The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

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Beers Henry Augustin. The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

THE CONNECTICUT WITS

THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE

EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS

THE ART OF LETTER WRITING

THACKERAY’S CENTENARY

RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA4

SHERIDAN

THE POETRY OF THE CAVALIERS

ABRAHAM COWLEY

MILTON’S TERCENTENARY

SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES

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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.”

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Alas! nous autres, we do not love our friends because they are more or less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘damn your attributes!’ ”

Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.

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