Text: John Quincy Adams, “Thomas H. Chivers,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 14, 1897, p. ?, col. ?

[page ?, column ?:]

Written for The Constitution.

I am not sure that I owe the public any apology for my long silence about the life and writings of Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers. If so, it lies in the fact that I have never been, nor am I now, his literary executor. Moreover, nothing that could be written by curiosity hunters, or published in a newspaper, will be of any permanent value. Nevertheless, I yield, at last, to what seems to be a widespread, popular request, and give such information as I possess as absolutely true.

What has already appeared in print is very unsatisfactory to the average reader. Major C. H. Smith, himself an author, gathers a few facts and criticisms. He is cock-sure this week that Chivers was the “precursor of Poe;” the next week a friend tells him he is fooling with “myths,” and Mrs. Smith begs him “not to rob the dead” (by the way, Mrs. Smith is always right), and so he leaves “Chivers in Shadow” until the arrival of “a clearer expose,” etc. I say, therefore, in the beginning, this article is not to contrast Chivers and Poe, but is only an outline of the former's life and writings. If he cannot stand alone on his own merits, then it is best that he sleep on till the judgment day.

What is truth?”asked doubting Pilate, but he would not stay for an answer. This was the attitude of the south down to our civil war towards her literary children. She was only a materialist. She had no literature of her own, and she felt no need of such a thing To pile up only visible riches, to destroy forests, to lay waste a generous soil, then to transfer the surplus niggers and mules further west — this was the only road to success, while politics was the only stepping stone to distinction or fame. If a southerner would sell his brains for gold or reputation he went north, and if successful his glory was reflected back upon his own country with the chances of being damned by faint praise. Is it any surprise, therefore, that so few, even among men of letters, remember a man who was the intimate friend of Poe and correspondent of all the great scholars of the north? Edmund C. Stedman and Joel Benton,. the ripest of American scholars, and Swinburne, the greatest of English poets since Tennyson, know more about “our lost poet” than his own relatives in the south. It was Benton who said in Collier's Weekly, “Swinburne can repeat many of Chivers's longest poems, and it has been suggested to me by one critic and author that Swinburne not only repeated them, but that he has put in his own poetry many marks of their influence.”

It is characteristic of the prestige of a great newspaper that it can arouse both curiosity and interest in any man, at home or abroad. Such is the fact in regard to this so-called “resurrection” of a great scholar, whose writings seem to be as unknown at the south as the alleged lost manuscripts of Rowley; another confirmation of the truth that many great men have died since Agamemnon for the lack of a faithful historian.

In March, 1888, (the 8th, I think) I published in The Constitution an article saying I had come into possession by accident of a box of manuscripts and letters relating to Poe and his contemporaries. I was very careful to say there were letters from Poe, Mrs. Clemon [[Clemm]], his mother-in-law; from Mrs. Shelton and Mrs. Whitman (the two ladies to whom Poe was engaged to a southern man, himself to be married), a distinguished scholar and author, whom Poe addressed as “his dearest friend.” This letter was widely read and The New York Critic, commenting on it, said: “This box must be Griswold's, which unaccountably disappeared.” But as will be seen, it was not Griswold's.

I did not give the name of this “dearest friend” at the time referred to, because I wished to excite interest in a man who seemed, from his literary remains, to deserve a better late. I knew as early as 1863 of the existence of such a box, while Its contents and value were intact, and it is with a feeling of both regret and indignation ‘that* I could not then secure it, but for reasons not necessary to state here, l)t did not come into my hands till 1887. Meanwhile Sherman's army had looted Decatur end Atlanta, destroyed and stolen Dr. Chivers's library and mutilated all his manuscripts. This is the reason, I learn, why his surviving family do not now own any of his printed books, “for ‘Stedman, “I am still searching which,” says especially for ‘The Eonchs of Ruby,’ now owned by Mrs. Bayard Taylor, who lives in Germany.” However, The Constitution went out on Its long journey even to London, and for several years my correspondence made me very tired. Finally the best result was Benton's two chapters of criticism in Collier's Weekly !n 1895. But even he knows nothing accurate about Dr. Chivers's life, nor the dates of the poems which seem to mark him as the “precursor” of Poe.

I mean to be as brief as possible ( the facts of this “wild Mazeppa of letters,” as Gilmore Sims calls him. His future biographer and editor — should he ever find one — may fill out the picture. It seems the earnest wish of all scholars, north and south, now to resurrect him on his native heath. They would brush the dust and grave-mold from this hoary locks and cry out to him:

* * * * * *

Thomas Holley Chivers, M. D., the oldest of seven children, three sons and four daughters, son of Colonel Robert Chivers, was born in 1807 at Digby Manor, seven miles south of Washington, Wilkes county, Georgia. The. family on both sides came of good English stock and first settled in Virginia — the mother, Miss Digby, being descended from the Digbys who were conspicuous in the troublous times from 1640 to 1688. Colonel Robert was a rich planter and mill owner. He was overindulgent to his son, who was early set down as a genius, and so the doctor was a born autocrat. He was sent to the best country schools, but in fact he educated himself. He never was graduated at Yale, as has been alleged, but he was a distinguished graduate in medicine at Transylvania, now the University of Kentucky, about 1828. He cared only for the scientific cult of his profession, though to the day of his death he never failed to serve gratis those too poor to hire a doctor. After a few years’ practice he chose literature rather as a profession; and having always abundant means for his solitary and temperate life, he lived and died “in the mad pride of intellectuality.” He despised all mere pretenses toward scholarship. Among ordinary men he was a most “unclubable man,” but among his equals he was a charming companion. His correspondence show's he was held in high esteem, and he was an authority on all kinds of knowledge, especially Hebrew. He went north to live about 1832, where he married Miss Harriet Hunt, a beautiful woman, by whom he had four children, who died of typhoid fever within two months during a short sojourn at Digby Manor. Three other children were afterwards born to them, a sop and two daughters. The son died leaving four children — three sons and a daughter — all adapted by his second sister, Mrs. Isabel Brown, now living at the Villa Allegra, Decatur, Ga. The oldest daughter, Potter, lives in Connecticut.

It is delightful reading out of the very best correspondence in this old box. Gilmore Sims [[Simms]] asks Chivers where he finds all his strange words and chides him for “the monotony of his sorrow.’‘ Then the doctor advises Sims [[Simms]] “to stop writing such stupid novels and take up literature as a pleasure.” “I am hungry and naked in Philadelphia,” says Dickinson, the actor, “and my wardrobe is held for debt in Baltimore.” Another letter says, “Longfellow, God bless him, paid me out — $72.” Poe writes to Chivers, “Please lend me $50 for three months — I am so poor and friendless, I am half distracted; but I shall be all right when you and I start our magazine.” I have the first of the printed slips, or prospectus of this long-hoped-for magazine — The Stylus — and it is the greatest curiosity I ever read. Alas! for idle dreams.

Mr. Joel Benton, in Collier's Weekly (New York), Oct. 31 and Nov. 7, 1895, has an article on the Poe-Chivers controversy, which Mr. Griswold characterizes as “very interesting but inconclusive,’‘ because Mr. B. was unable to prove the date of Dr. Chivers’ “ first publication. The article is entitled, “A Precursor of Poe.’‘ Dr. Chivers himself set up counter claims in self-defence, but as I learn from Mr. Griswold, the poems cited by Chivers, in the Museum, are not the ones brought forward by Mr. Benton. It will be seen, therefore, that this leaves the controversy unsettled as far as Mr. B. is concerned.

While Mr. Benton's allegations about Dr. Chivers's high-sounding verbosity are in the main just, he should be careful not to accuse him wrongfully. For example, when quoting the lines from “Rosalie Lee”:

he derisively asks: “Is there any dictionary that can explain to us a ‘sucket,’ and when it has done that can it also define a ‘Cydonian sucket’? Has Mr. Benton a copy of Webster's Unabridged? Cydonian is a common classical adjective. In the very first newspaper I picked up after reading Mr. Benton* article in Collier's Weekly, I saw an advertisement headed ‘Cydonia Soap.’ To a poem entitled ‘Anacreontique,’ Dr. Chivers appends a note explanatory of Cydonian sucket.’”

Did Poe borrow from Dr. Chivers, and what did he borrow? Confining ourselves mainly to the “Raven,” did he borrow the metre, did he borrow the metre for purposes identical with those of Dr. Chivers; did’ he borrow the iteration, the triplicate rhyme: did he borrow the refrain? Setting aside the theme, the thoughts, the verbiage, which are not strictly included in this discussion, did he borrow the machinery? Of course, he did not borrow the very strains, but did he borrow the pipes? Poe was wont to charge plagiarism on Longfellow and others, and this is prima facie evidence that he was not guilty of it himself. We require stronger evidence, however. Have we got it? Had Poe written the “Raven,” and never vaunted his originality in the matter of its construction, it might have been said that the coincidences were unconscious imitations, but his own arrogant assumptions, and the still more arrogant claims of his friends, demand his conviction or acquittal.

Poe published the “Raven” in the American Review, in 1845. In 1842, Dr. T. Holley Chivers wrote a poem addressed “To Allegra Florence in heaven.”

Speaking of the stanzas of the “Raven,” “Poe says, “My own has the merit of being my own. No writer living or dead has ever employed anything resembling it.” (Redmond, vol, iii., p. 295). It will be here seen that the rhythm, metre and stanza are identical. “These identical rhythms are arranged in identical metres, these identical rhythms and metres are constructed into identical stanzas. Both poems are elegiac. In both poems the trochaic metre is employed. Poe's verse is octameter acatalectic. Chivers's is the same. Chivers's poem has eight lines in each stanza, Poe has only six. The idiosyncracy of the movement in Chivers’ poem is eight troches in the first line, seven and a half in the next, and so on through. Poe departs from Chivers In each stanza after the first four lines. He does not alternate in the fifth but repeats in length the fourth, using seven and a half troches, and concluding with three and a half in the sixth line. He saw that Chivers's stanza of eight lines with no variation grew monotonous, and therefore he curtailed it to six, foreshortening the fifth line for iteration and still farther the sixth for an appended refrain. It will be seen that the stanzas run exactly parallel through the first four lines. The I second quatrain is varied and immensely improved in the variation. But whether Poe Improved upon it is not the question. Whether the improvement voids the original patent is perhaps the question. We admit that he did; we deny that it does. To sum it up, then, the Chivers stanza contains four lines of eight troches and. four lines of and three lines of seven and a half troches. Poe's stanza of five lines excluding the sixth consists of two lines of eight troches s seven and a half troches. The sixth line is three and a half troches.

In describing the composition of the “Raven” Poe says, “My first object, as usual, was originality! Each of the lines in that poem, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the ‘Raven’ has is their combination into stanzas. Nothing even remotely approaching the combination has ever been attempted.”

“Quoth the raven, Nevermore.” Is this refrain original with Poe? He says, you remember, that he chose It because in looking for a refrain he was “led inevitably to the long ‘o’ as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with ‘r’ as the most producible consonant.” In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to have overlooked the word “nevermore.” In fact it was the very first word that presented itself. No doubt of it. A reminiscence has a facile way of presenting itself. Hark! Dr. Chivers says in a poem written July, 1839:

About 1852, nearly three years after Poe's death, began a fierce letter and newspaper controversy as to “the signs, sounds and coloring’‘ of the Raven, Isadora and Allegra Florence, the poems upon which is founded Benton's article in Collier's Weekly, as to whether Chivers was “the precursor of Poe.” As early as 1845, Chivers had been reviewed by Poe, Duganne, Dowe and Hunt-all well-known critics of current literature — but I find no reference to any question of similarity of style or mannerism, until 1850, when Gilmore Sims, in The Southern Magazine, published at Charleston, referred to, both and demanded the dates of these poems. These were given at once, Isadore and Allegra Florence being published first in The Middletown Sentinel in 1841, the Raven in January, 1845. Chivers writes to Sims [[Simms]] — this letter now lies before me — “I tell you this rhythm of the Raven is mine, and now I proceed to prove it’‘ — and no doubt he thought he did. The fight lasted long, but those question was left undecided. How could it be otherwise, seeing that an able writer then said what Mr. Stedman has repeated in his monograph on Poe, to wit, that Poe got his “rhythmical swing of the Raven from Lady Geraldine's Courtship, by Mrs. Browning, Here is a sample stanza:

On further reading I find both Mrs. Osgood and the German poet, Korner, used the words “Lenore and nevermore” as common property. Some years ago I wrote to Mr. Stedman about Chivers, Poe and Longfellow, and asked if the Kalevala was the precursor of Hiawatha? His brief criticism is worth quoting says: “‘It may be true, as Dr. Chivers thought, that more successful poets worked up their poems from his suggestive but careless melodies.” As to Longfellow; “He ate all the ambrosia in Europe, digesting it into chyle — Hiawatha is worse all over, but none the less Longfellowish and Injun.” And such is the right of all poets. I should do violence to my own scholarship if I failed to record my opinion on this point. The fact is, Poe copied nobody — he stands sui generis, separate and apart from all poets, living or dead. It is the psychological development of a theme, not its peculiar practical feet, that constitutes a work of art. A true poet can invent a new measure, combine various measures or ring in. an old one to the delight of the world. This is the distinctive difference between genius and talent. The former creates; the latter uses old effects and they only seem new. Both Chivers and Poe, each on his own merits, write according to his own idiosyncrasy; but there is no analogy in the development of their themes, even when these are similar, or the same. For these reasons and many more, therefore, there is no ground for asking if Poe had a precursor in anybody. He may have caught “the swing of his verse,” as Stedman says, from Mrs. Browning's poem, but the theme, the development and denouement of the Raven are all his own. He read it to William Ross Wallace and said: “Wallace, this is the greatest poem ever written by any man.”

In 1856 Dr. Chivers came south for good, and settled at Decatur. He was soon elected professor of physiology in the medical college at Savannah, but ill health prevented his acceptance. Those who knew him well say he would have made success as a painter, for he drew likenesses of himself and family, and sketched beautifully with only a pen and ink. In early life he invented a machine which wound and twisted silk from the cocoons all at once. A fine specimen took the silver cup at the fair in Atlanta just before the war. His daughter at Decatur has the drawing of this machine, and its silk, even now. I don’t know if this machine was ever patented, but ‘tis a curiosity.

Dr. Chivers died at Decatur, December 18, 1858. The event was widely noticed at the north, Professor Gierlow, the Danish author, writing a beautiful poem about him. Among the doctor's manuscript I find this epitaph on Poe:

Published Works.

Published works:

“Conrad and Eudora;” Philadelphia, 1834. 144 pages, 16 mo.

“The Path of Sorrow;” 1832, Philadelphia.

“Narcoochee and Other Poems;” 1837. 153 pages, 12 mo. New York.

“The Lost Pleiad and Other Poems;” 1845. New York.

“Eonchs of Ruby;” 108 pages; 1851; New York.

“Memoralia,” 108 pages; 1851; New York.

“Virginalia;” 108 pages; 1851; New York.

“Atlanta;” 132 pages; Philadelphia; 1853.

“Facts of Diamonds “ — (named by Echo Club, of New York).

“Search. After Truth; A Psychologic Study.”

“The Sons of Usna; five-act tragedy; 92 pages; Philadelphia; 1858.

“Birthday Song of Liberty;” Atlanta; 1856. (This was printed by our ancient friend, Hanleiter & Co.)

The Manuscript Works.

“Charles Stuart;” a tragedy; (sold to Manager Cov. Garden theater, London.)

“Leona;” tragedy; five acts.

“The Signet Ring;” a tragedy; five acts.

“Count Julian;” tragedy; five acts.

“Osceola;” tragedy; five acts.

“Lectures on Poetry and Art,” “Gothic Songs of England,” “Life of Poe” — badly mutilated, etc.

I have been asked what disposition will be made of this manuscript matter. I answer that I don’t know, unless a complete set of Dr. Chivers's works can be formed. His earliest poems, like those of Byron and other “poets of passion,” are not only highly defective, but most atrocious trash. “Eonchs of Ruby,” “Memorialia” and “Virginalia” contain the cream of his muse. If these can be found it is possible to bring out a volume worthy of the poet. He did not print for money and hence but few of his works were published. If these can be found, I presume some competent editor will be chosen.

In no age or country can the lover of literature recall so sad a destiny — such utter waste of intellectual energy — a great scholar and critic, to say nothing of the poet though sitting high on Parnassus with his brothers, cast down and spirited away into oblivion.

JOHN Q. ADAMS.

Washington, Ga., March 12, 1897.

WHO WAS CHIVERS?

A Review of the Poe-Chivers Controversy.

The Claims of Dr. T. Holley Chivers to Have Furnished the Basis of Poe's Most Famous Poems — A Clear and Convincing Statement of Facts and Dates — Crude Poetry of No Mean Order.

Mr. W. M. Griswold of Cambridge, in a recent issue of the Transcript, adverts to a series of letters in some old volumes of the Literary Museum, by Dr. T. Holley Chivers. These letters referred to what the doctor called “cruel slanders,” published by Mrs. Locke and others in the Waverley Magazine, who charged that whatever was meritorious in Dr. Chivers's poetry “was purloined from Poe.”