XLIX
Thus began an acquaintance with Mr. Bryant that quickly became as intimate as I suppose any acquaintance with him ever did—or at any rate any acquaintance begun after the midyears of his life. Once in a while I passed a Sunday with him at his Roslyn home, but chiefly such converse as I enjoyed with him was held in the office of the Evening Post, and of course it was always of his seeking, as I scrupulously avoided intruding myself upon his attention. Our interviews usually occurred in this way: he would enter the library, which communicated with my little writing room by an open doorway, and after looking over some books, would enter my room and settle himself in a chair, with some remark or question. The conversation thus began would continue for such time as he chose, ten minutes, half an hour, two hours, as his leisure and inclination might determine.
It was always gentle, always kindly, always that of two persons interested in literature and in all that pertains to what in the culture-slang of this later time is somewhat tiresomely called "uplift." It was always inspiring and clarifying to my mind, always encouraging to me, always richly suggestive on his part, and often quietly humorous in a fashion that is nowhere suggested in any of Mr. Bryant's writings. I have searched them in vain for the smallest trace of the humor he used to inject into his talks with me, and I think I discover in its absence, and in some other peculiarities of his, an explanation of certain misjudgments of him which prevailed during his life and which endure still in popular conception.
Mr. Bryant's Reserve—Not Coldness
The reader may perhaps recall Lowell's criticism of him in "A Fable for Critics." The substance of it was that Mr. Bryant was intensely cold of nature and unappreciative of human things. I wish to bear emphatic witness that nothing could be further from the truth, though Lowell's judgment is the one everywhere accepted.
The lack of warmth usually attributed to Mr. Bryant, I found to be nothing more than the personal reserve common to New Englanders of culture and refinement, plus an excessive personal modesty and a shyness of self-revelation, and self-intrusion, which is usually found only in young girls just budding into womanhood.
Mr. Bryant shrank from self-assertion even of the most impersonal sort, as I never knew any other human being to do. He cherished his own opinions strongly, but he thrust them upon nobody. His dignity was precious to him, but his only way of asserting it was by withdrawal from any conversation or company that trespassed upon it.
Above all, emotion, to him, was a sacred thing, not to be exploited or even revealed. In ordinary intercourse with his fellow-men he hid it away as one instinctively hides the privacies of the toilet. He could no more lay his feelings bare to common scrutiny than he could have taken his bath in the presence of company.
In the intimate talks he and I had together during the last half dozen years of his life, he laid aside his reserve, so far as it was possible for a man of his sensitive nature to do, and I found him not only warm in his human sympathies, but even passionate. If we find little of this in his writings, it is only because in what he wrote he was addressing the public, and shyly withholding himself from revelation. Yet there is passion and there is hot blood, even there, as who can deny who has read "The Song of Marion's Men," or his superb interpretation of Homer?
There is a bit of literary history connected with "The Song of Marion's Men," which may be mentioned here as well as anywhere else. The venerable poet one day told me the facts concerning it.
When Mr. Bryant issued the first collected edition of his poems, English publication was very necessary to the success of such a work in America, which was still provincial. Accordingly Mr. Bryant desired English publication. Washington Irving was then living in England, and Mr. Bryant had a slight but friendly acquaintance with him. It was sufficient to justify the poet in asking the great story teller's friendly offices. He sent a copy of his poems to Irving, asking him to secure a London publisher. This Irving did, with no little trouble, and in the face of many obstacles of prejudice, indifference, and the like.
When half the book was in type the publisher sent for Irving in consternation. He had discovered, in "The Song of Marion's Men," the lines:
"The British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told."
It would never, never do, he explained, for him to publish a book with even the smallest suggestion in it that the British soldier was a man to "tremble" at any danger. It would simply ruin him to publish this direct charge of cowardice against Tommy Atkins.
The Irving Incident
For the time Irving was at a loss to know what to do. Mr. Bryant was three thousand miles away and the only way of communicating with him was by ocean mails, carried by sailing craft at long intervals, low speed, and uncertain times of arrival. To write to him and get a reply would require a waste of many weeks—perhaps of several months. In his perplexed anxiety to serve his friend, Irving decided to take the liberty of making an entirety innocent alteration in the words, curing them of their offensiveness to British sensitiveness, without in the least altering their significance. Instead of:
"The British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told,"
he made the lines read:
"The foeman trembles in his tent
When Marion's name is told."
"So far as I was concerned," said Mr. Bryant in telling me of the matter, "what Irving did seemed altogether an act of friendly intervention, the more so because the acquaintance between him and me was very slight at that time. He was a warm-hearted man, who in doing a thing of that kind, reckoned upon a slight friendship for justification, as confidently as men of natures less generous might reckon upon a better established acquaintance. He always took comradery for granted, and where his intentions were friendly and helpful, he troubled himself very little with formal explanations that seemed to him wholly unnecessary. I had asked him to secure the publication of my poems in England, a thing that only his great influence there could have accomplished at that time. He had been at great pains and no little trouble to accomplish my desire. Incidentally, it had become necessary for him either to accept defeat in that purpose or to make that utterly insignificant alteration in my poem. I was grateful to him for doing so, but I did not understand his careless neglect to write to me promptly on the subject. I did not know him then as I afterwards learned to do. The matter troubled me very little or not at all; but possibly I mentioned his inattention in some conversation with Coleman, of the Evening Post. I cannot now remember whether I did so or not, but at any rate, Coleman, who was both quick and hot of temper, and often a trifle intemperate in criticism, took the matter up and dealt severely with Irving for having taken the liberty of altering lines of mine without my authority.
"The affair gave rise to the report, which you have perhaps heard—for it persists—that Irving and I quarreled and became enemies. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were friends to the day of his death."
Inasmuch as different versions of the Irving-Bryant affair are extant, it seems proper to say that immediately after the conversation ended I put into writing all that I have here directly quoted from Mr. Bryant. I did not show the record of it to him for verification, for the reason that I knew him to be sensitive on the subject of what he once referred to as "the eagerness of a good many persons to become my literary executors before I am dead." That was said with reference to the irksome attempts a certain distinguished literary hack was making to draw from Mr. Bryant the materials for articles that would sell well whenever the aged poet should die.
After a séance with that distinguished toady one day, Mr. Bryant came to me, in some disturbance of mind, to ask for a volume of verse that I had just reviewed—to soothe his spirit, he said. Then he told me of the visitation he had had, and said:
"I tried to be patient, but I fear I was rude to him at the last. There seemed to be no other way of getting rid of him."
Alas, even rudeness had not baffled the bore; for when Mr. Bryant died the pestilent person published a report of that very interview, putting into the poet's mouth many utterances directly contrary to Mr. Bryant's oft-expressed opinions.