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Page 28
What hadst _thou_ to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes
give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy Muses
were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy
merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand. 'Who will open his
door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is there that will not
send them back again without a gift? And they with naked feet and looks
askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me when they have gone on a
vain journey, and listless again in the bottom of their empty coffer they
dwell with heads bowed over their chilly knees, where is their drear abode,
when portionless they return.' How far happier was the prisoned goat-herd,
Comatas, in the fragrant cedar chest where the blunt-faced bees from the
meadow fed him with food of tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped
sweet nectar on his lips!
Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the
galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones, and
Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory. Thou
soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned write still
on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of Rhodes. So
ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy, jealousy, and all unkindness.
Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all these
centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie with thee.
There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and
Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup time; and all the modish
swains of France have sung against thee, as the _son challenged Athene_. They
never knew the shepherd's life, the long' winter nights on dried heather by
the fire, the long summer days, when over the dry grass all is quiet, and only
the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in
high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is
weary of all concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how
unlike the golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus.
Somewhat, Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought
the shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the
shepherds.
XIV.
To Edgar Allan Poe.
Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances
than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred
which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that certain
microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still harass your
name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and
heeded slanders in the literary papers of New York. But their persistent
animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike with which many
American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary
genius, of their country. With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to
rate native merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an
American prophet almost without honour in his own country.
The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable
study of your career ('Edgar Allan Poe,' by George Woodberry: Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it, and
teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer. How
unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or
seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary
criticism! About the writers of his own generation a leader of that generation
should hold his peace, he should neither praise nor blame nor defend his
equals; he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The
breath of their life is in the columns of 'Literary Gossip;' and they should
be allowed to perish with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture.
Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds should only
criticise the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or
fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you vexed a
continent, and you are still unforgiven. What 'irritation of a sensitive
nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,' drove you (in Mr.
Longfellow's own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we may never
ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to
the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that
knew not how to forget. 'The New Yorkers never forgave him,' says your latest
biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was
not individual vanity alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed.
'As a literary people,' you wrote, 'we are one vast perambulating humbug.'
After that declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still.
He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private
letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling above your
tomb.
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