University of Virginia Library

A Mixed Bag from the Bookman of New York
by
Arthur Sherbo

The editors of the Literary History of the United States write that "One of the most distinguished literary and critical journals during the first quarter of the twentieth century was the Bookman (1895-1933)."[1] In A History of American Magazines, Frank Luther Mott devotes ten pages to his account of the Bookman; I quote the one sentence pertinent to this article: "There were some articles in these early years by English critics—Clement K. Shorter, George Saintsbury, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang—and much attention to British books and writers."[2] Despite the articles by the English critics named and by others not named, and despite the great attention to British books and other writers, a great deal of the matter pertaining to these writers and their works, or writings about them, lies buried and forgotten. I intend to resurrect some of this forgotten matter, confessing at the same time that I have not exhausted all the possibilities offered in these volumes. I should add that I have also gleaned some Henry James items that will appear in The Henry James Review. And while my primary concern is with matters British, I reprint poems by John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant and letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ellen Glasgow, all also forgotten. As with others of my forays in the periodicals, I offer but little comment and proceed seriatim.

The first number of the Bookman (February 1895) contained an item with the title "From an Unpublished French Essay of Charlotte Brontë" (pp. 30-32) with the following headnote: "We are enabled to give the following extracts from an essay written by Charlotte Brontë, in French, on The Death of Moses. The essay, an exercise given her by M. Héger during her stay in Brussels, has not hitherto been published. After telling how Moses at the end of his life received the command of God to climb Mount Nebo, and how he blessed one by one the twelve tribes, the narrative proceeds:—" (1:30). One long paragraph in French is quoted, followed by this interpolation: "There comes an excursion into biblical criticism. Are we to interpret the narrative literally, and believe Moses to have been actually face to face with God, or as an allegory? Her answer is decisive," i.e. the account is not an allegory. The rest of the French is quoted and then there is an English "Translation of the Extracts." What is of more interest than the "unpublished French essay" is the light it throws on the regime in the Maison d' Èducation Pour

les Jeunes Demoiselles sous la direction de Madame Heger-Parent, Rue d' Isabelle à Bruxelles where Charlotte and Emily were enrolled in 1842 and where Charlotte fell in love with Constantin Heger, Madame Heger's husband.[3] There is one other work by Charlotte which attests to her fluency in French, a translation into English verse of the first book of Voltaire's Henriade.[4]

The fairly recent (1983) Twayne Publishers' George du Maurier, written by Richard Kelly, does not list Shirley Brooks, editor of Punch, in the index, nor any others named in the following letter, except for a passing reference to William Frith. The letter has du Maurier's sketch of Calderon, Destouches, and himself on the third page. All three originals are on one page of the November 1896 number.

Leonée Ormond, in her definitive biography, George du Maurier (4:183) (1969), lists Calderon and Frith in her index, but not Destouches, Bellew, and the Cuddleips. The letter to Brooks may be dated August 1867, Ormond describing the Ramsgate holiday as of that date (pp. 191-192). There are four letters from Brooks to du Maurier quoted in George S. Layard, Shirley Brooks of Punch. His Life, Letters, and Diaries (1907); none from du Maurier to Brooks. Du Maurier had illustrated some of Brooks's works, the "Nursery Rhymes" in Punch being among those. I could not discover who the Cuddleips were. Should not a future biographer identify them?

James C. Johnson of Langley, Fairfax County, Virginia, wrote to the Bookman to make known that he had in his possession "the manuscript of a poem written by Thomas Moore during his visit to this country, which has never been published." Moore was hospitably treated by William Wischam, "a prominent figure in the State capitol of Virginia," and wrote the verses in Wischam's house. Johnson received the manuscript "from a grandchild of Mr. Wischam." He provided a facsimile of the manuscript and concluded his headnote by stating that the poem was now printed for the first time. The text of the facsimile is faithfully reprinted in the July 1898 number, and I have not found any subsequent printing of the poem.

Nine poems in the known canon of Moore's poems begin with the word "Yes." The account of Moore's visit to Virginia in 1803 in Terence de Vere White's Tom Moore, The Irish Poet (1977) makes no mention of the Wischams or, of course, of these verses. Indeed, his account (pp. 40-41) does not gibe with Moore's poem or with Johnson's headnote which contains a reference to the cold reception accorded Moore in Norfolk.

The next two pieces are letters by Robert Browning and by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first, in the June 1899 number, is reprinted from Moscheles's Fragments 1899 (pp. 217-218) and has escaped the notice of Browning scholars, despite the fact that Moscheles, a very well-known portrait painter, had painted a portrait of Browning. I quote the headnote as well as the letter.

Since Moscheles went to the United States in 1883, the date of Browning's letter should be 1883. Mrs. Browning's letter to Cornelius Matthews, editor of Graham's Illustrated Magazine, is one of a number of manuscript letters in the collection of William Harris Arnold, bibliophile and writer on bibliography. Mrs. Browning's letter, writes the editor of the Bookman in the April 1901 issue, "is of especial interest, as in it she expresses her great admiration for Tennyson. It is believed to be unpublished."

Mrs. Browning wrote at least three other letters to Matthews, on August 28, 1843, and on October 1 and November 14, 1844.[6] The reference to Leigh Hunt's collected poems "republished by Moxon" makes it possible to date the letter in the Bookman as sometime in 1844, the year Edward Moxon republished Hunt's Poetical Works.

While there is much material for literary biographers in the pages of the Bookman—interviews, letters to periodicals, reminiscences—I have limited myself to extracts from two pages (326-327) on Wilkie Collins from the December 1901 number.

An extract from Mrs. Logan's account then follows:

Biographies of Collins would have been enriched by these reminiscences of Mrs. Logan's, actress and writer and lecturer on the theater. While Balzac is quite properly mentioned as Collins's hero, and Victor Hugo, another French writer whom Collins admired greatly, is also accorded mention, there is nothing in the biographies about Zola and Sterne. Collins's views of the dullness of Daudet's novels and the excellence of The Vicar of Wakefield are corroborated in Kenneth Robinson's Wilkie Collins: A Biography (1952), pp. 289 and 293-294. And then, of course, of much greater importance than these critical opinions, is Wilkie Collins on his methods of composing fiction.

One article in the October 1903 Bookman bears the eye-catching title "Confessions of a Literary Quill-Driver." The piece is an autobiographical sketch by Eugene Lemoine Didier (1838-1913), author, publisher, critic, bibliophile, and editor. Didier, not one to hide his light under a bushel, made the most of the occasion, being afforded some fourteen long columns of the periodical (pp. 135-142). What is germane, however, is the answer Oliver Wendell Holmes gave to Didier's youthful letter, "telling him [Holmes] with easy assurance, that I was well-fitted by my tastes, education and accomplishments —(I was a college-bred shorthand writer with literary aspirations) for the

position of amanuensis to a literary man, and suggested that, perhaps, he might require my services; but, if he did not, would he be so kind as to recommend me to some one who did; also to use his influence to open a way for me to some good magazine that paid well," adding that he "did not expect to be treated with cold indifference, but with kindness and sympathy" (p. 135). He had the good grace to characterize Holmes's answer as "very kind." Holmes wrote,

"As the good Doctor did not suggest the probability of getting an opening for me in any 'magazine that paid well,'" wrote Didier, quoting himself, "as I had requested him to do, I had to do the best I could for myself, which was what others have done before and since" (p. 136). He concluded his article by listing the periodical articles he had written and the sums he had earned for each ((pp. 141-142).

The August 1904 Bookman posed a number of questions to authors and to illustrators "about the value of illustrating novels" as "illustrators have in many cases been severely criticized because they do not seem to have read the text of the stories which they illustrate, and in consequence have made some queer 'breaks'" (p. 348). One of the authors asked to reply to the four questions posed to them was Ellen Glasgow. Her answer was brief and to the point, briefer than the answers of Winston Churchill, George Barr McCutcheon, Josephine Daskam Bacon, and Nancy Huston Banks:

Resurrection is, of course, the novel by Tolstoi, a writer for whose works Miss Glasgow had the highest admiration. E. Stanley Godbold, Jr. writes that "before 1900 she [Miss Glasgow] discovered Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book she quickly decided was the greatest novel ever written."[7] An illustrated edition of Resurrection was published by T. Y. Crowell of New York in 1899. I have not seen a copy.

The Complete Verse of Hilaire Belloc (1970) includes a poem simply titled "The Author" (pp. 224-226), which, bare of any comment, loses the cream of the jest. Part of a disparaging discussion of the American Who's Who in the July 1904 Bookman is the following, necessary for an appreciation of the joke.

The poem follows, the text the same as that in the Complete Verse, but with marginal notations imitating the various sections of a typical Who's Who entry. Thus, the fifth stanza is labelled "Parentage"; the sixth, seventh and eighth, "Education"; the ninth, "Clubs"; the tenth, "Career"; the eleventh, "Occupation"; the twelfth, "Works"; and the last, "Recreations, etc." Only now can the poem be enjoyed as it was meant to be.

Walter Jerrold, who wrote on and edited much English literature (some fourteen columns in NUC), including literature of the eighteenth century, offered "A New Found Poem of Oliver Goldsmith's" to the editors of the Bookman who reprinted it in the November 1914 number. The article is not listed in the bibliography of secondary works on Goldsmith; the poem, Goldsmith's

or not, was either not known to Arthur Friedman, editor of Goldsmith's works, or rejected by him. I quote Jerrold's explanatory paragraph, the poem, and Jerrold's concluding remarks.

The following lines have been found in an old close-packed scrap-book. This scrap-book—the completion of which is noted as having been made on November 21, 1812—consists of an extraordinary medley of three or four thousand cuttings from newspapers and magazines of the preceding sixty or seventy years, but the Goldsmith item has no indication of the place or date of its appearance. It runs as follows:

While there can be no certainty about the authorship of the poem, comparison with works, both poetry and prose, of the accepted canon make it highly probable that the poem is Goldsmith's. His views on luxury were somewhat ambiguous, but not in The Deserted Village, where he fiercely inveighed against it. In Verses, lines 19-36 paint the grimmest picture of luxury which, as in The Deserted Village, forces peasants to emigrate. Lines 37-42, condemnatory of Refinement, echo Goldsmith's views, as recourse to the index in volume five of Arthur Friedman's edition of Goldsmith's works clearly demonstrates. The following portion of the Verses, those on Simplicity (ll. 43-50), stress, as does Goldsmith in other works, the difference between it and Refinement. Indeed, the movement from refinement to simplicity is seen in the twenty-fifth letter of The Citizen of the World: "the inhabitants of the country, from primitive simplicity soon began to aim at elegance, and from elegance proceeded to refinement." The opening sentence of "The History of Carolan, the last Irish Bard" reads, "There can be perhaps no greater entertainment than to compare the rude Celtic simplicity with modern refinement" (Works, II. 105 and III. 118). Line 45 of Verses, "Do thou [Simplicity] and Nature still direct my way," is close to words in one of Goldsmith's Prefaces, "it finds nature in almost every instance acting with her usual simplicity" (Works, V. 231). The praise of the rigors of a northern existence (hard primitivism) of the last 18 lines of Verses finds its counterpart in lines 165-198 of The Traveller. Line 55 of Verses, "Where no choice stores the steril lands afford," is close to line 169 of The Traveller, "No product here the barren hills afford."

Much of the diction in the Verses, or what I have termed poetic diction, with all its perjorative connotation, is common to scores, even hundreds, of eighteenth-century poets and poetasters and cannot, therefore, be offered in evidence. The absence of some of the words in the Verses, among them "enervate," "emulate," "dissipated," "whelming," "trackless," from the canon of Goldsmith's poetry, while it should be mentioned, is of no real significance. The poetic canon is slight, some 2700 lines (about the number of lines in the first three Books of Paradise Lost). And a reading of Goldsmith's prose reveals his use of most of those words.[8]

Finally, for I arbitrarily limited myself to the first fifty volumes of the periodical, here are the unpublished poems by John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant in the February 1917 number. The title of the article in which they appear is "A Literary Discovery. Unpublished Poems by Bryant, Whittier, Holmes and Gerrit Smith." The author, Charles T. White, wrote much on Lincoln, and his Bookman piece is listed in the NUC by virtue of the fact that one copy is enclosed in a slipcase in the Stanford University Library. As the poems are not in the collected poems of Whittier or Bryant,

I reprint them now with a brief extract from White's explanatory headnote.

A relative of John Pierpont submitted "unpublished poems by William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Gerrit Smith sent to John Pierpont, poet, Unitarian clergyman, anti-slavery and temperance reformer, on his eightieth birthday anniversary, April 6, 1865, in the city of Washington."

As a boy Whittier read Pierpont's Airs of Palestine; later he wished to see Pierpont run for governor of Massachusetts and for Congress; he wrote an earlier poem, "To J.P.," in 1883; and he was asked by Pierpont's widow to write her husband's biography.[9] Charles H. Brown's William Cullen Bryant (1971) does not mentoin Pierpont.

While it is admittedly anticlimactic, bibliographers, among them those of the old and new CBEL, would have done well to have included a number of articles in the Bookman. I list a very few: Chesterton on Matthew Arnold (16:116, 374), J.W. Hammerton on Barrie (6:116-123); Arthur Symons on Austin Dobson's poems (5:195), Arthur Waugh on Edmund Gosse (4:205-208), Edith Warton on Stephen Phillips's Ulysses (15:168-170); W.J. Dawson on Robert Louis Stevenson (4:35-39)—six among hundreds.

Notes