In addition, you will always find us of the press your trusty friends. Although behind the scenes myself, the peculiar connection that exists between items-men and artists is as inexplicable to me as the partnership of the owl and the prairie-dog in their dwellings on the plains. Why, when we make every other calling pay roundly for a notice, we puff the artists gratis in the most conspicuous columns of the paper, is a puzzle to me. But the fact exists. Hire your studio, nail up your name on the door, and we will make a pet of you at once, and pat you encouragingly on the back. You shall have little paragraphs of this kind: "Salvator Smith is studying atmospheric effects in the Brooklyn Mountains"; or, "Smith, our own Salvator, is making studies from nature near Roxbury"; or, "He has a grand classical picture on his easel in Green Street, representing a celebrated American in the character of the infant Hercules, strangling the British lion with one hand and the Gallic cock with the other." Few of our readers may have heard of Smith, but they read these iterated notices, and soon believe Smith to be somebody. And he has the sweet sensation of seeing his name in print at no expense to himself, and the rare luck of fame before it is earned. In the circle he adorns he will be looked upon as a judge in all matters æsthetical. It is only necessary to have painted a poor picture in order to be an authority in architecture, music, poetry, dress, decoration, furniture, private theatricals, and fancy balls.
At this moment the fashionable world is an oyster, which with his spatula an artist may open. A picture mania rages. Good works bring enormous prices, and any discoloration of canvas in a gilt frame finds a ready purchaser, if signed by a known name. We are a commercial people, and are satisfied with a first-rate indorsement. The patron of art can soon educate himself for the position. The pet little phrases—"chalky," "sketchy," "tone," "repose," "opaque coloring," and all the rest of the technical vocabulary—are soon learned; and then if Lorenzo is able and willing to give ten thousand dollars for a picture, he may hold a court of artists and be sure of having a number of pleasant fellows about him. They, too, will be sure of champagne and oysters. All the schools, however different their theories of art may be, agree, I believe, that both of these compositions are excellent.
Lastly, I should like to say a few words in favor of my own noble profession, newspaper editing. Mr. Carlyle may spitefully call it "the California of the spiritually vagabond," but there is a proud pleasure in knowing that we gentlemen of the press furnish the great American people with their ideas and their phrases ready made, just as Brooks Brothers and Oak Hall provide them with their clothes. All very much alike, it is true,—"our spring style,"—and often ill-fitting and graceless; but we seem to fill a national want. Our names may be unknown outside of our offices, but the great planets are perceptibly influenced in their courses by little asteroids invisible to the naked eye, and many a celebrity who appears daily in large type is moved by the strings we pull, and knows it not. My comrade Tarbox says: "The oracles that became dumb in the year of our Lord were really a necessity to mankind, and consequently were made vocal again by the agency of Renaudot, who invented newspapers. The Delphis and Dodonas of the nineteenth century are newspaper offices." This may explain why young men in search of a profitable career write to us instead of applying to rich merchants or to dashing brokers. How fortunate that those who consult us never see the shrine or the priests! No gold or silver glitters in the modern adytum, or editor's room, and the tripod from which we distribute our afflatus to the compositors is a wooden three-legged stool, unpainted and uncushioned. That great oracle, Tarbox himself, was not long ago a noble savage who ran wild in the woods near some country college. Caught and caged in that institution, he devoted three years to pipes, and one to belles lettres, and receiving from a good-natured Faculty some sort of a degree, probably that of tobacco-laureate, came thence to town; where, inspired by a salary of ten dollars a week, he enlightens the public on finance and politics, art and literature, manners and taste, and writes those brilliant articles the world willingly lets die. When the California gold mines were first discovered, a clever fellow said that he knew of no opening for a young man like the Southwest Pass. That is still true for rough, coarse, self-asserting characters; but for delicate, refined, stay-at-home natures, who have wishes without wills, there are many ways of getting their porridge without selling their birthright of doing as little as possible. If they cannot float buoyantly on the surface, at least they need not sink far beneath it, but may enjoy a quiet, water-logged kind of existence, not devoid of comfort.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
May-Day and other Pieces. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
We wonder whether those who take up Mr. Emerson's poem now, amid the glories of the fading summer, are not giving the poet a fairer audience than those who hurried to hear his song in the presence of the May he celebrates. As long as spring was here, he had a rival in every reader; for then we all felt ourselves finer poets than ever sang of the season, and did not know that our virtue was but an effect of Spring herself,—an impression, not an expression of her loveliness, which must pass with her. Now, when the early autumn is in every sense, and those days when the year first awoke to consciousness have grown so far away, we must perceive that no one has yet been allowed to speak so well for the spring of our New World as this poet. The very irregularity of Mr. Emerson's poem seems to be part of its verisimilitude, and it appears as if all the pauses and impulses and mysterious caprices of the season—which fill the trees with birds before blossoms, and create the soul of sweetness and beauty in the May-flowers under the dead leaves of the woodlands, while the meadows are still bare and brown—had so entered into this song, that it could not emulate the deliberation and consequence of art. The "May-Day" is to the critical faculty a succession of odes on Spring, celebrating now one aspect and now another, and united only by their title; yet since an entire idea of spring is evolved from them, and they awaken the same emotions that the youth of the year stirs in us, we must accept the result as something undeniably great and good. Of course, we can complain of the way in which it is brought about, just as we can upbraid the New England climate, though its uncertain and desultory April and May give us at last the most beautiful June weather in the world.
The poem is not one that invites analysis, though it would be easy enough to instance striking merits and defects. Mr. Emerson, perhaps, more than any other modern poet, gives the notion of inspiration; so that one doubts, in reading him, how much to praise or blame. The most exquisite effects seem not to have been invited, but to have sought production from his unconsciousness; graces alike of thought and of touch seem the unsolicited gifts of the gods. Even the doubtful quality of occasional lines confirms this impression of unconsciousness. One cannot believe that the poet would wittingly write,
"Boils the world in tepid lakes,"