Part 15

The existing tombstone was erected by a committee of Baltimore schoolmarms, and cost about $1,000. It took the dear girls ten long years to raise the money. They started out with a “literary entertainment” which yielded $380. This was in 1865. Six years later the fund had made such slow progress that, with accumulated interest, it came to but $587.02. Three years more went by: it now reached $627.55. Then some anonymous Poeista came down with $100, two others gave $50 each, one of the devoted schoolmarms raised $52 in nickels and dimes, and George W. Childs agreed to pay any remaining deficit. During all this time not a single American author of position gave the project any aid. And when, finally, a stone was carved and set up and the time came for the unveiling, the only one who appeared at the ceremony was Walt Whitman. All the other persons present were Baltimore nobodies—chiefly schoolteachers and preachers. There were three set speeches—one by the principal of a local high school, the second by a teacher in the same seminary, and the third by a man who was invited to give his “personal recollections” of Poe, but who announced in his third sentence that “I never saw Poe but once, and our interview did not last an hour.”

This was the gaudiest Poe celebration ever held in America. The poet has never enjoyed such august posthumous attentions as those which lately flattered the shade of James Russell Lowell. At his actual burial, in 1849, exactly eight persons were present, of whom six were relatives. He was planted, as I have said, in a Presbyterian churchyard, among generations of honest believers in infant damnation, but the officiating clergyman was a Methodist. Two days after his death a Baptist gentleman of God, the illustrious Rufus W. Griswold, printed a defamatory article upon him in the New York _Tribune_, and for years it set the tone of native criticism of him. And so he rests: thrust among Presbyterians by a Methodist and formally damned by a Baptist.

3 _Memorial Service_

Let us summon from the shades the immortal soul of James Harlan, born in 1820, entered into rest in 1899. In the year 1865 this Harlan resigned from the United States Senate to enter the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln as Secretary of the Interior. One of the clerks in that department, at $600 a year, was Walt Whitman, lately emerged from three years of hard service as an army nurse during the Civil War. One day, discovering that Whitman was the author of a book called “Leaves of Grass,” Harlan ordered him incontinently kicked out, and it was done forthwith. Let us remember this event and this man; he is too precious to die. Let us repair, once a year, to our accustomed houses of worship and there give thanks to God that one day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet that America has ever produced and the damndest ass.

THE END

INDEX

Ade, George, 98, 114 _et seq._

Adler, Alfred, 170

_Ailsa Page_, 134

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 115, 138

_American Language, The_, 210

_Androcles and the Lion_, 185 _et seq._

_Angela’s Business_, 139

_Ann Veronica_, 25, 31

_Another Book on the Theater_, 211

Archer, William, 25, 174

Arnold, Matthew, 194

_Artie_, 121

_Atlantic Monthly_, 52, 134, 173, 174

Augier, Emile, 106

_Avariés, Les_, 107, 201

Bahr, Hermann, 16

Balmforth, Ramsden, 186

Balzac, H., 50

Barber, Granville, 219

_Bealby_, 24, 32

Beck, James M., 33

Beethoven, L. van, 18, 72, 94

Belasco, David, 213, 219

Belloc, Hillaire, 31

Bennett, Arnold, 31, 36 _et seq._

Beyerlein, F. A., 106

Bierce, Ambrose, 130

Bierbaum, O. J., 131

Blasco Ibáñez, 24, 145

Bleibtreu, K., 106

_Book of Prefaces, A_, 210

_Boon_, 31

Boynton, H. W., 14

Brahms, Johannes, 18

Braithwaite, W. S., 83

Brandes, Georg, 17

Brieux, Eugene, 61, 107, 201, 219

Brooks, Van Wyck, 34

Brownell, W. C., 11, 14

_Buried Alive_, 46

Bynner, Witter, 85

Cabell, James Branch, 144

_Call of the Wild, The_, 236

Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 191, 212

Cather, Willa Sibert, 130

_Century, The_, 174

_Certain Rich Man, A_, 140

Chambers, R. W., 73, 117, 129 _et seq._, 148

_Chap-Book, The_, 134

Chesterton, G. K., 27, 124

Childs, George W., 248

Churchill, Winston, 37, 131

Clemens, S. L., 52, 57, 97, 114, 115, 118

Cobb, Irvin, 97 _et seq._, 134

_Cobb’s Anatomy_, 99

Comfort, W. L., 240 _et seq._

Conrad, Joseph, 11, 34, 38, 40, 44, 56, 97, 112, 144

_Cosmopolitan, The_, 175 _et seq._

Craig, Gordon, 208

Crane, Frank, 46, 244

_Criterion, The_, 129, 130

Croce, Benedetto, 12, 212

Curtis, George W., 114

Dewey, John, 61 _et seq._

_Dial, The_, 64

_Doll’s House, A_, 22, 23

Dreiser, Theodore, 14, 34, 38, 47, 54, 97, 116, 119, 130, 144

_Ehre, Die_, 105

Ellis, Havelock, 244

Emerson, R. W., 115, 191 _et seq._, 246

_Everybody’s Magazine_, 175

_Family, The_ (Parsons), 155

_Family, The_ (Poole), 147

_Fate Knocks at the Door_, 241

_Fear and Conventionality_, 155 _et seq._

_First and Last Things_, 22

Fletcher, J. G., 92

_Forester’s Daughter, The_, 136

_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The_, 24, 145

France, Anatole, 34, 131

_Frau Sorge_, 105

Freud, Sigmund, 151, 170, 199

Frost, Robert, 84, 89, 92

_Frühlings Erwachen_, 201

Garland, Hamlin, 134 _et seq._

_Gay Rebellion, The_, 133

George, W. L., 40

Giovannitti, Ettore, 90, 92

_Godey’s Lady’s Book_, 174

Goethe, J. W., 12, 16, 194, 212

Grimm, Hermann, 194

Griswold, Rufus, 19, 172, 249

H. D., 92

Haeckel, Ernst, 45

Hagedorn, Hermann, 86

Hale, William Bayard, 34

Hamilton, Clayton, 140, 148 _et seq._, 220

_Harbor, The_, 146

Hardy, Thomas, 34

Harlan, James, 249

_Harper’s Magazine_, 173

Harrison, H. S., 117, 139 _et seq._, 141

Harvey, Alexander, 52

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 106, 213

Hazlitt, Wm., 16

Hearst, W. R., 175 _et seq._

_Hearst’s Magazine_, 176

_Heimat_, 105

_Higher Learning in America, The_, 65, 67, 71, 81

_His Second Wife_, 147

_History of Mr. Polly, The_, 25, 31

_Hohe Lied, Das_, 107

Holz, Arno, 105

Howe, E. W., 56, 118, 119

Howells, W. D., 52 _et seq._, 97, 118, 144

_Huckleberry Finn_, 53

Huneker, James, 17, 19, 57, 129, 130

Ibsen, Henrik, 12, 106, 107, 119, 219

_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, 65

_Indian Lily, The_, 107 _et seq._

_Instinct of Workmanship, The_, 65

_In the Heart of a Fool_, 140

James, William, 60 _et seq._, 154, 193

_Joan and Peter_, 25 _et seq._, 31, 32, 33

_John Barleycorn_, 236

Johnson, Owen, 98, 148

_Jungle, The_, 145, 146

_Katzensteg, Der_, 105

Kauffman, R. W., 199

Kilmer, Joyce, 86

_King in Yellow, The_, 134

Kipling, Rudyard, 27

Kreymborg, Alfred, 83

_Ladies’ Home Journal_, 53, 126, 143, 177

Lardner, Ring W., 98

_Leatherwood God, The_, 54

Le Bon, Gustave, 154

Lindsay, Vachel, 83, 84, 89, 92, 94, 96

_Lion’s Share, The_, 46, 51

_Little Lady of the Big House, The_, 239

Lloyd-George, David, 33

London, Jack, 37, 236 _et seq._

Lowell, Amy, 83, 86, 87, 92, 96

Lowell, J. R., 115, 173, 248

Lowes, John Livingstone, 88

Mabie, H. W., 16

McClure, John, 96

McClure, S. S., 175

_McClure’s Magazine_, 175

MacLane, Mary, 123 _et seq._, 134

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 61, 79, 219

_Magazine in America, The_, 171 _et seq._

_Magda_, 105

_Man and Superman_, 182

Marden, O. S., 46

_Marriage_, 22, 34

Marx, Karl, 66, 238

_Masks and Minstrels of New Germany_, 130

Masters, Edgar Lee, 83, 88, 92, 96

Meltzer, C. H., 57, 129

_Men vs. the Man_, 60

_Mercure de France_, 210

Mitchell, D. O., 115, 131

Monroe, Harriet, 83, 91

Moody, Wm. Vaughn, 57

_Moonlit Way, The_, 131

More, Paul Elmer, 17, 53

_Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, 24, 25

_Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents_, 211

Munsey, Frank A., 175

_Munsey’s Magazine_, 175

Nasby, Petroleum V., 114

Nathan, G. J., 208 _et seq._

_Nation, The_, 32, 64, 179

National Institute of Arts and Letters, 115, 116, 129 _et seq._

_Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, The_, 65

_New Leaf Mills_, 56

_New Machiavelli, The_, 31

_New Republic, The_, 64

_New Thought_, 192, 245

Nietzsche, F. W., 18, 24, 28, 32, 45, 61, 155, 182, 185, 192, 194, 243

Norris, Frank, 54, 57, 121

_North American Review_, 123

Norton, Charles Eliot, 173

_Old-Fashioned Woman, The_, 155

_One Man_, 224 _et seq._

Oppenheim, James, 86, 92, 94

O’Sullivan, Vincent, 144

_Paris Nights_, 51

Parsons, Elsie Clews, 155 _et seq._

_Passionate Friends, The_, 23, 30

Pattee, F. L., 117

Phelps, W. L., 11, 14, 116

Phillips, D. G., 131

Poe, E. A., 19, 52, 97, 115, 247 _et seq._

_Poetry_, 83

Pollard, Percival, 57

Poole, Ernest, 145 _et seq._

_Popular Theater, The_, 209

Pound, Ezra, 90, 92, 94

_Pretty Lady, The_, 42, 48, 51, 129

_Putnam’s_, 173

_Queed_, 139

Reese, Lizette W., 96

Repplier, Agnes, 56, 199

_Research Magnificent, The_, 24, 33

_Rise of Silas Lapham, The_, 54

Robinson, E. A., 90

Rolland, Romaine, 33

_Roll-Call, The_, 42, 50, 51

Roosevelt, Theodore, 61, 119, 124, 142, 178

Saint-Beuve, 16

Sandburg, Carl, 86, 92, 94

_Saturday Evening Post, The_, 100, 176

_Scarlet Plague, The_, 239

_Scribner’s_, 174

_Shadow World, The_, 136

Shakespeare, 19, 201

Shaw, G. B., 181 _et seq._, 199, 218

Sherman, S. P., 11, 14, 130

Sinclair, Upton, 145

_Sodoms Ende_, 106

_Son of the Middle Border, A_, 134, 135

_Soul of a Bishop, The_, 25, 31, 32

_Speaking of Operations_—, 99

Spingarn, J. E., 10 _et seq._, 212

_Spoon River Anthology, The_, 83

Stedman, E. C., 95, 115, 173

Steele, Robert, 226 _et seq._

Stockton, F. R., 115

Stoddard, R. H., 94, 115

_Story of a Country Town, The_, 56

Sudermann, Hermann, 105 _et seq._

Tassin, Algernon, 171 _et seq._

_Their Day in Court_, 131

_Theory of Business Enterprise, The_, 65

_Theory of the Leisure Class, The_, 65, 67, 70, 71, 76

Thoma, Ludwig, 108, 213

Thomas, Augustus, 215

Thompson, Vance, 129

_Those Times and These_, 98

_Times_, New York, 13, 24, 131

_Tono-Bungay_, 22, 25, 29, 34

_Town Topics_, 130

Towne, C. H., 86

_Tribune_, New York, 33, 180, 249

Trites, W. B., 57

Tyndall, John, 194

_Undying Fire, The_, 33

Untermeyer, Louis, 88, 91, 92

_V. V.’s Eyes_, 138

Van Dyke, Henry, 95

Veblen, Thorstein, 59 _et seq._, 154

Wagner, Richard, 238

Walker, J. B., 175

Ward, Artemas, 114

Wedekind, Frank, 201

Wells, H. G., 22 _et seq._, 36, 37

Wharton, Edith, 57, 144

White, William Allen, 139 _et seq._

Whitman, Walt, 86, 92, 93, 115, 243, 247, 249

_Whom God Hath Joined_, 50, 51

_Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon, The_, 23

Wilde, Oscar, 13

Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 34, 119, 178

Winter, William, 173, 214, 220, 223

Wright, Harold Bell, 141

Zola, Emile, 50, 106, 107

Transcriber’s note:

1. Silently corrected typographical errors.

2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.

3. Changed ‘Athanæums’ to ‘Athenæums’ on p. 78.

4. Changed ‘at’ to ‘as’ on p. 103.