Col. Aldrich’s “Last Cæsar” (1).

Professor W. Thackeray Wilkerson, the well-known littérateur and dentist of the West Side, calls our attention to a poem that is printed in the current number of “The Atlantic Monthly.” For the information of our public we will say that “The Atlantic Monthly” is a magazine published in Boston, being to that intelligent and refined community what “The Literary Life” was to Chicago culture before a fourth-ward constable achieved its downfall with a writ of replevin. “The Atlantic Monthly” is to the élite of the East what “The Century” is to the hoi polloi or the kayneel or the protalyrats. The poem in question is entitled “The Last Cæsar;” and it is from the pen of Col. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the editor of “The Atlantic.” Professor Wilkerson tells us that Col. Aldrich belongs to the same literary clique as Col. J. Russell Lowell, emeritus professor in the Chicago school of Shakespearian politics, and Dr. O. Wendell Holmes, author of numerous T. B. Peterson novels, and composer of the famous Greek poem entitled “The Iliad.” So it is to be taken for granted that Col. Aldrich is a very cultured and very affable gentleman; although, so far as we can learn, he has never done any thing for Chicago.

“I am very much surprised,” says Professor 159Wilkerson, “that none of the critics has pounced upon this Aldrich poem; for it is as bold a piece of error as I ever met with in the whole course of my existence. The poet claims to treat of one of the Cæsars: yet it is clear that the subject of his verses is Louis Napoleon, the late ex-emperor of the French; in fact, right under the title of his poem, Aldrich has put the figures 1851-1870, with the intention of giving people to understand thereby that the period of time between these dates is the era, or epoch,—or whatever you please,—of which he sings.”

This certainly would appear to be as clear as logic.

“Now,” continues Professor Wilkerson, “there is none so lost in the Egyptian darkness of ignorance as to be unaware of the fact that the last of the Cæsars died very many centuries before 1851. This is a historical matter that is determined in text-books used in our public schools; and if anybody has any doubts on the subject, let him refer to the ‘Lives of the Twelve Cæsars,’ a series of biographies second only in thrilling reliability and positive interest to A. T. Andreas & Co.’s ‘Lives of Prominent Chicagoans’ (half-calf, $14 net).”

The professor then told us that the author of this biography (not the half-calf one) was a Latin gentleman, whose name was Sweetonius. This Sweetonius seems to have been an Elijah M. 160Haines sort of fellow: he lived not for the Is, nor for the To Be, but for the Was. He had a morbid passion for prowling around in rusty old ruins, and for delving into old bureau-drawers, after family manuscripts and private letters: another of his penchants, too, was for sitting around in corners, and listening to scandals and legends about the ancients; and, upon his return to his lodgings, he would make memoranda of the same for elaboration at some future date. On the whole, he appears to have been a kind of premature Poggio, rather than a Haines; for, while our Haines is content with the proper historical literature of the meek and lowly Indian, this man Sweetonius had an appetite for nothing short of the most flagrant scandals of royalty. In after-years this lamentable penchant broke out in Kenelm Digby, old Pepys, G. Y. M. Reynolds, and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

“In his poem,” says Professor Wilkerson, “the misguided editor of ‘The Atlantic’ shows a better acquaintance with Paris than with Roman history. He speaks of the Eleezy (sometimes called the Shongzy Leezy), the day zonvyleeds, the Sane, the Tweelyrees, and the Plas de la Concord. Surprisingly enough, he says nothing about the basteel, nor the boorse, nor the zhardan maybeel, nor the Pier la Shays, nor the loover—and, what is still more preposterous, he has the effrontery to write about an alleged Cæsar without 161even alluding to the Latin quarter! Now, flippancy is something that people will not tolerate in poetry: the people of Chicago, at least, will not read with any patience a narrative that takes a Roman monarch all the way to Paris for no other purpose, we will say, than that of satisfying the whim of an erratic Boston poet. What if our own poet, Irving J. Higgins, had tried to play a trick of this kind when he composed the great lyric which he read at the unveiling of the corner-stone of the Fairbanks Lard Refinery? What if, instead of speaking of Apollo as the ‘smiling god of Belvidere, Ill.,’ he had located him in Indiana, or some other heathen community? What if he had assigned Mercury to one of the suburban packing-houses instead of to Dale’s drug-store? Would the Chicago public have stood it?”

“But is there not a certain amount of freedom which is allowed to every poet?”

“There exists in the minds of the vulgar,” said Professor Wilkerson, “a base idea that a poet has license to prance around about as he pleases; but true culture accords the poet no such license. There was a time when poets could commit every sort of—of anarchism—I mean anacreonism—and yet be regarded as poets. That time has passed: its end came when Chicago’s output of pork swept the last prop from under the old Elizabethan school at Cincinnati. Under the new dispensation, 162poets are compelled to observe certain rigid rules; and nowadays none can drive his Pegasus without a snaffle.”

“His Pegasus?”

“That is metaphor. Pegasus is a mythological horse which every poet mounts when he engages in composition. Riding this horse Pegasus is called ‘soaring to empyrean realms,’ or ‘achieving Parnassan heights.’ Parnassus was a mountain in Thessaly near the Attic salt-mines: it has been immortalized by N. P. Willis in his poem of ‘Parnassus and the Captive.’ The trouble with Col. Aldrich’s poem is, that Col. Aldrich mounted his Pegasus in Italy in the second century, and immediately let it gallop away with him over into France and the nineteenth century. Boston critics may wink at this sort of thing, but we of the West are too precise to abide it. We discussed this matter at the monthly meeting of the West-Side Dante Club last Thursday night, and we adopted a resolution expressing a lack of confidence in Col. Aldrich and Boston. The only man who voted against the resolution was a young poet named Algernon Remorse; and he opposed the resolution, because, as he said, he had just sent ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ a poem on ‘The Last Faro; or, The Result of a Spring Election in Chicago.’ Algernon explained that he hoped to have his poem accepted, as he needed the money to buy a railroad ticket to Omaha.”

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