Part 42 (1/2)

For the mighty wind arises roaring seaward and I go.

Then for this current 1886-7, a just-out sequel, which (as an apparently authentic summary says) ”reviews the life of mankind during the past sixty years, and comes to the conclusion that its boasted progress is of doubtful credit to the world in general and to England in particular. A cynical vein of denunciation of democratic opinions and aspirations runs throughout the poem in mark'd contrast with the spirit of the poet's youth.” Among the most striking lines of this sequel are the following:

Envy wears the mask of love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, Cries to weakest as to strongest, 'Ye are equals, equal born,'

Equal-born! Oh yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.

Charm us, orator, till the lion look no larger than the cat: Till the cat, through that mirage of overheated language, loom Larger than the lion Demo--end in working its own doom.

Tumble Nature heel o'er head, and, yelling with the yelling street, Set the feet above the brain, and swear the brain is in the feet, Bring the old dark ages back, without the faith, without the hope.

Beneath the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.

I should say that all this is a legitimate consequence of the tone and convictions of the earlier standards and points of view. Then some reflections, down to the hard-pan of this sort of thing.

The course of progressive politics (democracy) is so certain and resistless, not only in America but in Europe, that we can well afford the warning calls, threats, checks, neutralizings, in imaginative literature, or any department, of such deep-sounding, and high-soaring voices as Carlyle's and Tennyson's. Nay, the blindness, excesses, of the prevalent tendency--the dangers of the urgent trends of our times--in my opinion, need such voices almost more than any. I should, too, call it a signal instance of democratic humanity's luck that it has such enemies to contend with--so candid, so fervid, so heroic. But why do I say enemies? Upon the whole is not Tennyson--and was not Carlyle (like an honest and stern physician)--the true friend of our age?

Let me a.s.sume to pa.s.s verdict, or perhaps momentary judgment, for the United States on this poet--a remov'd and distant position giving some advantages over a nigh one. What is Tennyson's service to his race, times, and especially to America? First, I should say--or at least not forget--his personal character. He is not to be mention'das a rugged, evolutionary, aboriginal force--but (and a great lesson is in it) he has been consistent throughout with the native, healthy, patriotic spinal element and promptings of himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is vital and genuine. He reflects the uppercrust of his time, its pale cast of thought--even its _ennui_. Then the simile of my friend John Burroughs is entirely true, ”his glove is a glove of silk, but the hand is a hand of iron.” He shows how one can be a royal laureate, quite elegant and ”aristocratic,” and a little queer and affected, and at the same time perfectly manly and natural. As to his non-democracy, it fits him well, and I like him the better for it. I guess we all like to have (I am sure I do) some one who presents those sides of a thought, or possibility, different from our own--different and yet with a sort of home-likeness--a tartness and contradiction offsetting the theory as we view it, and construed from tastes and proclivities not at all his own.

To me, Tennyson shows more than any poet I know (perhaps has been a warning to me) how much there is in finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others--as in the line,

And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight,

in ”The Pa.s.sing of Arthur,” and evidenced in ”The Lady of Shalott,” ”The Deserted House,” and many other pieces. Among the best (I often linger over them again and again) are ”Lucretius,” ”The Lotos Eaters,” and ”The Northern Farmer.” His mannerism is great, but it is a n.o.ble and welcome mannerism. His very best work, to me, is contain'd in the books of ”The Idylls of the King,” and all that has grown out of them. Though indeed we could spare nothing of Tennyson, however small or however peculiar--not ”Break, Break,” nor ”Flower in the Crannied Wall,” nor the old, eternally-told pa.s.sion of ”Edward Gray:”

Love may come and love may go, And fly like a bird from tree to tree.

But I will love no more, no more Till Ellen Adair come back to me.

Yes, Alfred Tennyson's is a superb character, and will help give ill.u.s.triousness, through the long roll of time, to our Nineteenth Century. In its bunch of orbic names, s.h.i.+ning like a constellation of stars, his will be one of the brightest. His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like the voyagers of a s.h.i.+p, casting off for new seas, distant sh.o.r.es.

We would still dwell in the old suffocating and dead haunts, remembering and magnifying their pleasant experiences only, and more than once impell'd to jump ash.o.r.e before it is too late, and stay where our fathers stay'd, and live as they lived.

May-be I am non-literary and non-decorous (let me at least be human, and pay part of my debt) in this word about Tennyson. I want him to realize that here is a great and ardent Nation that absorbs his songs, and has a respect and affection for him personally, as almost for no other foreigner. I want this word to go to the old man at Farringford as conveying no more than the simple truth; and that truth (a little Christmas gift) no slight one either. I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. The readers of more than fifty millions of people in the New World not only owe to him some of their most agreeable and harmless and healthy hours, but he has enter'd into the formative influences of character here, not only in the Atlantic cities, but inland and far West, out in Missouri, in Kansas, and away in Oregon, in farmer's house and miner's cabin.

Best thanks, anyhow, to Alfred Tennyson--thanks and appreciation in America's name.

SLANG IN AMERICA

View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies. It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, combiner, and conqueror.

The scope of its etymologies is the scope not only of man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments, and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are comprehended in words, and their backgrounds. This is when words become vitaliz'd, and stand for things, as they unerringly and soon come to do, in the mind that enters on their study with fitting spirit, grasp, and appreciation.

Slang, profoundly consider'd, is the lawless germinal element, below all words and sentences, and behind all poetry, and proves a certain perennial rankness and protestantism in speech. As the United States inherit by far their most precious possession--the language they talk and write--from the Old World, under and out of its feudal inst.i.tutes, I will allow myself to borrow a simile even of those forms farthest removed from American Democracy. Considering Language then as some mighty potentate, into the majestic audience-hall of the monarch ever enters a personage like one of Shakspere's clowns, and takes position there, and plays a part even in the stateliest ceremonies. Such is Slang, or indirection, an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems, and doubtless in pre-historic times gave the start to, and perfected, the whole immense tangle of the old mythologies. For, curious as it may appear, it is strictly the same impulse-source, the same thing. Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pa.s.s away; though occasionally to settle and permanently crystallize.

To make it plainer, it is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang. In the processes of word-formation, myriads die, but here and there the attempt attracts superior meanings, becomes valuable and indispensable, and lives forever. Thus the term _right_ means literally only straight. _Wrong_ primarily meant twisted, distorted. _Integrity_ meant oneness. _Spirit_ meant breath, or flame. A _supercilious_ person was one who rais'd his eyebrows. To _insult_ was to leap against. If you _influenced_ a man, you but flow'd into him. The Hebrew word which is translated _prophesy_ meant to bubble up and pour forth as a fountain.

The enthusiast bubbles up with the Spirit of G.o.d within him, and it pours forth from him like a fountain. The word prophecy is misunderstood. Many suppose that it is limited to mere prediction; that is but the lesser portion of prophecy. The greater work is to reveal G.o.d. Every true religious enthusiast is a prophet.

Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the ma.s.ses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. It impermeates all, the Past as well as the Present, and is the grandest triumph of the human intellect. ”Those mighty works of art,” says Addington Symonds, ”which we call languages, in the construction of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, the forms of which were determin'd not by individual genius, but by the instincts of successive generations, acting to one end, inherent in the nature of the race--Those poems of pure thought and fancy, cadenced not in words, but in living imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the mind of nascent nations, which we call Mythologies--these surely are more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more mature production of the races which evolv'd them. Yet we are utterly ignorant of their embryology; the true science of Origins is yet in its cradle.”

Daring as it is to say so, in the growth of Language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling from their nebulous conditions of all that is poetical in the stores of human utterance. Moreover, the honest delving, as of late years, by the German and British workers in comparative philology, has pierc'd and dispers'd many of the falsest bubbles of centuries; and will disperse many more.

It was long recorded that in Scandinavian mythology the heroes in the Norse Paradise drank out of the skulls of their slain enemies. Later investigation proves the word taken for skulls to mean _horns_ of beasts slain in the hunt. And what reader had not been exercis'd over the traces of that feudal custom, by which _seigneurs_ warm'd their feet in the bowels of serfs, the abdomen being open'd for the purpose? It now is made to appear that the serf was only required to submit his unharm'd abdomen as a foot cus.h.i.+on while his lord supp' d, and was required to chafe the legs of the seigneur with his hands.