environment as if seeking a higher medium of expression. Emerson’s
command of poetic materials was extraordinary, though it fails to
justify the claims sometimes made for him. He could be wilfully
careless in respect to technique. There are moments when no cacophonous
combination terrifies him. Then will he say his say though the language
creak.
He had published freely in ‘The Dial,’ where he met his own little
audience, but when the question arose of putting his verses in
the pretentious form of a book Emerson hesitated. Only after much
deliberation, continued through four years, did he come finally to a
decision.
His capital theme is Nature, ‘the inscrutable and mute.’ ‘Woodnotes,’
‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘My Garden,’ ‘Sea-Shore,’ ‘Song of Nature,’
‘Nature,’ ‘The Snow Storm,’ ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ ‘Musketaquit,’ ‘The
Adirondacs,’ are varied renderings of the subject. Among the lines
which haunt the memory, take for example this description of the sea:--
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
* * * * *
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.
Splendid imagery and rich coloring mark the fine passages in ‘May-Day’
describing the advance of summer:--
As poured the flood of the ancient sea
Spilling over mountain chains,
Bending forests as bends the sedge,
Faster flowing o’er the plains,--
A world-wide wave with a foaming edge
That rims the running silver sheet,--
So pours the deluge of the heat
Broad northward o’er the land,
Painting artless paradises,
Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,
Fanning secret fires which glow
In columbine and clover-blow,
* * * * *
The million-handed sculptor moulds
Quaintest bud and blossom folds,
The million-handed painter pours
Opal hues and purple dye;
Azaleas flush the island floors,
And the tints of heaven reply.
Leaving to one side the mere external shows of the world, and calling
in science to aid imagination, the poet strikes out stanzas like these
from the ‘Song of Nature:’--
I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.
‘Hamatreya,’ the exquisite ‘Rhodora,’ and the musical allegory ‘Two
Rivers’ are important as showing the part played by Nature in Emerson’s
verse.
Certain poems repeat (or anticipate) the ideas of the essays. ‘Brahma,’
for example, is an incomparable setting of the doctrine of the
universal soul or ground of all things:--
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
‘The Sphinx’ announces, in a sphinx-like manner it must be
acknowledged, though with rare beauty in individual lines, the doctrine
of man’s relation to all existences, comprehending one phase of which
man has the key to the whole. ‘Uriel’ is a declaration of the poet’s
faith in good out of evil. ‘The Problem’ teaches the imminence of the
Infinite:--
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;--
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Rich in thought and abounding in genuine poetic gold are ‘The
World-Soul,’ ‘The Visit,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘Days’ (Emerson’s perfect poem),
‘Forerunners,’ ‘Xenophanes,’ ‘The Day’s Ration,’ and the ‘Ode to
Beauty.’
‘Merlin’ and ‘Saadi’ treat of the poet and his mission. The one is a
protest against the tinkling rhyme, an art without substance; the other
exalts the calling of the bard, but warns him that while he has need of
men and they of him, the true poet dwells alone. Together with these
suggestive verses should be read the posthumous fragment originally
intended for a masque.[23]
Of his occasional and patriotic poems the ‘Concord Hymn,’ sung at the
dedication of the battle monument in 1837, must be held an imperishable
part of our young literature. The winged words of the first stanza are
among the not-to-be-forgotten things, and there is rare beauty in the
second stanza:--
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
For the Concord celebration of 1857 Emerson wrote the ‘Ode’ beginning
O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
and for the ‘Jubilee Concert’ in Music Hall, on the day Emancipation
went into effect, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ with the bold stanzas:--
God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.
Think ye I made this ball
A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?
The best of Emerson’s patriotic poems is the ‘Voluntaries,’ containing
the often quoted and perfect lines:--
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
The youth replies, _I can_.
The personal poems are ‘Good-Bye,’ ‘Terminus,’ ‘In Memoriam,’ ‘Dirge,’
and ‘Threnody.’ The last of the group is the poet’s lament for his
first-born, the ‘hyacinthine boy’ of five years, who died in 1842. It
is hardly worth the while to compare these exquisite verses with some
other poem born of intense sorrow with a view to determining whether
they are greater, or less. Their wondrous beauty is as palpable as it
is unresembling.
Comparisons little befit Emerson the poet. His muse was wayward.
Extreme eulogists do him injury by applying to him standards that were
none of his. They forget how he said of himself that he was ‘not a
poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as a writer,
etc., in this empty America before the arrival of poets.’ For the
extravagancies of the extremists the tempered admirers find themselves
regularly lectured, as if they were children who must have it explained
to them that Emerson was not a Keats or a Shelley, or a Hugo.
Emerson as frequently gets less than he deserves as more. What
niggardly praise is that from the pen of an eminent living English
man of letters who can only suppose that Emerson ‘knew what he was
about when he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in such
moments _he found nothing better to his hand_!’ But the ‘Threnody,’
‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘Voluntaries,’ and ‘The Problem,’ whatever
else may be true of them, are not the work of a man who found nothing
better to his hand.
VII
LATEST BOOKS
Five volumes remain to be commented on. The first, _Society and
Solitude_ (so called after the initial paper), is a group of twelve
essays entitled ‘Civilization,’ ‘Art,’ ‘Eloquence,’ ‘Domestic Life,’
‘Farming,’ ‘Works and Days,’ ‘Books,’ ‘Clubs,’ ‘Courage,’ ‘Success,’
and ‘Old Age.’ They have mostly a practical bent. That on ‘Books’
doubtless gives an account of Emerson’s own reading, adequate as
far as it expresses his literary preferences, inadequate respecting
completeness. For example, Emerson must have read George Borrow, of
an acquaintance with whom he repeatedly gives proof, but these lists
contain no mention of _Lavengro_ or _Romany Rye_. Here too will be
found his famous heresy about the value of translations, but not so
radically stated by Emerson as it is sometimes stated by those who
propose to attack Emerson’s position.
_Letters and Social Aims_ (a volume forced from him by the rumor
that an English house proposed to reprint his early papers from ‘The
Dial’) covers topics as diverse as, on the one hand, ‘Social Aims,’
‘Quotation and Originality,’ ‘The Comic,’ and on the other, ‘Poetry and
Imagination,’ ‘Inspiration,’ ‘Greatness,’ ‘Immortality.’ There are also
essays on ‘Eloquence,’ ‘Resources,’ ‘Progress of Culture,’ and ‘Persian
Poetry.’
_Lectures and Biographical Sketches_ consists of nineteen pieces,
among which will be found ‘Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New
England,’ ‘The Superlative,’ and the brilliant sketches of Thoreau, of
Ezra Ripley, and of Carlyle.
_Miscellanies_ (not to be confounded with the volume of 1849 bearing
the same title) contains a number of papers and addresses on political
topics, and is indispensable to the student of Emerson’s life. Here
will be found his speeches on John Brown, on the Fugitive Slave Law, on
Emancipation in the West Indies, on American Civilization, on Lincoln,
and that inspiring lecture, ‘The Fortune of the Republic.’
_Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers_ is made up of lectures
from the Harvard University course (1870–71) and earlier courses, and a
sheaf of papers from ‘The Dial,’ mostly on ‘Modern Literature.’ He who
deplores the curtness of the note on Tennyson in _English Traits_ will
be glad to seek comfort in this earlier tribute. Yet the comfort may
prove to be less than he would like.
* * * * *
Emerson’s audience is large and varied. Let us consider a few among the
varieties of those who are attracted by his genius and the charm of
his personality.
To certain hardy investigators Emerson is not a mere man of letters
whose thought, radiantly clothed, takes the philosophical form, he is
a philosopher almost in the strict sense. They find a place for him in
their classification. They know exactly what ideas, derived from what
pundits, have come out with what new inflection in his writings. They
have done for Emerson more than he could do, or perhaps cared to do,
for himself; they have given him a system.
All this is important and valuable. No little praise is due to results
worked out with so much courage and critical acumen. Whether the
conclusions are quite true is another question.
Doubtless, too, there are readers who, taking their cue from the class
just mentioned, find their self-love flattered as they turn the pages
of the _Essays_ and the _Conduct of Life_. Not only, in spite of
dark sayings here and there, does ‘philosophy’ prove easier and more
delightful than they were wont to think, but their estimate of their
own mental powers is immensely enlarged.
There are the critics of letters whose function is interpretative, and
whose influence is restraining. Solicitous to do their author justice,
they are above all solicitous that injustice shall not be done him
by overpraise. They bring proof that Emerson was not a precursor of
Darwin, that he was inferior to Carlyle, that he was not a poet, that
he was never a great and not always a good writer, that he was apt
to impose on his reader as a new truth an old error in ‘a novel and
fascinating dress,’ that he was even capable of writing words without
ideas.
But the motives which draw and bind to him the great majority of
Emerson’s readers are connected with literature rather than philosophy
or criticism. A prerogative of the man of letters is to be read both
for what he says and for the way he says it. In the case of Emerson his
thought may not be divided from the verbal setting. ‘He can never get
beyond the English language.’ ‘No merely French, or German, or Italian
reader will have the least notion of the magic of his diction.’[24]
Perhaps in the long run they get the most out of Emerson who read
him not for stimulus, for his militant optimism, for the shock his
fine-phrased audacities give their humdrum opinions, for his uplifting
idealism (all of which they are sure to get and profit by), but who
read him for literary pleasure, for downright good-fellowship, and
for the humor that is in him. That he attracts a large audience of
this (seemingly) unimportant class is enough to show how little danger
there is that Emerson will be handed over to the keeping of the merely
erudite and bookish part of the public.
It is well to remember that he had no intention of being so disposed
of. When he said, ‘My own habitual view is to the well being of
students or scholars,’ he was careful immediately to explain that he
used the word ‘student’ in no restricted sense. ‘The class of scholars
or students ... is a class that comprises in some sort all mankind,
comprises every man in the best hours of his life.’ He pictures the
newsboy entering a train filled with men going to business. The morning
papers are bought, and ‘instantly the entire rectangular assembly,
fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second
breakfast.’ This was Emerson’s student body, this was the audience he
aimed to reach.
Did he reach this body? It is believed that he did, if not always
directly, then vicariously. He was compelled as a matter of course to
speak in his own way--the impossible thing for him was to do violence
to his genius. Emerson invented the phrase, ‘the man in the street.’
Now it is notorious that the man in the street cares little about
the ‘over-soul.’ The mere juxtaposition of the two expressions is
comic. But Emerson did not talk of the over-soul all the time. He
had a Franklin-like common-sense and a pithiness of speech which are
captivating. Perhaps in magnifying his idealism we have neglected to do
justice to his mundane philosophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Ellen (Tucker) Emerson was but twenty years of age at the
time of her death. Emerson first saw her in December, 1827.
They were married about two years later.
[20] Cabot: _Emerson_, i, 244.
[21] G. W. Cooke: _An Historical and Biographical Introduction to
accompany_ THE DIAL _as reprinted in numbers for The Rowfant
Club_ [Cleveland], 1902.
[22] Emerson to Carlyle, Oct. 30, 1840.
[23] ‘The Poet,’ printed in the appendix of the definitive edition
of Emerson’s _Poems_.
[24] Richard Garnett.
VII
_Edgar Allan Poe_
REFERENCES:
=R. W. Griswold=: ‘Memoir of the Author’ prefixed to the _Works
of Edgar A. Poe_, vol. iii, 1850.
=E. C. Stedman=: _Edgar Allan Poe_, 1881.
=J. H. Ingram=: _Edgar Allan Poe, his Life, Letters, and
Opinions_, 1880.
=G. E. Woodberry=: _Edgar Allan Poe_, ‘American Men of Letters,’
fourth edition, 1888.
=J. A. Harrison=: _Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe_ [1902–03].
=Emile Lauvrière=: _Edgar Poe, sa Vie et son Œuvre, étude de
psychologie pathologique_, 1904.
I
HIS LIFE
Poe was of Irish extraction. His great-grandfather, John Poe, came
to America about 1745 and settled near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. John
Poe’s son David (known in the annals of Baltimore as ‘old General
Poe’) rendered notable services to his country during the Revolution.
Lafayette remembered him well and during a visit to Baltimore in 1824
asked to be taken to the place where Poe was buried. ‘Ici repose un
cœur noble,’ said Lafayette as he knelt and kissed the old patriot’s
grave.
Of General Poe’s six children, the eldest, David, was to have been bred
to the law, but his tastes led him first to the amateur and then to the
professional stage. He married a young English actress, Mrs. Elizabeth
(Arnold) Hopkins. They had three children, William, Edgar, and
Rosalie. Edgar (afterwards known as Edgar Allan) was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809.
The young family suffered the petty miseries incident to the life of
strolling players, and became at one time very poor. The circumstances
of David Poe’s death and the place of his burial are unknown. When Mrs.
Poe died at Richmond, Virginia, in December, 1811, Edgar was taken by
Mrs. John Allan, the wife of a highly respected merchant of that city,
and was brought up as a child of the house.
The Allans were in England from 1815 to 1820. During this time Poe was
placed at Manor House School, Stoke Newington. He afterwards attended
the English and Classical School in Richmond and on February 14, 1826,
matriculated at the University of Virginia. His connection with the
University ceased in December of the same year. He left behind him a
reputation for marked abilities, but he is said to have lost caste by
his recklessness in card playing. Allan positively refused to pay the
youth’s gambling debts, which amounted to twenty-five hundred dollars.
Placed in Allan’s counting-house, Poe was unhappy and rebellious, and
finally disappeared. He declared in after years that he went abroad to
offer his services to the Greeks. What he really did was to enlist in
the United States army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. During the
summer of 1827 he was with Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort
Independence, Boston. In August of that year he published _Tamerlane
and Other Poems, by a Bostonian_. The edition was small and the
pamphlet has become one of the rarest of bibliographical curiosities.
Battery H was sent to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, in October, 1827,
and a year later to Fortress Monroe, Virginia. At some time during this
period Poe must have made his whereabouts known to the Allans. Mrs.
Allan, who was tenderly attached to Poe, may have succeeded in bringing
about an understanding between the youth and his foster father. When
she died (in February, 1829) Poe lost his best friend.
Allan, however, did what he could to forward the young man’s newest
ambition, which was to enter the Military Academy at West Point. He
paid for a substitute in the army and wrote letters to men who were
influential in such matters, with the result that Poe was enrolled at
the Academy on July 1, 1830. He gave his age as nineteen years and five
months. His prematurely old look led to the invention of the story that
the appointment was really procured for Poe’s son, but the son having
died the father had taken his place.
While the question of the appointment was pending, Poe spent some
time in Baltimore and there published his second volume of verse, _Al
Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems_ (1829).
The accounts of his life at the Academy are not so divergent as
to be contradictory. One classmate noted the youth’s censorious
manner: ‘I never heard him speak in terms of praise of any English
writer, living or dead.’ Excelling in French and mathematics, Poe by
intentional neglect of military duty brought about his own dismissal.
He was court-martialled and left West Point on March 7, 1831. He had
previously taken subscriptions among his friends for a new book of
verse. It was published in New York (1831) under the title of _Poems_,
‘second edition,’ and was dedicated to ‘the U. S. Corps of Cadets,’ who
are said to have been disappointed at finding in its pages none of the
local squibs with which the author had been wont to amuse them.
Poe is next heard of in Baltimore, where he seems to have made his
home with his father’s sister, Mrs. Maria Clemm, a widow with one
child, Virginia. In 1833 ‘The Saturday Visiter’ of Baltimore offered
two prizes--one hundred dollars for a story, fifty for a poem. Poe
submitted a manuscript volume entitled ‘Tales of the Folio Club,’ and
was given one award for his famous ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Had not
the conditions of the contest precluded giving both prizes to the
same person, he would have received the other award for his poem ‘The
Coliseum.’
Through John P. Kennedy, one of the judges in the contest, Poe came
into relations with T. W. White, the proprietor of ‘The Southern
Literary Messenger,’ published at Richmond. His contributions were
heartily welcomed. White then invited Poe to become his editorial
associate. The offer was accepted and Poe went to Richmond. Mrs.
Clemm and Virginia followed, and in May, 1836, Poe was married to his
cousin. A private marriage is said to have taken place at Baltimore the
preceding September.
The arrangement entered into by White and Poe was most propitious.
The proprietor of the ‘Messenger’ had obtained the services of a
young man with a positive genius for the work in hand,--a young man
who was able to contribute such tales as ‘Berenice,’ ‘Morella,’ ‘Hans
Pfaall,’ ‘Metzengerstein,’ besides poems, miscellanies, and caustic
book-criticisms. On the other hand, Poe had, if a small, at least a
regular income. He could not buy luxury with a salary of five hundred
and twenty dollars, but it was a beginning, and an increase was
promised. Moreover, he was in the hands of a man who regarded him
with affection no less than admiration. Unfortunately the arrangement
was not to last. Poe had become the victim of a hereditary vice.[25]
Whether he drank much or little is of less consequence than the fact
that after a period of indulgence he was wholly unfitted for work.
Once when Poe was temporarily in Baltimore, White wrote him that if
he returned to the office it must be with the understanding that all
engagements were at an end the moment he ‘got drunk.’ Kennedy explained
Poe’s leaving the ‘Messenger’ thus: He was ‘irregular, eccentric, and
querulous, and soon gave up his place.’
From Richmond, Poe went to New York, attracted by some promise in
connection with a magazine. He lived in Carmine Street, and Mrs. Clemm
contributed to the family support by taking boarders. In July, 1838,
was published _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_. A month later Poe
removed to Philadelphia.
He contributed to annuals and magazines and had a hand in a piece of
hack-work, _The Conchologist’s First Book_ (1839). This same year he
became assistant editor of ‘Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American
Monthly,’ a periodical owned by the actor, William E. Burton, and held
his position until June, 1840. The irregularity and querulousness
which Kennedy had remarked led to misunderstandings. How the two men
differed in policy becomes plain from a letter to Poe in which Burton
says: ‘You must, my dear sir, get rid of your avowed ill feelings
towards your brother authors.’ There was a quarrel, and Poe, who
had some command of the rhetoric of abuse, described Burton as ‘a
blackguard and a villain.’
The year 1840 was notable in the history of American letters, for then
appeared the first collected edition of Poe’s prose writings, _Tales of
the Grotesque and Arabesque_. The edition, of seven hundred and fifty
copies, was in two volumes and contained twenty-five stories, among
them ‘Morella,’ ‘William Wilson,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’
‘Ligeia,’ ‘Berenice,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’.
Poe, a born ‘magazinist,’ cherished the ambition of editing a
periodical of his own in which, as he phrased it, he could ‘kick
up a dust.’ He secured a partner and actually announced that ‘The
Penn Magazine’ would begin publication on January 1, 1841. Compelled
to postpone his project, he undertook the editorship of ‘Graham’s
Magazine,’ a new monthly formed by uniting the ‘Gentleman’s,’ which
Graham had bought, and ‘The Casket.’ From February, 1841, to June,
1842, Poe contributed to every number of the new magazine, printing,
among other things, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of
Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ Griswold succeeded
him in the editorial chair. Poe gave as a reason for resigning his
place ‘disgust with the namby-pamby character of the magazine.’ In the
hope of bettering his fortune, he sought a place in the Philadelphia
Custom House, but was unsuccessful.