Recollections of a Varied Life Part 23

"Considered absolutely," I replied, "perhaps it wasn't. But considered in the light of the temptation I was under to say immeasurably severer things, it was mild and gentle in an extreme degree. The man is not a poet, but a fool. He not only hasn't the smallest appreciation of what poetry is or means, but he hasn't the ability to entertain a thought of any kind worthy of presentation in print or in any other way. I should have stultified myself and the _Evening Post_ if I had written more favorably of his work than I did. I should never have thought of writing of it at all, but for the _Evening Post's_ rule that every book offered here for review must be mentioned in some way in the literary columns.

Here is the book. I wish you would glance at the alleged poems and tell me how I could have said anything concerning them of a more considerately favorable character than what in fact I printed."

He took the book from my hand and looked it over. Then he laid it on my desk, saying:

"It is indeed pretty bad. Still, I have always found that it is possible to find something good to say about a poet's work."

A little later a still worse case came to my lot. It was a volume of "verse," with no sense at all in it, without even rhythm to redeem it, and with an abundance of "rhymes" that were not easily recognizable even as a.s.sonances. It was clumsily printed and "published" at some rural newspaper office, and doubtless at the expense of the author. Finally the cover attempt at decoration had resulted in a grotesque combination of incompatible colors and inconsequent forms. In brief, the thing was execrably, hopelessly, irredeemably bad all over and clear through.

I was puzzling over the thing, trying to "find something good to say" of it, when Mr. Bryant came into my den. I handed him the volume, saying:

"I wish you would help me with a suggestion, Mr. Bryant. I'm trying to find something good that I can say of that thing, and I can't--for of course you do not want me to write lies."

"Lies? Of course not. But you can always find something good in every volume of poems, something that can be truthfully commended."

"In this case I can't regard the sprawlings of ill-directed aspiration as poems," I replied, "and it seems to me a legitimate function of criticism to say that they are not poems but idiotic drivel--to discriminate between poetry in its unworthiest form and things like that. However, the man calls his stuff poetry. I wish you would help me find something good that I may say of it without lying."

[Sidenote: Commending a Cover]

He took the book and looked through it. Finally he said:

"It is pretty sorry stuff, to be sure. It is even idiotic, and it doesn't suggest poetic appreciation or poetic impulse or poetic perception on the part of its author. Still, the man aspires to recognition as a poet, and he is doubtless sensitively conscious of his own shortcomings.

Let us deal gently with him."

"But what can I say, Mr. Bryant?"

"Well, of course, there is nothing _inside_ the book that you can praise," he answered, "but you might commend the cover--no, that is an affront to taste and intelligence,"--looking it over with an expression of disgust--"but at any rate you can commend the publishers for _putting it on well_."

With that--apparently dreading further questioning--he left the room. I proceeded to review the book by saying simply that the cover was put on so strongly that even the most persistent and long continued enjoyment or critical study of the text was not likely to detach or loosen it.

I am disposed to think that Mr. Bryant's excessive tenderness toward poets was lavished chiefly upon the weaklings of that order. For a little while later a poet of genuine inspiration, who afterwards did notable work, put forward his first volume of verse. I found an abundance of good things to say about it, but there was one line in one of his poems that was so ridiculously inconsequent and absurd, that I could not refrain from poking fun at it. I am convinced that the poet in question, with his larger experience and the development that afterward came to his critical faculties, would not have permitted that line to stand if it had occurred in a poem of a later period. It appealed to him then by its musical quality, which was distinctly marked, but when subjected to the simplest a.n.a.lysis it was obvious and arrant nonsense.

Mr. Bryant was interested in the review I wrote of the volume, and in talking with me about it, he distinctly chuckled over my destructive a.n.a.lysis of the offending line. There was no suggestion in what he said, that he regarded the criticism as in the least a transgression of his injunction to "deal gently with the poets."

Unfortunately, the poet criticised seemed less tolerant of the criticism. He was a personal friend of my own, but when next I saw him his mood was that of one cruelly injured, and for many years thereafter he manifested this sense of injury whenever he and I met. I think he afterward forgave me, for we later became the best of friends, and I am glad to believe there was no rancor in his heart toward me when he died a little while ago.

[Sidenote: Anonymous Criticism]

In these cases I was at a peculiar disadvantage--though I think it not at all an unjust one--in every indulgence in anything like adverse criticism. I may best explain this, perhaps, by telling of an incident that happened soon after I a.s.sumed my position. I had been lucky enough to secure from Richard Henry Stoddard a very brilliant review of a certain book which he was peculiarly the fittest man in all the land to write about. I had the review in type, when I mentioned to Mr. Bryant my good fortune in securing it.

"Is it signed?" he asked in his gentlest manner.

I answered that it was not, for the reason that Stoddard was under a certain a.s.sertion of obligation which he refused to recognize but which I could not ask him to repudiate, not to write things of that character for other than a particular publication.

"Then I request that you shall not use it," said Mr. Bryant.

"But really, Mr. Bryant, there is not the smallest obligation upon him in the matter. He is perfectly free----"

"It is not of that that I was thinking," he interrupted. "That is a matter between him and his own conscience, and you and I have nothing whatever to do with it. My objection to your use of the article is that _I regard an anonymous literary criticism as a thing quite as despicable, unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter_. It is something that no honorable man should write, and no honorably conducted newspaper should publish."

"But my own reviews in the _Evening Post_ are all of them anonymous,"

I suggested.

"Not at all," he answered. "When you were appointed literary editor the fact was communicated to every publisher in the country. I directed that and saw that it was done, so that every publisher and, through the publishers, every author, should know that every literary criticism in the _Evening Post_ was your utterance. In veritable effect, therefore, everything you print in our literary columns is signed, just as every critical article in the great British reviews is. When Jeffrey ridiculed 'Hours of Idleness,' and later, when he seriously criticised 'Cain,'

Byron had no need to inquire who his critic was. The work was responsibly done, as such work should be in every case. The reasons seem to me obvious enough. In the first place, anonymous literary criticism may easily become a cowardly stabbing in the back under cover of darkness.

In the second place, the reader of such criticism has no means of knowing what value to place upon it. He cannot know whether the critic is a person competent or incompetent, one to whose opinions he should defer or one whose known incapacity would prompt him to dismiss them as unworthy of consideration because of their source. In the third place, anonymous literary criticism opens wide the door of malice on the one hand, and of undue favoritism on the other. It is altogether despicable, and it is dangerous besides. I will have none of it on the _Evening Post_."

I suggested that I had myself read the book that Stoddard had reviewed, and that I was ready to accept his criticism as my own and to hold myself responsible for it.

"Very well," he replied. "In that case you may print it as your own, but I had much rather you had written it yourself."

I have often meditated upon these things since, and I have found abundant reason to adopt Mr. Bryant's view that an anonymous literary criticism is as despicable as an anonymous letter. About a year ago I was startled by the utterance of precisely the same thought in nearly identical words, by Professor Brander Matthews. I was sitting between him and Mr. Howells at a banquet given by Colonel William C. Church to the surviving writers for that best and most literary of American magazines, _The Galaxy_, and when Matthews uttered the thought I turned to Mr. Howells and asked him what his opinion was.

"I have never formulated my thought on that question, even in my own mind," he replied. "I don't know how far it would be just to judge others in the matter, but for myself, I think I never wrote a literary criticism that was not avowedly or ascertainably my own. Without having thought of the ethical question involved, my own impulse is to shrink from the idea of striking in the dark or from behind a mask."

LI

[Sidenote: A Thrifty Poet's Plan]

On one occasion Mr. Bryant's desire to "deal gently with the poets" led to an amusing embarra.s.sment. Concerning a certain volume of verse "made in Ohio" and published by its author, I had written that "this is the work of a man who seems to have an alert appreciation of the poetic side of things, but whose gift of poetic interpretation and literary expression is distinctly a minus quant.i.ty."

Soon afterward Mr. Bryant entered my den with an open letter in his hand and a look of pained perplexity on his face.

"What am I to do with that?" he asked, handing me the letter to read.

I read it. The poet, knowing Mr. Bryant to be the editor of the _Evening Post_, evidently supposed that he wrote everything that appeared in the columns of that newspaper. a.s.suming that Mr. Bryant had written the review of his book, he wrote asking that he might be permitted to use the first half of my sentence as an advertis.e.m.e.nt, with Mr. Bryant's name signed to it. To facilitate matters he had prepared, on a separate sheet, a transcript of the words:

"This is the work of a man who seems to have an alert appreciation of the poetic side of things."

This he asked Mr. Bryant to sign and return to him for use as an advertis.e.m.e.nt, explaining that "Your great name will help me to sell my book, and I need the money. It cost me nearly two hundred dollars to get the book out, and so far I haven't been able to sell more than twenty-seven copies of it, though I have canva.s.sed three counties at considerable expense for food, lodging, and horse-feed."

I saw how seriously distressed Mr. Bryant was by this appeal, and volunteered to answer the letter myself, by way of relieving him. I answered it, but I did not report the nature of my answer to Mr. Bryant, for the reason that in my personal letter I dealt by no means "gently"

with this particular poet.

For the further distraction of Mr. Bryant's mind from a matter that distressed him sorely, I told him of the case in which a thrifty and shifty London publisher turned to good advertising account one of the _Sat.u.r.day Review's_ most murderous criticisms. The _Review_ had written:

"There is much that is good in this book, and much that is new. But that which is good is not new, and that which is new is not good."

The publisher, in his advertis.e.m.e.nts, made display of the sentence: "There is much that is good in this book, and much that is new.--_Sat.u.r.day Review_."

One thing leads to another in conversation and I went on--by way of the further diversion of Mr. Bryant's mind--to ill.u.s.trate the way in which the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, like many other publications, sometimes ruined its richest utterances by dilution. I cited a case in which that periodical had begun a column review of a wishy-washy book by saying:

"This is milk for babes, with water superadded. The milk is pure and the water is pure, but the diet is not invigorating."

As a bit of destructive criticism, this was complete and perfect. But the writer spoiled it by going on to write a column of less trenchant matter, trampling, as it were, and quite needlessly, upon the corpse of the already slain offender.