The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

 
"poet-tuned,
Goes singing down his meadows."
 

But Judea did not type Damascus. The Merrimac bears not the sign of Abana, nor was Abana born of Jordan: all, obedient to the word of the Lord, trickled forth from their springs among the hills, and wander down, one through his vine-land, one through his olive-groves, and one to meet the roaring of the mill-wheel's rage.

I lay no claim to originality. Uttering feebly, but only

 
"The thoughts that arise in me,"
 

I know full well that the soil has been tilled and the seed scattered of all that is worthy in the world. Where giants have wrestled, it is not for pigmies to boast their prowess. Where the gods have trodden, let mortals walk unsandalled. The lowliest of their learners, I sit at the feet of the masters. To me, as to all the world, the great and the good of the olden times have left their legacy, and the monarchs of to-day have scattered blessing. Upon me, as upon all, have their grateful showers descended. My brow have they crowned with their goodness, and on my life have their paths dropped fatness. Dreaming under their vines and fig-trees, I have gathered in my lap and garnered in my heart their mellow fruits.

 
"With them I take delight in weal
        And seek relief in woe,
And while I understand and feel
        How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedewed
With tears of heartfelt gratitude."
 

But, though with gladness and joy I render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, he shall not have that which does not belong to him. Neither Benlomond, nor any living man, nor any one man, living or dead, has any claim to my fealty, be it worth much or little. If I cannot go in to the banquet on Olympus by the bidding of the master of the feast, I will forswear ambrosia altogether, and to the end of my days feed on millet with the peasants in the Vale of Tempe.

Then you sail on another tack, smile and shake your head and say, "It is all very well, but it has not the element of immortality. Observe the difference between this writer and Charles Lamb. One is ginger-pop beer that foams and froths and is gone, while the other is the sound Madeira that will be better fifty years hence than now."

Well, what of it? Do you mean to say, that, because a man has no argosies sailing in from, the isles of Eden, freighted with the juices of the tropics, he shall not brew hops in his own cellar? Because you will have none but the vintages of dead centuries, shall not the people delight their hearts with new wine? Because you are an epicure, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Go to! It is a happy fate to be a poet's Falernian, old and mellow, sealed in amphoræ, to be crowned with linden-garlands and the late rose. But for all earth's acres there are few Sabine farms, whither poet, sage, and statesman come to lose in the murmur of Bandusian founts the din of faction and of strife; and even there it is not always Cæcuban or Calenian, neither Formian nor Falernian, but the vile Sabinum in common cups and wreathed with simple myrtle, that bubbles up its welcome. So, since there must be lighter draughts, or many a poor man go thirsty, we who are but the ginger-pop of life may well rejoice, remembering that ginger-pop is nourishing and tonic,—that thousands of weary wayfarers who could never know the taste of the costly brands, and who go sadly and wearily, will be fleeter of foot and gladder of soul because of its humble and evanescent foam.

Ginger-pop beer is it that you scoff? Verily, you do an unconsidered deed. When one remembers all the liquids, medicinal, soporific, insipid, poisonous, which flood the throat of humanity, one may deem himself a favorite of Fortune to be placed so high in the catalogue. Though upon his lowliness gleam down the rosy and purple lights of rare old wines aloft, yet from his altitude he can look below upon a profane crowd in thick array of depth immeasurable, and rejoice that he is not stagnant water nor exasperated vinegar nor disappointed buttermilk. Nay, I am not only content, but exultant. It may be an ignoble satisfaction, yet I believe I would rather flash and fade in one moment of happy daylight than be corked and cob-webbed for fifty years in the dungeons of an unsunned cellar, with a remote possibility, indeed, of coming up from my incarceration to moisten the lips of beauty or loosen the tongue of eloquence, but with a far surer prospect of but adding one more to the potations of the glutton and wine-bibber.

And what, after all, is this oblivion which you flaunt so threateningly? Even if I do encounter it, no misfortune will happen unto me but such as is common unto men. Of all the souls of this generation, the number that will sift through the meshes of the years is infinitesimately small. The overwhelming majority of names will turn out to be chaff, and be blown away. I shall be forgotten, but I shall be forgotten in very good company. The greater part of my kin-folk and acquaintance, your own self, my critic, and your family and friends, will go down in the same darkness which ingulfs me. When I am dead, I shall be no deader than the rest of you, and I shall have been a great deal more alive while I was alive.

I am not afraid to be forgotten. Posterity will have its own soothsayers, and somewhere among the stars, I trust, I shall be living a life so intense and complete that I shall never once think to lament that I am not mulling on a bookshelf down here. Besides, if you insist upon it, I am not going to be forgotten. You don't know anything more about it than I do. Knowledge is not always prescience. "This will never do," ruled Jeffrey from his judgment-seat. "Order reigns in Warsaw," pronounced Sebastiani. "I have now gone through the Bible," chuckled Tom Paine, "as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow." But Wordsworth to-day is reverenced by the nation that could barb no arrow sharp enough to shoot at him. The evening sky that bends above Warsaw is red with the watch-fires of her old warfare bursting anew from their smouldering ashes. And the oaks that doughty Paine fancied himself to have levelled show not so much as a scratch upon their sturdy trunks. Nay, I do not forget that even Charles Lamb was fiercely belabored by his own generation. So, when upon me you pass sentence of speedy death, I assure you that I shall live a thousand years, and there is nobody in the world who can demonstrate that I am in the wrong. Even if after a while I disappear, it proves nothing; you cannot tell whether I am really submerged, or only lying in the trough of the sea to mount the crest of the coming wave. Till the thousandth year proves me moribund, I shall stoutly maintain that I am immortal.

Concerning Charles Lamb the less you say the better. It is easy to build up a reputation for sagacity by offering incense to the gods who are already shrined. Of course there is a difference between us. A pretty rout you would make, if there were not. But, for all your adoration of Charles Lamb, I dare say he would have liked me a great deal better than he would you. Would? Why should I intrench myself in hypothesis? Does he not? When I knock at the door of the Inner Temple, does he not fling it wide open, and does not his face welcome me? When the red fire glows on the hearth, have I not sat far into the night, Bridget sitting beside me with heaven's own light shining in her beautiful eyes, and above her dear head the white gleam of guardian angels hovering tenderly? And when Elia arches his brows, and lowers at me his storm-clouds, which I do not mind for the sunshine that will not be hidden behind them,—when in the sweet, play of June lights and shadows, and the golden haze of Indian-summer, I forget even the kingly words that go ringing through the land, waking the mountain-echo,—when I look out upon this gray afternoon, and see no leaden skies, no pinched and sullen fields, but green paths, gem-bestrewn from autumn's jewelled hand, and warm light glinting through the apple-trees under which he stood that soft October day, till

 
"Conscious seems the frozen sod
And beechen slope whereon he trod,"—
 

O Alexander, get out of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't put me in a frenzy!"

Well, friend, when you have satisfied yourself with the limiting, you begin on the descriptive adjectives, and pronounce me egotistical. Certainly. I should be unlike all others of my race, if I were not. It is a wise and merciful arrangement of Providence, that every one is to himself the centre of the universe. What a fatal world would this be, if it were otherwise! When one thinks what a collection of insignificances we are, how dispensable the most useful of us is to everybody, how little there is in any of us to make any one care about us, and of how small importance it is to others what becomes of us,—when one thinks that even this round earth is so small, that, if it should fall into the arms of the sun, the sun would just open his mouth and swallow it whole, and nobody ever suspect it, (vide Tyndall on Heat,) one must see that this self-love, self-care, and self-interest play a most important part in the Divine Economy. If one did not keep himself afloat, he would surely go under. As it is, no matter how disagreeable a person is, he likes himself,—no matter how uninteresting, he is interested in himself. Everybody, you, my critic, as well, likes to talk about himself, if he can get other people to listen; and so long as I can get several thousand people to listen to me, I shall keep talking, you may be sure, and so would you,—and if you don't, it is only because you can't! You are just as egotistical as I am, only you won't own it frankly, as I do. True, I might escape censure by using such circumlocutions as "the writer," "the author," or still more cumbrously by dressing out some lay figure, calling it Frederic or Frederika, and then, like the Delphic priestesses, uttering my sentiments through its mouth, for the space of a folio novel; but at bottom it would be my own self all the while; and besides, in order to get at the thing I wanted to say, I should have to detain you on a thousand things that I did not care about, but which would be necessary as links, because, when you have made a man or a woman, you must do, something with him. You can't leave him standing, without any visible means of support. One person writes a novel of four hundred pages to convince you in a roundabout way, through thirty different characters, that a certain law, or the mode of administering it, is unjust. He does not mention himself, but makes his men and women speak his arguments. Another man writes a treatise of forty pages and gives you his views out of his own mouth. But he does not put himself into his treatise any more than the other into his novel. For my part, I think the use of "I" is the shortest and simplest way of launching one's opinions. Even a we bulges out into twice the space that I requires, besides seeming to try to evade responsibility. Better say "I" straight out,—"I," responsible for my words here and elsewhere, as they used to say in Congress under the old régime. Besides being the most brave, "I" is also the most modest. It delivers your opinions to the world through a perfectly transparent medium. "I" has no relations. It has no consciousness. It is a pure abstraction. It detains you not a moment from the subject. "The writer" does. It brings up ideas entirely detached from the theme, and is therefore impertinent. All you are after is the thing that is thought. It is not of the smallest consequence who thought it. You may be certain that it is not always the people who use "I" the most freely who think most about themselves; and if you are offended, consider whether it may not be owing to a certain morbidness of your taste as much as to egotism in the offender.

Remember, also, that, when a writer talks of himself, he is not necessarily speaking of his own definite John Smith-ship, that does the marketing and pays the taxes and is a useful member of society. Not at all. It is himself as one unit of the great sum of mankind. He means himself, not as an isolated individual, but as a part of humanity. His narration is pertinent, because it relates to the human family. He brings forward a part of the common property. He does not touch that which pertains exclusively to himself. His self is self-created. His imaginative may have as large a share in the person as his descriptive powers. You don't understand me precisely? Sorry for you.

You think me arrogant. You would think so a great deal more, if you knew me better. At heart I believe I incline very much to the opinion of a charming friend of mine, that, "after all, nobody in the world is of much account but Susy and me,"—only in my formula I leave out Susy. Don't, therefore, think solely of the arrogance that is revealed, but think also of the masses concealed, and in consideration of the greater repression pardon the great expression. It is not the persons who sin the least, but those who overcome the strongest temptations, who are the most virtuous. People endowed by Nature with a sweet humility do not deserve half the credit for their lovely character that those who are naturally selfish and arrogant often deserve for being no more disagreeable than they are. Yes, it must be confessed, you are right in attributing arrogance,—though, after this meek confession and repentance, if you do not forgive me freely and fully, for past and future, your secondary will be a great deal worse than my original sin;—but you never would accuse me of "an arrogance that disdains docility," if you had seen the mean-spirited way in which I sit down by the side of an editor and let him ram-page over my manuscript. Out fly my best thoughts, my finest figures, my sharpest epigrams,—without chloroform,—and I give no sign. I have heard that successful authors can always have everything their own way. I must be the greatest—or the smallest—failure of the age.

"It will be much better to omit this," says the High Inquisitor, turning the thumb-screw.

"No," I writhe. "Take everything else, but leave that."

"I am glad to see that you agree with me," he responds, with Mephistophelian courtesy; and away it goes, and I say nothing, thankful that enough is left to hobble in at all.

"Revealing somewhat of the arrogance of success," you comment, directed by your Evil Genius, upon that especial chapter which was written in a gully of the Valley of Humiliation, when I was gasping under an Ætna of rejected manuscripts,—when there was not a respectable newspaper in the country by which I had not been "declined with thanks,"—when, in the desperation of my determination, I had recourse to bribery, and sent an editor a dollar with the manuscript, to pay him for the fifteen minutes it would take to read it. (Mem. I never heard from editor, manuscript, or dollar.) No, it may be arrogance, but it is not the arrogance of success. Whatever it was, it was in the grain. And, to look at it in another light, I cannot have been "spoiled by the indulgent praise which my early efforts received," because, on the other hand, I have always been praised,—

 
"Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
I fed on poisons, till they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment."
 

The earliest event I remember is being presented with two cents by one of the "Committee" visiting the school. And if I could stand two cents in my tender infancy, don't you suppose I can stand your penny-a-lining now I am grown up? I may have been spoiled, or I may not have been worth much to begin with; but the mischief was all done before you ever heard of me. Confine yourself to facts: dismiss conjectures. State actions: shun motives. Give results: avoid causes, if you would insure confidence in your sagacity.

But all this will I forgive and forget, if you will not tell me to stop writing. That I cannot and will not do. You may iterate and reiterate, that the public will tire of me. I am sorry for the public, but it is strong and will be easily rested. Sorry? No, I am not; I am glad. I should like to pay back a part of the weariness which the public has inflicted on me in the shape of lectures, lessons, sermons, speeches, customs, fashions. Why should it have the monopoly of fatiguing? Minorities have their rights as well as majorities. The spout of a tea-kettle is not to be compared, in point of bulk, to the tea-kettle, but it puts in a claim for an equal depth of water, and Nature acknowledges the claim. I cannot think of reining in yet. I have but just begun. And everything is so interesting. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is insignificant. Everything you touch thrills. It does not seem to matter much what you look at: only look long enough, and a life, its life, starts out. You see that it has causes and consequences, dependencies, bearings, and all manner of social interests; and before you know it, you have become involved in those interests and are one of the family. For the time, you stake all on that issue, and fight to the death. As soon as that is decided, and you stop to take breath a moment, something else comes equally interesting and seeming equally important, and again your lance is in rest. When it comes to the quantities of morals, there isn't much difference between one thing and another. And you ask me to fold my hands and sit still! Not I. One of my youthful maxims was, "Do something, if it's mischief"; and I intend to follow it, especially the condition. I promise to do the best I can, but I shall do it. I will never write for the sake of writing, but I will say my say. I have not been rumbling underground all my life, to find a volcano at last, and then let it be choked up after a single eruption. There are rows of blocks standing around the walls of my workshop, waiting to be chiselled. They won't be Apollos,—but even Puck is a Robin Goodfellow, since,

 
"In one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-laborers could not end."
 

And I shall not confine myself to my sphere. I hate my sphere. I like everything that is outside of it,—or, better still, my sphere rounds out infinitely into space. Nihil humani a me alienum puto. I was born into the whole world. I am monarch of all I survey. Wherever I see symptoms of a pie, thither shall my fingers travel. Wherever a windmill flaps, it shall go hard but I will have a tilt at it. I shall not wait till I know what I am talking about. If I did, I never should talk at all. It is a well-known principle in educational science, that the surest way to learn anything is to teach it. How fast would Geology get on, if its professors talked only of what they knew? Planting their feet firmly on facts, they feel about in all directions for theories. By carefully noting, publishing, comparing, discussing their uncertainties, they presently arrive at a certainty. Horace might advocate nine years' delay. He was building for himself a monument that should defy the rolling years. He was setting to work in cool blood to compass immortality, and a little time, more or less, made no difference. Apollo and Bacchus could afford to wait. Beautiful daughters of beautiful mothers will exist to the world's end, and their praises will always be in order. But when, unmindful of the next generation, which will have its books and its memories, though you are unread and forgotten, mindful only of this generation which groans and travails in pain, you look on suffering that you yearn to assuage, danger of which you long to warn, sadness which you would fain dispel, burdens which you would strive, though ever so little, to lighten, delay, even for things so desirable as complete knowledge and perfect polish, becomes not only absurd, but impossible. Better shoot into the cavern, even if you don't know in what precise part of it the dragon lies coiled. The flash of your powder may reveal his whereabouts to a surer marksman. A transient immortality is of no importance; it is of importance that hearts be purified, homes made happy, paths cleared, clouds dispelled. Is that ignoble? Very well. But the noblest way to benefit posterity is to serve the present age,—to serve it by doing one's best, indeed, but by doing it now, not waiting for some distant day when one can do it better. A writer deserves no pardon for careless or hurried writing. As much time as he has mental ability to spend on it, so much time he should devote to it. But then speed it on its way. Shut it up for a term of years, and you will perhaps have a manuscript that says begin where it used to say commence, but in the mean time all the people whom you wished to save have died of a broken heart,—or lived with one, which is still worse. Besides, even for improvement, it is better to publish your paper than to keep it in the drawer. There, all the amendments it can receive will come from the few feeble advances in knowledge which you may be so fortunate as to make. But print it and every one immediately gives you especial attention and the benefit of his judgment. If you should happen to serve in the right wing of Orthodoxy, you will have the inestimable boon of the freest criticism from the left wing. And it is the religious newspapers for not mincing matters. Between Jew and Gentile hostility is the normal condition of things; and is carried on peaceably enough; but when Jew meets Jew, then comes the tug of war! These people obey to the letter the Apostolic injunction, and confess your faults one to another with a relish that is marvellous to behold, and which must furnish to the unbelieving world a lively commentary on the old text, "Behold how these Christians love one another!" When their own list of your shortcomings is exhausted, ten to one they will take up the parable of somebody else; and if little Johnny Horner sitting in the corner of his sanctum has not room in his crowded columns for the whole pie in which his brother Horner has served you up, never fear but he will put in his thumb and pick out the plums to enliven his feast withal.

No. I shall keep on writing,—hit, if I can, miss, if I must, but shoot any way. There is a great deal of firing that kills no men and breaches no walls, but it worries the enemy. John Brown did not in the least know what he was doing. His definite attempt was a fatal failure; but the great and guilty conspiracy behind, of which he saw nothing, was smitten to the heart under his random blows; his sixteen white men and five negroes, flung blindly and recklessly against the ramparts of Slavery, were but the precursors of that great host, black and white, which has since gone down, organized and intelligent, to tread the wine-press of the wrath of God.

I fear I am committing the rhetorical error of comparing small things with great; but, if Virgil could bring in the Cyclops and their thunderbolts to illustrate his bees, and Demetrius Phalereus justify it, you will hardly count it a capital offence in me,—and I don't much care if you do, if I can only convince you that I am not going to be silent because I don't know the Alpha and Omega of things. I don't pretend to be logical, or consistent, or coherent. Nature is not. A forest of oaks burns down or is cut down, and do oaks spring again? No. Pines. Logic, is baffled, but the land is bettered. A field of corn is planted, and Nature does not set herself to protect it, but sends a flock of crows to devour it; the farmers grumble, but the crows are saved alive. Freezing water contracts awhile, and then without any provocation turns right about face and expands; if your pitcher stands in the way, so much the worse for your pitcher, but the little fishes are grateful; and with all her whims and inconsequences, Nature gets on from year to year without once failing of seed-time and harvest, cold or heat. How is it with you and your logic, you men who have been to college and discovered what you are talking about? You who discuss politics and decide affairs, are you not continually accusing each other of sophistry, inconsistency, and shying away from the point? Take up any political or religious newspaper, and see, if any faith is to be put in testimony, how deficient in logic are all these logic-mongers,—how all the learned and logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions, of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches was only to make you more intensely illogical than you could otherwise be.

 
"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than they who cannot swim at all,
So in the sea of sophisms, to my thinking.
You have a strange alacrity in sinking."
 

(Ego et Dorset fecimus!)

Sure I am my humble ability in the way of unreason can never compass fallacies so stupendous as those which you attribute to each other; and if this is all the result of your logic, I will none of it, initialed to possess at least the advantage, that, when I write nonsense, I know it is nonsense, while you write it and think it sense. But your thinking so does not make it so, and you need not rule me out of court on the strength of it. I acknowledge, in the domain of letters, none but Squatter Sovereignty. In literature, unlike morals, might makes right. If I think you are cultivating the soil to its utmost capacity, I shall not meddle; but if it seems to me that you are letting it lie fallow while I can draw a furrow to some purpose, you need not warn me off with your old title-deeds; in my ploughshare shall drive. To a better farmer I will yield right gladly, but I will not be scared away by a sign-board.

Nor need you go very far out of your way to affirm that I have not the requisite experience for writing on such and such topics. As a principle your remark is absurd. Cannot a doctor prescribe for typhus fever, unless he has had typhus fever himself? On the contrary, is he not the better able to prescribe from always having had a sound mind in a sound body? As a fact, my experience in those things concerning which you allege its insufficiency has never been presented to you for judgment, and its discussion is therefore entirely irrelevant. If my statements are false, they are false; if my arguments are inconclusive, they are inconclusive: disprove the one and refute the other. But whether this state of things be owing to a want of experience, or inability to use experience aright, or any personal circumstance whatever, is a matter in regard to which all the laws of literary courtesy forbid you to concern yourself.

And pray, Gentle Critic, do not tell me that I must be content simply to amuse, or must—anything else. Must is a hard word; be not over-confident of its power. I feel a grandmotherly interest in the world and its ways; and much as I should like to amuse it, I shall never be content with that. You may not like to be instructed, my dear children, but instructed you shall be. You read long ago, in your story-book, that little Tommy Piper didn't want his face washed, though he was very willing to be amused with soap-bubbles; but his face needed washing and got it. I come to you with soap-bubbles indeed, but with scrubbing-brushes also. If you take to them kindly, it will soon be over; but if you scream and struggle, I shall not only scrub the harder, but be all the longer about it.

Sometimes your grave refutations are very amusing. It is astonishing to see how crank-proof sundry minds are. Everything seems to them on a dead level of categorical proposition. They walk up to every statue with their measuring-line of Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque Prioris, and measure them off with equal solemnity, telling you severely that this nose is far longer than the classic rule admits, and this arm has not the swelling proportions of life,—never seeing, that, though another statue was indeed designed for an Antinoüs, this was never meant to be anything but a broomstick dressed in your grandfather's cloak, with a lantern in a pumpkin for a head. Oh, the dreariness of having to explain pleasantry! of appending to your banter Artemas Ward's parenthesis, "This is a goak"! of dealing with people who do not know the difference between a blow and a "love-pat," between Quaker guns and an Armstrong battery, between a granite paving-stone and the moonshine on a mud-puddle!

Dear Public, don't begin to be tired yet. I am not. There are many books still to come, if they can ever be brought to light. They were ready long ago, but no publisher could be found; and now that I have found a publisher, I cannot find the books. There is a treatise on the Curvature of the Square,—a Dissertation on Foreign Literature,—two or three novels,—a book on Human Life, that is going to turn the world upside down,—a book on Theology, dull enough to be sensible, that is going to turn it back again,—and a bandboxful of children's stories. Still, in spite of this formidable prospect, take the consolation that an end is sure to come. There is not a particle of reserved force or dormant power or anything of the kind for you to dread. All there is of me is awake. I have struck twelve, and at longest it will be but a little while before I shall run down,—

 
"And silence like a poultice come
                To heal the blows of sound."
 

And does not the exquisite sensation of departed pain almost atone for the discomfort of its presence? How heartily, for your sake, would I be the most profound and able writer in the world, and how gladly should all my profundity and ability be laid at your feet! And since

 
"the good but wished with God is done,"
 

can you not find it in your heart to "yearn o'er my little good and pardon my much ill"?