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042 - Great Writers by Little Men · Reviews

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  Speaker 1: Section forty one of reviews by Oscar Wilde. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Karen Savage, section forty one. Great Writers by
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  Speaker 1: Little Men, pal Mal Gazette, March twenty eighth, eighteen eighty seven.
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  Speaker 1: In an introductory note prefixed to the initial volume of
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  Speaker 1: Great Writers, a series of literary monographs now being issued
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  Speaker 1: by mister Walter Scott, the publisher himself comes forward, in
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  Speaker 1: the kindest manner possible, to give his authors the requisite
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  Speaker 1: puff preliminary and ventures to express the modest opinion that
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  Speaker 1: such original and valuable works have never before been produced
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  Speaker 1: in any part of the world at a price so
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  Speaker 1: low as a shilling a volume. Far be it from
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  Speaker 1: us to make any heartless allusion to the fact that
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  Speaker 1: Shakespeare's Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or that for
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  Speaker 1: fourpence halfpenny one could have bought a marshal in ancient Rome.
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  Speaker 1: Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right
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  Speaker 1: to beat a drum before his booth. Still we must
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  Speaker 1: acknowledge that mister Walter Scott would have been much better
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  Speaker 1: employed in correcting some of the more obvious errors that
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  Speaker 1: appear in his series. When, for instance, we come across
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  Speaker 1: such a phrase as the brotherly liberality of the brother's wedgewood.
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  Speaker 1: The awkwardness of the expression is hardly atoned for by
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  Speaker 1: the fact that the name of the great potter is
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  Speaker 1: misspelt Longfellow is so essentially poor in rhymes that it
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  Speaker 1: is unfair to rob him even of one, and the
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  Speaker 1: misquotation on page seventy seven is absolutely unkind. The joke
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  Speaker 1: Coleridge himself made upon the subject should have been sufficient
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  Speaker 1: to remind anyone that Comerbach Sick was not the name
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  Speaker 1: under which he enlisted, and no real beauty is added
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  Speaker 1: to the first line of his pathetic work without hope
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  Speaker 1: by printing lair l a r E sick instead of
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  Speaker 1: lair l a i r. The truth is that all
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  Speaker 1: premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves, and in
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  Speaker 1: the present case, though the series has only just entered
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  Speaker 1: upon existence, already a great deal of the work done
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  Speaker 1: is careless, disappointing, unequal, and tedious. Mister Eric Robertson's Longfellow
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  Speaker 1: is a most depressing book. No one survives being over estimated.
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  Speaker 1: Nor is there any shorer way of destroying an author's
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  Speaker 1: reputation than to glorify him without judgment and to praise
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  Speaker 1: him without tact. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the
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  Speaker 1: first true men of letters America produced, and as such
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  Speaker 1: deserves a high place in any history of American civilization.
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  Speaker 1: To a land out of breath and its greed for gain,
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  Speaker 1: he showed the example of a life devoted entirely to
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  Speaker 1: the study of literature. His lectures, though not by any
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  Speaker 1: means brilliant, were still productive of much good. He had
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  Speaker 1: a most charming and gracious personality, and he wrote some
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  Speaker 1: pretty poems. But his poems are not of the kind
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  Speaker 1: that call for intellectual analysis, or for elaborate description, or
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  Speaker 1: indeed for any serious discussion at all. They are as
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  Speaker 1: unsuited for panegyric as they are unworthy of censure, and
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  Speaker 1: it is difficult to help smiling when mister Robertson gravely
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  Speaker 1: tell us that few modern poets have given utterance to
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  Speaker 1: a faith so comprehensive as that expressed in the Psalm
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  Speaker 1: of Life, or that Evangeline should confer on Longfellow the
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  Speaker 1: title of golden mouthed, and that the style of meter
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  Speaker 1: adopted carries the ear back to times in the world's
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  Speaker 1: history when grand simplicities were sung. Surely, mister Robertson does
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  Speaker 1: not believe that there is any connection a tour between
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  Speaker 1: Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and Rome,
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  Speaker 1: or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of
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  Speaker 1: Homer's or Virgil's line. Where also lies the advantage of
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  Speaker 1: confusing popularity with poetic power. Though the Psalm of Life
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  Speaker 1: be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make
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  Speaker 1: it true poetry. Why call upon us to admire a
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  Speaker 1: bad misquotation for the midnight mass for the dying year?
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  Speaker 1: And why talk of Longfellow's hundreds of imitators. Longfellow has
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  Speaker 1: no imitators, For of echoes themselves, there are no echoes,
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  Speaker 1: And it is only style that makes a school. Now
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  Speaker 1: and then, However, mister Robertson considers it necessary to assume
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  Speaker 1: a critical attitude. He tells us, for instance, that whether
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  Speaker 1: or not Longfellow was a genius of the first order.
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  Speaker 1: It must be admitted that he loved social pleasures and
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  Speaker 1: was a good eater and judge of wines, admiring Bass's
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  Speaker 1: ale more than anything else he had seen in England.
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  Speaker 1: The remarks on Excelsior are even still more amazing. Excelsior,
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  Speaker 1: says mister Robertson, is not a ballad because a ballad
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  Speaker 1: deals either with real or with supernatural people, and the
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  Speaker 1: hero of the poem cannot be brought under either category.
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  Speaker 1: For were he of human flesh, his mad cap notion
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  Speaker 1: of scaling a mountain with the purpose of getting to
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  Speaker 1: the sky would be simply driveling lunacy, to say nothing
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  Speaker 1: of the fact that the pique in question is much
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  Speaker 1: frequented by tourists, while on the other hand, it would
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  Speaker 1: be absurd to suppose him a spirit, for no spirit
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  Speaker 1: would be so silly as climb a snowy mountain for nothing.
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  Speaker 1: It is really painful to have to read such preposterous nonsense.
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  Speaker 1: And if mister Walter Scott imagines that work of this
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  Speaker 1: kind is original and valuable, he has much to learn.
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  Speaker 1: Nor are mister Robertson's criticisms upon other poets at all
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  Speaker 1: more felicitous. The casual allusion to Herrick's confectioneries of Verse
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  Speaker 1: is of course quite explicable, coming as it does from
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  Speaker 1: an editor who excluded Herrick from an anthology of the
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  Speaker 1: child poems of our literature in favor of mister Ashby
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  Speaker 1: Sterry and mister William Sharp. But when mister Robertson tells
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  Speaker 1: us that Poe's loftiest flights of imagination in Verse rise
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  Speaker 1: into no more imperial realm than the fantastic, we can
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  Speaker 1: only recommend him to read as soon as possible the
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  Speaker 1: marvelous lines to Helen, a poem as beautiful as a
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  Speaker 1: Greek gem and as musical as Apollo's lute. The remarks, too,
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  Speaker 1: on Poe's critical estimate of his own work show that
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  Speaker 1: mister Robertson has never really studied the poet on whom
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  Speaker 1: he pronounces such glib and shallow judgments, and exemplify very
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  Speaker 1: clearly the fact that even dogmatism is no excuse for ignorance.
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  Speaker 1: After reading mister Halcain's Coleridge, we are irresistibly reminded of
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  Speaker 1: what Wordsworth once said about a bust that had been
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  Speaker 1: done of himself. After contemplating it for some time, he remarked,
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  Speaker 1: it is not a bad Wordsworth, but it is not
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  Speaker 1: the real Wordsworth. It is not Wordsworth the poet. It
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  Speaker 1: is the sort of Wordsworth who might be Chancellor of
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  Speaker 1: the Exchequer. Mister Kane's Coleridge is certainly not the sort
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  Speaker 1: of Coleridge who might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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  Speaker 1: For the author of Cristabell was not by any means
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  Speaker 1: remarkable as a financier. But for all that, it is
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  Speaker 1: not the real Coleridge, It is not Coleridge the poet.
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  Speaker 1: The incidents of the life are duly recounted. The gunpowder
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  Speaker 1: plot at Cambridge, the egg hoart and oroonokou at the
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  Speaker 1: little tavern in Newgate Street, the blue coat and the
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  Speaker 1: white waistcoat that so amazed the worthy Unitarians, and the
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  Speaker 1: terrible smoking experiment at Birmingham are all carefully chronicled, as
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  Speaker 1: no doubt they should be in every popular biography. But
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  Speaker 1: of the spiritual progress of the man's soul we hear
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  Speaker 1: absolutely nothing. Never, for one single instant are we brought
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  Speaker 1: near to Coleridge. The magic of that wonderful personality is
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  Speaker 1: hidden from us by a cloud of mean details, an
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  Speaker 1: unholy jungle of fats, and the critical history promised to
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  Speaker 1: us by mister Walter Scott in his unfortunate preface is
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  Speaker 1: conspicuous only by its absence. Carlyle once proposed in jest
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  Speaker 1: to write a life of Michaelangelo without making any reference
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  Speaker 1: to his art, and mister Kane has shown that such
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  Speaker 1: a project is perfectly feasible. He has written the life
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  Speaker 1: of a great peripatetic philosopher, and chronicled only the peripatetics.
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  Speaker 1: He has tried to tell us about a poet, and
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  Speaker 1: his book might be the biography of the famous tallow chandler,
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  Speaker 1: who would not appreciate the Watchman. The real events of
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  Speaker 1: Coleridge's life are not his gig excursions and his walking tours.
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  Speaker 1: They are his thoughts, dreams, and passions, his moments of
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  Speaker 1: creative impulse their source and secret, his moods of imaginative joy,
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  Speaker 1: their marvel in their meaning. And not his moods merely,
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  Speaker 1: but the music and the melancholy that they brought him,
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  Speaker 1: the lyric loveliness of his voice when he sang, the
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  Speaker 1: sterile sorrow of the years when he was silent. It
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  Speaker 1: is said that every man's life is a soul's tragedy.
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  Speaker 1: Coleridges certainly was so, and though we may not be
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  Speaker 1: able to pluck out the heart of his miss still
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  Speaker 1: let us recognize that mystery is there, and that the
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  Speaker 1: goings out and comings in of a man, his places
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  Speaker 1: of sojourn, and his roads of travel, are but idle
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  Speaker 1: things to chronicle. If that which is the man be
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  Speaker 1: left unrecorded, so mediocre is mister Kane's book that even
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  Speaker 1: accuracy could not make it better on the whole, then
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  Speaker 1: mister Walter Scott cannot be congratulated on the success of
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  Speaker 1: his venture so far. The one really admirable feature of
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  Speaker 1: the series is the bibliography that is appended to each volume.
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  Speaker 1: These bibliographies are compiled by mister Anderson of the British Museum,
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  Speaker 1: and are so valuable to the student, as well as
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  Speaker 1: interesting in themselves, that it is much to be regretted
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  Speaker 1: that they should be accompanied by such tedious letter press.
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  Speaker 1: First end note Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Eric S. Robertson.
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  Speaker 1: Second end note Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Hall Caine.
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  Speaker 1: Great Writers Series, Walter Scott, end of section forty one
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  Speaker 1: great writers, by little men.