A Hero and Some Other Folks

by William A. Quayle

I desire to show that these phases of criticism are not difficult of explanation. These are natural, and are the outgrowth of an image-making age. Study the age, understand it thoroughly, and the literature of that period can hardly be a puzzling question. The nineteenth century will stand in history as the chiefest iconoclast which has arisen in the world's first six thousand years. And its science, statecraft, art, and literature will be looked upon as segments of the one circle, and that circle the century.

VII

Tennyson the Dreamer

My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are associated with the old Harper's volume, green-bound, large-paged, and frontispieced with two pictures of the poet—one of them, a face bearded, thoughtful, with eyes seeming not to see the near, but the remote; a head well-poised and noble, with hair tangled as if matted by the wind; the face, as I a lad thought, of a dreamer and a poet; and my first impressions, I think, were right, since the years are confirmatory of this first conviction. The second portrait pictured the poet wrapped in his cloak, standing, lost in thought, alone upon a cliff, gazing solitary at the sea, and listening. If I do not mistake, these pictures caught the poet's spirit in so far as pictures can portray spirit. Tennyson was always alone beside a sea, looking, listening, dreaming; and as dreamer this article purposes portraying him.

Tennyson was, his life through, a recluse. He dwelt apart. He was as one who stands afar oft and listens to the shock of battle, hears the echo of cannon's roar, and so conceives a remote picture of the tragedy of onset. English poetry began with Chaucer, outrider to a king, associate with State affairs, participant in those turbulencies recorded in Froissart's voluble "Chronicles." He was a courtier. Camp and king's antechamber and embassage and battle made the arsis and thesis of his poetry, and his poems are a picture of Edward III's age, accurate as if a king's pageant passing flung shadow in a stream along whose bank it marched. Spenser was a recluse, looking on the world's movement as an Oriental woman watches the street from her latticed window. Shakespeare was bon vivant, a player, therefore a brief chronicler of that time and of all times. He floated in people as birds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as a sculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications for dramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literary debauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courts and society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it. Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who lives far from a public thoroughfare, where neither the dust nor bustle of travel can touch his bower of quiet; in its quality of isolation, Grasmere was an island in remote seas. Keats was a lad, dreaming in some dim Greek temple, listening to a fountain's plash at midnight which never whitened into dawn.

Nor does there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, aside from the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of Bayard Taylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could write dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocation drying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, diplomat, poet,—in every department distinguished. His essay on Dante ranks him among the great expositors of that melancholy Florentine. Yet who of us has not wished he might have consecrated himself to poetry as priest to the altar? We gained in the publicist and essayist, but lost from the poet. And our ultimate loss out-topped our gain; for essayists and ambassadors are more numerous than poets. Had Lowell been a man of one service, and that service poetry, what might he not have left us as a poet's bequest? Would he had lived in some forest primeval, from whose shadows mountains climbed to meet the dawns, and streams stood in silver pools or broke into laughter on the stones, and where winds among the pines were constant ministrants of melody! Solitudes minister to poets. You can hear a fountain best at midnight, because then quiet rules.

Tennyson was a solitary. Hallam Tennyson's biography of the laureate resents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves the commonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love of contemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man of the people. He fled from tourists as if they brought a plague with them. He did nothing but dream. You might as easily catch the whip-poor-will, whose habitation changes at an approaching step, as Tennyson. His was not in the widest sense a companionable nature. He cared to be alone and to be let dream, and resented intrusion and a disturbance of his solitude. Some have dreamless sleep, like the princess in "The Sleeping Beauty;" others sleep to dream, and to wake them by a hand's touch or a voice, however loved, would be to break the sweet continuity of their dreams. Seeing Tennyson was as he was, his solitude helped him. I think moonlight was wine to his spirit, and the dim voices of rolling breakers heard afar woke his passion and his poetry. The

"Break, break, break,
On thy cold, gray stones, O sea!"

was what his spirit needed as qualification to

"Utter the thoughts that arise in me."