Chapter III: Part 3

“But what’s that? a mass-meeting? No, there come in lots,
The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts,
And in short the American everything-elses,
Each charging the others with envies and jealousies;--
By the way, ’tis a fact that displays what profusions
Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,
That while the Old World has produced barely eight
Of such poets as all men agree to call great,
And of other great characters hardly a score
(One might safely say less than that rather than more),
With you every year a whole crop is begotten,
They’re as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton;
Why, there’s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,
Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles,
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,--
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain
Will be some very great person over again.
There is one inconvenience in all this, which lies
In the fact that by contrast we estimate size,[5]
And where there are none except Titans, great stature
Is only the normal proceeding of nature.
What puff the strained sails of your praise will you furl at, if
The calmest degree that you know is superlative?
At Rome, all whom Charon took into his wherry must,
As a matter of course, be well _issimust_ and _errimust_,
A Greek, too, could feel, while in that famous boat he tost,
That his friends would take care he was ιστοςt and ωτατοςt,
And formerly we, as through graveyards we
past,
Thought the world went from bad to worst fearfully fast;
Let us glance for a moment, ’tis well worth the pains,
And note what an average graveyard contains;
There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,
There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,
Horizontally there lie upright politicians,
Dose-a-dose with their patients sleep faultless physicians,
There are slave-drivers quietly whipped under ground,
There bookbinders, done up in boards, are fast bound,
There card-players wait till the last trump be played,
There all the choice spirits get finally laid,
There the babe that’s unborn is supplied with a berth,
There men without legs get their six feet of earth,
There lawyers repose, each wrapped up in his case,
There seekers of office are sure of a place,
There defendant and plaintiff get equally cast,
There shoemakers quietly stick to the last,
There brokers at length become silent as stocks,
There stage-drivers sleep without quitting their box,
And so forth and so forth and so forth and so on,
With this kind of stuff one might endlessly go on;
To come to the point, I may safely assert you
Will find in each yard every cardinal virtue[6];
Each has six truest patriots: four discoverers of ether,
Who never had thought on ’t nor mentioned it either;
Ten poets, the greatest who ever wrote rhyme:
Two hundred and forty first men of their time:
One person whose portrait just gave the least hint
Its original had a most horrible squint:
One critic, most (what do they call it?) reflective,
Who never had used the phrase ob- or subjective:
Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred
Their sons for the rice-swamps, at so much a head,
And their daughters for--faugh! thirty mothers of Gracchi:
Non-resistants who gave many a spiritual black-eye:
Eight true friends of their kind, one of whom was a jailer:
Four captains almost as astounding as Taylor:
Two dozen of Italy’s exiles who shoot us his
Kaisership daily, stern pen-and-ink Brutuses,
Who, in Yankee back-parlors, with crucified smile,[7]
Mount serenely their country’s funereal pile:
Ninety-nine Irish heroes, ferocious rebellers
’Gainst the Saxon in cis-marine garrets and cellars,
Who shake their dread fists o’er the sea and all that,--
As long as a copper drops into the hat:
Nine hundred Teutonic republicans stark
From Vaterland’s battles just won--in the Park,
Who the happy profession of martyrdom take
Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak:
Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jacksons:
And so many everythings-else that it racks one’s
Poor memory too much to continue the list,
Especially now they no longer exist;--
I would merely observe that you’ve taken to giving
The puffs that belong to the dead to the living,
And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom’s tones
Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.”

Here the critic came in and a thistle presented[8]--
From a frown to a smile the god’s features relented,
As he stared at his envoy, who, swelling with pride,
To the god’s asking look, nothing daunted, replied,--
“You’re surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long,
But your godship respecting the lilies was wrong;
I hunted the garden from one end to t’other,
And got no reward but vexation and bother,
Till, tossed out with weeds in a corner to wither,
This one lily I found and made haste to bring hither.”

“Did he think I had given him a book to review?
I ought to have known what the fellow would do,”
Muttered Phœbus aside, “for a thistle will pass
Beyond doubt for the queen of all flowers with an ass;
He has chosen in just the same way as he’d choose
His specimens out of the books he reviews;
And now, as this offers an excellent text,
I’ll give ’em some brief hints on criticism next.”
So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd,
And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud:--

“My friends, in the happier days of the muse,
We were luckily free from such thing as reviews;
Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer
The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;
Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they
Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;
Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul
Precreated the future, both parts of one whole;
Then for him there was nothing too great or too small,
For one natural deity sanctified all;
Then the bard owned no clipper and meter of moods
Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods
O’er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods;
He asked not earth’s verdict, forgetting the clods,
His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods;
’Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,
And shaped for their vision the perfect design,
With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,
As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;
Then a glory and greatness invested man’s heart,
The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,
In the free individual moulded, was Art;
Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire
For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,
As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,
And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,
Eurydice stood--like a beacon unfired,
Which, once touched with flame, will leap heav’nward inspired--
And waited with answering kindle to mark
The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.
Then painting, song, sculpture did more than relieve
The need that men feel to create and believe,
And as, in all beauty, who listens with love
Hears these words oft repeated--‘beyond and above,’
So these seemed to be but the visible sign
Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;
They were ladders the Artist erected to climb
O’er the narrow horizon of space and of time,
And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained
To the one rapturous glimpse of the never-attained,
As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod
The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god.

“But now, on the poet’s dis-privacied moods
With _do this_ and _do that_ the pert critic intrudes;
While he thinks he’s been barely fulfilling his duty
To interpret ’twixt men and their own sense of beauty,
And has striven, while others sought honor or pelf,
To make his kind happy as he was himself,
He finds he’s been guilty of horrid offences
In all kinds of moods, numbers, genders, and tenses;
He’s been _ob_- and _sub_jective, what Kettle calls Pot,
Precisely, at all events, what he ought not;
_You have done this_, says one judge; _done that_ says another;
_You should have done this_, grumbles one; _that_, says ’tother;
Never mind what he touches, one shrieks out _Taboo!_
And while he is wondering what he shall do,
Since each suggests opposite topics for song,
They all shout together _you’re right!_ and _you’re wrong!_

“Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can’t write can surely review,
Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his
Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies:
Thus a lawyer’s apprentice, just out of his teens,
Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines;
Having read Johnson’s lives of the poets half through,
There’s nothing on earth he’s not competent to;
He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,--
He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles;
It matters not whether he blame or commend,
If he’s bad as a foe, he’s far worse as a friend:
Let an author but write what’s above his poor scope,
He goes to work gravely and twists up a rope,
And, inviting the world to see punishment done,
Hangs himself up to bleach in the wind and the sun;
’Tis delightful to see, when a man comes along
Who has anything in him peculiar and strong,
Every cockboat that swims clear its fierce (pop) gundeck at him,
And make as he passes its ludicrous Peck at him”----

Here Miranda came up and began, “As to that”----
Apollo at once seized his gloves, cane, and hat,
And seeing the place getting rapidly cleared,
I too snatched my notes and forthwith disappeared.

Ariel Booklets

1. =The Gold Bug.= By Edgar Allan Poe.

2. =Rab and his Friends= and =Marjorie Fleming=. By John
Brown, M.D.

3. =The Culprit Fay.= By Joseph Rodman Drake.

4. =Our Best Society.= By George William Curtis.

5. =Sonnets from the Portuguese.= By Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.

6. =The School for Scandal.= By Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

7. =The Rivals.= By Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

8. =The Good-Natured Man.= By Oliver Goldsmith.

9. =Sweetness and Light.= By Matthew Arnold.

10. =Lyrics.= By Robert Browning.

11. =L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.= By John Milton.

12. =Thanatopsis, Flood of Years, etc.= By William Cullen
Bryant.

13. =Charity and Humor, and Nil Nisi Bonum.= By William M.
Thackeray.

14. =She Stoops to Conquer.= By Oliver Goldsmith.

15. =Nothing to Wear.= By William Allen Butler.

16. =Rime of the Ancient Mariner.= By Samuel T. Coleridge.

17. =Elegy in a Country Churchyard, etc.= By Thomas Gray.

18. =The House of Life.= By Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

19. =Lays of Ancient Rome.= By Lord Macaulay.

20. =Epictetus, Selections from.=

21. =Marcus Aurelius. Thoughts.=

22. =Sesame and Lilies.= By John Ruskin.

23. =The Rose and the Ring.= By William M. Thackeray.

24. =The Nibelungen Lied.= By Thomas Carlyle.

25. =Ideas of Truth.= By John Ruskin.

26. =Eve of St. Agnes.= By John Keats.

27. =King of the Golden River.= By John Ruskin.

28. =The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.= By Washington Irving.

29. =Rip Van Winkle.= By Washington Irving.

30. =Ideals of the Republic.=

31. =Verses and Flyleaves.= By Charles S. Calverley.

32. =Novels by Eminent Hands.= By W. M. Thackeray.

33. =Cranford.= By Mrs. Gaskell.

34. =Vicar of Wakefield.= By Oliver Goldsmith.

35. =Tales by Heinrich Zschokke.=

36. =Rasselas.= By Samuel Johnson.

37. =Shakespeare’s Sonnets.=

38. =Wit and Humour of Charles Lamb.=

39. =The Travels of Baron Munchausen.=

40. =The Fables of Æsop.=

41. =The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.=

42. =The Sayings of Poor Richard.= By Benjamin Franklin.

43. =A Christmas Carol.= By Charles Dickens.

44. =The Cricket on the Hearth.= By Charles Dickens.

45. =The Blessed Damozel.= By D. G. Rossetti.

46. =The Story without an End.= By F. W. Carové.

47. =The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.=

48. =Father Tom and the Pope.= By Samuel Ferguson.

49. =Love and Skates.= By Theodore Winthrop.

50. =The Princess.= By Alfred Tennyson.

51. =The Child in the House.= By Walter Pater.

52. =The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.=

53. =The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti.=

54. =On Friendship.= By R. W. Emerson and Marcus Tullius
Cicero.

55-56. =The Sketch-Book.= By Washington Irving. 2 vols.

57. =Robert Louis Stevenson.= By Leslie Stephen.

58. =Some of the Essays of Francis Bacon.=

59. =The Apology of Socrates together with the Crito, as recorded
by Plato.=

60. =The Phaedo: The Death of Socrates, as recorded by Plato.=

61-62. =Essays of Elia.= By Charles Lamb.

63. =Three Essays.= By Thomas De Quincey.

64. =The Battle of Dorking.= By Major-General George Chesney.

65. =Select Tales from the Gesta Romanorum.= Translated by
Rev. C. Swan.

66. =Letters and Maxims.= By Lord Chesterfield.

67. =Peter Schlemihl.= By Adelbert Chamisso.

With plates by George Cruikshank.

68. =A Fable for Critics.= By James Russell Lowell.

69. =Virginibus Puerisque.= By Robert Louis Stevenson.

70. =True Americanism.= Four Essays. By Theodore Roosevelt.

71. =The Word for the Day.= Compiled by A. R.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The wise Scandinavians probably called their bards by the queer-looking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to hint to the world the hot water they always get into.

[2]

To demonstrate quickly and easily how per-
Versely absurd ’tis to sound this name _Cowper_,
As people in general call him named _super_,
I remark that he rhymes it himself with horse-trooper.

[3]

(If you call Snooks an owl, he will show by his looks
That he’s morally certain you’re jealous of Snooks.)

[4] (Cuts rightly called wooden, as all must admit.)

[5]

That, is in most cases we do, but not all,
Past a doubt, there are men who are innately small,
Such as Blank, who, without being ’minished a tittle,
Might stand for a type of the Absolute Little.

[6]

(And at this just conclusion will surely arrive,
That the goodness of earth is more dead than alive.)

[7] Not forgetting their tea, and their toast, though, the while.

[8]

Turn back now to page--goodness only knows what,
And take a fresh hold on the thread of my plot.