Ponkapog Papers

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> Ponkapog Papers


I think that at least one thing will be patent to every unprejudiced
reader of these excerpts, namely--that any frog (with its head on or its
head off) which happened to make the personal acquaintance of Professor
Rutherford must have found him poor company. What benefit science may
have derived from such association I am not qualified to pronounce upon.
The lecturer showed conclusively that the frog is a peculiarly sensitive
and intelligent little batrachian. I hope that the genial professor, in
the years which followed, did not frequently consider it necessary to
demonstrate the fact.




LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL

IT has recently become the fashion to speak disparagingly of Leigh Hunt
as a poet, to class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer to
Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell, Hunt was not a Keats nor
a Shelley nor a Coleridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He was
a delightful essayist--quite unsurpassed, indeed, in his blithe,
optimistic way--and as a poet deserves to rank high among the lesser
singers of his time. I should place him far above Barry Cornwall, who
has not half the freshness, variety, and originality of his compeer.

I instance Barry Cornwall because there has seemed a disposition since
his death to praise him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck me as
extremely artificial, especially in his dramatic sketches. His verses in
this line are mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a dramatist
may find it to his profit to go out of his own age and atmosphere for
inspiration; but in order successfully to do so he must be a dramatist.
Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the role; he got no further than
the composing of brief disconnected scenes and scraps of soliloquies,
and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for which the stage had no use. His
chief claim to recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the dramatic
studies, his attitude is nearly always affected. He studiously strives
to reproduce the form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Londoner,
he naturally sings much of rural English life, but his England is the
England of two or three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say about
the "falcon," but the poor bird has the air of beating fatigued wings
against the bookshelves of a well-furnished library! This well-furnished
library was--if I may be pardoned a mixed image--the rock on which Barry
Cornwall split. He did not look into his own heart, and write: he looked
into his books.

A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the world
is all before him where to choose; but there are subjects which he had
better not handle unless he have some personal knowledge of them. The
sea is one of these. The man who sang,

The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, _the ever free!_

(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never
have permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of
Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly
vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever
laid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames at Greenwich, and
in looking over Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not so much
surprised as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of land
in the whole course of his existence. It is to be said of him more
positively than the captain of the Pinafore said it of himself, that he
was hardly ever sick at sea.

Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the ocean in all its protean moods,
piping such thin feebleness as

"The blue, the fresh, the ever free!"

To do that required a man whose acquaintance with the deep was limited
to a view of it from an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Even
frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship and
Turtle will not enable one to write sea poetry.

Considering the actual facts, there is something weird in the statement,

I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be.

The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth of an imagined sailor,
but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
ends with a striking piece of realism:

If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

This is the course of action usually pursued by sailors during a gale.
The first or second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably, each
in his hammock, and serves them out an extra ration of grog after the
storm is over.

Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally winning personality,
for he drew to him the friendship of men as differently constituted as
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best of
his time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, who caught a
glimpse of the aged poet in his vanishing. The personal magnetism of an
author does not extend far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries. It is
of the lyrist and not of the man I am speaking here. One could wish he
had written more prose like his admirable "Recollections of Elia."

Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note, but when he does it is
extremely sweet. That little ballad in the minor key beginning,

Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream,
was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh Hunt, though not without
questionable mannerisms, was rich in the inspiration that came but
infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full of natural felicities.
He also was a bookman, but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew how
to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the coinage with his own head.
In "Hero and Leander" there is one line which, at my valuing, is worth
any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall has written:

So might they now have lived, and so have died;
_The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side_.

Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane Carlyle gave him lingers on
everybody's lip. That and the rhyme of "Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel"
are spice enough to embalm a man's memory. After all, it takes only a
handful.




DECORATION DAY

HOW quickly Nature takes possession of a deserted battlefield, and goes
to work repairing the ravages of man! With invisible magic hand she
smooths the rough earthworks, fills the rifle-pits with delicate
flowers, and wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent drapery
of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp outline of the spot is lost in
unremembering grass. Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the
foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremulous note; and where
the menacing shell described its curve through the air, a harmless crow
flies in circles. Season after season the gentle work goes on, healing
the wounds and rents made by the merciless enginery of war, until at
last the once hotly contested battleground differs from none of its
quiet surroundings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take a richer
tint and the grasses a deeper emerald.

It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated by Time, but there are
left other and more lasting relics of the struggle. That dinted army
sabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its hilt, which hangs over
the mantel-piece of the "best room" of many a town and country house
in these States, is one; and the graven headstone of the fallen hero
is another. The old swords will be treasured and handed down from
generation to generation as priceless heirlooms, and with them, let us
trust, will be cherished the custom of dressing with annual flowers the
resting-places of those who fell during the Civil War.

With the tears a Land hath shed
Their graves should ever be green.

Ever their fair, true glory
Fondly should fame rehearse--
Light of legend and story,
Flower of marble and verse.

The impulse which led us to set apart a day for decorating the graves of
our soldiers sprung from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our
own time there is little chance of the rite being neglected. But the
generations that come after us should not allow the observance to fall
into disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh love and sorrow,
should be with them an acknowledgment of an incalculable debt.

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays. How
different from those sullen batteries which used to go rumbling through
our streets are the crowds of light carriages, laden with flowers and
greenery, wending their way to the neighboring cemeteries! The grim
cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into
peach blooms. There is no hint of war in these gay baggage trains,
except the presence of men in undress uniform, and perhaps here and
there an empty sleeve to remind one of what has been. Year by year that
empty sleeve is less in evidence.

The observance of Decoration Day is unmarked by that disorder and
confusion common enough with our people in their holiday moods. The
earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour, leaving a softened solemnity.
It quickly ceased to be simply a local commemoration. While the
sequestered country churchyards and burial-places near our great northern
cities were being hung with May garlands, the thought could not but come
to us that there were graves lying southward above which bent a grief as
tender and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped unseen flowers upon
those mounds. There is a beautiful significance in the fact that, two
years after the close of the war, the women of Columbus, Mississippi,
laid their offerings alike on Northern and Southern graves. When all is
said, the great Nation has but one heart.




WRITERS AND TALKERS

AS a class, literary men do not shine in conversation. The scintillating
and playful essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the most genial
and entertaining of companions, turns out to be a shy and untalkable
individual, who chills you with his reticence when you chance to
meet him. The poet whose fascinating volume you always drop into your
gripsack on your summer vacation--the poet whom you have so long desired
to know personally--is a moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman, who
fails to catch your name on introduction, and seems the avatar of the
commonplace. The witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had
painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid appetite for tender young
poets--the writer of those caustic and scholarly reviews which you never
neglect to read--destroys the un-lifelike portrait you had drawn by
appearing before you as a personage of slender limb and deprecating
glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when
you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl
Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with
epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a
short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle
at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal
fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh from
witnessing his delightful comedy of manners, you meet him face to face
only to discover that his own manners are anything but delightful.
The play and the playwright are two very distinct entities. You grow
skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's assertion that the style is the
man himself. Who that has encountered his favorite author in the flesh
has not sometimes been a little, if not wholly, disappointed?

After all, is it not expecting too much to expect a novelist to talk
as cleverly as the clever characters in his novels? Must a dramatist
necessarily go about armed to the teeth with crisp dialogue? May not a
poet be allowed to lay aside his singing-robes and put on a conventional
dress-suit when he dines out? Why is it not permissible in him to be as
prosaic and tiresome as the rest of the company? He usually is.




ON EARLY RISING

A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my acquaintance, who has devoted years
to investigating the subject, states that he has never come across a
case of remarkable longevity unaccompanied by the habit of early rising;
from which testimony it might be inferred that they die early who lie
abed late. But this would be getting out at the wrong station. That the
majority of elderly persons are early risers is due to the simple
fact that they cannot sleep mornings. After a man passes his fiftieth
milestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no credit
to him. As the theorist confined his observations to the aged, he easily
reached the conclusion that men live to be old because they do not sleep
late, instead of perceiving that men do not sleep late because they are
old. He moreover failed to take into account the numberless young lives
that have been shortened by matutinal habits.

The intelligent reader, and no other is supposable, need not be told
that the early bird aphorism is a warning and not an incentive. The fate
of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb,
which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by
showing how extremely dangerous it is. I have no patience with the worm,
and when I rise with the lark I am always careful to select a lark that
has overslept himself.

The example set by this mythical bird, a mythical bird so far as New
England is concerned, has wrought wide-spread mischief and discomfort.
It is worth noting that his method of accomplishing these ends is
directly the reverse of that of the Caribbean insect mentioned
by Lafcadio Hearn in his enchanting "Two Years in the French West
Indies"--a species of colossal cricket called the wood-kid; in the
creole tongue, _cabritt-bois_. This ingenious pest works a soothing,
sleep-compelling chant from sundown until precisely half past four in
the morning, when it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens everybody
it has lulled into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with
strange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "For
thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its
song is the signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of the West
India islands furnishing such satanic entomological specimens will
ever be annexed to the United States. Some of our extreme advocates of
territorial expansion might spend a profitable few weeks on one of those
favored isles. A brief association with that _cabritt-bois_ would be
likely to cool the enthusiasm of the most ardent imperialist.

An incalculable amount of specious sentiment has been lavished upon
daybreak, chiefly by poets who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at
mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their practice was better than
their precept--or their poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle of
Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved apostrophe,

"Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,"

was one of the laziest men of his century. He customarily lay in bed
until noon meditating pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to be
seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both hands in his waistcoat
pockets, eating peaches from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English
poets who at that epoch celebrated what they called "the effulgent orb
of day" were denizens of London, where pure sunshine is unknown eleven
months out of the twelve.

In a great city there are few incentives to early rising. What charm is
there in roof-tops and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even
from a nightmare? What is more depressing than a city street before the
shop-windows have lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem asleep,"
as Wordsworth says, and nobody is astir but the belated burglar or the
milk-and-water man or Mary washing off the front steps? Daybreak at
the seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, though
familiarity with it breeds indifference. The man forced by restlessness
or occupation to drink the first vintage of the morning every day of
his life has no right appreciation of the beverage, however much he may
profess to relish it. It is only your habitual late riser who takes in
the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to
go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the
sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him--a momentary
Adam--the world is newly created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the
similitude of a three-pound trout.

In the country, then, it is well enough occasionally to dress by
candle-light and assist at the ceremony of dawn; it is well if for no
other purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the professional early
riser who, were he in a state of perfect health, would not be the
wandering victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are few small
things more exasperating than this early bird with the worm of his
conceit in his bill.




UN POETE MANQUE

IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poetical melange is a little
poem which needs only a slight revision of the initial stanza to
entitle it to rank with some of the swallow-flights in Heine's lyrical
intermezzo. I have tentatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza:

I taste a liquor never brewed
In vats upon the Rhine;
No tankard ever held a draught
Of alcohol like mine.

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the Foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy caps
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable honey-gatherer who gets
himself turned out-of-doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very taking
matters. I know of more important things that interest me vastly less.
This is one of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly perfect in
structure as almost to warrant the reader in suspecting that Miss
Dickinson's general disregard of form was a deliberate affectation. The
artistic finish of the following sunset-piece makes her usual quatrains
unforgivable:

This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!

Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.

The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere of a Claude
Lorraine. One instantly frames it in one's memory. Several such bits of
impressionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.

It is to be said, in passing, that there are few things in Miss
Dickinson's poetry so felicitous as Mr. Higginson's characterization of
it in his preface to the volume: "In many cases these verses will seem
to the reader _like poetry pulled up by the roots_, with rain and dew
and earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be objected that this is
not the best way to gather either flowers or poetry.

Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and bizarre mind.
She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced
by the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied her
bonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her garden
at Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She had
much fancy of a quaint kind, but only, as it appears to me, intermittent
flashes of imagination.

That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a certain something which, for want
of a more precise name, we term _quality_, is not to be denied. But
the incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse are
fatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisite
line or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or an
isolated exquisite line does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says
of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss Dickinson: "Donne is full of
salient verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with
their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then
delight us with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved
him. He is exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary."

Touching this question of mere technique Mr. Ruskin has a word to say
(it appears that he said it "in his earlier and better days"), and Mr.
Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution can
outweigh one grain or fragment of thought." This is a proposition to
which one would cordially subscribe if it were not so intemperately
stated. A suggestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive dictum is
furnished by his own volume of verse. The substance of it is weighty
enough, but the workmanship lacks just that touch which distinguishes
the artist from the bungler--the touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when
writing prose, appears not much to have regarded either in his later or
"in his earlier and better days."

Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impossible rhyme, their involved
significance, their interrupted flute-note of birds that have no
continuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a group of eager
listeners. A shy New England bluebird, shifting its light load of song,
has for the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale.




THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD

I WENT to see a play the other night, one of those good old-fashioned
English comedies that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. The
piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its archaic stiffness,
and obsolete code of morals, was devoid of interest excepting as a
collection of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it through.
The one thing in it that held me a pleased spectator was the graceful
costume of a certain player who looked like a fine old portrait--by
Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say--that had come to life and kicked off
its tarnished frame.

I do not know at what epoch of the world's history the scene of the play
was laid; possibly the author originally knew, but it was evident that
the actors did not, for their make-ups represented quite antagonistic
periods. This circumstance, however, detracted only slightly from the
special pleasure I took in the young person called Delorme. He was
not in himself interesting; he was like that Major Waters in "Pepys's
Diary"--"a most amorous melancholy gentleman who is under a despayr in
love, which makes him bad company;" it was entirely Delorme's dress.

I never saw mortal man in a dress more sensible and becoming. The
material was according to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of some
dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings of a deeper shade. My idea of
a doublet is so misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the
gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat of some description
hanging negligently from the shoulders and looped at the throat,
showing a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at the wrists. Full
trousers reaching to the tops of buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft
hat--not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque shapeless head-gear,
one side jauntily fastened up with a jewel--completed the essential
portions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to walk in, to ride
in, to sit in. The wearer of it could not be awkward if he tried, and I
will do Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress to some severe
tests. But he was graceful all the while, and made me wish that my
countrymen would throw aside their present hideous habiliments and
hasten to the measuring-room of Delorme's tailor.

In looking over the plates of an old book of fashions we smile at the
monstrous attire in which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to deck
themselves. Presently it will be the turn of posterity to smile at us,
for in our own way we are no less ridiculous than were our ancestors
in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and _chapeau de bras_. In fact we are
really more absurd. If a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catch
a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of his descendants four
or five generations removed, he would have a strong impression of being
something that had escaped from somewhere.

Whatever strides we may have made in arts and sciences, we have made
no advance in the matter of costume. That Americans do not tattoo
themselves, and do go fully clad--I am speaking exclusively of my own
sex--is about all that can be said in favor of our present fashions. I
wish I had the vocabulary of Herr Teufelsdrockh with which to
inveigh against the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angular
swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look like a poor species of bird
and gets him mistaken for the waiter. "As long as a man wears the modern
coat," says Leigh Hunt, "he has no right to despise any dress. What
snips at the collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridiculous cut
about the flaps! What buttons in front that are never meant to button,
and yet are no ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair of
buttons at the back! gravely regarded, nevertheless, and thought as
indispensably necessary to every well-conditioned coat, as other bits
of metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom we laugh at. There is
absolutely not one iota of sense, grace, or even economy in the modern
coat."