The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 31

A SERIES OF JOKES

BY A WONDERFUL QUIZ

_Who accompanies himself with a rub-a-dub-dub, full of spirit and grace, on the top of the tub._

SET FORTH IN

_October, the 21st day, in the year '48._

G.P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY.

It being the commonest mode of procedure, I premise a few candid remarks

TO THE READER:--

This trifle, begun to please only myself and my own private fancy, was laid on the shelf. But some friends, who had seen it, induced me, by dint of saying they liked it, to put it in print. That is, having come to that very conclusion, I asked their advice when 'twould make no confusion. For though (in the gentlest of ways) they had hinted it was scarce worth the while, I should doubtless have printed it.

I began it, intending a Fable, a frail, slender thing, rhymeywinged, with a sting in its tail. But, by addings and alterings not previously planned, digressions chance-hatched, like birds' eggs in the sand, and dawdlings to suit every whimsey's demand (always freeing the bird which I held In my hand, for the two perched, perhaps out of reach, in the tree),--it grew by degrees to the size which you see. I was like the old woman that carried the calf, and my neighbors, like hers, no doubt, wonder and laugh; and when, my strained arms with their grown burthen full, I call it my Fable, they call it a bull.

Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom n.o.body knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, that I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in short, I take more than a young author's lawful ease, and laugh in a queer way so like Mephistopheles, that the Public will doubt, as they grope through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun _of_ them or _with_ them.

So the excellent Public is hereby a.s.sured that the sale of my book is already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call _lofty_ and _true_, and about thirty thousand (_this_ tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed _full of promise_ and _pleasing_. The Public will see by a glance at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting _them_, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot.

As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my pages, with praises or blames, let them SEND IN THEIR CARDS, without further DELAY, to my friend G.P. PUTNAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where a LIST will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR to each NEW EDITION. Thus a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently HIGH (as the magazines say when they tell their best lie) to induce bards to CLUB their resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run through the mill.

One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters sketched in this slight _jeu d'esprit_, though, it may be, they seem, here and there, rather free, and drawn from a somewhat too cynical standpoint, are _meant_ to be faithful, for that is the grand point, and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you, without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes' tub.

A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Though it well may be reckoned, of all composition, the species at once most delightful and healthy, is a thing which an author, unless he be wealthy and willing to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all instances, called on to write, though there are, it is said, who, their spirits to cheer, slip in a new t.i.tle-page three times a year, and in this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the popular favor,--much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat the Ugolino inside to a picture of meat.

You remember (if not, pray turn, backward and look) that, in writing the preface which ushered my book, I treated you, excellent Public, not merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could b.u.t.ter both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are those with whom _your_ verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the higher court sitting within.

But I wander from what I intended to say,--that you have, namely, shown such a liberal way of thinking, and so much aesthetic perception of anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

You have watched a child playing--in those wondrous years when belief is not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle over the street, his fancy, in purest good faith, will make sail round the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds of times. Or, suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of childhood, the Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony and cry, 'Jack, let's play that I am a Genius!' Jacky straightway makes Aladdin's lamp out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two urchins, have grown into men, and both have turned authors,--one says to his brother, 'Let's play we're the American somethings or other,--say Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews.' So they both (as mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous bays. Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased review, thinks--Here's pretty high praise, but no more than my due.

Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, it asked, scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when he said that the Public _sometimes_ hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down (by Smith with the cordial a.s.sistance of Brown), in all, if you put any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, while I am writing,--I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink of it,--Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun a critique,--am I not to be pitied?[1]

Now I shall not crush _them_ since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,--no action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste time in putting them down--I am thinking not their own self-inflation will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the whole bevy,--though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy.

No, my dear honest bore, _surdo fabulam narras_, they are no more to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get _fou_ with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight; the pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes, where pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by recall to September the blue of June's sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but--pish! I've buried the hatchet: I'm twisting an allumette out of one of you now, and relighting my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece.

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the _errata_, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kinds of strata (only these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed, squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride become an aversion,--my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an _o_'s being wry, a limp in an _e_, or a c.o.c.k in an _i_,--but to have the sweet babe of my brain served in _pi!_ I am not queasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet as that was quite out of the question.

In the edition now issued no pains are neglected, and my verses, as orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the public's own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one, has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine, whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking together, would not be _my_ way. I can hardly tell whether a question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t'other.

For my other _anonymi_, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a caricature, and what by a portrait. There _are_ those who think it is capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women nor men for their gender, nor own any s.e.x in a pen. I choose just to hint to some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two parties also to every good laugh.

A FABLE FOR CRITICS

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade, Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made, For the G.o.d being one day too warm in his wooing, She took to the tree to escape his pursuing; Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk, And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk; And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her, He somehow or other had never forgiven her; Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic, Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic, 10 And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.

'My case is like Dido's,' he sometimes remarked; 'When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked In a laurel, as _she_ thought--but (ah, how Fate mocks!) She has found it by this time a very bad box; Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,-- You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.

Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!

What romance would be left?--who can flatter or kiss trees? 20 And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,-- Not to say that the thought would forever intrude That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood?

Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves, To see those loved graces all taking their leaves; Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now, As they left me forever, each making its bough!

If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right, Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.' 30

Now, Daphne--before she was happily treeified-- Over all other blossoms the lily had deified, And when she expected the G.o.d on a visit ('Twas before he had made his intentions explicit), Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care, To look as if artlessly twined in her hair, Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses, Like the day breaking through, the long night of her tresses; So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible, Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table 40 (I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable, Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),-- He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it, As I shall at the----, when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I've been spinning, I've got back at last to my story's beginning: Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress, As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries, Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories, We read of his verses--the Oracles, namely,-- 50 (I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely, For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk, They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk, And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,--) First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is Would induce a mustache, for you know he's _imberbis;_ Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position Was a.s.sailed by the age of his son the physician; At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately, 60 And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly; 'Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding felonious,-- Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?

Look well to your seat, 'tis like taking an airing On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing; It leads one, 'tis true, through the primitive forest, Grand natural features, but then one has no rest; You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance, When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,-- Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?' 70 --Here the laurel leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.

'Oh, weep with me, Daphne,' he sighed, 'for you know it's A terrible thing to be pestered with poets!

But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good, She never will cry till she's out of the wood!

What wouldn't I give if I never had known of her?

'Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over: If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over, I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher, And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning the loss of her. 80 One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,-- A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin on; What boots all your grist? it can never be ground Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round; (Or, if 'tis a water-mill, alter the metaphor, And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore, Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"-- It is not a metaphor, though, 'tis a simile); A lily, perhaps, would set _my_ mill a-going, For just at this season, I think, they are blowing. 90 Here, somebody, fetch one; not very far hence They're in bloom by the score, 'tis but climbing a fence; There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his Whole garden, from one end to t'other, with lilies; A very good plan, were it not for satiety, One longs for a weed here and there, for variety; Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.'

Now there happened to be among Phoebus's followers, A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers, 100 Who bolt every book that comes out of the press, Without the least question of larger or less, Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head,-- For reading new books is like eating new bread, One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he Is brought to death's door of a mental dyspepsy.

On a previous stage of existence, our Hero Had ridden outside, with the gla.s.s below zero; He had been, 'tis a fact you may safely rely on, Of a very old stock a most eminent scion,-- 110 A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on, Who stretch the new boots Earth's unwilling to try on, Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on, Whose hair's in the mortar of every new Zion, Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one, Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on, Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, with the lion (Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one), Who contrive to make every good fortune a wry one, And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on, 120 Whose pedigree, traced to earth's earliest years, Is longer than anything else but their ears,-- In short, he was sent into life with the wrong key, He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey.

Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters; Far happier than many a literary hack, He bore only paper-mill rags on his back (For It makes a vast difference which side the mill One expends on the paper his labor and skill); 130 So, when his soul waited a new transmigration, And Destiny balanced 'twixt this and that station, Not having much time to expend upon bothers, Remembering he'd had some connection with authors, And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,-- She set him on two, and he came forth a critic.

Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took In any amus.e.m.e.nt but tearing a book; For him there was no intermediate stage From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age; 140 There were years when he didn't wear coat-tails behind, But a boy he could never be rightly defined; like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span, From the womb he came gravely, a little old man; While other boys' trousers demanded the toil Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil, Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy, He sat in the corner and read Viri Romae.

He never was known to unbend or to revel once In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once; 150 He was just one of those who excite the benevolence Of your old prigs who sound the soul's depths with a ledger, And are on the lookout for some young men to 'edger- cate,' as they call it, who won't be too costly, And who'll afterward take to the ministry mostly; Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious, Always keep on good terms with each _mater-familias_ Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year: Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions, 160 Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions.

In this way our Hero got safely to college, Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge; A reading-machine, always wound up and going, He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing, Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin, To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin That Tully could never have made out a word in it (Though himself was the model the author preferred in it), And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee 170 All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B., He was launched (life is always compared to a sea) With just enough learning, and skill for the using it, To prove he'd a brain, by forever confusing it.

So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning With the holiest zeal against secular learning, _Nesciensque scienter_, as writers express it, _Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit_.

'Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew, Each a separate fact, undeniably true, 180 But with him or each other they'd nothing to do; No power of combining, arranging, discerning, Digested the ma.s.ses he learned into learning; There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for (And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),-- Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter, Till he'd weighed its relations to plain bread and b.u.t.ter.

When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits In compiling the journals' historical bits,-- Of shops broken open, men falling in fits, 190 Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers, And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,-- Then, rising by industry, knack, and address, Got notices up for an unbiased press, With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for: From this point his progress was rapid and sure, To the post of a regular heavy reviewer.

And here I must say he wrote excellent articles On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles; 200 They filled up the s.p.a.ce nothing else was prepared for, And n.o.body read that which n.o.body cared for; If any old book reached a fiftieth edition, He could fill forty pages with safe erudition: He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules, And his very old nothings pleased very old fools; But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart, And you put him at sea without compa.s.s or chart,-- His blunders aspired to the rank of an art; For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, 210 Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him, So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him, Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite, New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet, Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create In the soul of their critic the measure and weight, Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace, To compute their own judge, and a.s.sign him his place, Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it, And, reporting each circ.u.mstance just as he found it, 220 Without the least malice,--his record would be Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea, Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print for our sakes, Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes, Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a Comprehensive account of the ruins at Denderah.

As I said, he was never precisely unkind.

The defect in his brain was just absence of mind; If he boasted, 'twas simply that he was self-made, A position which I, for one, never gainsaid, 230 My respect for my Maker supposing a skill In his works which our Hero would answer but ill; And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he, Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery, And set up a kind of a man-manufactory,-- An event which I shudder to think about, seeing That Man is a moral, accountable being.

He meant well enough, but was still in the way, As dunces still are, let them be where they may; Indeed, they appear to come into existence 240 To impede other folks with their awkward a.s.sistance; If you set up a dunce on the very North pole All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul, He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins, And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins, To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice, All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice; Or, if he found n.o.body else there to pother, Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other, For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, 250 Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

A terrible fellow to meet in society, Not the toast that he b.u.t.tered was ever so dry at tea; There he'd sit at the table and stir in his sugar, Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar; Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights, Of your time,--he's as fond as an Arab of dates; You'll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way, Of something you've seen in the course of the day; And, just as you're tapering out the conclusion, 260 You venture an ill-fated cla.s.sic allusion,-- The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!

The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back!

You had left out a comma,--your Greek's put in joint, And pointed at cost of your story's whole point.