The New Portfolio

“ AND why the New Portfolio, I would ask ? ”

Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly spoken of as a baby ? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the baby ? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of as a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no other in existence ?

Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully from time to time and show them to callers, namely, to the whole family which this monthly visitor reckons on its list of intimates, and such others as may drop in by accident. And so it shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its fellows as a portfolio.

What can be more natural than that a reader who has found some little pleasure in the contents of the old worn-out portfolio should take up the new one with the feeling that it can never be to him or her what the earlier one has been ? No, my dear friend, it cannot be. You and I were younger when that was opened. It is a very small affair to be illustrated from the Scripture record, and yet you remember the beetle and the giant, — alike in one point, though so far apart in many. I am thinking of the old and the new Jewish temple, and the story Ezra tells of them : —

But many . . . who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice.

It is much more likely that you will smile, dear reader, but I do not think you will laugh. You could hardly be one of my willing readers unless you were capable of feeling instinctively that there is something in this confidence on which I venture, lying deeper than the superficial layer which belongs to the ridiculous. So much has changed since the older, not the oldest, portfolio was opened for the first number of this magazine! I cannot go back to the feelings with which I wrote, nor you to the feelings with which you read. No matter ; we have a good deal left in common yet: air is still sweet to breathe, and ginger is hot in the mouth just as it used to be. Only deal kindly with the New Portfolio at its first opening. It takes a slight effort to open it, and It seems as if it creaked a little. Have patience with it; do not brutalize it with a cynical welcome.

I got a lesson when a young man, which has lasted me a long time. One of my most intimate college friends was married very early, and by and by a cradle appeared in the room christened the nursery, and in the cradle a male infant, of which the young parents were very proud, as a matter of course. Some weeks had passed over its little head, when I, as a friend of the family, was admitted to a view of the young phenomenon. What more natural than to take it from the mother’s arms and bear it about the room in triumph ? But one must have a good look at one’s friend’s baby, — not smothered up in all sorts of little bed-clothes, or hugged out of sight in the arms of the nurse or the mother, or even in one’s own arms. Let us set it down on the floor, and step back and get a good perspective view of the small miracle. Down I plumped the baby in the sitting posture, and over the baby went backward, with such a thump of its poor little head on the floor as if a cannon ball had dropped. Father and mother and baby have been dead many and many a long year, but I can hear that thump and the maternal cry and the infant ululation, and see the rush of the parental pair, and recall the feeling which came over me, — more like the condition of Truth in Mr. Bryant’s often-quoted verse than anything else I can think of just now. But though “ crushed to earth ” I managed to “ rise again,” and to take with me a lesson which has made me gentle in the handling of all tender offspring of human parentage, whether found in cradles or portfolios.

I am not at this particular time beginning a serial story. What I may find in my portfolio by and by is another matter ; if there should be a certain thread of connection between the papers that come from it I do not know that it will render them less interesting. There are, however, a few personal and incidental matters I wish to say something of before getting deep into the real contents of the portfolio.

As I have reminded you, I have had other portfolios before this, — two more especially, and the first thing I wish to say relates to these.

Do not throw this number of the magazine down, or turn to another page, when I tell you that I opened my first portfolio more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession, for fifty years are just enough to make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, and not enough to give anything the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but fifty years ago, — there are too many talkative old people that know all about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware. A coin-fancier would say that your fifty - year - old facts have just enough of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them the delicate and durable patina which is time’s exquisite enamel.

When the first portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its legend, — or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could have had their way, — Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Cœsar. Aug. Div. Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with the precious metals at that period of my career, and there might have been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or knowing much about it.

What do you say to a few reminiscences of that far-off time ?

In those days the Athenæum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively innocent flirtations of our city’s primitive period, in that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.

How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in the mind’s gallery ! Trumbull’s Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it for one of our sunset after-glows ; and Neagle’s full-length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves ; and Copley’s long-waistcoated gentlemen and satinclad ladies, — they looked like gentlemen and ladies, too ; and Stuart’s florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and Allston’s lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women, not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable rocking-horse, — you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in those days ; and the Murillo, — not from Marshal Soult’s collection ; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athentæum a hundred dollars ; and Cole’s allegorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph’s coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West’s brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenæum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned fish-horns.

If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the Athenæum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary butterflies. The father was editor of the Boston Recorder, a very respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of the week as “ the Sahbuth.” The son was the editor of several different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.

Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published in bis father’s paper, I think, and signed “ Roy.” He had started the “American Magazine,” afterwards merged in the “ New York Mirror.” He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of verse. He had just written

He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in luxurious abundance ; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights ; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a remembrance of Count D’Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phædra, in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but the freshcheeked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded out of human sight. I took the flower which lies before me at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad, overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant’s Thanatopsis and the Death of the Flowers, Halleek’s Marco Bozzaris, Red-Jacket ,and Burns; on Drake’s American Flag, and Percival’s Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking, — and not getting very wide awake, either. These could be depended on. A few other copies of verses might he found, but Dwight’s “Columbia, Columbia” and Pierpont’s Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the sands in which they have been or still are legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled Truth, a Gift for Scribblers, which made some talk for a while, and is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may he read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The London Athenæum spoke of it as having been described as a “ tomahawk sort of satire.” As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an article on Bryant’s Poems for the North American Review and another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an incident of a fight with the Osages.

“ Standing by my father’s side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp, aud returned in triumph to my father. He said nothing, but looked pleased.”

This little red story describes very well Suellinig’s style of literary warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very much like Black Hawk’s way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised ; hardly any one else escaped.

If one wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of in the pages of Truth. I recognize only three names among the living of all who are mentioned in the little book; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Snelling’s exterminating onslaught. Time dealt as hardly with poor Snelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least, was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.

That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel engravings, on a level with the common fashionplates of advertising establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding, — to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years. The Scarlet Letter was an unhinted possibility. The Voices of the Night had not stirred the brooding silence ; the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.

What dreadful work Snelling made among those slight reputations, floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections ! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the small littérateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His attack on Willis very probably did him good ; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautious came with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer Snelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, “ who made long since a happy snatch at fame,” which must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify him ; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not wholly unremembered ; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable writer of light verse, — all these are commended to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.

It was a good time to open a new portfolio. But mine had boyhood written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old war-ship I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen literature, and in the Naval Monument, was threatened with demolition ; a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.

During a quarter of a century the first portfolio remained closed for the greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a member.

In the year 1857, towards its close, this magazine, which I had the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips & Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought there might be something in my old portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle, which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness, and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where the emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded ; not wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim! — how was the most fine gold changed ! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time for literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old portfolio had done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of supply was still in existence. I looked at the old portfolio, and said to myself, “ Too late ! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten, these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and leave them to the spider and the book-worm.”

In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When, a little while after the establishment of this magazine, the “ Saturday Club " gathered about the long table at “ Parker’s,” such a representation of all that was best in American literature had never been collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom foreigners cared to see — leaving out of consideration official dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of curiosity — were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist, and the magazine was an experiment. There had already been several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent, among which Putnam’s Magazine was conspicuous, owing its success largely to the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful writer, Mr. George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat prolonged and very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals go when they die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording angel whose name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live that its death was a surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly take its place and keep it when that, with all its attractions and excellencies, had died out, and left a blank in our periodical literature which it would be very hard to fill as well as that had filled it ?

This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon, and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell urged me with such earnestness to become a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I could not understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the magazine.

That was the way in which the Second Portfolio found its way to my table, and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was already at least

when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most dangerous of the carnivora, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion.

The Second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me, and I hope I may find something in it which will justify me in coming once more before my old friends in the pages where my name has been so long in stereotype.

If I can find a paper for every month my readers shall have it, and at any rate they may depend on having set before them whatever may be contained in the New Portfolio.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.