A Fable for Critics

by James Russell Lowell

And here I must say he wrote excellent articles
On Hebraical points, or the force of Greek particles;
They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for,
And nobody read that which nobody cared for;
If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,
He could fill forty pages with safe erudition:
He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules,
And his very old nothings pleased very old fools;
But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart,
And you put him at sea without compass or chart,—
His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;
For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,
Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him,
So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,
Carving new forms of truth out of Nature’s old granite,
New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier’s planet,
Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create
In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,
Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,
To compute their own judge, and assign him his place,
Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,
And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it,
Without the least malice,—his record would be
Profoundly æsthetic as that of a flea,
Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,
Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,
Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a
Comprehensive account of the ruins of Denderah.

As I said, he was never precisely unkind,
The defect in his brain was just absence of mind;
If he boasted, ’twas simply that he was self-made,
A position which I, for one, never gainsaid,
My respect for my Maker supposing a skill
In His works which our Hero would answer but ill;
And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he,
Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery,
And set up a kind of a man-manufactory,—
An event which I shudder to think about, seeing
That Man is a moral, accountable being.

He meant well enough, but was still in the way,
As dunces still are, let them be where they may;
Indeed, they appear to come into existence
To impede other folks with their awkward assistance;
If you set up a dunce on the very North Pole
All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,
He’d manage to get betwixt somebody’s shins,
And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins,
To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,
All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice;
Or, if he found nobody else there to pother,
Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,
For there’s nothing we read of in torture’s inventions,
Like a well-meaning dunce with the best of intentions.

A terrible fellow to meet in society,
Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea;
There he’d sit at the table and stir in his sugar,
Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar;
Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights,
Of your time,—he’s as fond as an Arab of dates;
You’ll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,
Of something you’ve seen in the course of the day;
And, just as you’re tapering out the conclusion,
You venture an ill-fated classic allusion,—
The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack!
The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back!
You had left out a comma,—your Greek’s put in joint,
And pointed at cost of your story’s whole point.
In the course of the evening you find chance for certain
Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain:
You tell her your heart can be likened to one flower,
“And that, O most charming of women ’s the sunflower,
Which turns”—here a clear nasal voice, to your terror,
From outside the curtain, says, “That’s all an error.”
As for him, he’s—no matter, he never grew tender,
Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender,
Shaping somebody’s sweet features out of cigar smoke
(Though he’d willingly grant you that such doings are smoke);
All women he damns with mutabile semper,
And if ever he felt something like love’s distemper,
’Twas tow’rds a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican,
And assisted her father in making a lexicon;
Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious
About Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius,
Or something of that sort,—but, no more to bore ye
With character-painting, I’ll turn to my story.

Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes
To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes,
The genus, I think it is called, irritabile,
Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily,
And nurses a—what is it?—immedicabile,
Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel,
As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel,
If any poor devil but look at a laurel;—
Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting
(Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting
Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a
Retreat to the shrine of tranquil siesta),
Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray,
Which he gave to the life, drove the rabble away;
And if that wouldn’t do, he was sure to succeed,
If he took his review out and offered to read;
Or, failing in plans of this milder description,
He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription,
Considering that authorship wasn’t a rich craft,
To print the “American drama of Witchcraft.”
“Stay, I’ll read you a scene,”—but he hardly began,
Ere Apollo shrieked “Help!” and the authors all ran:
And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit,
And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate,
He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle
As calmly as if ’twere a nine-barrelled pistol,
And threatened them all with the judgment to come,
Of “A wondering Star’s first impressions of Rome.”
“Stop! stop!” with their hands o’er their ears, screamed the Muses,
“He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses,
’Twas a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying,
’Tis mere massacre now that the enemy’s flying;
If he’s forced to ’t again, and we happen to be there,
Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether.”

I called this a “Fable for Critics”; you think it’s
More of a display of my rhythmical trinkets;
My plot, like an icicle, ’s slender and slippery,
Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry,
And the reader unwilling in loco desipere
Is free to jump over as much of my flippery
As he fancies, and, if he’s a provident skipper, he
May have like Odysseus control of the gales,
And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails;
Moreover, although ’tis a slender return
For your toil and expense, yet my paper will burn,
And, if you have manfully struggled thus far with me,
You may e’en twist me up, and just light your cigar with me:
If too angry for that, you can tear me in pieces,
And my membra disjecta consign to the breezes,
A fate like great Ratzau’s, whom one of those bores
Who beflead with bad verses poor Louis Quatorze
Describes (the first verse somehow ends with victoire),
As dispersant partout et ses membres et sa gloire;
Or, if I were over-desirous of earning
A repute among noodles for classical learning,
I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis,
As new as the jests of Didaskalos tis;
Better still, I could make out a good solid list
From authors recondite who do not exist,—
But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist
Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries
After Milton’s prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris;—
But, as Cicero says he won’t say this or that
(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat),
After saying whate’er he could possibly think of,—
I simply will state that I pause on the brink of
A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion,
Made up of old jumbles of classic allusion:
So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied,
Just conceive how much harder your teeth you’d have gritted,
An ’twere not for the dulness I’ve kindly omitted.

I’d apologize here for my many digressions,
Were it not that I’m certain to trip into fresh ones
(’Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once;)
Just reflect, if you please, how ’tis said by Horatius,
That Mæonides nods now and then, and, my gracious!
It certainly does look a little bit ominous
When he gets under way with ton d’apameibomenos.
(Here a something occurs which I’ll just clap a rhyme to,
And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,—
Any author a nap like Van Winkle’s may take,
If he only contrive to keep readers awake,
But he’ll very soon find himself laid on the shelf,
If they fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)

Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I—
When Phœbus expressed his desire for a lily,
Our Hero, whose homœopathic sagacity
With an ocean of zeal mixed his drop of capacity,
Set off for the garden as fast as the wind
(Or, to take a comparison more to my mind,
As a sound politician leaves conscience behind),
And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps
O’er his principles, when something else turns up trumps.

He was gone a long time, and Apollo, meanwhile,
Went over some sonnets of his with a file,
For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet
Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it;
It should reach with one impulse the end of its course,
And for one final blow collect all of its force;
Not a verse should be salient, but each oneshould tend
With a wave-like up-gathering to break at the end;
So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink,
He was killing the time, when up walked Mr. D——;
At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses
Went dodging about, muttering, “Murderers! asses!”
From out of his pocket a paper he’d take,
With a proud look of martyrdom tied to its stake,
And, reading a squib at himself, he’d say, “Here I see
’Gainst American letters a bloody conspiracy,
They are all by my personal enemies written;
I must post an anonymous letter to Britain,
And show that this gall is the merest suggestion
Of spite at my zeal on the Copyright question;
For, on this side the water, ’tis prudent to pull
O’er the eyes of the public their national wool,
By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull
All American authors who have more or less
Of that anti-American humbug—success,
While in private we’re always embracing the knees
Of some twopenny editor over the seas,
And licking his critical shoes, for you know ’tis
The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice;
My American puffs I would willingly burn all
(They’re all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal)
To get but a kick from a transmarine journal!”

So, culling the gibes of each critical scorner
As if they were plums, and himself were Jack Horner,
He came cautiously on, peeping round every corner,
And into each hole where a weasel might pass in,
Expecting the knife of some critic assassin,
Who stabs to the heart with a caricature,
Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure,
Yet done with a dagger-o’-type, whose vileportraits
Disperse all one’s good and condense all one’s poor traits.