In the old barbaric force and native color of the passions, as they burst out undisguised around the gold,
In the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning,
In a desert peopled, and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity,
In a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart,
In “the siege of Gold,” defended stoutly by Rock and Disease,
In the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design,
Fate offered poetry a theme broad and high, yet piquant, and various as the dolphin and the rainbow.
I cannot sing this song, because I am neither Lamartine, nor Hugo, nor Walter Scott. I cannot hum this song, because the severe conditions of my story forbid me even to make the adventurous attempt. I am here to tell, not the great tale of gold, but the little story of how Susan Merton was affected thereby. Yet it shall never be said that my pen passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters, the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification of dead dwarfs.
God has been bountiful to the human race in this age. Most bountiful to Poets; most bountiful to all of us who have a spark of nobleness in ourselves, and so can see and revere at sight the truly grand and noble (any snob can do this after it has been settled two hundred years by other minds that he is to do it). He has given us warlike heroes more than we can count—far less honor as they deserve; and valor as full of variety as courage in the Iliad is monotonous—except when it takes to its heels.
He has given us one hero, a better man than Hector or Achilles. For Hector ran away from a single man; this hero was never known to run away at all. Achilles was a better egotist than soldier; wounded in his personal vanity, he revenged himself, not on the man who had wronged him—Prudence forbade—but on the army, and on his country. This antique hero sulked; my hero, deprived of the highest command, retained a higher still—the command that places the great of heart above all petty personal feeling. He was a soldier, and could not look from his tent on battle and not plunge into it. What true soldier ever could? He was not a Greek but a Frenchman—and could not love himself better than his country. Above all, he was not Achilles, but Canrobert.