Text: Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Poe, Cooper, and the Hall of Fame,” North American Review (New York, NY), vol. 185, no. 8, whole no. 621, August 1905, pp. 801-812

[page 801, unnumbered:]

THE picturesque village of Cooperstown has devoted a week's round in this last month of summer to the centennial celebration of its settlement at the foot of Otsego Lake. Its citizens look upon the name and fame of James Fenimore Cooper as the chief glory of the place where one whom they pronounce “the greatest of American writers of romance” lived, worked and died. At his grave the village children sang and scattered flowers, while not inconceivably the shades of Uncas and Natty Bumppo hovered near, and the heroic ghost of Long Tom Coffin ventured thus far inland to share in the rites. The eloquence of Professor Matthews panegyrized the novelist of his adopted State — and this is well, for our champion of the spelling cohort has been one of the doughtiest defenders, since Cooper, of American letters against foreign misconception. Cooper plainly is not without honor in the glades of his own legendary. But no tablet bearing the name of the author of “The Pilot” and “The Pioneers” has been unveiled in the pavilions of our metropolitan Hall of Fame.

The capital of Virginia has raised ten thousand dollars for a [page 802:] memorial of Edgar Allan Poe, whose boyhood was passed in Richmond. Last spring, Baltimore awoke to the belief that there can be no fitter addition to the structures from which she derives her titular epithet than an impressive monument, of some kind, to the poet and romancer whom Tennyson considered “the literary glory of America.” It was in Baltimore that Poe won his first start; there, too, he met his last mischance, and lay distraught upon his deathbed; there his remains are guarded by the modest tomb erected, through the efforts of a woman, almost three decades after their interment; and in the same city still dwell the clansmen of his name. Baltimoreans applaud the project for an adequate memorial, and doubtless the subscription will soon be under way. As yet, however, the votes cast for Edgar Allan Poe by the electors of the Hall of Fame have fallen slightly short of the number required for inclusion within its colonnade.

Public opinion concerning our temple on the Heights has gone through several stages. The announcement of the conception of such a shrine, and of the fact that means had been supplied by private munificence for its realization under the auspices of New York's junior University, was received with some urbane yet not unkindly lifting of the eyebrows at the conscious or unconscious audacity of the undertaking. Could it seem otherwise than supereminently Hesperian to our kin across sea whose Westminster Abbey came not as a birth, but “just growed”? Could any awe invest a Pantheon established neither by a National Assembly nor by that divine right of royalty which created off-hand the Walhalla of the Danube?

The genesis of the institution doubtless was more unabashed, and also less seriously scrutinized, than if its sponsor had been one of the older seaboard universities. To cut in is after all a way of doing things, and the world has few barriers to assurance plus energy. Both traits were displayed by the management of the college whose resources were scanty, yet equal to obtaining the grandest of sites for future expansion, and to making itself at once conspicuous by so notable a memorial. It soon was apparent that to the plain people there was something effective in the plan set forth. Those who had received their schooling since the adoption of statutes requiring the national flag to be unfurled above every schoolhouse, and who knew by heart “My Country, [page 803:] tis of Thee,” showed an interest which tempered the cynicism of an exclusive class. The resulting tolerance extended by our arbiters of taste was confirmed, with American gallantry, from the moment when the rumor went about that to the patriotic impulse of a young countrywoman, whom all held in affectionate honor, the coming shrine would owe its endowment.

Next came an interval of curiosity as to the working of the scheme. Would it be as wisely guided as it had been cleverly adventured? Could it maintain the dignity of its attributes, or would it be a thing for passers to wag their heads at, and say: “Aha, aha! our eye hath seen it.” Manifestly, however, Chancellor MacCracken in any case would be able to render his antiphonal: “Aha! even the ancient high places are ours in possession.” When the columned hemicycle began to show around Stanford White's beautiful edifice, on that lofty site, the Chancellor's vantage-ground was indisputable; and when, ere long, the result of the balloting, in 1900, for a possible fifty famous Americans became known, it was admitted that the test of an initial election had come out fairly well. The country at large had made nominations and was discussing the returns; it had been taken with the idea of such a foundation in the city which every American visits, and in which, as in Washington, he seems to have a certain share. In fine, this first election, conducted with much circumstance and precision, advanced the enterprise to the status of achievement: not necessarily a Pantheon such as well might have been founded at the national capital, but at least the peer in location and pretensions of Munich's Ruhmeshalle — from which it appears to take its name.

This virtual acceptance of the Hall as a public institution brought with it the right of citizen censorship which has been exercised Amerikanisch, with all degrees of seriousness and humor. The election of only twenty-nine from the nominated list showed that even the greatest of democracies has not yet produced fifty heroes beyond all cavil — stars of such magnitude that no differences of faith, opinion, temperament, among the electors, could prevent a common recognition of their light. On the whole, twenty-nine was a goodly number to begin with, and there might have been worse happenings than the reservation of twenty-one vacancies for the arbitrament of after time and discussion. The election of Lee by a two-thirds vote proved the catholicity of the [page 804:] judges. The debarment of Hamilton by his alien birth was keenly felt; probably I was but one of the electors who expressed regret, when rendering their ballots, over his ineligibility.

Nevertheless, the failure to elect two or three of the nominees seemed, upon consideration of the relative rank of several among the chosen, a palpable sin of omission. It was to me a cause for bewilderment. I had committed the error of supposing that my own judgment was so naturally shared by discerning men that the success of these candidacies was inevitable. And should not the electors, though one of their own number say it, be reckoned as discerning? Imbued, then, with respect for the breadth and acumen of the twenty-five “college presidents,” the twenty-six “professors of history and scientists,” the twenty-six “publicists, editors, and authors,” and the twenty-three “chief justices,” with whom I was associated, — and to whom so honorable a function had unexpectedly been entrusted, — I confess that I was quite taken aback to find that only thirty including myself had voted for Cooper, and that Poe, with presumedly the South behind him, had received but thirty-eight of the ninety-seven ballots returned. Then, too, possessed by a reverence acquired in youth for the Father of American Song, and a belief that a man's eminence should be measured by its ratio to his own era, I thought it surprising that the nomen venerabile of Bryant was not upon the bead-roll, although he had lacked but 2 votes of the required 51.

The case of Cooper seemed peculiarly inexplicable, and now, since the second test, in 1905, it would seem as much more so as the square of the additional years, but for conditions which it is the purpose of this article to examine in the hope of their amelioration. That Washington Irving should have received the large percentage of eighty-three out of ninety-seven votes, standing eleventh on the list, could not be criticised. But if Irving, why not his great compeer — that other romancer, who, if the less classical and refined of the two, was the more creative, the more American, and is to this day “equal in renown”? Above all, why but thirty votes for him, to Irving's eighty-three? Both were founders of a native school, and side by side the vansmen in our sixty years’ march for international copyright. Were there fewer than a third of the electors uninformed concerning the worldwide vogue of Cooper, and the unceasing sale of his works; were [page 805:] there so few who could recall experiences like that of the present writer, who, with a zest excited in boyhood by a chance acquaintance with but one of Cooper's novels, had trudged a league for each successive other, until the whole enchanting series had been assimilated? Had then the lapse of years made so unfamiliar to my colleagues those opening stanzas of Halleck's “Red Jacket”? —

Were there no more who had appreciated the survey of Cooper's life and work afforded by Professor Lounsbury's contribution to the “Men of Letters” series? Recalling to mind that biography, a classic in its way, and therewith the estimate placed by Mr. Brownell in a masterpiece of criticism upon our rugged celebrant of frontier and ocean adventure, I felt that in respect of the romancer's inalienable claims to such apotheosis as can be bestowed by official commemoration I was willing to be “in the right with two or three.”

If the vote for Cooper gave cause for wonder, what of the insufficient tally scored for Poe, whose manes probably will never cease to be vexed by a witling class of followers, but concerning whose place in imaginative literature the world at large has not the slightest doubt? As a writer he was among the first to recognize the powers of Hawthorne; both were idealists, and if the one produced no sustained romances like “The Scarlet Letter,” the other gave voice to no lyric melodies such as “Israfel” and “The Haunted Palace.” These artistic, beauty-haunted compeers were twin orbs in their nineteenth-century constellation. And as for the matter of renown — of a place in the Hall of Fame — what, then, is fame? On your conscience, fellow judges, whether you are realists or dreamers, jurists, scholars or divines, pay some slight regard to that voice of the outer world, which one of our own writers termed the verdict of “a kind of contemporaneous posterity”; note that there is scarcely an enlightened [page 806:] tongue into which Poe's lyrics and tales have not been rendered, — that he is read and held as a distinctive genius, in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, — that the spell of his art is felt wherever our own English speech goes with the flags of its two great overlands. Fame! Is there one of us still unconscious of Poe's fame?

Those who have given their votes for Franklin and Hamilton surely have not demurred on ethical grounds to one against whom no charge of immorality can lie, seeing that his life, like his handiwork, was chaste as moonlight. That he was poor and headstrong is true; that he was the congenital victim of an abnormal craving for stimulants, now accounted a disease, is true; but what of all this beside the gift that made its shining way against such odds — beside one's gratitude for his crystallization of our inchoate taste and for the recognition which his poetry — and romance did so much to gain for the literary product of his native land.

Thus I thought and think, and the blanks on the bulletin of 1900 would still seem inexplicable, and far more so their persistence after the second election — in which, though Cooper advanced to a count of forty-three, and Poe to forty-two, Bryant fell off to forty-six — were it not that I have begun to see a light. — Meanwhile, public opinion concerning these shortcomings has been outspoken, and barbed with the sarcasms of a justifiably ironic press. It has been intimated, for example, that Poe and Whitman are taboo by senatorial edict. Plainly this cannot be so as regards Poe, for his name has twice been squarely presented on the roll of nominations, and nine more votes would have given it a majority on the second trial. In relation to Whitman it should be noted that to put a name before the electors requires, under the constitution, nominations “from the public in general — seconded by any member of the University Senate.” It is true that after an election is decided a veto-power may be exercised against an elect, but only “by a majority of the nineteen members of the New York University Senate.” This veto would simply “return the name for future consideration. The electors might again approve it by an emphatic vote.” The fact is that [page 807:] the name of Whitman was not eligible, under the ten-year limit, until the election of 1905, nor had there been any so general an advocacy of it as to constitute a definite public estimate of his fame — nor, so far as I am aware, any preliminary effort made by its most ardent votaries. Any elector had the right to add it to the list submitted for supplementary nominations, and if even a few of the Hundred had done so, I very much doubt if it would have failed to appear upon the “revised” roll containing the full and final panel.

The priority, by a generation, of Cooper and Poe, and of Bryant — whom Whitman found so satisfying — is manifest, and that any name is not submitted at the first available date hardly constitutes a grievance. As one never deaf to Whitman's large utterance, and whose early statement that he and Emerson and Poe were our poets from whom the world “had most to learn” has long been vindicated, I foresee a lustrum when he will be ushered to the Hall by the equity of time; yet I conceive that even his chartered renowners would not care to have him enter before he comes as a conqueror.

With light gained, then, from the returns of 1905, which elected Lowell and Whittier, but no historian or other author, and not a single scientist or great inventor, it is plain that the rules thus far adhered to block the way to reasonable coordination. An otherwise good system surely may be amended in such wise as to produce results more in accord with national expectation. This belief is here expressed because it may well be said that the judges themselves should not rest content with the mere transmission of their votes. For one, I should have made some unofficial effort in 1905, in behalf of certain names, but unforeseen events put it quite beyond my power. Another election will take place in 1910, but I do not assume to count upon a surer or more serviceable time than the present for lightening the concern upon my mind.

I have used the word “associates” in speaking of the hundred judges, but — and here I reach the gravamen of the complaint — we have been, after all, associated no more actively than the gargoyles of Notre Dame or the saintlier marble images of the Milan Cathedral; perhaps still less so, for it has not seemed beyond conjecture, in the fancy of our pasquinaders, that the statued sages of a Supreme Court House, or Mr. Ward's allegorical [page 808:] impersonations within the Stock Exchange pediment, may confabulate at the mystic midnight hour. I am myself the possessor of a generous bowl which I piously believe — like Gil Blas unquestioning his children's paternity — to be of the true Imari ware, and which mayhap was often brimmed with votive blossoms before its departure from the Far East. For me and mine it serves the office of a punch-bowl, though too fragile to be lent in the fashion of Holmes's silver transmittendum from the “Mayflower,” nor setting up any claim to have come hither in the “Powhatan” with the first Japanese embassy. Yet ‘tis not without the dignity of years, and is treasured all the more for its spacious fragility. Now, grouped in a council ring within its inner surface — τὶ θεω̄ν δαιδαλμα, “some cunning work of the gods “ — are the sages of Nippon, they whom we traditionally denominate the Hundred Wise Men. More than once I have essayed to count these dignitaries, but the refulgence of their shorn and shining heads is confusing, and one can only make sure that their tally falls somewhat short; certain of them must have tarried behind, like those laggard judges who withheld their ballots in the University election of 1905. It is true that after a liberal enjoyment of the service which my bowl renders upon occasion the count is enlarged, or even doubled. Between two extremes it is pleasant to regard the Wise Men as present in full quota — a legendary Hundred; and as to their wisdom, do not their reverend faces, their attire — judicial, sacerdotal or scholastic — reveal this beyond a doubt?

How often, since the inception of our Hall of Fame, I have reflected enviously upon the superior advantages for counsel enjoyed by our prototypes within the hollow of this bowl — this coracle so vastly fuller of wisdom, and more enduring, than that which sank beneath the weight of only three wise men of Gotham!

Under our electoral system a real cause for surprise is that the enshrinement of forty immortals has been already effected, and has called forth so few expressions of discontent respecting the selections actually made. Consider the limitations imposed. Once and again, a period of five years intervening, the university and college presidents, the chief justices, the professors of history and scientists, and the publishers, editors and authors have not been disobedient to the vision from the Heights. They have received the representative lists of the famous dead, and have [page 809:] underscored the names of those whom they, each for himself, have thought most entitled to mural consecration. Possibly some of the justices have been able to confer, in full bench, before reaching their decisions, but as for the publishers, editors and authors, they have voted in cabinets as separate as those in which cardinals are immured for the election of a new Pope. Few of them have had the opportunity, after receiving in late springtime the official “roll of names” from the Chancellor, to compare views with their colleagues; still fewer have exchanged written communications. If some plan had been devised whereby a goodly number of us might have been in conference for a single day; if we could have bumped heads and grazed shoulders, like the Hundred Wise Men of the East; or, if the Chancellor, in the exercise of his prerogative, had acquainted the electoral body, by means of an inclusive circular No. 3, with arguments submitted to him by any judges in support of any nominees, there would have been a basis for reconsideration. If, then, a supplementary vote had been permitted in the cases of those names - which had come within a half-score ballots of the needful fifty-one, it seems probable that from five to ten more names would have been added to the eleven (of all classes) successful at the more recent election.

As it was, Holmes received the large number of forty-nine votes, although it was the first occasion of his eligibility; Bryant received forty-six, and a like number was accorded to Patrick Henry, Calhoun and Andrew Jackson, respectively. Motley reached forty-seven. Among famous Americans of foreign birth, Hamilton had the votes of eighty-eight out of the ninety-five cast, and was the only one elected, although Roger Williams, of the same group, lacked but five votes of a majority. The test of a supplementary ballot might well have been applied to. nominees most nearly obtaining the requisite count, and if it had been extended to the candidacies of Poe and Cooper, — which had gained new supporters since 1900, — I think they would have been “of the company “ whose tablets were unveiled last Decoration Day. Nothing, of course, could be more fantastic than a choice made peine forte et dure. The electors are no members of a Sacred College, to be returned again and again to their boxes, nor jurymen sent back to quarters to prevent a mistrial, nor delegated for extended balloting as under the [page 810:] two-thirds rule of a Democratic convention. Yet a system is defective that goes “to the other extreme,” as Astor Bristed said when Bentley changed the title of “The Wits’ Miscellany” to that of “Bentley's Magazine.”

A single ballot is permitted at each recurring fifth year, and while, in 1905, there were twenty-six vacancies in the native American class alone, there was but the hit-or-miss chance of obtaining fifty-one votes for any name at all. The fundamental trouble is to be sought among the rules upon which the Chancellor lays most stress in his attractive and perspicuous “Official Book of the Hall of Fame” — issued, one notes, in 1901, when their practicability had received but a first trial. “There is no obligation,” he says, “upon the Board of Electors in any given year to agree upon any name or number of names,” and certainly none could wish there should be were it possible. When he adds, not without dignity, that “their opinions are sought once only,” experience justifies the response that the opinions of the — Board well might be sought and intercommunicated, and weighed in preparation for an eclectic supplementary ballot and the final closure of the polls. Last spring an Academy of the Fine Arts, voting in actual conclave for the admission of new members, egregiously failed to carry out its avowed inclinations, electing but three of many laudable candidates recommended by its council. Suppose that the seventy-one voters had been distributed throughout the country: is it likely that even those three could have passed the ordeal of an unrenewable vote by mail? As it was, a supplementary session set matters right.

It is quite as commendable a function of the public to take part in the primaries as to pass judgment on the returns. The proselyting sisterhood have shown the way, enshrining three famous and eligible women, by means of unceasing admonition to the electors. Their zeal would have triumphed only in the case of Mary Lyon, had not the University Senate so construed the rules that forty-seven votes — of the eighty-six cast by those who “actually considered the names of women “ — should elect, instead of a vote of fifty-one out of ninety-five as required in all other. classes. By this construction the Senate seemingly conceded that what it terms the constitution is, after all, not more sacrosanct, nor less subject to amendment, under unforeseen conditions, than, for instance, the masterpiece devised by the [page 811:] Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Outside of the feminine propaganda not much direct influence was exerted, except by the special advocates of denominational worthies, counter-claimants, names hardly of the universal class. The fact that the press alone spoke up for Poe and Cooper doubtless reflected a general assumption that their fame was so secure that direct appeals in their behalf would imply distrust of the electoral intelligence. It now appears that such appeals should have been made. Personally I should have valued a license to give Poe the triple vote that Mark Twain proposed to cast for Mr. Jerome, and certain fellow writers were similarly inclined. All the same, it is not fully evident that if there had been a National Academy of Letters, to which his name could be referred, the affair would have come out much better. The literary vote for no author was larger than that awarded by some other judicial group, and was relatively smaller as given for Holmes, Parkman, Poe and Whittier. The function of such an Academy which Mr. Benson thinks its best excuse for being — namely, “to draw a line “ — was freely exercised by the voting literati in relation to their own guild.

It is already perceptible that few observances of the Republic's most poetic holiday will be thought more expressive than the quinquennial dedication, in the Hall of Fame, of tablets to those who have bequeathed us their renown, and

On the occasion of last May, thinking it perhaps my only chance to witness the ceremony, I was of the many who crossed. Washington Bridge with that intent. The day's blend of air and sunshine was auspicious for the superb plateau of University Heights. I followed intelligent throngs inspecting the grounds, the college buildings, the Hall and its Museum, and I foresaw, as none can fail to do, the growth and expansion made possible by the University's transmigration. The scene, the gathering, the ceremonies of the colonnade, were unquestionably effective. I listened upon the terraced lawn to Chancellor MacCracken's justly confident address; to Governor Hughes's characterizations of Quincy Adams, Madison, Hamilton, General Sherman, Lowell, Whittier, and others whose panels were unveiled; and to the patriotic [page 812:] speech of the visiting Governor of the old Bay State. One was aware that the emotions of the typical assemblage were not out of keeping; that few thought to scrutinize the authority investing a foundation so visually realized, and that in all likelihood a new generation will view it through that perspective which tends to make equal in time and honor institutions established earlier than one's remembrance.

Its appeal, then, to the aspirations of American youth is fairly well assured. But this year's unveiling, while lengthening a classified roll of famous Americans to the twoscore mark, pointedly accentuated the slight put upon two or three names as well entitled to precedence as any of the author class thus far commemorated. Inasmuch as whatever reproach this implies is divided between the electoral Board and the custodians of the endowment, I thus respectfully ask the Senate of the University to consider the need of an improved working method. In this heyday of executive supremacy the Chancellor-Chairman would be forgiven for taking a hint from the example of a reform Governor bent upon carrying out the wishes of a generous public. It is my trust that in his heart he will not disfavor this behest, that the press, as the electoral year approaches, shall not slacken, but increase rather, its admonitions, and that all loyal Americans shall do likewise; and that all manly youths shall speak up for their wholesomest and most virile old-time recounter; and that our innumerous fiction-writers shall recall their obligations to him who founded a native school, and to that romancer whose wonder tales brought the short story to its first artistic perfection; and, lastly, that all bards and bardlings, though now a secondary division of this army with banners, shall lift their voices for the lyrist “whose heart-strings are a lute,” and for the austere and gray-beard minstrel who, with harp in hand, began their Parnassian procession. And that these adjurations may be humbly reénforced, I pray those of my judicial colleagues who, in 1910, retain their incumbency to underscore upon their ballot lists names too long unhonored, and in this wise further justify the confidence bestowed with their electoral charge.

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.