The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859. Various
is too exclusively my literary kingdom,—who classified the vices which Swift smote so fearfully in "The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms"; and the curious catalogue contained "avarice, fraud, cheating, violence, rapine, extortion, cruelty, oppression, tyranny, rancor, envy, malice, detraction, hatred, revenge, murder, bribery, corruption, pimping, lying, perjury, subornation, treachery, ingratitude, gaming, flattery, drunkenness, gluttony, luxury, vanity, effeminacy, cowardice, pride, impudence, hypocrisy, infidelity, blasphemy, idolatry, and innumerable other vices, many of them the notorious characteristics of the bulk of humankind." Delightful catalogue! How odd, indeed, that a man with such work to do should not have sported with Amaryllis, or played with the tangles of Neaera's hair,—should not have worn well-anointed love-locks and snowy linen,—should, on the other hand, have bared his brawny arm, and sent the hissing flail down swiftly upon the waled and blistered back of Sham! How much better would it have been, if he had written a history, in twelve elephantine volumes, of the rise, culmination, and decay of the Empire of Barataria, which we would have gone to prison, the rack, and the drop, with rapture rather than read!
How low seems Fielding, with his pot-house heroes, Tom Jones, Squire Western, and Jonathan Wild, when we contrast them with the elegant, cleanly-polished, and extremely proper Sir Charles Grandison! What a coarse drab is Molly Seagrim, when juxtaposited with the princess of all prudes, the indomitably virtuous Pamela! How childish was it of Cowper to sing of sofas, poultry, rabbits, orchards, meadows, and barnyards! How much more nobly employed was John Dryden in manufacturing a brand-new, truculent, loud-voiced, massively-calved, ensiferous Alexander! Who but an addle-headed sot would have wandered up and down the lanes, like Morland, chalking out pigs and milkmaids, when he might have been painting, like Barry, pictures, by the acre, of gods and goddesses enacting incomprehensible allegories! Let us be respectable, O my Bobus, and wear good coats and the best hats to be had for money or upon credit; let us carefully conceal our connection with "The Gotham Revolver," although the honest people who print it do give us our beer and mutton; let us write great histories which nobody will read, engage in tractations to which nobody will listen, build twelve-storied epics which nobody will publish, and invent Gordian philosophies which nobody can untie. Surely it is quite time for Minerva to have a general house-cleaning, to put on a fresh smock, and to live cleanly. Rabelais shall be washed, and Sterne sad-ironed into gravity; De Foe shall be made as decorous as a tract; Mandeville shall be reburned, and we will kindle the fire with half the leaves of this dry and yellow Montaigne. Nobody shall approach the waters of Castaly save upon stilts; and whoever may giggle, as he takes his physic, shall be put upon a dreadfully plentiful allowance of Guieciardini for bread, and of the poems of – – for water.
But, alas! Brother Bobus, where to begin our purification, and where to end it? We may, like the curate in "Don Quixote," reprieve Amadis de Gaul, but shall we, therefore, make Esplandian, "his lawful-begotten son," a foundation for the funeral-pile we are to set a-blazing presently? To be sure, there is sense in the observation of the good and holy priest upon that memorable occasion. "This," said the barber, "is Amadis of Greece; and it is my opinion that all those upon this side are of the same family." "Then pitch them all into the yard," responded the priest; "for, rather than miss the satisfaction of roasting Queen Pintiquiniestra and the pastorals of Darinel the Shepherd and his damned unintelligible speculations, I would burn my own father along with them, if I found him playing at knight-errantry." So into the yard went "Olivante de Laura, the nonsensical old blockhead," "rough and dull Florismart of Hyrcania," "noble Don Platir," with nothing in him "deserving a grain of pity," Bernardo del Carpio, and Roncesvalles, and Palmerin de Oliva. What a delicious scene it is! The fussy barber, tired of reading titles and proceeding to burn by wholesale, passing down books in armfuls to the eager housekeeper, more ready to burn them than ever she had been to weave the finest lace. And how charming is the hit of the Curate! "Certainly, these cannot be books of knight-errantry, they are too small; you'll find they are only poets,"—the supplication of the niece that the singers should not be spared, lest her uncle, when cured of his knight-errantry, should read them, become a shepherd, and wander through forests and fields,—"nay, and what is more to be dreaded, turn poet, which is said to be a disease absolutely incurable." So down went "the longer poems" of Diana de Montemayor, the whole of Salmantino, with the Iberian Shepherd and the Nymphs of Henares. The impatience of the curate, who, completely worn out, orders all the rest to be burned á canga cerrada, fitly rounds the chapter, and sends us in good-humor from the auto da fé, while the poor knight is in his bedchamber, all unconscious of the purification in progress, which, if he had known it, mad as he was, would have made his madness starker still, thrashing about with his sword, back-stroke and fore-stroke, and, as Motteux translates it, "making a heavy bustle." 'Tis all droll enough; especially when we find that the housekeeper made such clean work of it in the evening, in spite of the good curate's reservations, and burnt all the books, not only those in the yard, but all those that were in the house; but I should think twice before I let Freston the necromancer into any library with which I am acquainted.
Let us be gentle with the denizens of Fame's proud temple, no matter how they came there. You remember, I suppose, Swift's couplet,—
"Fame has but two gates,—a white and a black one;
The worst they can say is I got in at the back one."
"I have nothing," wrote Pope to his friend Cromwell, "to say to you in this latter; but I was resolved to write to tell you so. Why should not I content myself with so many great examples of deep divines, profound casuists, grave philosophers, who have written, not letters only, but whole tomes and voluminous treatises about nothing? Why should a fellow like me, who all his life does nothing, be ashamed to write nothing, and that, too, to one who has nothing to do but read it?" And so, with "ex nihilo nil fit," he laughingly ends his letter.
And now, while I am at it, I must quote a passage, somewhat germane, from the very next letter, which Pope wrote to the same friend:—"You talk of fame and glory, and of the great men of antiquity. Pray, tell me, what are all your great dead men, but so many living letters? What a vast reward is here for all the ink wasted by writers and all the blood spilt by princes! There was in old time one Severus, a Roman Emperor. I dare say you never called him by any other name in your life; and yet in his days he was styled Lucius, Septimius, Severus, Pius, Pertinax, Augustus, Parthicus, Adiabenicus, Arabicus, Maximus, and what not? What a prodigious waste of letters has time made! What a number have here dropped off, and left the poor surviving seven unattended! For my own part, four are all I have to take care of; and I'll be judged by you, if any man could live in less compass. Well, for the future, I'll drown all high thoughts in the Lethe of cowslip-wine; as for fame, renown, reputation, take 'em, critics! If ever I seek for immortality here, may I be damn'd, for there's not much danger in a poet's being damn'd,—
'Damnation follows death in other men,
But your damn'd Poet lives and writes agen.'"
And so they do, even unto the present, otherwise blessed day. But, dear old friend, is not this sublime sneering? and is there not an honest ray or two of truth mingled here and there in the colder coruscations of this wit? Of the sincerity of this repudiation and renunciation so fashionable in the Pope circle I have nothing to say; but in certain moods of the mind it is vastly entertaining, and cures one's melancholy as cautery cures certain physical afflictions. It may be amusing for you also to notice that Don Quixote's niece and Pope were of the same mind. She called poetry "a catching and incurable disease," and Pope's unfortunate Poet "lives and writes agen."
And, after all, Bobus, why should we not be tender with all the gentlemen who crowd the catalogues and slumber upon the shelves? It may be all very well for you or me, whose legend should be
"Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, coeno, quiesco,"
to laugh at them; but who shall say that they did not do their best, and, if they were stupid, pavonian, arrogant, self-sufficient, and top-heavy, that they were not honestly so? I always liked that boast of Flaccus about his "monument harder than brass." It is a cheerful sight to see a poor devil of an author in his garret, snapping his fingers at the critics. "No beggar," wrote Pope, "is so poor but he can keep a cur, and no author so beggarly but he can keep a critic." And, after all, abuse is pleasanter than contemptuous and silent neglect. I do honestly believe, that, if it were