THE cBURIER.
m
i THE PASSING SHOW jj
My tnntnliztxl sjiirit
Hero blandly rpjtoses,
Forgetting, or novor
KpRrcttiiiR lti rotros,
It old ncilntions
Of in) rt Irs and roses.
For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A lioller cxlor
About it, of jmnsips
A rosemary odor
Commingled with pansies.
With rao and the beautiful
Puritan pansles.
Edgar Allan Poe.
The Shakespeare society of New York,
r which is really about the only useful
literary organization in this country, is
making rigorous efforts to redress an
old wrong and atone for a long neglect.
Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at
the Poe cottage on Kingsbridge road
near Fordhara, for the purpose of start
ing an organized movement to buy back
the cottage, restore it to its original
condition and preserve it as a memorial
of Poo. So it has come at last. After
helping build monuments to Shf-Uoy
Keats and Carlylo we havo at last re
membered this man, the greatest of our
poets and the mo;t unhappy. I am
glad that this movement is in the hands
of American factors, for it was among
them that Poe found his best friends
and warmest admirers. Some way he
always seemed to belong to the strolling
Thespians who were his mother's peo
ple. Among all the thousands of life's lit
tle ironies that make history so divert
ing, there is none more paradoxical than
that Edgar Poe should have been an
American. Look at his face. Had wo
ever another like it? He must have
been a strange figure in his youth,
among those genial, courtly Virginians,
this handsome, pale fellow, violent in
his enthusiasm, ardent in his worship,
but spiritually cold in his affections.
Now playing heavily for the mere ex
citement of play, now worshipping at
the shrine of a woman old enough to be
his mother, merely because her voice
was beautiful; now Bwlmming six miles
up the James river againet a heavy cur
rent in the glaring sun of a June mid
day. He must have seemed to them an
unreal figure, a sort of stage man who
was wandering about the streets with
his mask and buskins on, a theatrical
figure who had scaped by some strange
mischance into the prosaic daylight.
His speech and actions were uncon
sciously and sincerely dramatic, always
as though done for effect. He had that
nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature
common to stage children who seem to
have been dazzled by the footlights and
maddened by tho applause before they
are born. It was in his blood. With
.thejexceptToii of two women who loved
him. lived for him, died for him, he
went through life friendless, misunder
stood, with that dense, complete, hope
less misunderstanding which, as Amiel
said, is the secret of that sad smile upon
the lips of the great. Men tried to be
friend him, but in some way or other he
hurt and disappoint! d them. He tried
to mingle and share with other men, but
he was always shut from them by that
shadow, light as gossamer but unyield
ing as adamant, by which, from tho be
ginning of the world, nrt bus shielded
ana guarded and protected her own,
that God-concealing mist in which the
heroes of old were hidden, immersed in
lhat gloom and solitude which, if we
could but know it here, is but the
shadow of God's hand as it falls upon
his elect.
We lament our dearth of great prose.
With the exception of Henry Jamee and
Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of
pure prose. Wo lament our dearth of
poets. With the exception or Lowell,
Poo is our only great poet. Poe found
short story writing a bungling make
shift. Ho left it a perfect art. Ho
wrote the first perfect short stories in
the English language. Hofirst gave the
short story purpose, method, and artistic
form. In a careless reading one can not
realize the wonderful literary art, the
cunning devices, the masterly effects
that those entrancing tales conceal
jhey are simple and direct enough to
delight us when we are children, subtle
and artistic enough to bo our marvel
when wo are old. To this day they are
the wonder and admiration of the
French, who are the acknowledged
masters of craft and form. How in his
wandering, laborious life, bound to the
hack work of the press and crushed by
an ever-growing burden of want and
debt, did he ever come upon all this
deep and mystical lore, this knowledge
of all history, of all languages, of all art,
this penetration into the hidden things
of the East? As Steadman says, "Tho
6elf training of genius is always a mar
vel " The past is spread before us all
and most of us spend our lives in learn
ing those things which we do not need
to know, but genius reaches out in
stinctively and takes only the vital de
tail, by some sort of spiritual gravita
tion goes directly to the right thing.
Poe belonged to the modern French
school of decorative and discriminating
prose before it ever existed in France.
He rivalled Gautier, Flaubert and
de Maupassant before they were born
He clothed his tales in a barbaric splen
dor and persuasive unreality never be
fore heard of in English. No such pro"
fusion of co'or, oriental splendor of de
tail, grotesque combinations ami misti
cal effects bad ever before been wrought
into language. There are tales as gro
tesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the
stone griffens and gargoyles that are
cut up among the unvisited niches and
towers of Notre Dame, stories as poetic
and delicately beautiful as the golden
lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring.
He fitted his words together as the Baz
antine jewelers fitted priceless stones.
He found tho inner harmony and kin
ship of wort's. Where lived another
man who conld blend the beautiful and
the horrible, the gorgeous and the gro
tesque in such intricate and inexplica
ble fashion? Who could delight you
with his noun and disgust youwitlI his
verb, thrill you with his adjective and
chill you with his adverb, make ou run
the whole gamut of human emotions in
a single sentence? Sitting in that mis
erable cottage at Fordham he wrote of
the splendor of dream palaces beyond
the dreams of art. He hung those
grimy walls with dream tapestries, paved
those narrow halls wfth black marbled
and polished onyx, and into thos: low
roofed chambers he brought all the
Pall
Styleii
Celebrated. Hata
SIO'w on aie y
You want the best
The best is always the cheap-st
GOLDEN THISTLE and LITTLE HAT C HET FLOUR
are always the best
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treasured imagery of fancy, from the
"huge carvings of untutored Egypt" to
"mingled and conflicting perfumes, reek
ing up from strange convolute censors,
together with multitudious, flaring and
flickering tongues of purple and violet
fire."' Hungry and ragged he wrote of
Epicurean feasts and luxury that would
have beggared the purpled pomp of
pagan Rome and put Nero and his Gol
den House tothame.
And this mighty master of the organ
of language, who knew its every stop
and pipe, who could awaken at will the
thin silver to..es of its slenderest reeds
or the solemn cadence of its deepest
thunder, who could make it sing liko a
flute or roar like a cataract, he was
born into a country without a literature.
He was of that ornate s-hool which usu
ally comes last in a national literature,
and became first. American taste had
been vitiated by men like Griswold and
N. P. Willis until it was at the lowest
possible ebb. Wilis was considered a
genius, that is the worst that could pos
sibly be said. In the North a new race
of great philosophers was growing up,
but Poo had neither their frierdsbip
nor encouragement. He went indeed,
sometimes, to tho chilly salon of Mar
garet Fuller, but he was alwajs a dis
cord there. He was a mero artist and
he had no business with philosophy, he
had no theories as to the "higher life"'
and the "true happiness. ' He had only
his unshapen dreams that battled with
him in dark places, the unborn that
struggled in his brain for birth. What
time has an artist to learn tho multipli
cation table or to talk philosophy? He
was not afraid of them. Ho laughed at
Willis, and flung Longfellow's lie in his
teeth, the lie tho rest of the world was
twenty years in finding. He scorned
the obtrusive learning of the transcend
entalists and ho disliked their hard
talkative women. He left them and
went back to his dream women, his Bere
nice, his Ligeia, his Marchesa Aphro
dite, pale and cold as the mist maidens
of the North, sad as the Norns who weep
for human woe.
The tragedy of Poo's life was not alco
hol, but hunger. He died when ho waB
forty, when his work was just begin
ning. Thackeray had not touched his
great novels at forty, George Eliot
was almost unknown at that age. Hugo,
Goethe, Hawthorne, Lowell and Dumas
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