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| Southern Literary Messenger Volume 18 - August 1852 |
This handy little contraction 'twere (= it were) simply illustrates, in one word, the poetical flavor and aims of Scenes Beyond the Western Border. "C." is the Captain of U. S. Dragoons; "F." is Frank, his imaginary friend:
F. " At last you have struck a chord that answers as to the touch of truth! And as for love, I know none better than that of the she-bear for her cub; and that lasts, and is returned, just so long as circumstance and interest bind."
C. "O! my friend! Is there not then a pure soul-love, a deathless friendship, "passing the love of women," which all life's trials and the world's baseness cannot soil or sap? If that be truth, 'twere better never to look into her Medusa face! (Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852)Parallels in known writings by Herman Melville:
—Doth not the world know me for thy wife?—She shall not come! 'Twere a foul blot on thee and me. --Melville's Pierre, 1852
"Oh fettered sons of fettered mothers, conceived and born in manacles," cried Yoomy; "dragging them through life; and falling with them, clanking in the grave:—oh, beings as ourselves, how my stiff arm shivers to avenge you! 'Twere absolution for the matricide, to strike one rivet from your chains. My heart outswells its home!" --Mardi, They Visit the Extreme South of VivenzaMelville's Mardi also exhibits the rhetorical construction "If that be . . ." which, as in the example above from Scenes Beyond the Western Border, occurs in the context of a philosophical dialogue:
"Well, Oro is every where. What now?"
"Then, if that be absolutely so, Oro is not merely a universal on-looker, but occupies and fills all space; and no vacancy is left for any being, or any thing but Oro. Hence, Oro is in all things, and himself is all things—the time-old creed. --Mardi, Babbalanja Discourses in the DarkThe contraction 'twere was deleted in revision of the dialogue for the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army. The change eliminates repetition in the original wording: in the revised version, the subjunctive were in "'twere" replaces be, the present tense subjunctive form that appeared in the original introductory clause "If that be [valid]. . . ."
"If that were truth, better never to look into her Medusa face; better to cherish illusion: blind credulity would be heroism! ay,—and policy,—like that of the great Cortez, who burnt the proofs of a conspiracy, rather than foster damning doubt."For earlier posts at Dragooned on this earnest and intensely suggestive prairie dialogue from the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, check out
Here's a coincidence that probably won't be repeated- I happened to read the following in Scenes & Adventures yesterday: "There is virtue in fair wide margins, and pictoral embellishment." (p. 160 on my Nook) and just the other day I read this on the Laudator Temporis Acti blog: "Some people buy books for the contents, and that is a very vulgar reason; and some people buy books for the binding, and that is a little better and not so vulgar; and others buy books for the printing, and that is really a very good reason; but the real reason for which to buy a book is the margin! Always look at the margin." -Herbert Warren, quoted in William Walrond Jackson, Ingram Bywater: The Memoir of an Oxford Scholar, 1840-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 161.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I will try this out and report back.
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