Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Samuel Gridley Howe to Senator Charles Sumner, January 16, 1853

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

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