My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first
paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible
to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a
delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the
imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that
he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less
distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of
illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based
upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not
a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of
correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend
from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after
literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to
achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object
while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have
stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
LONDON, February 29, 1845.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s
strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all
the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my
hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all this
positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that
all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little
chamber,—that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its
one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste
or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same
little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise
me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the
snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose,
on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble
impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile
myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me
hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me
to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until
now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse
as the wits of Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the
Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to
Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had
anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life
and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man
on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual
immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,—so fat as to give the
impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without
sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of
corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be
Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?”
Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and
carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues
of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving while his outward
man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he
were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet
it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on
the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up
its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot
was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether
Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one.
The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at
least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending the
slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which will
enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is
pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful
errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a
religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of
Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being
perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque
illumination demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is
bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and
this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul
fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords
or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous
and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit
similar sins in other people with the sincerest vengeance which his
somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on
the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before
the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man
to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart
that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of
paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may
have found it so.
I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words,
whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one
worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that
they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that
there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have
resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly
out. Byron,—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need
not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,—Byron is preparing a new
edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and
amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of
highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions
having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has
deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively
he no longer understands his own poetry.
This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious,
whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever
morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails
settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever
could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a
republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its
place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship’s later style.
You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The
result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very
sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in Tophet have been
extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by
no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that
this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will
at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in
the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece,
were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about
burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in
a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat
man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very
extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the
immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty
years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to
attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of
it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more
substantial.
Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I
mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to
London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by
the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet
cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither
now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival.
It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the
little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be
extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor
of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he was examining
a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs,
which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been
embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor
the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair
floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows
of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that
have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent
preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort
of liveliness,—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or
none,—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme
old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we
perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was
surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and
brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving
only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing
upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos.
At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses,
so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did
partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and
his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in
Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to
meet her there.
Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its
wit and humor—of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded
by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a
close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a
satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant
poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having
been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as
attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now
considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I
suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard
to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say,
remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of
which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day
and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s
tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether
in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in
his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating
tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
deemed worth any one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that
once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,—a striking
combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as
no other man alive could have bit off,—a glimmer from that ruined mind,
as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom
of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy
ground.
For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It
was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should
first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a
one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same
position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest
purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was
qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation
even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young
man,—one Dickens,—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in
humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow
died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I
think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than
it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit
it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all
that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal
substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small
sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended
only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the
old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to
see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of
thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned
to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive
to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought
upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic
influence of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in
the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,—buried
beneath his own mortality,—and lacking even the qualities of sense that
enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of
the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long
endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,—for he is now
above seventy,—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted
shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena to England. They should
now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung
down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to be a
little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
Hannibal,—the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke
and tracked it round with bloody footsteps,—was seized with a nervous
trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear
friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those
two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea
of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take
such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New
England. Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little
whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window,—strange that it should
have been iron-grated!—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd
wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life.
Positively it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the
keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of
intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The
rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.
Fie! fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even
now that hateful chamber—the iron-grated window, which blasted the
blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my comfortable
apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be
such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.
You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known
to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past
been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he
has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith,
with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you
may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small
country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily
for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of
a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of
Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of
combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt
of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might
be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing
where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a
higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a
regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of
the earlier poems and say, “This is my work,” with precisely the same
complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of
discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a
staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon
the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what
would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his
staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial
brightness.
How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care,
so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower
region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits,
I consider the productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those
of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has served as an
interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the
faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont
to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete
arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley
can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his
friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,—sheer nonsense!
What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his
being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio,
and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and
frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of
marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s heart, and that
his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman
earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I
have met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only
yesterday?
Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on
terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in
contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the life of man!
Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop,
to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his
lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of
ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or
two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
_The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
_Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets
whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with
his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of
age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a
man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our
speculative license of kicking him.
Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers
other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender
figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore,
or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old
cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the
verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the
dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in
short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the
porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him
fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell
whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my
mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile
me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so
fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the
effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on
his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him
to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have
been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.
Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world,
is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of
his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been
audible on earth since Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these
specimens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell Lowell, who
seems to be one of the poet’s most fervent and worthiest worshippers.
The information took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats’s
poetic incense, without being embodied in human language, floated up to
heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal choristers, who
perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought
their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
written a poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another
sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of
the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of
its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman,
redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful
and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s
happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over
dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then
but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
mankind another peril,—a last encounter with the evil principle. Should
the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of
ages. If we triumph—But it demands a poet’s eye to contemplate the
splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a
spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of
a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme.
Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends;
for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in
question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea
that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it
worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet.
The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
foreign to the purpose.
I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time
blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order
of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few
words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or
rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom
I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long
grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who
made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter,
clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely
to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me
in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men,
and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.
For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
before me, in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the
elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or
other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His
powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the
ghost of the Danish king.
In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my
brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she
took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother,
John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly
majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables
him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection
has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable
one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form
than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as
if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
contrive, and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so
hideous, an avenging Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it
is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him to change
countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and
night-time. Some other players of the past generation were present, but
none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best
but painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
anther’s thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to
fade and the voice to croak with age.
What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know
that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to
exhibit any of the characteristics of the author’s mind as displayed in
his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not
merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the deeper and more
faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I
doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to
the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly
our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to
untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned
my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else
he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last
sleep, with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured
marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses
in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis
as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker
youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and
who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I
remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who
scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
Gottingen. Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly, in
1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to give us sketches
of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all
of them, have grown to be famous men.
And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I
was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit,
where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when
fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest
mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn,
it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never
make a truer one.
What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,—for there is no
need of generalizing the remark,—what an odd brain is mine! Would you
believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
intellectual ear—some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such
verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable
destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their
posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they
have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to
attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in
some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of
pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be
glad of such a job.
Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still
scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever?
It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I.
Expect me home soon, and—to whisper you a secret—in company with the
poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of
the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls
himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his
densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and
forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
Your true friend, P.
P. S.—Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic
reputation on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And
does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas with
machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the
nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect
ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?