Text: N. P. Willis, A comment on Longfellow's Waif controversy, Evening Mirror (New York), February 5, 1845, vol. 1, no. 103, p. 2, cols. 2-3

[page 2, column 2, continued:]

LONGFELLOW’S WAIF. — A friend, who is a very fine critic, gave us, not long since, a review of this delightful new book. Perfectly sure that anything from that source was a treasure for our paper, we looked up from a half-rend proof to run our eye hastily over it, and gave it to the printer — not, however, without mentally differing from the writer as to the drift of the last sentence, as follows: —

Notwithstanding the haste with which it passed through our attention (for we did not see it in proof), the question of admission was submitted to a principle in our mind; and, in admitting it, we did by Longfellow as we [column 3:] would have him do by us. It was a literary charge, by a pen that never records an opinion without some supposed good reason, and only injurious to Longfellow (to our belief) while circulating, un-replied-to, in conversation-dom. In the second while we reasoned upon it, we went to Cambridge and saw the poet's face, frank and scholar-like, glowing among the busts and pictures in his beautiful library, and (with, perhaps a little mischief in remembering how we have always been the football and he the nosegay of our contemporaries) we returned to our printing-office arguing thus: Our critical friend believes this, though we do not; Longfellow is asleep on velvet; it will do him good to rouse him; his friends will come out and fight his battle; the charge (which to us would be a comparative pat on the back) will be openly disproved, and the acquittal of course leaves his fame brighter than before — the injurious whisper in conversationdom killed into the bargain!

That day's Mirror commenced its

We expected the return mails from Boston to bring us a calmly indignant “Daily Advertiser,” a coquettishly reproachful “Transcript,” a paternally severe “Courier,” and an Olympically-denunciatory “Atlas.” A week has elapsed, and we are still expecting. Thunder is sometimes “out to pasture.” But, meantime, a friend who thinks it the driver's lookout if stones are thrown at a hackney-coach, but interferes when it is a private carriage — (has loved us these ten years, that is to say, and never objected to our being a target, but thinks a fling at Longfellow is a very different matter) — this friend writes us a letter. He thinks as we do, exactly, and we shall, perhaps, disarm the above-named body-guard of the accused poet by quoting the summing-up of his defence: —

It can easily be seen how Longfellow, and his friends for him, should have a very different estimate from ourself as to the value of an eruption, in print, of the secret humors of appreciation. The transient disfiguring of the skin seems to us better than disease concealed to aggravation. But, apart from the intrinsic policy of bringing all accusations to the light, where they can be encountered, we think that the peculiar temper of the country requires it. Our national character is utterly destitute of veneration. There is a hostility to all privileges, except property in money — to all hedges about honors — to all reserves of character and reputation — to all accumulations of value not bankable. There is but one field considered fairly open — money-making. Fame-making, character-making, position-making, power-making, are privileged arenas in which the “republican many” have no share.

The distrust with which all distinction, except wealth, is regarded, makes a whispered doubt more dangerous to reputation than a confessed defect. The dislike to inheritors of anything — birthrights of anything — family names or individual genius — metamorphoses the first suspicion greedily into a belief. A clearing-up of a disparaging doubt about a man is a public disappointment. “That fellow is all right again, hang him “ is the mental ejaculation of ninety-nine in a hundred of the readers of a good defense or a justification.

P. S. We are not recording this view of things by way of assuming to be, ourself, above this every-day level of the public mind — too superfine to be a part of such a public. Not a bit of it. We can not afford superfinery of any kind. We are trying to make a living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of the tide in these matters. The country is at the lowest ebb of democracy consistent with its intelligence. The taste for refinements, for distinctions, for aristocratic entrenchments, is moving with the additional momentum of a recoil. We minister to this, in the way of business, as the milliner makes a crown-shaped head-dress for Mrs. President Tyler. It has its penalty, but that was reckoned at starting. We knew, of course, that we could not sell fashionable opinions at our counter without being assailed as assuming to be the representative of fashion* — just as if we could not even name a tribute of libertinism to virtue without being sillily called a libertine by the Courier, Commercial, and Express. However, there is some hope, by dint of lifetime fault-culture, that, in the sod over a man's grave, there will be no slander-seed left to flower posthumously undetected.

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*Others have recorded this national habit of attacking the individual instead of the opinion. Dr. Reese, in his of Address in behalf of the Bible in Schools,” thus speaks of the manner of opposition to his philanthropic labors: —