Text: Rebecca Harding Davis, “Some Hobgoblins in Literature,” Book Buyer (New York, NY), vol. XIV, no. 3, April 1897, pp. 229-231

[page 228, unnumbered:]

SOME HOBGOBLINS IN LITERATURE

I REMEMBER, when I was a child in Virginia, that there came to the school one day an authoress. None of the children had ever before seen a woman who had written a book. She was to us a something apart from the actual world, like a comet or a two-headed dog. She was a round-faced, mild little woman, who looked askance at the huge black-board, being afraid, I suspect now, that the teacher would set her a sum. But we watched her with bated breath. Was she an abolitionist? Or an atheist Something monstrous she must be. Only a genius could write a book; and to our simple souls “a genius” was outside of nature-disguised, perhaps, with a body like other men and women, but inside of it, an angel or a ravening beast. We only breathed freely when the door closed behind her.

One or two books published lately make me suspect that the average American is as young as the children in the school-house were that day. He, too, takes his geniuses too seriously. He thinks that the man who has written a great book or painted a great picture must be a demi-god or a devil to his wife and office-boy: just as the children of Ravenna smelled [column 2:] hell's fire on Dante's cloak as he walked by, and the Greeks covered their eyes at sight of the Delphic oracle. Nobody can doubt that Dante did see hell, but his cloak was common woollen stuff; and though the Pythia spoke for God when He saw fit, as soon as she came down from her three-legged stool she was an ordinary old woman with a tendency to rheumatism and neuralgia.

Now, look at the reverent awe with which New England still regards Margaret Fuller, as a presence superhuman, a female Buddha who once made an avatar in Boston.

I once asked a shrewd old Quaker who had known her intimately the truth about Margaret.

“She had an insight,” he said, “into ideas and men as keen as divination. Apart from that, her thoughts, her creed, her whole character consisted in a pro- found belief in Margaret Fuller. She urged her Self on you perpetually, in season and out of season, with a flood of words which washed you down; and when you struggled up to answer, washed you down again. She was the vainest and most voluble human being that I ever met.”

Brook Farm and Hawthorne's story of [page 230:] Zenobia, and her Italian title and her death in the stormy sea with the bell tolling a requiem over the waves where she sank, all have combined to throw a mystical glamour over this pioneer New woman, and to hide her commonplace traits.

Another American whom popular prejudice has clothed with abnormal qualities is Walt Whitman. His disciples regard him as the one bard of the century — the only one that America has ever produced. His voice, they declare, will yet be heard by all the listening nations of the earth as he proclaims universal democracy, as one who chants at dawn in the dark forests the coming of a new day. They claim, too, that he was not only the one poet, but the chief Patriot and Friend of his age, the universal brother of us all, with a heart big enough to take whole races home to it, and to still their hunger and pains in its love.

Chief of these excited followers was William D. O’Connor, a kindly, sincere little man who left his cradle with his imagination at white heat and never suffered it to cool afterwards. He talked in superlatives. He was one of the Pfaff crowd of Bohemians, a rampant abolitionist, a hater of churches, a dabbler in infidelity. He made Whitman the idol of his later years, and sang pæans to him with his whole being. The “Good Gray Poet” was to O’Connor the culmination of humanity; he was Socrates, Gautama, the, Christ — all in one.

So profound was the faith of his devotees in Whitman that they made incessant pilgrimages to his house in Camden as to a shrine, never coming away without laying gifts upon the altar. When he died, they paid homage to the memory not only of the poet but the man, saluting him as the “most eminent citizen of the Republic.” The shades of Confucius, Buddha, and the Saviour were summoned at his [column 2:] grave to welcome their peer into the heavens.

On the other side is a large intelligent public who believe Whitman to have been a sort of devil. They deny him any spark of the divine fire: the poems which his disciples regard as immortal treasures of inspiration, they describe as dunghill heaps of filth and corruption. They hold the man himself to have been a monster of vice. He was discharged from the service of the Government, when the Cabinet read his poems, as promptly as a beast of prey would be driven out of a village Sewing Circle, and the poems were for- bidden circulation in the mails by special edict. Whitman, I believe, is the only man whose immorality has roused the United States Government to put it down.

What, after all, is the truth about “Walt”?

Surely a cool and critical posterity will acknowledge that this huge, uncouth fellow had the eye and tongue of the seer. To him, as to Dante and the oracle, it was given sometimes to be spokesman for the gods, to talk of death and life, and free man, in words not feeble nor unworthy of their themes.

But while the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap and mean. Judging even from the biographies written by his friends, I estimate Walter Whitman, from first to last, a boorish, awkward poseur. He sang of the working man as of a god, but he never did an hour's work himself if he could live by alms; he sounded the note of battle for the slave, but he never shouldered a gun in the battle; he cursed shams, while he played the cheap part of “bard,” as he conceived it, in flowing hair and beard, gray clothes, broad rolling. collar and huge pearl buttons, changing even his name to suit the rôle ; he saluted Christ as “my comrade,” declaring that “we walk together the earth over, making [page 231:] our ineffaceable mark upon time and the eras,” while he, Whitman, was loafing in a filthy house in Camden, provided for him by charity, accepting weekly the hard- earned money of poor young men, while he had thousands hoarded in bank which he spent in building a tawdry monument. to himself. As to the immorality in his poems, it is not worth while to call it unnatural or talk of demoniac possession, as his enemies do. I believe that Whitman simply was indecent as thousands of other men are indecent, who are coarse by nature and vulgar by breeding. Hawthorne, when he saw the Venus of the Uffizi Palace, to which all the world has paid homage, acknowledged its greatness, but added, “To my mind Titian was a very nasty old man” — a criticism which goes to the root of the matter in Whitman as in Titian, and leaves no more to be said.

The chief hobgoblin of American literature, however, is Edgar Allan Poe. This is due to the savage, cowardly attack made upon him by Griswold while he lay dead, in which he was described as a moral monster. The world has shuddered ever since at this large-brained soulless creature, a unique bundle of hideous vices.

The late Charles J. Peterson, who, better than any other man, knew the facts of the case, has often told me that Griswold's dislike and jealousy of Poe were intense. He never made these charges against him while Poe was living. But it was Mr. Peterson's belief that the article containing them had been written before he died and held ready for use, as it appeared in print a few hours after the tidings of his death reached Philadelphia. It is strange that the public should have attached any importance to a slander which was never spoken of the living man, but was poured out with inhuman virulence upon his coffin, the moment that the lips were dumb that could have resented it. Mr. Peterson, who as editor of Graham knew the poor Virginian well, described him as “a most gentle gentleman, always courteous, kindly and honorable. He had one very common failing and was ashamed of it. His character was in no way unnatural or abnormal.”

In early days I knew, too, friends of Poe's in Richmond. They always spoke of “Edgar” affectionately, as a lovable, nervous man who, like too many Southern men of that day, drank hard, and fell in love easily. They all testified that he was a tender son and faithful husband. “No woman was ever the worse for Poe's love.”

The malignancy of this one man, how- ever, has ceased to blacken the good name of the poet. The world now sees that he had only the ordinary faults of his class and time. Nothing worse can be truly said of him.

Why should we not give up our habit of throwing Roentgen rays into our men. of genius to discover abnormal vices and virtues in them? It is time that we understood that the light of genius may burn in a man, and yet that he will be in no sense a god or a fiend, but remain a very ordinary fellow. It does not seem to affect his every-day character any more. than it does his teeth or hair. The man who speaks words that help the world may nag his wife like Carlyle, or fly into a pet like Moses, or delight in flashing neck-ties like Dickens, or be a bit of a gourmand like Thackeray and Sir Walter. The giants in mind do not wear seven-leagued boots in undress, nor make huge tracks upon the streets. There is no need for us to canonize them as saints or damn them as hobgoblins.

Exaggeration is a childish trait; let us give it up. We are no longer a childish people. We really ought now to be al- most grown up.

Rebecca Harding Davis.