do not like to find him standing, scrimped up as small as possible in order to escape notice, behind the scenes in a modern play, where I must stumble over his toes at every turn. There are characters in the British drama, which seem to possess the longevity of the Wandering Jew, and the pertinacious vitality of the clown in a pantomime. After beholding them, not without secret satisfaction, killed in the massacre of the innocents at the end of one tragedy, they suddenly revive in the middle of another, looking as indifferent as if nothing special had happened; and, to increase the wonder, they commonly appear, like the posthumous heroes of a wax-collection, in the identical clothes they had on when they were murdered. Practice has made them perfect in this strange accomplishment; they have died so often as to make nothing of it. I have asked my legal friends if some process might not be sued out to keep them dead; but the weak point in the case seems to lie in the want of evidence of any contract on their part to that effect. Hermippus might have learned of them the cheapest method of prolonging life. Jones, who mimics the crowing of a cock so well, suspected a trick. From a certain tenuity in their discourse, he surmised that they were not really living characters, but only the ghosts of such; and accordingly, on an evening when he knew that one of them was to appear, stationed himself in the gallery, where zoological imitations and improvisations are allowed, to try the effect of the ancient specific for putting such vermin to flight. As soon as the thing appeared upon the stage, our friend crowed, as he avers, with even more than his usual precision; but it remained entirely unmoved, and was soon after run through the heart, to arise again, doubtless, at the next blast of the scene-shifter's whistle. Jones considers this as conclusive for the bodily-existence theory; but without any impugnment of his extraordinary powers of imitation, it may be conjectured that the phenomenon (if a ghost) understood the hoax and despised it. I think a real chanticleer should be tried, as that would leave no reasonable doubt. JOHN. You have had a long chase after your butterfly. Have you nothing more to read me from Chap man ? PHILIP. I will only take leave of him in his own noble words: "Farewell, brave relics of a complete man! . and, when thou sett'st Thy radiant forehead in the firmament, Make the vast crystal crack with thy receipt; THIRD CONVERSATION. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. JOHN. I HAVE always thought that our own history supplied many fine plots for tragedy. Hawthorne and Whittier have both drawn upon the persecutions of the early Quakers in New England for subjects. The Salem witch-mania would afford many striking situations. Our good Pilgrim ancestors thought that religion could not see to pick her steps without light now and then from a bonfire of heretics. Perhaps our dramatists may find their account in it. King Philip, and Tecumseh, and Osceola would make good heroes; so would the martyr Lovejoy. The institution of slavery, too, horrible as it is, might give us some materials. But I suppose our refined democracy would not allow another Othello upon the stage. The rudeness of the age in which Shakspeare lived will excuse his want of delicacy; but in an American, and in the nineteenth century, it would be atrocious not to believe in the aristocracy of the feelings. PHILIP. No doubt, our poets may find proper subjects, without going out of their own geographical territories; but I would not imprison them within those. What has poetry to do with space and time? Past and future are to her but arcs of one horizon, whose centre is the living heart. Yet how much cant do we hear about a national literature ! Let a man make a Pequod or a Cherokee bemoan himself through some dozen or more stanzas in such a style as neither of them ever dreamed of; let him invent a new rhyme for Huron, or a new epithet for Niagara, and he has done something national. What have we to do with a dance of savages more than with one of dervishes, or that of the planets which Pythagoras fancied? Our notion of an Indian is about as true as that which the Europeans have of us. In all the situations which are proper to poetry one man will feel precisely like another; and to the poet it is quite indifferent whether his scene be in Congo or Massachusetts, unless, indeed, he be not strong enough to walk firmly without the external support of old associations or magnificent ones. An Indian whose child dies, mourns the loss of one who would have been a great brave and an expert hunter; a tradesman in the same case laments that of a lineal successor behind the counter. Where is the difference in the feeling? Yet, in writing about the first, one would be bol stered up with rocks, woods, rivers, lakes, wigwams, scalping-parties, and the whole machinery of savage life, things merely extraneous and cumbrous, and not at all belonging to the bare feeling one is trying to reproduce. It is merely because of our arbitrary and unnatural associations with different callings or modes of life, associations unworthy of men, much more, then, unworthy of poets, that we esteem the savage more picturesque (or whatever you choose to call it) than the tradesman. In all the feelings with which Poesy concerns herself, the latter may be, and ought to be, superior. The savage has had, it is true, the limbs of the oak-tree for his cradle; the primeval forest and the lonely prairie have been his playmates and nurses; the sky, the waterfall, the thunder, the stars, the legends of his forefathers, these have been his letters and his poetry. But the other, if he has not been dandled by the forest-titan, has had the nobler tutelage of a mother's arms; nature denies herself to him no more than to his savage brother; the stars, and the forest, and the waterfall have their secrets for him as well; and in books he can converse with yet higher company, the ever-living spirits of the brave and wise. Methinks the account between the two is well balanced, or, if not, that the debit is on the side of him whom we idly call the child of nature, as if we dwellers in cities were but her foster-sons. -A man is neither more nor less a poet because he chooses one sub |