The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays. Beers Henry Augustin

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СКАЧАТЬ was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1886.

      Barlow’s most ambitious undertaking was the “Columbiad,” originally printed at Hartford in 1787 as “The Vision of Columbus,” and then reissued in its expanded form at Philadelphia in 1807: a sumptuous quarto with plates by the best English and French engravers from designs by Robert Fulton: altogether the finest specimen of bookmaking that had then appeared in America. The “Columbiad’s” greatness was in inverse proportion to its bigness. Grandiosity was its author’s besetting sin, and the plan of the poem is absurdly grandiose. It tells how Hesper appeared to Columbus in prison and led him to a hill of vision whence he viewed the American continents spread out before him, and the panorama of their whole future history unrolled. Among other things he saw the Connecticut river —

      Thy stream, my Hartford, through its misty robe,

      Played in the sunbeams, belting far the globe.

      No watery glades through richer vallies shine,

      Nor drinks the sea a lovelier wave than thine.

      It is odd to come upon familiar place-names swollen to epic pomp. There is Danbury, for example, which one associates with the manufacture of hats and a somewhat rowdy annual fair. In speaking of the towns set on fire by the British, the poet thus exalteth Danbury, whose flames were visible from native Redding: —

      Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills

      High flaming Danbury the welkin fills.

      Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes

      And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains.

      But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time: —

      E’en in thy native regions how I blush

      To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!

      This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a bowl of polenta, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr. Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in Paris at the Trois Frères; and how one of them would sit tinkling the ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset.”

      THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE

      MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of the American people. He is the idol of a literary culte. Shall I tell you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling newspaper poetry of the usual kind – and very poor of its kind – which had attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world will say – as in fact it did – ‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here must be the great American poet at last.’ ”

      Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all “leaves of grass.”

      Well, my friend, and Walt Whitman’s, promised to read Riley’s poems. And shortly I got a letter from him saying that he had read them with much enjoyment, but adding, “Surely you would not call him a great national poet.” Now since his death, the newspaper critics have been busy with this question. His poetry was true, sweet, original; but was it great? Suppose we leave aside for the moment this question of greatness. Who are the great poets, anyway? Was Robert Burns one of them? He composed no epics, no tragedies, no high Pindaric odes. But he made the songs of the Scottish people, and is become a part of the national consciousness of the race. In a less degree, but after the same fashion, Riley’s poetry has taken possession of the popular heart. I am told that his sales outnumber Longfellow’s. This is not an ultimate test, but so far as it goes it is a valid one.

      Riley is the Hoosier poet, but he is more than that: he is a national poet. His state and his city have honored themselves in honoring him and in keeping his birthday as a public holiday. The birthdays of nations and of kings and magistrates have been often so kept. We have our fourth of July, our twenty-second of February, our Lincoln’s birthday; and we had a close escape from having a McKinley day. I do not know that the banks are closed and the children let out of school – Riley’s children, for all children are his – on each succeeding seventh of October; but I think there is no record elsewhere in our literary history of a tribute so loving and so universal to a mere man of letters, as the Hoosier State pays annually to its sweet singer. Massachusetts has its poets and is rightly proud of them, but neither Bryant nor Emerson nor Lowell nor Holmes, nor the more popular Longfellow or Whittier, has had his natal day marked down on the calendar as a yearly state festa. And yet poets, novelists, playwriters, painters, musical composers, artists of all kinds, have added more to the sum of human happiness than all the kings and magistrates that ever lived. Perhaps Indianians are warmer hearted than New Englanders; or perhaps they make so much of their poets because there are fewer of them. But this is not the whole secret of it. In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the odd ways and characters of little country towns. But just for this faithfulness to their environment these “poems here at home” come home to others whose homes are far away from the Wabash, but are not so very different after all.

      America, as has often been said, is a land of homes: of dwellers in villages, on farms, and in small towns. We are common people, middle-class people, conservative, decent, religious, tenacious of old ways, home-keeping and home-loving. We do not thrill to Walt Whitman’s paeans to democracy in the abstract; but we vibrate to every touch on the chord of family affections, of early friendships, and of the dear old homely things that our childhood knew. Americans are sentimental and humorous; and Riley abounds in sentiment – wholesome sentiment – and natural humor, while Whitman had little of either.

      To all Americans who were ever boys; to all, at least who have had the good luck to be country boys and go barefoot; whether they dwell in the prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and characters of Riley’s poems are familiar: Little Orphant Annie and the Raggedy Man, and the Old Swimmin’ Hole and Griggsby’s Station “where we ust to be so happy and so pore.” They know when the frost is on the “punkin,” and that the “Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out”; and how the old tramp said to the Raggedy Man: —

        You’re a purty man! —You air! —

      With a pair o’ eyes like two fried eggs,

        An’ a nose like a Bartlutt pear!

      They have all, in their time, followed along after the circus parade, listened to the old village band playing tunes like “Lily Dale” and “In the Hazel Dell my Nellie’s Sleeping” and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower”; have heard the campaign stump speaker when he “cut loose on monopolies and cussed and cussed and cussed”; have belonged to the literary society which debated СКАЧАТЬ