Burton Egbert Stevenson

“ Clement Clarke Moore
A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS
Nothing is harder to kill than a nursery rhyme. Once let it become part of the patter of childhood and its immortality is assured. Jack Sprat, King Cole, Miss Muffet and Boy Blue are known and loved by thousands upon thousands who have never heard, nor cared to hear, of Endymion or Prometheus or Childe Harold. Mother Goose will probably be the last work of English literature to perish.
It is astonishing how a mere jingle will sometimes win a tremendous vogue. ”

“ There is no poem in the language which has been spoken so often above an open grave, none which has brought so much consolation to stricken hearts. There is about it a calm certainty of faith, a serene courage, infinitely inspiriting. The persistent repetition of the phrase, "There is no death!" is in itself reassuring. ”

“ Still they shop in Paris, still they arrive in all the steamers with their spoil, still it shrinks and withers to nothing in their keeping. Probably there are no longer lovers so simple-hearted as to fancy any of them going to a function in a street costume, or in a dress which has already been worn three times, but, if there were, their fate would be as swift and dire. In such things the world does not change, and the plutocrats of imperial New York spell their qualities with the same characters as the plutocrats of Imperial Rome. ”

“ Robert Graves, in his little book, On English Poetry, evolves an ingenious theory about one-poem men. He believes that true poetry is the result of a sort of brain-storm, in which the poet, in a state of self-hypnosis, produces something quite beyond the capacities of his normal waking state—a diamond in the rough, as it were, with a heart of flame, but full of surface faults which require the patient craftsmanship of his waking state to remove. ”

“ Like all other one-poem men, Mr. Watson was convinced that Fate had done him a great injustice by linking his name to a single poem, and consigning all his other work to oblivion.
“I am not only the author of ‘Beautiful Snow,’” he protested, “but of ‘The Dying Soldier,’ ‘Farmer Brown,’ ‘Ring Down the Drop,’ and of many others as good or better. Why they are not equally famous I cannot imagine. ”

“ The idea that a woman who had taken the wrong turning could ever come back was anathema. In fact, society was banded together to prevent her coming back. To contend that such a woman had any claim to consideration, that she might be a good sort at bottom, and that she might eventually make a success of her life and be happy and contented in her last days was to incur grave suspicion. ”

“ Morse triumphantly, was it possible for Mrs. Akers to be wrinkled and gray-haired in 1860, and blooming with youth some years later? Here is the conclusive, inescapable proof of the falsity of her high-handed claim to “Rock Me to Sleep!”
Nor is this all. If any one is so pig-headed as to be still unconvinced, there is one proof more. Mr. Ball, it seems, was in the habit of writing a poem to his mother’s memory to celebrate each succeeding Christmas. ”

“ It is a fact, however, that, outside of Treasure Island, the chantey has never been found anywhere in print, and it has always been one of the tragedies of literature that the Captain never got any further than the first four lines. The beginning is so admirable! Though, of course, as a chantey four lines are enough; many chanteys consist of no more than that. For a chantey is made to be sung as a gang of sailors heave on a rope, or do some other work in concert, one voice carrying the lines and all of them coming in on the chorus. ”

“ Conclusive indeed must be the proof to convince any one that he would soil himself by the theft of another man's poem in order to add one more leaf to his wreath of laurel. The only final and absolute proof would be the discovery of the poem in some published form prior to 1822. Until such proof is forthcoming, Dr. Moore's claim to its authorship cannot be justly denied, and the children whom it has delighted need not hesitate to gather around his grave, as heretofore, on Christmas eve, to do him honor. ”

“ But one-poem men are either born poets tortured by a life-long mental conflict to which only once in their whole lives are they able completely to yield themselves, or they are not naturally poets at all, but men who, just once, are driven by some force beyond themselves to express in verse a sudden intolerable clamor in the brain. ”

“ Sarah Doudney.
THE LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL
It is usually the despair of single-poem men that their fame rests upon what seems to most of them so slender a foundation, and nearly all of them disclose a curious blind spot when it comes to looking at their own work, so that, just as a parent will often love his unworthiest child the best, the poet almost always thinks many of his creations are far superior to the one the public prefers, and is inclined to feel abused when they are disregarded. ”

“ When Mr. Butler died, twenty years ago, many learned societies passed resolutions of respect and regret, and panegyrics upon his legal attainments were pronounced in many courts; but he was quite right in thinking that all these would quickly fade. They are almost as though they had never been, and the great public still remembers him—in so far as it remembers him at all—only as the author of a single poem.
That poem, of course, is “Nothing to Wear,” published in 1857—the first bit of genuinely American rhymed satire in our literature. ”

“ They shine for evermore.
No doubt other tombstones scattered up and down the land bear these same lines, for they were once unbelievably popular, but the one at Washington stands above the grave of the man who claimed to be their author, who fought to establish that claim for more than forty years, and who finally died sick at heart, knowing that he had failed. There have been other men who have written one famous poem; but McCreery stands unique, for his poem brought him nothing but ridicule and disillusion. ”

“ Won’t Stewart, or some of our dry-goods importers,
Take a contract for clothing our wives and our daughters?
Or, to furnish the cash to supply these distresses,
And life’s pathway strew with shawls, collars, and dresses,
Ere the want of them makes it much rougher and thornier,
Won’t some one discover a new California? ”

“ But the chances are against it. And it is just as certain that modern literature is built upon a foundation of forgotten masterpieces as that modern life moves over an earth compounded of the forgotten dead. ”

“ Similarly, when a learned professor of Oriental and Greek literature in the General Theological Seminary of New York City, the editor of a monumental Hebrew lexicon, and a thoroughly grave and learned man, so far unbent as to write some merry Christmas verses for his two little daughters, he would have been indeed disillusioned and impressed with the vanity of human attainments had he foreseen that of all his works this jingle alone was destined to survive. ”

“ Holley was one of those rare personages who know a masterpiece when they see it! He was not mistaken in thinking the poem would have a wide appeal. It standardized Santa Claus. It visualized the appearance of the old saint so clearly that no artist since has dared to depart from the specifications there set down. Clarence Cook well called it "a true piece of Dutch painting in verse." No homely detail is overlooked, and each is drawn with rare precision. ”

“ Yet every sane person who stops to think of it knows that the Judge was wise to ride away back to his own circle and manner of life, and that if he had not done so, if he had tarried and married, instead of a little tender melancholy, he would have had a lifelong tragedy on his hands. ”

“ Whoever says “to-morrow,” “the unknown,”
“The Future,” trusts that power alone
He dares disown.
There is no unbelief;
The heart that looks on when dear eyelids close,
And dares to live when life has only woes,
God’s comfort knows. ”

“ Wherever exists a book that adds to our wisdom, that consoles our thought, it cannot perish. Nothing is so immortal as mere words, once they have been spoken fitly or divinely. A good book die! We shall sooner see the forests cut away from the hillside. ”

“ With a bed and a shroud of the beautiful snow!
John Whitaker Watson.
BEAUTIFUL SNOW
The human race is incurably romantic. It longs to believe that, however drab life may be in the immediate vicinity, somewhere else, in some happier clime, hearts are always light, virtue always rewarded, and high and passionate love the rule instead of the rare exception. Romance, romance—it is what every one sighs for and endeavors to experience—if not in person, at least by proxy; if not in one’s own life, then in a novel or a play or a movie.
Sometimes even in a poem! ”

“ If an author of reputation says that he or she wrote such or such a poem, his or her word ought to end all controversy, particularly such controversies as are waged by persons of whom no one ever heard before or cares to hear again. ”

“ At least let it be remembered that to him the American public owes its introduction to the supreme classic of baseball.
For every one has now agreed that that is what "Casey" is. But classics have a way of being despised or ignored by their contemporaries, and when the poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner nobody hailed it with shouts of joy or suspected that the great Casey was to become immortal. In fact, the Examiner staff was rather proud that the New York Sun should think well enough of the poem to copy the last eight stanzas. ”

“ They are, for the most part, curiosities, literary orphans which have flitted through the columns of the press, their parentage uncertain. They have been mutilated by brutal scissors, debased by stupid compositors and marred by careless proofreaders, into mere pitiful shadows of their proper selves. ”

“ Nowhere in his talks does Burroughs make any reference to the fact that he subsequently wrote a concluding stanza to the poem, which perhaps sums up the philosophy of his later life:
The law of love threads every heart
And knits it to its utmost kin,
Nor can our lives flow long apart
From souls our secret souls would win. ”

“ One of the commonest devices of the literary thief is to write some additional stanzas to the poem he has stolen in order to prove that he wrote all of them. It is also one of the most perilous, for seldom indeed can the pretender duplicate the flavor of the original. In Mr. Ball’s case it is fatal. Mrs. Akers’s “Rock Me to Sleep” is very far from being a great poem, but at least it shows rather unusual skill in versification, its lines are smooth and flowing, and each of them possesses the requisite number of feet. ”

“ Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who ought to know, went so far as to assert that it was only under such circumstances a poet could hope to be visited by the Muse:
A man should live in a garret aloof,
And have few friends and go poorly clad,
With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,
To keep the Goddess constant and glad.
Most pot-boilers, of course, are not masterpieces and are soon forgotten, having served their purpose of providing their creators with a little ready cash. ”

“ When first we practise to deceive!
So to the story.
In the early sixties of the last century, there dwelt in the pleasant town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a prosperous and respected harness-maker by the name of Alexander M. W. Ball. He was a devoted husband and father, something of a personage since he had made the long voyage to California and back a few years before, well thought of by his neighbors, and possessed of enough political influence to secure an election to the New Jersey legislature.
But the thing of which he was proudest was his reputation as a poet. ”

“ The ideal that what is good for us will come, and that we need not be uneasy or in haste, has proved true in my own case. Much good has come to me that I had no reason to expect—came just as a matter of luck in the unfolding of the great world life. “The theme of the poem accorded with the religious ideas of my people. They were Old School Baptists who believed in predestination, foreordination, and all that sort of thing. I inherited their feeling, but I wasn’t so theological. It took the shape with me that you see in the poem. It is predestination watered down, or watered up. ”

“ Miss Flora McFlimsey became a type, and “nothing to wear” a phrase with satiric implications which it has never lost. Its permanence, indeed, is due in no small part to its universality, for its message is as intelligible and apropos to-day as the day it was written. The moral at the close may be found old-fashioned and banal, and the puns sometimes a little forced, but, as a whole, the poem has lost none of its sparkle. ”

“ But this is not the stuff of which romance is made, the public will have none of it; and Maud Muller and the Beggar Maid and others of that ilk will always be popular heroines.
The task of the patient historian whose duty it too often is to puncture these pleasant fictions is a thankless one. To tear the halo of wifely devotion from the head of the Empress Josephine, to show that Queen Victoria was at bottom only an obstinate and narrow-minded woman—these are acts which to the multitude savor of sacrilege. ”

“ There must be something in a literary reputation, or so many would not be striving to attain it by all sorts of means. There is a class of scribblers who wriggle themselves into momentary notoriety by puffery, and there is another class who impudently demand attention by claiming the authorship of productions which they could not under any circumstances have written. ”

“ Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering sight should appear
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick. ”

“ If she was pictured at all, it was as despairing and hopeless, ceaselessly bemoaning her fall from virtue, drinking the dregs of misery and want, with remorse ever gnawing at her heart, and finally dying of starvation amid wretched surroundings. ”