poor poet. He was indeed poor; often he had no certainty whether he should be able to procure the next day’s meals. And the poet knew the beauty of truth, and adored, not in the abstract merely, but in practice, the excellence of upright principles.
Night came. Lingave, wearied, lay upon his pallet again and slept. The misty veil thrown over him, the spirit of poesy came to his visions, and stood beside him, and look’d down pleasantly with her large eyes, which were bright and liquid like the reflection of stars in a lake.
Virtue, (such imagining, then, seem’d conscious to the soul of the dreamer,) is ever the sinew of true genius. Together, the two in one, they are endow’d with immortal strength, and approach loftily to Him from whom both spring. Yet there are those that having great powers, bend them to the slavery of wrong. God forgive them! for they surely do it ignorantly or heedlessly. Oh, could he who lightly tosses around him the seeds of evil in his writings, or his enduring thoughts, or his chance words–could he see how, haply, they are to spring up in distant time and poison the air, and putrefy, and cause to sicken–would he not shrink back in horror? A bad principle, jestingly spoken–a falsehood, but of a word–may taint a whole nation! Let the man to whom the great Master has given the might of mind, beware how he uses that might. If for the furtherance of bad ends, what can be expected but that, as the hour of the closing scene draws nigh, thoughts of harm done, and capacities distorted from their proper aim, and strength so laid out that men must be worse instead of better, through the exertion of that strength–will come and swarm like spectres around him?
“Be and continue poor, young man,” so taught one whose counsels should be graven on the heart of every youth, “while others around you grow rich by fraud and disloyalty. Be without place and power, while others beg their way upward. Bear the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain the accomplishment of their flattery. Forego the gracious pressure of a hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have, in such a course, grown gray with unblench’d honor, bless God and die.”
When Lingave awoke the next morning, he despatch’d his answer to his wealthy friend, and then plodded on as in the days before.
LITTLE JANE
“Lift up!” was ejaculated as a signal! and click! went the glasses in the hands of a party of tipsy men, drinking one night at the bar of one of the middling order of taverns. And many a wild gibe was utter’d, and many a terrible blasphemy, and many an impure phrase sounded out the pollution of the hearts of these half-crazed creatures, as they toss’d down their liquor, and made the walls echo with their uproar. The first and foremost in recklessness was a girlish-faced, fair-hair’d fellow of twenty-two or three years. They called him Mike. He seem’d to be look’d upon by the others as a sort of prompter, from whom they were to take cue. And if the brazen wickedness evinced by him in a hundred freaks and remarks to his companions, during their stay in that place, were any test of his capacity–there might hardly be one more fit to go forward as a guide on the road of destruction. From the conversation of the party, it appear’d that they had been spending the early part of the evening in a gambling house.
A second, third and fourth time were the glasses fill’d; and the effect thereof began to be perceiv’d in a still higher degree of noise and loquacity among the revellers. One of the serving-men came in at this moment, and whisper’d the barkeeper, who went out, and in a moment return’d again. “A person,” he said, “wish’d to speak with Mr. Michael. He waited on the walk in front.”
The individual whose name was mention’d, made his excuses to the others, telling them he would be back in a moment, and left the room. As he shut the door behind him, and stepp’d into the open air, he saw one of his brothers–his elder by eight or ten years–pacing to and fro with rapid and uneven steps. As the man turn’d in his walk, and the glare of the street lamp fell upon his face, the youth, half-benumb’d as his senses were, was somewhat startled at its paleness and evident perturbation. “Come with me!” said the elder brother, hurriedly, “the illness of our little Jane is worse, and I have been sent for you.”
“Poh!” answered the young drunkard, very composedly, “is that all? I shall be home by-and-by,” and he turn’d back again.
“But, brother, she is worse than ever before. Perhaps when you arrive she may be dead.”
The tipsy one paus’d in his retreat, perhaps alarm’d at the utterance of that dread word, which seldom fails to shoot a chill to the hearts of mortals. But he soon calm’d himself, and waving his hand to the other: “Why, see,” said he, “a score of times at least, have I been call’d away to the last sickness of our good little sister; and each time it proves to be nothing worse than some whim of the nurse or physician. Three years has the girl been able to live very heartily under her disease; and I’ll be bound she’ll stay on earth three years longer.”
And as he concluded this wicked and most brutal reply, the speaker open’d the door and went into the bar-room. But in his intoxication, during the hour that follow’d, Mike was far from being at ease. At the end of that hour, the words, “perhaps when you arrive she may be _dead_?” were not effaced from his hearing yet, and he started for home. The elder brother had wended his way back in sorrow.
Let me go before the younger one, awhile, to a room in that home. A little girl lay there dying. She had been ill a long time; so it was no sudden thing for her parents, and her brethren and sisters, to be called for the witness of the death agony. The girl was not what might be called beautiful. And yet, there is a solemn kind of loveliness that always surrounds a sick child. The sympathy for the weak and helpless sufferer, perhaps, increases it in our own ideas. The ashiness and the moisture on the brow, and the film over the eyeballs–what man can look upon the sight, and not feel his heart awed within him? Children, I have sometimes fancied too, increase in beauty as their illness deepens.
Besides the nearest relatives of little Jane, standing round her bedside, was the family doctor. He had just laid her wrist down upon the coverlet, and the look he gave the mother, was a look in which there was no hope. “My child!” she cried, in uncontrollable agony, “O! my child!” And the father, and the sons and daughters, were bowed down in grief, and thick tears rippled between the fingers held before their eyes.
Then there was silence awhile. During the hour just by-gone, Jane had, in her childish way, bestow’d a little gift upon each of her kindred, as a remembrancer when she should be dead and buried in the grave. And there was one of these simple tokens which had not reach’d its destination. She held it in her hand now. It was a very small much-thumbed book–a religious story for infants, given her by her mother when she had first learn’d to read.
While they were all keeping this solemn stillness-broken only by the suppress’d sobs of those who stood and watch’d for the passing away of the girl’s soul–a confusion of some one entering rudely, and speaking in a turbulent voice, was heard in an adjoining apartment. Again the voice roughly sounded out; it was the voice of the drunkard Mike, and the father bade one of his sons go and quiet the intruder “If nought else will do,” said he sternly, “put him forth by strength. We want no tipsy brawlers here, to disturb such a scene as this.” For what moved the sick girl uneasily on her pillow, and raised her neck, and motion’d to her mother? She would that Mike should be brought to her side. And it was enjoin’d on him whom the father had bade to eject the noisy one, that he should tell Mike his sister’s request, and beg him to come to her.
He came. The inebriate–his mind sober’d by the deep solemnity of the scene–stood there, and leaned over to catch the last accounts of one who soon was to be with the spirits of heaven. All was the silence of the deepest night. The dying child held the young man’s hand in one of hers; with the other she slowly lifted the trifling memorial she had assigned especially for him, aloft in the air. Her arm shook–her eyes, now becoming glassy with the death-damps, were cast toward her brother’s face. She smiled pleasantly, and as an indistinct gurgle came from her throat, the uplifted hand fell suddenly into the open palm of her brother’s, depositing the tiny volume there. Little Jane was dead.
From that night, the young man stepped no more in his wild courses, but was reform’d.
DUMB KATE
Not many years since–and yet long enough to have been before the abundance of railroads, and similar speedy modes of conveyance–the travelers from Amboy village to the metropolis of our republic were permitted to refresh themselves, and the horses of the stage had a breathing spell, at a certain old-fashion’d tavern, about half way between the two places. It was a quaint, comfortable, ancient house, that tavern. Huge buttonwood trees embower’d it round about, and there was a long porch in front, the trellis’d work whereof, though old and moulder’d, had been, and promised still to be for years, held together by the tangled folds of a grape vine wreath’d about it like a tremendous serpent.
How clean and fragrant everything was there! How bright the pewter tankards wherefrom cider or ale went into the parch’d throat of the thirsty man! How pleasing to look into the expressive eyes of Kate, the land-lord’s lovely daughter, who kept everything so clean and bright!
Now the reason why Kate’s eyes had become so expressive was, that, besides their proper and natural office, they stood to the poor girl in the place of tongue and ears also. Kate had been dumb from her birth. Everybody loved the helpless creature when she was a child. Gentle, timid, and affectionate was she, and beautiful as the lilies of which she loved to cultivate so many every summer in her garden. Her light hair, and the like-color’d lashes, so long and silky, that droop’d over her blue eyes of such uncommon size and softness–her rounded shape, well set off by a little modest art of dress–her smile–the graceful ease of her motions, always attracted the admiration of the strangers who stopped there, and were quite a pride to her parents and friends.
How could it happen that so beautiful and inoffensive a being should taste, even to its dregs, the bitterest unhappiness? Oh, there must indeed be a mysterious, unfathomable meaning in the decrees of Providence which is beyond the comprehension of man; for no one on earth less deserved or needed “the uses of adversity” than Dumb Kate. Love, the mighty and lawless passion, came into the sanctuary of the maid’s pure breast, and the dove of peace fled away forever.
One of the persons who had occasion to stop most frequently at the tavern kept by Dumb Kate’s parents was a young man, the son of a wealthy farmer, who own’d an estate in the neighborhood. He saw Kate, and was struck with her natural elegance. Though not of thoroughly wicked propensities, the fascination of so fine a prize made this youth determine to gain her love, and, if possible, to win her to himself. At first he hardly dared, even amid the depths of his own soul, to entertain thoughts of vileness against one so confiding and childlike. But in a short time such feelings wore away, and he made up his mind to become the betrayer of poor Kate. He was a good-looking fellow, and made but too sure of his victim. Kate was lost!
The villain came to New York soon after, and engaged in a business which prosper’d well, and which has no doubt by this time made him what is call’d a man of fortune.
Not long did sickness of the heart wear into the life and happiness of Dumb Kate. One pleasant spring day, the neighbors having been called by a notice the previous morning, the old churchyard was thrown open, and a coffin was borne over the early grass that seem’d so delicate with its light green hue. There was a new made grave, and by its side the bier was rested–while they paused a moment until holy words had been said. An idle boy, call’d there by curiosity, saw something lying on the fresh earth thrown out from the grave, which attracted his attention. A little blossom, the only one to be seen around, had grown exactly on the spot where the sexton chose to dig poor Kate’s last resting-place. It was a weak but lovely flower, and now lay where it had been carelessly toss’d amid the coarse gravel. The boy twirl’d it a moment in his fingers–the bruis’d fragments gave out a momentary perfume, and then fell to the edge of the pit, over which the child at that moment lean’d and gazed in his inquisitiveness. As they dropp’d, they were wafted to the bottom of the grave. The last look was bestow’d on the dead girl’s face by those who loved her so well in life, and then she was softly laid away to her sleep beneath that green grass covering.
Yet in the churchyard on the hill is Kate’s grave. There stands a little white stone at the head, and verdure grows richly there; and gossips, some-times of a Sabbath afternoon, rambling over that gathering-place of the gone from earth, stop a while, and con over the dumb girl’s hapless story.
TALK TO AN ART-UNION
_A Brooklyn fragment_
It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty. Such men are not merely artists, they are also artistic material. Washington in some great crisis, Lawrence on the bloody deck of the Chesapeake, Mary Stuart at the block, Kossuth in captivity, and Mazzini in exile–all great rebels and innovators, exhibit the highest phases of the artist spirit. The painter, the sculptor, the poet, express heroic beauty better in description; but the others _are_ heroic beauty, the best belov’d of art.
Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs–of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history–deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.
BLOOD-MONEY
“_Guilty of the body and the blood of Christ_.”
I.
Of olden time, when it came to pass That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his work on earth, Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth, And took pay for his body.
Curs’d was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutching hand grew dry;
And darkness frown’d upon the seller of the like of God, Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him from her, and heaven refused him,
He hung in the air, self-slaughter’d.
The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalk’d silently forward, Since those ancient days–many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.
And still goes one, saying,
“What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?” And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.
II
Look forth, deliverer,
Look forth, first-born of the dead, Over the tree-tops of Paradise;
See thyself in yet continued bonds, Toilsome and poor, thou bear’st man’s form again, Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison, Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest; With staves and swords throng the willing servants of authority, Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite; Toward thee stretch the hands of a multitude, like vultures’ talons, The meanest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their palms; Bruised, bloody, and pinion’d is thy body, More sorrowful than death is thy soul.
Witness of anguish, brother of slaves, Not with thy price closed the price of thine image: And still Iscariot plies his trade.
_April, 1843_.
PAUMANOK.
WOUNDED IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS
_”And one shall say unto him. What are these wounds in thy hands? Then he shall answer Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.”–Zechariah, xiii. 6._
If thou art balk’d, O Freedom,
The victory is not to thy manlier foes; From the house of friends comes the death stab.
Virginia, mother of greatness,
Blush not for being also mother of slaves; You might have borne deeper slaves–
Doughfaces, crawlers, lice of humanity– Terrific screamers of freedom,
Who roar and bawl, and get hot i’ the face, But were they not incapable of august crime, Would quench the hopes of ages for a drink– Muck-worms, creeping flat to the ground, A dollar dearer to them than Christ’s blessing; All loves, all hopes, less than the thought of gain, In life walking in that as in a shroud; Men whom the throes of heroes,
Great deeds at which the gods might stand appal’d, The shriek of the drown’d, the appeal of women, The exulting laugh of untied empires,
Would touch them never in the heart, But only in the pocket.
Hot-headed Carolina,
Well may you curl your lip;
With all your bondsmen, bless the destiny Which brings you no such breed as this.
Arise, young North!
Our elder blood flows in the veins of cowards: The gray-hair’d sneak, the blanch’d poltroon, The feign’d or real shiverer at tongues, That nursing babes need hardly cry the less for– Are they to be our tokens always?
SAILING THE MISSISSIPPI AT MIDNIGHT
Vast and starless, the pall of heaven Laps on the trailing pall below;
And forward, forward, in solemn darkness, As if to the sea of the lost we go.
Now drawn nigh the edge of the river, Weird-like creatures suddenly rise;
Shapes that fade, dissolving outlines Baffle the gazer’s straining eyes.
Towering upward and bending forward, Wild and wide their arms are thrown,
Ready to pierce with forked fingers Him who touches their realm upon.
Tide of youth, thus thickly planted, While in the eddies onward you swim,
Thus on the shore stands a phantom army, Lining forever the channel’s rim.
Steady, helmsman! you guide the immortal; Many a wreck is beneath you piled,
Many a brave yet unwary sailor
Over these waters has been beguiled.
Nor is it the storm or the scowling midnight, Cold, or sickness, or fire’s dismay– Nor is it the reef, or treacherous quicksand, Will peril you most on your twisted way.
But when there comes a voluptuous languor, Soft the sunshine, silent the air,
Bewitching your craft with safety and sweetness, Then, young pilot of life, beware.
NOVEMBER BOUGHS
OUR EMINENT VISITORS
_Past, Present and Future_
Welcome to them each and all! They do good–the deepest, widest, most needed good–though quite certainly not in the ways attempted–which have, at times, something irresistibly comic. What can be more farcical, for instance, than the sight of a worthy gentleman coming three or four thousand miles through wet and wind to speak complacently and at great length on matters of which he both entirely mistakes or knows nothing–before crowds of auditors equally complacent, and equally at fault?
Yet welcome and thanks, we say, to those visitors we have, and have had, from abroad among us–and may the procession continue! We have had Dickens and Thackeray, Froude, Herbert Spencer, Oscar Wilde, Lord Coleridge–soldiers, savants, poets–and now Matthew Arnold and Irving the actor. Some have come to make money–some for a “good time”–some to help us along and give us advice–and some undoubtedly to investigate, _bona fide_, this great problem, democratic America, looming upon the world with such cumulative power through a hundred years, now with the evident intention (since the secession war) to stay, and take a leading hand, for many a century to come, in civilization’s and humanity’s eternal game. But alas! that very investigation–the method of that investigation–is where the deficit most surely and helplessly comes in. Let not Lord Coleridge and Mr. Arnold (to say nothing of the illustrious actor) imagine that when they have met and survey’d the etiquettical gatherings of our wealthy, distinguish’d and sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions citizens (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c., have certain stereotyped strings of them, continually lined and paraded like the lists of dishes at hotel tables–you are sure to get the same over and over again–it is very amusing)–and the bowing and introducing, the receptions at the swell clubs, the eating and drinking and praising and praising back–and the next “day riding about Central Park, or doing the” Public Institutions “–and so passing through, one after another, the full-dress coteries of the Atlantic cities, all grammatical and cultured and correct, with the toned-down manners of the gentlemen, and the kid-gloves, and luncheons and finger-glasses–Let not our eminent visitors, we say, suppose that, by means of these experiences, they have “seen America,” or captur’d any distinctive clew or purport thereof. Not a bit of it. Of the pulse-beats that lie within and vitalize this Commonweal to-day–of the hard-pan purports and idiosyncrasies pursued faithfully and triumphantly by its bulk of men North and South, generation after generation, superficially unconscious of their own aims, yet none the less pressing onward with deathless intuition–those coteries do not furnish the faintest scintilla. In the Old World the best flavor and significance of a race may possibly need to be look’d for in its “upper classes,” its gentries, its court, its _etat major_. In the United States the rule is revers’d. Besides (and a point, this, perhaps deepest of all,) the special marks of our grouping and design are not going to be understood in a hurry. The lesson and scanning right on the ground are difficult; I was going to say they are impossible to foreigners–but I have occasionally found the clearest appreciation of all, coming from far-off quarters. Surely nothing could be more apt, not only for our eminent visitors present and to come, but for home study, than the following editorial criticism of the London _Times_ on Mr. Froude’s visits and lectures here a few years ago, and the culminating dinner given at Delmonico’s, with its brilliant array of guests:
“We read the list,” says the _Times_, “of those who assembled to do honor to Mr. Froude: there were Mr. Emerson, Mr. Beecher, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Bryant; we add the names of those who sent letters of regret that they could not attend in person–Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Whittier. They are names which are well known–almost as well known and as much honor’d in England as in America; and yet what must we say in the end? The American people outside this assemblage of writers is something vaster and greater than they, singly or together, can comprehend. It cannot be said of any or all of them that they can speak for their nation. We who look on at this distance are able perhaps on that account to see the more clearly that there are qualities of the American people which find no representation, no voice, among these their spokesmen. And what is true of them is true of the English class of whom Mr. Froude may be said to be the ambassador. Mr. Froude is master of a charming style. He has the gift of grace and the gift of sympathy. Taking any single character as the subject of his study, he may succeed after a very short time in so comprehending its workings as to be able to present a living figure to the intelligence and memory of his readers. But the movements of a nation, the, _voiceless purpose of a people which cannot put its own thoughts into words, yet acts upon them in each successive generation_–these things do not lie within his grasp…. The functions of literature such as he represents are limited in their action; the influence he can wield is artificial and restricted, and, while he and his hearers please and are pleas’d with pleasant periods, his great mass of national life will flow around them unmov’d in its tides by action as powerless as that of the dwellers by the shore to direct the currents of the ocean.”
A thought, here, that needs to be echoed, expanded, permanently treasur’d by our literary classes and educators. (The gestation, the youth, the knitting preparations, are now over, and it is full time for definite purpose, result.) How few think of it, though it is the impetus and background of our whole Nationality and popular life. In the present brief memorandum I very likely for the first time awake “the intelligent reader” to the idea and inquiry whether there isn’t such a thing as the distinctive genius of our democratic New World, universal, immanent, bringing to a head the best experience of the past–not specially literary or intellectual–not merely “good,” (in the Sunday School and Temperance Society sense,)-some invisible spine and great sympathetic to these States, resident only in the average people, in their practical life, in their physiology, in their emotions, in their nebulous yet fiery patriotism, in the armies (both sides) through the whole secession war–an identity and character which indeed so far “finds no voice among their spokesmen.”
To my mind America, vast and fruitful as it appears to-day, is even yet, for its most important results, entirely in the tentative state; its very formation-stir and whirling trials and essays more splendid and picturesque, to my thinking, than the accomplish’d growths and shows of other lands, through European history, or Greece, or all the past. Surely a New World literature, worthy the name, is not to be, if it ever comes, some fiction, or fancy, or bit of sentimentalism or polish’d work merely by itself, or in abstraction. So long as such literature is no born branch and offshoot of the Nationality, rooted and grown from its roots, and fibred with its fibre, it can never answer any deep call or perennial need. Perhaps the untaught Republic is wiser than its teachers. The best literature is always a result of something far greater than itself–not the hero, but the portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there must be the transaction. Beyond the old masterpieces, the Iliad, the interminable Hindu epics, the Greek tragedies, even the Bible itself, range the immense facts of what must have preceded them, their _sine qua non_–the veritable poems and masterpieces, of which, grand as they are, the word-statements are but shreds and cartoons.
For to-day and the States, I think the vividest, rapidest, most stupendous processes ever known, ever perform’d by man or nation, on the largest scales and in countless varieties, are now and here presented. Not as our poets and preachers are always conventionally putting it–but quite different. Some colossal foundry, the flaming of the fire, the melted metal, the pounding trip-hammers, the surging crowds of workmen shifting from point to point, the murky shadows, the rolling haze, the discord, the crudeness, the deafening din, the disorder, the dross and clouds of dust, the waste and extravagance of material, the shafts of darted sunshine through the vast open roof-scuttles aloft-the mighty castings, many of them not yet fitted, perhaps delay’d long, yet each in its due time, with definite place and use and meaning–Such, more like, is a symbol of America.
After all of which, returning to our starting-point, we reiterate, and in the whole Land’s name, a welcome to our eminent guests. Visits like theirs, and hospitalities, and hand-shaking, and face meeting face, and the distant brought near–what divine solvents they are! Travel, reciprocity, “interviewing,” intercommunion of lands–what are they but Democracy’s and the highest Law’s best aids? O that our own country–that every land in the world–could annually, continually, receive the poets, thinkers, scientists, even the official magnates, of other lands, as honor’d guests. O that the United States, especially the West, could have had a good long visit and explorative jaunt, from the noble and melancholy Tourgueneff, before he died–or from Victor Hugo–or Thomas Carlyle. Castelar, Tennyson, any of the two or three great Parisian essayists–were they and we to come face to face, how is it possible but that the right understanding would ensue?
THE BIBLE AS POETRY
I suppose one cannot at this day say anything new, from a literary point of view, about those autochthonic bequests of Asia–the Hebrew Bible, the mighty Hindu epics, and a hundred lesser but typical works; (not now definitely including the Iliad–though that work was certainly of Asiatic genesis, as Homer himself was–considerations which seem curiously ignored.) But will there ever be a time or place–ever a student, however modern, of the grand art, to whom those compositions will not afford profounder lessons than all else of their kind in the garnerage of the past? Could there be any more opportune suggestion, to the current popular writer and reader of verse, what the office of poet was in primeval times–and is yet capable of being, anew, adjusted entirely to the modern?
All the poems of Orientalism, with the Old and New Testaments at the centre, tend to deep and wide, (I don’t know but the deepest and widest,) psychological development–with little, or nothing at all, of the mere esthetic, the principal verse-requirement of our day. Very late, but unerringly, comes to every capable student the perception that it is not in beauty, it is not in art, it is not even in science, that the profoundest laws of the case have their eternal sway and outcropping.
In his discourse on “Hebrew Poets” De Sola Mendes said: “The fundamental feature of Judaism, of the Hebrew nationality, was religion; its poetry was naturally religious. Its subjects, God and Providence, the covenants with Israel, God in Nature, and as reveal’d, God the Creator and Governor, Nature in her majesty and beauty, inspired hymns and odes to Nature’s God. And then the checker’d history of the nation furnish’d allusions, illustrations, and subjects for epic display–the glory of the sanctuary, the offerings, the splendid ritual, the Holy City, and lov’d Palestine with its pleasant valleys and wild tracts.” Dr. Mendes said “that rhyming was not a characteristic of Hebrew poetry at all. Metre was not a necessary mark of poetry. Great poets discarded it; the early Jewish poets knew it not.” Compared with the famed epics of Greece, and lesser ones since, the spinal supports of the Bible are simple and meagre. All its history, biography, narratives, &c., are as beads, strung on and indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power. Yet with only deepest faith for impetus, and such Deific purpose for palpable or impalpable theme, it often transcends the masterpieces of Hellas, and all masterpieces.
The metaphors daring beyond account, the lawless soul, extravagant by our standards, the glow of love and friendship, the fervent kiss–nothing in argument or logic, but unsurpass’d in proverbs, in religious ecstasy, in suggestions of common mortality and death, man’s great equalizers–the spirit everything, the ceremonies and forms of the churches nothing, faith limitless, its immense sensuousness immensely spiritual–an incredible, all-inclusive non-worldliness and dew-scented illiteracy (the antipodes of our Nineteenth Century business absorption and morbid refinement)–no hair-splitting doubts, no sickly sulking and sniffling, no “Hamlet,” no “Adonais,” no “Thanatopsis,” no “In Memoriam.”
The culminated proof of the poetry of a country is the quality of its personnel, which, in any race, can never be really superior without superior poems. The finest blending of individuality with universality (in my opinion nothing out of the galaxies of the “Iliad,” or Shakspere’s heroes, or from the Tennysonian “Idylls,” so lofty, devoted and starlike,) typified in the songs of those old Asiatic lands. Men and women as great columnar trees. Nowhere else the abnegation of self towering in such quaint sublimity; nowhere else the simplest human emotions conquering the gods of heaven, and fate itself. (The episode, for instance, toward the close of the “Mahabharata”–the journey of the wife Savitri with the god of death, Yama,
“One terrible to see–blood-red his garb, His body huge and dark, bloodshot his eyes, Which flamed like suns beneath his turban cloth, Arm’d was he with a noose,”
who carries off the soul of the dead husband, the wife tenaciously following, and–by the resistless charm of perfect poetic recitation!– eventually redeeming her captive mate.)
I remember how enthusiastically William H. Seward, in his last days, once expatiated on these themes, from his travels in Turkey, Egypt, and Asia Minor, finding the oldest Biblical narratives exactly illustrated there to-day with apparently no break or change along three thousand years–the veil’d women, the costumes, the gravity and simplicity, all the manners just the same. The veteran Trelawney said he found the only real _nobleman_ of the world in a good average specimen of the mid-aged or elderly Oriental. In the East the grand figure, always leading, is the _old man_, majestic, with flowing beard, paternal, &c. In Europe and America, it is, as we know, the young fellow–in novels, a handsome and interesting hero, more or less juvenile–in operas, a tenor with blooming cheeks, black mustache, superficial animation, and perhaps good lungs, but no more depth than skim-milk. But reading folks probably get their information of those Bible areas and current peoples, as depicted in print by English and French cads, the most shallow, impudent, supercilious brood on earth.
I have said nothing yet of the cumulus of associations (perfectly legitimate parts of its influence, and finally in many respects the dominant parts,) of the Bible as a poetic entity, and of every portion of it. Not the old edifice only–the congeries also of events and struggles and surroundings, of which it has been the scene and motive–even the horrors, dreads, deaths. How many ages and generations have brooded and wept and agonized over this book! What untellable joys and ecstasies–what support to martyrs at the stake–from it. (No really great song can ever attain full purport till long after the death of its singer–till it has accrued and incorporated the many passions, many joys and sorrows, it has itself arous’d.) To what myriads has it been the shore and rock of safety–the refuge from driving tempest and wreck! Translated in all languages, how it has united this diverse world! Of civilized lands to-day, whose of our retrospects has it not interwoven and link’d and permeated? Not only does it bring us what is clasp’d within its covers; nay, that is the least of what it brings. Of its thousands, there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotions, successions of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of our own antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on which, phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably depends–our ancestry, our past.
Strange, but true, that the principal factor in cohering the nations, eras and paradoxes of the globe, by giving them a common platform of two or three great ideas, a commonalty of origin, and projecting kosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope, all time–that the long trains gestations, attempts and failures, resulting in the New World, and in modern solidarity and politics–are to be identified and resolv’d back into a collection of old poetic lore, which, more than any one thing else, has been the axis of civilization and history through thousands of years–and except for which this America of ours, with its polity and essentials, could not now be existing.
No true bard will ever contravene the Bible. If the time ever comes when iconoclasm does its extremest in one direction against the Books of the Bible in its present form, the collection must still survive in another, and dominate just as much as hitherto, or more than hitherto, through its divine and primal poetic structure. To me, that is the living and definite element-principle of the work, evolving everything else. Then the continuity; the oldest and newest Asiatic utterance and character, and all between, holding together, like the apparition of the sky, and coming to us the same. Even to our Nineteenth Century here are the fountain heads of song.
FATHER TAYLOR (AND ORATORY)
I have never heard but one essentially perfect orator–one who satisfied those depths of the emotional nature that in most cases go through life quite untouch’d, unfed–who held every hearer by spells which no conventionalist, high or low–nor any pride or composure, nor resistance of intellect–could stand against for ten minutes.
And by the way, is it not strange, of this first-class genius in the rarest and most profound of humanity’s arts, that it will be necessary, (so nearly forgotten and rubb’d out is his name by the rushing whirl of the last twenty-five years,) to first inform current readers that he was an orthodox minister, of no particular celebrity, who during a long life preach’d especially to Yankee sailors in an old fourth-class church down by the wharves in Boston–had practically been a seafaring man through his earlier years–and died April 6, 1871, “just as the tide turn’d, going out with the ebb as an old salt should”? His name is now comparatively unknown, outside of Boston–and even there, (though Dickens, Mr. Jameson, Dr. Bartol and Bishop Haven have commemorated him,) is mostly but a reminiscence.
During my visits to “the Hub,” in 1859 and ’60 I several times saw and heard Father Taylor. In the spring or autumn, quiet Sunday forenoons, I liked to go down early to the quaint ship-cabin-looking church where the old man minister’d–to enter and leisurely scan the building, the low ceiling, everything strongly timber’d (polish’d and rubb’d apparently,) the dark rich colors, the gallery, all in half-light–and smell the aroma of old wood–to watch the auditors, sailors, mates, “matlows,” officers, singly or in groups, as they came in–their physiognomies, forms, dress, gait, as they walk’d along the aisles–their postures, seating themselves in the rude, roomy, undoor’d, uncushion’d pews–and the evident effect upon them of the place, occasion, and atmosphere.
The pulpit, rising ten or twelve feet high, against the rear wall, was back’ d by a significant mural painting, in oil–showing out its bold lines and strong hues through the subdued light of the building–of a stormy sea, the waves high-rolling, and amid them an old-style ship, all bent over, driving through the gale, and in great peril–a vivid and effectual piece of limning, not meant for the criticism of artists (though I think it had merit even from that standpoint,) but for its effect upon the congregation, and what it would convey to them.
Father Taylor was a moderate-sized man, indeed almost small, (reminded me of old Booth, the great actor, and my favorite of those and preceding days,) well advanced in years, but alert, with mild blue or gray eyes, and good presence and voice. Soon as he open’d his mouth I ceas’d to pay any attention to church or audience, or pictures or lights and shades; a far more potent charm entirely sway’d me. In the course of the sermon, (there was no sign of any MS., or reading from notes,) some of the parts would be in the highest degree majestic and picturesque. Colloquial in a severe sense, it often lean’d to Biblical and Oriental forms. Especially were all allusions to ships and the ocean and sailors’ lives, of unrival’d power and life-likeness.
Sometimes there were passages of fine language and composition, even from the purist’s point of view. A few arguments, and of the best, but always brief and simple. One realized what grip there might have been in such words-of-mouth talk as that of Socrates and Epictetus. In the main, I should say, of any of these discourses, that the old Demosthenean rule and requirement of “action, action, action,” first in its inward and then (very moderate and restrain’d) its outward sense, was the quality that had leading fulfilment.
I remember I felt the deepest impression from the old man’s prayers, which invariably affected me to tears. Never, on similar or any other occasions, have I heard such impassion’d pleading–such human-harassing reproach (like Hamlet to his mother, in the closet)–such probing to the very depths of that latent conscience and remorse which probably lie somewhere in the background of every life, every soul. For when Father Taylor preach’d or pray’d, the rhetoric and art, the mere words, (which usually play such a big part) seem’d altogether to disappear, and the _live feeling_ advanced upon you and seiz’d you with a power before unknown. Everybody felt this marvellous and awful influence. One young sailor, a Rhode Islander, (who came every Sunday, and I got acquainted with, and talk’d to once or twice as we went away,) told me, “that must be the Holy Ghost we read of in the Testament.”
I should be at a loss to make any comparison with other preachers or public speakers. When a child I had heard Elias Hicks–and Father Taylor (though so different in personal appearance, for Elias was of tall and most shapely form, with black eyes that blazed at times like meteors,) always reminded me of him. Both had the same inner, apparently inexhaustible, fund of latent volcanic passion–the same tenderness, blended with a curious remorseless firmness, as of some surgeon operating on a belov’d patient. Hearing such men sends to the winds all the books, and formulas, and polish’d speaking, and rules of oratory.
Talking of oratory, why is it that the unsophisticated practices often strike deeper than the train’d ones? Why do our experiences perhaps of some local country exhorter–or often in the West or South at political meetings–bring the most definite results? In my time I have heard Webster, Clay, Edward Everett, Phillips, and such _celebres_ yet I recall the minor but life-eloquence of men like John P. Hale, Cassius Clay, and one or two of the old abolition “fanatics” ahead of all those stereotyped fames. Is not–I sometimes question–the first, last, and most important quality of all, in training for a “finish’d speaker,” generally unsought, unreck’d of, both by teacher and pupil? Though may-be it cannot be taught, anyhow. At any rate, we need to clearly understand the distinction between oratory and elocution. Under the latter art, including some of high order, there is indeed no scarcity in the United States, preachers, lawyers, actors, lecturers, &c. With all, there seem to be few real orators–almost none.
I repeat, and would dwell upon it (more as suggestion than mere fact)–among all the brilliant lights of bar or stage I have heard in my time (for years in New York and other cities I haunted the courts to witness notable trials, and have heard all the famous actors and actresses that have been in America the past fifty years) though I recall marvellous effects from one or other of them, I never had anything in the way of vocal utterance to shake me through and through, and become fix’d, with its accompaniments, in my memory, like those prayers and sermons–like Father Taylor’s personal electricity and the whole scene there–the prone ship in the gale, and dashing wave and foam for background–in the little old sea-church in Boston, those summer Sundays just before the secession war broke out.
THE SPANISH ELEMENT IN OUR NATIONALITY
[Our friends at Santa Fe, New Mexico, have just finish’d their long-drawn-out anniversary of the 333d year of the settlement of their city by the Spanish. The good, gray Walt Whitman was asked to write them a poem in commemoration. Instead he wrote them a letter as follows:–_Philadelphia Press_, August 5, 1883.]
CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _July 20, 1883_.
_To Messrs. Griffin, Martinez, Prince, and other Gentlemen at Santa Fe_:
DEAR SIRS:–Your kind invitation to visit you and deliver a poem for the 333d Anniversary of founding Santa Fe has reach’d me so late that I have to decline, with sincere regret. But I will say a few words offhand.
We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only–which is a very great mistake. Many leading traits for our future national personality, and some of the best ones, will certainly prove to have originated from other than British stock. As it is, the British and German, valuable as they are in the concrete, already threaten excess. Or rather, I should say, they have certainly reach’d that excess. To-day, something outside of them, and to counterbalance them, is seriously needed.
The seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States, in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling everything else, are, in my opinion, but a vast and indispensable stage in the new world’s development, and are certainly to be follow’d by something entirely different–at least by immense modifications. Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be establish’d, through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes–not one of which at present definitely exists–entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on it, and to justify it.
To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect–grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor. (It is time to dismiss utterly the illusion-compound, half raw-head-and-bloody-bones and half Mysteries-of-Udolpho, inherited from the English writers of the past 200 years. It is time to realize–for it is certainly true–that there will not be found any more cruelty, tyranny, superstition, &c., in the _resume_ of past Spanish history than in the corresponding _resume_ of Anglo-Norman history. Nay, I think there will not be found so much.)
Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come, I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian population–the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West–I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own–are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe–and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own–the autochthonic ones?
As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some subterranean river, dipping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?
If I might assume to do so, I would like to send you the most cordial, heartfelt congratulations of your American fellow-countrymen here. You have more friends in the Northern and Atlantic regions than you suppose, and they are deeply interested in the development of the great Southwestern interior, and in what your festival would arouse to public attention.
Very respectfully, &c.,
WALT WHITMAN.
WHAT LURKS BEHIND SHAKSPERE’S HISTORICAL PLAYS
We all know how much _mythus_ there is in the Shakspere question as it stands to-day. Beneath a few foundations of proved facts are certainly engulf d far more dim and elusive ones, of deepest importance– tantalizing and half suspected–suggesting explanations that one dare not put in plain statement. But coming at once to the point, the English historical plays are to me not only the most eminent as dramatic performances (my maturest judgment confirming the impressions of my early years, that the distinctiveness and glory of the Poet reside not in his vaunted dramas of the passions, but those founded on the contests of English dynasties, and the French wars,) but form, as we get it all, the chief in a complexity of puzzles. Conceiv’d out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism–personifying in unparallel’d ways the mediaeval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation)–only one of the “wolfish earls” so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works–works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature.
The start and germ-stock of the pieces on which the present speculation is founded are undoubtedly (with, at the outset, no small amount of bungling work) in “Henry VI.” It is plain to me that as profound and forecasting a brain and pen as ever appear’d in literature, after floundering somewhat in the first part of that trilogy–or perhaps draughting it more or less experimentally or by accident–afterward developed and defined his plan in the Second and Third Parts, and from time to time, thenceforward, systematically enlarged it to majestic and mature proportions in “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “King John,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” and even in “Macbeth,” “Coriolanus” and “Lear.” For it is impossible to grasp the whole cluster of those plays, however wide the intervals and different circumstances of their composition, without thinking of them as, in a free sense, the result of an _essentially controling plan_. ‘What was that plan? Or, rather, what was veil’d behind it?–for to me there was certainly something so veil’d. Even the episodes of Cade, Joan of Arc, and the like (which sometimes seem to me like interpolations allow’d,) may be meant to foil the possible sleuth, and throw any too ‘cute pursuer off the scent. In the whole matter I should specially dwell on, and make much of, that inexplicable element of every highest poetic nature which causes it to cover up and involve its real purpose and meanings in folded removes and far recesses. Of this trait–hiding the nest where common seekers may never find it–the Shaksperean works afford the most numerous and mark’d illustrations known to me. I would even call that trait the leading one through the whole of those works.
All the foregoing to premise a brief statement of how and where I get my new light on Shakspere. Speaking of the special English plays, my friend William O’Connor says:
They seem simply and rudely historical in their motive, as aiming to give in the rough a tableau of warring dynasties,–and carry to me a lurking sense of being in aid of some ulterior design, probably well enough understood in that age, which perhaps time and criticism will reveal…. Their atmosphere is one of barbarous and tumultuous gloom,–they do not make us love the times they limn,… and it is impossible to believe that the greatest of the Elizabethan men could have sought to indoctrinate the age with the love of feudalism which his own drama in its entirety, if the view taken of it herein be true, certainly and subtly saps and mines.
Reading the just-specified play in the light of Mr. O’Connor’s suggestion, I defy any one to escape such new and deep utterance- meanings, like magic ink, warm’ d by the fire, and previously invisible. Will it not indeed be strange if the author of “Othello” and “Hamlet” is destin’d to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the first full expose–and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of doctrinaires and economists–of the political theory and results, or the reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace?
The summary of my suggestion would be, therefore, that while the more the rich and tangled jungle of the Shaksperean area is travers’d and studied, and the more baffled and mix’d, as so far appears, becomes the exploring student (who at last surmises everything, and remains certain of nothing,) it is possible a future age of criticism, diving deeper, mapping the land and lines freer, completer than hitherto, may discover in the plays named the scientific (Baconian?) inauguration of modern democracy–furnishing realistic and first-class artistic portraitures of the mediaeval world, the feudal personalities, institutes, in their morbid accumulations, deposits, upon politics and sociology,–may penetrate to that hard-pan, far down and back of the ostent of to-day, on which (and on which only) the progressism of the last two centuries has built this Democracy which now hold’s secure lodgment over the whole civilized world.
Whether such was the unconscious, or (as I think likely) the more or less conscious, purpose of him who fashion’d those marvellous architectonics, is a secondary question.
A THOUGHT ON SHAKSPERE
The most distinctive poems–the most permanently rooted and with heartiest reason for being–the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid, or Scandinavian Eddas, or Nibelungen, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or _bona fide_ Ossian, or Inferno–probably had their rise in the great historic perturbations, which they came in to sum up and confirm, indirectly embodying results to date. Then however precious to “culture,” the grandest of those poems, it may be said, preserve and typify results offensive to the modern spirit, and long past away. To state it briefly, and taking the strongest examples, in Homer lives the ruthless military prowess of Greece, and of its special god-descended dynastic houses; in Shakspere the dragon-rancors and stormy feudal Splendor of mediaeval caste.
Poetry, largely consider’d, is an evolution, sending out improved and-ever-expanded types–in one sense, the past, even the best of it, necessarily giving place, and dying out. For our existing world, the bases on which all the grand old poems were built have become vacuums–and even those of many comparatively modern ones are broken and half-gone. For us to-day, not their own intrinsic value, vast as that is, backs and maintains those poems–but a mountain-high growth of associations, the layers of successive ages. Everywhere–their own lands included–(is there not something terrible in the tenacity with which the one book out of millions holds its grip?)–the Homeric and Virgilian works, the interminable ballad-romances of the middle ages, the utterances of Dante, Spenser, and others, are upheld by their cumulus-entrenchment in scholarship, and as precious, always welcome, unspeakably valuable reminiscences.
Even the one who at present reigns unquestion’d–of Shakspere–for all he stands for so much in modern literature, he stands entirely for the mighty esthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres of the future. The inward and outward characteristics of Shakspere are his vast and rich variety of persons and themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all,–not only limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but great excess, superfoetation–mannerism, like a fine, aristocratic perfume, holding a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark)–with boundless sumptuousness and adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste–but a good deal of bombast and fustian–(certainly some terrific mouthing in Shakspere!)
Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakspere–a style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern and scientific and democratic American purposes. Think, not of growths as forests primeval, or Yellowstone geysers, or Colorado ravines, but of costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest fixings and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to correspond–think of carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and appropriate statue-groups and the finest cultivated roses and lilies and japonicas in plenty–and you have the tally of Shakspere. The low characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen–all in themselves nothing–serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies (exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in admirably portray’d common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the elite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.
But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakspere has left us–to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality–to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams.
The best poetic utterance, after all, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real perfection, or the solution of any deep problem, or any completed statement of the moral, the true, the beautiful, eludes the greatest, deftest poet–flies away like an always uncaught bird.
ROBERT BURNS AS POET AND PERSON
What the future will decide about Robert Burns and his works–what place will be assign’d them on that great roster of geniuses and genius which can only be finish’d by the slow but sure balancing of the centuries with their ample average–I of course cannot tell. But as we know him, from his recorded utterances, and after nearly one century, and its diligence of collections, songs, letters, anecdotes, presenting the figure of the canny Scotchman in a fullness and detail wonderfully complete, and the lines mainly by his own hand, he forms to-day, in some respects, the most interesting personality among singers. Then there are many things in Burns’s poems and character that specially endear him to America. He was essentially a Republican–would have been at home in the Western United States, and probably become eminent there. He was an average sample of the good-natured, warm-blooded, proud-spirited, amative, alimentive, convivial, young and early-middle-aged man of the decent-born middle classes everywhere and any how. Without the race of which he is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day–could not project with unparallel’d historic sway into the future.
Perhaps the peculiar coloring of the era of Burns needs always first to be consider’d. It included the times of the ’76-’83 Revolution in America, of the French Revolution, and an unparallel’d chaos development in Europe and elsewhere. In every department, shining and strange names, like stars, some rising, some in meridian, some declining–Voltaire, Franklin, Washington, Kant, Goethe, Fulton, Napoleon, mark the era. And while so much, and of grandest moment, fit for the trumpet of the world’s fame, was being transacted–that little tragi-comedy of R. B,’s life and death was going on in a country by-place in Scotland!
Burns’s correspondence, generally collected and publish’d since his death, gives wonderful glints into both the amiable and weak (and worse than weak) parts of his portraiture, habits, good and bad luck, ambition and associations. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. McLehose, (Clarinda,) Mr. Thompson, Dr. Moore, Robert Muir, Mr. Cunningham, Miss Margaret Chalmers, Peter Hill, Richard Brown, Mrs. Riddel, Robert Ainslie, and Robert Graham, afford valuable lights and shades to the outline, and with numerous others, help to a touch here, and fill-in there, of poet and poems. There are suspicions, it is true, of “the Genteel Letter-Writer,” with scraps and words from “the Manual of French Quotations,” and, in the love-letters, some hollow mouthings. Yet we wouldn’t on any account lack the letters. A full and true portrait is always what is wanted; veracity at every hazard. Besides, do we not all see by this time that the story of Burns, even for its own sake, requires the record of the whole and several, with nothing left out? Completely and every point minutely told out its fullest, explains and justifies itself–(as perhaps almost any life does.) He is very close to the earth. He pick’d up his best words and tunes directly from the Scotch home-singers, but tells Thompson they would not please his, T.’s, “learn’d lugs,” adding, “I call them simple–you would pronounce them silly.” Yes, indeed; the idiom was undoubtedly his happiest hit. Yet Dr. Moore, in 1789, writes to Burns, “If I were to offer an opinion, it would be that in your future productions you should abandon the Scotch stanza and dialect, and adopt the measure and language of modern English poetry”!
As the 128th birth-anniversary of the poet draws on, (January, 1887,) with its increasing club-suppers, vehement celebrations, letters, speeches, and so on–(mostly, as William O’Connor says, from people who would not have noticed R. B. at all during his actual life, nor kept his company, or read his verses, on any account)–it may be opportune to print some leisurely-jotted notes I find in my budget. I take my observation of the Scottish bard by considering him as an individual amid the crowded clusters, galaxies, of the old world–and fairly inquiring and suggesting what out of these myriads he too may be to the Western Republic. In the first place no poet on record so fully bequeaths his own personal magnetism,[39] nor illustrates more pointedly how one’s verses, by time and reading, can so curiously fuse with the versifier’s own life and death, and give final light and shade to all.
I would say a large part of the fascination of Burns’s homely, simple dialect-melodies is due, for all current and future readers, to the poet’s personal “errors,” the general bleakness of his lot, his ingrain’d pensiveness, his brief dash into dazzling, tantalizing, evanescent sunshine–finally culminating in those last years of his life, his being taboo’d and in debt, sick and sore, yaw’d as by contending gales, deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all with himself–high-spirited too–(no man ever really higher-spirited than Robert Burns.) I think it a perfectly legitimate part too. At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb’d. Through that view-medium of misfortune–of a noble spirit in low environments, and of a squalid and premature death–we view the undoubted facts, (giving, as we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns’s were, before all else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable _post-mortem_ comment and influence referr’d to, that gives them their contrast, attraction, making the zest of their author’s after fame. If he had lived steady, fat, moral, comfortable, well-to-do years, on his own grade, (let alone, what of course was out of the question, the ease and velvet and rosewood and copious royalties of Tennyson or Victor Hugo or Longfellow,) and died well-ripen’d and respectable, where could have come in that burst of passionate sobbing and remorse which well’d forth instantly and generally in Scotland, and soon follow’d everywhere among English-speaking races, on the announcement of his death? and which, with no sign of stopping, only regulated and vein’d with fitting appreciation, flows deeply, widely yet?
Dear Rob! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as strong ones-essential type of so many thousands–perhaps the average, as just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the same. I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood. (How clear it is to me that the common soil has always been, and is now, thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is well-called the _Ploughman_. “Holding the plough,” said his brother Gilbert, “was the favorite situation with Robert for poetic compositions; and some of his best verses were produced while he was at that exercise.” “I must return to my humble station, and woo my rustic muse in my wonted way, at the plough-tail.” 1787, to the Earl of Buchan. He has no high ideal of the poet or the poet’s office; indeed quite a low and contracted notion of both:
“Fortune! if thou’ll but gie me still Hale breeks, a scone, and whiskey gill, An’ rowth o’ rhyme to rave at will,
Tak’ a’ the rest.”
See also his rhym’d letters to Robert Graham invoking patronage; “one stronghold,” Lord Glencairn, being dead, now these appeals to “Fintra, my other stay,” (with in one letter a copious shower of vituperation generally.) In his collected poems there is no particular unity, nothing that can be called a leading theory, no unmistakable spine or skeleton. Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is the charm of his songs: “I take up one or another,” he says in a letter to Thompson, “just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug.”
Consonantly with the customs of the time–yet markedly inconsistent in spirit with Burns’s own case, (and not a little painful as it remains on record, as depicting some features of the bard himself,) the relation called _patronage_ existed between the nobility and gentry on one side, and literary people on the other, and gives one of the strongest side-lights to the general coloring of poems and poets. It crops out a good deal in Burns’s Letters, and even necessitated a certain flunkeyism on occasions, through life. It probably, with its requirements, (while it help’d in money and countenance) did as much as any one cause in making that life a chafed and unhappy one, ended by a premature and miserable death.
Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work-a-day agricultural labor and life, (whose spirit and sympathies, as well as practicalities, are much the same everywhere,) and treats fresh, often coarse, natural occurrences, loves, persons, not like many new and some old poets in a genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or third removes, but in their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat, unction. Perhaps no one ever sang “lads and lasses”–that universal race, mainly the same, too, all ages, all lands–down on their own plane, as he has. He exhibits no philosophy worth mentioning; his morality is hardly more than parrot-talk–not bad or deficient, but cheap, shopworn, the platitudes of old aunts and uncles to the youngsters (be good boys and keep your noses clean.) Only when he gets at Poosie Nansie’s, celebrating the “barley bree,” or among tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking generally,
(“Freedom and whiskey gang the gither.”)
we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those interiors of rake-helly life and tavern fun–the cantabile of jolly beggars in highest jinks–lights and groupings of rank glee and brawny amorousness, outvying the best painted pictures of the Dutch school, or any school.
By America and her democracy such a poet, I cannot too often repeat, must be kept in loving remembrance; but it is best that discriminations be made. His admirers (as at those anniversary suppers, over the “hot Scotch”) will not accept for their favorite anything less than the highest rank, alongside of Homer, Shakspere, etc. Such, in candor, are not the true friends of the Ayrshire bard, who really needs a different place quite by himself. The Iliad and the Odyssey express courage, craft, full-grown heroism in situations of danger, the sense of command and leadership, emulation, the last and fullest evolution of self-poise as in kings, and god-like even while animal appetites. The Shaksperean compositions, on vertebers and frame-work of the primary passions, portray (essentially the same as Homer’s,) the spirit and letter of the feudal world, the Norman lord, ambitious and arrogant, taller and nobler than common men–with much underplay and gusts of heat and cold, volcanoes and stormy seas. Burns (and some will say to his credit) attempts none of these themes. He poetizes the humor, riotous blood, sulks, amorous torments, fondness for the tavern and for cheap objective nature, with disgust at the grim and narrow ecclesiasticism of his time and land, of a young farmer on a bleak and hired farm in Scotland, through the years and under the circumstances of the British politics of that time, and of his short personal career as author, from 1783 to 1796. He is intuitive and affectionate, and just emerged or emerging from the shackles of the kirk, from poverty, ignorance, and from his own rank appetites–(out of which latter, however, he never extricated himself.) It is to be said that amid not a little smoke and gas in his poems, there is in almost every piece a spark of fire, and now and then the real afflatus. He has been applauded as democratic, and with some warrant; while Shakspere, and with the greatest warrant, has been called monarchical or aristocratic (which he certainly is.) But the splendid personalizations of Shakspere, formulated on the largest, freest, most heroic, most artistic mould, are to me far dearer as lessons, and more precious even as models for Democracy, than the humdrum samples Burns presents. The motives of some of his effusions are certainly discreditable personally–one or two of them markedly so. He has, moreover, little or no spirituality. This last is his mortal flaw and defect, tried by highest standards. The ideal he never reach’d (and yet I think he leads the way to it.) He gives melodies, and now and then the simplest and sweetest ones; but harmonies, complications, oratorios in words, never. (I do not speak this in any deprecatory sense. Blessed be the memory of the warm-hearted Scotchman for what he has left us, just as it is!) He likewise did not know himself, in more ways than one. Though so really fret and independent, he prided himself in his songs on being a reactionist and a Jacobite–on persistent sentimental adherency to the cause of the Stuarts–the weakest, thinnest, most faithless, brainless dynasty that ever held a throne.
Thus, while Burns is not at all great for New World study, in the sense that Isaiah and Eschylus and the book of Job are unquestionably great–is not to be mention’d with Shakspere–hardly even with current Tennyson or our Emerson–he has a nestling niche of his own, all fragrant, fond, and quaint and homely–a lodge built near but outside the mighty temple of the gods of song and art–those universal strivers, through their works of harmony and melody and power, to ever show or intimate man’s crowning, last, victorious fusion in himself of Real and Ideal. Precious, too–fit and precious beyond all singers, high or low–will Burns ever be to the native Scotch, especially to the working-classes of North Britain; so intensely one of them, and so racy of the soil, sights, and local customs. He often apostrophizes Scotland, and is, or would be, enthusiastically patriotic. His country has lately commemorated him in a statue.[40] His aim is declaredly to be ‘a Rustic Bard.’ His poems were all written in youth or young manhood, (he was little more than a young man when he died.) His collected works in giving everything, are nearly one half first drafts. His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor’d like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of his works, heroically printed, “following copy,” every piece, every line according to originals. Other poets might tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In “this odd-kind chiel” such points hardly mar the rest. Not only are they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew’d flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not “put on,” that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and re-wrought polish of the most perfect verse?) Mark the native spice and untranslatable twang in the very names of his songs-“O for ane and twenty, Tam,” “John Barleycorn,” “Last May a braw Wooer,” “Rattlin roarin Willie,” “O wert thou in the cauld, cauld blast,” “Gude e’en to you, Kimmer,” “Merry hae I been teething a Heckle,” “O lay thy loof in mine, lass,” and others.
The longer and more elaborated poems of Burns are just such as would please a natural but homely taste, and cute but average intellect, and are inimitable in their way. The “Twa Dogs,” (one of the best) with the conversation between Cesar and Luath, the “Brigs of Ayr,” “the Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “Tam O’Shanter”–all will be long read and re-read and admired, and ever deserve to be. With nothing profound in any of them, what there is of moral and plot has an inimitably fresh and racy flavor. If it came to question, Literature could well afford to send adrift many a pretensive poem, and even book of poems, before it could spare these compositions.
Never indeed was there truer utterance in a certain range of idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small, but has “snap” and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme (often doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of the kirk-deacons–drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that “to the De’il” among them)–“to Mailie and her Lambs,” “to auld Mare Maggie,” “to a Mouse,”
“Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie:”
“to a Mountain Daisy,” “to a Haggis,” “to a Louse,” “to the Toothache,” &c.–and occasionally to his brother bards and lady or gentleman patrons, often with strokes of tenderest sensibility, idiopathic humor, and genuine poetic imagination–still oftener with shrewd, original, sheeny, steel-flashes of wit, home-spun sense, or lance-blade puncturing. Then, strangely, the basis of Burns’s character, with all its fun and manliness, was hypochondria, the blues, palpable enough in “Despondency,” “Man was made to Mourn,” “Address to Ruin,” a “Bard’s Epitaph,” &c. From such deep-down elements sprout up, in very contrast and paradox, those riant utterances of which a superficial reading will not detect the hidden foundation. Yet nothing is clearer to me than the black and desperate background behind those pieces–as I shall now specify them. I find his most characteristic, Nature’s masterly touch and luxuriant life-blood, color and heat, not in “Tam O’Shanter,” “the Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “Scots wha hae,” “Highland Mary,” “the Twa Dogs,” and the like, but in “the Jolly Beggars,” “Rigs of Barley,” “Scotch Drink,” “the Epistle to John Rankine,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” and in “Halloween,” (to say nothing of a certain cluster, known still to a small inner circle in Scotland, but, for good reasons, not published anywhere.) In these compositions, especially the first, there is much indelicacy (some editions flatly leave it out,) but the composer reigns alone, with handling free and broad and true, and is an artist. You may see and feel the man indirectly in his other verses, all of them, with more or less life-likeness–but these I have named last call out pronouncedly in his own voice,
“I, Rob, am here.”
Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe literary criticism–(in the present outpouring I have “kept myself in,” rather than allow’d any free flow)–after full retrospect of his works and life, the aforesaid “odd-kind chiel” remains to my heart and brain as almost the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory) dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone poets.
Notes:
[39] Probably no man that ever lived–a friend has made the statement–was so fondly loved, both by men and women, as Robert Burns. The reason is not hard to find: he had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom; you could almost hear it throb. “Some one said, that if you had shaken hands with him his hand would have burnt yours. The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but Nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place; he did not pile up cantos of poetic diction; he pluck’d the mountain daisy under his feet; he wrote of field-mouse hurrying from its ruin’d dwelling. He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp. And he was loved. The simple roll of the women who gave him their affection and their sympathy would make a long manuscript; and most of these were of such noble worth that, as Robert Chambers says, ‘their character may stand as a testimony in favor of that of Burns.'” [As I understand, the foregoing is from an extremely rare book publish’d by M’Kie, in Kilmarnock. I find the whole beautiful paragraph in a capital paper on Burns, by Amelia Barr.]
[40] The Dumfries statue of Robert Burns was successfully unveil’d April 1881 by Lord Rosebery, the occasion having been made national in its character. Before the ceremony, a large procession paraded the streets of the town, all the trades and societies of that part of Scotland being represented, at the head of which went dairymen and ploughmen, the former driving their carts and being accompanied by their maids. The statue is of Sicilian marble. It rests on a pedestal of gray stone five feet high. The poet is represented as sitting easily on an old tree root, holding in his left hand a cluster of daisies. His face is turn’d toward the right shoulder, and the eyes gaze into the distance. Near by lie a collie dog, a broad bonnet half covering a well-thumb’d song-book, and a rustic flageolet. The costume is taken from the Nasmyth portrait, which has been follow’d for the features of the face.
A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON
Beautiful as the song was, the original “Locksley Hall” of half a century ago was essentially morbid, heart-broken, finding fault with everything, especially the fact of money’s being made (as it ever must be, and perhaps should be) the paramount matter in worldly affairs;
Every door is barr’d with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
First, a father, having fallen in battle, his child (the singer)
Was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward.
Of course love ensues. The woman in the chant or monologue proves a false one; and as far as appears the ideal of woman, in the poet’s reflections, is a false one–at any rate for America. Woman is _not_ “the lesser man.” (The heart is not the brain.) The best of the piece of fifty years since is its concluding line:
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 assume to pass 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 Passing 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 noble 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 passion 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 illustriousness, through the long roll of time, to our Nineteenth Century. In its bunch of orbic names, shining 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 ship, casting off for new seas, distant shores. 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 ashore 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 institutes, 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 pass 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 God 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 God. 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 masses, 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 cushion while his lord supp’ d, and was required to chafe the legs of the seigneur with his hands.
It is curiously in embryons and childhood, and among the illiterate, we always find the groundwork and start, of this great science, and its noblest products. What a relief most people have in speaking of a man not by his true and formal name, with a “Mister” to it, but by some odd or homely appellative. The propensity to approach a meaning not directly and squarely, but by circuitous styles of expression, seems indeed a born quality of the common people everywhere, evidenced by nick-names, and the inveterate determination of the masses to bestow sub-titles, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes very apt. Always among the soldiers during the secession war, one heard of “Little Mac” (Gen. McClellan), or of “Uncle Billy” (Gen. Sherman.) “The old man” was, of course, very common. Among the rank and file, both armies, it was very general to speak of the different States they came from by their slang names. Those from Maine were call’d Foxes; New Hampshire, Granite Boys; Massachusetts, Bay Staters; Vermont, Green Mountain Boys; Rhode Island, Gun Flints; Connecticut, Wooden Nutmegs; New York, Knickerbockers; New Jersey, Clam Catchers; Pennsylvania, Logher Heads; Delaware, Muskrats; Maryland, Claw Thumpers; Virginia, Beagles; North Carolina, Tar Boilers; South Carolina, Weasels; Georgia, Buzzards; Louisiana, Creoles; Alabama, Lizards; Kentucky, Corn Crackers; Ohio, Buckeyes; Michigan, Wolverines; Indiana, Hoosiers; Illinois, Suckers; Missouri, Pukes; Mississippi, Tadpoles; Florida, Fly up the Creeks; Wisconsin, Badgers; Iowa, Hawkeyes; Oregon, Hard Cases. Indeed I am not sure but slang names have more than once made Presidents. “Old Hickory,” (Gen. Jackson) is one case in point. “Tippecanoe, and Tyler too,” another.
I find the same rule in the people’s conversations everywhere. I heard this among the men of the city horse-cars, where the conductor is often call’d a “snatcher” (i. e. because his characteristic duty is to constantly pull or snatch the bell-strap, to stop or go on.) Two young fellows are having a friendly talk, amid which, says 1st conductor, “What did you do before you was a snatcher?” Answer of 2d conductor, “Nail’d.” (Translation of answer: “I work’d as carpenter.”) What is a “boom”? says one editor to another. “Esteem’d contemporary,” says the other, “a boom is a bulge.” “Barefoot whiskey” is the Tennessee name for the undiluted stimulant. In the slang of the New York common restaurant waiters a plate of ham and beans is known as “stars and stripes,” codfish balls as “sleeve-buttons,” and hash as “mystery.”
The Western States of the Union are, however, as may be supposed, the special areas of slang, not only in conversation, but in names of localities, towns, rivers, etc. A late Oregon traveller says:
“On your way to Olympia by rail, you cross a river called the Shookum-Chuck; your train stops at places named Newaukum, Tumwater, and Toutle; and if you seek further you will hear of whole counties labell’ d Wahkiakum, or Snohomish, or Kitsar, or Klikatat; and Cowlitz, Hookium, and Nenolelops greet and offend you. They complain in Olympia that Washington Territory gets but little immigration; but what wonder? What man, having the whole American continent to choose from, would willingly date his letters from the county of Snohomish or bring up his children in the city of Nenolelops? The village of Tumwater is, as I am ready to bear witness, very pretty indeed; but surely an emigrant would think twice before he establish’ d himself either there or at Toutle. Seattle is sufficiently barbarous; Stelicoom is no better; and I suspect that the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus has been fixed at Tacoma because it is one of the few places on Puget Sound whose name does not inspire horror.”
Then a Nevada paper chronicles the departure of a mining party from Reno: “The toughest set of roosters that ever shook the dust off any town left Reno yesterday for the new mining district of Cornucopia. They came here from Virginia. Among the crowd were four New York cock-fighters, two Chicago murderers, three Baltimore bruisers, one Philadelphia prize-fighter, four San Francisco hoodlums, three Virginia beats, two Union Pacific roughs, and two check guerrillas.” Among the far-west newspapers, have been, or are, _The Fairplay_ (Colorado) _Flume, The Solid Muldoon_, of Ouray, _The Tombstone Epitaph_, of Nevada, _The Jimplecute_, of Texas, and _The Bazoo_, of Missouri. Shirttail Bend, Whiskey Flat, Puppytown, Wild Yankee Ranch, Squaw Flat, Rawhide Ranch, Loafer’s Ravine, Squitch Gulch, Toenail Lake, are a few of the names of places in Butte county, Cal.
Perhaps indeed no place or term gives more luxuriant illustrations of the fermentation processes I have mention’d, and their froth and specks, than those Mississippi and Pacific coast regions, at the present day. Hasty and grotesque as are some of the names, others are of an appropriateness and originality unsurpassable. This applies to the Indian words, which are often perfect. Oklahoma is proposed in Congress for the name of one of our new Territories. Hog-eye, Lick-skillet, Rake-pocket and Steal-easy are the names of some Texan towns. Miss Bremer found among the aborigines the following names: _Men’s_, Horn-point; Round-Wind; Stand-and-look-out; The-Cloud-that-goes-aside; Iron-toe; Seek-the-sun; Iron-flash; Red-bottle; White-spindle; Black-dog; Two-feathers-of-honor; Gray-grass; Bushy-tail; Thunder-face; Go-on-the-burning-sod; Spirits-of-the-dead. _Women’s_, Keep-the-fire; Spiritual-woman; Second-daughter-of-the-house; Blue-bird.
Certainly philologists have not given enough attention to this element and its results, which, I repeat, can probably be found working every where to-day, amid modern conditions, with as much life and activity as in far-back Greece or India, under prehistoric ones. Then the wit–the rich flashes of humor and genius and poetry–darting out often from a gang of laborers, railroad-men, miners, drivers or boatmen! How often have I hover’d at the edge of a crowd of them, to hear their repartees and impromptus! You get more real fun from half an hour with them than from the books of all “the American humorists.”
The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. Or, perhaps Language is more like some vast living body, or perennial body of bodies. And slang not only brings the first feeders of it, but is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor, breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.
AN INDIAN BUREAU REMINISCENCE
After the close of the secession war in 1865, I work’d several months (until Mr. Harlan turn’d me out for having written “Leaves of Grass”) in the Interior Department at Washington, in the Indian Bureau. Along this time there came to see their Great Father an unusual number of aboriginal visitors, delegations for treaties, settlement of lands, &c.–some young or middle-aged, but mainly old men, from the West, North, and occasionally from the South–parties of from five to twenty each–the most wonderful proofs of what Nature can produce, (the survival of the fittest, no doubt–all the frailer samples dropt, sorted out by death)–as if to show how the earth and woods, the attrition of storms and elements, and the exigencies of life at first hand, can train and fashion men, indeed _chiefs_, in heroic massiveness, imperturbability, muscle, and that last and highest beauty consisting of strength–the full exploitation and fruitage of a human identity, not from the culmination-points of “culture” and artificial civilization, but tallying our race, as it were, with giant, vital, gnarl’d, enduring trees, or monoliths of separate hardiest rocks, and humanity holding its own with the best of the said trees or rocks, and outdoing them.
There were Omahas, Poncas, Winnebagoes, Cheyennes, Navahos, Apaches, and many others. Let me give a running account of what I see and hear through one of these conference collections at the Indian Bureau, going back to the present tense. Every head and face is impressive, even artistic; Nature redeems herself out of her crudest recesses. Most have red paint on their cheeks, however, or some other paint. (“Little Hill” makes the opening speech, which the interpreter translates by scraps.) Many wear head tires of gaudy-color’d braid, wound around thickly–some with circlets of eagles’ feathers. Necklaces of bears’ claws are plenty around their necks. Most of the chiefs are wrapt in large blankets of the brightest scarlet.
Two or three have blue, and I see one black. (A wise man call’d “the Flesh” now makes a short speech, apparently asking something. Indian Commissioner Dole answers him, and the interpreter translates in scraps again.) All the principal chiefs have tomahawks or hatchets, some of them very richly ornamented and costly. Plaid shirts are to be observ’d–none too clean. Now a tall fellow, “Hole-in-the-Day,” is speaking. He has a copious head-dress composed of feathers and narrow ribbon, under which appears a countenance painted all over a bilious yellow. Let us note this young chief. For all his paint, “Hole-in-the-Day” is a handsome Indian, mild and calm, dress’d in drab buckskin leggings, dark gray surtout, and a soft black hat. His costume will bear full observation, and even fashion would accept him. His apparel is worn loose and scant enough to show his superb physique, especially in neck, chest, and legs. (“The Apollo Belvidere!” was the involuntary exclamation of a famous European artist when he first saw a full-grown young Choctaw.)
One of the red visitors–a wild, lean-looking Indian, the one in the black woolen wrapper–has an empty buffalo head, with the horns on, for his personal surmounting. I see a markedly Bourbonish countenance among the chiefs–(it is not very uncommon among them, I am told.) Most of them avoided resting on chairs during the hour of their “talk” in the Commissioner’s office; they would sit around on the floor, leaning against something, or stand up by the walls, partially wrapt in their blankets. Though some of the young fellows were, as I have said, magnificent and beautiful animals, I think the palm of unique picturesqueness, in body, limb, physiognomy, &c., was borne by the old or elderly chiefs, and the wise men.
My here-alluded-to experience in the Indian Bureau produced one very definite conviction, as follows: There is something about these aboriginal Americans, in their highest characteristic representations, essential traits, and the ensemble of their physique and physiognomy–something very remote, very lofty, arousing comparisons with our own civilized ideals–something that our literature, portrait painting, &c., have never caught, and that will almost certainly never be transmitted to the future, even as a reminiscence. No biographer, no historian, no artist, has grasp’d it–perhaps could not grasp it. It is so different, so far outside our standards of eminent humanity. Their feathers, paint–even the empty buffalo skull–did not, to say the least, seem any more ludicrous to me than many of the fashions I have seen in civilized society. I should not apply the word savage (at any rate, in the usual sense) as a leading word in the description of those great aboriginal specimens, of whom I certainly saw many of the best. There were moments, as I look’d at them or studied them, when our own exemplification of personality, dignity, heroic presentation anyhow (as in the conventions of society, or even in the accepted poems and plays,) seem’d sickly, puny, inferior.
The interpreters, agents of the Indian Department, or other whites accompanying the bands, in positions of responsibility, were always interesting to me; I had many talks with them. Occasionally I would go to the hotels where the bands were quarter’d, and spend an hour or two informally. Of course we could not have much conversation–though (through the interpreters) more of this than might be supposed –sometimes quite animated and significant. I had the good luck to be invariably receiv’d and treated by all of them in their most cordial manner.
[Letter to W. W. from an artist, B. H., who has been much among the American Indians:]
“I have just receiv’d your little paper on the Indian delegations. In the fourth paragraph you say that there is something about the essential traits of our aborigines which ‘will almost certainly never be transmitted to the future.’ If I am so fortunate as to regain my health I hope to weaken the force of that statement, at least in so far as my talent and training will permit. I intend to spend some years among them, and shall endeavor to perpetuate on canvas some of the finer types, both men and women, and some of the characteristic features of their life. It will certainly be well worth the while. My artistic enthusiasm was never so thoroughly stirr’d up as by the Indians. They certainly have more of beauty, dignity and nobility mingled with their own wild individuality, than any of the other indigenous types of man. Neither black nor Afghan, Arab nor Malay (and I know them all pretty well) can hold a candle to the Indian. All of the other aboriginal types seem to be more or less distorted from the model of perfect human form–as we know it–the blacks, thin-hipped, with bulbous limbs, not well mark’d; the Arabs large-jointed, &c. But I have seen many a young Indian as perfect in form and feature as a Greek statue–very different from a Greek statue, of course, but as satisfying to the artistic perceptions and demand.
“And the worst, or perhaps the best of it all is that it will require an artist–and a good one–to record the real facts and impressions. Ten thousand photographs would not have the value of one really finely felt painting. Color is all-important. No one but an artist knows how much. An Indian is only half an Indian without the blue-black hair and the brilliant eyes shining out of the wonderful dusky ochre and rose complexion.”
SOME DIARY NOTES AT RANDOM
NEGRO SLAVES IN NEW YORK
I can myself almost remember negro slaves in New York State, as my grandfather and great-grandfather (at West Hills, Suffolk county, New York) own’d a number. The hard labor of the farm was mostly done by them, and on the floor of the big kitchen, toward sundown, would be squatting a circle of twelve or fourteen “pickaninnies,” eating their supper of pudding (Indian corn mush) and milk. A friend of my grandfather, named Wortman, of Oyster Bay, died in 1810, leaving ten slaves. Jeanette Treadwell, the last of them, died suddenly in Flushing last summer (1884,) at the age of ninety-four years. I remember “old Mose,” one of the liberated West Hills slaves, well. He was very genial, correct, manly, and cute, and a great friend of my childhood.
CANADA NIGHTS–_Late in August_–
Three wondrous nights. Effects of moon, clouds, stars, and night-sheen, never surpass’d. I am out every night, enjoying all. The sunset begins it. (I have said already how long evening lingers here.) The moon, an hour high just after eight, is past her half, and looks somehow more like a human face up there than ever before. As it grows later, we have such gorgeous and broad cloud-effects, with Luna’s tawny halos, silver edgings–great fleeces, depths of blue-black in patches, and occasionally long, low bars hanging silently a while, and then gray bulging masses rolling along stately, sometimes in long procession. The moon travels in Scorpion to-night, and dims all the stars of that constellation except fiery Antares, who keeps on shining just to the big one’s side.
COUNTRY DAYS AND NIGHTS–
_Sept. 30, ’82, 4.30 A.M._–I am down in Camden county, New Jersey, at the farmhouse of the Staffords–have been looking a long while at the comet–have in my time seen longer-tail’d ones, but never one so pronounc’d in cometary character, and so spectral-fierce–so like some great, pale, living monster of the air or sea. The atmosphere and sky, an hour or so before sunrise, so cool, still, translucent, give the whole apparition to great advantage. It is low in the east. The head shows about as big as an ordinary good-sized saucer–is a perfectly round and defined disk–the tail some sixty or seventy feet–not a stripe, but quite broad, and gradually expanding. Impress’d with the silent, inexplicably emotional sight, I linger and look till all begins to weaken in the break of day.
_October 2_.–The third day of mellow, delicious, sunshiny weather. I am writing this in the recesses of the old woods, my seat on a big pine log, my back against a tree. Am down here a few days for a change, to bask in the Autumn sun, to idle lusciously and simply, and to eat hearty meals, especially my breakfast. Warm mid-days–the other hours of the twenty-four delightfully fresh and mild–cool evenings, and early mornings perfect. The scent of the woods, and the peculiar aroma of a great yet unreap’d maize-field near by–the white butterflies in every direction by day–the golden-rod, the wild asters, and sunflowers–the song of the katydid all night.
Every day in Cooper’s Woods, enjoying simple existence and the passing hours–taking short walks–exercising arms and chest with the saplings, or my voice with army songs or recitations. A perfect week for weather; seven continuous days bright and dry and cool and sunny. The nights splendid, with full moon–about 10 the grandest of star-shows up in the east and south, Jupiter, Saturn, Capella, Aldebaran, and great Orion. Am feeling pretty well–am outdoors most of the time, absorbing the days and nights all I can.