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Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 Poe’s real début in letters was in 1833, when (ætat 24) he won a
prize of a hundred dollars offered by the proprietor of The Saturday
Visitor, Baltimore, for the best story. Better than the money, the
contest brought him the friendship of the judges, and about a year
later the editorship of The Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond,
at ten dollars a week. The intervening year is one of the blanks.
The Richmond editorship marks a turning point in Poe’s career. He
made the fortune of the Messenger; married (’35) his cousin,
Virginia Clem; and first began that line of work which is, in my
opinion, its distinctive feature, as it certainly proved to be decisive of
his destiny—to-wit: criticism. He published in some issues as much
as thirty or forty pages of book reviews. They created a tempest; for,
rare as is his imagery and wonderful as is his imagination, Poe’s
distinguishing mental characteristic is analysis. He is more logician
than poet, more metaphysician than romancer.
Poe subsequently (’37-’38) edited the Gentlemen’s Magazine, and
then Graham’s Magazine, both in Philadelphia, and in ’44 we find him
in New York, employed on the Mirror, the journal of the poets N. P.
Willis and George P. Morris. In Philadelphia he did the best work of
his life in romance and criticism. Here, too, he made the
acquaintance of his evil genius, Dr. Griswold. Poe believed that
Griswold supplanted him from the editorship of Graham’s; G.’s
subsequent enmity, while professing friendship, was of the
unforgiving nature that often comes of the consciousness of having
inflicted a secret wrong on another. The only other causes of
disagreement between them alleged are that Poe criticised
Griswold’s book in a lecture, and that Griswold attempted to buy a
favorable criticism from Poe’s pen. But they were outwardly friendly,
after a reconciliation, till Poe’s voice and pen were beyond the power
of response. The work of detraction had preceded Poe to New York,
for Mr. Willis writes of this engagement:
“With the highest admiration for his genius, and a
willingness to let it alone for more than ordinary
irregularity, we were led by common report to expect a
 very capricious attention to his duties, and occasionally a
scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however,
and he was invariably punctual and industrious. To our
occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a
criticism, or that he would erase a passage colored too
highly with his resentments against society and mankind,
he readily and courteously assented—far more yielding
than most men, we thought, on points so excusably
sensitive. Through all this considerable period we had
seen but one presentment of the man—a quiet, patient,
industrious, and most gentlemanly person, commanding
the utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying
deportment and ability.”
In 1845 appeared the work on which Poe’s poetic fame most
depends, that poem in which he wedded Despair to Harmony, “The
Raven.” It marks the acme of his life, also; his star declined rapidly
thereafter. His wife, who bore the hereditary taint of consumption,
was in a decline; care and anxiety on that account, and his own ill
health, took away his ability to write and he was without means of
support. He was driven to ask loans from one or two friends, and by
a fatality such as he sometimes made to drive his fictitious
characters upon their worst expedients, he chose Dr. Griswold as
one of them. “Can you not send me five dollars?” he pleaded with
G.; “I am ill and Virginia is almost gone.” This and one or two other
such letters Griswold published, in connection with his slanders on
Poe’s character, to give his attack the cover of friendly sincerity.
Something was published in New York papers regarding the distress
of the Poes, and a lady friend (Mrs. Shew) visited them at Fordham.
The worst was confirmed.
“There was no clothing on the bed—which was only
straw—but a snow-white spread and sheets. The weather
was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that
accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on
the straw bed, wrapped in her husband’s great coat, with
 a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat
seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and
the cat were the sufferer’s only means of warmth, except
as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet.”
Mrs. Poe died January 30, 1847. Captain Mayne Reid, the novelist,
who visited often at her house, thus describes her:
“No one who remembers that dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter of
the South; her face so exquisitely lovely; her gentle, graceful
demeanor; no one who has ever spent an hour in her society but will
endorse what I have said of this lady, who was the most delicate
realization of the poet’s ideal.”
Another said: “She had large, black eyes, and a pearly whiteness
of complexion which was a perfect pallor. Her pale face, her brilliant
eyes, and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look. One felt that
she was almost a disrobed spirit.”
After this Poe’s decline was rapid. He was ill for a long time, and
never quite recovered his mental balance. In the autumn of this year
he visited Mrs. Shew, his benefactress. She says that at this time,
under the combined influence of her gentle urgency, a cup of tea
and the sound of neighboring church bells, he wrote the first draft of
“The Bells.” She adds:
“My brother took Poe to his own room, where he slept
twelve hours and could hardly recall the evening’s work.
This showed his mind was injured—nearly gone out for
want of food and from disappointment. He had not been
drinking and had only been a few hours from home.
Evidently his vitality was low, and he was nearly insane. I
called in Dr. Francis (the old man was odd but very skilful),
who was one of our neighbors. His words were, ‘He has
heart disease and will die early in life.’ We did not waken
him, but let him sleep.”
 Since I began writing this paper I have heard recited in a
company of literary people an account of Poe’s staggering into a
stranger’s house at midnight, calling for a pen and dashing off “The
Bells;” then falling into a drunken stupor on the library table. It was
evidently believed by the narrator, despite Mrs. Shew’s circumstantial
and more rational account.
During these dark days, as indeed during all Poe’s adult life, Mrs.
Clem was his guardian angel. The poet Willis touchingly draws this
picture of devotion:
“It was a hard fate that she was watching over. Mr. Poe
wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much
above the popular level to be well paid. He was always in
pecuniary difficulty and, with his sick wife, frequently in
want of the merest necessaries of life. Winter after winter,
for years, the most touching sight to us in this whole city
has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and
insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a poem
or an article on some literary subject to sell—sometimes
simply pleading in a broken voice that ‘he was ill,’
whatever might be the reason for his writing nothing—and
never, amid all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering
one syllable to escape her lips that would convey a doubt
of him, or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his
genius and good intentions. Her daughter died a year and
a half since, but she did not desert him. She continued his
ministering angel, living with him, caring for him, guarding
him against exposure, and when he was carried away by
temptation, amid grief and the loneliness of feeling
unreplied to, and awoke from his self-abandonment
prostrated in destitution and suffering, begging for him
still. If woman’s devotion, born with a first love and fed
with human passion, hallows its object, as it is allowed to
do, what does not a devotion like this—pure, disinterested
 and holy as the watch of an invisible spirit—say for him
who inspired it.”
By this test, Poe’s was always a pure nature, for he inspired
respect, pity and regard in every woman he came in contact with. It
was a reflex sentiment, for Poe revered woman, and there is not in
all his writings an impure suggestion or an indelicate word.
The rest of the history is one of occasional indulgence in
intoxicants and rarely intermitting mental aberration. It is to him
during these last months of his unhappy career that the least charity
has been extended. He conducted a courtship of three ladies at
once, making to each like frantic protestations of love, the same
despairing appeals to each to become his savior from some dreadful
impending fate. In June, ’49, he departed for Richmond, for what
purpose is unknown. In Philadelphia he appeared the subject of a
hallucination that he was pursued by conspirators, and had his
mustache taken off for the sake of disguise. In Richmond he
remained until the latter part of September, writing some and
renewing old acquaintances. During these three or four months he
was twice known to be overcome and in danger of his life from
drink; he was credited with having been almost continuously “in a
state of beastly intoxication” during the whole time. Mrs. Weiss
thinks that this was one of the brightest and happiest seasons of his
life; if so, it was light at its eventide. The return voyage is shrouded
—that is the fit word—shrouded in mystery and controversy.
This seems to be true—that he was taken up unconscious in
Baltimore at daybreak, taken to a hospital, and died there at
midnight of the same day (October 7, 1849). It is also known that he
left Richmond by boat on the evening of the 4th, he then being
sober and cheerful. In proper course he must have arrived in
Baltimore the night of the 5th or morning of the 6th; he was himself
then, for he removed his trunk to a hotel. There was thus left less
than twenty-four hours in which for him to travel to Havre de Grace
and back, miss the New York connection, vote eleven times in the
Baltimore city election, go through the “prolonged debauch,” fall into
the delirium, and lapse into the comatose state in which he was
found—as described in most of his biographies; and he immediately
thereafter is found to have no smell of liquor about him, no tremor,
and is conversing rationally when roused to consciousness.
The event was announced by Griswold in the Tribune with this
brutal bluntness:
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This announcement will startle many,
but few will be grieved by it. He had few or no friends.” But the
Southern Literary Messenger said: “Now that he is gone, the vast
multitude of blockheads may breathe again.” Griswold simply elected
himself mouthpiece of that host.
On Poe’s supersensitive organization stimulants told with fearful
effect. Mrs. Clem said “A single cup of coffee would intoxicate him.”
N. P. Willis explained the vagaries and sins of Poe by supposing him
to be possessed of two antagonistic spirits, a devil and an angel,
each having complete mastery of him by turns. But, says Willis,
“With a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the
demon became uppermost and, though none of the usual signs of
intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. He easily
seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and
was accused accordingly of insulting arrogance and bad
heartedness. It was a sad infirmity of physical constitution which
puts it upon very nearly the ground of temporary and almost
irresponsible insanity.”
That these lapses were infrequent, instead of almost continuous,
we have plenty of testimony from those who were much with him as
business associates and inmates of the same house. “I have never
seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred and particularly
refined,” is a certificate of one who was intimate in the family, which
was confirmed by many witnesses of different periods and places.
The poet Swinburne was probably right in declaring that Poe’s
inebriety was “the effect of a terrible evil, rather than its cause.”
That evil lay not alone, perhaps not chiefly, in his inherited and
educated predisposition to indulgence and his morbidness of
mentality; but in the character and consequences of his chiefest
literary work.
It is a hard enough lot, under the best circumstances and in the
best times, to live by the pen. The characteristics as well of Poe’s
genius as of his times made that lot a doom for him. The rewards of
authorship were on an eleemosynary scale (Poe received only $10
for “The Raven,” and $10 a week as editor-in-chief of a magazine:
the North American Review then paid only $2 a page for matter);
literary taste was unformed and, worst of all, the market was
drugged and cheapened and the best public appreciation perverted
by a silly school of writer who had arisen—similar to the “Della
Crusca School” which a few years before had infested literature in
England. Their lucubrations were both barren of ideas and bad in
style. It was the lollipop stage of our literature. Now Poe possessed
in high degree two parts which, when addressed to criticism, would
most offend these callow writers, to-wit: The musical sense of
language, and marvelous analytical powers. The most obvious
quality of his poetic style is its rhythm. The musical ear led him to
adopt refrains and euphonious syllables, like “Never more,” “Lenore,”
“bells,” and to dwell on their cadence; it made a bad composition
distract him as a discord does a sensitive musician. For him divine
harmonies lay in the relation of words to each other, as if they had
been notes.
Coupled with this, to him, uncomfortable sensitiveness to verbal
sounds, was his almost superhuman power of dissecting thought—
extremely uncomfortable to others, even to the best of writers. Thus
gifted with a mental touch equally for the substance of language and
the substance of thought which language struggles to give birth to;
possessed of the power of an eager and a nipping sarcasm and an
infernal courage, fortified with extensive reading and a retentive
memory, Poe became a scourge to mediocrity, imitation, sham and
pretense. There could not have been a more critical time for such a
man to attempt a livelihood at letters; there could not have been a
man better fitted to work havoc among the essayists and poetasters
of the day, to compel literary reform and to bring misfortunes on
himself. “He elected himself chief justice of the court of criticism and
head hangman of dunces,” says Stoddard. “He hated a bad book as
a misdemeanor.” Burton, proprietor of the Gentleman’s Magazine,
remonstrated with Poe against the severity of some of his book
reviews. “You say,” said he to Poe, “that the people love havoc; I
think they love justice.” One adds, “Poe thought literary justice
meant havoc with such mediocrity as then flourished.” To the cause
of pure literature he thus devoted his life with example, with precept
and with destructive force. He was the Wendell Phillips of American
literature. He did a work that was necessary to be done in behalf of
American literature. He pulled down upon his own head and theirs,
the sham temple which the little scribbling Philistines had erected.
So it is not to be wondered at that “he contrived to attach to
himself animosities of the most enduring kind,” as the Messenger
declared. It became Poe against the whole literary world of America
in a very short time—for he had unstinted praise for no one. It is
doubtless due to the influence of this army of foes that he lost in
succession all his editorial situations and was impoverished. There
were other enemies as unscrupulous as Griswold. One of these put
in successful circulation the theory that Poe, by cruelty, deliberately
caused the death of his wife in order to get the inspiration for “The
Raven,” and the story may still be met on its rounds,
notwithstanding the fact that the poem was written two years before
she died. (Amiable human nature delights in contemplation of
human monsters.) She declared on her death-bed that her life had
been shortened by anonymous letters slandering and threatening
her husband. Perhaps it was to meet this story that he wrote that
curious analysis (“The Philosophy of Composition”) of the mechanical
and prosaic methods by which he constructed “The Raven.”
The critical instinct, coupled with an impulsive temperament, high
ideals of perfect performance and a powerful pen, is a fatal gift to
any man. The path of such a one will be strewn with the tombs of
friendships which he has stabbed, many and many a time
unconsciously; his life will be haunted with vain regrets for words
gone past recall, carrying with them consequences he did not reckon
upon, hurting those he loves, missing those he aimed at. His way
leads steadily through bitter animosities, bitterer remorse and,
bitterest of all, isolation from his fellows, who shall clothe him with a
character foreign, antagonistic and repulsive to his better nature. If
he be not possessed of an o’ermastering will, a thick skin and a
healthy, cheerful temper it leads to morbidness, gloom and despair.
Poe was not of that will and temper. He was affectionate, sociable
and supersensitive to coolness of manner in others. A rebuff was a
stab to him, hatred a calamity. It is said his early life was clouded by
the stigma put on him by his parents’ theatrical associations and his
own dependence on charity; and that when a lad he wept many wild
nights at the grave of a lady who had spoken kindly to him and
become the confidante of his boyish sorrows and hopes. So with this
nature and with his devastating pen in hand he traced that descent
into the living tomb. If from its gloom he sometimes sought “respite
and nepenthe” in drink it is not to be wondered at; he was often
tempted to suicide. He once solemnly protested: “I have no pleasure
in stimulants. It [indulgence in drink] has been in the desperate
attempt to escape from torturing memories—memories of wrong,
and injustice and imputed dishonor—from a sense of insupportable
loneliness and a dread of some strange impending gloom.”
I fancy he tried to typify this unhappy mission that had come to
blast his life in that poem in which he “wedded despair to harmony.”
“The Raven” was a “grim, ghastly, ominous messenger from the
night’s Plutonian shore” that settled on the bust of Pallas, goddess of
wisdom, even as that critical impulse had settled upon his genius.
His soul never was lifted from the shadow. He was himself, of that
fell work, the
 —“Unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster.”

And why did he not stop the war on the literati and pseudo-
authors? Who can tell? He “wasn’t practical.” He lacked some of
Falstaff’s “instinct.” He was not good and sweet. He wasn’t well-
balanced; he was an Eccentric. Pity the Eccentric—the man who
knows himself called and chosen to a cause, whether by the
necessities of his own nature or by divine impulse—if, indeed, this
and that be not the same. Whether that cause be warring upon high
injustice, exposing hypocrisy in high places, reforming an art, lifting
up the lowly—anything that sets a man apart to a purpose other
than self-seeking, brings him ingratitude, misinterpretation, isolation
and many sorrows. Hamlet called to set right the out-of-joint times
would rather, if he had dared, have taken his quietus with a bare
bodkin than face this life of heart-ache, oppressors’ wrongs, law’s
delays to correct the wrongs, and the spurns that patient merit of
the unworthy takes. The greatest of Eccentrics became a stranger
unto his brethren, was despised and rejected of man, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief; even His chosen disciples when
He tried to purify the holy places from the profanation of greed
misunderstood him; “the zeal of his house hath eaten him up,”
sneered they.
Edgar A. Poe’s personal appearance matched his genius. Let
those who saw him tell it: “He was the best realization of a poet in
features, air and manner that I have ever seen, and the unusual
paleness of his face added to its aspect of melancholy interest.”
“Slight but erect of figure, of middle height, his head finely modeled,
with a forehead and temples large and not unlike those of
Bonaparte; his hands as fair as a woman’s; even in the garb of
poverty ‘with gentleman written all over him.’ The handsome,
intellectual face, the dark and clustering hair, the clear and sad gray-
violet eyes—large, lustrous, glowing with expression.” “A man who
never smiles.” “Those awful eyes,” exclaimed one woman. “The face
tells of battling, of conquering external enemies, of many a defeat
when the man was at war with his meaner self.” He was both much
sinned against and much sinning. But he was not a monster, nor an
ogre. He was only a poet and an Eccentric.
 No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Nor draw his frailties from their dread abode.

[A] Davidson.
BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH.

By R. A. PROCTOR.

There are many points in which English and American speakers

and writers of culture differ from each other as to the use of certain
words and as to certain modes of expression.
In America the word “clever” is commonly understood to mean
pleasant and of good disposition, not (as in England) ingenious and
skilful. Thus, though an American may speak of a person as a clever
workman, using the word as we do, yet when he speaks of another
as a clever man, he means, in nine cases out of ten, that the man is
good company and well-natured. Sometimes, I am told, the word is
used to signify generous or liberal. I can not recall any passages
from early English literature in which the word is thus used, but I
should not be surprised to learn that the usage is an old one. In like
manner, the words “cunning” and “cute” are often used in America
for “pretty” (German niedlich). As I write, an American lady, who has
just played a very sweet passage from one of Mozart’s symphonies,
turns from the piano to ask “whether that passage is not cute,”
meaning pretty.
The word “mad” in America seems nearly always to mean
“angry;” at least, I have seldom heard it used in our English sense.
For “mad,” as we use the word, the Americans say “crazy.” Herein
they have manifestly impaired the language. The words “mad” and
“crazy” are quite distinct in their significance as used in England, and
both meanings require to be expressed in ordinary parlance. It is
obviously a mistake to make one word do duty for both, and to use
the word “mad” to imply what is already expressed by other and
more appropriate words.
 I have just used the word “ordinary” in the English sense. In
America the word is commonly used to imply inferiority. An “ordinary
actor,” for instance, is a bad actor; a “very ordinary man” is a man
very much below par. There is no authority for this usage in any
English writer of repute, and the usage is manifestly inconsistent
with the derivation of the word. On the other hand, the use of the
word “homely” to imply ugliness, as is usual in America, is familiar at
this day in parts of England, and could be justified by passages in
some of the older English writers. That the word in Shakspere’s time
implied inferiority is shown by the line—

Home keeping youths have ever homely wits.

In like manner, some authority may be found for the American

use of the word “ugly” to signify bad-tempered.
Words are used in America which have ceased to be commonly
used in England, and are, indeed, no longer regarded as admissible.
Thus, the word “unbeknown” which no educated Englishman ever
uses, either in speaking or in writing, is still used in America in
common speech and by writers of repute.
Occasionally, writers from whom one would expect at least correct
grammar make mistakes which in England would be regarded as
very bad—mistakes which are not, indeed, passed over in America,
but still attract less notice there than in England. Thus, Mr. Wilkie,
who is so severe on English English in “Sketches beyond the Seas,”
describes himself as saying (in reply to the question whether
Chicago policemen have to use their pistols much), “I don’t know as
they have to as a matter of law or necessity, but I know they do as a
matter of fact;” and I have repeatedly heard this incorrect use of
“as” for “that” in American conversation. I have also noted in works
by educated Americans the use of the word “that” as an adverb,
“that excitable,” “that head-strong,” and so forth. So the use of “lay”
for “lie” seems to me to be much commoner in America than in
England, though it is too frequently heard here also. In a well-
written novelette called “The Man who was not a Colonel,” the words
—“You was” and “Was you?” are repeatedly used, apparently
without any idea that they are ungrammatical. They are much more
frequently heard in America than in England (I refer, of course, to
the conversation of the middle and better classes, not of the
uneducated). In this respect it is noteworthy that the writers of the
last century resemble Americans of to-day; for we often meet in
their works the incorrect usage in question.
And here it may be well to consider the American expression “I
guess,” which is often made the subject of ridicule by Englishmen,
unaware of the fact that the expression is good old English. It is
found in a few works written during the last century, and in many
written during the seventeenth century. So careful a writer as Locke
used the expression more than once in his treatise “On the Human
Understanding.” In fact, the disuse of the expression in later times
seems to have been due to a change in the meaning of the word
“guess.” An Englishman who should say “I guess” now, would not
mean what Locke did when he used the expression in former times,
or what an American means when he uses it in our own day. We say,
“I guess that riddle,” or “I guess what you mean,” signifying that we
think the answer to the riddle, or the meaning of what we have
heard, may be such and such. But when an American says, “I guess
so,” he does not mean “I think it may be so,” but more nearly “I
know it to be so.” The expression is closely akin to the old English
saying, “I wis.” Indeed, the words “guess” and “wis” are simply
different forms of the same word. Just as we have “guard” and
“ward,” “guardian” and “warden,” “Guillaume” and “William,”
“guichet” and “wicket,” etc., so we have the verbs to “guess” and to
“wis.” (In the Bible we have not “I wis,” but we have “he wist.”) “I
wis” means nearly the same as “I know,” and that this is the root-
meaning of the word is shown by such words as “wit,” “witness,”
“wisdom,” the legal phrase “to-wit,” and so forth. “Guess” was
originally used in the same sense; and Americans retain that
meaning, whereas in our modern English the word has changed in
significance.
It may be added, that in many parts of America we find the
expression “I guess” replaced by “I reckon,” and “I calculate” (the “I
cal’late” of the Biglow Papers). In the South, “I reckon” is generally
used, and in parts of New England “I calculate,” though (I am told)
less commonly than of yore. It is obvious from the use of such
words as “reckon” and “calculate” as equivalents for “guess,” that
the expression “I guess” is not, as many seem to imagine, equivalent
to the English “I suppose” and “I fancy.” An American friend of mine,
in response to the question by an Englishman (an exceedingly
positive and dogmatic person, as it chanced), “Why do Englishmen
never say ‘I guess?’” replied (more wittily than justly), “Because they
are always so positive about everything.” But it is noteworthy that
whereas the American says frequently, “I guess,” meaning “I know,”
the Englishman as freely lards his discourse with the expression,
“You know,” which is, perhaps, more modest. Yet, on the other side,
it may be noted, that the “down east” American often uses the
expression “I want to know,” in the same sense as our English
expression of attentive interest, “Indeed?”
Among other familiar Americanisms may be mentioned the
following:—
An American who is interested in a narrative or statement will say,
“Is that so?” or simply “So!” The expression “Possible!” is sometimes,
but not often, heard. Dickens misunderstood this exclamation as
equivalent to “It is possible, but does not concern me;” whereas, in
reality, it is equivalent to the expression, “Is it possible?” I have
occasionally heard the exclamation “Do tell!” but it is less frequently
heard now than of yore.
The word “right” is more frequently used than in England, and is
used also in senses different from those understood in our English
usage of the word. Thus, the American will say “right here” and
“right there,” where an Englishman would say “just here” or “just
there,” or simply, “here” or “there.” Americans say “right away,”
where we say “directly.” On the other hand, I am inclined to think
that the English expression “right well,” for “very well,” is not
commonly used in America.
Americans say “yes, sir,” and “no, sir,” with a sense different from
that with which the words are used in England; but they mark the
difference of sense by a difference of intonation. Thus, if a question
is asked to which the reply in England would be simply “yes” or “no”
(or, according to the rank or station of the querist, “yes, sir,” or “no,
sir,”), the American reply would be “yes, sir,” or “no, sir,” intonated as
with us in England. But if the reply is intended to be emphatic, then
the intonation is such as to throw the emphasis on the word “sir”—
the reply is “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” In passing, I may note that I have
never heard an American waiter reply “yessir,” as our English waiters
often do.
The American use of the word “quit” is peculiar. They do not limit
the word, as we do, to the signification “take leave”—in fact, I have
never heard an American use the word in that sense. They generally
use it as equivalent to “leave off” or “stop.” (In passing, one may
notice as rather strange the circumstance that the word “quit,” which
properly means “to go away from,” and the word “stop,” which
means to “stay,” should both have come to be used as signifying to
“leave off.”) Thus, Americans say “quit fooling” for “leave off playing
the fool,” “quit singing,” “quit laughing,” and so forth.
To English ears an American use of the word “some” sounds
strange—viz., as an adverb. An American will say, “I think some of
buying a new house,” or the like, for “I have some idea of buying,”
etc. I have indeed heard the usage defended as perfectly correct,
though assuredly there is not an instance in all the wide range of
English literature which will justify it.
So also, many Americans defend as good English the use of the
word “good” in such phrases as the following:—“I have written that
note good,” for “well;” “it will make you feel good,” for “it will do you
good;” and in other ways, all equally incorrect. Of course, there are
instances in which adjectives are allowed by custom to be used as
adverbs, as, for instance, “right” for “rightly,” etc.; but there can be
no reason for substituting the adjective “good” in place of the
adverb “well,” which is as short a word, and at least equally
euphonious. The use of “real” for “really,” as “real angry,” “real nice,”
is, of course, grammatically indefensible.
The word “sure” is often used for “surely” in a somewhat singular
way, as in the following sentence from “Sketches beyond the Sea,” in
which Mr. Wilkie is supposed to be quoting a remark made by an
English policeman: “If policemen went to shooting in this country,
there would be some hanging, sure; and not wholly among the
classes that would be shot at, either.” (In passing, note that the
word “either” is never pronounced eyether in America, but always
eether, whereas in England we seem to use either pronunciation
indifferently.)
An American seldom uses the word “stout” to signify “fat,” saying
generally “fleshy.” Again, for our English word “hearty,” signifying “in
very good health,” an American will sometimes employ the singularly
inappropriate word “rugged.” (It corresponds pretty nearly with our
word “rude”—equally inappropriate—in the expression “rude
health.”)
The use of the word “elegant” for “fine” strikes English ears as
strange. For instance, if you say to an American, “This is a fine
morning,” he is likely to reply, “It is; an elegant morning,” or perhaps
oftener by using simply the word “elegant.” It is not a pleasing use
of the word.
There are some Americanisms which seem more than defensible
—in fact, grammatically more correct than our English usage. Thus,
we seldom hear in America the redundant word “got” in such
expressions as “I have got,” etc., etc. Where the word would not be
redundant, it is generally replaced by the more euphonious word
“gotten,” now scarcely ever heard in England. Yet again, we often
hear in America such expressions as “I shall get me a new book,” “I
have gotten me a dress,” “I must buy me that,” and the like. This
use of “me” for “myself” is good old English, at any rate.
I have been struck by the circumstance that neither the
conventional, but generally very absurd, American of our English
novelists, nor the conventional, but at least equally absurd,
Englishman of American novelists, is made to employ the more
delicate Americanisms or Anglicisms. We generally find the American
“guessing” or “calculating,” if not even more coarsely Yankee, like
Reade’s Joshua Fullalove; while the Englishman of American novels
is almost always very coarsely British, even if he is not represented
as using what Americans persist in regarding as the true “Henglish
haccent.” Where an American is less coarsely drawn, as Trollope’s
“American Senator,” he uses expressions which no American ever
uses, and none of those Americanisms which, while more delicate,
are in reality more characteristic, because they are common, all
Americans using them. And in like manner, when an American writer
introduces an Englishman of the more natural sort, he never makes
him speak as an Englishman would speak; before half a dozen
sentences have been uttered, he uses some expression which is
purely American. Thus, no Englishman ever uses, and an American
may be recognized at once by using, such expressions as “I know it,”
or “That’s so,” for “It is true;” by saying “Why, certainly,” for
“Certainly;” and so forth. There are many of these slight but
characteristic peculiarities of American and English English.
—“Knowledge” Library.
STILL YOUNG.

By ELLEN O. PECK.
The fleeting years, the changing scenes,
The light and shade that intervenes
’Twixt now and youth’s rejoicing teens
Have come and gone so silently.
Tho’ much from out my life is drawn
Of love and trust I leaned upon
I never thought my youth was gone,
But laughed at time defiantly,—

Until I met with those I knew

When life’s first romance burst to view,
Whom long ago I bade adieu,
And scanned their faces eagerly;
Alas! I read the fatal truth
That time indeed with little ruth
Had claimed the beauty of their youth,
And dealt with them most meagerly.

Amid the brown locks shone the gray,

And lines of care on foreheads lay,
And so, I read my fate to-day,
From their faces cheerlessly—
What I’d not read upon my own,
That youth, with time, had surely flown,
And I with them had older grown;
The truth—I take it fearlessly.

And with a sigh o’er vanished years,

(I have no time to give to tears)
I near life’s noontide without fears,
Bearing its burdens silently;
No happy song I leave unsung,
A deeper life within has sprung,
And so my heart forever young,
Still laughs at time defiantly.
 THE GOSPELS CONSIDERED AS A
DRAMA.

Lecture by David H. Wheeler, LL.D., President of Allegheny College,

delivered in the Amphitheater, Chautauqua, N. Y., August 23d, at 2 p.
m.

Let me begin by saying that my subject is not theological, and it

will save us trouble if we remember it. Let me say in the second
place that my subject is not the stage, but a book. I shall not discuss
the drama as it is related to the stage, but the drama as a form of
literature. The theologian may find some comfort in the reflection
that if God makes a book it must be the best book. By the drama we
mean simply the best telling of a story. The gospels as God’s book
may therefore be regarded as necessarily the best told story in the
world. But a few things may be profitably said with regard to the
relations of the drama with the stage. First, this general one, that
the stage was a contrivance for ages and times when men could not
read; and that ever since men learned to read, the stage has been
passing into shadow. An illustration of that may be found in the fact
that in the sixteenth century, the age of Shakspere, there were
probably one thousand men who went to the theater to one man
who could read a book; whereas, in our time, there are a hundred
thousand men who read books to one man who frequents the
theater. The stage, in other words, is an effete institution. It is
therefore an institution whose death does not carry with it the death
of the drama; for, along with the death of the stage, there has come
an enlargement of the scope of the drama. No important story was
ever put upon the stage, or could be. The stage is too narrow for a
great theme; therefore all the themes of all the plays are necessarily
narrow themes—a few incidents grouped about a character, or
grouped about a single characteristic of human nature. We have
need in the world to tell stories that are larger, that require an
ampler stage for their development; that deal not only with single
principles, and single men, but with many principles and vast masses
of men—that concern not for a moment, or an hour, and a single
epoch of human life, but concern vast reaches of time and vaster
interests of humanity. And so it has come to pass that in our modern
times, our poetry—our epic poetry and our dramatic poetry—the two
highest forms of literary art, have undergone a great transformation.
The poem has become a novel. The epic has passed into this form;
and the drama has become history. Carlyle says that it is the
business of the poet to write history.
We make distinction between prose and poetry, but we ought to
remember that with regard to epic poetry, and dramatic poetry, both
are to be expressed either in verse or prose, and that versification is
an accident. There may be epic poems in prose; and, as the freest
form, prose has become the prevailing form, and poetry is, more and
more, as the world grows older, confined to the lyric jingle. Poetry, in
the old sense, soon will pass, and the drama has passed into
unversified poetry. Milton made a great change by adopting blank
verse, and Shakspere had started us on the same road. In our age
the great works of poetic language may be expected to be produced
in what is technically prose. The epic poem may also be dramatically
constructed, so that we may have the prose epic under form of the
drama.
Let me call attention to the fact that we are fortunate in speaking
a tongue, the imperial language, in which Shakspere practically killed
the old Aristotelian unities. He wanted a dramatic form in which to
tell the story of the fall of Julius Cæsar, and the story of English
history. He had to discard the old unities of time and place. The only
Aristotelian unity that remains in our English literature is that of
subject. The subject of a dramatic action, or an epic story, must
have unity. There must be one action having a beginning, a middle,
and an end; and there must be a constant, regular, orderly, striking,
impressive advance from the beginning to the end.
Now we come to consider whether the gospels ought to be
regarded as a drama. In the first place, we are familiar with the
custom of commenting on and praising the literary merits of the
gospel. We say how sweet and fluent and intelligible is the language
in which it is written. We understand that portions of it reach the
heights of sublimity, particularly the seventeenth chapter of John.
We are familiar with the fact that its English is so beautiful that there
are men among us to rise and complain if we interfere with a word
in it. We are familiar with the idea that the gospels have literary
merits of a very high order. But we have been accustomed, as a rule,
to regard these things in detail rather than as a whole. Now, when I
say that they may be regarded as dramatic, I mean the highest
literary merit crowns them as a whole. Their story is told in a
dramatic form. No story ever told under the sun was so well told as
is this story of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord
Jesus Christ. I must treat this topic illustratingly, for my sole purpose
is to get an idea before you. Look, then, at the idea of dramatizing
history. It is said that Lord Marlborough read only Shakspere for
English history. He found that the dramatist had put his conceptions
of the actions and characteristics of leading men in English history in
such an effective way, that, whether he was right or wrong, he had
fixed the national estimate of these characters—had typed them
forever. What Shakspere says a man was, the English people will go
on thinking him to have been. These characters give us, on a small
scale, the purpose and effect of the dramatization of history. When
Shakspere did his work, little historical study had been done. English
critical history dates from after his time. But without the help of
critics he conceived and typed groups of characters, and he had
such power of placing himself in the center of things and working
out the characteristics, that he really constructed English history by
the dramatic method. He had pitifully few materials, but historians
who have come after him have found his types very faithful, and
have been content to work out the details, accepting the pictures
Shakspere had hung up before the eyes of the nation. Shaksperean
English characters can not be much changed by ever so much study.
This is only an illustration of the triumph which the dramatic form
may win. Another most important distinction is the one between the
theatrical and the dramatic. We can best understand it by looking at
the common significance of the words. By “theatrical” we mean
something false, fictitious, showy, with no reality behind it.
When a human action is theatrical it is insincere and false to the
facts. On the other hand, when you use the word “dramatic,” you
mean something entirely different. You mean to praise the thing and
not condemn it. When the two Senators from New York suddenly
resigned their position in 1881—you remember it—the friends of
these men spoke of their action as dramatic, and their enemies
characterized their action as theatrical; one to praise, the other to
blame. An incident like that draws the line better than a definition.
The word “drama” has won a place outside of the stage—and it
more and more separates itself from the stage, and becomes a word
descriptive of the best told story. In such a story there must be
reality. It must be a story so put together that the meaning leaps out
as the story goes on, and the mind takes hold of the meaning easily
and fully—so that the whole meaning flashes on the understanding.
You all know the power of a good story teller. You all know that
every neighborhood has some man who can grasp an incident and
tell it so that it comes strikingly before the mind. This power of
narrative is at once epic and dramatic. This village story teller is a
miniature Milton and Shakspere. The arrangement of a drama is
systematic; and moves to a climax with full force. In order to a
dramatic arrangement it is not necessary that the characters should
be combined, as in the form of a play; it is only necessary that the
story should be told in the most effective way, so that its meaning
will flash clear and strong on the understanding. The gospels are
told in this way; and it is the only possible way in which their story
could reach the understanding. If we consider the gospels from this
point of view, there are several things to attract our attention. One
of them is the universality of the human nature which is brought out
in the gospel. If you take up a picture book, or a fashion book of a
hundred years ago, you are interested in a certain way in studying
the characters, and discovering that the people dressed in a way
very different from the present mode. You study the strange dresses
with interest, but at the same time with a kind of feeling that these
people were not just like yourself. Your point of observation in the
fashion-plate presents you with nothing but unlikeness to yourself
and your contemporaries. It is a strange world to you.
Now, what the fashion-plate is, a great part of literature is. It is
something which gets old, out of fashion, outworn, when it is a
hundred years old. People live largely upon a contemporaneous
literary diet. The most of the literature for each generation is
produced by itself, and therefore the human nature of it, like the
dresses of the fashion-plate, is in a little while out of date, and
seems old. I am not as old as I look to be, but I have seen several
kinds of literary fashions come and go. I have known men to be
famous, producing a book nearly every month, whose name would
now be strange, and there are few here who have thought of them
for a long time. Other books have taken their places. They were
novels, stories, histories, and even poems, but they have gone out
of date, because the human nature they dealt with was a temporary
and passing human nature—that of a fashion-plate. And the same
effect must attend most of the novels being written in our day,
because there is a passion upon us for this sort of living detail, this
sort of temporary book.
There is so little of permanent universal human nature in an
ordinary novel of the period, that when you are done with it you
have learned but very little about man. The great defect with this
class of books is that they do not deal with universal human nature,
and it is the power of Shakspere that he deals largely with universal
human nature. And here we discover the likeness that reigns there.
We recognize ourselves and our neighbors. We have struck one of
the old lines of humanity, and are acquainted with the people we
meet. They wear togas, we wear trousers; but we know each other
for brothers. The defect of Shaksperean human nature very soon
appears when you lay it down along side of the gospels. You have a
little universal human nature in Shakspere, in the gospels you have
almost nothing else but universal human nature. If you ask
yourselves why we are interested in certain incidents that occurred
nearly two thousand years ago, in a foreign land, that occurred in
connection with a people for whom we have nothing but antipathy,
what will be the answer? Why are we interested in this old history
lying back there in a world that had almost nothing like our world
except men, and the eternal rocks, and the ever flowing streams?
Why, belting the green earth, should we find men everywhere
singing about this passage in human history? What is the charm of it
that reaches human nature so widely? Undoubtedly there is much
charm in the delightful truth which it contains; more in the delightful
power behind it, but much also in the fact that when we open these
gospels we find ourselves in the presence of men and women like
ourselves, in the presence of human nature, undying, eternally the
same. In any of these passages you find yourself suddenly reminded
of yourself. You feel in every throb of a human heart in the gospels
something which allies the old heart with yourself.
Another proof of the dramatic quality of the gospels lies in the
fact that the details all work out into one picture, and each trait
resembles the whole. What I mean here I shall try to make clear.
The Righi is a mountain made up of pudding stones. It is a great
egg-shaped mass that leaps up out of the plain, rising thousands of
feet in the air, and is composed altogether of these pudding stones.
At different points up its rugged sides, masses have been broken off
by the action of the ice, and if you examine them you will find that
the fragments resemble the whole. Break up one of them into the
finest pieces, and each bit will still resemble the whole. In any
fragment of the vast mass you have a picture of the whole
mountain. Now this is true of the highest dramatic production, that
every piece and every incident is a picture of the whole. This highest
dramatic perfection is found only in the gospels. You find hints of it
elsewhere. Many of you have read the story of “Middlemarch,” the
most perfect piece of art produced in the way of a modern novel.
The art lies first in the dramatic conception, for it has a theme, and
the theme runs clear through, and the climax leaps out of the
theme. This theme is worked out through a principal character. In
her history the general lesson is impressively taught. But the art
does not end there, each one of the characters is a picture of the
heroine in little. The same story is repeated over and over again, in
the different characters. It is a story of human failure, of the way in
which a great human purpose, and high aspirations, growing in a
youthful mind, may be dispersed and destroyed as human life goes
on to its conclusion. It is a lesson of failure, and the failure of the
principal character is repeated in the subordinate characters.
Take another illustration from Shakspere: “Julius Cæsar” is his
best drama, not the best play, for it does not act well on the stage,
as it lacks singleness and simplicity; nevertheless it is, I think,
Shakspere’s most complete play, his most dramatic piece, and the
reason is this: His subject is large and is developed on the principle I
am laying down. The play is narrow, both in “Macbeth” and
“Othello.” In “Julius Cæsar” it is large. The subject may be named
the weaknesses of great men. The play is constructed so as to
develop the weaknesses of Julius Cæsar, and of all the rest of the
characters grouped about him. The story told in the death of Julius
Cæsar is told also in the death of all the parties in the terrible failure
of them all. But you must mark that in this case we have an
extremely narrow purpose as compared with the gospels. In the
gospels you can begin anywhere, and preach the whole gospel from
any incident. Take the case of the Prodigal Son, and you have the
whole story of the gospel in that short compass. Take up the case of
the man described as the “father of the child,” crying, “I believe,”
and you have it over again. It is over and over again, from the
beginning to the end, the pieces all conspiring to the grand result. It
is achieved not by ordinary art. The story teller has seen or heard or
conceived something, and he goes through a mass of details. The
gospels have nothing of that sort. They tell you in a few words what
they have to say of the woman of Samaria, or the maniac of Gadara,
or of her who loved much and was forgiven much. Names are
dispensed with, details, places of residence, all the tricks by which
the ordinary story teller succeeds. This story succeeds by pure force
of an infinite truth behind it.
Another characteristic of drama is a kind of consistency between
the beginning and the end, a kind of logical order in which it moves,
and this is illustrated in the gospels by the fact which must always
be borne in mind, that the task is one of supreme difficulty. The
author of the gospels has to tell the story of the Incarnation of God’s
son. A story in which there are human and divine actors, in which
there is both nature and the supernatural. It requires vast dramatic
power. I have suggested, yet I may more definitely repeat it, that
the human earth on which you tread is not that of old Palestine, or
Galilee, or Jerusalem. It is a real universal, a human earth. There is
not a bit of purer realism than the gospels. Take up this story, walk
with these men. Down by the lake you find the Gadarene crying
among the tombs. You see the stranger landing and healing him.
You stand down by the boat and hear the poor man begging Jesus
to allow him to go with him. You see these human figures. Look into
it a little, and there the man stands where he has stood almost two
thousand years, listening to the words of the Master compelling him
to go away. The meaning of it you understand, for the case is before
you. On this solid human earth, this real human nature, this realistic
character which makes you feel the heart beat, and smell the real
earth, all is combined with something else, with the supernatural.
There have been writers who have carried us into wonderland. We
were glad to be there, and we traveled along delighted with the
scenery and with the companions created by the imagination. The
gospels do not do this. This solid earth beneath your feet is not
more real than the heavens that bend over it. Human reality is
combined with heavenly, and you are continually going to and fro
between the earth and the sky. The natural and the supernatural are
so run together that you feel no shock in passing from one to the
other. You have men and angels, divine power and human power,
associated together. The warp of earth is woven into the woof of
heaven until it is one piece of cloth of gold. The gold of the skies is
braided into the earthly so perfectly I defy any man to take them
apart with consistency or success. This is the beauty and perfection
of dramatic success. The divine and the human are blended in Christ
so that you are puzzled to tell whether it is a man or a God who
speaks and works. The blending of the human about him, in him,
through him, all this is an effect utterly beyond human art. The story
goes straight home to the human heart. The time will never come
when it will not be a dear and sweet old story to the souls that hear
it. Edward Eggleston once told me that when he was lecturing in
some strange corner of the earth, where culture in the pulpit was
comparatively rare, after the lecture one of the men said, “I wish
you would come here and preach for us. Our minister preaches the
funeral of Jesus Christ twice a Sunday, fifty-two Sundays in the year.”
The case seemed to me to be an exceedingly sad one until I began
to ask myself, of what man that ever lived could it be said they
preached his funeral sermon twice a Sabbath for fifty-two Sundays in
the year, and the story still had such freshness that the people would
come out and hear it? What other thing was ever so well done that a
fool might talk about it, and still a certain amount of interest attach
to it despite the poor telling? Here lies one of the uses of the
dramatic power of the gospel. When a man of humble attainments
has it to tell, he has only to follow the book to make it an interesting
story. The moment he strikes a real point of interest, the attentive
soul feels that that is what it came for, and, what is better, that it is
said to him. In short, the enduring power of this story lies in great
part in this fact. The consistency between the beginning and the end
and the logical order of things, comes out in a thousand powerful
ways. For instance, the peculiar truth that reappears in the words
which are sculptured on Shakspere’s tomb.
Take the same thought as it reappears—the same thought slightly
turned over—as it is repeated in “Middlemarch,” or in that best
human version of all, that of Watts:
 “Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must lie as low as ours.”

You will find the thought, in good and bad versions, everywhere.
Do you wish to take this thought fresh from the fountain? Come to
the temple, where the disciples, accustomed to nothing great in art,
fresh from Galilee, stand gazing in admiration at the glory of the
great edifice and one of them cries out: “Master, behold these
stones; and what manner of a building is this?” And listen to the
Master as he says: “There shall not remain one stone upon another,”
and you have the fountain head of all these streams running down
into our poetry.
Mark the wonderful consistency, and the wonderful movement of
this story—consider it as a drama. You may regard the gospels as
beginning at that moment when suddenly there was with the angel a
great company of the heavenly hosts, appearing to the shepherds as
they watched their flocks by night. It practically ends when the
disciples, after the ascension, returned to Jerusalem with great joy,
and were continually in the temple singing the song which began in
angel mouths and ends in human mouths. The purpose of the story
was to sing that angelic music into the human heart.
In conclusion: What inferences may be drawn from the
statements I have made? Certainly not that the gospels have
attained their success because they are a drama. They had to have
the truth to succeed. They have the truth, and that has given them
success. It behooved that Christ should suffer and rise from the
dead the third day. And this behooving lies in something very deep
in our nature. We believe that these gospels are inspired; that the
authors were moved by the Holy Ghost; and it seems to me to be a
necessary inference that the story should be well told; and well told
means dramatically told. If it be true that the gospels sweep a larger
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