Part 6 (2/2)

But I pa.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 sh.o.r.eward 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 n.o.ble 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 ill.u.s.trious. 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, Ma.s.singer, 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 Ess.e.x 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 ident.i.ty. 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 by _a priori_ reasoning. 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 cla.s.sical 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 d.i.c.kens, and Byron's poems may give us the author's autobiography, and Sh.e.l.ley'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 authors.h.i.+p 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. s.p.a.ce 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.

VII

Tennyson the Dreamer

My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are a.s.sociated 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 n.o.ble, 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, a.s.sociate with State affairs, partic.i.p.ant in those turbulencies recorded in Froissart's voluble ”Chronicles.” He was a courtier. Camp and king's antechamber and emba.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing 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 was _bon 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, amba.s.sador, 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 amba.s.sadors 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion 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 ill.u.s.trious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where his hosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's n.o.blest 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 l.u.s.trum of centuries ago, and ”The May Queen” to remote decades. He writes in the nineteenth century, rarely _of_ it, 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 G.o.ds, 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.

”t.i.thonus,” ”Oenone,” ”Ulysses,” ”Tiresias,” ”Amphion,” ”The Hesperides,” ”The Merman,” ”Demeter and Persephone.” Do we not seem rather reading t.i.tles from some cla.s.sic poet than from a poet of the nineteenth century?

The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; ”Harold,” ”a 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 cla.s.sic period. To the purely romantic belong ”Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” ”The Lotos-Eaters,” ”The Talking Oak,” ”A Dream of Fair Women,” and ”G.o.diva.” 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+eld.

Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return ”The Poet's Song” voices:

”The rain had fallen, the Poet arose; He pa.s.sed 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 be When the years have died away.'”

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