The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

Our polity was constitutional in its character, strictly so; and if it has failed,—which we are far indeed from admitting,—the inference would seem fairly to be, that Constitutionalism has received a blow, not Democracy. As England is the greatest of constitutional countries, our failure, supposing it to have occurred, tells with force against her, from whose system we have drawn so much, and not adversely to the cause of European democracy, from whose principles and practice we have taken little. To us it seems that our war bears hard upon no government but our own, upon no people but ourselves, upon no party but American parties. It is as peculiar in its origin as in its modes. It had its origin in the existence of Slavery, and Slavery here existed in the worst form ever known among men. Until Slavery shall be found elsewhere in combination with Constitutionalism or Democracy, it would be unfair to quote our contest as a warning to other liberally governed lands. We were a nation with a snake in its bosom; and as no other nation is similarly afflicted, our misfortune cannot be cited in the case of any other community. Free institutions are to be judged by their effect when they have had fair play, and not by what has happened in a republic which sought to have them in an unnatural alliance with the most detestable form of tyrannical oppression. REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England. By Robert Carter. Boston: Crosby & Nichols, pp. 261.

In these days, when the high price of paper makes it easy for authors to sell by the pound what no one would take by the single copy, he is luckiest who has made the heaviest book. Our morning newspaper nowadays is a kind of palimpsest, and one cannot help wondering how many dead volumes, how many hopes and disappointments, lie buried under that surface made smooth for the Telegraph (sole author who is sure of readers) to write upon. We seem to detect here and there a flavor of Jones's Poem or Smith's History, something like the rhythm of the one and the accuracy of the other. Quot libras autore summo invenies? is the question for booksellers now.

In a metaphysical sense, one is apt to find many heavy books for one weighty one, and it is as difficult to make light reading that shall have any nutriment in it as to make light bread. Mr. Carter has succeeded in giving us something at once entertaining and instructive. One who introduces us to a new pleasure close by our own doors, and tells us how we may have a cheap vacation of open air, with fresh experience of scenery and adventure at every turn, deserves something of the same kind of gratitude as he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. Americans, above all other men, need to be taught to take a vacation, and how to spend one so as to find in it the rest which mere waste of time never gives. Mr. Carter teaches us how we may have all the pleasure without any of the responsibilities of yachting, and, reversing the method of our summer migration, shows us the shore from the sea.

Hakluyt and Purchas have made us familiar with, the landscape of our coast to the early voyagers,—with its fringe of forest to the water's edge, its fair havens, its swarms of wild fowl, its wooded islets tangled with grape-vines, its unknown mountains looming inland, and its great rivers flowing out of the realm of dream; but its present aspect is nearly as unfamiliar to us as to them. We know almost as little of the natives as Gosnold. Mr. Carter's voyage extends from Plymouth to Mount Desert, and he lands here and there to explore a fishing-village or seaport town, with all the interest of an outlandish man. He describes scenery with the warmth of a lover of Nature and the accuracy of a geographer. Acting as a kind of volunteer aide-de-camp to a naturalist, he dredges and fishes both as man of science and amateur, and makes us more familiarly acquainted with many queer denizens of fin-land. He mingles with our fishermen, and finds that the schoolmaster has been among them also. His book is lively without being flippant, and full of information without that dulness which is apt to be the evil demon of statistics. The moral of it is, that, as one may travel from Dan to Beersheba and see nothing, so one needs but to open his eyes to the life and Nature around him to find plenty of entertainment and knowledge.

Azarian: An Episode. By Harriet E. Prescott, Author of "The Amber Gods," etc. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

If one opened the costly album of some rare colorist, and became bewildered amid successive wreaths of pictured flowers, with hues that seemed to burn, and freshness that seemed fragrant, one could hardly quarrel with a few stray splashes of purple or carmine spilt heedlessly on the pages. Such a book is "Azarian"; and if few are so lavish and reckless with their pigments as Harriet Prescott, it is because few have access to such wealth. If one proceeds from the theory that all life in New England is to be pictured as bare and pallid, it must seem very wrong in her to use tints so daring; but if one believes that life here, as elsewhere, may be passionate as Petrarch and deep as Beethoven, there appears no reason why all descriptive art should be Quaker-colored.

Nature and cultivation gave to this writer a rare inventive skill, an astonishing subtilty in the delineation of character, and a style perhaps unequalled among contemporaries in a certain Keats-like affluence. Yet her plots have usually been melodramatic, her characters morbid, and her descriptions overdone. These are undoubtedly great offences, and have grievously checked her growing fame. But the American public, so ready to flatter early merit, has itself to thank, if that flattery prove a pernicious atmosphere. That fatal cheapness of immediate reputation which stunts most of our young writers, making the rudiments of fame so easy to acquire, and fame itself so difficult,—which dwarfs our female writers so especially that not one of them, save Margaret Fuller, has ever yet taken the pains to train herself for first-class literary work,—has no doubt had a transient influence on Harriet Prescott. Add to this, perhaps, the common and fatal necessity of authorship which pushes even second-best wares into the market. It is evident, that, with all the instinct of a student and an artist, she has been a sensation-writer against her will. The whole structure of "Azarian," which is evidently a work of art and of love, indicates these higher aspirations, and shows that she is resolved to nourish them, not by abandoning her own peculiar ground, but by training her gifts and gradually exorcising her temptations. Like her "Amber Gods," the book rests its strength on its descriptive and analytic power, not on its events; but, unlike that extraordinary story, it is healthful in its development and hopeful in its ending. The name of "An Episode" seems to be given to it, not in affectation, but in humility. It is simply a minute study of character, in the French style, though with a freshness and sweetness which no Frenchman ever yet succeeded in transferring into language, and which here leave none of that bad taste in the mouth of which Charlotte Brontè complained. The main situation is one not new in fiction, being simply unequal love and broken troth, but it is one never to be portrayed too often or too tenderly, and it is not desecrated, but ennobled by the handling. It is refreshing to be able to say for Miss Prescott that she absolutely reaches the end of the book without a suicide or a murder, although the heroine for a moment meditates the one and goes to the theatre to behold the other. The dialogue, usually a weak point with this writer, is here for better managed than usual, having her customary piquancy, with less of disfigurement from flippancy and bad puns. The plot shows none of those alarming pieces of incongruity and bathos which have marred some of her stories. And one may fancy that it is not far to seek for the originals of Azarian, Charmian, and Madame Sarator.

It is the style of the book, however, to which one must revert with admiration, not unmingled with criticism, and, it may be, a trifle of just indignation. There are not ten living writers in America of whom it can be said that their style is in itself a charm,—that it has the range, the flexibility, the delicacy, the ease, the strength, which constitute permanent power,—that it is so saturated with life, with literary allusion, with the symbolism of Nature, as to make us dwell on the mere sentences with delight, apart from all thought of argument or theme. This it is to be a literary artist; and as Miss Prescott may justly claim to rank among these favored ones, she must be tried by the code which befits her station. There is not, perhaps, another individual among us who could have written the delicious descriptions of external Nature which this book contains,—not one of the multitude of young artists, now devoting their happy hours to flower-painting, who can depict color by color as she depicts it by words. We hold in our hands an illuminated missal, some Gospel of Nature according to June or October, as the case may be. The price she pays for this astonishing gift is to be often overmastered by it, to be often betrayed into exuberant and fantastic phrases, and wanderings into the realm of words unborn. One fancies the dismay of the accomplished corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and "reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she, too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet; and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those who dare less. The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and her lavish wealth of description would be a gaudy profanation, were it not based on a fidelity of observation which is Thoreau-like, so far as it goes. "Sabbatia sprays, those rosy ghosts that haunt the Plymouth ponds,"—"the cardinal, with the very glitter of the stream it loves meshed like a silver mist behind its scarlet sheen,"—"the wide rhodora marshes, where some fleece of burning mist seemed to be fallen and caught and tangled in countless filaments upon the bare twigs,"—such traits as these are not to be found in the newspapers nor in the botanies. With all her seeming lavishness, she rarely wastes a word. Though she may sometimes heap upon a frail hepatica some greater accumulation of fine-spun fancies than its slender head will bear, she yet can so characterize a flower with a touch that any one of its lovers would know it without the name. If she hints at "those slipshod little anemones that cannot stop to count their petals, but take one from their neighbor or leave another behind them," it is because she knows how peculiarly this fantastic variableness belongs to the rue-leaved species, so unlike the staid precision of its cousin, the wind-flower, from which not one pedestrian in a hundred can yet distinguish it. If she simply says, "great armfuls of blue lupines," she has said enough, because this is almost the only wild-flower whose size, shape, and abundance naturally tempt one to gather it thus: imagine her speaking of armfuls of violets or wild roses! From this basis of accurate fact her fancy can safely unfold its utmost wings, as in her fancied illustrations for the Garden-Song in "Maud," or in the wonderful descriptions of Azarian's lonely nights on the water. "He leaned over his boat-side, miles away from any shore, a star looked down from far above, a star looked up from far below, the glint passed as instantly, and left him the sole spirit between immense concaves of void and fulness, shut in like the flaw in a diamond." How the subscribers to the Circulating Library of the enterprising Mr. Loring must catch their breaths in amazement, when that courteous gentleman hands them for the last new novel—sandwiched between "Pique" and "Woodburn"—thoughts of such a compass as that!

There are sometimes fictitious writers who sweep across the land in a great wave of popularity and then pass away,—as Frederika Bremer twenty years ago,—and leave no visible impression behind. But Harriet Prescott's fame rests on a foundation of sure superiorities, so far as she possesses it; and no one has impaired or can impair it, except herself. If it has not grown as was at first anticipated, it has been her own doing, and "Azarian" has come none too soon to give a better augury for the future. There is no literary laurel too high for her to grasp, if her own will, and favoring circumstances, shall enable her to choose only noble and innocent themes, and to use canvas firm and pure enough for the rare colors she employs.

The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States. By Robert Dale Owen. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 12mo.

"Book, Sir, book! It's the title!" This is the reputed saying of Longman, the publisher, when asked for the key to bookselling. It is a pity that Mr. Owen's book has so cumbrous a name to carry; for everything else about it is compact and portable. Few American works on statistics or political economy possess either brevity or an index, and this combines both treasures. "In this small volume, which a busy man may read in a few hours," the author condenses an immense deal,—and it is a blessed sign, if a man who has been in Congress can still be so economical of words. If his brother Congressmen would only imitate his precious example, what a blessed hope! How gladly would one subscribe for the "Congressional Globe," with the assurance that it would henceforth be the only tedious book in his library, that all the chaff would hereafter be safely winnowed into that, and all the sense put into comfortable little duo-decimos like this!

Mr. Owen's opportunities, as Chairman of the American Freedmen's Commission, have been very great, and he has used them well. The history of slavery and the slave-trade,—the practical consequences of both,—the constitutionality of emancipation,—the present condition of the freed slaves, and their probable future,—all this ground is comprehended within two hundred and fifty pages. The points last named have, of course, the most immediate value, and his treatment of these is exceedingly manly and sensible. He shows conclusively that the whole demeanor of the freed slaves has done them infinite credit, and that the key to their successful management is simply to treat them with justice. That this justice includes equal rights of citizenship he fully asserts, and states the gist of the matter in one of the most telling paragraphs of the book. "God, who made the liberation of the negro the condition under which alone we could succeed in this war, has now, in His providence, brought about a position of things under which it would seem that a full recognition of that negro's rights as a citizen becomes indispensable to stability of government in peace." For, as Mr. Owen shows, even if under any other circumstances we might excuse ourselves for delaying the recognition of the freedman's right to suffrage, because of his ignorance and inexperience, yet it would be utterly disastrous to do so now, when two-thirds of the white population will remain disloyal, even when conquered. We cannot safely reorganize a republican government on the basis of one-sixth of its population, and shall be absolutely compelled to avail ourselves of that additional three-sixths which is loyal and black. Fortunately, as a matter of fact, there are no obstacles to the citizenship of the Southern negro greater than those in the way of the average foreign immigrant. The emancipated negro is at least as industrious and thrifty as the Celt, takes more pride in self-support, is far more eager for education, and has fewer vices. It is impossible to name any standard of requisites for the full rights of citizenship which will give a vote to the Celt and exclude the negro.

Much as has been written on this point, Mr. Owen has yet some astonishing facts to contribute. He shows, for instance, by the official statements, that, amidst the great distress produced in the city of St. Louis at the beginning of the war, by the gathering of white and black refugees from all parts of the State, when ten thousand persons received public aid, only two out of that whole vast number were of negro blood. These two were all who applied, one being lame, the other bedridden, and both women. He shows, upon similar authority, that the free colored people of Louisiana, under serious civil disabilities, are, on the average, richer, by seven and a half per cent., than the people of the Northern States. Their average wealth in 1860 was five hundred and twenty dollars, while the average wealth in the loyal Free States is only four hundred and eighty-four dollars. Such facts show how utterly gratuitous is the frequent assumption that the emancipated slave does not sufficiently know the value of a dollar.

Upon some disputed points Mr. Owen does not, perhaps, make his facts quite cover his inferences, as, for instance, on the vexed question of the vigor and vitality of the mulatto, upon which the more extended observations of the last three years have as yet shed little light. It is the same with the whole obscure problem of amalgamation; indeed, he slips into an absolute contradiction, in pronouncing judgment rather too hastily here. "I believe," he says, "that the effect of general emancipation will be to discourage amalgamation. It is rare in Canada." (p. 219.) But, however it may be in Canada, he has already admitted, four pages before, that "the proportion of mulattoes among the free colored is much greater than among the slaves," which is, doubt less, true, except, perhaps, in a few large cities of the South. It is a subject of common remark that the Southern colored regiments are generally of far darker complexion than those recruited at the North, and this is inexplicable except on the supposition that freedom, even more than slavery, tends thus far to amalgamation. What further step in reasoning this suggests, it is, fortunately, not needful to inquire; like all other mysteries of human destiny, this will safely work itself out. It is not for nothing that the black man thrives in contact with the white, while the red man dies; and there certainly are practical anxieties enough to last us for a month or two, without borrowing any from the remoter future.

Enoch Arden, etc. By ALFRED TENNYSON, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

In his new volume Tennyson has thrown out some verses, graceful, defiant, triumphant, and yet a little touched with sadness, in which he assails the thieves who have stolen his seed of poetry, and made the flower so common that the people call it—as, indeed, they did when first it blossomed—a weed. It may be for the reason here indicated that he has chosen for his later poems a form—that of the Idyl—the versification, construction, and use of which he has made his own by a delicate and yet indisputable stamp of sovereignty: whatever may be the reason, let us be thankful for the choice. He has worked in no field of whose resources he was more completely master, or which has yielded him more full and varied development of his rare genius. The work of his riper years, with the results of his fidelity in discipline, his generous culture, his catholic and earnest intercourse with men, and his clear and thoughtful observation lying ready for his use, he has crowned the green glory of his past with a chaplet that will grow more sure of permanence with the scrutiny of every succeeding year. In his "Idyls of the King" we recognized the best moral qualities of many of his previous works; and in "Enoch Arden," which gives the title to his last volume, he has turned the full light of his perfected genius on the simple scenes of domestic joy and sorrow.

We have always deemed it one of the greatest of Tennyson's great and good qualities, that he is unfaltering in the tribute of honor which he pays to the sterling virtues and to the beauty and heroism which he rejoices to point us to in the daily walk of the humblest life. A blameless character, pure desire, manly ambition, a fervent faith, and a strong will, resting on the firm innermost foundation of a Christian spirit, are as real to him in the fisherman as in the peerless prince. The temptations, the strength, and the temper of the hero are so common to both, and so clearly brought out in each, that we feel the Man in the Prince, and the high aim of the Prince in the true Man. There is the "grand, heroic soul" in Enoch as in Arthur,—

"Who reverenced his conscience as his king;
Whose glory was redressing human wrong;
Who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it;
Who loved one only, and who clave to her."

Our poet never strays from Nature; which has for him two sides,—the old duality, which is also forever,—the real and the ideal. To the one he brings the most patient fidelity of study; the other he reflects in every part of his poems in glowing imagery. "Enoch Arden" contains scenes which a Pre-Raphaelite might draw from,—as that "cup-like hollow in the down" which held the hazel-wood, with the children nutting through its reluctant boughs, or the fireside of Philip, on which Enoch looked and was desolate. On the other hand, no poet has so planted our literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,—now so delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and spirited and solemn.

In this latest poem we find also the old surpassing skill of language, a skill dependent on the faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance both of words and of things, so that there is no waste, and so that single words in single sentences stamp on the brain the substance of long experiences. Witness this: Enoch lies sick, distant from home and wife and children; here is one word crowded with pathos, telling of the weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly growing more intolerably irksome to the bold and careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the fragile mother of the new-born babe:—

"Another hand crept, too, across his trade,
Taking her bread and theirs."

See, again, how one line woven in the context shows where the tears came. Enoch, wrecked, solitary, almost hopeless, found that

"A phantom made of many phantoms moved
Before him, haunting him,—or he himself
Moved, haunting people, things, and places known
Far in a darker isle beyond the line:
The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,
The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall,
The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill
November dawns and dewy glooming of the downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,
And the low moan of leaden-colored seas."

We know of no more perfect rendering of an unlearned and trustful faith in God than this which Tennyson puts in the mouth of Enoch as he departs on the voyage from which he never returns to his wife:—

"If you fear,
Cast all your fears on God: that anchor holds.
Is He not yonder in those uttermost
Parts of the morning? if I flee to these,
Can I go from Him? And the sea is His,
The sea is His: He made it."

In the repetition in the last line one can almost hear the sob welling up from the heart of the strong sailor, as he speaks of God to one beloved, in time of trial,—the feeling of bitterness in parting starting with the impulse of the stronger faith.

In "Enoch Arden," as in "In Memoriam," Tennyson shows the sweet and sure sympathy which informs him of all the ways of grief. In its sacred experiences, where the slightest variance from the simplicity of actual feeling would jostle all, he holds his way unquestioned.

It is a test, unembarrassed and complete, of genius, this treatment of grief, the emotion which least of all brooks exaggeration or sentimentalism. It is the test of human purity, too, and the hand must be very tender and very clean which leaves thus exact and clear the picture of the crowning phase of human life. If "In Memoriam" has appropriated to itself, by its sublime supremacy, a phrase which, though in daily use, is never heard without suggesting the poem, Tennyson shows in "Enoch Arden" that he understands the sad and perfect reign of grief in the life of the sailor and of the sailor's wife struck with a great sorrow for the loss of the latest born, as well as in the broad and varied range of his own cultured nature.

Coupled with the knowledge of grief is this of prayer,—"that mystery when God in man is one with man-in-God,"—which is said when Enoch had resolved to surrender his Annie rather than to break in upon her happiness:—

"His resolve
Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore
Prayer, from a living source within the will,
And beating up through all the bitter world,
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,
Kept him a living soul."

And so we close the poem, which touches us again more than we deemed possible, till each renewal of the reading stirs again the depths of passionate sympathy. A pure manhood among the poets, a heart simple as the simplest, an imperial fancy, whose lofty supremacy none can question, a high faith, and a spirit possessed with the sublimest and most universal of Christ's truths, a tender and strong humanity, not bounded by a vague and misty sentiment, but pervading life in all its forms, and with these great skill and patience and beauty in expression,—these are the riper qualities to which "Enoch Arden" testifies. They are qualities whose attainment and retention are singularly rare, and whose value we cannot easily overrate.

And thus much having been said of "Enoch Arden," we find no space for consideration of the other poems contained in the new volume. "Aylmer's Field" is in some respects, perhaps, more remarkable than the poem which precedes it, since the poet never loses sight of England, in its course, nor the old familiar scenes, but tugs at the fetid roots of shallow aristocracy with the relentless clutch of one of God's noblemen laboring for the right.

Shut in these few pages we find the substance of a three-volume novel; and while the mind sways slowly to the music of its "sculptured lines," the lives of men move on from birth to death, leaving their meaning stamped in rhythmic beauty on our heart and brain.

Nor must we forget, while contemplating the two principal poems in the volume,—finished heroic lessons of the poet's mature life,—the songs, singing themselves like summer ripples on the strand, which are their melodious companions. Among them we dare to mention "In the Valley of Cauteretz,"—

"Sweeter thy voice, though every sound is sweet."

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