Our present business, however, is not with these or with any who, being dead, have friends and followers
to sound their praises, or, living, whose books may still be read and admired, if only by themselves. We shall take leave to introduce the reader into an obscurer company, where he will yet, we are assured, find those who are not unworthy of his friendship and esteem. They themselves and their memories even are ghosts; but they will gladly take form and substance to receive our sympathetic greeting and unbosom themselves of their sorrows. Fate has pressed hardly on them; they have felt the “iniquity of oblivion”; forgetfulness has been for most of them their only mourner; upon their trembling little rushlight of glory that each fondly hoped was to be a beacon for eternity that sardonic jester, Time, has clapped his grim extinguisher and they are incontinently snuffed out. Posterity, their court of last appeal, is bribed to cast them, and their scanty heritage of immortality is parcelled out among a younger and greedier generation. Instead of the trophies and mausoleums they looked to so confidently, the monuments more lasting than brass, they are fain to put up with a broken urn in an antiquarian’s cabinet, a half-obliterated headstone in Sexton Allibone’s deserted graveyard.
We own to a weakness for neglected poets. The reigning favorite of that whimsical tyrant, Fame, ruffling in all the bravery of new editions and costly bindings, worldly-minded
critics may cringe to and flatter; we shall seek him out when he is humbled and in disgrace, very likely out at elbows and banished to the Tomos of the bookstall or the Siberia of the auction-room. We are shy indeed of those great personages who throng the council-chambers of King Apollo, and are ill at ease in their society. A bowing acquaintance with them we crave at most, to brag of among our friends, and, for the rest, are much more at home with the little poets who cool their heels in the gracious sovereign’s anteroom. These we can take to our bosoms and our firesides; but imagine having Dante every day to dinner, leaving hope at the door as he comes scowling in, or Milton for ever discoursing “man’s first disobedience” over the tea and muffins! Don Juan’s Commander were a more cheerful guest.
It is pleasant, we take it, to turn aside now and then from the crowded highway where these great folks air their splendors, and lose ourselves in the dewy woods where the lesser muses hide, tracing some slender by-path where few have strayed.—secretum iter et fallentes semita vitæ. The flowers that grow by the roadside may be more radiant or of rarer scent; but what delight to explore for ourselves the shy violet hidden from other eyes, to stumble by untrodden ways upon the freshness of secret springs, and perhaps of a sudden to emerge in the graveyard aforesaid, where the air is full of elegies more touching than Gray’s, and our good sexton is at hand to wipe the dust from this or the other sunken tombstone of some world-famous bard and help us to decipher his meagre record. The tombstone is the folio containing his immortal works; it is heavier than most tombstones, and
his world-famous memory moulders quietly beneath it. Surely there is something pathetic in such a destiny; something which touches a human chord. We may pity the fate of many a forgotten poet whose poems we should not greatly care to read. With their keen self-consciousness, which is not vanity, and their sensitiveness to outward impressions, poets more than most men cling to that hollow semblance of earthly life beyond the grave, that mirage of true immortality, we call posthumous fame. More than most they dread and shrink from the callous indifference, the cynical disrespect, of the mighty sans-culotte, Death. To die is little; but to die and be forgotten, to vanish from the scene of one’s daily walks and talks and countless cheerful activities, as utterly and as silently as a snow-flake melts in the sea; to be blotted out of the book of life as carelessly as a schoolboy would sponge a cipher from his slate—this jars upon us, this makes us wince. From that fate, at least, the poet feels himself secure; he leaves behind him the Beloved Book. With that faithful henchman to guard it, the pale phantom of his fame cannot be jostled aside from the places that knew him by the hurrying, selfish crowds. It will remain, the better part of himself, “the heir of his invention,” but kinder than most heirs, to jog the world’s elbow from time to time and buy him a brief furlough from oblivion. Through that loyal interpreter he may still hold converse with his fellows, who might ill understand the speech of that remote, mysterious realm wherein he has been naturalized a citizen; he will keep up a certain shadowy correspondence with the cosey firesides, the merry gatherings, he has left that may serve to warm and cheer him
in the chilly company of ghosts; perhaps—who knows?—may even lend him dignity and consequence among that thin fraternity. He will not wholly have resigned his voice in mundane matters; his memory, as it were a spiritual shadow, will continue to fall across the familiar ways; he will have his portion still, a place reserved for him, in the bustling, merry world. Very likely at this stage of his reflections he will whisper to himself, Non omnis moriar; in his enthusiasm he may go further, and with gay, vain, prattling Herrick share immortality, as though it were a school-boy’s plum-cake, among his friends. Hugging this smiling illusion, he resigns himself to the grave, and the daisies have not had time to bloom thereon before the Beloved Book, the loyal interpreter, the faithful henchman, the wonder-worker of his dream, is as dead and utterly forgotten as—well, let us say as the promises our friend the new Congressman made us when he expressed such friendly anxiety about our health just previous to the late election.
So utter, even ludicrous, a bouleversement of hopes so passionate—and there is nothing a poet longs for so passionately as remembrance after death, unless it be recognition in life—may touch the sourest cynic. It may be as Milton says in his proudly conscious way: Si quid meremur, sana posteritas sciet. But what comfort is it to our undeserving to know that a sane posterity is justified in forgetting it? Good poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. But the bad poet, outcast of gods and men, and of every bookseller who owns not and publishes a popular magazine; the Pariah of Parnassus, the Ishmael of letters, with every critic’s hand against him,
haunted through life by the dim, appalling spectre of his own badness, helplessly prescient in lucid intervals of the quaintly cruel doom which is to consign him after death to the paper-mill, there to be made over—heu! fides mutatosque deos!—for the base uses of other bad poets, his rivals—if to this martyr we cannot give consolation, we surely need not grudge compassion.
The discerning reader may have gathered from these remarks that the bards we are about to usher back from endless night into his worshipful presence are not all of the first order, or indeed of any uniform order, of excellence. They are not all Miltons or Shaksperes: si quid meremur would be for some of them an idle boast, and their posterity can hardly be convicted of insanity for having sedulously let them be. But neither must we argue rashly from this neglect of them that they deserved to be neglected. Neglect was for a time the portion of the greatest names in English letters. Up to the middle of the last century it was practically the common lot of all the writers who came before the Restoration. Literary gentlemen, the wits of the coffee-house, the Aristarchuses of Dick’s or Button’s, knew about them in a vague way as a set of queer old fellows who wrote uncouth verses in an outlandish dialect about the time of Shakspere and Milton. The more enterprising poets stole from them; but English literature as a living body knew them not. They were no longer members of the guild or made free of its mysteries; they were foreigners among their own people, speaking a strange tongue, shrewdly suspected of unwholesome dealings in such forbidden practices as fancy and imagination, and on the whole best excluded