Our Bepuffed Litterateurs

In a recent number of Liberty the writer briefly descanted on Harvard College as a huge local bore, a mere "good-society" institution rather than an Academy truly devoted to knowledge, science, and reflective thought for their own sake. The college is really a local bore, because the mention of it is never absent from the newspapers of this vicinity. In like manner, there is a local literary clique, sometimes called "the Cambridge set," the sound of which is dinned int one's ears perpetually hereabouts, as if its members were altogether transcendent writers. I refer, of course, to Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Howells, Aldrich, et id omne genus of scribbling emotionalists. Within proper limits one is ready to acknowledge the "readability" and merit of the above list of these litterateurs. They are bright and witty, beyond question. But one tires at last of the damnable literature of their names which is forever audible hereabouts. Not one of those over-popular, outrageously bepuffed litterateurs is a man of really commanding intellect, as distinguished from the emotional nature. They are deft, andriot, highly-scented, and highly-rouged writers merely, felicitous workers-over of current literary material and ideas so superabundant, trickers-out of current thought and themes in pert, studied, ornamental phrase, intent mostly upon style and the tournure of their sentences, and emulating the jackdraw in the borrowed character of their plumage. After the sugar candy and treacle of this Cambridge lot of superfine scribblers, the "yawp" of rough, jaunty Walt Whitman is really refreshing, even with Walt's large liberty of speech on ordinarily forbidden themes. Occasionally a great, original idea crops out of Walt, while out of Cambridge lot only honeyed rhetoric sprouts. Who is Howells? A literary carpet-bagger in New England, a sort of sugar-cured ham from Ohio, who was pickled for a time in the language of Venice. He is a novelette-ist of the Parisian sort, who longest flights are the hops of a sparrow from spray to spray, without length or strength of imaginative wing. Howells and Aldrich are par nobile fratrum, American-born Parisians, hot-house plants which have somehow blossomed on our New England soil, as the famous magnolia tree blossomed in the vicinity of the fishy, stony Gloucester. Howells excels in amorous dialogue or the voicing of the flirtations of lavendered youths and maidens laboring under erotomania. Governor Long, who, besides being a politician, is a nice, lavendered litterateur of the Howell-Aldrich type, exhibited the utter lack of correct literary judgment and appreciation to claim for Whittier superiority as a poet over Virgil, whom he nevertheless tried to translate, — as Bottom was translated however. In "the poet's land," to borrow Schiller's phrase, Virgil has stood for centuries like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved, charming with an irresistible spell over new generations and even his sadly uncritical, "down-east" Yankee, gubernational translator, John D. Long. Line after line and passage after passage of Virgil are as deeply carved in the memory of the Indo-European race as are Shakespere's greatest proverbial lines. There are thousands of lines of Virgil which Whittier could no more have written than he could scale the zenith bodily. He is an exquisite song-bird and sentimentalist, but even in the expression of sentiment  he is infinitely below Virgil's mark, while he could not sustain himself for a moment in the higher regions of the imagination in which Virgil's muse takes her flight, breathing with ease "empyreal air." But Whittier does not overestimate himself, and must be annoyed by the fulsome laudation of his admirers. Taken in over-doses of fifty or a hundred consecutive pages, Whittier's poetry cloys with its monotonous sweetness and sameness; but an occasional lyric of his like "My Playmate," for instance, is delightful and medicinal. Litterateurs who are overpraised and constantly, elaborately, and systematically bepuffed are sure, later along, to be unduly depreciated. That is the way the world takes its revenge for having been betrayed into a temporary excess of admiration. An excessive laudation of a few "literary fellers" is gross injustice to others who are as good men as they are.

B.