‘Harry Thurston Peck’: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

Harry Thurston Peck

by Joseph S. Salemi

A few weeks ago my wife asked me to find a book for her via the internet bookstores. This is now the only practical way to locate out-of-print texts, and I had done the same thing several times in the past for her and for other family members.

She wanted a book that she remembered from her grade school days—a child’s fantasy titled The Adventures of Mabel. My wife did not know the author, or the date of publication, or anything else about the book other than that it was a children’s text about a young girl and her adventures with several talking animals, and that it had a gray cover. But her memory also told her that the prose style of the book was definitely from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

When I started my search it did not seem promising. The search engines at the internet bookstores showed countless books with the name “Mabel” in the title, and many with the added word “Adventures.” Nevertheless, it became clear after some time that the book in question was The Adventures of Mabel, written in 1897 by Harry Thurston Peck. In addition to this first edition (which Peck published under a pseudonym) there were a surprising number of newer editions, going right through to the 1960s. The book seems to have been one that many school districts liked, and wanted in their school libraries, and this kept the thing in print for decades after the author’s death.

Eventually I located an edition of Peck’s Mabel that had a gray cover, and that seemed to fit the timeline of my wife’s grade school days. I immediately bought it, and when it arrived she told me that it was precisely the edition that she had read as a young girl. I’ve done this for her three times before, with other hard-to-locate texts, and she now thinks of me as some kind of magician or wizard. I told her that it was not me, but the world-encircling scope of the internet bookstores that made these finds possible.

Anyway, I became curious about the author Harry Thurston Peck, of whom I knew nothing at all. There was a fair amount of information on-line about him. He only wrote two children’s books, and Mabel had apparently made a huge hit. All of his other works were scholarly, since he was a classics professor of very high abilities. The more I read about him, the more interested I became.

Peck was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1856. He attended Columbia University, and while still a young man he joined the faculty of that school, and quickly became a highly respected classicist of the first rank. His scholarship and publications were so highly regarded that he was appointed the Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1904. His list of publications was impressive: he edited Suetonius, wrote a History of Classical Philology, translated Petronius Arbiter’s Dinner of Trimalchio, produced a text on the pronunciation of Latin, and put together several anthologies of translations. He was also a historian, an essayist, a travel writer, and the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities and other encyclopedic study guides, all before the age of forty-five—an amazing feat for anyone in Classical Studies.

He also wrote one small book of poetry, Greystone and Porphyry, published in 1899 by Dodd, Mead & Company here in New York. Having learned about Peck’s life and career, I wondered if this book of verse (which was mentioned in the list of his publications) was worth reading. So when I saw that a copy of his Greystone and Porphyry was listed for sale at one of the internet bookshops, I just had to buy it.

That small book is why I’m writing this essay. But before I get to Peck’s poetry, let me finish with his life story. It is a sobering tale.

By 1904 Peck was in his prime, and at the very pinnacle of his career. His scholarly reputation was beyond reproach. He had a tenured position at a major Ivy League university. His writing brought him substantial income, as well as fame. All signs pointed to him having many more years of success, prestige, publication, and material rewards.

It was not to be. Peck’s wife divorced him in 1908, on the grounds of “desertion,” though that may have simply been a cover for some other issue. In 1909 Peck married again, and this is what lit the fuse to disaster. A third woman, who had read in the papers of Peck’s second marriage, brought a breach-of-promise lawsuit (for $50,000) against him.

In those days, a breach-of-promise suit could be initiated on several grounds, not just on an open violation of some written contract or agreement. If you had sent a woman love letters, or had written her poems that could be construed as “romantic,” or if you had “courted” her publicly, or if she had become pregnant and named you as the father, or even if an unfounded rumor of your engagement to her had been bruited about in gossip, she could launch such a suit against you. This was the era of Anthony Comstock, and any offense against the purity of womanhood aroused fury, especially in the courts, which (as the writer Ernest Belfort Bax pointed out) tended to be highly biased in favor of female complainants.

The sum of $50,000 was immense at that time, and the scent of money was very strong for some lawyers, particularly if the proposed defendant was a man of significant wealth and property. The lawsuit was ruinous for Peck in both a reputational and a financial sense. The woman’s attorney offered as evidence many passionate letters and poems written by Peck to the lady, as well as her testimony about their relationship. Although Peck was acquitted because of various uncertainties of interpretation in the written evidence, he lost in the court of public opinion, since the case had become a huge public scandal, with the newspapers excoriating him as a cad and a Lothario.

Peck declared bankruptcy, since his defense had cost him practically his entire fortune. But even worse was this: he was summarily dismissed from his position at Columbia University by the school’s puritanically tight-assed President, Nicholas Murray Butler. By 1910 Peck had taught at the university for twenty-eight years, and had honored his department with the unbroken record of his scholarship. But back then tenure was de facto, and not official. Even though Peck and Butler were personal friends of long acquaintance, Butler fired him simply out of moralistic outrage, and a terror of bad publicity. When Professor Joel Spingarn (a brilliant scholar in the school’s Comparative Literature Department) spoke up defending Peck and questioning Butler’s unfair actions, Butler fired him also.

Most of Peck’s friends and colleagues deserted him, as did his new wife. He could not find any job in academia. He could only live by getting small writing assignments that paid practically nothing. He dropped out of sight and became a homeless vagrant and eventually wound up in Ithaca, New York, where he fell gravely ill in 1913. Both his wives worked to help his recovery, and he survived. But he was broken. By 1914 he was back in his home town of Stamford, living in a cheap rooming house. There, on March 23, 1914, he put a revolver to his head and committed suicide.

This was the man who wrote The Adventures of Mabel, the book that delighted my wife when she was in grade school, and no doubt has delighted hundreds of other children ever since it appeared in 1897. It probably has had many more readers than any of Peck’s specialized scholarly texts in Classical Studies. The character Mabel is a polite and well-spoken little girl who is intelligent, curious, and brave.

But what of that small book of poetry (Greystone and Porphyry) that Peck wrote? Well, let’s turn to that now, and see what it can tell us.

It’s short—only 62 pages. The book is a lovely duodecimo, with deckle-edged laid paper of heavy weight, and a rubricated title page. The covers are hard and gray, with the title and author’s name in flourished gold capitals, and with a strange herbal design as the chief decoration. It contains eighteen poems, mostly short, with the last one being longer than the rest. Of these poems four have Latin titles, although all are in English.

The subjects can be surprising. There is one poem on Jefferson Davis, and another on Otto von Bismarck, and the final poem is a lengthy complaint against the power of Money. But let’s take a look at “Heliotrope,” which is of a more personal nature.

Heliotrope

Amid the chapel’s chequered gloom
She laughed with Dora and with Flora,
And chattered in the lecture-room—
That saucy little sophomora!
Yet while, as in her other schools,
She was a privileged transgressor,
She never broke the simple rules
Of one particular professor.

But when he spoke of varied lore,
Paroxytones and modes potential,
She listened with a face that wore
A look half fond, half reverential.
To her, that earnest voice was sweet,
And, though her love had no confessor,
Her girlish heart lay at the feet
Of that particular professor.

And he had learned, among his books
That held the lore of ages olden,
To watch those ever-changing looks,
The wistful eyes, the tresses golden,
That stirred his pulse with passion’s pain
And thrilled his soul with soft desire,
And bade fond youth return again,
Crowned with its coronet of fire.

Her sunny smile, her winsome ways,
Were more to him than all his knowledge,
And she preferred his words of praise
To all the honours of the college.
Yet “What am foolish I to him?”
She whispered to her heart’s confessor.
“She thinks me old and grey and grim,”
In silence pondered the professor.

Yet once when Christmas bells were rung
Above ten thousand solemn churches,
And swelling anthems grandly sung
Pealed through the dim cathedral arches;
Ere home returning, filled with hope,
Softly she stole by gate and gable,
And a sweet spray of heliotrope
Left on his littered study table.

Nor came she more from day to day
Like sunshine through the shadows rifting:
Above her grave, far, far away,
The ever-silent snows were drifting;
And those who mourned her winsome face
Found in its stead a swift successor
And loved another in her place—
All, save the silent old professor.

But, in the tender twilight grey,
Shut from the sight of carping critic,
His lonely thoughts would often stray
From Vedic verse and tongues Semitic,
Bidding the ghost of vanished hope
Mock with its past the sad possessor
Of the dead spray of heliotrope
That once she gave the old professor.

The structure of this poem is simple: a lovely young female student and an older professor feel a mutual attraction, but say nothing, since each assumes that any relationship between them is impossible. The student thinks she is too immature and foolish to expect any attention from him, and he thinks he is too old and unattractive to stir her interest. She has deep feelings for the man, and he feels the same for her, and wishes that his youth could return.

Nevertheless, one day during the Christmas holidays she leaves a spray of heliotrope on his desk. She never comes back to school, and we are told that she has died. All have forgotten her, except the old professor, who keeps the dried spray of heliotrope as a remembrance of an imagined hope that never materialized.

The poem is typically late nineteenth-century in diction, style, and sentiment. There are verbal touches that we might find clichéd, such as “her girlish heart” and “tresses golden” and “her winsome ways.” The references to “Paroxytones and modes potential,” and to “Vedic verse,” clearly indicate that the poem’s professor is a Latinist and philologist, just as Peck was. Is the poem autobiographical? Perhaps, but the theme of hot sexual sparks between student and teacher goes as far back as Abelard and Heloise. The whole thing may be a fictive invention.

Note that each stanza is composed of two tetrameter ABAB quatrains, with alternating masculine and feminine endings. The rhymes are perfect except for “churches” and “arches,” which might be due to an earlier pronunciation from Peck’s Connecticut background. One major issue is the length of the poem, which today would be considered excessive for such a minor subject. And there is a kind of straitlaced sentimentality in the piece that practically strangles any genuine sexual expression. It is a polished poem, but very much of its time and place.

Another interesting poem is “Immemor” (unmindful, or unremembering), of nine rhyming couplets. It also deals with love and loss.

Immemor

I stood beside the sleeping sea
Whose waters murmured drowsily,

And Night behind her dusky bars
Looked through the lattice-work of stars.

Then she I loved was by my side
And all the world seemed glorified

When, stooping down, with dainty hand
My name she traced upon the sand,

And said that so Love’s magic art
That name had graven on her heart.

Slow crept the waves along the sand,
Soft lapped the waters on the land,

Till all her work of love and pride
Was lost beneath the swelling tide.

To-night I walk the shore alone
And, thinking of the years long flown,

Recall the tide of time that came
And blotted from her heart my name.

This is another poem on love, but one that clearly echoes Spenser’s Amoretti 75, and more obliquely, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. But Peck’s poem is darker—the waves wash away his name, and there is no expressed hope of any remembrance for himself, nor does he promise literary immortality to the girl addressed. It is another poem of deep regret and sorrow over thwarted desire. The poem’s language shows that Peck had significant talent, as in “the lattice-work of stars” and the use of “Slow” and “Soft” as adverbs.

Melancholy pervades all of Peck’s compositions. The poem “In Aeternum” (into eternity) is not just lugubrious, but even reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s obsession with premature burial.

In Aeternum

When I was still a living man,
And ere the years of life were spent,
My fearful fancy often ran
On what would be my punishment.

For I had sinned as only few
In human form have sinned as yet;
And, though suspicion slept, I knew
That God would wait and not forget.

This hideous form it seemed to take,
That I was doomed where none could save
To die yet not to die, but wake
Amid the damps that fill the grave.

And oftentimes in fearful dreams,
When all was dark and I was hid,
I heard my own half-stifled screams
From under neath the coffin-lid.

Five days ago life left its cell…
Long shuddering silence… then I knew
That I had died, and oh, too well
That all the dreadful dream was true!

Black darkness weighs my eyeballs down,
The leaden coffin’s close embrace
Keeps pressing, like a devil’s crown,
The cere-cloth on a ghastly face.

I struggle hard to stir, to speak,
To beg of Christ another fate,—
To cry aloud, to curse, to shriek,
To thrust away the leaden weight.

O depth of agony profound!
No heart to break, no tear to shed,
No tongue to voice the awful sound
Of him who dies and is not dead:

But o’er and o’er and o’er and o’er
I think of all the ill I did,
That holds me down forever more
Beneath the leaden coffin-lid.

This is a frightening and upsetting poem, and if it is autobiographical then we see Peck as a man tormented by unspoken guilt, and driven by a Connecticut Puritan conscience to an unshakable sense of his own depravity. What could he have possibly done that would evoke this nightmare of living death? His life story suggests a weakness for women, and relationships with women are what led to his downfall.

I’ll quote from one more poem, the strange “Unter den Linden, 1890.” It is set in Berlin, in the year that a young Kaiser Wilhelm II angrily dismissed his Reich Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. This act has generally been seen as a major mistake that set the stage for the catastrophe of World War I, since it resulted in the subsequent alliance of France and Czarist Russia that forced Germany into a two-front war in 1914.

Poets are sometimes said to be prophetic. I think a good case can be made that Peck’s piece, published before the start of the twentieth century, shows that kind of vatic power.

The poem is a twelve-stanza narrative, each stanza composed of two ABAB quatrains, exactly like “Heliotrope.” The scene is the Café Bauer, on the famous and picturesque Unter den Linden boulevard, where persons are relaxing towards the end of day. The city is described as flushed with national pride, beautiful, prosperous, and profoundly warlike.

Suddenly the sound of drums and bugles announces that the Kaiser and his retinue are approaching. And as the retinue comes into sight, Peck describes the figure of Kaiser Wilhelm II:

Cold eyes, set lips, a restless glance
That wanders in uneasy quest,
With looks that like a living lance
Blaze from beneath the helmet-crest;
Upon that face as on a page
Has nature stamped with cruel truth
The heartlessness of cynic age,
The reckless insolence of youth.

What morbid motive half defined,
What œstrus-thought that stings and stays,
Goads on his restless, brooding mind—
This sceptred Sphinx of modern days?
Is it ambition’s poisoned wine—
The throb, perchance, of ceaseless pain—
The spark of genius half divine—
The burning of a madman’s brain?

And this is he whose sword and pen
All Europe eyes with bated breath,
Whose word can arm a million men,
Whose nod can hurl them on to death:
A nation’s life, a nation’s ease,
The honour of a nation’s name,
The awful fates of war and peace,
All centred in a single frame.

This description of the Kaiser captures perfectly the unease and apprehension felt everywhere in the Western world about Germany’s new emperor—his unpredictability, his inexperience, his disregard of ministerial advice, his sometimes truculent nationalism, and most especially his undiplomatic impulsiveness and boyish militarism. Peck ends the poem with a reminder of the terrible potential enemies that Germany faces, and the major wars that may have to be fought:

To scourge the land with sword and flame
The northern Cossack grimly waits;
The Dane remembers Düppel’s shame,
The Austrian broods o’er Königgrätz;
While on the hills of fair Lorraine
That front the slopes of Vendenheim—
A tiger with a slender chain—
The Gallic foeman bides his time.

Stout-hearted sons of Fatherland!
Who kneel to God but face the foe,
And side by side together stand
To sing the song of long ago
That, rising from a myriad throats,
A nation’s battle-hymn divine,
Thrills on the ear like bugle notes:
“Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein!”

This is a perceptive comment from Peck about the dangers that Imperial Germany faced in 1890, when there was fierce resentment in France against the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, the silent threat of Czarist expansion in the east, Danish anger over the 1864 battle of Dübbel, and Austrian bitterness over their severe defeat at Königgrätz in 1866. Germany had been united by the victories in these wars against France, Denmark, and Austria, but it had come at the cost of lasting European resentment and revanchism. Peck seems to have been well up on current events and political personalities, and despite his distrust of the Kaiser, was favorably disposed to the German nation itself. When he quotes a line from the German patriotic song (“Strong and loyal stands the Watch on the Rhine!”) to end his poem, he is praising young Germany for its strength and military victories, while warning about the dangers that surround it, and about the unstable character of its new emperor. Peck sensed future disaster for the world, and expressed it in this poem.

I was pleased and surprised to find this obscure poet, whose tragic life cast a shadow over his scholarly achievements. And finding him and his poetry was a pure accident—the side result of doing an internet book search. And this has confirmed me in my strong opinion that a good poet must utterly put out of his mind any thoughts or concerns about his audience. You will never know who your audience might be! Your poems could float around for 126 years—as Harry Thurston Peck’s did—before a sympathetic reader in New York came across them while trying to please his wife.

Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.