“Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”
to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors of
little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour out of
the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of increase that
it seems as if before long every hour would bring a book, or at least an
article which is to grow into a book by and by?
I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These
attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one
like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm
in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But
what a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for
immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be
saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I have said,
it is not very likely that my reader will; if he does, he will find, I
am very sure, that I say it a little differently.
What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse,
which burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task only
to get out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the
whole of so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in
these days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
straight into the waste-basket. To write “poetry” was an art and mystery
in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.
When “Potter the ventriloquist,” the predecessor of the well-remembered
Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in
his performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to
their owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must
have ghostly assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of
“professors,” that is members of the church, whether they had not
compromised their characters by being seen at such an unhallowed
exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy who has made a study of parlor
magic can do many of those tricks almost as well as the great sorcerer
himself. How simple it all seems when we have seen the mechanism of the
deception!
It is just so with writing in verse. It was not understood that
everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
difficult tricks of juggling. M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been
speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man
who finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been
writing poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and
simple it is. Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear,
a sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be
what is called a poet. I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in
the average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of
readable verse.
This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.
They looked puzzled for a minute. One whispered to the next Teacup,
“More than nine out of ten! I should think that was a pretty liberal
allowance.”
Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to
the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to
set up a school for instruction in the art. “Poetry taught in twelve
lessons.” Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write
“poetry.” It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin
volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody
cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and
revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. Come! who will be
my pupils in a Course,--Poetry taught in twelve lessons? That made a
laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.
Through it all I heard the sweet tones of Number Five's caressing voice;
not because it was more penetrating or louder than the others, for it
was low and soft, but it was so different from the others, there was so
much more life,--the life of sweet womanhood,--dissolved in it.
(Of course he will fall in love with her. “He? Who?” Why, the newcomer,
the Counsellor. Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as the silvery
notes rippled from her throat? Did they not follow her in her movements,
as she turned her tread this or that way?
--What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people
strangers to each other before to-day!)
“A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too dull
and silly to say it in prose,” said Number Seven.
This made us laugh again, good-naturedly. I was pleased with a kind
of truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling
affirmation. I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I
thought deserved a paragraph to itself. It was from a letter I wrote not
long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing
himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he
was born a “poet.” “When you write in prose,” I said, “you say what you
mean. When you write in verse you say what you must.” I was thinking
more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a
very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain
and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are
figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under
what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are
handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming
vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you
have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you writing in
prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for
the harmonies of language, would all have full play. But there is your
rhyme fastening you by the leg, and you must either reject the line
which pleases you, or you must whip your hobbling fancy and all your
limping thoughts into the traces which are hitched to one of three or
four or half a dozen serviceable words. You cannot make any use of
cars, I will suppose; you have no occasion to talk about scars; “the
red planet Mars” has been used already; Dibdin has said enough about the
gallant tars; what is there left for you but bars? So you give up your
trains of thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some
kind of allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make
use of bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking
up all continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the
virility, which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong,
graceful, spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of
intellect to the-clink of well or ill matched syllables? I think you
will smile if I tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art
of writing “poems” to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The
trick of rhyming cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing
a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel
that I was well employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the
Asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of serious thought and
connected expression. I would start in the simplest way; thus:--
When darkness veils the evening....
I love to close my weary....
The pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children who
are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain
number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform
this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each
line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more
difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded
child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of
rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the second part.
Number Seven interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont;
for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we
should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly sound Teacup.
“That's the way,--that 's the way!” exclaimed he. “It's just the same
thing as my plan for teaching drawing.”
Some curiosity was shown among The Teacups to know what the queer
creature had got into his mind, and Number Five asked him, in her
irresistible tones, if he wouldn't oblige us by telling us all about it.
He looked at her a moment without speaking. I suppose he has often been
made fun of,--slighted in conversation, taken as a butt for people who
thought themselves witty, made to feel as we may suppose a cracked piece
of china-ware feels when it is clinked in the company of sound bits
of porcelain. I never saw him when he was carelessly dealt with
in conversation,--for it would sometimes happen, even at our
table,--without recalling some lines of Emerson which always struck me
as of wonderful force and almost terrible truthfulness:--
“Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight
When thou lookest in his face
Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;'
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.”
Poor fellow! Number Seven has to bear a good deal in the way of neglect
and ridicule, I do not doubt. Happily, he is protected by an amount
of belief in himself which shields him from many assailants who would
torture a more sensitive nature. But the sweet voice of Number Five and
her sincere way of addressing him seemed to touch his feelings. That
was the meaning of his momentary silence, in which I saw that his eyes
glistened and a faint flush rose on his cheeks. In a moment, however, as
soon as he was on his hobby, he was all right, and explained his new and
ingenious system as follows:
“A man at a certain distance appears as a dark spot,--nothing more.
Good. Anybody, man, woman, or child, can make a dot, say a period, such
as we use in writing. Lesson No. 1. Make a dot; that is, draw your man,
a mile off, if that is far enough. Now make him come a little nearer, a
few rods, say. The dot is an oblong figure now. Good. Let your scholar
draw the oblong figure. It is as easy as it is to make a note of
admiration. Your man comes nearer, and now some hint of a bulbous
enlargement at one end, and perhaps of lateral appendages and a
bifurcation, begins to show itself. The pupil sets down with his pencil
just what he sees,--no more. So by degrees the man who serves as model
approaches. A bright pupil will learn to get the outline of a human
figure in ten lessons, the model coming five hundred feet nearer each
time. A dull one may require fifty, the model beginning a mile off, or
more, and coming a hundred feet nearer at each move.”
The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that
there was a certain practical possibility about the scheme. Our two
Annexes, as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project, or
fancy, or whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it. “I guess
I'll try it,” said the American Annex. “Quite so,” answered the English
Annex. Why the first girl “guessed” about her own intentions it is hard
to say. What “quite so” referred to it would not be easy to determine.
But these two expressions would decide the nationality of our two young
ladies if we met them on the top of the great Pyramid.
I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me. In fact, it is
a good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a steady
talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of social
converse. The best talker is liable to become the most formidable of
bores. It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to
find himself out. Many a terebrant I have known who, in that capacity,
to borrow a line from Coleridge,
“Was great, nor knew how great he was.”
A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like
that famous “He builded better than he knew” of Emerson.
There was a slight lull in the conversation. The Mistress, who keeps an
eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic silences
was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not
know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the
“manufacture” of “poetry.”
You use the right term, madam, I said. The manufacture of that article
has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.
One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide
circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous
output of verse which is characteristic of our time. There are many
curious facts connected with this phenomenon. Educated people--yes,
and many who are not educated--have discovered that rhymes are not the
private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that
part of the literary domain some twenty or forty or sixty years
ago, have, as it were, fenced it in with their touchy, barbed-wire
reputations, and have come to regard it and cause it to be regarded as
their private property. The discovery having been made that rhyme is not
a paddock for this or that race-horse, but a common, where every
colt, pony, and donkey can range at will; a vast irruption into that
once-privileged inclosure has taken place. The study of the great
invasion is interesting.
Poetry is commonly thought to be the language of emotion. On the
contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all passionate
excitement. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, worrying hunt
after rhymes which can be made serviceable, after images which will be
effective, after phrases which are sonorous; all this under limitations
which restrict the natural movements of fancy and imagination. There
is a secondary excitement in overcoming the difficulties of rhythm
and rhyme, no doubt, but this is not the emotional heat excited by the
subject of the “poet's” treatment. True poetry, the best of it, is but
the ashes of a burnt-out passion. The flame was in the eye and in the
cheek, the coals may be still burning in the heart, but when we come
to the words it leaves behind it, a little warmth, a cinder or two just
glimmering under the dead gray ashes,--that is all we can look for. When
it comes to the manufactured article, one is surprised to find how well
the metrical artisans have learned to imitate the real thing. They catch
all the phrases of the true poet. They imitate his metrical forms as a
mimic copies the gait of the person he is representing.
Now I am not going to abuse “these same metre ballad-mongers,” for the
obvious reason that, as all The Teacups know, I myself belong to the
fraternity. I don't think that this reason should hinder my having my
say about the ballad-mongering business. For the last thirty years I
have been in the habit of receiving a volume of poems or a poem, printed
or manuscript--I will not say daily, though I sometimes receive more
than one in a day, but at very short intervals. I have been consulted by
hundreds of writers of verse as to the merit of their performances, and
have often advised the writers to the best of my ability. Of late I
have found it impossible to attempt to read critically all the literary
productions, in verse and in prose, which have heaped themselves on
every exposed surface of my library, like snowdrifts along the railroad
tracks,--blocking my literary pathway, so that I can hardly find my
daily papers.
What is the meaning of this rush into rhyming of such a multitude
of people, of all ages, from the infant phenomenon to the oldest
inhabitant?
Many of my young correspondents have told me in so many words, “I want
to be famous.” Now it is true that of all the short cuts to fame, in
time of peace, there is none shorter than the road paved with rhymes.
Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous. Still more notably
did Rouget de l'Isle fill the air of France, nay, the whole atmosphere
of freedom all the world over, with his name wafted on the wings of the
Marseillaise, the work of a single night. But if by fame the aspirant
means having his name brought before and kept before the public, there
is a much cheaper way of acquiring that kind of notoriety. Have your
portrait taken as a “Wonderful Cure of a Desperate Disease given up by
all the Doctors.” You will get a fair likeness of yourself and a partial
biographical notice, and have the satisfaction, if not of promoting
the welfare of the community, at least that of advancing the financial
interests of the benefactor whose enterprise has given you your coveted
notoriety. If a man wants to be famous, he had much better try the
advertising doctor than the terrible editor, whose waste-basket is a
maw which is as insatiable as the temporary stomach of Jack the
Giant-killer.
“You must not talk so,” said Number Five. “I know you don't mean any
wrong to the true poets, but you might be thought to hold them cheap,
whereas you value the gift in others,--in yourself too, I rather think.
There are a great many women,--and some men,--who write in verse from
a natural instinct which leads them to that form of expression. If you
could peep into the portfolio of all the cultivated women among your
acquaintances, you would be surprised, I believe, to see how many of
them trust their thoughts and feelings to verse which they never think
of publishing, and much of which never meets any eyes but their
own. Don't be cruel to the sensitive natures who find a music in the
harmonies of rhythm and rhyme which soothes their own souls, if it
reaches no farther.”
I was glad that Number Five spoke up as she did. Her generous instinct
came to the rescue of the poor poets just at the right moment. Not that
I meant to deal roughly with them, but the “poets” I have been forced
into relation with have impressed me with certain convictions which
are not flattering to the fraternity, and if my judgments are not
accompanied by my own qualifications, distinctions, and exceptions, they
may seem harsh to many readers.
Let me draw a picture which many a young man and woman, and some no
longer young, will recognize as the story of their own experiences.
--He is sitting alone with his own thoughts and memories. What is that
book he is holding? Something precious, evidently, for it is bound
in “tree calf,” and there is gilding enough about it for a birthday
present. The reader seems to be deeply absorbed in its contents, and
at times greatly excited by what he reads; for his face is flushed, his
eyes glitter, and--there rolls a large tear down his cheek. Listen to
him; he is reading aloud in impassioned tones:
And have I coined my soul in words for naught?
And must I, with the dim, forgotten throng
Of silent ghosts that left no earthly trace
To show they once had breathed this vital air,
Die out, of mortal memories?
His voice is choked by his emotion. “How is it possible,” he says to
himself, “that any one can read my 'Gaspings for Immortality' without
being impressed by their freshness, their passion, their beauty, their
originality?” Tears come to his relief freely,--so freely that he has
to push the precious volume out of the range of their blistering shower.
Six years ago “Gaspings for Immortality” was published, advertised,
praised by the professionals whose business it is to boost their
publishers' authors. A week and more it was seen on the counters of
the booksellers and at the stalls in the railroad stations. Then it
disappeared from public view. A few copies still kept their place on
the shelves of friends,--presentation copies, of course, as there is no
evidence that any were disposed of by sale; and now, one might as well
ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire at a bookstore for “Gaspings
for Immortality.”
The authors of these poems are all round us, men and women, and no one
with a fair amount of human sympathy in his disposition would treat them
otherwise than tenderly. Perhaps they do not need tender treatment.
How do you know that posterity may not resuscitate these seemingly dead
poems, and give their author the immortality for which he longed and
labored? It is not every poet who is at once appreciated. Some will
tell you that the best poets never are. Who can say that you, dear
unappreciated brother or sister, are not one of those whom it is left
for after times to discover among the wrecks of the past, and hold up to
the admiration of the world?
I have not thought it necessary to put in all the interpellations, as
the French call them, which broke the course of this somewhat extended
series of remarks; but the comments of some of The Teacups helped me to
shape certain additional observations, and may seem to the reader as of
more significance than what I had been saying.
Number Seven saw nothing but the folly and weakness of the “rhyming
cranks,” as he called them. He thought the fellow that I had described
as blubbering over his still-born poems would have been better occupied
in earning his living in some honest way or other. He knew one chap that
published a volume of verses, and let his wife bring up the wood for
the fire by which he was writing. A fellow says, “I am a poet!” and he
thinks himself different from common folks. He ought to be excused
from military service. He might be killed, and the world would lose the
inestimable products of his genius. “I believe some of 'em think,” said
Number Seven, “that they ought not to be called upon to pay their taxes
and their bills for household expenses, like the rest of us.”
“If they would only study and take to heart Horace's 'Ars Poetica,'”
said the Professor, “it would be a great benefit to them and to the
world at large. I would not advise you to follow him too literally, of
course, for, as you will see, the changes that have taken place since
his time would make some of his precepts useless and some dangerous,
but the spirit of them is always instructive. This is the way, somewhat
modernized and accompanied by my running commentary, in which he
counsels a young poet:
“'Don't try to write poetry, my boy, when you are not in the mood
for doing it,--when it goes against the grain. You are a fellow of
sense,--you understand all that.
“'If you have written anything which you think well of, show it to
Mr.______, the well-known critic; to “the governor,” as you call
him,--your honored father; and to me, your friend.'
“To the critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put out
of conceit with yourself,--it may do you good; but I wouldn't go to 'the
governor' with my verses, if I were you. For either he will think what
you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as he could
have written himself,--in fact, he always did believe in hereditary
genius,--or he will pooh-pooh the whole rhyming nonsense, and tell you
that you had a great deal better stick to your business, and leave all
the word-jingling to Mother Goose and her followers.
“'Show me your verses,' says Horace. Very good it was in him, and mighty
encouraging the first counsel he gives! 'Keep your poem to yourself for
some eight or ten years; you will have time to look it over, to correct
it and make it fit to present to the public.'
“'Much obliged for your advice,' says the poor poet, thirsting for a
draught of fame, and offered a handful of dust. And off he hurries to
the printer, to be sure that his poem comes out in the next number of
the magazine he writes for.”
“Is not poetry the natural language of lovers?”
It was the Tutor who asked this question, and I thought he looked in
the direction of Number Five, as if she might answer his question. But
Number Five stirred her tea devotedly; there was a lump of sugar, I
suppose, that acted like a piece of marble. So there was a silence while
the lump was slowly dissolving, and it was anybody's chance who saw fit
to take up the conversation.
The voice that broke the silence was not the sweet, winsome one we were
listening for, but it instantly arrested the attention of the company.
It was the grave, manly voice of one used to speaking, and accustomed to
be listened to with deference. This was the first time that the company
as a whole had heard it, for the speaker was the new-comer who has been
repeatedly alluded to,--the one of whom I spoke as “the Counsellor.”
“I think I can tell you something about that,” said the Counsellor. “I
suppose you will wonder how a man of my profession can know or interest
himself about a question so remote from his arid pursuits. And yet
there is hardly one man in a thousand who knows from actual experience
a fraction of what I have learned of the lovers' vocabulary in my
professional experience. I have, I am sorry to say, had to take an
important part in a great number of divorce cases. These have brought
before me scores and hundreds of letters, in which every shade of the
great passion has been represented. What has most struck me in these
amatory correspondences has been their remarkable sameness. It seems as
if writing love-letters reduced all sorts of people to the same level.
I don't remember whether Lord Bacon has left us anything in that
line,--unless, indeed, he wrote Romeo and Juliet' and the 'Sonnets;' but
if he has, I don't believe they differ so very much from those of his
valet or his groom to their respective lady-loves. It is always, My
darling! my darling! The words of endearment are the only ones the lover
wants to employ, and he finds the vocabulary too limited for his vast
desires. So his letters are apt to be rather tedious except to the
personage to whom they are addressed. As to poetry, it is very common to
find it in love-letters, especially in those that have no love in them.
The letters of bigamists and polygamists are rich in poetical extracts.
Occasionally, an original spurt in rhyme adds variety to an otherwise
monotonous performance. I don't think there is much passion in men's
poetry addressed to women. I agree with The Dictator that poetry is
little more than the ashes of passion; still it may show that the flame
has had its sweep where you find it, unless, indeed, it is shoveled in
from another man's fireplace.”
“What do you say to the love poetry of women?” asked the Professor. “Did
ever passion heat words to incandescence as it did those of Sappho?”
The Counsellor turned,--not to Number Five, as he ought to have done,
according to my programme, but to the Mistress.
“Madam,” he said, “your sex is adorable in many ways, but in the abandon
of a genuine love-letter it is incomparable. I have seen a string of
women's love-letters, in which the creature enlaced herself about the
object of her worship as that South American parasite which clasps the
tree to which it has attached itself, begins with a slender succulent
network, feeds on the trunk, spreads its fingers out to hold firmly
to one branch after another, thickens, hardens, stretches in every
direction, following the boughs,--and at length gets strong enough to
hold in its murderous arms, high up in air, the stump and shaft of the
once sturdy growth that was its support and subsistence.”
The Counsellor did not say all this quite so formally as I have set it
down here, but in a much easier way. In fact, it is impossible to smooth
out a conversation from memory without stiffening it; you can't have a
dress shirt look quite right without starching the bosom.
Some of us would have liked to hear more about those letters in the
divorce cases, but the Counsellor had to leave the table. He promised to
show us some pictures he has of the South American parasite. I have seen
them, and I can assure you they are very curious.
The following verses were found in the urn, or sugar-bowl.