I speak of this one and that,as it happens,and with no thought of giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago.I am aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart,and Iwould have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge and at Concord,which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
I would also like him to think of it as still a great town,merely,where every one knew every one else,and whose metropolitan liberation from neighborhood was just begun.
Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
Whipple,whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions.
He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature;and though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now,Isuspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned.
He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he was to what was done well in their elders;and there was no one writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition,though it might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure.He wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously;his point of view was solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities.I doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it;and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad.In this he was strictly of New England,and he was of New England in a certain general intelligence,which constantly grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,to analyze you to yourself;and the very modesty of the man,which made such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned,sometimes rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his subject.He had a keen perception of humor in others,but he had very little humor;he had a love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater than his sense of it.
I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work,not recently renewed.
Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance:a slight,short,ecclesiasticized figure in black;with a white neckcloth and a silk hat of strict decorum,and between the two a square face with square features,intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,and the prominent,myopic eyes staring through them.He was a type of out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects,but in the hospitable qualities of his mind and heart,the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory of all who ever knew him.
Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure,as essentially New En&land as this,and yet so different,relieve themselves.Charles F.Browne,whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter,was a Westernized Yankee.
He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking,and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature had otherwise known.He had gone from Cleveland to London,with intervals of New York and the lecture platform,four or five years before I saw him in Boston,shortly after I went there.We had met in Ohio,and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York;but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple.
He did not recognize me,but he gave me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality,with "How do you do?When did you come?"and other questions that had no concern in them,till I began to dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces.Then he seized my hand and wrung it all over again,and repeated his friendly demands with an intonation that was now "Why,how are you;how are you?"for me alone.
It was a bit of comedy,which had the fit pathetic relief of his impending doom:this was already stamped upon his wasted face,and his gay eyes had the death-look.His large,loose mouth was drawn,for all its laughter at the fact which he owned;his profile,which burlesqued.an eagle's,was the profile of a drooping eagle;his lank length of limb trembled away with him when we parted.I did not see him again;I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death,and this sad image remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor which characterizes the whole American people.
