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.
