Boston, Jan. 16th, 1853.
My Dear Sumner:
— You never yet performed the friendly office of criticizing anything of mine
that I did not thank you for it, and I do thank you for the black line drawn
against an expression in Wednesday's Commonwealth. Almost always I feel
the justice of your criticisms, and acknowledge your taste; this time, however,
I think you run purity into purism. Surely, in a newspaper squib, meant as an
answer to a squib, the use of an expression like that of poking fun, so
common, and free from offence to anything but conservative conventionalism, is
harmless. As for folks, it should have been marked as a quotation from
another paper.
Dear Sumner, are you not illiberal and ultra-conservative in
this one matter of style and form of expression? Would you not shut up the “well
of English” from the healthy influences of the spirit of the age, and deprive
language of the aid and the interest which the use of local and colloquial
expressions give it? Writing is an art, a good art; and a good writer is an
artist. It does seem to me absurd, however, to suppose it can be removed from
that class of things capable of change and improvement; or to hold that we are
to be tied down to the forms of expression used by classical writers. However,
of one thing I am quite sure; you have so little sense of fun or, to use a less
inelegant word, of the ludicrous, that you cannot make allowance enough
for those who have more of it, and who stir up that sense in the popular mind
by the use of what are considered, by mirthful people, very pleasant and
agreeable liberties with language. God made man to be mirthful as well as
moral; and Mirth may say to Morals, as Emerson makes the Squirrel say to the
Mountain:
“If I am not so large
as you,
You are not so small
as I,
And not half so spry!”
However you may have developed many other sides to your
character, one is dwarfed and undeveloped, the mirthful side.
So much for fun. Do continue to send me everything that you
can, even my Spirit of the Press with one black line against it. It is
not likely I shall continue it, however: it is like drumming in a pint pot. And
yet, when I think of the five thousand readers of the paper, and reflect upon
what I know, that my motives ought to appeal to and strengthen what is
good and high in them, I think I ought to do all I can, consistently with other
duties.
The Whigs here, Boston Whigs, are moving everything for
Everett; they feel however that they may have cause to repent by and by of
their success.
As for our friends, they are all dull or indifferent except
the “Dalgetties.” They feel sure of carrying the State next year, and Wilson
counts certainly upon the Gubernatorial chair. I think however that most of
them are quite careless about the modus in quo. They look to the
Democrats from a sort of fellow feeling. Now every element in my nature rises
up indignantly at the thought of our principles being bartered for
considerations of a personal and selfish nature; and all my feelings bid me do
what my reason forbids — that is, make open war, cause a clean split; appeal to
the “conscience Whigs” who formed the nucleus of our party, and march out of
the ranks with a banner of our own.
There are many considerations against it, and not the least
is the necessity of condemning severely the course of the party, and so losing
the advantage of the real good it has effected.
We shall see. What do you say?
Yours ever,
S. G. H.
SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals
of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 389-91
No comments:
Post a Comment