EDGAR ALLAN POE.
Among the names that were occasionally mentioned in the brief and fleeting annals of the stage from the year 1798 to the year 1811, were those of Mr. David Poe and the beautiful Miss Arnold—afterward Mrs. Poe,—the father and mother of that most brilliant but erratic genius Edgar A. Poe.
David Poe was the son of old General Poe, who won his honors in Revolutionary times and was a man of sterling character and many heroic qualities. Miss Arnold belonged to the stage by birth, and from earliest youth had been attached to the theatre in some capacity. It is a most miserable fate for a child, but she knew of nothing better. She came before the public with a naïveté that was touching, and played her little airs on the piano and sung her little songs and uttered her childish sentences always to the very best of her ability, putting up with the late hours and the hasty and often scanty meals and the general discomfort of her lot with the utmost amiability and good-nature. No sheltered home, no days of careless pleasure, no constant and watchful care over health or manners or morals, fell to her lot; but the frowns and sometimes the curses of the older actors, the ill-nature of the manager, and the wearied fretfulness of her mother, who was growing old in the drudgery of her profession,—for she never rose above that at any time. Nor does it appear that Miss Arnold had any particular talent, though she won a moderate share of favor upon the stage; but she was always much esteemed by those who knew her in private. She sung and sometimes danced, as did her husband, who was an actor of inferior merit. There is something very pathetic in the story of the little second-rate actress who was so conscientious and so persevering, and one cannot but hope that she received her due share of the applause which lends such a fascination to the life of the actor that he rarely abandons it for any other career.
There is a hint of the hardship of her life in the fact that there are but three short breaks in her dramatic career through all those years,—the times when the three children were born to them. Edgar was born Jan. 19, 1809, and his mother appeared upon the stage again February 10, and played to the end of the season almost incessantly. The family were poor to the verge of destitution at all times, and the little woman had need of a brave heart when the children came crowding into the poor unfurnished nest. One cannot doubt that there was much of pain and worry in the little creature's heart before the birth of Edgar; and no doubt the paint covered the traces of many tears on the faded cheeks, and the smiles which wreathed her face were more artificial than the usual stage smiles during all those weary months. In 1811 she and her husband were playing in Richmond, when her health failed her, and they were brought to great straits for the means of life. The actors gave her a benefit, but the receipts were small, and the following card was inserted in the Richmond papers:—
"To the Humane: On this night Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance; and asks it perhaps, for the last time."
Before the second benefit night the Richmond ladies had come to her relief, and she was tenderly cared for during the brief remainder of her life by stranger hands. She had never had a home. She had passed her whole life in poor, mean lodgings, about which no household charm could linger. In these desolate places had been passed even her honeymoon; in some garret lodgings had her children been born; here all that she had known of domestic joy or sorrow had been enacted; here she had doubtless wept her hot tears and had her little triumphs, and here she had died. Poor little variety-actress of the olden time! there is one heart at least that is touched by your lot, even at this distant day, and has dropped a tear to your memory on the page where she has read your history.
The three children were cared for by the kind people of Richmond, and Edgar was adopted by Mrs. John Allan, whose husband gave but a reluctant consent to the arrangement. Edgar was a most beautiful and precocious child, and attracted much attention in the new home. If the poor mother on her dying-bed could have known of the good fortune which awaited him, it would have eased somewhat the bitter pangs of her parting with her beautiful and idolized child. He was taken to England, where he spent several years of his childhood, and when he returned, entered a classical school, where he was prepared for college. He was described as "self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and, though of generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable." He was a facile scholar and fond of Latin and English poetry. He was nearly always alone, making few friends among his schoolmates, and was of a dignified and reserved disposition and inclined to melancholy. He entered the University of Virginia at the age of seventeen, and it was here that his fatal habit of drinking was first formed. One of his schoolmates writes:—
"Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and peculiar as that for cards. It was not the taste of the beverage that influenced him. Without a sip or smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, without water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp. This frequently used him up; but if not, he rarely returned to the charge."
This, for a lad of seventeen, with an excitable temperament, was sufficient to sow the seeds of all his future woe. The youthful brain inflamed with alcohol never really recovers its normal condition, even when abstinence follows, and Poe's life-long struggle with his adversary began at this tender age. Dr. Day, long connected with the inebriate asylum at Binghamton, N. Y., once had an opportunity to examine the brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed and lived for some years as a teetotaller. He found to his surprise that the globules of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol and resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid condition of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been habituated to liquor falls so easily under its sway again in spite of every moral reason for refraining. Doubtless he was right, and poor Poe was only one of a vast number of men of brilliant intellects and kind hearts, who after a life-long struggle are defeated by the enemy they have taken into their stomachs to destroy their brains.
It is not our purpose to trace the poet through all the devious windings of his life, but to dwell for a little while upon the course of his domestic life and give some of the striking points in his character. We will pass over the close of his college career and the episode at West Point, as well as the publication of his earliest volume of poems, and look at him as we find him in the summer of 1833, living in Baltimore. He had a home here with his father's widowed sister, Mrs. Clemm, who with her daughter Virginia lived in a very humble way in that city. The little Poe could earn—for he was then at one of his lowest financial periods—went into the common stock, and the three struggled along together. Virginia was a child of eleven, beautiful, delicate, refined; and Mrs. Clemm was then, as always thereafter, the best and kindest of friends to the poet. She had little to offer him, save kindness and motherly love; but she gave these most abundantly, and they were of priceless value to Poe. For many months he kept himself from his besetting sin, and worked faithfully at whatever literary work he could get to do. But he was poor to the point of destitution, and the mental strain upon him was great, with his extraordinary pride and sensitiveness. He had been well reared, with fine and delicate tastes, and accustomed to money; and privation was very bitter to him. He was naturally an aristocrat, too, and found in the associations to which he was almost compelled by poverty a heavy cross. At the end of two years he felt himself forced to leave Baltimore, and thought he could obtain employment in Richmond. He had become greatly attached to Virginia, and she was equally so to him; and although she was but a child of thirteen, Poe proposed to marry her and take her and Mrs. Clemm with him to his new destination. The youth of Virginia seems to have been the only obstacle in the mind of Mrs. Clemm, who had conceived the deepest affection for Poe and had great confidence in his abilities. She was friendless and unable to take care of herself and her daughter, and after some hesitation she consented to the marriage. It did not take place, however, till Virginia was fourteen years old.
Ill-starred and ill-timed as this marriage seemed to be, it was the one bright and beautiful thing about the life of Poe. He remained passionately devoted to the youthful wife as long as she lived; and it is thought by those who knew him best that, despite his numerous romantic passages with ladies after her death, Virginia was the only woman he ever really loved. In spite of the bad habits which clung to him so persistently, he seems to have been a really kind and devoted husband to the end. She, on her part, worshipped him with a supreme infatuation that was blind to all his faults. The romance of the first months of married life seemed never to wear off, and through all their sorrows—and they were many and bitter—their love burned as brightly as at first.
To Mrs. Clemm, also, Poe was always a devoted son, and through all his waywardness; and folly and sin she clung to him with the devotion of a true mother. The sturdy figure of this woman shows through all the dark spots of his life, casting a gleam of brightness. She was a strong, masculine-looking woman, full of energy, and took upon herself all the practical affairs of the little household. She received the money from Poe, and expended it in her own way; and she had a faculty of getting a good deal of comfort out of a very little money. So their home was almost always comfortable, even when they were poorest. And she never gave way to reproaches, even when Poe was at his worst. She seemed to consider his failing only in the light of a misfortune, and never blamed, but always pitied him. She worshipped his genius almost as blindly as did Virginia, and it is pleasant to think that with all their misfortunes and privations, they had much real happiness in their little home. Poe was very proud and very fond of Virginia, and liked to take strangers to see her. She had a voice of wonderful sweetness and sung exquisitely, and in some of their more prosperous days she had her harp and piano. One evening when she was singing she ruptured a blood-vessel, and for a time her life was despaired of Poe describes the affliction long afterwards in a letter as follows:—
"Six years ago a wife whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. At the end of a year the vessel again broke. I went through precisely the same scene. Then again—again—and even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death, and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive,—nervous to an unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of possible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity."
Although Poe's word is not always to be taken in regard to his own affairs, this doubtless describes his feelings over Virginia's condition quite truthfully; and whether the drinking was cause or effect we shall probably never really know.
During one of the periods of Virginia's improved health Poe took her and went to New York, leaving Mrs. Clemm behind to settle up domestic affairs. In a letter which he wrote to his mother-in-law, we have a glimpse of the kindlier side of the man's nature and of his real affection for this devoted friend, as well as some hints of the straits of poverty to which they had been accustomed, by the fulness of his descriptions of the plenty upon which they had fallen. He is speaking of his boarding-house:—
"I wish Catarina [the cat] could see it; she would faint. Last night for supper we had the nicest tea you ever drank,—strong and hot,—wheat and 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. 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. 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 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 send it on. You can't imagine how much we both do miss you. Sissy had a hearty cry last night because you and Catarina weren't here. We hope to send for you very soon."
It is hard to read of the straits to which Poe was often reduced for a little money, and to know that all this time he was writing those immortal tales which would now make a man's fortune as soon as produced. It is true that he had two or three times good salaried positions,—good for that day,—but he never kept them long, and his chronic state was one of poverty, if not of destitution.
Mrs. Osgood, who knew him in the later days in New York, says of him:—
"I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred, and fastidiously refined. To a sensitive and delicately nurtured woman there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect."
The home in the suburbs where he lived in the last days of his wife's life is described as a story-and-a-half house at the top of Fordham Hill. Within on the ground floor were two small apartments,—a kitchen and sitting-room,—and above, up a narrow stairway, two others, one Poe's room,—a low, cramped chamber lighted by little square windows like port-holes,—the other a diminutive closet of a bedroom, hardly large enough to lie down in. The furnishing was of the scantiest, but everything faultlessly neat.
"Mrs. Clemm, now over sixty, in her worn black dress made upon all who saw her an impression of dignity, refinement, and deep motherly devotion to her children. Virginia, at the age of twenty-five, retained her beauty, but the large black eyes and raven hair contrasted sadly with the pallor of her face. Poe himself, poor, proud, and ill, anticipating grief and nursing the bitterness that springs from helplessness in the sight of suffering borne by those dear to us, was restless and variable, the creature of contradictory impulses."
Virginia now failed rapidly, Poe was ill, and the household was reduced almost to the starving-point. Winter was upon them; and when at last a sympathizing friend found them she thus describes the situation:—
"There was no clothing upon the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet. Mrs. Clemm was passionately fond of her daughter, and her distress on account of her illness and poverty and misery was dreadful to see."
This friend at once interested some benevolent people in the case, and poor Virginia's last days were made comfortable by their aid. Poe's heart seemed filled with inexpressible gratitude to all who aided him in this sorest crisis of his life; and although he was much broken by his loss, he rallied once more and was sober and industrious for a time. Mrs. Clemm stood faithfully by him, and even watched over him through some of the fearful seasons of delirium which followed his complete giving up to the habits of drinking and of taking opium.
Of the final scenes of this unhappy life it is needless to write. They have been often described, and though the accounts vary, the sum and substance are the same. Poe was attacked with delirium-tremens in Baltimore, and died in a hospital in that city in October, 1849. Beautiful, gifted, and sensitive, proud, ambitious, and daring, endowed with a subtle charm of manner as well as of person, amiable and generous in his home life, loyal and devoted to his family, a very pleasing picture is presented of the man if we look but on this side. Could he have overcome the fatal fascination of drink, we might never have seen the reverse side of all this. As it is, let us cover his follies with our mantle of charity and dwell only upon his genius and his virtues.
