And whistled thro’ his bones,
Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth
Half whistles and half groans.’
When Coleridge saw it in print, he took his pencil, crossed it off, and wrote in the margin, ‘To be struck out. S. T. C.’ It did not appear in subsequent editions.” Coleridge did well to erase it for it is dangerously near to the ludicrous.
Whether the poet’s later emendations of his published verses are always improvements is problematical. We have been surfeited of late with examples of Tennyson’s amendments. He seems never to have been wholly satisfied with his work. In Buxton Forman’s “Keat’s Poetry and Prose”, one may perceive that a poet’s changes while sometimes making the lines smoother, almost invariably weaken the effect. It is so with Byron. The first thought and image, coming fresh from the brain, are usually more vigorous and poetic than the sober second-thoughts, and alterations appear to enfeeble the expression. It is Doctor Johnson’s “wit enough to keep it sweet” and the “putrefaction” amendment all over again. That, my friend who loves to ask “Why first editions?” is one of the reasons why.
The reference to Buxton Forman leads me to record an amusing bit of characteristic English newspaper wisdom. Some years ago in a book about autographs I ventured to make some remarks concerning Keats and Forman which drew down upon me the sneers of a London journal, the purport of which was that my observations were vulgar and peculiarly American. After I had recovered from the exaltation of spirit arising from being noticed at all by such an eminent authority, I permitted myself to indulge in justifiable mirth because it happened that I had stolen those very remarks from an old number of the London Athenæum in which my Keats letter had been copied and described: but according to the well known custom of plagiarists, I had accidentally omitted the quotation marks. I inferred that an English assertion becomes vulgar only when it is repeated by a despicable Yankee. Never again will I be guilty of petit larceny.
This matter of quotations is often a troublesome one. I am sorry now that I left out those neat little commas. The orator has an unfair advantage over the writer, because he is not obliged to use them, and in common justice he should be required to give some sign that the eloquent sentences he borrows are not his own: he might be compelled to hold up two fingers. A good, well rounded quotation is a great help when ideas grow so timid that they refuse to come at your call. I suppose that a lawyer who is asked to speak before assemblages, on some legal topic, almost always consults Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, where he finds little to aid him except that respectable old stand-by, “The seat of the law is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the world”. It sounds well and it makes a sonorous finale, besides giving the impression that the quoter is accustomed to occupy himself with the works of fine old authors: although it always seemed to me that when applied to what we call “the law” in these times, it is rather highly colored. A friend who was an admirer of the sentiment once carefully prepared an “address” to be delivered before the Maryland Bar Association, and had it printed in advance, lugging in the famous lines at the close of his peroration. To his horror, the learned President of the Association, who spoke immediately before him, and who evidently had a Bartlett of his own, closed an admirable speech with the same old “seat” and “bosom” story. There was nothing to be done but to pour it forth again upon the heads of those helpless Marylanders, on whom it must have had a “punch brothers” effect; but that man will never trot out the “harmony” yarn again unless he is sure that he is to have the first chance at it.
Mr. James Ford Rhodes in an entertaining paper about Edward Gibbon, expresses his belief that the historian of Rome’s decline and fall thought with Thucydides “My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten”. It is not a particularly novel observation, but a faded pamphlet lying before me is a reminder of the fact that “prize compositions”, “prize poems”, and “poems on occasions” are always much the same as they were in the time of Thucydides, feeble things, and the wonder is why men go on encouraging them and why sane people continue to produce them, unless there is a fond hope that some of them may turn out to be as good as “The Builders” of Henry Van Dyke or the great Commemoration Ode of James Russell Lowell. Even the devoted worshipers of the Autocrat must admit that as his college class drew nearer to the front rank of the Alumni processions, his reunion-verses grew quite tiresome; but no one could go on for some seventy years writing anniversary stanzas on the same theme without degenerating into the commonplace. The pamphlet is a little one of thirteen pages, entitled “Pompeii, A Poem which obtained the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, July, 1819; by Thomas Babington Macaulay, of Trinity College.” It was of this juvenile poem that the boyish author wrote to his father on February 5, 1819: “I have not, of course, had time to examine with attention all your criticism on ‘Pompeii’. I certainly am much obliged to you for withdrawing so much time from more important business to correct my expressions. Most of the remarks which I have examined are perfectly just; but as to the more momentous charge, the want of a moral, I think it might be a sufficient defence that, if a subject is given which admits of none, the man who writes without a moral is scarcely censurable.”[[1]] Poets, whether young or old, seldom take kindly to criticism of their lines, but one cannot help feeling some sympathy with the youthful Thomas in his gentle rebellion against the unpoetic demand of his somewhat priggish parent for a “moral”, although the subject of “Pompeii” ought to be far more fruitful of “morals” than that which ten years later was inflicted upon Tennyson, whose “Timbuctoo” carried off the prize in 1829. The Laureate’s successful “piece” is less impressive than Thackeray’s biting burlesque—not of Tennyson but of everything produced on that absurd theme—beginning something like this:
“In Africa—a quarter of the world—
Men’s skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled,