GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION
IN his own honorable tongue Mr. Yoni Noguchi is, I dare say, a poet; in ours he is a trifle unintelligible. His English prose, too, is of a kind that one does not write if one has a choice in the matter, yet sometimes Mr. Noguchi thinks in it with clarity and point. Concerning the late Lafcadio Hearn and the little tempest that was roaring round that author’s life and character, Mr. Noguchi wrote:
“It is perfectly appalling to observe in the Western countries that when one dies his friends have to rush to print his private letters, and even an unexpected person volunteers to speak as his best friend, and presumes to write his biography.”
No, this is not good prose (barring the “unexpected person,” which is delicious) but it is obvious truth and righteous judgment. Publication of letters not written for publication isprima facieevidence of moral delinquency in the offender. In doing this thing he supplies the strongest presumption againsthimself. The burden of proof is heavy upon him; he is to be held guilty unless he can support it with positive evidence of a difficult thing to prove—an untainted intention not related to gain, glory nor gratification of a public appetite to which there is no honorable purveyance. No evidence less valid than written permission obviously covering the particular letters published is acceptable. In all the instances that I have observed this credential is wanting. True, the scope of my observation is somewhat narrow, for I would no more read a dead man’s private correspondence in a book than I would break open his desk to obtain it. From a woman related to a famous poet and critic then recently deceased I had once a request for any letters that I might have from him. The lady said that she wanted them for his biography, already in course of preparation. The letters related to literary matters only, but as the lady submitted no authorization from their writer for their publication I civilly refused and took the consequences—there were consequences. Whether or not my part of the correspondence appeared in the book I shall not know unless told.
The family of a man of genius and renownmay be pretty confidently trusted to make him ridiculous in life with their clumsy tongues, and after death with their thrifty pens. I think there was never a man of genius whom all his relatives excepting his immediate offspring did not, while jealous of his fame, secretly regard as a fool. (Even the brothers of Jesus of Nazareth did not “believe on him,” and to some of us who are immune to legends of the Church it is given to know that his mother was of their way of thinking.) Dumbly resenting the distinction that seems to accentuate their own obscurity, these worthies are nevertheless keen to shine by the growing light of his posthumous fame, if he have it, and to profit by it too, as are his more appreciative children and children’s children, usually dullards and dolts to the thirteenth and fourteenth generation. His death is the opportunity of all. Some of them are very sure to crucify the body of him and thrust a pen into his side to show that his blood is the same as their own.
A most disagreeable instance of this most disagreeable practice is that of a son of Robert Browning, who has won literary renown and popular commendation by publishing his parents’ love-letters. Doubtless he is proud ofhis work, but in the eyes of his sainted father, I fear, he is one of Mr. Noguchi’s “unexpected persons,” at least in the sense that he is not expected in Paradise. Another and more recent illustration is the bookMy Soldier, the sanguinary work of a wife. Observe with what celerity the forehanded family of Tennyson “improved the occasion” of his passing. The poor man was hardly cold before they thrust a volume of Shakspeare into his dead hand, clove it with his finger at a significant passage chosen by a domestic council, admitted a consistent ray of moonshine into the death chamber and invited the world to witness the edifying show. So the man who wrote
Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me
Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me
Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me
was made to seem to “pass out to sea” in an impressive pose, appropriately spectacular and dramatically ridiculous.
If there is a Better Land it is where a great man can grow up from the ground like a tree, without human agency, get on without a friend, write no letters and leave no name at which himself grew pale, to point a lying anecdote or tale.
To the perils herein pointed out authors are peculiarly exposed. The world has apparently agreed that he who writes for publication shall write for nothing else. I have heard men of decent life and social repute gravely defend the thesis that the public has arightto all that an author has written; and as his letters are likely to be rather more interesting than those of one who works at another trade, they are held to have a value disproportionate to the mere fame of their writer. We all concede the virtue of abstention from theft of a paste jewel, but a real diamond!—that is another matter.
The people are not pigs; the author of their favorite personal letters need not have a great personal renown. If he has uttered a sufficient body of private correspondence they are willing to forgive him for their inattention to his public work. Their purveyors are even more liberal in the matter: they do not insist on an excellent epistolary style nor anything of that kind. An intimate “human document” in ailing syntax is quite as available for their purpose as one baring the heart of a grammarian.The Filial Correspondence of George Adeis foredoomed to as sharp a competition among dealers asThe Love Lettersof Professor Harry Thurston Peck, Stylist.
It may be thought that all this is a cry from the deep and dark of a great fear. Not so; since I became a public writer I have never engaged in a correspondence in which it has not been distinctly understood that my letters were never to be printed. Only through an impossible treachery can the public ever have the happiness and profit of reading them. As to love-letters I am clean-handed: all mine have been written in honorable payment for favors and, as Conscience is my willing witness, I never meant one word of them.