Recollections of a Varied Life Part 25

But while Mr. Bryant never indulged in undue familiarity with anybody, he never lost sight of the dignity of those with whom he conversed, and above all, he never suffered shams to obscure his perception of realities. One Sunday at his home in Roslyn he told me the story of his abrupt leaving of England during a journey to Europe. I will tell it here as nearly as possible in his own words.

"English society," he said, "is founded upon shams, falsehoods, and arrogant pretenses, and the falsehoods are in many ways insulting not only to the persons whom they directly affect, but to the intelligence and manhood of the casual observer who happens to have an honest and sincere mind. When I was over there I was for a time the guest of a wealthy manufacturer, a man of education, refinement, and culture, whose house in the country was an altogether delightful place to visit and whose personality I found unusually pleasing. One day as he and I were walking through his grounds a man came up on horseback and my host introduced us. It seems he was the head of one of the great 'county families,' as they call themselves and are called by others. He explained that he was on his way to my host's house to call upon me, wherefore we turned back in his company. During the call he asked me to be his guest at dinner on a day named, and I accepted, he saying that he would have a number of 'the best county people' to meet me. As the evening of the dinner day approached, I asked my host: 'When shall we dress for the dinner?' He looked at his watch and replied: 'It is time for _you_ to begin dressing now.' I observed the stress he laid upon the word 'you' and asked: 'Isn't it time for you, also?'

"'Oh, I am not invited,' he replied.

"'Not invited? Why, what can you mean?' I asked.

"'Why, of course I'm not invited. Those are county people and I am only a manufacturer--a man in trade. They would never think of inviting me to dinner.'

"I was surprised and shocked.

"'Do you mean to tell me,' I asked, 'that that man came into your house where I am a guest, and invited me to dinner, to meet his friends, without including you, my host, in the invitation?'

"'Why, yes, of course,' he replied. 'You must remember that they are county families, aristocrats, while I am a man in trade. They would not think of inviting me, and I should never expect it.'

"I was full of disgust and indignation. I asked my host to let one of his servants carry a note for me to the great man's house.

"'But why?' he asked. 'You will be going over there yourself within the hour.'

"'I am not going,' I replied. 'I will not be a party to so gross an affront to my host. I shall send a note, not of apology but of unexplained declination.'

"I did so, and as soon thereafter as I could arrange it, I quitted England in disgust with a social system so false, so arbitrary, and so arrogant that one may not even behave like a gentleman without transgressing its most insistent rules of social exclusiveness.

"The worst of the matter was the meek submissiveness of my host to the affront put upon him. He was shocked and distressed that I should decline to go to the dinner. He could not understand that the smallest slight had been put upon him, and I could not make him understand it.

That showed how completely saturated the English mind is with the virus of arbitrary caste. I am told that there has been some amelioration of all this during recent years. I do not know how much it amounts to.

But did you ever hear an English _grande dame_ crush the life out of a sweet and innocent young girl by calling her 'that young person'?

If not, you cannot imagine what measureless contempt can be put into a phrase, or how much of cruelty and injustice may be wrought by the utterance of three words."

LIII

[Sidenote: The Newspaper Critic's Function]

During my service as a literary editor, I held firmly to the conviction that the function of the newspaper book reviewer is essentially a news function; that it is not his business to instruct other people as to how they should write, or to tell them how they ought to have written, but rather to tell readers what they have written and how; to show forth the character of each book reviewed in such fas.h.i.+on that the reader shall be able to decide for himself whether or not he wishes to buy and read it, and that in the main this should be done in a helpful and generously appreciative spirit, and never carpingly, with intent to show the smartness of the reviewer--a cheap thing at best. The s.p.a.ce allotted to book reviews in any newspaper is at best wholly insufficient for anything like adequate criticism, and very generally the reviewer is a person imperfectly equipped for the writing of such criticism.

In accordance with this conception of my functions, I always held the news idea in mind. I was alert to secure advance sheets of important books, in order that the _Evening Post_ might be the first of newspapers to tell readers about them.

Usually the publishers were ready and eager to give the _Evening Post_ these opportunities, though the literary editors of some morning newspapers bitterly complained of what they regarded as favoritism when I was able to antic.i.p.ate them. On one very notable occasion, however, great pains were taken by the publishers to avoid all grounds of complaint. When Tennyson's "Harold" was published in 1876, there had been no previous announcement of its coming. The greatest secrecy, indeed, had been maintained. Neither in England nor in America had any hint been given that any poem by Tennyson was presently forthcoming. On the day of publication, precisely at noon, copies of "Harold" were laid upon the desks of all the literary editors in England and America.

My book reviews for that day were already in type and in the forms. One hour later the first edition of the paper--the latest into which book reviews could go--must go to press. I knew that my good friends, the literary editors of the morning newspapers, would exploit this great literary news the next morning, and that the evening papers would have it in the afternoon following. I resolved to be ahead of all of them.

I hurriedly sent for the foreman of the composing room and enlisted his cooperation. With the aid of my scissors I got two columns of matter ready, consisting mainly of quotations hastily clipped from the book, with a connective tissue of comment, and with an introductory paragraph or two giving the first news of the publication of an important and very ambitious dramatic poem by Tennyson.

At one o'clock the _Evening Post_ went to press with this literary "beat" displayed upon its first page. It proved to be the first announcement of the poem's publication either in England or in America, and it appeared twelve or fifteen hours in advance of any other publication either by advertis.e.m.e.nt or otherwise.

[Sidenote: Mr. Bryant and His Contemporaries]

On that occasion I tried to draw from Mr. Bryant some expression of opinion regarding Tennyson's work and the place he would probably occupy among English poets when the last word should be said concerning him.

I thought to use the new poem and a certain coincidence connected with it--presently to be mentioned--as a means of drawing some utterance of opinion from him. It was of no avail. In reply to my questioning, Mr. Bryant said:

"It is too soon to a.s.sign Tennyson to his permanent place in literature.

He may yet do things greater than any that he has done. And besides, we are too near to judge his work, except tentatively. You remember Solon's dictum--'Call no man happy until death.' It is especially unsafe to attempt a final judgment upon the works of a poet while the glamor of them is still upon us. Moreover, I have never been a critic. I should distrust any critical judgment of my own."

That reminded me that I had never heard Mr. Bryant express his opinion with regard to the work of any modern poet, living or dead. The nearest approach to anything of the kind that I can recall was in a little talk I had with him when I was about leaving for Boston to attend the breakfast given in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth year. The subject of Holmes's work arose naturally, and in talking of it Mr. Bryant said:

"After all, it is as a novelist chiefly that I think of him."

"You are thinking of 'Elsie Venner'?" I asked.

"No,--of 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,'" he answered. "Few persons care for anything in that except the witty wisdom of it, and I suppose Dr. Holmes wrote it for the sake of that. But there is a sweet love story in the book--hidden like a bird in a clump of obtrusively flowering bushes. It is a sweet, wholesome story, and the heroine of it is a very natural and very lovable young woman."

The coincidence referred to above was this. Almost exactly at the time of the publication of Tennyson's "Harold," some American whose name I have forgotten, to my regret, brought out a dramatic poem on the same subject, with the same hero, and in a closely similar form. It was ent.i.tled "The Son of G.o.dwin," and, unless my memory plays me a trick, it was a work of no little merit. It was completely overshadowed, of course, by Tennyson's greater performance, but it had enough of virility and poetic quality in it to tempt me to write a carefully studied comparison of the two works.

While Mr. Bryant shrank from the delivery of opinions concerning the moderns, his judgments of the older writers of English literature were fully formed and very positive. He knew the cla.s.sic literature of our language--and especially its poetic literature--more minutely, more critically, and more appreciatively than any other person I have ever known, and he often talked instructively and inspiringly on the subject.

On one of those periodically recurring occasions when the Baconian authors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare's works is clamorously contended for by ill-balanced enthusiasts, Mr. Bryant asked me if I had it in mind to write anything about the controversy. I told him I had not, unless he particularly wished me to do so.

"On the contrary," he answered; "I particularly wish otherwise. It is a sheer waste of good brain tissue to argue with persons who, having read anything avowedly written by Bacon, are still able to persuade themselves that the least poetical and most undramatic of writers could have written the most poetical and most dramatic works that exist in any language."

"It seems to me," I answered, "that the trouble with such persons is that they are futilely bothering their brains in an attempt to account for the unaccountable. Shakespeare was a genius, and genius is a thing that can in nowise be measured, or weighed, or accounted for, while genius itself accounts for anything and everything it may do. It is subject to no restrictions, amenable to no law, and restrained by no limitations whatsoever."

"That is an excellent way of putting an obvious truth," he answered.

"I wish you would write it down precisely as you have uttered it orally, and print it as the _Evening Post's_ sole comment upon the controversy."

Then he sat musing for a time, and after a while added:

"Genius exists in varying degrees in different men. In Shakespeare it was supreme, all-inspiring, all-controlling. In lesser men it manifests itself less conspicuously and less constantly, but not less positively.

No other poet who ever lived could have written Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' yet Coleridge could no more have written 'Hamlet'

or 'Macbeth' or 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' than any child in pinafores could. When poetry is genuine, it is inspired, as truly as any sacred Scripture ever was. Without inspiration there may be cleverness, beauty, and grandeur in metrical composition, but genuine poetry is the result of inspiration always, and inspiration is genius."

"Whence comes the inspiration?" I ventured to ask, hoping to draw something further from him.

"I do not know," he answered. "Whence comes the color of the rose or the violet or the dandelion? I am not a theologian, to dogmatize about things that are beyond the ken of human intelligence. I only know that the inspiration is there, just as I know that the colors of the flowers are there--in both cases because the thing perceived is obvious."

[Sidenote: Genius and "Thanatopsis"]

One day I asked Mr. Bryant about "Thanatopsis." When I made my first acquaintance with that poem in a school reader, it was printed with some introductory lines in smaller type, and I had never been able to discover the relation of those lines to the poem or to the thought that inspired it.

In answer to my questions Mr. Bryant explained that the lines in question really had no relation to the poem and no possible connection with it.

"I was a mere boy," he said, "when 'Thanatopsis' was written. It bore no t.i.tle in my ma.n.u.script--that was supplied by an editor who knew Greek, a language of which I did not then know even the alphabet. My father got possession of the poem, took it to Boston, and had it published, all without my knowledge. With the ma.n.u.script of it he found some other lines of mine and a.s.sumed that they belonged to the poem, as they did not. The editor printed them at top in smaller type, and they got into the schoolbooks in that way. That is the whole story."