Text: Signed “D” (E. A. Duyckinck), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), January 4, 1845, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 26-28

[page 26, column 2, continued:]

There are several very good reasons why a series of articles should be written on the American Prose Writers. In the first place many of them are very clever men, and deserve this formal recognition of their merits; and it is one of the most natural of all impulses, that leads us, while we are day after day feasting on their intellectual beef and trifle, to offer up a few words of grace in a complimentary criticism. In the second place, many of our best prose writers are comparatively unknown, and it will be doing the public a greater service than the writers themselves, to speak of their merits. In the third place, it may happen that a few of these authors may be partially misunderstood, and criticism surely needs no apology when it is employed in removing any of the impediments which beset the discovering of truth. In the fourth place we hold the prose writers to have quite as good a claim to be celebrated as the poets of whom so much has latterly been said. In the fifth, a native author has certainly a right, in the present state of things, to all the crumbs he can get. In the sixth place, the public like this kind of biographical and gossipping table talk. And the seventh — a reason which we should hold sufficient were all the rest good for nothing — contributors must write and magazines must be filled, come what will of it.

We shall establish no order of precedence in the men or women we write about, nor set up any standard of exclusiveness further than what we have just indicated in this very sentence, that the authors and authoresses shall be men or women, with some kindling vitality in them — not mere walking gentlemen and ladies, hobby-de-hoys or copy-book misses.

Without more ado in the way of preface, we plunge our arms into the huge chest in which we have collected our material, and out of the heap of volumes, magazines, pamphlets, files of newspapers, there thrown together, a richer collection than you will find on the shelves of any bookseller, we extricate a huge bundle, strongly corded and labelled after our fancy, “Manifold and excellent illustrations of English literature — foreign and at home, old and recent, by William A. Jones.” There are at least, if drawn out from their hiding places, and printed in book form, a thousand pages of them, and quantity no less than quality shall be our harvest for asserting the claims, for the first time among critics, of a fresh American author.

What has he written and how has he written, are the first questions when a new name is mentioned in literature — First the facts, then the comment, and lastly the conclusion. — Though we consider the mere quantity that an author writes by no means the best proof of his merits, and remember that even the greatest reputations are generally sustained by a [page 27:] very few pages, which are all that the great public are acquainted with, yet as an incidental proof of capacity, especially in the present circumstances of reading and writing, it is quite necessary that an author show, by his power of sustaining himself, that he has not blundered or stumbled into literature, or got there by sheer impudence and trickery. An ordinary man may borrow with ingenuity, or be stung by the passion of the moment to produce a few vivid words, but we may not call him an author. The perfection of literature requires both art and nature. It is possible that a man in conversation may display higher powers of wit, humour or sentiment; than another may in writing, or a man may write mechanically as every decently educated person now-a-days can, without feeling. Neither of these deserve the name of authors.

How much has he written, then, is a fair question. We have a great horror of making notabilities out of nothing, so we proceed to give an account of Mr. Jones's labours, an imposing word, by which what ought to be called the recreations of genius, pass current with a dull minded world.

Mr. Jones's earliest papers were written for the American Monthly Magazine, while it was edited by Park Benjamin, and were soon after collected and published with a few others from the New Yorker in a volume, entitled The Analyst, in 1840. The peculiarity of this volume was its exhibition of the early development of the critical faculty, proving, as has been proved since in very many cases, that there is at times an early harvest for the judgment as well as for the apparently more youthful fancy and sentiment. One of the most remarkable examples of this, is in a case pointed out by Mr. Jones himself in a paper on the early maturity of Genius, that of Owen Felltheim, who was as wise as Bacon and pointed as La Bruyere at the age of nineteen.

The matter is easily explained. Whatever a man can do in literature or in active life, what is most characteristic of him, he is apt to do with the first salient spring of youth and ripened physical energy, before the sinews are hardened by time, or the heart by the world. This is true generally. Of that large portion of books which is built up on the passion of love, it is always true. Special circumstances may supply to some minds, in other cases, what the difference of years could not teach the dull and sluggish. Some men may learn more of the rash policy of the world from family and friends, in the few opening years of life, than others who pass their whole time among courts and statesmen. It is not the largeness of the landscape that informs us, but the power of vision.

The “Analyst” came into the world from the head of its author., like Minerva, without any apparent gestation. Its observation was not the less acute nor its knowledge the less wise. It discusses serious questions of morals, character and studies, with but few errors of judgment for the hand of time to correct, and none of the heart. There were some traces of bookishness in it, of course. It was evident that the writer had read Hazlitt, and the moralist. There was a smack of this good relish in the style, nor was the author disposed to withhold his acknowledgements. But with all this there was abundant self reliance, ample indication of original power, and no trace of what Mr. Poe calls American cribbage. The method of the book was inferior to the matter — a good sign and a comparatively rare one in our native literature. — Not that rudeness and awkwardness are commendable things in themselves, or that it is not a higher proof of genius, as in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that the just conception should mould the just style, but that the matter is the more essential thing of the two, and that a charlatan and pretender [column 2:] may secure the one, the outward, by care or thievery, but cannot pass off any false claim to the inner. Much as Mr. Jones has since written, though he has gained greater scope and maintains a longer flight, and attained considerable skill, yet a defect of manner still occasionally mars his writings. He cannot feign a sentiment, or write out of his element. It is only on a subject of which his heart is full that he writes very clearly and without impediment. Should any man write on any other? Certainly not in the Millennium, but should not is changed into must, while money continues to be so essential an article as it is at present, and magazines pay by the page.

The next literary appearance of our author, was in a series of papers in DR. HAWKES’ Church Record on the old English Literature, undertaken in pursuance of the constant ever-present aim of that distinguished divine to do all in his power, by the pulpit, education, the press, for liberal studies. There appeared week after week for more than a year sketches of old divines, like Donne, Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, and the later Barrow, South, Berkeley and Sterne; biographies of Izaak Walton's Saints, and many others as good and worthy, sketches of the sacred poets Quarles and Cra-shaw, and a few narratives of men after the writer's own heart, like Steele and Felton. These papers are now inaccessible to the general reader, and good as MSS. for all publishing purposes. They should be reset, an omission here and there supplied, and “written in a book” — a book that would form a choice companion to the library, useful as D’Israeli's miscellanies for its facts, and more interesting inasmuch as it has more heart. Books of this kind, a mixture of the critical, biographical and personal, will always have their charm with the educated as well as the novices in letters. We take up one of these papers, and it is as winning and uniting as the eloquent conversation of a friend pointing out to us that which is among the richest of all treasures, an unopened mine of wealth in the library. Blessings on these takers-down of misappreciated volumes, these openers of the ponderous jaws of unread folios!

Let those who would see more of our author, read the papers signed J. in “Arcturus” and look over a file of the “Boston Miscellany” and the “Democratic Review,” in the December number of which is a paper on Children's Books which is a very fair and right honourable picture of the writer's mind.

The characteristics of Mr. Jones's writings are a fine vein of sentiment, manly, delicate, and unerring in knowledge and tone of truth, and a sagacious critical acumen which is guided by the heart not the head, and hence, like the remarks of the child of nature in Mrs. lnchbald's tale, seems sometimes very odd among the plausibilities and conventialisms of the world. This writer is so very odd as sometimes to speak exactly what he thinks, however strangely the matter may stare out on the page among the polished devices of modern typography. Many of his remarks, it must be confessed, would read better (to most people) a hundred years hence in an autobiography, when this personal matter both of praise and censure offends no one, than at the present day. His writings are to be read with a mental comment and due consideration of the individual character that lurks beneath. There is a worldly tact in criticism seemingly fair and full — some would call it ingeniously plausible — which is the beau ideal of the craft that he seldom reaches. He is earnest, vigorous, dogmatic, and when he gets out of the range of his sympathies and experience, sometimes wrong. His affections are first of all with the true authors of sentiment, Sterne, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Jean Paul and Dickens. — [page 28:] Harmony of style as the index of harmony of feeling and the passions is his delight. He cares more for the natural unstudied traits of character, developed in harmony of prose or poetical numbers, as in a song or sonnet, than in the loftier flights of the muse. He never talks in his criticisms of a constructive work of art. The Drama and the Epic are out of his range. He reads the minor poets and essayists, and is content with perfect beauty in miniature without a thought of the great masters. He, perhaps, undervalues t heir native labors, if we may infer this from the neglect of them in his various criticisms. He is not a constructive critic, a phrase which he would use in reference to his treatment of American Literature. That is to say, lie does not attempt to select the elements of the future and build up a school of nationality. He looks upon literature and books as personal affairs. If he is hit and pleased, he says so — but there is much that does not touch him.

Criticism and its opportunities after all afford but an insufficient means of developing our author's character. He has humour, feeling, acute discrimination seen and acknowledged by his intimates, but what does a stranger know of them. He reads his articles, perhaps, with indifference, and complains that the critic's measure is a foot rule out of all proportions. It is no foot rule at all. Yet we can conceive of others, skilled in the honest language of nature, who detect the character of the writer, who feel when he is at home and speaking from himself; and who set aside the occasional job work as” leather and prunella.” With such our critic will gain a deep and permanent reputation. It is a customary phrase, with these good and true men, “I always read an article in the magazines that bears the name of WILLIAM A. JONES.”

D.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 26, column 2:]

* To be followed by a series of articles from different pens on American prose writers, since the Revolution.