38 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



gible ; when practical work of some sort was held to be the 

 only authentic and adequate expression of a man's spirit; 

 when to be an artist meant, for the majority of Americans, 

 to be a painter of tavern signs, a mere decorator, or a reveller 

 strayed from ancient immoral revels with scantily clothed 

 goddesses and muses, one who had no lot in a world in which 

 the saving of a man's soul was the one real business of life. 



Of beauty as the ultimate form of truth, and of art as the 

 universal language of the human spirit, the men of Poe's time 

 had only the faintest perception. If Hawthorne's subtle 

 genius had not so deeply concerned itself with sin it would 

 not have gained its early recognition; and Emerson's serene 

 and beautiful insight, translating" life into larger terms, made 

 men of traditional temper shiver as if a fresh wind had sud- 

 denly penetrated a close room. A host of Poe's contem- 

 poraries did in it understand him because they spoke a dialect 

 while he used the universal language; and there are still those 

 to whom the dialect is dear because, like the dialect spoken 

 on the canals of Venice, it offers such a large vocabulary of 

 abusive and profane words. 



Poe was unfortunate in the period in which he lived be- 

 cause it was alien to him and out of sympathy with his point 

 of view and conception of art; he has been also marvelously 

 unlucky in his friends. Enemies are rarely dangerous: their 

 motives are so obvious and their methods so clumsy that, in 

 most cases, their attacks are purely spectacular; like those 

 animosities which some newspapers substitute for principles. 

 The bombs our enemies prepare with malevolent devotion and 

 surreptitious skill generally burst in their hands. But friends 

 are a great and serious peril; and at times one understands 

 Ibsen's cynical remark that he could not afford to have friends; 

 they were too expensive. When Gilfillan, in a moment of 

 rashness, knocked at the door of the house in Cheyne Row 

 and Carlyle opened it in person the ardent admirer introduced 

 himself by saying: " Air. Carlyle, I've been lecturing on you." 

 And a damned piece of impertinence it was." cried the great 



