Part 12 (1/2)
”Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'T is only n.o.ble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.”
Nor is the Laureate's subsequent acceptance of the peerage a retraction of these earlier sentiments; for he did but accept the ribbon of an order which was part of the political system of his native land.
Himself was self-made. Who were the Tennysons? Who are the Tennysons?
He made a house. And in the list of lords, does any one think there is a name whose device one would rather wear than that of Lord Tennyson?
Holland has this bit of verse, whose application is apparent:
”Heaven is not reached at a single bound; But we build the ladder by which we rise From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And mount to its summit round by round.”
Genius does the same. The stairs each generation climbed are rotten at its death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward.
Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King, ent.i.tled ”Gareth and Lynette,” is application of this thought of manhood above t.i.tle or name or blood. Worth, the main thing, is the theme of the idyl.
Hear Gareth call, like voice of trumpets,
”Let be my name; until I make my name My deeds will speak.”
He seemed, and was not, a kitchen knave. He seemed not, and he was, a knight of valor and of purity and might, of purpose and of succor.
Silly Lynette might rain her superficial insults on him like a winter's sleet--this hindered not his service. He knew to wait, and dare, and do. His fame was in him. A great life bears not its honors on its back, as mountains do their pines, but in his heart, as women do their love. In Tennyson's concept of manhood, worth counts, not rank. To this argument, words from ”In Memoriam” are a contribution:
”As some divinely-gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And b.r.e.a.s.t.s the blows of circ.u.mstance, And grapples with his evil star;
Who makes by force his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mold a mighty State's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;
And moving on from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The center of a world's desire.”
Such words seem as if fallen from the lips of Lincoln in a dream.
”Aylmer's Field” is a protest, written in grief and tears and blood against the iniquity of ancestry as divorced from the pure course of n.o.bler love. G.o.d made of one blood all kindreds of the earth, and means to mix this blood till time shall die. Hearts give scant heed to heraldry. Life is wider than a baron's field. Arthur Hallam, whose epitaph is the sweetest ever written, and bears t.i.tle of ”In Memoriam,”--Arthur Hallam, so greatly loved and missed, was never n.o.bleman in genealogy, but was full prince in youth and ideality and purity and genius and promise, worth more than all the ancestries of buried kings. More: Tennyson was as much self-made as King Arthur. He made a house which rose to the sound of poet's lute, rehearsing, in our days, the story of Orpheus in the remote yesterdays. So myths come to be history. And who would not rather be author of ”The Lotos-Eaters,”
and ”Oenone,” and ”Ulysses,” and ”Enoch Arden,” and ”In Memoriam” than to have been possessed, with Sir Aylmer Aylmer, of
”s.p.a.cious hall, Hung with a hundred s.h.i.+elds, the family tree Sprung from the midriff of a prostrate king?”
King Arthur's knights were _novi viri_. Whence came Lancelot and Geraint and Sir Percivale? And how came they, save as
”Rising on their dead selves To higher things?”
Arthur, at whose back march all the legions of Tennyson's poetry celebrative of manhood,--Arthur a.s.serts the n.o.bleness of manhood, irrespective of the accidents of wealth or birth. Many scenes in Tennyson are taken from the cottage. ”The May Queen,” ”The Gardener's Daughter,” ”The Grandmother,” ”Rizpah,” and, above all, ”Enoch Arden,”
are poems showing how poetry dwells in the hearts of common folks. The verse of books they may not know; the verse of sentiment they are at home with. Birth is not a term in the proportion of worth; and I hold Arthur one of the strongest voices of our century a.s.sertive of the sufficiency of manhood. Self-made and greatly made was this king at Camelot.
King Arthur was optimist. He expected good in men, was not suspicious.
”Interpreting others by his own pure heart,” you interject, ”He was duped.” The harlot Vivien called him fool, and despised him; but she was fallen, shameful, treacherous, and, what was worse, so fallen as not to see the beauty in untarnished manhood, which is the last sign of turpitude. Many bad men have still left an honest admiration for a goodness themselves are alien to. Vivien was so lost as that goodness, manhood, knightliness, sweet and tall as mountain pines, made no appeal to her. Filth is dearer to some than mountain air. She was such. A fallen woman, given over to her fall, is horrible in depravity. Merlin saw that her estimate of Arthur was the measure of herself. Beatrix Esmond did not appreciate Henry Esmond; for the Pretender was her measure of soul. Though to her praise be it said that, in her old age, Esmond dead, she thought of him as women think of Christ. Arthur believed in men, supposing them to be transcripts of himself; and in so doing in details, he erred. His philosophy of goodness was erroneous; for he held to the theory of goodness by environment, fencing knights and ladies about with his own fine honor and chast.i.ty, supposing pure environment would make them pure, forgetting how G.o.d's kingdom is always within. Environment is not gifted to make men good. Arthur believed men pure, nor was he wholly wrong. The men about him gave the lie to his expectation; but these moral ragam.u.f.fins did not invalidate the king's faith. The road taken was not the world. Lancelot and Guinevere and Gawain and Modred, false? False! Pelleas, seeing Ettarre l.u.s.tful and untrue, digging rowels into his steed and crying, ”False! false!” was not wise as Arthur. The optimist is right. Some were false, 't is true; but others were true as crystal streams, that all night long give back the heavens star for star. There were and are true men and women. Our neighborhood, if so be it is foul, is not the earth. Enid, and Elaine, and Sir Galahad, and Sir Percivale, and Gareth, and others not designated, were pure. Snows on city streets are stained with soot and earth; snows on the mountains are as white as woven of the beams of noon. King Arthur, expecting the better of the world, in so doing followed the example of his Savior, Christ, who was most surely optimist. King Arthur, in his midnight hour, when knight and wife and Lancelot deserted him, when his ”vast pity almost made him die,” still kept the lamp of hope aflame and sheltered from the wind, lest it flame, flare, and die. His fool still loved him and clasped his feet; and bold Sir Bedivere staid with him through the thunder shock of that last battle in the west. Not all were false. Some friends abide. Though his application was not always wise, his att.i.tude was justified. Having done his part, he had not been betrayed; for he was still victor. Lancelot and Guinevere were defeated, ruined, as were Gawain and Ettarre, who, as they wake, find across their naked throats the bare sword of Pelleas; then Ettarre knew what knight was knightly. Goodness wins in the long battle, though supposed defeated in the petty frays, Tennyson makes his ideal man an optimist. ”Maud” is a study in pessimism. The lover's blood is tainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with all things and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broad sympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, rasping and self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wings beneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up their young; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity, then despise him, then pity him once more, and in sheer charity think him raving mad. Stand Maud's lover alongside King Arthur, and how splendid does King Arthur look! The lover was pessimist and wrong; Arthur was optimist and, in his temper, right. Though hacked at by the careless or vicious swords of c.u.mulating hatreds, underestimations, selfishness, and lewdness of lesser and cruder souls, knowing, as he did, how G.o.d is on goodness' side, knew, therefore, who is on G.o.d's side keeps hope in good, believing better things. Those who, thinking themselves shrewd, and are perennially suspicious, do really lack in shrewdness, lacking depth. The far view is the serene view. Pelleas, too, is a study in lost faith. He was near-sighted in his moral life, and so, in losing faith in Ettarre, lost faith in womanhood, a conclusion not justified from the premises; and you hear him in the wild night, crying as beasts of the desert cry, and what he hisses as you pa.s.s is, ”I have no sword.” Arthur kept his sword till time came to give it back to the ”arm clothed in white samite.” He threw not his sword away until his hand could hold it no longer. Hands and swords must keep company while life and strength remain, and who breaks or throws sword away from sheer despair has lost sight of duty, in so far that our business is to do battle valiantly and constantly for righteousness, and keep the sword at play in spite of dubious circ.u.mstances. Battles are often on the point of being won when they look on the point of being lost, as was the case with Pelleas, whose hope died just at the hour when hope ought to have begun shouts befitting triumph; for that night when he lay his naked sword across Ettarre's naked neck, she, waking and finding whose sword was lying, like a mad menace, on her breast, recovered her womanhood, loved the knight, who came and went, and slew her not, as his right was, and loved him to her death; while he, the cause of her reformation, swung through the gloomy night with faith and courage lost. He should have held his faith, however his trust in one had been shamed and sunk.
Faith in one snuffed out is not in logic to lose faith; for all are more than one. Trust Arthur; he was right. Pessimism is no sane mood.
All history conspires to justify his att.i.tude. Himself inspires optimism in us, and the three queens wait for him, and the black funeral barge that bears him, not to his funeral, but to some fair city where there seems one voice, and that a voice of welcome to this king; and besides all this, his name lights our nights till now, as if he were some sun, pre-empting night as well as day. Has not his optimism been justified a hundred-fold? Do those who view the present only, think to see all the landscape where deeds reap victories? Time is so essential in the propagandism of good. Time is the foe of evil, but sworn ally of good. G.o.d owns the future.