16. LETTER XVI.
The books and the music came safe to hand, dear
Doctor, but I trust we are not to stand upon quid-pro-quosities.
The barrel of buck wheat not only cost me
nothing, but I have had my uses of it in the raising, and
can no more look upon it as value, than upon a flower
which I pluck to smell, and give away when it is faded.
I have sold some of my crops for the oddity of the sensation;
and I assure you it is very much like being paid
for dancing when the ball is over. Why, consider the
offices this very buckwheat has performed. There was
the trust in Providence, in the purchase of the seed—
a sermon. There were the exercise and health in
ploughing, harrowing, and sowing—prescription and
pill. There was the performance of the grain, its
sprouting, its flowering, it earing, and its ripening—a
great deal more amusing than a play. Then there
were the harvesting, thrashing, fanning, and grinding—
a sort of pastoral collection, publication, and purgation
by criticism. Now, suppose your clergy man, your
physician, your favorite theatrical corps, your publisher,
printer, and critic, thrashed and sold in bags
for six shillings a bushel! I assure you the cases are
similar, except that the buckwheat makes probably
the more savory cake.
The new magazine was welcome; the more, that it
brought back to my own days of rash adventure in
such ticklish craft, with a pleasant sense of deliverance
from its risk and toil. The imprint of “No. I.,
Vol. I.,” reads to me like a bond of the unreserved
abandonment of time and soul. Truly, youth is wisely
provided with little forethought, and much hope.
What child would learn the alphabet if he could see
at a glance the toil that lies behind it? I look upon
the fresh type and read the sanguine prospectus of
this new-born monthly, and remember, with astonishment,
the thoughtlessness with which, years ago, I
launched in the same gay colors such a venture on
the wave. It is a voyage that requires plentiful stores,
much experience of the deeps and shallows of the
literary seas, and a hand at every halyard; yet, to
abandon my simile, I proposed to be publisher and
editor, critic and contributer; and I soon found that I
might as well have added reader to my manifold offices.
No one who has not tried this vocation can
have any idea of the difficulty of procuring the light,
yet condensed—the fragmented, yet finished—the
good-tempered and gentlemanly, yet high-seasoned
and dashing papers necessary to a periodical. A man
who can write them, can, in our country, put himself
to a more profitable use—and does. The best magazine
writer living, in my opinion, is Edward Everett;
and he governs a state with the same time and attention
which in England, perhaps, would be cramped
to contributing to a review. Calhoun might write
wonderfully fine articles. Legaré, of Charleston, has
the right talent, with the learning. Crittenden, of the
senate, I should think might have written the most
brilliant satirical papers. But these, and others like
them, are men the country and their own ambition
can not spare. There is a younger class of writers,
however; and though the greater number of these, too,
fill responsible stations in society, separate from general
literature, they might be induced, probably, were the
remuneration adequate, to lend their support to a
periodical “till the flower of their fame shall be more
blown,” Among them are Felton and Longfellow,
both professors at Cambridge; and Summer and Henry
Cleaveland, lawyers of Boston—a knot of writers
who sometimes don the cumbrous armor of the North
American Review, but who would show to more advantage
in the lighter harness of the monthlies. I
could name twenty more to any one interested to
know them, all valuable allies to a periodical; but no
literary man questions that. We have in our country
talent enough, if there were the skill and means to put
it judiciously together.
Coleridge and others have mourned over the age of
reviews, as the downfall and desecration of authorship;
but I am inclined to think authors gain more than they
lose by the facility of criticism. What chance has a
book on a shelf, waiting to be called for by the purchaser
uninformed of its merits, to one whose beauties
and defects have been canvassed by these Mercury-winged
messengers, volant and universal as the quickest
news of the hour? How slow and unsympathetic
must have been the progress of a reputation, when the
judicious admirer of a new book could but read and
put it by, expressing his delight, at farthest, to his
immediate friend or literary correspondent? The apprehensive
and honest readers of a book are never
many; but in our days, if it reach but one of these,
what is the common outlet of his enthusiasm? Why,
a trumpet-tongued review, that makes an entire people
partakers of his appreciation, in the wax and wane
of a single moon. Greedily as all men and women
devour books, ninety-nine in a hundred require them
to be first cut up, liable else, like children at their
meals, to swallow the wrong morsel. Yet, like children
still, when the good is pointed out, they digest it
as well as another, and so is diffused an understanding,
as well as prompt admiration of the author. For myself,
I am free to confess I am one of those who like
to take the first taste of an author in a good review. I
look upon the reviewer as a sensible friend, who came
before me to the feast, and recommends me the dish
that has most pleased him. There is a fellowship in
agreeing that it is good. I have often wished there
were a Washington among the critics—some one upon
whose judgment, freedom from paltry motives, generosity
and fairness, I could pin my faith blindly and
implicitly. Dilke, of the London Athenæum, is the
nearest approach to this character, and a good proof
of it is an order frequently given (a London publisher
informed me), by country gentlemen: “Send me everything
the Athenæum praises.” Though a man of
letters, Dilke is not an author, and, by the way, dear
Doctor, I think in that lies the best qualification, if not
the only chance for the impartiality of the critic.
How few authors are capable of praising a book by
which their own is thrown into shadow. “Why does
Plato never mention Zenophon? and why does Zenophon
inveigh against Plato?”
But I think there is less to fear from jealousy, than
from the want of sympathy between writers on different
subjects, or in different styles. D'Israeli the elder,
from whom I have just quoted, sounds the depth
of this matter with the very plummet of truth. “Every
man of genius has a manner of his own; a mode
of thinking and a habit of style; and usually decides
on a work as it approximates or varies from his own.
When one great author depreciates another, it has often
no worse source than his own taste. The witty
Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; the cold, classical
Boileau, the rough sublimity of Crebillon; the
refining Marivaux, the familiar Moliére. The deficient
sympathy in these men of genius, for modes of feeling
opposite to their own, was the real cause of their opinions;
and thus it happens that even superior genius is
so often liable to be unjust and false in its decisions.”
Apropos of English periodicals, we get them now
almost wet from the press, and they seem far off and
foreign no longer. But there is one (to me) melancholy
note in the Pæan with which the Great Western
was welcomed. In literature we are no longer a
distinct nation. The triumph of Atlantic steam navigation
has driven the smaller drop into the larger, and
London has become the centre. Farewell nationality!
The English language now marks the limits of a
new literary empire, and America is a suburb. Our
themes, our resources, the disappearing savage, and
the retiring wilderness, the free thought, and the action
as free, the spirit of daring innovation, and the irreverent
question of usage, the picturesque mixture
of many nations in an equal home, the feeling of expanse,
of unsubserviency, of distance from time-hallowed
authority and prejudice—all the elements which
were working gradually but gloriously together to
make us a nation by ourselves, have, in this approximation
of shores, either perished for our using, or
slipped within the clutch of England. What effect
the now near and jealous criticism of that country will
have upon our politics is a deeper question, but our
literature is subsidized at a blow. Hitherto we have
been to them a strange country; the few books that
reached them they criticised with complimentary jealousy,
or with the courtesy due to a stranger; while
our themes and our political structures were looked on
with the advantage of distance, undemeaned by acquaintance
with sources or familiarity with details.
While all our material is thrown open to English authors,
we gain nothing in exchange, for, with the instinct
of descendants, we have continued to look back
to our fathers, and our conversance with the wells of
English literature was as complete as their own.
The young American author is the principal sufferer
by the change. Imagine an actor compelled to
make a début without rehearsal and you get a faint
shadow of what he has lost. It was some advantage,
let me tell you, dear Doctor, to have run the gauntlet
of criticism in America before being heard of in
England. When Irving and Cooper first appeared as
authors abroad, they sprung to sight like Minerva, full-grown.
They had seen themselves in print, had reflected
and improved upon private and public criticism,
and were made aware of their faults before they were
irrecoverably committed on this higher theatre. Keats
died of a rebuke to his puerilities, which, had it been
administered here, would have been borne up against
with the hope of higher appeal and new effort. He
might have been the son of an American apothecary,
and never be told by an English critic to “return to
his gallipots.” The Atlantic was, hitherto, a friendly
Lethe, in which the sins of youth (so heavily and unjustly
visitited on aspirants to fame), were washed out
and forgotten. The American “licked into shape”
by the efficient tongues of envy and jealousy at home,
stepped ashore in England, wary and guarded against
himself and others. The book by which he made
himself known, might have been the successful effort
after twenty failures, and it met with the indulgence
of a first. The cloud of his failures, the remembrance
of his degradations by ridicule were left behind.
His practised skill was measured by other's beginnings.
We suffer, too, in our social position, in England.
We have sunk from the stranger to the suburban or
provincial. In a year or two every feature and detail
of our country will be as well known to English society
as those of Margate and Brighton. Our similarity
to themselves in most things will not add to their
respect for us. We shall have the second place accorded
to the indigenous society of well-known places
of resort or travel, and to be an American will be
in England like being a Maltese or an East Indian—
every way inferior, in short, to a metropolitan in London.
You see, my dear Doctor, how I make my correspondence
with you serve as a trap for my stray
thoughts; and you will say, that in this letter I have
caught some that might as well have escaped. But
as the immortal Jack “turned” even “diseases to
commodity,” and as “la superiorité est une infirmité
sociale,” perhaps you will tolerate my dulness, or consider
it a polite avoidance of your envy. Write me
better or worse, however, and I will shape a welcome
to it.
