University of Virginia Library

Search this document 


  

expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
collapse section 
Last Gleanings From The Critic: Clemens, Whitman, Hardy, Thackeray, and Others by Arthur Sherbo
 1. 
 2. 
 3. 
 4. 
 5. 
 6. 
 7. 
 8. 
 9. 
 10. 
 11. 
 12. 
 13. 
 14. 
  
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 

expand section 

212

Page 212

Last Gleanings From The Critic: Clemens, Whitman, Hardy, Thackeray, and Others
by
Arthur Sherbo

One of the subtitles of The Critic, a literary periodical published in New York from 1881 until its merger with Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1906, was A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, Music and The Drama. The magazine's wide purview naturally led it to pay special attention to contemporary literary figures; the resulting riches are now available for researchers who have the patience to glean. With this article I close my own series of investigations;[1] I meanwhile suggest to others with various interests that it will repay further study.

In what follows I offer hitherto unrecorded materials by and about both American and English writers. Unless otherwise stated, the pieces quoted are not, to the best of my knowledge, in the standard editions of these authors. With volume 4 the periodical began a new series; my references cite the concurrent numbering according to the old series.

I
Samuel L. Clemens.

The Critic of November 28, 1885 (vol. 7) had featured a celebration of Clemens's "Semi-Centennial" with tributes from Oliver Wendell Holmes (a poem), Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris (letters). Clemens responded on December 5 (p. 271):

My Dear Conspirators:

—It was the pleasantest surprise I have ever had, and you have my best thanks. It reconciles me to being fifty years old; and it was for you to invent the miracle that could do that—I could never have invented one myself that could do it. May you live to be fifty yourselves, and find a fellow-benefactor in that hour of awful need.

Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens Hartford, Nov. 20, 1885

The following issue (Dec. 12, p. 283) quoted from an undated letter of Clemens on the same topic to an unnamed correspondent:

Every mail brings me letters from people who seem glad I'm fifty years old. I do not see what I have done to have so many enemies. I have never congratulated a person

213

Page 213
for being fifty years of age. It is true I have shot at people in the dark when I have had something unusual against them, but I have drawn the line there.

Another reference is of value for establishing the first printing and early text of a Clemens poem. Arthur L. Scott has reprinted Twain's verses "Contract With Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895," which he describes as "First printed in Munsey's Magazine, October, 1895."[2] But two months before that "The Lounger" column of The Critic (27 [Aug. 3, 1895], 79) quotes a "current paragraph" for the text of the verses and the circumstances that gave them rise. As not many readers will have ready access to The Critic and/or the verses themselves, I quote the whole entry:

A current paragraph reports Mrs. Thomas K. Beecher as having concluded a conversation on immortality, in which Mark Twain had "taken the agnostic side," by asking him whether he would confess his error, if he should meet her in Heaven a million years hence. Mark promised that he would, and sealed the promise by writing appropriate stanzas on three stones found on the banks of the Chemung River, the three stones being fragments of what once was a single rock. The "contract" is dated Elmira, N. Y., 2 July 1895; and here are the terms of it:—

"If you prove right and I prove wrong,
A million years from now,
In language plain and frank and strong,
My error I'll avow.
(To your dear mocking face)."
"If I prove right, by God His grace,
Full sorry I shall be,
For in that solitude no trace
There'll be of you and me,
(Nor of our vanished race)."
"A million years, O patient stone!
You've waited for this message.
Deliver it a million years—
Survivor pays expressage."

In line 5 of Scott's version, the word "mocking" has been changed to the possibly puzzling "waking." In line 11, "years" becomes "hence." Scott notes only that the poem was "Written on three leaves of stone"; the circumstances and details in The Critic make its origin more understandable.

A final reference (31 [July 3, 1897], 8) reprints a letter of Clemens in response to a benefit fund that had been established for him.

Mark Twain lost a fine opportunity to add to his reputation as a humorist in his letter declining the Hearld's fund for his benefit, after first having accepted it. His letter is one to make his many friends weep rather than smile. Here it is:—

"To the Editor of the Herald:—

"I made no revelation to my family of your generous undertaking in my behalf and for my relief from debt, and in that I was wrong. Now that they know all about the matter they contend I have no right to allow my friends to help me while my health is good and my ability to work remains, that it is not fair to my friends and


214

Page 214
not justifiable, and that it will be time enough to accept help when it shall be proven that I am no longer able to work. I am persuaded that they are right. While they are grateful for what you have done and for the kindly instinct which prompted you, it is urgent that the contributions be returned to the givers with their thanks and mine. I yield to their desire and forward their request and my indorsement of it to you. I was glad when you initiated that movement, for I was tired of the fact and worry of debt, but I recognize that it is not permissible for a man whose case is not hopeless to shift his burdens to other men's shoulders.

"London, 19 June 1897.
S. L. Clemens."

In his biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966) Justin Kaplan describes this project of the New York Herald (p. 349), but he does not mention Clemens's letter to the newspaper.

Walt Whitman.

The October 13, 1888, issue of The Critic (vol. 13) had published Edmund Gosse's provocative essay "Has America Produced a Poet?" Among those who responded in the November 24 number were John Greenleaf Whittier, John Burroughs, Julian Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Dudley Warner, and Walt Whitman, whom Gosse had met three years earlier, in 1885. (Gay Wilson Allen, who described the meeting in The Solitary Singer [1960; pp. 520-522], evidently did not know of Whitman's letter in response to the essay.) Whitman's letter (p. 521) was prefaced by editorial comment:

Walt Whitman's views are, naturally, more radical than those of any other contributor to the discussion:
Briefly to answer impromptu your request of Oct: 19—to answer the question whether I think any American poet not now living deserves a place among the thirteen "English inheritors of unassailed renown" (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats,)—and which American poets would be truly worthy, &c. Though to me the deep of the matter goes down, down beneath. I remember the London Times at the time, in opportune, profound and friendly articles on Bryant's and Longfellow's deaths, spoke of the embarrassment, warping effect, and confusion on America (her poets and poetic students) "coming in possession of a great estate they had never lifted a hand to form or earn"; and the further contingency of "the English language ever having annexed to it a lot of first-class Poetry that would be American, not European"—proving then something precious over all, and beyond valuation. But perhaps that is venturing outside the question. Of the thirteen British immortals mentioned—after placing Shakspere on a sort of preëminence of fame not to be invaded yet—the names of Bryant, Emerson, Whittier and Longfellow (with even added names, sometimes Southerners, sometimes Western or other writers of only one or two pieces,) deserve in my opinion an equally high niche of renown as belongs to any on the baker's dozen of that glorious list.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Holmes is represented first by a letter of literary comments to Joseph Gilder, one of the editors of The Critic (21 [Sept. 10, 1892], 134):

The following personal letter, written in answer to a question, is printed by permission of the writer:—

Beverly Farms, Mass., Aug. 28th, 1892.
My dear Mr. Gilder:—

I have been interviewed already and got off as cheaply as I could, for it has become rather monotonous answering birthday questions—a little too much like 'What


215

Page 215
is your name? N. or M.', if I remember the Church Catechism correctly, as I used to see a stray copy of it now and then, in my boyhood, wondering what 'M. or N.' stood for.

I have received two poems in advance, and my dear and honored friend Whittier, whose heart is a cornucopia of blessings for his fellow-creatures, has remembered me in the pages of The Atlantic, where we have found ourselves side by side for so many years. Long may the sands of his life keep running, for they come from the bed of Pactolus.

I shall very probably have a few visitors to-morrow with whom I shall interchange kindly words, but I have really no news of myself which can interest.

------

Sept. 1.

Here I was interrupted, and from that moment I have been in a perfect storm of letters, poems, flowers, fruits, gifts of various kinds; one of them a silver-framed chambered Nautilus from a Chicago lady—an exquisite piece of work, fit for a young prince's heir-loom rather than an old poet's.

I have forgotten almost everything in the crowd and crush of these pleasant interruptions. But I must not forget to thank you for your kind remembrance, for which I am truly grateful, only regretting that I cannot reach all the kind and generous friends who have sent their cheering remembrances to one whose most notable virtue is that he is the survivor of so many of his betters.

------

Another interruption, and ah! how sad a one. A reporter calls at my door and tells me that George William Curtis died this morning. His death eclipses the cheerfulness of a great reading public. He has not left a sweeter nature or a fairer record behind him. The lovable quality of his bright intelligence showed in his features, in his voice, in every line he wrote. No American writer came so near taking the place of Washington Irving in the affections of his countrymen, no one has been more generally missed and lamented than he will be. Peace to his gentle memory! This is a day of mourning to all who love what is purest and best in letters and civilization.

Believe me, dear Mr. Gilder,
Faithfully yours,
O. W. Holmes.

Two years later a correspondent provided another letter (25 [Oct. 27, 1894], 273): To the Editors of The Critic:—

Boston, Oct. 15, 1894.

Since the following letter was written, I have enjoyed many a conversation with the genial Autocrat, but then I knew him only through his writings. It so aptly illustrates the uniform courtesy of the man as a man that I add it to The Critic's repertoire of tributes. The "magnifier" was a choice little magnifying-glass, set in solid silver, marked "O. W. H."

W. C. W.

"296 Beacon Street, July 9, 1872.
"My Dear Sir:—

"I am particularly obliged to you for returning my little magnifier with such promptness that I had not even time to miss it. I shall always value it more hereafter for having passed through the hands of a finder who proved not only honest but courteous. There may be a hundred or more honest men in Boston, but there are not many who would be so attentive.

"I hope you blessed my instrument of research, as the Pope blesses a coin or a medal—at any rate you have conferred new value upon it. The bread that was cast upon the waters was to return "after many days," but my little estray cannot have been wandering from the pocket where it belongs many hours.


216

Page 216

"I truly wish I could lose something every day, if I were sure to have it so swiftly returned with a pleasant word for the owner to make him contented with himself and grateful to the friend who restores the lost possession.

"Very truly and especially yours,
"To Rev. W. C. Winslow, Boston.
O. W. Holmes."

I have found no reference to this little incident in the biographies of Holmes. Is it generally known that he used a "magnifier"?

William Dean Howells.

Among those writing letters on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of Leo Tolstoy were Edmund C. Stedman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Howells (his published in 33 [Oct. 1898], 288). Howells's letter, dated August 21, 1898, from York Harbor, Maine, is listed in the Bibliography of his works by William M. Gibson and George Arms (1948; p. 127) and was reprinted in part in the Bookman of New York in October 1898 (8: 107). It is not, however, one of the Selected Letters of the sixvolume Twayne edition. The passage included in the Bookman is the third of four paragraphs of the letter printed in The Critic, which I quote in its entirety.

York Harbor, Maine, August 21, 1898.

I am sorry that I shall not be able to join with his other friends in keeping the seventieth birthday of Leo Tolstoy. His writings and his life have meant more to me than any other man's; and if I could be with you I should try to express my deep sense of the import of his philosophy to such an age as this, and to a people who have been the latest, as I wish they might be the last, to make war.

It seems to me that Tolstoy's greatest word is peace; and in this as in everything he appeals to the intellectual and spiritual reality within the official and social simulacrum which hides each of us from the others. It has been his mission to give men a bad conscience, to alarm them and distress them in the opinions and conventions in which they rested so comfortably. He repeats to us the divinely simple truth which the good and wise have known from the beginning, in terms which the most modern intelligence cannot refuse as trite. He arrives at a moment of civilization when no one any longer contends that the evils which war sums up in itself are justifiable apart from it, and he asks us to refrain from them by refraining from war, which makes imperative things essentially and immutably wrong.

Tolstoy's literature, his matchless art, his fiction, which makes all other appear so feeble and false, is merely the flower of his love of men, his desire to be true to them. All that he has written, so far as I know it, is of one effect with all that he has been since he came to his moral consciousness. I cannot separate his aesthetics from his ethics, for he has himself known no difference in them. But it seems to me that in his fiction he works more instinctively and vitally, and I believe that in this he will work longest. As a teacher he has put in contemporaneous terms the wisdom which has always been in the world for the conduct of men; but as an artist he has divined things concerning their nature and character in mystical heights and depths unreached before, and has portrayed life with an unexampled truth and fullness.

Such a man was sure to come when he was needed most; and in order that he should perform his office to the generation to which he was sent it was not necessary that his own life should be perfect, or his whole doctrine unerring. One perfect life and one unerring doctrine we had already, and it is praise enough for Tolstoy to say that he teaches these with all his heart and all his mind; and however he falters or wanders, he worships them by a constant endeavor for their goodness and beauty.

James Fenimore Cooper.

In James Fenimore Cooper (1949), James Grossman devoted some four pages to the relationship of Cooper and Edward


217

Page 217
("Ned") Meyers (pp. 183-186). A letter from Cooper in The Critic (37 [Sept. 1900], 200) amplifies that account.

Mr. E. R. Mason, of Binghamton, N.Y., has kindly placed the following letter at our disposal:

Hall, Cooperstown, Jan. 12, 1850.
Dear Sir:

During the last session, a law granting a pension to Edward Myers. passed to Hou. Rep., but was not taken up in the Senate. Myers was the old seaman whose life and services I have recorded in "Ned Myers." I feel quite confident of the justice of his claims, having the facts from eye-witnesses, as well as from his commander, the late Comm. Chauncey. There is no doubt that his energy, coolness, and skill were the principal means of saving some ten or twelve lives, the night he received the hurt for which the pension is asked.

Alas! Poor Myers can now never be benefited by the grant. He died of dropsy a few weeks since, leaving a widow and several children. The arrears of this pension is all he had to bequeath. He made a will leaving everything to his wife during her life, and then to the children.

I do not know whether the law will have to be taken up again in the House, but I suppose a claim once looked into, and in-so-much granted, will be regarded as sacred. May I ask your good offices in this matter. It is for a widow and orphans that the grant will now be made.

It might interest them were this letter shown to Messrs. Calhoun, Cass, Seward, Cooper, and others of the Senate. I think I can safely say that the claimant well deserved all his family will get, and more too.

I remain very truly
Yours,
J. Fenimore Cooper.
D.S. Dickinson, Esquire,
U. S. Senate.

James Russell Lowell to Edgar Allen Poe.

According to M. A. DeWolfe Howe, James Russell Lowell wrote to George Woodberry on March 12, 1884, that "[I saw Poe only once] and that must have been, I think, in 1843 when I was in New York sitting to Page for my portrait."[3] Whatever the date of the meeting, it is known that in 1843 Lowell wrote at least four letters on various literary matters to Poe. A letter of September 27, 1844, was printed in Richard Henry Stoddard's Recollections Personal and Literary, ed. Ripley Hitchcock (1903; pp. 101-102). The Critic (42 [April 1903], 319) prints a facsimile of this letter, revealing a phrase not present in Stoddard's text. Referring to his biography of Poe that he will send Poe, Lowell says, "It is not half so good as it ought to be."

II
Thomas Hardy.

In its issue of July 9, 1892, The Critic had begun its review of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by noting that the American edition lacked Hardy's preface (pp. 13-14). Hardy responded with a letter in the issue of September 10, 1892 (21: 134):


218

Page 218

Max Gate, Dorchester, Aug. 26th, 1892.
To the Editors of The Critic:—

A complaint has reached me from your pages to the effect that even in the revised and enlarged American edition of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles' I have thought fit to suppress the explanatory preface which appears in all the English editions.

I find it to be quite true that the preface is omitted; but you will perhaps allow me to assure your readers that such omission was not intentional on my part, but arose from circumstances of publication over which I had no control at the time.

I am now taking measures to attach to the American edition both the original preface and a new preface which is in preparation for the fifth English edition.

I may add in this connection that the necessity for (at least) simultaneous publication in America of English books, to secure copyright, renders it almost impossible that the latest addenda of an author should be incorporated in the foreign imprint. Could even a fortnight's grace be allowed, final touches, given just before going to press on this side, would not be excluded from American copies as they now are in so many cases.

Yours faithfully,
Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Carlyle on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The June 13, 1891, number of The Critic (18: 318) conveys Carlyle's views on the "rural hermitship" that some followers of Emerson's ideas had adopted.

—In a recent London sale was a letter from Carlyle on a lecture by Emerson that had been sent him, in which he says:—
Thanks for your gift of Emerson's lecture. Mr. Ballantyne had already sent me two copies; that was my first sight of the performance. It is an excellent discourse, greatly wanted on both sides of the Atlantic, and cannot be too widely circulated. Probably you are not aware that in New England a certain set of persons, grounding themselves on these ideas of Emerson's, are already about renouncing this miserable humbug of a world altogether, and retiring into the rural wilderness, to live there exclusively upon vegetables raised by their own digging. Three hours' daily work they say will produce a man sufficient vegetables, and he can live there according to his own mind, leaving the world to live according to its. An American was here lately, as an express missionary of all that, working for recruits, for proselytes; naturally finding none. I was obliged to express my total, deep, irreclaimable dissent from the whole vegetable concern, not without great offense to the missionary, and that, perhaps, is the reason why he sent me no American copy of this lecture. Emerson does not yet go into vegetables, into rural hermitship; and we hope never will.
Thomas Ballantyne (whose name does not appear in the index of the Duke University edition of Carlyle's letters) was a friend of Carlyle's who wrote a memoir of him and edited some of his writings. Emersonians may be able to suggest a date for Carlyle's letter.

William Makepeace Thackeray.

On September 17, 1892, The Critic (21: 150) reprinted a letter from Anne Ritchie's "Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs, VIII," MacMillan's Magazine, 66 (Sept. 1892), 349-349, in which Thackeray praised Carlyle's work.

Thackeray was a great admirer of Carlyle. In a letter to his mother, written in 1839, he says:—"I wish you could get Carlyle's miscellaneous criticisms. I have read a little in the book. A nobler one does not live in our language, I am sure, and one that will have such an effect on our ways of thought and prejudices. Criticism has been a party matter with us till now, and literature is a poor political lacquey. Please

219

Page 219
God we shall begin, ere long, to love art for art's sake. It is Carlyle who has worked more than any other to give it its independence."

A month later (21 [Oct. 15, 1892], 212) "The Lounger" column reported that "In a letter to Dr. Henry Van Dyke some time in 1889 he [Thackeray] said:—'I think it wisest in a man to do his work in the world as quickly and as well as he can, without much heeding the praise and dispraise.'"

Charles Reade.

In his column titled "Boston Letter," the miscellaneous writer William Henry Rideing quoted some letters of Reade (12 [Feb. 11, 1888], 68). Reade had gone to Cannes in early September 1883 and returned to London late in February, 1884, where he died on Good Friday, April 11. Rideing thought that presentation of the letters was timely because they mention a posthumous work on "Biblical Character" announced for publication in London.

'The subject is old,' he writes in one letter,
The subject is old, but it is as good as new and better; because up to this date the treatment of such subjects by French, German and English writers has been all a mistake and a truly wonderful one. I cannot in the compass of a single letter explain the many vital blunders in their treatment. I must confine myself to saying that it is so; and that everybody will see it when my manuscripts are printed. I have already written a short preliminary discourse, and described two Bible characters who pass for small Bible characters only because the divines who have handled them have literally no insight into character whatever.
In the same letter he complains of the Canadian publishers.
The Canadian publishers are a thorn in the side of American publishers: they do you harm in all manner of ways; they are ungrateful knaves. . . . In spite of bronchitis and some strange disorder in the intestines, I am fulfilling an engagement to write a serial story in Harper's Weekly and I hope to publish it in a month, but I do not think I shall ever again undertake to write a story of that length. After all, condensation is a fine thing, and perhaps a story long enough to excite an interest and paint characters vividly, a story in which there is no conversation but only dialogue which rapidly advances the progress of the action, is more likely to be immortal than those more expanded themes which betray us nto diffuseness.
In another letter he maintained the impossibility of writing a good story without making love the foundation of it.
The truth is that Fiction is a more severe mistress than people think. An imaginative writer often begins his career with subjects independent of sexual love, but his readers, and especially his female readers, soon show him that they won't stand it, and so they drag him out of the by-paths of invention and force him into the turnpike road, until at last their habit becomes his, and I suppose his mind accepts the groove.
These letters were written from Cannes, and each complained of his sufferings. A week or two after the date of the last he returned to London and died in the little house at Shepherd's Bush, which he took after leaving 'Naboth's Vineyard' in Knights-bridge.

Arthur Conan Doyle.

In The Critic of December 21, 1893, Conan Doyle wrote asking a favor (23: 362):

I have seen reviews in American papers of a collection of stories under my name, entitled 'My Friend the Murderer.' Would you have the goodness to allow me to state in your columns that the book is published without any sanction of mine, and

220

Page 220
that the tales in it were written many years ago, and were meant to have the ephemeral life they deserve? It is a matter of very little interest to anyone else no doubt, but it is slightly annoying to an author when work which he has deliberately repressed is resuscitated against his wish.
Reform Club, London, 13 Nov. 1893.
The publishers of My Friend the Murderer wrote to The Critic to the effect that they, Lovell & Co., had bought the stories from "an agent" of Conan Doyle's named "Mr. Hogg" for "twenty-five pounds" (Dec. 23, 1893). Conan Doyle's answer, dated January 7, 1894, from Davos Platz, states in part, "I have no doubt that Messrs. Lovell & Co. have as much to complain of as I, but I would suggest to them that an agent should be asked to furnish some credentials. I have never employed any agent of that name, and my first intimation of the appearance of the book was a review in an American journal" (24 [Jan. 27, 1894], 65). I have not found an account of this contretemps in the literature on Conan Doyle.

Edmund Gosse on John Keats.

On June 9, 1894, The Critic (24: 388) reprinted a letter from Edmund Gosse to the Times of London, where it had appeared on May 24.

To the Editor of The Times:—
Sir,

—As the centenary of the birth of John Keats approaches, it will doubtless be of importance to a wide circle of lovers of English poetry to be informed of any steps which it may be intended to take in the direction of honoring so beloved a memory. . . . The American Committee, which has been engaged for some five years past in preparing for an English memorial of Keats, has done me the honor to communicate to me its intentions, and has asked me to make them known in this country.

The movement is due to the piety of Mr. F. Holland Day of Norwood, Massachusetts, who is a great Keats enthusiast. As early as 1889, Mr. Day began to suggest to certain men-of-letters and artists in America that a monument to the poet should be presented by the United States to England. He consulted Mr. Lowell in particular, and received the warmest encouragement from him. There is no doubt, indeed, that, if the life of Mr. Lowell had been prolonged, he would to-day be found at the head of this generous movement. Among those, however, who, on the failure of Mr. Lowell's health, continued to urge forward the execution of the scheme, were Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. T. B. Aldrich, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the late Dr. T. W. Parsons, and, indeed, most of those who are now prominent in American poetical literature. . . . Mr. Day has arrived in this country with a marble bust of Keats, which, through the kindness of the vicar, the Rev. Mr. Burnaby, will shortly be unveiled in the parish church at Hampstead. It now merely awaits the carrying out of the accepted design for a bracket, upon which the advice of Mr. E. Onslow Ford, A.R.A., was desired. Lovers of Keats—and this is but a synonym for lovers of poetry—will presently receive a formal announcement of the date when the little ceremony of presenting and accepting the bust will be performed at Hampstead.

So far I obey the duty which has been laid upon me by our American friends. Will you permit me to add one word for ourselves? Surely, while we accept this gracious gift from our Transatlantic kinsfolk, we shall not be able to do so without some sense of shame at our own negligence in rites so appropriate and seemly. How long are we to be contented to accept from others monuments to those men of genius who are, after all, not theirs, but ours? In a few months a hundred years will have passed since the birth of one of the most illustrious and original of the long line of English poets, yet if there is any scheme on foot for the celebration of that event by Englishmen on English soil, I have not been fortunate enough to hear of it. There is no other country in the world that could have produced a Keats a hundred years ago,


221

Page 221
and yet could still point out no public monument to his memory. It is fortunate that America, at least, is sensitive about those national glories to which we seem perfectly indifferent.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
Edmund Gosse. 29, Delamere-terrace, London, W., May 24.

In her biography Edmund Gosse, A Literary Landscape, 1849-1928 (1984) Ann Thwaite notes that Gosse gave an admired oration at the "unveiling of the Keats Memorial at Hampstead, a splendid present from his American admirers" (p. 352). She does not mention Gosse's letter or his regret that the English themselves could not erect a monument to one of their great poets.

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw.

After the Academy of London had published a list of "Forty Immortals of Contemporary English Literature," the editors of The Critic reprinted letters of reaction. On November 27, 1897, they wrote (31: 326): "Mr. H. G. Wells says, among other things:— 'There is a lot of overdone Heine about George Bernard Shaw; but eliminate that, and there is a sufficient literary residue to put beside or a little above, Bryce or Trevelyan."

There is little need for an obvious conclusion, but I shall state it anyway: The Critic has served me well and will reward other students who take the time to pore over its pages.

Notes

 
[1]

Earlier reports have appeared in "Henry James in The Critic," Henry James Review, 9 (1988); "John Greenleaf Whittier in The Critic, 1881-1892," Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990); "Matters English in The Critic," RES, N.S. 39 (1988); and "Further Matters English in The Critic," RES, N.S. 42 (1992). I have in hand an article, "Lowelliana," also gleaned from The Critic.

[2]

On the Poetry of Mark Twain. With Selections from His Verse (1966), p. 110. Scott notes that the poem is in Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Twain (1912), from which he presumably takes his text.

[3]

New Letters by James Russell Lowell (1932). The words in brackets were printed by Woodberry in his biography of Poe.