very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I was able to do
it, because now thou wert become my helper. I entered and discerned
with the eye of my soul (such as it was), even beyond my soul and
mind itself, the Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light which
all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind,
as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and
with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but
other, yea, far other from all these. Neither was it so above my
understanding as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above
the earth. But it is above me, because it made me; and I am under
it, because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity, knows
what that light is, and he that knows it, knows eternity, and it
is known by charity. O eternal Verity! and true Charity! and dear
Eternity! thou art my God, to thee do I sigh day and night. Thee
when I first knew, thou liftedst me up that I might see, there
was what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And
thou didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams
upon me after a vehement manner; and I even trembled between love
and horror, and I found myself to be far off, and even in the very
region of dissimilitude from thee.”
IV.
AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.[8]
In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an
orchard where boys were grafting apple-trees, and found the
Farmer in his corn-field. He was holding the plough, and his son
driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he
is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all
appearances,—excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and
blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field; so honest withal,
that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I
still remember with some shame that in some dealing we had together a
long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the
affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked
to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his
own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here
is the Cæsar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer,
after how many and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day;
not like Napoleon, hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand,
and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with
Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and
useless city limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong
soldier, for his have done his own work and ours too. What good this
man has or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law
left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with
which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them
a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year,
and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a
man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood
ballad,—
“Much, the miller’s son,
There was no inch of his body
But it was worth a groom.”
Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil
has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and
hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual
taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent
spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any
shape. I walked up and down the field, as he ploughed his furrow,
and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the
season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the
Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things
in it; but it was easy to see that he felt toward the author much as
soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more
good-nature than reverence for the gownsman.
The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the
first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one
thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first.
But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken
to send it to them; it was by accident that this volume came into my
hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford
to follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers;
their own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the
literary men. But in that case, the state should not be taxed to pay
for it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar,—that is very good
and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer’s
daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a
farm,—that is good too, and we have much that is like it in Thomas’s
Almanack. But why this recommendation of stone houses? They are not
so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for us. Our roads are always
changing their direction, and after a man has built at great cost a
stone house, a new road is opened, and he finds himself a mile or two
from the highway. Then our people are not stationary, like those of
old countries, but always alert to better themselves, and will remove
from town to town as a new market opens or a better farm is to be
had, and do not wish to spend too much on their buildings.
The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and their
hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers always
know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have no
choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below, where
manure is cheap and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in November;
but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall, would be to
sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop in the
spring. And thus Necessity farms it; necessity finds out when to go
to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. Colman
can tell us.
But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of
the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and
Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good Commissioner
takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts the value of
“his feeble praise,” and repeats his compliments as often as their
names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D., with all his
knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any one of
fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a farmer
manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and spends on
it every year from other resources; otherwise his farm had ruined
him long since;—and as for the Major, he never got rich by his skill
in making land produce, but in making men produce. The truth is, a
farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do not know of
a single instance in which a man has honestly got rich by farming
alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have farms grow
rich, is either by other resources, or by trade, or by getting their
labor for nothing, or by other methods of which I could tell you
many sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor know of all
this? What can he know? He is the victim of the “Reports” that are
sent him, of particular farms. He cannot go behind the estimates to
know how the contracts were made, and how the sales were effected.
The true men of skill, the poor farmers, who, by the sweat of their
face, without an inheritance and without offence to their conscience
have reared a family of valuable citizens and matrons to the state,
reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm,—although their buildings are
many of them shabby, are the only right subjects of this Report; yet
these make no figure in it. These should be holden up to imitation,
and their methods detailed; yet their houses are very uninviting
and inconspicuous to State Commissioners. So with these premiums
to farms, and premiums at cattle-shows. The class that I describe
must pay the premium which is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium
obviously ought to be given for the good management of a poor farm.
In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special criticisms.
He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him of any
blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism
concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture
of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and
inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to
be heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under all his statement
that it deserved a record.
V.
EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS.[9]
It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary
calendar, when within a twelvemonth a single London advertisement
announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and
a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s nature or character has had
all the time it needed in order to make its mark and supply the want
of talent. We have learned how to read him. We have ceased to expect
that which he cannot give. He has the merit of just moral perception,
but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip
at such slipshod newspaper style. Many of his poems, as for example
the Rylstone Doe, might be all improvised. Nothing of Milton, nothing
of Marvell, of Herbert, of Dryden, could be. These are such verses
as in a just state of culture should be _vers de société_, such
as every gentleman could write but none would think of printing,
or of claiming the poet’s laurel on their merit. The Pindar, the
Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the just and open soul, have
also the eye to see the dimmest star that glimmers in the Milky Way,
the serratures of every leaf, the test-objects of the microscope, and
then the tongue to utter the same things in words that engrave them
on all the ears of mankind. The poet demands all gifts, and not one
or two only.
The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer the
sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and into the
dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse
with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses.
His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to
be seen and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story, and
its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on the Copyright
Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the coroner,
quoted Wordsworth’s poetry in derision, and asked the roaring House
of Commons what that meant, and whether a man should have public
reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace, Milton and Chaucer
would defy the coroner. Whilst they have wisdom to the wise, he
would see that to the external they have external meaning. Coleridge
excellently said of poetry, that poetry must first be good sense; as
a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a house.
Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet Wordsworth,
though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind his own
mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on his
compositions; though confounding his accidental with the universal
consciousness, and taking the public to task for not admiring
his poetry,—is really a master of the English language, and his
poems evince a power of diction that is no more rivalled by his
contemporaries than is his poetic insight. But the capital merit
of Wordsworth is that he has done more for the sanity of this
generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a crisis it is
said in his private affairs, he made his election between assuming
and defending some legal rights, with the chances of wealth and a
position in the world,—and the inward promptings of his heavenly
genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a poet, and sat
down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain fare to obey
the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his will, manifested
itself in every line to be real. We have poets who write the poetry
of society, of the patrician and conventional Europe, as Scott and
Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer, write the poetry of
vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself into his place, made
no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were not to be divided.
He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin of Windermere,
and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime midnights for
his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace, nor Milton,
nor Dante. He once for all forsook the styles and standards and
modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books read there, and
the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and Windermere, and the dim
spirits which these haunts harbored. There was not the least attempt
to reconcile these with the spirit of fashion and selfishness, nor
to show, with great deference to the superior judgment of dukes
and earls, that although London was the home for men of great
parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations for such as fate had
condemned to the country life,—but with a complete satisfaction
he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and celebrated his own
with the religion of a true priest. Hence the antagonism which was
immediately felt between his poetry and the spirit of the age, that
here not only criticism but conscience and will were parties; the
spirit of literature and the modes of living and the conventional
theories of the conduct of life were called in question on wholly
new grounds,—not from Platonism, not from Christianity, but from the
lessons which the country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing
a mountain and following a river from its parent rill down to the
sea. The Cannings and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals
and Literary Gazettes were not well pleased, and voted the poet a
bore. But that which rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many
others as high as to the heart. What he said, they were prepared to
hear and confirm. The influence was in the air, and was wafted up
and down into lone and into populous places, resisting the popular
taste, modifying opinions which it did not change, and soon came
to be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last
in legislation. In this country it very early found a stronghold,
and its effect may be traced on all the poetry both of England and
America.
But, notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s grand merits, it was a great
pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson’s two volumes were coming
out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The
elegance, the wit and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his
power of language, his metrical skill, his independence of any
living masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and
gorgeous, discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories,
of parks and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that
he wants rude truth; he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask
and alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life
than in “Lalla Rookh” and “The Loves of the Angels.” Amid swinging
censers and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain
and frost. Otto-of-roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical
friend of ours affirms that the vice which bereaved modern painters
of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended;
to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of their
religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough;
they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which
agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw
all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors,
and paint for their predecessors’ public. It seems as if the same
vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson’s compositions are not so much
poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry
old masters. He is not the husband, who builds the homestead after
his own necessity, from foundation-stone to chimney-top and turret,
but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint staircases and groined
ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make
our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then
legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary
expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy,
hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare
occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson’s beauty is
more grateful than Tennyson’s. It is a natural manly grace of a
robust workman. Ben’s flowers are not in pots at a city florist’s,
arranged on a flower-stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home,
attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and
apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck
with boughs of hemlock and sweetbriar, with ferns and pond lilies
which the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our
benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then?
It is long since we have had as good a lyrist; it will be long before
we have his superior. “Godiva” is a noble poem that will tell the
legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present
age for which we predict the longest term, is “Abou ben Adhem,” of
Leigh Hunt. Fortune will still have her part in every victory, and
it is strange that one of the best poems should be written by a man
who has hardly written any other. And “Godiva” is a parable which
belongs to the same gospel. “Locksley Hall” and “The Two Voices”
are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read.
“The Talking Oak,” though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is
beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. “Ulysses” belongs to
a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more
cultivated in the next generation. “Œnone” was a sketch of the same
kind. One of the best specimens we have of the class is Wordsworth’s
“Laodamia,” of which no special merit it can possess equals the total
merit of having selected such a subject in such a spirit.
Next to the poetry, the novels, which come to us in every ship from
England, have an importance increased by the immense extension of
their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them
to so many willing thousands. We have heard it alleged with some
evidence that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer’s
romances has proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands
of young men in England and America. The effect on manners cannot be
less sensible, and we can easily believe that the behavior of the
ball-room and of the hotel has not failed to draw some addition of
dignity and grace from the fair ideals with which the imagination of
a novelist has filled the heads of the most imitative class.
We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read Mr.
Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he has
really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant caricatures.
He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with great energy and
with a courage of experiment which in each instance had its degree
of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those world-fables which
is so agreeable to the human imagination that it is found in some
form in the language of every country, and is always reappearing
in literature. Many of the details of this novel preserve a poetic
truth. We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic is natural. It
is implied in all superior culture that a complete man would need
no auxiliaries to his personal presence. The eye and the word are
certainly far subtler and stronger weapons than either money or
knives. Whoever looked on the hero would consent to his will, being
certified that his aims were universal, not selfish; and he would
be obeyed as naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For this
reason, children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in
them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true. But
Zanoni pains us and the author loses our respect, because he speedily
betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the charm;
because the power with which his hero is armed is a toy, inasmuch as
the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind, is
a power for London; a divine power converted into a burglar’s false
key or a highwayman’s pistol to rob and kill with.
But Mr. Bulwer’s recent stories have given us who do not read novels,
occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed to
be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that
the obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds: first,
the novels of costume or of circumstance, which is the old style,
and vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any
particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is
greatly in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and
the business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the
problem to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the
Porter novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and
Scott romances.
It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales will
so take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old foolish
trap. Had one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect,
one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the reader
had been made a participator of their triumph; he too had been an
invited and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is property,
all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and
for none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude and
insulting to all but the minion.
Except in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent knew how
to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the novels of
costume are all one, and there is but one standard English novel,
like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is repeated
every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which “Wilhelm Meister” is the best specimen,
the novel of _character_, treats the reader with more respect; the
development of character being the problem, the reader is made a
partaker of the whole prosperity. Everything good in such a story
remains with the reader when the book is closed. A noble book was
“Wilhelm Meister.” It gave the hint of a cultivated society which we
found nowhere else. It was founded on power to do what was necessary,
each person finding it an indispensable qualification of membership
that he could do something useful, as in mechanics or agriculture
or other indispensable art; then a probity, a justice was to be
its element, symbolized by the insisting that each property should
be cleared of privilege, and should pay its full tax to the state.
Then a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element of
the association, by which each was dignified and all were dignified;
then each was to obey his genius to the length of abandonment. They
watched each candidate vigilantly, without his knowing that he
was observed, and when he had given proof that he was a faithful
man, then all doors, all houses, all relations were open to him;
high behavior fraternized with high behavior, without question of
heraldry, and the only power recognized is the force of character.
The novels of Fashion, of D’Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong to
the class of novels of costume, because the aim is purely external
success. Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable
and the most efficient was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are
the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with
no tithe of Byron’s genius, rules longer. One can distinguish the
Vivians in all companies. They would quiz their father and mother and
lover and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and fate,
love and death, over the soup. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay
nowhere, eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to anything, though
it were the genesis of nature, or the last cataclysm,—Festus-like,
Faust-like, Jove-like, and could write an Iliad any rainy morning,
if fame were not such a bore. Men, women, though the greatest
and fairest, are stupid things; but a rifle, and a mild pleasant
gunpowder, a spaniel, and a cheroot, are themes for Olympus. I fear
it was in part the influence of such pictures on living society
which made the style of manners of which we have so many pictures,
as, for example, in the following account of the English fashionist.
“His highest triumph is to appear with the most wooden manners,
as little polished as will suffice to avoid castigation, nay, to
contrive even his civilities so that they may appear as near as
may be to affronts; instead of a noble high-bred ease, to have the
courage to offend against every restraint of decorum, to invert the
relation in which our sex stand to women, so that they appear the
attacking, and he the passive or defensive party.”