The Albemarle, New York, December 19,1861.
. . . This is a wonderful city. It has greatly changed since
you and I were here eighteen years ago. There is a special fitness in the first
syllable of its name, for it is essentially New, and seems likely always to
remain so. It is all of the New World, and what Villemain says of Joinville is
true in another sense of the impression that a stranger receives from New York “On
dirait que les objets sont nés
dans le monde le jour où
il les a vus.” The only old things here are yesterday's newspapers. People do
not seem to live here, — they pass the nights and spend the days in the city, —
that is all. The persons whom I meet in the street do not have, to my eyes, the
air of belonging here, or of being at home. They look restless, and even the
children have tired faces as if they had been seeing sights too long.
The New Yorkers have got Aladdin's lamp, and build palaces
in a night. The city is gay, entertaining, full of costly things, — but its
lavish spending does not result in magnificence, it is showy rather than fine,
and its houses and churches and shops and carriages are expensive rather than
beautiful. Architecture is not practised as a fine art, it is known here only
as a name for the building trade.
Boston is farther off than it used to be from New York. We
are provincials, with a very little city of our own. This is really metropolitan,
and has great advantages. A few years hence and Boston will be a place of the
past, with a good history no doubt, but New York will be alive. It seems to be
getting what Paris has so much of,—a confidence in the immortality of the
present moment. It does not care for past or future.
My windows look out on the junction of Broadway and Fifth
Avenue, and there is not a livelier place in the world.
The news from England, I trust, is not so bad as it seems.
The manner in which the country has received it is most satisfactory, — and
there is apparently no reason to fear war as the result of any popular
excitement here, or of any want of temper or discretion on the part of the
Administration. It is a fortunate thing for us that Seward has regained so much
of the public confidence. He will feel himself strong enough not to be
passionate or violent. I cannot believe that the English ministry mean war, —
if they do they will get it and its consequences.
How good the new number of the “Atlantic” is! I have read
and re-read your letters in it, always with a fuller sense of the overflowing
humour, wit and cleverness of them. You are as young, my boy, as you were in
the old time. It seems to me indeed (you will take what I say for what it is
worth, and of this you are a better judge than I am), that there is some risk
from the very abundance of your power lest the popularity and effect of this
new series of the "Biglow Papers" should not be as great as it ought
to be. This letter of B. Sawin's is too full, and contains too much. I know
that the necessity of the case forced you into details in order to place your
characters on the stage in an intelligible way. But I am afraid that the public
will be impatient of detail, and will complain of divided interest. It was this
that prevented common readers from appreciating the delightful fun and humour
of “Our Own.” The truth is that for popularity — that is, for wide, genuine,
national popularity — there is need of unity of effect. One blow must be
struck, not ten. Moreover our people are more in earnest now than they ever
have been before, they are not in the vein for being amused by the most humorous
touches of satire unless there be a simple, perfectly direct moral underneath.
The conclusion to which I want to come is this, — that you must interrupt the
series of Birdofredum's letters, by some shorter pieces of Hosea's own, the
shorter the better if so be that they give expression and form to any one of
the popular emotions or sentiments of the moment; — and more than this, that
you should make them as lyrical and as strong as possible, binding the verses
together with a taking refrain. The pieces in the old “Biglow Papers” that have
become immortal are the lyrics; — the John P. Robinson; the Gen. Cass says some
one's an ass; the Apostles rigged out in their swallow-tail coats, and so on.
Am I right? I believe so. And if I am, I am sure that you
can do what I think should be done. You have a fine chance (me judice) at
this moment to put the popular feeling toward England into verse which shall
ring from one end of the country to the other. Do let Hosea do it, and send it
with one of his brief old-fashioned letters to the publishers for the next
number, — and keep back Birdofredum till March. If you hit the nail of the
minute such a ringing blow on the head as you can hit it, all the people will
cheer and laugh, and throw up their hats in your honour. I am so proud of you,
and love you so well that I not only want you to do the best for the country
but am sure that you can do it. And love gives me the precious right to write
thus freely to you. . . .
SOURCE: Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters
of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 247-50
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