Hiram Corson Voices the Spirit

Hiram Corson, in the days when professors looked like professors 

Around here things have begun to slip in a distinctively geriatric way.  More than sixty years ago I one day noticed that my grandfather, who had always been a stickler about his modest personal toilette, was going two days, sometimes three, between shaves.  I still shave most days, but I’ve lost control of numerous other things of greater import, such as my library.  Half the time I set out to fetch one of my books, I fail to find it where it should be.  Very recently I lost a book I had agreed to review and had held in my hands only long enough to give it a superficial skim.  This means I am constantly having to go to the library to consult something I know is in this house or—even worse—ordering a second copy from the Internet.  I reckon that any price under ten dollars is saving me money otherwise paid out at gas stations and fed into parking meters, not to mention the annoyance of time-consuming and fruitless searching of my shelves.

Quite recently I thought I needed to consult an old favorite, Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study (1894, 1898), a handbook of great originality and enduring charm.  If you want to know why nineteenth-century political oratory is in a different and higher realm than that of the impeachment proceedings now in progress, this book offers a clue.  I think I already have two copies of it, but it’s of small format and easily lost behind or under a regular octavo.  I got another from Abebooks for six dollars, and it is nearly pristine.  As of May 4, 1899, as recorded on the flyleaf, it was the property of one Howard Stinson Kinney, presented as “First prize in Public Speaking.”  Mr. Kinney, apparently a talker rather than a reader, had not even cut all of the pages.

This is a wonderful little book, but by the time the new old copy had arrived, the urgency of my desire had been calmed by Google Books.  I don’t like reading books on line but will do so under duress.   So since the book arrived—and before it gets lost--I have been concentrating on the author rather than his most refreshing ideas about literary study.  Most people if asked the odd question “What is the greatest thing the French government ever did for the United States?” would probably answer: “The gift of the statue of Liberty.”  That was in 1886, and it is the wrong answer.  The right answer is “The revocation of the Edict of Nantes” two hundred years earlier (1685).  By this colossal act of self-defeating bigotry, Louis XIV rescinded the policy of the limited toleration of French Protestantism.  Among the long-term results of the French Wars of Religion was a very large exodus of French Protestants (also called Huguenots) seeking refuge in some neighboring countries.  The Huguenots were notable for their industry, their skilled labor, their artisanal training and accomplishments, their business acumen , their progressive attitudes, and their can-do spirit.  This was not a population that wise national leaders would ordinarily want to slaughter, persecute or expel.  But the Sun King’s folly was the bonanza of other lands, including England and her north American colonies.

Seventeenth-century French ecumenicism

The original American Corson showed up on Staten Island in the seventeenth century, his Carolina-bound ship having been blown slightly off course in a gale.  By the time of the Revolution the family had established a major beachhead in and around Philadelphia, where several of them adopted Quakerism.  Perhaps the most celebrated of the Corsons, also a Hiram (1804-1896), was a medical doctor resident at Plymouth Meeting.  This man, in addition to being famous for his superior medical prowess, was an early feminist and committed abolitionist.  Most readers probably don’t even know what a medical “house call” was, but I am just barely old enough to remember them.  Dr. Corson, making house calls, travelled on horseback or by carriage a distance equivalent to sixteen laps around the globe’s circumference!

But I must get to the doctor’s relative, my Hiram Corson, the English professor (1828 –1911).  He eventually taught at Cornell, an institution of unique importance in the history of American higher education for several founding innovations.  But his earlier pedagogical career was an exercise in virtuous works at such places as Girard College (indigent and underprivileged students) and the Ogontz School (highest quality education for young ladies).  He published dozens of essays and books, beginning with Old English, Chaucer, and the Elizabethans, but including Robert Browning, who in 1886 was the keenest of cutting edges.  His masterpiece, in my estimation, is his Aims of Literary Study; but what fascinates me even more were his extracurricular interests. 

Corson was a great believer in the spiritual, a concept only tangentially connected with religion.  For him every poem had an “intellectual” but also a “spiritual” content, the latter apprehensible only through expert vocalization.  It was not through literary analysis in a book or classroom discussion that one grasped the spirit of a poem, but through the expert articulation of the trained human voice.  The “vocal” aspect of literary study has practically disappeared today, but it is directly connected to the teachings of classical rhetoricians.  An American high-school graduate of the nineteenth century could be expected to have memorized a large store of English poetry and to be able to recite it in an elegant manner.

Madame Blavatsky

Corson didn’t stop there with “spirit”.  He was an actual Spiritualist and a pioneer student of “paranormal phenomena” and “psychical research”.  The second half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of poltergeists, table-rappers, and ectoplasm manifestations.  Corson was convinced that there had to be a few grains of wheat among all the chaff and heroically set out to winnow through it.  He was in cahoots—or as he thought of it, scientific collaboration—with the celebrated “controlled” medium Minnie Meserve Soule (1867-1936), a prim and proper Bostonian lady.  A “controlled” medium was one who in the trance-state became the voice or channel for specific familiar spirits from the Other World.  Minnie discovered her unwelcome powers in childhood through a series of remarkable precognitive dreams.  Her occult name was “Mrs. Chenoweth”, and she channeled an impressive spirit called Imperator as well as various young American Indian lasses, especially a sixteen-year-old Choctaw named Sunbeam.  Corson was a friend of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, and one of the weirder women who ever walked the earth.  Nominally a Russian Orthodox Christian, Blavatsky was fascinated by Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, and played a major role in stimulating the “oriental” aspects of Western occultism.  What is one to say about all this?  Well, it’s better than most current literary critical theory.  Corson entertained Madame Blavatsky at his home in Ithaca.  Though I have no documentation for it I like to think that over tea he introduced her to his friend Andrew Dickson White, one of Cornell’s founders, who in 1896 published his great two-volume classic, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.