"I am not able to write to order,” Miss Lazarus wrote to the ex-Secretary of State. He had requested a poetic contribution to the Statue of Liberty Pedestal Fund; the date was 1883, and the famous statue stood in a Parisian suburb, a baseless, soulless, forsaken-looking colossus finished by France and waiting for America to set up its promised foundation in New York harbor. But the response here was weak, to say the least.
The last hope rested on a sale of manuscripts by literary celebrities, dead or alive, including Longfellow, Bryant, Whitman and Mark Twain—and upon the 34-year-old Miss Lazarus, whose fame, long privately budding, had just soared at an odd tangent and who regretted that she could not “write to order.”
It was her usual way of refusal. A few years earlier she gave the same answer to her old religious teacher, Rabbi Gottheil, who wanted a poem for his Jewish hymn book. Then she had added: “I will gladly assist you as far as I am able; but that will not be much. I shall always be loyal to my race, but I feel no religious fervor in my soul.”
Miss Lazarus came from an old Sephardic family but her young soul shrank from the Jewish life. The sugar merchant Moses Lazarus and his wife Esther, née Nathan, kept an orthodox house; at the Passover table six daughters heard their brother Frank traditionally read the ancient text, “Let then each consider as though he himself had been delivered from Egypt,” but little Emma listened without understanding. Nor could she relate her pride in her race to her more recent ancestors’ decision to give up their country rather than their faith. To the American child, 1492 implied Columbus’ voyage, not the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
She grew up well protected. The family lived on Fourteenth Street, near Union Square—but Union Square, in those days, was a stamping ground for blooded carriage horses, not polyglot advocates of self-help by the underprivileged. The children of Mr. Lazarus were privately tutored. Emma met few strangers, knew few people other than her own. She was precocious, shy, unusually serious and fond of solitude, and from these traits her father deduced special gifts: at seven, when her sisters laughed at her first childish verse, he warned her not to mind them but to keep on working. More and more, her bright, inquisitive mind turned inward and to that most introspective of arts, lyric poetry. At fourteen she had written a whole book of stilted rhymes, full of shattered hearts and broken vows; the chief characters were Apollo, Daphne and Aphrodite; the chief topics—strange for a carefree adolescent—were Age and Death. The chief merit of her achievement was quantity; sister Josephine, her best-loved playmate, proudly told of Emma’s penning 1500 lines in two weeks. And yet, in these awkward lines one could first sense the relentless sincerity, the near-possessedness which would mark her work although it could not satisfy her yearnings.
At sixteen she saw her first book, Poems and Translations, printed “for private circulation.” It was well received; William Cullen Bryant, the master of the succinct superlative, called the poems better than any he recalled “by any American girl of eighteen.” At the time of Whitman’s hounding by literary America, Emma succeeded by sticking to the rules. Her translations of poems by Heine revealed skill and sympathy, a creditable knowledge of German and a lack of all feeling for the provocative iridescence of that most cosmopolitan of poetic spirits. Miss Lazarus, to whom the gay side of art would always remain foreign, saw Heine purely as a German romantic, failing to see either the “wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire” or the unwilling Jew. (Of course Heine, the apostate, was then still suspect to conscious Jews everywhere, but Emma, without a thought of apostasy, had effaced her Jewish consciousness far more completely than the sentimentalist who wrote The Rabbi of Bacharach in the year of his baptism.)
Miss Lazarus set her course by different stars. Old World thought had just found an American expression in Transcendentalism, a sort of cosmic individualism with a Concord accent. Concord, linked to Harvard College and Back Bay by an intellectual party line, was the Weimar of the new American civilization, the Mecca of American youth. Its spirit was the only one of which the young New York Jewess would be a part.
_____________
She first read Ralph Waldo Emerson in her teens. The impression of his poetry is doubtful (she sharply criticized it later) but his ideas became her “bread and wine.” The faith he preached, of the individual in himself and in the equal divinity of all men, became her religion. “Every man,” said Emerson, “has his magnetic needle,” to be found by “trusting himself, by listening to the whisper of the voice within him”—it was that voice to which Emma had long listened passionately, fearful almost of listening to another. Now she joined a mass movement. She asked, “To how many youthful hearts has not his word been the beacon—nay more, the guiding star—that led them safely through periods of mental storm and struggle?” At last presented to the aging oracle at the house of his friend Samuel Ward Gray, she thrilled to the “tall, spare figure crowned by the small head carrying out with its birdlike delicacy and poise the aquiline effect of the beaked nose and piercing eyes. Unforgettable eagle eyes, full of smiling wisdom!”
The success of her book encouraged her to send a copy to Concord, shyly referring to the meeting at Mr. Gray’s. Emerson, whose memory by then failed to retain much more important matters, had long forgotten both the occasion and the awkward girl with the somewhat sharp profile. As to ignore her entirely would have been unkind, she got a few lines of benevolent approbation. Emma replied post-haste; it was the beginning of a long correspondence.
She was “astonished and delighted by the high estimate” placed on her poetry. The master found her sympathies “too classical”? She had other samples. She naively consulted him about James R. Lowell’s remark that she should be “sent back to learn her lesson over again”—was she not capable of anything worthwhile? The reply: “Mr. Lowell is right if by rough judgment he can drive you to a severer pruning of your verses. . . . After recording Shakespeare for fifteen minutes you shall read this manuscript a page or two and see what you can spare. . . .”
He found her ode on Thoreau “not worth any day-dawn or midnight oil”—she threw it away. Before he spoke, she had no opinion on anything. Emerson may have been flattered. Though slow at times, his replies never failed to arrive. Once he wrote, “I know too well the value of having a sensible soul to speak to and hear from.” At another time he called “transparent sincerity” her greatest attraction. Yet her Admetus drew a warm, “All hail! You have written a noble poem which I cannot enough praise,” and for the first time the signature: “Ever your friend.”
Her second book, Admetus and Other Poems, was dedicated “to my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
He was the master, she was the disciple; spiritually Emma sat at Emerson’s feet, but besides, the relationship seemed to recall attractive literary prototypes. Her next work, Alide, a novel, dealt with the old problem of the great poet and the maiden—ostensibly, Goethe and Friederike Brion. Of course she carefully kept these unauthorized flights of her fancy from the sage of Concord.
For ten years their imaginary friendship dominated Emma’s life. An Emersonian phrase became her slogan: “The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts, but in the silent thoughts by the wayside.” She wrote, but not to express feeling, or present conflicts of life—she wrote in lieu of living. Not just her thoughts, her very life remained silent and by the wayside. She shunned reality; it was both her charm and her weakness.
Disenchantment was inevitable; that at first it took a childish form might have been expected. In his American anthology, Parnassus, Emerson omitted Emma, and Emma fell out of the clouds. She wrote to him, about her “extreme disappointment,” and for the first time her idol did not reply. By then—it was 1874—she had found both American and English recognition; from Paris Turgenev wrote of finding Alide “very sincere and poetical”; John Burroughs wrote that her work had drawn Whitman’s attention, adding, “I hope you are not judging yourself so harshly as you were. . . . Cherish, encourage, insist upon yourself!” No praise could make up for Emerson’s disapproval. Emma blamed only herself and grew despondent; she had “accomplished nothing to stir, to awaken, to teach or suggest, nothing the world could not equally do without. . . .”
A more real blow fell in the same year. Her mother died. A circle was torn, her only link with reality and at the same time her shield against it. Emma clung to her father; he was to remain the only true love of her life. About this time Edmund Stedman, the “poet-banker” of New York, suggested the Jewish tradition as her human and artistic heritage, but Emma shook her head. She was “proud of her blood and lineage,” but “the Hebrew ideals did not appeal” to her.
In the spring of 1876, as if the great disappointment could still be mended, Emerson sent a letter. “You,” he wrote, “who, I believe, have never entered Massachusetts, should come and spend a week in Concord and correct our village narrowness. My wife joins me,” etc.
“I have waited ten years for this moment,” cried the 27-year-old who had never traveled without her family, who had seen nothing of the world except New York and their summer home in New Haven, and now should see the Grail’s castle of her youth.
Emma’s heart pounded as she got off the train; there was the “tall, spare figure”—Mr. Emerson was at the depot to meet her. Her timidity welled up but “the first glance at his benevolent face sufficed to set the shyest at their ease.”
Miss Lazarus spent her week in this “modest home looking upon orchard and garden, in the midst of wholesome, natural influences.” Concord was “lovely, smiling with its quiet meadows, quiet slopes, quietest rivers,” but its rural calm would not let Emma forget the identity of her host—of him whose “soul was like a star and dwelt apart.” She was not a city girl in the country. She was an aspiring poetess at civilization’s cradle.
She met the Concord circle, disliked Bronson Alcott, found William Ellery Channing’s figure standing out “like a gnarled and twisted shrub—a pathetic, impossible creature”; with all of them she found an inexhaustible topic of conversation in the late Henry Thoreau. Emerson took her to Walden Pond, where Thoreau had retired to prove that man was not of necessity a gregarious animal; she saw the rock-pile marking the site of the hut in which Thoreau had lived; she gazed into a misty distance, at the roof of his birthplace. At the farewell, when her week was up, Channing gave her a package. She did not open it until later, to find a copy of Channing’s book on Thoreau, and the very compass which the nature-lover had carried on his expedition into the Maine woods.
Emma treasured the keepsake. Somehow the dead Thoreau seemed to be a more fitting link to Concord and its circle than the surviving members. As the train rolled south, the whole world of Transcendentalism seemed to stay behind, hovering about the small New England town and passing with it beyond a poetic horizon. The week in Emerson’s house marked the end of his controlling influence on Emma’s life and work. Soon, writing after his death, she would compound enduring admiration with thoughtful criticism of his “lack of lyric spontaneity,” and of the “peculiarities of structure” which made his poems formless—“for him,” she remarked, “Shelley and Poe were distinctly not poets. Music seemed a sealed volume to him. . . . He had little acquaintance with Heine . . .”
We always return to our first loves, say the French. In withdrawing from Emerson, Emma resumed her childhood attempts to grasp Heine. Her new translation of his poems appeared in 1881, but again Dr. Gottheil frowned at her failure to see the poet from the Jewish point of view.
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In the first days of August, 1881, Miss Lazarus joined a group of New York women on a visit to Ward’s Island. There, in the East River opposite Upper Manhattan, a shipload of Jews had been landed from a tramp steamer on July 29th and were now waiting to be let into America. They were about two hundred and fifty men, women and children—a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands caught in the Russian pogroms and the unwitting vanguard of a historic migration.
To the historian of anti-Semitic violence, the Russian pogroms of those years mark an interesting halfway point between the Crusades and Hitler. Still unleashed by the ritual-murder fairy tale, still carried out by mobs as primitive as the medieval followers of John the Hermit, they were already being fomented by official newspapers and shrugged off as “spontaneous illegalities” by a government which charged the victims dearly for the privilege of fleeing abroad. The civilized world, then, was horrified by what went on in Russia. The dignified Times of London wrote, “These persecutions, these oppressions, these cruelties, these outrages have taken every form of atrocity in the experience of mankind, or which the resources of the human tongue can describe.” America, too, was horrified. There were protest meetings, and the press ran sympathetic editorials when the first few Russian Jews reached New York Harbor. On Ward’s Island they were visited by intellectuals and humanitarians, and the chances are that Miss Emma Lazarus went to see these bits of human flotsam without a thought of the earlier emigrants who had become the fathers of a Jewish aristocracy.
Presumably, in her inbred Sephardic pride, she expected to find them of a rather low class—suitable alms-recipients. Instead, in the bare sheds of the small island she was shocked to see “huddled together men of brilliant talents and accomplishments—the graduates of Russian universities, scholars of Greek as well as Hebrew, and familiar with all the principal European tongues—engaged in menial drudgery and burning with zeal in the cause of their wretched co-religionists.”
For the first time, Miss Lazarus actually faced persecuted people. For the first time she saw a picture surpassing the liveliest poetic imagination. She did not always understand what these Jews were saying, but in their eyes she read of lingering despair and fear of death. They were like men just released from dark cells and only with difficulty adjusting themselves to the new light. And yet these poor wrecks were not thinking of themselves—no, they were “burning with zeal in the cause of their wretched co-religionists.”
At that moment the ivory tower collapsed. What no professed pride in her “blood and lineage,” no orthodox upbringing, no religious teacher, no literary friend had been able to bring about was accomplished by a first sight of the persecuted and reviled: Emma recognized her heritage. The young American woman of letters to whom the “Hebrew ideals did not appeal,” who felt “no religious fervor in her soul,” who had so long, firmly and successfully striven to rid herself of Jewish influences, suddenly felt an indissoluble bond between herself and the people chosen to suffer.
It was a great change that came over her at thirty-three. It did not only affect her Judaism; it changed her work, her character, her life. In the fifteen years of her literary career she had written just two books of verse, one novel and a play, and translated some poems; now, in the single year of 1882, she wrote as much—and all of it superior to her previous output. She had been timid, fearful of argument, self-critical to a fault, always inclined to heed the opinions of others; now she plunged into heated public debate, fought with the bold and confident skill of a gladiator and spoke the truth, requiring no one any more to help her see it. She had been disconsolate about having accomplished “nothing to stir, to awaken, to teach or suggest,” and had quoted Emerson to show that the “epochs of life” were not in the “visible facts.” But it was the stark, visible fact of the rescued Jews on Ward’s Island that in one year made a world figure out of the eclectic New York lyricist and bound her name up forever with the greatest man-made symbol of freedom.
It was in an old play that Emma Lazarus found the best, briefest statement of her conversion. She put it as motto at the head of her first ringing article of protest. It had but two lines:
Let us thank the Lord, who made us those
To suffer, not to do this deed.
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In April 1882 Century Magazine brought out a very interesting issue.
To begin with, it contained the last printed work of the old Emma Lazarus. It was an essay on Lord Beaconsfield, in which the authoress took up Georg Brandes’ contention that the British statesman and writer was no representative Jew and came to the conclusion that he was one. In Emma’s eyes, Disraeli’s many facets only reflected the many facets of Jewry, whose gamut runs from Shylock to Spinoza. “Whether or not the Jews are capable of growth,” wrote the child of Moses Lazarus, the sugar merchant, “the next hundred years will show”—thus for the last time incurring Rabbi Gottheil’s displeasure—and, also for the last time, she emphasized the importance of “the poetic idea rather than the dead prosaic fact.”
Then, in its “Topics of the Time” column, the April Century carried excerpts from a speech made on February 4th in New York’s Chittering Hall by former Secretary of State William B. Evarts, at a mass protest meeting against the Russian pogroms, under the chairmanship of ex-President Grant, and with prominent clergymen taking part to show that the voice of America was raised without distinction of creed. Mr. Evarts quoted figures from the London Times report—exact, appalling figures: “300 houses and 60 shops were plundered at Warsaw while a garrison of 20,000 soldiers was kept within barracks—and that on the morning when in the name of Christ peace and good will were proclaimed over all earth.” He said, “Without forgetting the glass-house in which we ourselves live-we who have seen anti-Negro riots in New York and anti-Chinese riots at San Francisco—it must still be said that Russia’s duty is to civilize herself. For it must be remembered that the Jews everywhere are, in great measure, what they are made by the people among whom their lot is cast.”
The Century’s editor made no use of these words in drawing attention to the most startling feature of his April issue, although they would have been apt indeed. Instead, he stressed the “extraordinary character” of the contribution, conceded that the charges raised in it had “a medieval aspect” and felt obliged to announce that they were to be answered in another article scheduled for the next issue. The extraordinary article, entitled “Russian Jews and Gentiles” and signed by a Madame Ragozin, proposed to analyze the pogroms from “the Russian point of view.”
Madame Ragozin (not yet as well known as when she later collaborated on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) first told the facts of the pogroms briefly, with a slight smirk but still with seeming objectivity. She then asked what might cause “this singularly tenacious phenomenon” of the people’s wrath turning ever again on the Jews? It could not be mere bigotry, as claimed by the “ so-called progressive and liberal” press—for there were millions of Mohammedans in Russia, and no one ever heard of outbreaks against them. In fact, far from bigoted, the lady found the Russian majority “strictly logical” in its anti-Semitism—that is to say, “ruled by irresistible hidden currents of its life.”
“The Jews torture us,” had been the Christians’ cry. Clearly, the fault lay with the Jews. They were and remained a foreign body and it was as such that they were attacked. They were despised, according to Madame Ragozin, “because they will not stand up for themselves and manfully resent an insult or oppose vexation, but will take any amount if they can thereby turn a penny.” And the “good-natured mob,” provoked to direct action by these alien traits, did not even seek the Jews’ lives—unless, of course, they tried to keep their ill-gotten gains by force. Next Madame digressed upon the “dualism in this singular people’s life” and tolerantly conceded that there were “Jews of two descriptions: those who saw God and those who worshipped the golden calf, those who followed Jesus and those who crucified him, the thinkers and the sticklers, Spinoza and his persecutors.” In summing up she proposed a perfectly simple solution of the Jewish question: the Jews should be forbidden the exercise of all their rituals and customs, and then received into the community. Little wonder that the American editor called Madame’s article “extraordinary.”
Still, her diatribe was not seized upon by hate-mongering groups of the kind which would do so today—mainly, perhaps, because they were not yet in business. By and large, the America of the eighties was a tolerant country and the Russian bigot’s was a lost voice, the very sounding of which might now be forgotten but for the rebuttal that the Century published in May, over the signature of Emma Lazarus.
For it was this reply that testified to Emma’s conversion. She prefaced it with the two old lines of thanks to God for having made her race the anvil, not the hammer, of oppression.
“The dualism of the Jews,” she answered Madame’s quasi-philosophical speculation on that subject, “is the dualism of humanity. They are made up of the good and the bad. Immortal genius and moral purity, as exemplified by Moses and Spinoza, constitute a minority among the Jews as they do among the Gentiles—but here ends the truth of the matter.”
Emma, who in the past had so often lost herself in unreality and floundered for lack of an adequate expression, suddenly became clear, articulate, concise and convincing in factual, logical polemics. Was the “good-natured” mob to be praised for sparing the Jews’ lives unless they resisted, and were the Jews at the same time to be blamed for not standing up for themselves? They were denied the protection of the law; it was “vain to expect the virtues of free men from a community of slaves.” She quoted Heine—“Every country has the Jews she deserves”—and backed him up against the Russian Christian lady, with the opinion of an American Christian minister who called it “the glory of America that she finds among her Israelites the purest and strongest elements of republican liberty.”
Madame asked why there were no anti-Mohammedan outbreaks. Emma pointed to Russia’s Islamic neighbors, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, India—if the Mussulmen got better treatment, they owed it to the powers ready to protect them from Russia’s type of Christian love. The Jews “tortured” the Christians who outnumbered them by tens of millions? Should the all-powerful majority “have no other weapon than tyranny, violence, murder, to preserve them against the Jew who has nothing but his wits?”
This was not a defense of the Russian Jews. It was a ringing protest against persecution, any persecution. It closed with a passage from Mr. Evarts’ Chittering Hall speech: “Americans need to consider only one ground upon which to base their attitude. It is not the oppression of the Jews by Russians; it is the oppression of men and women by men and women. And we are men and women.” Emma was attacking in the first great polemical utterance of her career; she did not even deign to discuss the Ragozin “solution” of the Jewish question, and so the nature of the new ideal for which she was fighting did not yet clearly emerge.
She was to make it clear soon, in another medium. She still was a poetess. And so it was in her first ardent song of liberty that Emma Lazarus answered the proposal to make the Jews’ reception into the community conditional on the suppression of their religious freedom. The poem—called, In Exile, and published that year in her volume, Songs of a Semite—bore at its head some lines from a letter sent to her by a Russian refugee in Texas: “ . . . now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true, brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs.” Then, for the first time knowing whereof she spoke, Emma spoke about freedom:
FREEDOM to love the law that Moses
brought,
To sing the songs of David and to think
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught;
FREEDOM to dig the common earth, to
drink
The universal air—for this they sought
Refuge o’er wave and continent to link
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain
And truth’s perpetual lamp forbid to wane.
Before the year was out, Emma Lazarus was the Jewish poet of her time, “the sweet singer of Israel.”
Besides Songs of a Semite, she wrote in the remaining months a tragedy, The Dance to Death, about the medieval persecutions of the Jews and dedicated it to their modem Christian champion, George Eliot. She took up Hebrew in order fully to understand her heritage, the great tradition from which she had turned before; instead of a Hebrew primer she studied poetry by longdead men like Ibn Gabirol and Jehuda Halevi, and Dr. Philip Cohen eagerly published her first translations of them in his American Hebrew. When the Jewish cemetery at Newport moved Longfellow to write,
And the dead nations never rise again—
Emma took up the cudgels for her rediscovered people and replied in The New Ezekiel:
The Spirit is not dead; proclaim the word,
Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men
stand;
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
And I shall place you living in your land.
This promise, in fact, soon became her main concern. Whether moved by a thought which she had passingly touched upon in her reply to Mme. Ragozin—the Jews’ lack of a powerful real nation to bar their maltreatment elsewhere—or just in consequence of her discovery of her people: she became what would now be called an ardent Zionist. However, to her the fight for a Jewish homeland was not a reason to close her own country’s doors; for
In two divided streams the exiles part:
One rolling homeward to its ancient source,
One rushing sunward, with fresh will, new
heart—
it was the young, vigorous, pioneering element among the refugees that she felt should be directed to the New World, to mutual benefit. Emma engaged in numerous, far-flung activities, all of them new to her and unaccustomed. She arranged group meetings of prominent American Jews, to discuss ways of solving the Eastern Jewish question. She joined in representations to the State Department. She took an interest in the physical rehabilitation of Jewish youth. She helped found the Jewish Technical Institute. She formulated her demands on and for the Jews in sixteen Epistles to the Hebrews, which Philip Cohen published.
The circle in which she moved changed radically in the course of one year. Her friends and correspondents had once been selected literary figures; now they were Jewish leaders or Christian champions of the Jewish cause, like Evarts and Lawrence Oliphant, a leading advocate of Jewish nationhood. The name of Emma Lazarus suddenly had meaning far beyond the community of the poets. It became a clarion call for Jews everywhere, ringing most clearly among those who were the most cruelly oppressed. She had more than made good her once so negative promise: “I shall always be loyal to my race.”
All at once Emma Lazarus found a tremendous influence thrust upon her. She could be the organizer of a new Exodus—covering not just the few hundred miles from Egypt to the Promised Land but starting in scores of Egypts ruled by tyrants far more refined than Pharaoh, spanning oceans and continents by the most diverse means of transportation and ending, besides Palestine, in scores of “more enlightened and progressive countries.” She could be the voice of Jewry. But she did not relish the position.
She was concerned with ideas; their realization, she felt, was properly the province of others. With public interest hardly focussed upon her, she wished to get back to the “silent thoughts by the wayside.” She wanted to get away, for a short while at least, from the scene of her increasing fame. And significantly it was not Palestine which now attracted her, but Western Europe, from which the ideas of liberty and human rights had first come to the New World. To salve her conscience, Emma announced her intention of winning intellectual leaders in England and France for the Jewish cause. But this was not the real reason why she went overseas in May 1885 with Josephine, her favorite sister.
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At thirty-four, with the enthusiasm of a child, she embarked on her first Atlantic crossing. At sundown of the sixth day—it was “a vision of beauty from morning till night”—she experienced “the great sensation: land. First like the ghost of a ship—two or three widely scattered rocks, which were promontories of Ireland.”
At Liverpool she was met by prominent English Jewish leaders. But her great cause quickly faded into the background before the impression which every bit of England made on her American eyes. “Most ordinary objects,” she wondered, “bewitch us back into a dream world of a previous existence.” Never, save in books, had she encountered centuries of tradition. “An ivied wall, a pebbled brook, a lattice-windowed cottage, a single-arched stone bridge”—everything brought back “a thousand haunting memoirs of Shakespeare, Spenser, Shelley, Milton and Keats,” and her English friends were perpetually surprised by the “easily excited enthusiasm” of their American visitor. She went to Chester and its “quaint, picturesque streets” reminded her of Scott’s novels. But London bewildered her; “the whirl of people, sights, impressions” became too much to bear. Emma fled to Paris.
Paris was fascinating—and frightening. The close relation of the present and long bygone centuries, which comes naturally to people reared and living amid the mute witnesses of the past, was utterly strange to the young woman from New York. She spent July 4th on Bastille Square and vividly imagined its gory past. She saw “ruins on every side in Paris—of the Commune, or the siege, or the Revolution.” In the end she found only one word for the City of Light: “terrible.”
With this designation she left Paris—without taking notice of her favorite poet’s favorite goddess, the Venus de Milo, or of the waiting Statue of Liberty. She actually rushed out of France, and only regained her composure at the first glimpse of “mellow England” over the Channel. There, at least, the mementos of the past were restful, stimulating to the mind rather than upsetting to the emotions—though Emma, socially conscious since her trip to Ward’s Island and her, subsequent discoveries, found “inequality more glaring, the pressure of the densely crowded population upon the means of subsistence more painful. In America”—she noted in contrast—” the need for higher culture, finer taste, a more solidly constructed social basis were much more conspicuous than the inequality of conditions.”
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In the late summer of 1883 Emma and Josephine came back to the United States. There hardly was time for getting settled at home. Demands, in the name of the cause for which she had devoted herself in the past year, had mounted during Emma’s absence into a staggering pile of letters, circulars and visiting cards. One of the letters, written by ex-Secretary Evarts on stationery of the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty, was addressed to Emma Lazarus, the poetess: she was asked to donate a poem to the “Art Loan Collection” in behalf of the Pedestal Fund. Since Mr. Evarts had written not as a friend but in his capacity as committee chairman, Emma felt free to give her stock reply. She regretted being “unable to write to order. . . .”
Having mailed her refusal, however, she found the thought of what she had been asked to do still in her mind. She had not gone to see the statue in Paris, but its form was familiar to her from drawings and photographs; and now she saw it before her roving mind’s eye—not in its actual dreary surroundings in a Parisian working-class quarter, baseless, half-hidden by scaffolding—but high and free and glorious on the wonderfully chosen site which Emma had viewed some days earlier, from the deck of a ship. And the picture of the homeless fugitives on Ward’s Island returned, and that of the shocking squalor of the English proletarians, and that of the palaces and ruins of France, breathing the odor of a dead past; and each somehow seemed to have a bearing on the figure that was soon to rise on the bare rocks out in the Bay.
They had a name for it: “Liberty Enlightening the World.” What liberty? The important men who had conceived it had even held different views on the issue of Negro slavery in the United States; their minds were kept strictly on their own versions of liberty, and by defining the activity of their ideals as “enlightenment” they implied that they did not see it as necessarily doing more. It took a woman—an American poetess newly fired with the passion to save oppressed people—to see that liberty had to extend to all who needed it and that it had to help, not just to enlighten.
Emma Lazarus was truly unable to write to order. It was not to order, or by deliberation—it was from sheer inner compulsion that she wrote a sonnet on “The New Colossus” and sent it to the Hon. William B. Evarts two days after declining his request.
In her sonnet she gave the monument a meaning that had occurred to none of its sponsors on either side of the Atlantic; “Mother of Exiles” she called the figures, and:
. . . From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes
command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities
frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”
cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your
poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”