm with safety that Tennyson was poet of the past.
You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mind so wholly poetic as Tennyson's it seemed possible to get the poetry of conduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-day is matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediaevalism was fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voice and lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has given diagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voice behind morion and shield.
Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return "The Poet'sSong" voices:
"The rain had fallen, the Poet arose;He passed by the town and out of the street;A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,And waves of shadow went over the wheat,And he sat him down in a lonely place,And chanted a melody loud and sweet,That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,And the lark drop down at his feet.
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,The snake slipt under a spray;The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,And stared, with his foot on the prey;And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs,But never a one so gay;For he sings of what the world will beWhen the years have died away.'"
Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,—there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, which we are to do more and still more. Thomson's poetry was not pastoral poetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficient theme for poetry, lacking passion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowing stream, and tossing seas are valuable as associates of the soul and helping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and nature into his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying,
"O would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me!"
The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the elocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essential of spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outside of his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Scenery has never had lovers as now; and participative in this mood is Tennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature is loneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a passing passion, but is passionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it. "Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid" and "Oenone." In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the sea and the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is not introduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow. He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:
"He came to the desert of London townGray miles long.He wandered up, he wandered down,Singing a quiet hymn."
Not so Tennyson. London and he were compatriots, but not friends; for he belonged to the quiet of the country woods, and the clamor of sea-gulls and sea-waves, whose very tumult drown the voice of care. Tennyson was to express the yearning of his era, and his poems are a cry; for, like a babe, he has
"No language but a cry."
Our yearning is our glory. The superb forces of our spirits are inarticulate, and can not be put to words, but may be put to the melody of a yearning cry. Souls struggle toward expression like a dying soldier who would send a message to his beloved, but can not frame words therefor before he dies. Our pathos is—and our yearning is—
"O would that my lips could utterThe thoughts that arise in me!"
But we have no words; and Holmes, in his most delicately-beautiful poem, entitled "The Voiceless," has made mention of this grief:
"We count the broken lyres that restWhere the sweet wailing singers slumber;But o'er their silent sister's breastThe wild-flowers, who will stoop to number?A few can touch the magic string,And noisy Fame is proud to win them:Alas for those that never sing,But die with all their music in them!
Nay, grieve not for the dead alone,Whose song has told their heart's sad story,—Weep for the voiceless, who have knownThe cross without the crown of glory!Not where Leucadian breezes sweepO'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,But where the glistening night-dews weepOn nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.
O hearts that break and give no signSave whitening lip and fading tresses,Till Death pours out his cordial wine,Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,—If singing breath or echoing chordTo every hidden pang were given,What endless melodies were poured,As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!"
Souls cry, "Give us a voice;" and nature enters into our yearning moods. The autumn and the rain grieve with us, and June makes merry with us as at a festival, and the deep sky gives room for the soaring of our aspirations, and the solemn night says, "Dream!" And for our heartache and longing, Tennyson is our voice; for he seems near neighbor to us. He lay on a bank of violets, and looked into the sky, and heard poplars pattering as with rain upon the roof. Really, in all Tennyson's poems you will be surprised at the affluence of his reference to nature. His custom was to make the moods of nature to be explanatory of the moods of the soul. Man needs nature as birds need air, and flowers, and waving trees, and the dear sun. Tennyson will make appeal to
"The flower in the crannied wall"
by way of silencing the agnostic's prating against God. Hear him:
"Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies—Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower,—but if I could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is."
Here follow a few, among many, very many, delicious references to the out-of-door world we name nature, as explanatory of the indoor world we call soul:
"Who make it seem more sweet to beThe little life on bank and brier,The bird that pipes his lone desireAnd dies unheard within his tree."
"A thousand suns will stream on thee,A thousand moons will quiver;But not by thee my steps shall be,Forever and forever."
"Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale."
"I saw that every morning, far withdrawn,Beyond the darkness and the cataract,God made himself an awful rose of dawn,Unheeded."
"There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;But thou go by."
"As through the land at eve we went,And pluck'd the ripen'd ears,We fell out, my wife and I,—O we fell out, I know not why,And kiss'd again with tears.
For when we came where lies the childWe lost in other years,There above the little grave,—O there above the little grave,We kiss'd again with tears."
"Set in a cataract on an island-crag,When storm is on the heights of the long hills."
"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sandWhen the tide ebbs in sunshine."
"Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;The cloud may stoop from heaven, and take the shape,With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;But O too fond, when have I answered thee?Ask me no more."
"And she, as one that climbs a peak to gazeO'er land and main, and sees a great black cloudDrag inward from the deeps, a wall of night."
"That like a broken purpose wastes in air."
"To rest beneath the clover sod,That takes the sunshine and the rains,Or where the kneeling hamlet drainsThe chalice of the grapes of God."
"So be it: there no shade can lastIn that deep dawn behind the tomb,But clear from marge to marge shall bloomThe eternal landscape of the past."
"I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray."
"But Summer on the steaming floods,And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,That gather in the waning woods."
"From belt to belt of crimson seas,On leagues of odor streaming far,To where in yonder Orient starA hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'"
"There rolls the deep where grew the tree:O earth, what changes thou hast seen!There where the long street roars, hath beenThe stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flowFrom form to form, and nothing stands;They melt like mist, the solid lands,Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
"If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,I heard a voice, 'Believe no more,'And heard an ever-breaking shoreThat tumbled in the godless deep."
"As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone,Running too vehemently to break upon it."
"Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff,And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers;And high above a piece of turret stair,Worn by the feet that now were silent, wouldBare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stemsClaspt the gray walls with hairy-fibered arms,And suck'd the joining of the stones, and look'dA knot, beneath, of snakes; aloft, a grove."
"For as a leaf in mid-November isTo what it was in mid-October, seem'dThe dress that now she look'd on to the dressShe look'd on ere the coming of Geraint."
"That had a sapling growing on it, slipFrom the long shore-cliff's windy walls to the beach,And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew:So lay the man transfixt."
"For oneThat listens near a torrent mountain-brook,All thro' the crash of the near cataract hearsThe drumming thunder of the huger fallAt distance, were the soldiers wont to hearHis voice in battle, and be kindled by it."
"And in the moment after, wild Limours,Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloudWhose skirts are loosen'd by the breaking storm,Half ridden off with by the thing he rode,And all in passion, uttering a dry shriek,Dash'd on Geraint"
"Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely bluePlay'd into green, and thicker down the frontWith jewels than the sward with drops of dew,When all night long a cloud clings to the hill,And with the dawn ascending lets the dayStrike where it clung: so thickly shone the gems."
"As the southwest that blowing Bala LakeFills all the sacred Dee. So past the days."
"In the midnight and flourish of his May."
"Only you would not pass beyond the capeThat has the poplar on it."
"And at the inrunning of a little brook,Sat by the river in a cove and watch'dThe high reed wave, and lifted up his eyesAnd saw the barge that brought her moving down,Far off, a blot upon the stream, and said,Low in himself, 'Ah, simple heart and sweet,You loved me, damsel, surely with a loveFar tenderer than my Queen's!'"
"Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart,As the sharp wind that ruffles all day longA little bitter pool about a stoneOn the bare coast."
"A carefuler in peril did not breatheFor leagues along that breaker-beaten coastThan Enoch. . . . And he thrice had pluck'd a lifeFrom the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas."
"All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,That burned as on an altar."
"With kisses balmier than half-opening budsOf April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd,Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,While Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers."
"Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of lifeShoots to the fall."
"That sets at twilight in a land of reeds."
"And wearying in a land of sand and thorns."
"Pelleas and sweet smell of the fieldsPast, and the sunshine came along with him."
"By a mossed brookbank on a stoneI smelt a wildweed flower alone;There was a ringing in my ears,And both my eyes gushed out with tears."
"Clash like the coming and retiring wave."
"Quiet as any water-sodden logStay'd in the wandering warble of a brook."
"The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh."
From these quotations, not exhaustive, but representative, one may see in how gracious a sense Tennyson was a pastoral poet, in that he and his thought haunted the brookside and the mountainside, the shadow and the sunshine, the dark night, or dewy eve, or the glad dawn, always. Therefore is Tennyson a rest to the spirit. He takes you from your care, and ends by taking your care from you. He quiets your spirit. I go to his poems as I would go to seashore or mountain; and a quiet deep, as the gently falling night, wraps my spirit. Bless him always for the rest he knows to give and cares to give!
Tennyson's genius is lyrical rather than either dramatic or epic. What music is like his? Say of his poems, in words of James Whitcomb Riley,
"O but the sound was rainy sweet!"
Not great Milton was more master of music than he; though Milton's was the melody of wide ocean in open sea, or crash of waves upon the rugged rocks, or wrathing up the yellow sands in tumult of majestic menace. Tennyson's music is rather the voice of gentle waters, or the cadence of summer's winds in the tree-tops, or like human voices heard in some woodland. In either poet is no marred music. Mrs. Browning fell out of time; Tennyson never. His verse is like some loved voice which makes perpetual music in our heart. Read all of his poetry, and how diversified soever his meter is, music never fails; yet his lyrics are not as those of Burns, whose words sing like the brook Tennyson has sung of. Burns's melody is laughter: it babbles, it sighs for a moment, but will sing. But Tennyson's is not laughter. He is no joyous poet. Burns has tears which wet his lashes, scarcely his cheeks. Tennyson's cheeks are wet. He is the music of winds in pine-trees in a lonely land, or as a sea breaking upon a shore of rock and wreck; but how passing sweet the music is, stealing your ruggedness away, so that to be harsh in thought or diction in his presence seems a crime!
Lyric differs from epic poetry in sustainedness. One form of poetry runs into another imperceptibly, as darkness into daylight or daylight into darkness, so that the dividing line can not be certified. Lyric poetry may be dramatic in spirit, as Browning's "The Ring and the Book;" or dramatic poetry may be lyric in spirit, as Milton's "Comus." Tennyson has written drama and epic too; for such, I think, clearly he proposed the "Idyls of the King" to be. This we must say: Despite the genial leniency of Robert Browning's criticism of the dramatic success of "Harold," and "Becket," and "The Cup," we may safely refuse concurrence in judgment. Trying made the failure of the play impossible when he was character in them. There is no necessity of denying that the so-called trilogy has apt delineation of character, and that Green, the historian, was justified in saying that "Becket" had given him such a conception of the character of that courtier and ecclesiastic as all his historical research had not given; nor need we deny that these dramas are rich in noble passages. These things go without the saying, considering the author was Alfred Tennyson. In attempting a criticism of the dramatic value, however, the real question is this: Would not "Harold" and "Queen Mary" have been greater poems if thrown out of the dramatic into the narrative form, like "Guinevere" or "Enoch Arden?" "Maud" is really the most dramatic of Tennyson's poems, and in consequence the least understood. Most men at some time espouse what they can not successfully achieve. Was not this Tennyson's case? Are not the portrayal of character and the rhythm and the melody of the drama qualities inherent in Tennyson, and are they in any distinct sense dramatic? If we declare Tennyson neither epic nor dramatic, but always lyric, adverse criticism melts away like snow in summer. As lyrist, all is congruous and enthralling. "The Idyls of the King," as a series of lyric romances, is beyond blame in technique. Tennyson tells a story. Dramatic poetry takes the story out of the poet's lips and tells itself. The epic requires a strong centrality of theme, movement, and dominancy, like a ubiquitous sovereign whose power is always felt in every part of his empire. Viewing "The Idyls of the King" as singing episodes, told us by some wandering minstrel, not only do they not challenge hostile criticism, but they take rank among the noblest contributions to the poetry of any language. "Columbus," "Ulyses," "Eleanore," "Enoch Arden," "Lucretius," "The Day-Dream," "Locksley Hall," "Dora," "Aylmer's Field," "The Gardener's Daughter," have all the subdued beauty of Wordsworth's narrative poems, and are as certainly lyric as those unapproachable lyrics in "The Princess." The ocean is epic in its vast expanse; tragic in its power to crush Armadas on the rocks and let them
"Rot in ribs of wreck;"
and lyric in its songs, whether of storm outsounding cataracts, or the singing scarce above the breath of waves that silver the shores of summer seas. Commend me to the ocean, and give all the ocean to me. Dispossess me of no might nor tragedy nor melody. Let the whole ocean be mine. So, though Tennyson be not epic as Milton, nor dramatic as Browning, he is yet a mine of wealth untold. He is more melodious than Spenser (and what a praise!) Tennyson can not write the prose, but always the poetry of life. So interpreted, how perfect his execution becomes! His words distill like dews. Take unnumbered extracts from his poems, and they seem bits of melody, picked out from nature's book of melodies, and in themselves and as related they satisfy the heart. Let these songs sing themselves to us:
"Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee?Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: what answer should I give?I love not hollow cheek or faded eye;Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;Ask me no more.
Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd;I strove against the stream and all in vain;Let the great river take me to the main;No more, dear Love, for at a touch I yield;Ask me no more."
"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."
"O love, they die in yon rich sky,They faint on hill or field or river;Our echoes roll from soul to soul,And grow forever and forever.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying."
"Sweet and low, sweet and low,Wind of the western sea,Low, low, breathe and blow,Wind of the western sea!Over the rolling waters go,Come from the dying moon, and blow,Blow him again to me;While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,Father will come to thee soon;Rest, rest, on mother's breast,Father will come to thee soon;Father will come to his babe in the nest,Silver sails all out of the westUnder the silver moon:Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep."
And "Tears, Idle Tears," is beyond all praise. Passion was never wed to music more deliriously and satisfyingly. I am entranced by this poem always, as by God's poem of the starry night:
"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean;Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyesIn looking on the happy autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,That brings our friends up from the under world;Sad as the last which reddens over oneThat sinks with all we love below the verge;So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'dOn lips that are for others; deep as love,Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
All these lyrics are such delights as leave us silent, seeing we have no words to tell the glow of spirit we feel. The genius of lyric poetry is its power of condensation. The drama may expand, the lyric must condense, and Tennyson has the lyric power, summing up large areas of thought and feeling into a single sentence or a few verses, which presents the quintessence of the lyric method. Immense passion poured into the chalice of a solitary utterance—this is a song. Let the harpist sit and sing, nor stop to wipe his tears what time he sings,—only let him sing! Tennyson was as some rare voice which never grows husky, but always sounds sweet as music heard in the darkness, and when he speaks, it is as if
"Up the valley came a swell of music on the wind."
Tennyson is poet of love. Love is practically always the soil out of which his flowers grow. Our American bards say little of love, and we feel the lack keenly. Love is the native nobleman among soul-qualities, and we have become schooled to feel the poets must be our spokesmen here where we need them most. But Bryant, nor Whittier, nor Longfellow, nor yet Lowell, have been in a generous way erotic poets. They have lacked the pronounced passion element. Poe, however, was always lover when he wrote poetry, and Bayard Taylor has a recurring softening of the voice to a caress when his eyes look love. Tennyson, on the contrary, is scarcely less a love poet than Burns, though he tells his secret after a different fashion. Call the roll of his poems, and see how just this observation is. Love is nodal with him as with the heart. Bourdillon was right in saying:
"The night has a thousand eyes,The day has one;Yet the light of the bright world diesWith the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,And the heart but one;Yet the life of a whole life diesWhen love is done."
In many poets, love is background, not picture, or, to change a figure as is meet, love is a minor chord in song. In Shelley, I would say that love was a sort of afterglow upon the landscape, and softens his rigid anarchy into something like beauty. With Tennyson is a very different offering to love. It is omnipresent, though not obtrusively so; for he never obtrudes his main meanings. They rather steal on you as springtime does. You catch his meaning because you are not blind nor deaf. He hints at things as lovers do, and is as one who would not thrust his company upon you, so modest and reticent is he; yet we do not mistake him. Love is always close at hand, and in some form is never absent. "Mariana," "Lady of Shalott," "Locksley Hall," "Maud," "The Sisters," "The Talking Oak," "Edward Gray," "The Miller's Daughter," "Harold," "Queen Mary," "Enoch Arden," and "The Idyls of the King,"—is not love everywhere? These are poems of love between men and women as lovers; but there is other love. In Tennyson: love of country, as in his "The Revenge," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and others; love of nature, as "The Brook;" the love of Queen, as in the dedication in "The Idyls of the King;" love of a friend (and such love!) flooding "In Memoriam" like spring tide's; love to God, as "St. Agnes' Eve," "Sir Galahad," and in "King Arthur." By appeal to book do we see how his poems constitute a literature of love, for he is in essence saying continuously, "Life means love," and we shall not be those to say him nay. May we not safely say no poet has given a more beautiful and sympathetic explication of love in its entirety? Browning has expressed the sex-love more mightily in Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Tennyson has, however, given no partial landscape; he has presented the whole. Love of the lover, of the widowed heart, of the friend, of the parent, of the patriot, of the subject to sovereign, of the redeemed of God. Truly, this does impress us as a nearly-completed circle. If it is not, where lies the lack? Love is life, gladness, pathos, power. A humblest spirit, when touched with the unspeakable grace of love, becomes epic and beautiful, as is illustrated in "Enoch Arden." Herein see a sure element of immortality in Tennyson. The race will always with alacrity and sympathy read of love in tale or poem; and this poet is always translating love's thought into speech.
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 itsglowing hands;Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all thechords with might;Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in musicout 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 agonyOf lamentation like a wind, that shrillsAll 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 thereTill 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 holdFrom 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 stairsOf life."
"The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruitOf wisdom. Wait."
"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sandWhen the tide ebbs in sunshine."
"Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tearsBy some cold morning glacier; frail at firstAnd 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 wineTo dying lips is all he said).
And look thy look, and go thy way,But blame not thou the winds that makeThe 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 drownThe 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 movedUpon the topmost froth of thought.
From point to point, with power and graceAnd music in the bounds of law,To those conclusions when we sawThe God within him light his face.
And while the wind began to sweepA music out of sheet and shroud,We steer'd her toward a crimson cloudThat landlike slept along the deep.
Abiding with me till I sailTo seek thee on the mystic deeps,And this electric force, that keepsA 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 rooksAt 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 lossFalls 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 cameUpon 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 eyesAnd loved him, with that love which was her doom."
"And in the meadows tremulous aspen-treesAnd poplars made a noise of falling showers."
"No greatness, save it be some far-off touchOf 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 longA little bitter pool about a stoneOn the bare coast."
"Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,And I should evermore be vext with theeIn 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'dAs 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 lifeCrept down into the hollows of the wood."
"Then Philip, with his eyesFull of that lifelong hunger, and his voiceShaking a little like a drunkard's hand."
"Had he notSpoken with That, which being everywhereLets 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 wreckSee through the gray skirts of a lifting squallThe boat that bears the hope of life approachTo save the life despair'd of, than he sawDeath dawning on him, and the close of all."
"And he lay tranced; but when he rose and pacedBack 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 tornIn tempest."