| The
readers of Harper's Magazine who have for so many years
been accustomed to turn to the "Easy Chair,"
sure of half an hour's enjoyment, will miss that humor
and good sense which have made the name of George William
Curtis a household word. He had many another claim to
the world's attention and respect, and he was in his
own country as active a politician as he was a writer,
but to the thousands scattered over the world his literary
work will be his title to remembrance. He was born in
1824. His father was a business man and intended his
son to follow in the same path, but he had hardly been
in business a year before he took up farming. In 1842
he joined the community at "Brook Farm," and
resided there for four years, making the acquaintance
of all the enthusiasts who formed that extraordinary
group—Margaret Fuller Ripley, Hawthorne, Emerson,
Parker, Alcott and Thoreau. In 1846 he went to Europe
and travelled for four years. After his return he joined
the editorial staff of The Tribune, and in 1852 was
the editor of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, to which he
contributed "Prue and I." When the magazine
changed hands he became a partner in the new concern,
and when the firm suspended payment he sank his whole
private fortune and worked with all his energy to save
the good name of the firm, which he was at last successful
in doing. His first connection with Harper Brothers
was in 1852, when he wrote for the "Monthly,"
and in the following year he assumed control of the
"Easy Chair," upon the establishment of the
"Weekly." In 1857 he became its leading editor,
and held the position until the time of his death. He
was thus closely identified with the success of three
important periodicals. Although he will never take rank
as one of the foremost literary men of America, with
those friends of his youth, Thoreau and Hawthorne, yet
his books will be read for their charming style and
unaffected geniality. For years thousands of people
looked to him for a weekly and monthly return of pleasure,
and one may safely say that they were never disappointed.
His death will leave a gap which it will be hard to
fill, and as yet no announcement of the continuance
of the "Easy Chair" has been made. To many
it will never be the same, no matter how brilliant a
successor may discourse from the seat they will always
remember George William Curtis.
S.
Some
little discussion having arisen in regard to one of
Mr. Bliss Carman's poems, it is not inopportune to say
something in regard to Mr. Carman in general. The number
of people who have the time or inclination to interest
themselves in young contemporary writers is always very
limited, and of the few who care to do so in this country,
still fewer, I fancy, have any notion of the immense
promise—nay, more than promise, the immense accomplishment—there
is in Mr. Carman's work. Mr. Carman has published very
little of his work, probably because he is confronted
by the same obstacle that stands in the way of every
new writer of obstinate originality—the impenetrable
stupidity that invariable shortsightedness of publishers.
Those few personal friends of Mr. Carman, however, who
have been specially favored with an opportunity to judge
his work, know that there is hardly any limit to the
expectation that may be had of their friend's future.
With great imaginative power and a most uncommon gift
of musical versification, he has discovered and taken
up a quite new poetic standpoint. His poems are suffused
with a new and peculiar and most beautiful imaginative
spirit, a spirit which is that of our own northern land,
developed in the atmosphere of the Norse, with tinges
of Indian legend. Many people will complain of his obscurity,
and he is often—very often—obscure, because
he does not aim at conveying clearly-cut images and
ideas, but prefers, in obedience to a powerful impulse
of his own mind, to steep his reader's imagination in
splendid moods through the agency of magnificent metrical
effects and a vast and mysterious imagery. Whether obscure
or not, for the true lover of poetry there is one presence
that covers a multitude of faults—the presence
of beauty. We cavil in vain at a man's work if it is
beautiful, and Mr. Carman's work is exquisitely beautiful.
L.
I
am told that the poetry of Mr. T.B. Aldrich sells better
just now than that of any other living American poet,
with the exception of that of Jas. Whitcomb Riley, and
that it is increasing in popularity. Mr. Riley's work
has such a popular quality that it cannot help but be
marketable, but the work of Mr. Aldrich is noted for
its artistic delicacy and strength of fancy, qualities
that without unusual power attached should restrict
a poet's constituency to a cultured few. Mr. Aldrich,
who is slightly over 50, can now be conceded to be the
most prominent of living American poets who have produced
a large volume of high class work. Of course, we still
have Dr. Holmes, the oldest and most distinguished all-round
litterateur, but it is as a humorist that Dr. Holmes
will live longest. Then, Mr. Stedman, the distinguished
critic, has denied himself too much the exercise of
his undoubtedly high poetical powers in order to identify
himself as he has done with his monumental works in
criticism. In Richard Henry Stoddard America has a lyrist
of whom any country might be proud, but he has grown
old in the toils of journalism. But Aldrich, since he
has severed his editorial connections, has tuned his
lyre anew with much ambitious effort to achieve loftier
work. Aldrich is essentially an artist, and on this
side will take high rank, but he is too much the artist,
I am afraid, to be a great popular poet of the people,
who require a stronger heart-touch than his artistic
repression will allow. He has attempted such a wide
range of work that it would be a hard matter to give
a proper idea of his powers by adequate quotation, but
there is no doubt that he is at his best in exquisitely
delicate cameos. He has no burden of song for the righting
of wrongs, as Whittier had. He has no spiritual sombreness
of sentiment such as made Longfellow a household friend.
He has not the clarion note, the manly, human didacticism
that fired Lowell; but perhaps in the long run he may
prove to have the most enduring qualities of them all.
He has certainly proved himself to possess the strongest
artistic powers of any American poet who has ever written,
and perhaps, after Tennyson, than any of this century
in the English language. Certainly, none show to a better
extent the Greek-like polish and repression of the artist.
But it is as a thinker and as a poet of the heart that
Aldrich falls short in all-round greatness, or else
he would have outshone Tennyson. He appears to have
so many moods, or else such a general lack of mood,
that it is hard to get at his feeling, outside of his
art. That he loves nature no one can doubt from his
exquisite suggestion of Herrick, whom he resembles on
one of his lighter sides, but he loves the well-kept
lawns and parks and the cultured haunts of the old world
too well to ever be a genuine American nature-poet.
As a thinker, where his marked repression allows us
to see it, he might be called the most worldly of all
the greater American singers. His philosophy is ever
governed by his art, and is almost heartless in its
want of bias. His whole work has a general lack of that
pathos found in poets who have probed deep down into
life. But Mr. Aldrich's verse structures are not human
houses wherein men and women dwell, and suffer and enjoy,
like to those of Burns, Hood and Wordsworth. Nor are
they demon caves of a weird imagination, such as were
conjured up by Coleridge and Poe (not that he does not
possess the qualities requisite to such production,
for some of his earlier work had a kinship to the former
school, while such a remarkably strong poem as "The
Shipmaster's Tale," in a recent Harper's, shows
a strong affinity to the latter). But for the most part
his verses are airy turrets carved with exquisite skill
from gems. Within are dreamy boudoirs of the artist's
imagination, where he may sit on cushioned divans and
flawless bric-a-brac, and dream Eastern dreams toned
down by a Western artistic repression, wherein the weird
and fanciful are strung together on a cynic fatalism
that pervades the whole. This is Aldrich, pure and simple.
That he has written poems depicting great deeds, as
in "Judith," or the soul struggle, as in "Friar
Jerome's Beautiful Book," we must admit, and that
they are poems of a high order, especially the latter,
no one can deny; but in both it is the artist who is
supreme, and somehow we miss the man who feels, despite
the exquisite art and stately verse. There is all through
felt the lack of an uplifting thought, nor is there
a touch of the really lofty imagination that exalts
though it may not touch. All through it is the master
artist, who dazzles by deft and often stately phrases,
or quaint and sometimes exquisite fancies. But the true
poet, apart from the artist, who stands forever on the
threshold of the unknowable and reports to his fellows
the majesty of life, is not to be found, for the most
part, in these magic pages. I do not say he is not found,
for art, even in verse, has its revelation of life beauty,
but where it is here found, it is for the most part
whispered in under-breath interludes rather than sung.
His exquisite sonnet, "Sleep," is a good sample
of his best work, and is by some regarded as his master-piece.
The fancy here is almost transcendent in its delicacy
of expression, but the thought involved touches no high
chord in the reader. As already stated, the master-artist
is there, but that is all. For the uplifting quality,
the divine gift of revealing the unseen, and the beauty
of thought in its relations to the universe, we must
go to another school. We are glad to see the ever-growing
popularity of this master in artistic and exquisite
verse; but Mr. Aldrich must know himself that, much
as his work may be admired and read, as certainly it
deserves to be for the artistic genius shown therein,
he has given himself over to too much artistic repression
ever to be beloved as a poet.
C.
It
is satisfactory to note a considerable recent increase
in our literary activity, as indicated by the rise of
new periodicals and the improvement of old ones. In
Arcadia we have a journal vigorously edited, filled
with a great quantity of interesting matter, some valuable
original contributions, and of an exceedingly attractive
appearance. It has also kept completely clear of that
tendency to over-bubbling nonsense, which has been the
besetting sin of Montreal literary periodicals heretofore.
The Lake promises well as a magazine. We have hardly
seen enough of it yet to judge, but there is no reason
why an unillustrated magazine, wisely edited, and backed
by a little money, should not succeed in this country,
sufficiently well, at any rate, to maintain its place
and standard. The Week has much improved in the last
year or two, and its editorial department in particular
has become a very important addition to our means of
guidance in the practical questions of the day. A weekly
journalistic expression of opinion characterised by
undoubted sincerity and impartiality is a rare and valuable
thing. The Dominion Illustrated, if it would drop the
illustrating and the articles on football and such things
and go in for literature, would also have a good prospect
of success. It enjoys the advantage of seniority, and
needs only to enter upon the right path. Let us not
neglect to mention that great journal whereof this,
the Mermaid Inn, is a humble part, and to praise the
largeness of that enterprise which has scattered weekly
broadcast over the Dominion so vast a quantity of useful
information, and various and interesting matter of all
sorts, literary and otherwise.
L.
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