James De Mille's "Phi Beta Kappa Poem"

Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia Monk

The republication of James De Mille's untitled poem on the state of humankind, read at the anniversary exercises of the Phi Beta Kappa society of Brown University on June 16, 1879, is of considerable interest to students of De Mille and of nineteenth-century Canadian literature.  De Mille is, of course, best known to Canadian readers for his "science fiction" novel, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which occupies an important place in the development of Canadian fiction in the late nineteenth century; he is also known, to a somewhat lesser extent, for the posthumously published Behind the Veil, a long poem on immortality and Divine Love.  The Phi Beta Kappa poem sheds more light not only on the author of these two works but also on the relationship between them, since they can now be seen, together with the poem itself, as parts of a total oeuvre, rather than as isolated pieces as they have been.  This development in turn begins to fill in one more gap in the as yet incomplete map of nineteenth-century literary history in Canada.

     Most importantly, the Phi Beta Kappa poem provides solid evidence of the talent for verse attributed to De Mille by correspondents describing him, some years after his death, to Archibald MacMechan, who was at that time contemplating writing a biography of De Mille.  There are some examples of light verse in manuscript in the Archives of Dalhousie's Killam Library, including the elaborately illustrated "Eggs, Eggs, Eggs" (a parody of Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break") reproduced in part by MacMechan in his 1906 article on De Mille for the Canadian Magazine.  There is also, moreover, among MacMechan's notes, a reference to a notebook of De Mille's (now apparently lost) containing a great deal of verse.  But the Phi Beta Kappa poem is the first extended example of De Mille's verse, other than Behind the Veil, to see daylight since the author's death, and it may prove to be the only one to do so.

     That this talent attributed to De Mille may have been quite considerable is suggested by the evident skill with which he manipulates the form and thought of the poem.  To begin with, his debt to the Age of Reason — to Pope, Johnson, and Goldsmith, in particular — is apparent in his choice of the heroic couplet.  De Mille's own couplets, although perhaps not as expertly turned as those of his masters, are for the most part respectably and occasionally even sharply executed.  His comment, for example, that "these things must be, the world shall never lack / The swindler and twaddler and the quack" (11.113-114), without being obviously dependent on any particular rhetorical devotee, nevertheless fairly spits contempt.  Yet De Mille is far from displaying the saeva indignatio of Swift, and his lines lack the persistent waspishness of Pope's.  In fact, of all his eighteenth-century models, he is perhaps closest to Goldsmith in mood, for the point of the poem turns on a plea for mercy for errant humankind:  "Scan not too strictly how man's life is spent, / But give him credit for his good intent; / So may the path with good intentions paven / Lead him, not down to hell, but up to Heaven" (11.191-194), and in the last line of this, although the phrasing echoes Johnson's "Sir, hell is paved with good intentions", De Mille turns it to precisely the opposite effect.  This manipulation of one of Johnson's pronouncements is one of many literary allusions worked skilfully (and sometimes also playfully) into the text of the poem, and like all the others it is more than a sign of a "literary man" addressing an audience of the same.  Allusion, whether it is played straight or given a satiric twist, is for De Mille a device for manipulating the tone and for modulating it from the satiric opening, through the carefully reasoned middle section, into the almost passionate vision of the triumph of Truth which concludes the poem.  It is the demonstration of this and other verbal skills which enforces De Mille's claim to a talent for verse.

     Almost equally importantly, the satiric vision of this Phi Beta Kappa poem makes very clear its link with Strange Manuscript.  Both the poem and the novel maintain a healthy scepticism about human society, recorded by a clear-eyed and keen-witted observer.  There is in the earlier novel (and if we accept A.H. De Mille's claim in a letter that Strange Manuscript was one the first things his brother wrote, we may consider it very early) an exuberance of fantastic imagination, which in the later poem is replaced by a more sober and tempered judgment (De Mille was 46 in 1879), but the two are nevertheless manifestly akin in their vision of the folly, corruption, and potential for good, of human society.

     In view of this likeness, Behind the Veil may seem, on the other hand, to be even more than previously an isolated work.  I would argue, however, that it is to be seen as complementary to them — the other face of Janus, so to speak.  Set against the basically social vision of the Phi Beta Kappa poem, the other-worldly vision of Behind the Veil becomes even more startling and intriguing in its mysticism — a view of the poem which I have developed fully in a separate article (cf. Canadian Poetry 3, Fall/Winter 1978).  The strength of the likeness between Strange Manuscript and the Phi Beta Kappa poem, however, merely forces the complementary difference of Behind the Veil to stronger relief.  Moreover, our understanding of De Mille himself becomes more three-dimensional as the two sides of his work are brought into a stronger relationship.

     Although the existence of the Phi Beta Kappa poem itself was not unknown between 1879 and 1979, it was for the most part forgotten (except for brief mentions and the reprinting of a section in the Brown Alumni Monthly for July 1907, to accompany an article on De Mille).  The poem in fact exists in two versions:  a manuscript in the Killam Library Archives of Dalhousie University (cited from this point as MS) and a published version in the columns of the Providence Daily Journal for June 18, 1879 (cited from this point as Journal).  The following text has been prepared from these two versions.

     The status of the MS is not entirely clear.   It came to the Dalhousie Archives as a gift from Laurence Burpee in 1926, having been found among the papers of Frederick De Mille, James's younger brother.  Burpee's accompanying letter suggests that the MS "seems to be rather in Fred's hand writing than James's".  It seems probable that James's own copy, the one from which he read, went to the Journal as the copy for setting up the published version.

     There are certain features of the two versions which deserve comment.  There is a noticeable lack of punctuation, especially final punctuation, in the MS, but in a few instances the MS punctuation gives a better reading than that of the Journal, and I have preferred it.  I have indicated these instances in my notes to the poems, but I have not indicated where the Journal merely supplies punctuation lacking in the MS, unless there is a clear difference in the sense as a result.  There are also discrepancies between the MS and the Journal which are equally unlikely to be mistakes by the Journal's compositor's or mistakes by a careless copyist.  I have indicated these differences in my notes, but such obvious misprints as do occur in the Journal I have corrected without a note.  I have retained the paragraphing as shown in the Journal, and noted where the MS does not agree with this, but I have indented the first line of each paragraph without authority from either the MS or the Journal, in order to avoid possible ambiguity.

     I would like to thank the Librarians of Dalhousie's Killam Library and Brown University's John Hay Library for the use of material from their Archives.

Prof. De Mille's Poem

Notes