"Sighing weariedly, as one
Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,
When all the goodlier guests are past away."
"As the crest of some slow-arching wave
Heard in dead night along that table-shore
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing."
"Belted his body with her white embrace."
"And out beyond into the dream to come."
"Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home,
And glancing on the window, when the gloom
Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame
That rages in the woodland far below."
Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim for
Alfred Tennyson as a painter?
And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualities are in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although from centuries of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that so sensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a lowered standard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especially considering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan, Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where a luxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a high degree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of a commanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as to pollute the living springs from which a generation of men and women drank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moral mood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals of both life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; and purest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar," and be only purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Bible in Tennyson," an article, after his habit, discriminating and appreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the delicious verse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, so native is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believe the larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thought evidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet's life. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in these later centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible than our planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate the moral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years, though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and pure thinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century. That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Browning were given a single race in a single century is abundant cause for giving hearty thanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote days coming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie to the poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to be incompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they have swept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair as the morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is no slightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protest against it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm that bites as acids do:
"Rip your brother's vices open, strip your own foul
passions bare:
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward,
naked—let them stare.
Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of
your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain lest the stream should
issue pure.
Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism,
Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too,
in the abysm.
Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising
race of men."
And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger! Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii. Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand of mercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subways being justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservation of a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in the sewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tell all he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knows there are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and let the romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers.