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[page 81, continued:]
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Thomas
Dunn
Brown.
 I have seen
one or two scraps
of verse with this gentleman's nom de plume*
appended, which
had
considerable merit. For example:
[["Azthene."]]
A sound melodious shook the
breeze
When thy
beloved name was heard;
Such was the
music in the word
Its dainty
rhythm the pulses
stirred,
But passed forever joys like
these.
There is no
joy, no light, no
day,
But black
despair and night al-way
And
thickening gloom;
And this, Azthene, is my doom.
Was it for this, for weary
years,
I strove
among the sons of men,
And by the
magic of my pen
—
Just sorcery
— walked the lion's
den
Of slander, void of tears and fears
—
And all for
thee? For thee! — alas!
As is the
image on a glass
So baseless seems
Azthene, all my earthly dreams. |
I must confess, however, that I do
not appreciate
the "dainty rhythm" of [page 82:] such a word as "Azthene",
and perhaps there is
some taint of egotism in the passage about "the magic" of Mr Brown's
pen. Let us be charitable, however, and set all this down under the
head of
the pure imagination, or invention — the first of poetical
requisites. The inexcusable sin of Mr Brown is imitation — if this be
not
too
mild a term. When Barry Cornwall, for example, sings about a "dainty
rhythm"
Mr Brown forthwith, in B flat, hoots about it too. He has taken,
however, his most unwarrantable liberties in the way of plagiarism,
with Mr Henry B. Hirst, of Philadelphia —
a
poet whose merits have not yet been properly estimated.
I place Mr Brown, to be sure, on my
list of literary
people not on account of his poetry (which I presume he
himself
is not weak enough to estimate very highly) but on the score of his
having
edited, for several months, "with the aid of numerous collaborators," a
magazine called "The Aristidean." This work, although professedly a
monthly,
was issued at irregular intervals, and was unfortunate, I fear, in not
attaining at any period more than about fifty subscribers.
Mr Brown has at least that amount of
talent which
would enable him to succeed in his father's profession — that of a
ferryman
on the Skuykill [[Schuylkill]] — but the fate of "The Aristidean"
should indicate to
him that, to prosper in any higher walk of life, he must apply himself
to study. No spectacle can be more ludicrous than that of a man
without
the commonest school education, busying himself in attempts to instruct
mankind on topics of polite literature. The absurdity, in such cases,
does
not lie merely in the ignorance displayed by the would-be instructor,
but
in the transparency of the shifts by which he endeavors to keep this
ignorance
concealed. The "editor of the Aristidean," for example, was not
the
public laughing-stock throughout the five months of his magazine's
existence,
so much on account of writing "lay" for "lie," "went" for "gone," "set"
for "sit," etc. etc., or for coupling nouns in the plural with verbs in
the singular — as when he writes, above,
——
so baseless seems
Azthene, all my earthly dreams
— |
he was not, I say, laughed at so much on account
of his excusable
deficiencies in English grammar (although an editor should undoubtedly
be able to write his own name) as on account of the pertinacity
with which he exposes his weakness, in lamenting the "typographical
blunders"
which so unluckily would creep into his work. He should
have
reflected that there [page 83:] is not in
all America a proof-reader so blind as
to
permit such errors to escape him. The rhyme, for
instance,
in the matter of the "dreams" that "seems", would have distinctly shown
even the most uneducated printer's devil
that he, the devil, had no right to meddle with so obviously an intentional
peculiarity.
Were I writing merely for American
readers, I should
not, of course, have introduced Mr Brown's name in this book. With us, grotesqueries
such as "The Aristidean" and its editor, are not altogether
unparalleled,
and are sufficiently well understood — but my purpose is to convey to
foreigners
some idea of a condition of literary affairs among us, which otherwise
they might find it difficult to comprehend or to conceive. That
Mr
Brown's blunders are really such as I have described them — that I have
not distorted their character or exaggerated their grossness in any
respect
— that there existed in New York, for some months, as conductor of a
magazine
that called itself the organ of the Tyler party and was even
mentioned,
at times, by respectable papers, a man who obviously never went to
school,
and was so profoundly ignorant as not to know that he could not spell —
are serious and positive facts — uncolored in the slightest degree —
demonstrable,
in a word, upon the spot, by reference to almost any editorial sentence
upon any page of the Magazine in question. But a single instance will
suffice:
— Mr Hirst, in one of his poems, has the lines,
Oh Odin ! 'twas pleasure — 'twas
passion to see
Her serfs sweep like wolves on a
lambkin like me. |
At page 200 of "The Aristidean" for
September 1845,
Mr Brown, commenting on the English of the passage, says: — "This
lambkin
might have used better language than 'like me' — unless he
intended
it for a specimen of choice Choctaw, when it may, for all we know to
the
contrary, pass muster." It is needless, I presume, to proceed
farther
in a search for the most direct proof possible or conceivable, of the
ignorance
of Mr Brown — who, in similar cases, invariably writes — "like I."
In an editorial announcement on page
242 of the same
"number," he says: — "This and the three succeeding numbers brings
the work up to January and with the two numbers previously
published makes
up a volume or half year of numbers." But enough of this
absurdity:
— Mr Brown had, for the motto on his magazine cover, the words of
Richelieu, [page 84:]
—— Men call me
cruel;
I am not: — I am just. |
Here the two monosyllables "an ass"
should have been
appended. They were no doubt omitted through "one of those d——d
typographical
blunders" which, through life, have been at once the bane and the
antidote
of Mr Brown.
I make these remarks in no spirit of
unkindness. Mr B. is yet young — certainly not more than thirty-eight
or nine —
and
might readily improve himself at points where he is most
defective.
No one of any generosity would think the worse of him for getting
private
instruction.
I do not personally know him.
About his appearance
there is nothing very remarkable — except that he exists in a perpetual
state of vacillation between mustachio and goatee. In character,
a windbeutel.
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