No More Learning

Now I would not
take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter
both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught
to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I
have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are
those with whom _your_ verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the
higher court sitting within.

But I wander from what I intended to say,--that you have, namely, shown
such a liberal way of thinking, and so much aesthetic perception of
anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of
some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two
weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours
most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section
was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

You have watched a child playing--in those wondrous years when belief is
not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear
and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a
knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle
over the street, his fancy, in purest good faith, will make sail round
the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely
ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds of times. Or,
suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of
childhood, the Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony and cry, 'Jack,
let's play that I am a Genius! ' Jacky straightway makes Aladdin's lamp
out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural
powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two
urchins, have grown into men, and both have turned authors,--one says to
his brother, 'Let's play we're the American somethings or other,--say
Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no
matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll
be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews. ' So they both (as
mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous
bays. Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his
friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased
review, thinks--Here's pretty high praise, but no more than my due.
Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same
farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, it asked, scarce a month
since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's
critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when
he said that the Public _sometimes_ hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty
good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary
edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down
(by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any
faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and,
while I am writing,--I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment
be just on the brink of it,--Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has
begun a critique,--am I not to be pitied? [1]

Now I shall not crush _them_ since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure
I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,--no
action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste
time in putting them down--I am thinking not their own self-inflation
will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the
whole bevy,--though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy.
No, my dear honest bore, _surdo fabulam narras_, they are no more to me
than a rat in the arras.
I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the
Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more
than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow
tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all
but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I
leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I
wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get _fou_
with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish
dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with
Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a
fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas
welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward
again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that
spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in
Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can
bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her
shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling
and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The
waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks,
with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight; the pond in the
woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes, where
pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by recall to September the blue
of June's sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to
say aught to you all, my poor critics, but--pish! I've buried the
hatchet: I'm twisting an allumette out of one of you now, and relighting
my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you please, I will
give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece.

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond
author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the
_errata_, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kinds of strata (only
these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born
well-featured and fair, turning suddenly wry-nosed, club-footed,
squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride
become an aversion,--my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a
change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an _o_'s being wry, a limp in
an _e_, or a cock in an _i_,--but to have the sweet babe of my brain
served in _pi! _ I am not queasy-stomached, but such a Thyestean banquet
as that was quite out of the question.

In the edition now issued no pains are neglected, and my verses, as
orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders remain of the public's
own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a
character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one,
has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine,
whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking
together, would not be _my_ way. I can hardly tell whether a
question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune
agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though
not the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying
and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not
found so rife I can easily smother my love for them, whether on my side
or t'other.

For my other _anonymi_, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a
caricature, and what by a portrait.