A Hero and Some Other Folks Part 9

The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the life of a whole life dies When 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 G.o.d, as "St.

Agnes' Eve," "Sir Galahad," and in "King Arthur." By appeal to book do we see how his poems const.i.tute 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 s.e.x-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 G.o.d. 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 sh.o.r.e, so that on my face was what might be either rain or tears.

In Tennyson,

"Love took up the gla.s.s of Time, and turned it in its glowing hands; Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, pa.s.sed in music out 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 a.n.a.lysis 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! G.o.d 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 a.s.signed, 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 ill.u.s.trative:

"An agony Of lamentation like a wind, that shrills All 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 ill.u.s.trative. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 there Till every daisy slept."

"Love with knit brows went by, And with a flying finger swept my lips."

"Breathed like the covenant of a G.o.d, to hold From 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 stairs Of life."

"The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom. Wait."

"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in suns.h.i.+ne."

"Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears By some cold morning glacier; frail at first And 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 wine To dying lips is all he said).

And look thy look, and go thy way, But blame not thou the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple break, The tender-pencil'd shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears, Ah me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose m.u.f.fled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears.

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves p.r.i.c.k, 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 moved Upon the topmost froth of thought.

From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The G.o.d within him light his face.

And while the wind began to sweep A music out of sheet and shroud, We steer'd her toward a crimson cloud That landlike slept along the deep.

Abiding with me till I sail To seek thee on the mystic deeps, And this electric force, that keeps A thousand pulses dancing, fail.

And hear at times a sentinel, Who moves about from place to place, And whispers to the worlds of s.p.a.ce, In the deep night, that all is well."

"Brawling, or like a clamor of the rooks At 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 loss Falls 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 came Upon 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 eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom."