Edgar Allan Poe - How to know him/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
The Man
I
If, to know Poe, we must know him as a world-author, it is equally necessary that we know him as a man. His world-fame is, after all, but the reach of his genius; it is not its source or matrix. These are to be sought in the man himself, in his reaction to the life about him, in the temper and quality of his thought about things unliterary as well as literary. In a word, Poe's personality is not only essential in the interpretation of his work; it is, unfortunately, that part of the man that has been consistently ignored or as consistently misrepresented. The common view of Poe is that he had no personality. He had temperament; he had genius; he had individuality. But that richer combination that we call personality, that coordination of thought and mood and conduct, of social action and reaction, of daily interest and aim, this finds no portrayal in the biographies of Poe. Instead, we are told that Poe alone among American writers was utterly unrelated to time and place; that he saw only through a telescope; that for him the contemporary did not exist; that, like the lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror with her back to the realities of life, Poe was a dreamer and nothing but a dreamer.
Let us try to break away from the stereotyped biographies of Poe. They confuse the exceptional with the characteristic in his life, and they exalt particular moments and moods into fixed crystallizations of habit or impulse. Gestures are regarded as attitudes, and a single incident is made the scales in which an entire life is weighed. Let us take Poe's great phrase, "totality of effect," and look at his life as a whole.
So far from being unrelated to the problems and interests of his time, Poe seems to me the one man in American literature from whose writings a history of the essential thought-currents of the time could be garnered. But by his writings I do not mean primarily his poems or his stories; in these he deliberately turned away from the things of every-day life or so subtly transfused them as to make the distillation not easily identifiable as concrete incident or personal experience. I mean, above all, the criticisms that he passed on the men and women and things and themes that made up the life round about him. In the only complete edition of his works, the Virginia Edition,[1] containing seventeen volumes, only one volume contains Poe's poetry, five volumes his stories, while nine volumes contain his criticisms, his essays, his miscellanies, his marginalia, and his letters. In these nine volumes lie scattered the elements which combined will summon back to us Poe, the man, as he can not be recalled from the volumes that reveal him as the self-conscious and creative artist.
II
All the information that we have about Poe goes to show that he observed closely and accurately. Mere dreamers do not. If he saw through a telescope it was only that he might extend the knowledge already gained through a microscope. Lowell said of him:
"He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed."
But Lowell was speaking of Poe, the artist; he did not know that Poe, the man, was as minutely observant and retentive as Poe, the weaver of narrative spells. In a letter to Mrs. M. L. Shew, who had asked him to make some art purchases for her, Poe writes:
"During my first call at your house after my Virginia's death, I noticed with so much pleasure the large painting over the piano, which is a masterpiece indeed; and I noticed the size of all your paintings, the scrolls instead of set figures of the drawing-room carpet, the soft effect of the window shades, also the crimson and gold...... I was charmed to see the harp and piano uncovered. The pictures of Raphael and the 'The Cavalier' I shall never forget their softness and beauty! The guitar with the blue ribbon, music-stand and antique jars!"
There are two room interiors that always recur to me as I try to make clear in my own mind the difference between Poe, the artist, and Poe, the man. It must be remembered that Poe's philosophy of art impelled him to beauty plus strangeness. This element of the strange, the eerie, the arrestive-because-not-seen-before, is present in all of his art creations. It is not accidental; it is a part of a studied and predetermined effect. Bacon had said, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion," and Poe quotes and re-quotes the saying both as defense and as goal of his own practise. The reader is justified in saying of Poe's studied descriptions and of his fictive characters that they are not accurate transcripts from real life, but he is not justified in saying that Poe was not an accurate observer. Sensitiveness to the abnormal presupposes an even greater sensitiveness to the normal. Everything that is strange to us in Poe's creations was strange first to him. There is never for a moment in his work any suggestion of inability to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal, between the natural and the bizarre. "Poe was not a victim of delusions," says Curtis Hidden Page, "but a creature of illusions." He loved mystery and mystification but he was not a mystic.
Note now the studied strangeness that haunts the interior of Roderick Usher's room in The Fall of the House Usher:
"The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all."
If Poe, the conscious artist, speaks in Usher's room, surely Poe, the man, the observer, the lover of beauty without strangeness, speaks in the description of the parlor of Landor's Cottage:
"Nothing could be more rigorously simple than the furniture of the parlour. On the floor was an ingrain carpet, of excellent texture—a white ground, spotted with small circular green figures. At the windows were curtains of snowy white jaconet muslin; they were tolerably full, and hung decisively, perhaps rather formally, in sharp parallel plaits to the floor. The walls were papered with a French paper of great delicacy—a silver ground, with a faint green cord running zigzag throughout. Its expanse was relieved merely by three of Julien's exquisite lithographs a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames. One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a 'carnival piece' spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head; a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.
"The more substantial furniture consisted of a round table, a few chairs (including a large rocking-chair) and a sofa, or rather 'settee'; its material was plain maple painted a creamy white, slightly interstriped with green—the seat of cane. The chairs and table were 'to match'; but the forms of all had evidently been designed by the same brain which planned 'the grounds'; it is impossible to imagine anything more graceful.
"On the table were a few books; a large, square crystal bottle of some novel perfume; a plain, ground-glass astral (not solar) lamp, with an Italian shade; and a large vase of resplendently-blooming flowers. Flowers indeed, of gorgeous colours and delicate odour, formed the sole mere decoration of the apartment. The fireplace was nearly filled with a vase of brilliant geranium. On a triangular shelf in each angle of the room stood also a similar vase, varied only as to its lovely contents. One or two smaller bouquets adorned the mantel; and late violets clustered about the opened windows."
The same contrast is seen between the characters that drift or shimmer through Poe's poems and stories and those photographic portraits that he has left us of the men and women that he had actually met. These show a clearness of instant vision, an ability to see the object as in itself it really is, that critics have denied to the creator of Ligeia, Morella, Annabel Lee, Usher, and others. But in the latter Poe's purpose was to make an artistic use of indefinitiveness, "a suggestive indefinitiveness," as he said of The Lady of Shalott, "with a view of bringing about a definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect." Turn now to The Literati of New York and note the clearcut pen-pictures that Poe made of the writers that he had seen and met. William Cullen Bryant he had not met but he had passed him on the street and had heard him speak. Is there anywhere such a picture of Bryant as Poe has drawn in this sketch?
"He is now fifty-two years of age. In height, he is perhaps five feet nine. His frame is rather robust. His features are large but thin. His countenance is sallow, nearly bloodless. His eyes are piercing gray, deep set, with large projecting eyebrows. His mouth is wide and massive, the expression of the smile hard, cold—even sardonic. The forehead is broad, with prominent organs of ideality; a good deal bald; the hair thin and grayish, as are also the whiskers, which he wears in a simple style. His bearing is quite distinguished, full of the aristocracy of intellect. In general, he looks in better health than before his last visit to England. He seems active—physically and morally energetic. His dress is plain to the extreme of simplicity, although of late there is a certain degree of Anglicism about it.
"In character no man stands more loftily than Bryant. The peculiarly melancholy expression of his countenance has caused him to be accused of harshness, or coldness of heart. Never was there a greater mistake. His soul is charity itself, in all respects generous and noble. His manners are undoubtedly reserved."
In the letter that Poe wrote to Mrs. Clemm as soon as he and Virginia had arrived in New York from Philadelphia there is a solicitous affection that can not be paraphrased. There is a pathos, too, beyond the reach of conscious art. But is there not also a minuteness of detail, an eager, loving, childlike recording of little things that nothing seems to escape? The author of The Raven and Ulalume and The Sleeper may have been a dreamer but it was not a dreamer that penned these lines:
"April 7, [1844], just after breakfast.
"MY DEAR MUDDY—We have just this minute done breakfast, and I now sit down to write you about everything. I can't pay for the letter, because the P. O. won't be open to-day. In the first place we arrived safe at Walnut St. wharf. The driver wanted to make me pay a dollar, but I wouldn't. Then I had to pay a boy a levy to put the trunks in the baggage car. In the meantime I took Sis [Virginia] in the Depot Hotel. It was only a quarter past six, and we had to wait till seven. We saw the 'Ledger' and 'Times'—nothing in either—a few words of no account in the 'Chronicle.' We started in good spirits, but did not get here until nearly three o'clock. We went in the cars to Amboy, about forty miles from N. York, and then took the steamboat the rest of the way. Sissy coughed none at all. When we got to the wharf it was raining hard. I left her on board the boat, after putting the trunks in the Ladies' cabin, and set off to buy an umbrella and look for a boarding-house. I met a man selling umbrellas, and bought one for twenty-five cents.
"Then I went up Greenwich St. and soon found a boarding-house. It was just before you get to Cedar St., on the west side going up—left-hand side. It has brown stone steps, with a porch with brown pillars. 'Morrison' is the name on the door. I made a bargain in a few minutes and then got a hack and went for Sis. I was not gone more than half an hour, and she was quite astonished to see me back so soon. She didn't expect me for an hour. There were two other ladies waiting on board—so she wasn't very lonely. When we got to the house we had to wait about half an hour before the room was ready. The house is old and looks buggy [The letter is cut here for the signature on the other side.] the cheapest board I ever knew, taking into consideration the central situation and the living. I wish Kate [Catterina, the cat] could see it—she would faint. Last night, for supper, we had the nicest tea you ever drank, strong and hot, wheat bread, rye bread—cheese—tea-cakes (elegant), a great dish (two dishes) of elegant ham and two of cold veal, piled up like a mountain and large slices—three dishes of the cakes and everything in the greatest profusion. No fear of starving here. The landlady seemed as if she couldn't press us enough, and we were at home directly. Her husband is living with her—a fat, good-natured old soul. There are eight or ten boarders—two or three of them ladies—two servants. For breakfast we had excellent-flavored coffee, hot and strong—not very clear and no great deal of cream—veal cutlets, elegant ham and eggs and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the eggs—and the great dishes of meat. I ate the first hearty breakfast I have eaten since I left our little home. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had no night sweat. She is now busy mending my pants which I tore against a nail.
"I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept in all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop—so that I hope soon to get out of trouble. The very instant I scrape together enough money I will sent it on. You can't imagine how much we both do miss you. Sissy had a hearty cry last night, because you and Catterina weren't here. We are resolved to get two rooms the first moment we can. In the meantime it is impossible we could be more comfortable or more at home than we are. It looks as if it were going to clear up now. Be sure and go to the P. O. and have my letters forwarded. As soon as I write Lowell's article, I will send it to you, and get you to get the money from Graham. Give our best love to C."
But Poe the man is seen not merely in the unclouded clearness with which he saw and reproduced the men and things of his time but more especially in his reaction to the ideas and institutions that environed him. So far from holding himself apart and aloof, he fronted the old and the new of his day with an eager philosophic interest that would have kept his name afloat, if not alive, even though he had written no work of creative genius. "Poe had no sweep of intellectual outlook," says Brander Matthews, "no interest in the world of ideas, as he had no interest in the world of affairs." A verdict of this sort can be accounted for only on the supposition that its author had not read that part of Poe's writing which, if not destined for immortality, is peculiarly freighted with autobiography.
One of the larger questions that pressed for solution in Poe's lifetime was that of public education in the South. Poe had himself applied for a position as teacher in a public school of Baltimore early in 1835. "In my present circumstances," he writes to his friend, J. P. Kennedy, "such a position would be most desirable, and if your interest could obtain it for me, I would always remember your kindness with the deepest gratitude." He was unsuccessful in his application but, what is far more important, he became a resolute champion of a public school system for every southern state, a system that should have as its pinnacle a state university. This was Jefferson's plan, though many years were to pass before it was to find even partial fulfillment. Poe had hardly moved to Richmond before we find him urging upon Virginians "the establishment throughout the country of district schools upon a plan of organization similar to that of our New England friends." He does not believe, as William Wirt believed, that as need arises rich men will establish universities without the aid of state governments, and he points proudly to Virginia, "where, notwithstanding the extent of private opulence and the disadvantages under which the community so long labored from a want of regular and systematic instruction, it was the government which was finally compelled, and not private societies which were induced, to provide establishments for effecting the great end."
At times Poe suggests new subjects for the school curriculum. After proving, by his own amazing powers of analysis, that "human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve," he adds:
"It may be observed, generally, that in such investigations the analytic ability is very forcibly called into action; and, for this reason, cryptographical solutions might with great propriety be introduced into academies as the means of giving tone to the most important of the powers of the mind."
The time may come, he thinks, when the student will be taught to read not by words or paragraphs but by pages:
"A deep-rooted and strictly continuous habit of reading will, with certain classes of intellect, result in an instinctive and seemingly magnetic appreciation of a thing written; and now the student reads by pages just as other men by words. Long years to come, with a careful analysis of the mental process, may even render this species of appreciation a common thing. It may be taught in the schools of our descendants of the tenth or twentieth generation."
Poe's own habit of reading page by page was that of Theodore Roosevelt. "The child," says Lawrence F. Abbott,[2] "reads laboriously syllable by syllable or word by word; the practised adult reads line by line; Roosevelt read almost page by page and yet remembered what he read."
Another problem, more menacing and insistent than that of education, was the problem of slavery. Poe was reared in a slave-holding community; he was one of the first American writers to introduce a slave and his dialect into a short story; and his thought on the great issue itself is characteristically matured and original. In 1836 he writes:
"There is a view of the subject most deeply interesting to us, which we do not think has ever been presented by any writer in as high relief as it deserves. We speak of the moral influences flowing from the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it.... We shall take leave to speak, as of things in esse, of a degree of loyal devotion on the part of the slave to which the white man's heart is a stranger, and of the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent, equally incomprehensible to him who drives a bargain with the cook who prepares his food, the servant who waits at his table, and the nurse who dozes over his sick bed. That these sentiments in the breast of the negro and his master are stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race, we believe. That they belong to the class of feelings 'by which the heart is made better,' we know. How come they? They have their rise in the relation between the infant and the nurse. They are cultivated between him and his foster brother. They are cherished by the parents of both. They are fostered by the habit of affording protection and favors to the younger offspring of the same nurse. They grow by the habitual use of the word 'my,' used in the language of affectionate appropriation, long before any idea of value mixes with it. It is a term of endearment. That is an easy transition by which he who is taught to call the little negro 'his,' in this sense and because he loves him, shall love him because he is his. The idea is not new, that our habits and affections are reciprocally cause and effect of each other.
"But the great teacher in this school of feeling is sickness. In this school we have witnessed scenes at which even the hard heart of a thorough bred philanthropist would melt. But here, we shall be told, it is not humanity, but interest that prompts. Be it so. Our business is not with the cause but the effect. But is it interest, which, with assiduous care, prolongs the life of the aged and decrepid negro, who has been, for years, a burthen? Is it interest which labors to rear the crippled or deformed urchin, who can never be anything but a burthen—which carefully feeds the feeble lamp of life that, without any appearance of neglect, might be permitted to expire? Is not the feeling more akin to that parental στοργή which, in defiance of reason, is most careful of the life which is, all the time, felt to be a curse to the possessor? Are such cases rare? They are as rare as the occasions; but let the occasion occur, and you will see the case. How else is the longevity of the negro proverbial? A negro who does no work for thirty years! (and we know such examples) is it interest which has lengthened out his existence?"
The argument does credit to Poe's heart, if not to his head; and the instances that he later adduces, instances that he had himself witnessed, of love and devotion at the sick bed of master and slave, evince a native sympathy and susceptibility of which Poe's stories give only scattered hints. Though abolition had made but little headway at this time, Poe seemed to have an intuitive conviction that slavery was doomed. "It is a sort of boding," he says, "that may belong to the family of superstitions. All vague and undefined fears, from causes the nature of which we know not, the operations of which we cannot stay, are of that character."
Partly because of his defense of slavery and partly because of his views on southern literature, the charge has often been made that Poe was partisan and sectional. But he was neither. His loyalty to certain definite principles of criticism is evident in all that he wrote. It was not men or parties or sections of the country that Poe defended; it was rather those bases of thought and feeling which had come to have for him the authority of ultimate truth. If a southerner violates these principles Poe's blade pierces his armor as surely as though he were a New England transcendentalist or incorrigible abolitionist. Take the case of William Gilmore Simms, the novelist and poet, of South Carolina. Poe is constantly complaining that Simms and other writers not born in New England are omitted in popular compendiums of American literature, but he is unsparing in pointing out the defects of Simms as a writer, defects which no one questions to-day. Poe's contention is not that southern writers are better than others but that they at least deserve consideration in every survey of American literature that claims to be representative. Totality rather than personality is the real issue. If New England writers are omitted from such surveys or inadequately represented, Poe is prompt to note the defect. When Griswold published his famous Poets and Poetry of America, in 1842, Poe wrote of it: "Perhaps the author, without being aware of it himself, has unduly favored the writers of New England," but he adds that injustice has also been done to two New Englanders, Lowell and Holmes: "A few years hence Mr. Griswold himself will be amazed that he assigned no more space to Lowell than to McLellan, Tuckerman, and others." It is in prophecies of this sort, by the way, that Poe's critical sagacity is seen at its best. Lowell had written hardly anything when this forecast was made but in that little Poe had detected unerringly the coming poet.
Of Griswold's Female Poets of America, Poe writes:
"We are glad, for Mr. Griswold's sake, as well as for the interests of our literature generally, to perceive that he has been at the pains of doing what Northern critics seem to be at great pains never to do—that is to say, he has been at the trouble of doing justice, in great measure, to several poetesses who have not had the good fortune to be born in the North. The notices of the Misses Gary, of the Misses Fuller, of the sisters Mrs. Warfield and Mrs. Lee, of Mrs. Nichols, of Mrs. Welby, and of Miss Susan Archer Talley, reflect credit upon Mr. Griswold, and show him to be a man not more of taste than—shall we say it?—of courage. Let our readers be assured that, (as matters are managed among the four or five different cliques who control our whole literature in controlling the larger portion of our critical journals,) it requires no small amount of courage, in an author whose subsistence lies in his pen, to hint, even, that anything good, in a literary way, can, by any possibility, exist out of the limits of a certain narrow territory."
Everything that Poe said about southern literature and western literature was said not with the view of unduly exalting either but of giving to both a place of impartial representation beside the literature of New England. When Whitman a generation later pleaded for a literature that should be commensurate with American life, he was only transmitting the torch
lighted by Poe.
But the charge of intemperate sectionalism is brought most frequently against Poe's criticism of Lowell's Fable for Critics. "Mr. Lowell," he writes, "is one of the most rabid of the Abolition fanatics; and no southerner who does not wish to be insulted, and at the same time revolted by a bigotry the most obstinately blind and deaf, should ever touch a volume by this author." One may well ask, What has this to do with Lowell, the poet, or Lowell, the literary critic? Nothing whatever. But Lowell had called his Fable only "a slight jeu d'esprit" and yet had introduced into it such lines as,
Forty fathers of Freedom, of whom twenty bred
Their sons for the rice swamps at so much a head,
And their daughters for . . . . . faugh!
Surely one can not blame Poe for abdicating the rôle of literary critic for a moment and warning the readers of the Southern Literary Messenger of what they may expect in a poem which presumably was to deal only with matters literary. He is not striking beneath the belt: he is warding off a blow already aimed beneath the belt. But the omission of the anti-southern lines from the college editions of Lowell's poem makes Poe's reference seem an irrelevant and unwarranted intrusion of sectionalism. Is it not unfair and un-American to cite Poe's outburst of indignation without citing at the same time the lines that called it into being? Poe's review of the Fable for Critics, read as a whole, does credit to his impartiality and to his desire to see North, South, East, and West justly represented in a national American literature. He begins with a discussion of the reasons for the absence of satire in our literature:
"It seems to us that, in America, we have refused to encourage satire—not because what we have had touches us too nearly—but because it has been too pointless to touch us at all. Its namby-pambyism has arisen, in part, from the general want, among our men of letters, of that minute polish—of that skill in details—which, in combination with natural sarcastic power, satire, more than any other form of literature, so imperatively demands. In part, also, we may attribute our failure to the colonial sin of imitation. We content ourselves—at this point not less supinely than at all others—with doing what not only has been done before, but what, however well done, has yet been done ad nauseam. We should not be able to endure infinite repetitions of even absolute excellence; but what is 'McFingal' more than a faint echo from 'Hudibras'?—and what is 'The Vision of Rubeta' more than a vast gilded swill-trough overflowing with Dunciad and water? Although we are not all Archilochuses, however—although we have few pretensions to the ὴχήεντες ἶαμβοι—although, in short, we are no satirists ourselves—there can be no question that we answer sufficiently well as subjects for satire."
When Poe comes to the lines about himself,
Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge—
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge;
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make all men of common sense d....n metres;
Who has written some things far the best of their kind;
But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind,
his objection is not to Lowell's fractional distribution of "genius" and "fudge" but to the omission of all other southerners save himself:
"It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell's set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters,—are cited by the dozen, and lauded by this candid critic without stint, while Legaré, Simms, Longstreet, and others of equal note are passed by in contemptuous silence. Mr. L. cannot carry his frail honesty of opinion even so far south as New York. All whom he praises are Bostonians. Other writers are barbarians, and satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all."
Yet in this same review, one of the last that Poe wrote, he defends Longfellow and Lowell against the attack of Margaret Fuller:
"Messrs. Longfellow and Lowell, so pointedly picked out for abuse [by Miss Fuller] as the worst of our poets, are, upon the whole, perhaps, our best—although Bryant and one or two others are scarcely inferior."[3]
The more Poe's Americanism is studied the less restricted it will be seen to be. "You are almost the only fearless American critic," Lowell wrote him in 1842, and, when inviting him to address the Boston Lyceum, he added: "The Boston people want a little independent criticism vastly." Poe was not only fearless and independent; he was untrammeled by local prejudice and he was singularly future-minded. Our cause, he says, is "the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature." He saw clearly that America would not always be hemmed within its present boundaries, and he looked to the Pacific as the arena of our future exploits and to "a hardy, effective, and well disciplined national navy" as "the main prop of our national power." Commenting on the "Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs," of March 21, 1836, he writes:
"Our pride as a vigorous commercial empire should stimulate us to become our own pioneers in that vast island-studded ocean, destined, it may be, to become, not only the chief theatre of our traffic, but the arena of our future naval conflicts. Who can say, viewing the present rapid growth of our population, that the Rocky Mountains shall forever constitute the western boundary of our republic, or that it shall not stretch its dominion from sea to sea? This may not be desirable, but signs of the times render it an event by no means without the pale of possibility."
Realizing that America had followed in the rear of scientific discovery when she ought to have led the van, he pleads eloquently for national aid to scientific research:
"It is our duty, holding as we do a high rank in the scale of nations, to contribute a large share to that aggregate of useful knowledge, which is the common property of all. We have astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, botanists, eminent professors in every branch of physical science—we are unincumbered by the oppression of a national debt, and are free from many other drawbacks which fetter and control the measures of the trans-Atlantic governments. We possess, as a people, the mental elasticity which liberal institutions inspire, and a treasury which can afford to remunerate scientific research. Ought we not, therefore, to be foremost in the race of philanthropic discovery, in every department embraced by this comprehensive term? Our national honor and glory which, be it remembered, are to be 'transmitted as well as enjoyed,' are involved. In building up the fabric of our commercial prosperity, let us not filch the corner-stone. Let it not be said of us, in future ages, that we ingloriously availed ourselves of a stock of scientific knowledge, to which we had not contributed our quota—that we shunned as a people to put our shoulder to the wheel—that we reaped where we had never sown. It is not to be controverted that such has been hitherto the case. We have followed in the rear of discovery, when a sense of our moral and political responsibility should have impelled us in its van."
But his strictures on America and Americans were equally bold and outspoken. When James Fenimore Cooper was being attacked with a malignity and scurrility without parallel in our history merely because he had made some tactless but essentially sound comments on American democracy, Poe, almost alone among American critics, hurried to the aid of the elder novelist. "We are a bull-headed and prejudiced people, and it were well if we had a few more of the stamp of Mr. Cooper who would feel themselves at liberty to tell us so to our teeth." The American fondness for glitter, glare, and show found in Poe its most consistent contemporary satirist:
"We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself."
While his Americanism resented "the disgusting spectacle of our subserviency to British criticism," it resented equally the inverted patriotism that commends a bad book because an American wrote it:
"There was a time, it is true, when we cringed to foreign opinion—let us even say when we paid a most servile deference to British critical dicta. That an American book could, by any possibility, be worthy perusal, was an idea by no means extensively prevalent in the land; and if we were induced to read at all the productions of our native writers, it was only after repeated assurances from England that such productions were not altogether contemptible....... The excess of our subserviency was blamable—but, as we have before said, this very excess might have found a shadow of excuse in the strict justice, if properly regulated, of the principle from which it issued. Not so, however, with our present follies. We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off, with the most presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur, all deference whatever to foreign opinion—we forget, in the puerile inflation of vanity, that the world is the true theatre of the biblical histrio—we get up a hue and cry about the necessity of encouraging native writers of merit—we blindly fancy that we can accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider that what we choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general application, rendered precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American."
But subserviency to mere rank, to inherited wealth or social position, was an outrage to Poe's Americanism more deeply resented than subserviency to foreign criticism. Deploring the popularity of Charles O'Malley's Irish Dragoon, Poe pays his respects to the base sycophancy of the book in words that still flame and warn:
"There is a disgusting vulgarism of thought which pervades and contaminates this whole production, and from which a delicate or lofty mind will shrink as from a pestilence. Not the least repulsive manifestation of this leprosy is to be found in the author's blind and grovelling worship of mere rank. Of the Prince Regent, that filthy compound of all that is bestial—that lazarhouse of all moral corruption—he scruples not to speak in terms of the grossest adulation—sneering at Edmund Burke in the same villainous breath in which he extols the talents, the graces, and the virtues of George the Fourth! That any man, to-day, can be found so degraded in heart as to style this reprobate, 'one who, in every feeling of his nature, and in every feature of his deportment was every inch a prince'—is matter for grave reflection and sorrowful debate. The American, at least, who shall peruse the concluding pages of the book now under review, and not turn in disgust from the base sycophancy which infects them, is unworthy of his country and his name."
Poe's Americanism was not the robust, genial, confident Americanism of Lowell. But it was less conventional; it was also more searching, more interrogative, more constructive. Its base was not so broad, but its summit was higher. Poe was essentially a frontiersman, Lowell a dweller in the more settled interior.
A quality inseparable from personality and almost inseparable from Americanism is humor. Did Poe have a sense of humor? Did he ever smile or make others smile? There is little evidence of it in his poems and better known stories. Hence we find James Hannay[4] saying and others saying with him, "Poe has no humor." But Poe's best work did not call for humor; it excluded it. "Humor," he says, "with an exception to be made hereafter, is directly antagonistical to that which is the soul of the Muse proper; and the omni-prevalent belief, that melancholy is inseparable from the higher manifestations of the beautiful, is not without a firm basis in nature and in reason. But it so happens that humor and that quality which we have termed the soul of the Muse (imagination) are both essentially aided in their development by the same adventitious assistance—that of rhythm and of rhyme. Thus the only bond between humorous verse and poetry, properly so called, is that they employ in common a certain tool."
Others point as evidence to the stories in which Poe tried to be funny and failed,—to A Tale of Jerusalem, How to Write a Blackwood Article, The Devil in the Belfry, The Man That Was Used Up, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, The Spectacles, The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq., and X-ing a Paragrab. That these are flat and irredeemable failures if weighed in the scales of laughter I for one should admit without hesitation. If laughter is heard in them or caused by them it is surely a falsetto cackle. It is not the laughter of Shakespeare or Lamb or Mark Twain or O. Henry. But these futile efforts do not prove that Poe had no sense of humor. They prove only that, if he did, he could not put it into literature. He could not fuse it with his other constructive qualities. He could not make it merchantable as a social commodity.
But he could make it felt in his criticisms of foolish books. When he was asked by Griswold to name certain selections from his writings that might be considered fairly representative, he replied that among his "funny" pieces the review of Flaccus would do as well as anything else. Flaccus was Thomas Ward, whom Griswold had praised in his Poets and Poetry of America and characterized as "a gentleman of elegant leisure." "The sum of his [Ward's] deserts," says Poe, "has been footed up by a clique who are in the habit of reckoning units as tens in all cases where champagne and 'elegant leisure' are concerned." Then follows an extract from Ward's Worth of Beauty with characteristic comment:
"Can we venture to present our readers with a specimen?
Now roses blush, and violets' eyes,
And seas reflect the glance of skies;
And now that frolic pencil streaks
With quaintest tints the tulips' cheeks;
Now jewels bloom in secret worth
Like blossoms of the inner earth;
Now painted birds are pouring round
The beauty and the wealth of sound;
Now sea-shells glance with quivering ray,
Too rare to seize, too fleet to stay,
And hues outdazzling all the rest
Are dashed profusely on the west,
While rainbows seem to palettes changed,
Whereon the motley tints are ranged.
But soft the moon that pencil tipped,
As though, in liquid radiance dipped,
A likeness of the sun it drew,
But flattered him with pearlier hue;
Which haply spilling runs astray,
And blots with light the milky way;
While stars besprinkle all the air
Like spatterings of that pencil there.
"All this by the way of exalting the subject. The moon is made a painter and the rainbow a palette. And the moon has a pencil (that pencil!) which she dips, by way of a brush, in the liquid radiance, (the colors on a palette are not liquid,) and then draws (not paints) a likeness of the sun; but, in the attempt, plasters him too 'pearly,' puts it on too thick; the consequence of which is that some of the paint is spilt, and 'runs astray' and besmears the milky way, and 'spatters' the rest of the sky with stars! We can only say that a very singular picture was spoilt in the making."
This is Poe's method in all of the "funny" reviews. He probably took his cue from Macaulay whom he greatly admired though with qualifications. But Poe made the method his own. Instead of denouncing ab extra, he places a specimen before the reader, punctures it, and lets the nonsense and impropriety dribble out.
Of Rufus Dawes, author of Geraldine, Griswold had written, "As a poet the standing of Mr. Dawes is as yet unsettled." Poe thought otherwise:
He laid her gently down, of sense bereft,
And sunk his picture on her bosom's snow,
And close beside these lines in blood he left:
"Farewell forever, Geraldine, I go
Another woman's victim—dare I tell?
'Tis Alice!—curse us, Geraldine!—farewell!"
"There is no possibility of denying the fact: this is a droll piece of business. The lover brings forth a miniature, (Mr. Dawes has a passion for miniatures,) sinks it in the bosom of the lady, cuts his finger, and writes with the blood an epistle, (where is not specified, but we presume he indites it upon the bosom as it is 'close beside' the picture,) in which epistle he announces that he is 'another woman's victim,' giving us to understand that he himself is a woman after all, and concluding with the delicious bit of Billingsgate
dare I tell?
'Tis Alice!—curse us, Geraldine!—farewell!
We suppose, however, that 'curse us' is a misprint; for why should Geraldine curse both herself and her lover?—it should have been 'curse it!' no doubt. The whole passage, perhaps, would have read better thus—
oh, my eye!
'Tis Alice!—d——n it, Geraldine!—good bye!"
In his review of The Sacred Mountains, by J. T. Headley, a prose work, Poe satirizes by calling attention to the familiar omniscience that Headley displays in regard to events in which, thinks Poe, more reverence and more reserve should have been shown. Headley's long passage about the Crucifixion begins: "How heaven regarded this disaster, and the Universe felt at the sight, I cannot tell." Upon which Poe comments thus:
"Mr. Headley is a mathematical man. Moreover he is a modest man; for he confesses (no doubt with tears in his eyes) that really there is one thing that he does not know. 'How Heaven regarded this disaster, and the Universe felt at the sight, I cannot tell.' Only think of that! I cannot!—I, Headley, really cannot tell how the Universe 'felt' once upon a time! This is downright bashfulness on the part of Mr. Headley. He could tell if he would only try. Why did he not inquire? Had he demanded of the Universe how it felt, can any one doubt that the answer would have been—'Pretty well, I thank you, my dear Headley; how do you feel yourself?'"
The trail of Poe's humor may be interestingly traced in his comments on poems modeled upon his own. He has often been accused, and justly, of seeing plagiarism where no one else could see it; but in the following excerpt no reader will question that his scent was true or that the plagiarist got any less than his deserts:
"Here is a passage from another little ballad of mine, called Lenore, first published in 1830:
How shall the ritual, then, be read—the requiem how be sung
By you—by yours, the evil eye—by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?
"And here is a passage from The Penance of Roland, by Henry B. Hirst, published in 'Graham's Magazine' for January, 1848:
Mine the tongue that wrought this evil—mine the false and slanderous tongue
That done to death the Lady Gwineth—Oh, my soul is sadly wrung!
"Demon! devil," groaned the warrior, "devil of the evil eye!"
I do not object [concludes Poe] to his stealing my verses; but I do object to his stealing them in bad grammar. My quarrel with him is not, in short, that he did this thing, but that he has went and done did it."
Scores of passages like these, together with his instant recognition and loyal defense of the first efforts of a young English writer known then only as "Boz," are evidence that Poe was very far from being the stark, solemn, unsmiling figure that so many picture him. He could even laugh at himself. When he had won the hundred-dollar prize in 1833 and Mr. Latrobe, one of the committee of award, asked the unknown young writer what else he had for publication, he replied that he was engaged on a voyage to the moon. "And at once," says Mr. Latrobe, "he began to describe the journey with so much animation that for all I now remember, I may have fancied myself the companion of his aerial journey. When he had finished his description, he apologized for his excitability, which he laughed at himself." Indeed Poe's smile—it is not likely that he ever laughed boisterously—was a noticeable and memorable characteristic of his manner and expression. "I meet Mr. Poe very often at the receptions," wrote a friend to Mrs. Whitman, when Poe was living in New York. "He is the observed of all observers. His stories are thought wonderful, and to hear him repeat The Raven, which he does very quietly, is an event in one's life. People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told, and, what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences,[5] at the mention of which he always smiles. His smile is captivating."
Captivating, too, was the genial, affectionate, playful manner of Poe in the privacy of his own home. After 1842 there was, it is true, the deepening and saddening solicitude for Virginia's health; but there was also a love, a sympathy, an unselfishness that wrought expansively upon all who dwelt within. Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, the writer, knew Poe in the little home at 85 Amity Street, New York, and has left a sketch that should lay forever the specter of brooding and habitual melancholy that still parades itself as Edgar Allan Poe. On her deathbed, a few months after Poe's death, Mrs. Osgood wrote:
"It was in his own simple yet poetical home that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child, for his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. At his desk beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing, in an exquisitely clear chirography and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts—the 'rare and radiant fancies'—as they flashed through his wonderful and ever-wakeful brain. I recollect, one morning, toward the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay and lighthearted. Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a pressing invitation to come to them; and I, who never could resist her affectionate summons, and who enjoyed his society far more in his own home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity Street. I found him just completing his series of papers entitled The Literati of New York. 'See,' said he, displaying in laughing triumph several little rolls of narrow paper (he always wrote thus for the press), 'I am going to show you by the difference of length in these the different degrees of estimation in which I hold all you literary people. In each of these one of you is rolled up and fully discussed. Come, Virginia, help me!' And one by one they unfolded them. At last they came to one which seemed interminable. Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the room with one end, and her husband to the opposite with the other. 'And whose lengthened sweetness long drawn out is that?' said I. 'Hear her!' he cried. 'Just as if her little vain heart didn't tell her it's herself!'"
But no appraisal of Poe's personality or of his relatedness to his age would be at all complete without some mention of his attitude to religion. Here again the poems and stories leave us in the dark; but there is abundant evidence from other sources that from childhood, when he went regularly to church with Mrs. Allan,[6] to that last hour when he asked Mrs. Moran if she thought there was any hope for him hereafter, God and the Bible were fundamental in his thinking. It is equally evident that, though living in a sceptical age, an age in which science seemed to be weakening the foundations of long cherished beliefs, and being himself enamored of scientific hypothesis and speculative forecast, Poe remained untouched by current forms of unbelief. It is hard to understand what Mr. Woodberry means when he records the fact that Mrs. Moran read to the dying poet the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel and adds: "It is the only mention of religion in his entire life."[7] If the mere reading of the Bible to Poe, not by him, be construed as a "mention of religion" in his life, what shall be said of his own familiarity with the Bible, of his keen interest in biblical research, of his oft-expressed belief in the truth of the Bible, or of his final and impassioned defense, in Eureka, of the sovereignty of the God of the Bible?
Poe's intimate knowledge of the Bible might be traced in the many allusions that he makes to Bible history and Bible imagery, but more than mere knowledge is seen in the conscious and vivid imitation of Bible style that he achieves in many of his greatest prose passages. No one could have written Shadow, a Parable or Silence, a Fable unless he had so communed with the Old Testament prophets as to catch both the form and the spirit of their utterance. In dignity and elevation of thought, in faultlessness of keeping, in utter simplicity of style and structure, Poe's workmanship in these two selections alone would place him not only among the masters of English prose but among the still smaller number of those whose mastery seems not so much a homage to ancient models as an illumination from the same central sun.
Poe's interest in the discoveries that were beginning to throw new light upon many perplexing problems in the Bible was not the interest of the antiquarian. There was little of the antiquarian in his nature. It was the interest of one who feels an instinctive fellowship with all forms of progressive thought. "I read all the time," says Edison,[8] "on astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, music, metaphysics, mechanics, and other branches—political economy, electricity, and, in fact, all things that are making for progress in the world." Poe might have said the same. It was the forward movement, the widening horizon, the latent possibilities of a subject that interested Poe, rather than the elemental nature of the subject itself. Landscape gardening, mesmerism, cryptography, metaphysical speculation, the nebular hypothesis, the new science or pseudo-science of aeronautics, the explorations then making in the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas, Maury's additions to marine lore, the latent results of the gold-excitement in California, these appealed to Poe not so much in themselves as through the enfolded sense of something greater yet to be. They were open doors rather than reservoirs. They were frontier subjects and out of each of them he wrought literature.
If he did not make literature out of the results of Bible discovery in Oriental lands, he at least left on record his familiarity with the subject and his prompt recognition of the part that such discoveries were destined to play in the interpretation of the Old and the New Testament. Though he did not live to greet any of the discoveries of Sir Henry Rawlinson, "the father of Assyriology," Poe's review of Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petræa, and the Holy Land, by John Lloyd Stephens, the New Jersey lawyer, shows the spirit in which he would have welcomed the work of the great English Orientalist:
"Viewed only as one of a class of writings whose direct tendency is to throw light upon the Book of Books, it has strong claim upon the attention of all who read. While the vast importance of critical and philological research in dissipating the obscurities and determining the exact sense of the Scriptures cannot be too readily conceded, it may be doubted whether the collateral illustration derivable from records of travel be not deserving at least equal consideration. Certainly the evidence thus afforded, exerting an enkindling influence upon the popular imagination, and so taking palpable hold upon the popular understanding, will not fail to become in time a most powerful because easily available instrument in the downfall of unbelief. Infidelity itself has often afforded unwilling and unwitting testimony to the truth. It is surprising to find with what unintentional precision both Gibbon and Volney (among others) have used, for the purpose of description, in their accounts of nations and countries, the identical phraseology employed by the inspired writers when foretelling the most improbable event. In this manner scepticism has been made the root of belief, and the providence of the Deity has been no less remarkable in the extent and nature of the means for bringing to light the evidence of his accomplished word, than in working the accomplishment itself."
Later on in this review Poe avows his belief in the literal meaning and literal fulfilment of Bible predictions. The italics are of course Poe's:
"We look upon the literalness of the understanding of the Bible predictions as an essential feature in prophecy—conceiving minuteness of detail to have been but a portion of the providential plan of the Deity for bringing more visibly to light, in after-ages, the evidence of the fulfilment of his word. No general meaning attached to a prediction, no general fulfilment of such prediction, could carry, to the reason of mankind, inferences so unquestionable, as its particular and minutely incidental accomplishment. General statements, except in rare instances, are susceptible of misinterpretation or misapplication: details admit no shadow of ambiguity. That, in many striking cases, the words of the prophets have been brought to pass in every particular of a series of minutiæ, whose very meaning was unintelligible before the period of fulfilment, is a truth that few are so utterly stubborn as to deny. We mean to say that, in all instances, the most strictly literal interpretation will apply."
He inserts also in the same review his proffered emendation of Isaiah XXXIV, 10, quoting the original Hebrew in Hebrew letters. Poe was very proud of this achievement and repeats his newly acquired Oriental lore several times in later years, though one must sympathize with him in his repetitions because the typographical outfit was not again equal to the reproduction of the awesome and erudite Hebrew originals. Of course he has been called a charlatan and worse for intimating a knowledge of Hebrew which he did not possess. But surely his pride in the matter is pardonable. It was a very small hoax. Doctor Charles Anthon, of New York, had given him in a letter (June 1, 1837) all the information that was needed, and Poe used it, making much of the Hebrew characters that Doctor Anthon had furnished. But Doctor Anthon's letter was in answer to one from Poe, asking whether the emendation was borne out by the Hebrew text. Poe nowhere claims familiarity with Hebrew or even originality in his proffered reading of the text.
Poe's belief in the Bible, his aversion to scepticism, and his assurance of the immortality of the soul find frequent assertion in his less known works. He commends the inaugural address of the President of Hampden-Sidney College because it shows "a vein of that truest of all philosophy, the philosophy of the Christian." He believed that the lines,
Trifles, like straws, upon the surface flow,
He who would search for pearls must dive below,
"Were the indications we derive from science, of the nature and designs of Deity, and thence, by inference, of man's destiny,—were these indications proof direct, it is then very true that no advance in science could strengthen them; for, as the essayist justly observes, 'nothing can be added to the force of the argument which the mind finds in every beast, bird and flower;' but, since these indications are rigidly analogical, every step in human knowledge, every astronomical discovery, in especial, throws additional light upon the august subject, by extending the range of analogy. That we know no more, to-day, of the nature of Deity, of its purposes, and thus of man himself, than we did even a dozen years ago, is a proposition disgracefully absurd. 'If Natural Philosophy,' says a greater than Macaulay, 'should continue to be improved in its various branches, the bounds of moral philosophy would be enlarged also.' These words of the prophetic Newton are felt to be true, and will be fulfilled."
It was the scepticism of Lord Bolingbroke which, according to Poe, rendered nearly half of the viscount's work comparatively worthless:
"The philosophical essays, occupying two of the volumes on our table, are comparatively valueless, and inferior, both in style and matter, to the political tracts. They are deeply imbued with the sceptical opinions of the author, and we should have willingly seen them omitted in this edition, if it were possible to get a complete one, with nearly one half of the author's works left out. Little, therefore, as we value the philosophical works of Bolingbroke, we commend the publishers for not expunging them as too many others have done."
"Twenty years ago," says Poe, writing in 1844, "credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic; now the case is conversed. The wise are wisely averse from disbelief. To be sceptical is no longer evidence either of information or of wit."
"No man doubts the immortality of the soul," declares Poe, "yet of all truths this truth of immortality is the most difficult to prove by any mere series of syllogisms." And later: "However well a man may reason on the great topics of God and immortality, he will be forced to admit tacitly in the end, that God and immortality are things to be felt rather than demonstrated." There was a time, however, when Poe believed that man's immortality could be proved:
"Indeed, to our own mind, the only irrefutable argument in support of the soul's immortality—or, rather, the only conclusive proof of man's alternate dissolution and rejuvenescence ad infinitum—is to be found in analogies deduced from the modern established theory of the nebular cosmogony. This cosmogony demonstrates that all existing bodies in the universe are formed of a nebular matter, a rare ethereal medium, pervading space; shows the mode and laws of formation, and proves that all things are in a perpetual state of progress; that nothing in nature is perfected."
Not a proof but an indication of immortality, "a forethought of the loveliness to come," "a prescient ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave," Poe found in poetry:
"He who shall merely sing with whatever rapture, in however harmonious strains, or with however vivid a truth of imitation, of the sights and sounds which greet him in common with all mankind—he, we say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a longing unsatisfied, which he has been impotent to fulfill. There is still a thirst unquenchable, which to allay he has shown us no crystal springs. This burning thirst belongs to the immortal essence of man's nature. It is equally a consequence and an indication of his perennial life. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is not the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is a wild effort to reach the beauty above. It is a forethought of the loveliness to come. It is a passion to be satisfied by no sublunary sights, or sounds, or sentiments, and the soul thus athirst strives to allay its fever in futile efforts at creation. Inspired with a prescient ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of Time, to anticipate some portion of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain solely to Eternity. And the result of such effort, on the part of souls fittingly constituted, is alone what mankind have agreed to denominate Poetry."
But Eureka, published in 1848, contains more of Poe's matured personality, more of his spiritual autobiography, than any other product of his pen. For seven years at least the main conception of this prose-poem absorbed Poe as no other constructive thought had ever absorbed him before. He seemed consciously in the grip not of a marginal truth but of a central and star-ypointing truth. "What I here propound," he writes in his brief preface, "is true:—therefore it cannot die:—or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will 'rise again to the Life Everlasting.'" Virginia's death with its long but foreseen approach had thrown him starkly back upon the problem of life here and its expansion or extinction hereafter. The companionship that he needed in these tense hours of composition was now furnished by Mrs. Clemm. "When he was composing Eureka," she wrote, "we used to walk up and down the garden, his arm around me, mine around him, until I was so tired I could not walk. He would stop every few minutes and explain his ideas to me, and ask if I understood him."
God's in his heaven—
All's right with the world.
Two passages must suffice. The echo of the first seems heard in a line of Tennyson's In Memoriam,
One God, one law, one element.
Poe writes:
"That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt. By the former we imply merely the laws of the latter. But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future—with Him all being Now—do we not insult him in supposing his laws so contrived as not to provide for every possible contingency?—or, rather, what idea can we have of any possible contingency, except that it is at once a result and a manifestation of his laws? He who, divesting himself of prejudice, shall have the rare courage to think absolutely for himself, cannot fail to arrive, in the end, at the condensation of laws into Law—cannot fail of reaching the conclusion that each law of Nature is dependent at all points upon all other laws, and that all are but consequences of one primary exercise of the Divine Volition. Such is the principle of the Cosmogony which, with all necessary deference, I here venture to suggest and to maintain."
Just as Tennyson asked that Crossing the Bar be placed last in all editions of his poems, so Poe might well have asked that the close of Eureka—his swan song—be viewed as the terminus of all that he had thought or dreamed or hoped or suffered. If "Nevermore" seem at times the refrain of all of his singing, "Evermore" was the note on which he closed; if despair seem the companion of his more solitary moods, it was only that faith and hope might abide with him at the end; if death seem to loom too large and menacing in his visions, it was over and beyond its vanishing rim that he saw rise the beckoning and unclouded life:
"These creatures [animate and inanimate] are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."
III
And this is the man they call detached from the life about him, unaligned with the problems of his day, uninterested in the things that interested all others, "an exotic with no roots in the soil of his nativity," neither a person nor a personality but a "fantastically disembodied" spirit. If Hawthorne, the man, were similarly interpreted, if he were judged solely from his greatest works, we should think of him as tortured day and night by a brooding sense of guilt; we should picture him as living under the shadow of a curse, merited or inherited, that left no peace to his stricken conscience. It would be a false conception, however, because we know from other sources that Hawthorne was not abnormal in the pathological sense. But in the case of Poe there have been no other sources. The stories and poems have been requisitioned as autobiography, as the only autobiography. They are the autobiography of the artist, an artist who has again and again recorded his conviction that art is concerned primarily with beauty, and that beauty, to be appealing, must be garmented in strangeness.
But Poe's personality has also been interpreted in terms not of his art but of a habit that clung to him to the last. It is needless to go into the old sifted and re-sifted question of the exact amount of alcohol necessary to render Poe irresponsible. There is no doubt that he drank to excess and more frequently than his defenders have admitted. There is no doubt also that he fought the habit, fostered by inheritance and environment, with every power of will and every prompting of duty that he could muster. The evidence is plain that the temptation to drink was strongest during those quick descents from confident hope and exaltation to pitiless and intolerable dejection. George Eliot writes of "the still melancholy that I love." Poe did not love it, nor was it habitual with him. His temperament was mercurial, and to break the fall from elation to hopelessness he drank. Indulgence was followed not by angry retort to those that sought to counsel him but by profound humiliation and by promise of reform. To assert that Poe found poetic inspiration in drink is to fly in the face of all the known facts. Drink did not help him; it hurt him, and he fought it as a foe of art, of thought, of personality, and of selfrespect. The very nature of his work,—with its meticulous care in details, its orderliness, its niceties of analysis, its interplay of reason and logic, its symmetry of construction, makes impossible the conjecture that he could have wrought it or any part of it while excited by drink. Poe drank but he was not a drunkard; he was dissipated but not dissolute.
No one has stated the case better than his friend, F. W. Thomas:
"If he took but one glass of weak wine or beer or cider the Rubicon of the cup was passed with him, and it almost always ended in excess and sickness. But he fought against the propensity as hard as ever Coleridge fought against it, and I am inclined to believe, after his sad experience and suffering, if he could have gotten office with a fixed salary, beyond the need of literary labour, that he would have redeemed himself—at least at this time. The accounts of his derelictions in this respect when I knew him were very much exaggerated. I have seen men who drank bottles of wine to Poe's wine glasses who yet escaped all imputation of intemperance. His was one of those temperaments whose only safety is in total abstinence. He suffered terribly after any indiscretion. And after all what Byron said of Sheridan was true of Poe—
Ah little do they know
That what to them seemed vice might be but woe."
The poems that Poe wrote after the death of Virginia, the addresses that he delivered to applauding audiences, and the unexceptional testimony of the men and women who knew him most intimately during the last three months in Richmond show that there was no bankruptcy of intellect, no collapse of character, no disintegration of personality. "With all his recklessness," says Stedman, warning the reader against making Poe and the unheroic hero of William Wilson one and the same, "he was neither vicious nor criminal, and he never succeeded or wished to succeed in putting down his conscience. That stayed by him to the bitter end, and perhaps the end was speedier for its companionship."
Summing up, may we not say that Poe's work will enter upon a still wider stage of influence when it is regarded not as allurement to doubt and despair but as an outcry against them? Is is not unjust to call him the poet laureate of death and decay in the sense in which we call Shelley the poet laureate of love, Wordsworth of nature, Tennyson of trust, or Browning of resolute faith? Poe did not love death; he did not celebrate the charms of doubt or of darkness or of separation. He abhorred them. The desolate lover in The Raven does not acquiesce in "Nevermore." It flouts and belies every instinct and intuition of his heart. And in every poem and story of Poe's over which blackness seems to brood, there is the unmistakable note of spiritual protest; there is the evidence of a nature so attuned to love and light, to beauty and harmony, that denial of them or separation from them is a veritable death-in-life. Poe fathomed darkness but climbed to the light; he became the world's spokesman for those dwelling within the shadow but his feet were already upon the upward slope. Out of it all he emerged victor, not victim.
When I remember that Poe resented the charge of pantheism as keenly as that of atheism, when I recall that he ended his career as thinker and prophet with the chant, "All is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine," the sunlight seems to fall upon "the misty mid region of Weir," even "the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir;" and Edgar Allan Poe seems no longer our great autumnal genius, heralding an early winter, but the genius of winter itself, a late winter, with spring already at its heart.
- ↑ By James A. Harrison, New York, 1902.
- ↑ Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt (1919), p. 183.
- ↑ Stedman's reference to the clash between Poe and Lowell is amusing: "A speck of reservation spoiled for him [Poe] the fullest cup of esteem, even when tendered by the most knightly and authoritative hands. Lowell's Fable for Critics, declaring 'three-fifths of him genius,' gave him an award which ought to content even an unreasonable man. As it was, the good-natured thrusts of one whose scholarship was unassailable, at his metrical and other hobbies, drew from him a somewhat coarse and vindictive review of the whole satire." Poe, it must be remembered, did not happen to belong to the "Sweet Alice" type, so affectingly portrayed by Thomas Dunn English:
"She wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with grief at your frown." - ↑ The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, London, 1863.
- ↑ Poe refers to these "experiences" in his Marginalia: "The Swedenborgians inform me that they have discovered all that I said in a magazine article, entitled 'Mesmeric Revelation,' to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt my veracity—a thing which, in that particular instance, I never dreamed of not doubting myself. The story is a pure fiction from beginning to end."
- ↑ See The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, by J. H. Whitty, 1917, p. XXIV.
- ↑ The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909), vol. II, p. 345.
- ↑ Life of Edison, by Dyer and Martin, vol. II, p. 764.