We come back again into the atmosphere of strong Bible influence when we name Alfred Tennyson.When Byron died, and the word came to his father's rectory at Somersby, young Alfred Tennyson felt that the sun had fallen from the heavens.He went out alone in the fields and carved in the sandstone, as though it were a monument: "Byron is dead." That was in the early stage of his poetical life.At first Carlyle could not abide Tennyson.He counted him only an echo of the past, with no sense for the future; but when he read Tennyson's "The Revenge," he exclaimed, "Eh, he's got the grip o' it"; and when Richard Monckton Milnes excused himself for not getting Tennyson a pension by saying his constituents had no use for poetry anyway, Carlyle said, "Richard Milnes, in the day of judgment when you are asked why you did not get that pension, you maylay the blame on your constituents, but it will be you who will be damned!" Dr.Henry van Dyke studied Tennyson to best effect at just this point.In his chapter on "The Bible in Tennyson" are many such sayings as these: "It is safe to say that there is no other book which has had so great an influence upon the literature of the world as the Bible.We hear the echoes of its speech everywhere, and the music of its familiar phrases haunts all the field and grove of our fine literature.At least one cause of his popularity is that there is so much Bible in Tennyson.We cannot help seeing that the poet owes a large debt to the Christian Scriptures, not only for their formative influence on his mind and for the purely literary material in the way of illustrations and allusions which they have given him, but also for the creation of a moral atmosphere, a medium of thought and feeling in which he can speak freely and with an assurance of sympathy to a very wide circle of readers."I need not stop to indicate the great poems in which Tennyson has so often used Scripture.The mind runs quickly to the little maid in "Guinevere," whose song, "Late, Late, so Late," is only a paraphrase of the parable of the foolish virgins."In Memoriam" came into the skeptical era of England, with its new challenge to faith, and stopped the drift of young men toward materialism.Recall the fine use he makes, in the heart of it, of the resurrection of Lazarus, and other Biblical scenes.Dr.van Dyke's "four hundred direct references to the Bible" do not exhaust the poems.No one can get Tennyson's style without the English Bible, and no one can read Tennyson intelligently without a fairly accurate knowledge of the Bible.
In this Victorian group the last name is Thackeray's.He is another whose mother trained him in the English Bible.The title of Vanity Fair is from Pilgrim's Progress, but the motto is from the Scripture; and he wrote his mother regarding the book: "What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase.)" It is certain his mother did not count it a cant phrase, for he learned it from the Scripture.The subtitle of his Adventures of Philip says he is to show who robbed him, who helped him, and who passed him by.Thackeray got those expressions from the Bible.Somewhere very early in any of his works hereveals the influence of his childhood and manhood knowledge of the English Bible.
All this about the Victorian group is meant to be very familiar to any who are fresh from the reading of literature.They are great names, and they have differences as wide as the poles; but they have this in common, that they have drunk lightly or deeply from the same fountain; they have drawn from it ideas, allusions, literary style.Each of them has weakened as he has gotten farther from it, and loyalty to it has strengthened any one of them.
Turn now to the American group of writers.If we except theological writers with Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, and their like, and political writers with Jefferson, Webster, and their like, the list need not be a long one.Only one writer in our narrower sense of literature must be named in the earlier day--Benjamin Franklin.In the period before the Civil War must be named Edgar Allan Poe (died 1849) and Washington Irving (died 1859).The Civil War group is the large one, and its names are those of the later group as well.Let them be alphabetical, for convenience: William Cullen Bryant, poet and critic; George William Curtis, essayist and editor; Emerson, our noblest name in the sphere of pure essay literature; Hawthorne, the novelist of conscience, as Socrates was its philosopher; Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose "two chief hatreds were orthodoxy in religion and heterodoxy in medicine"; James Russell Lowell, essayist and poet, apt to live by his essays rather than by his poetry; Longfellow, whose "Psalm of Life" and "Hiawatha" have lived through as much parody and ridicule as any two bits of literature extant, and have lived because they are predestined to live; Thoreau, whose Walden may show, as Lowell said, how much can be done on little capital, but which has the real literary tang to it; and Whittier, whose poetry is sung the world around.
