“The persistent and palpably malignant efforts to damn him with some drops of faint praise and some oceans of strong abuse,”[A] have, indeed, produced a reactionary tendency toward panegyric, since the angels rolled the stone away from his tomb. The best any one can now do is to pity the man and admire his works, and weigh probabilities. A careful view as well of his time as of his character and environment is necessary. Premising that I am not so presumptuous as to expect to add much to the general fund of misinterpretation of his acts and misunderstanding of his character, a brief summary of the less controverted features of this history is submitted.
In “that stray child of Poetry and Passion” concentered hot Celtic and Southern blood, stimulated upon his father’s side by drink, upon his mother’s by the artificial surroundings of an actress’s life, and in both intensified by a runaway marriage, followed by a joint “barn-storming” life. Himself an inter-act, his nursery was the green room, his necessary nourishment narcotics. It is a sad thing to say, but probably one of the few fortunate circumstances of his life was that his parents died in his infancy—one of his many misfortunes was to have been adopted and raised by a wealthy family (Mr. Allan’s of Baltimore). He was born in 1809, or 1811, in either Boston, Baltimore or Richmond, through all of which he, living, “begged his bread,” a la Homer. The Allans assiduously spoiled the child with unlimited money, indulgence and praise. It was easy, for he was rarely beautiful, affectionate, and precocious; he recited with marvelous childish effect, spun webs of imaginative stories, and composed rhymes. “He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,” and when he was nine or ten years old his proud foster-father seriously contemplated issuing a volume of his baby-verse, but was dissuaded by the boy’s tutor, who said he had conceit enough already, and such additional celebrity would probably ruin his prospects.
Edgar was schooled in England, at the University of Virginia, and at West Point, but he must have picked up independently of schools and school masters the varied culture which shows in his versatile writings—especially his acquaintance with science, psychology and literature. At these schools he was distinguished alike for fast learning and fast living—his easy absorption of the branches he liked, his utter revulsion against those he did not like (mathematics, notably), for his literary and critical tastes, athletic exercises, and the lavishness with which he scattered his guardian’s money. These characteristics won him the jealousy of his plodding classmates, distinction at the university, expulsion from West Point, and quarrels with his foster-father. Over-indulgence by parents produced the usual result of disrespect and ingratitude in the youth; and the marriage of Mr. Allan to a second wife, and the birth of heirs to his estates brought about a final separation and a disinheritance of the adopted son, and so Edgar, at about his majority age, was thrown on his own resources. He chose literature as his profession, and doomed himself to poverty, anguish, professional jealousy (especially strong among authors), triumphs, defeats, ruin and insanity.
Poe’s real début in letters was in 1833, when (ætat 24) he won a prize of a hundred dollars offered by the proprietor of The Saturday Visitor, Baltimore, for the best story. Better than the money, the contest brought him the friendship of the judges, and about a year later the editorship of The Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond, at ten dollars a week. The intervening year is one of the blanks.
The Richmond editorship marks a turning point in Poe’s career. He made the fortune of the Messenger; married (’35) his cousin, Virginia Clem; and first began that line of work which is, in my opinion, its distinctive feature, as it certainly proved to be decisive of his destiny—to-wit: criticism. He published in some issues as much as thirty or forty pages of book reviews. They created a tempest; for, rare as is his imagery and wonderful as is his imagination, Poe’s distinguishing mental characteristic is analysis. He is more logician than poet, more metaphysician than romancer.
Poe subsequently (’37-’38) edited the Gentlemen’s Magazine, and then Graham’s Magazine, both in Philadelphia, and in ’44 we find him in New York, employed on the Mirror, the journal of the poets N. P. Willis and George P. Morris. In Philadelphia he did the best work of his life in romance and criticism. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of his evil genius, Dr. Griswold. Poe believed that Griswold supplanted him from the editorship of Graham’s; G.’s subsequent enmity, while professing friendship, was of the unforgiving nature that often comes of the consciousness of having inflicted a secret wrong on another. The only other causes of disagreement between them alleged are that Poe criticised Griswold’s book in a lecture, and that Griswold attempted to buy a favorable criticism from Poe’s pen. But they were outwardly friendly, after a reconciliation, till Poe’s voice and pen were beyond the power of response. The work of detraction had preceded Poe to New York, for Mr. Willis writes of this engagement:
“With the highest admiration for his genius, and a willingness to let it alone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious. To our occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a criticism, or that he would erase a passage colored too highly with his resentments against society and mankind, he readily and courteously assented—far more yielding than most men, we thought, on points so excusably sensitive. Through all this considerable period we had seen but one presentment of the man—a quiet, patient, industrious, and most gentlemanly person, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling by his unvarying deportment and ability.”
In 1845 appeared the work on which Poe’s poetic fame most depends, that poem in which he wedded Despair to Harmony, “The Raven.” It marks the acme of his life, also; his star declined rapidly thereafter. His wife, who bore the hereditary taint of consumption, was in a decline; care and anxiety on that account, and his own ill health, took away his ability to write and he was without means of support. He was driven to ask loans from one or two friends, and by a fatality such as he sometimes made to drive his fictitious characters upon their worst expedients, he chose Dr. Griswold as one of them. “Can you not send me five dollars?” he pleaded with G.; “I am ill and Virginia is almost gone.” This and one or two other such letters Griswold published, in connection with his slanders on Poe’s character, to give his attack the cover of friendly sincerity. Something was published in New York papers regarding the distress of the Poes, and a lady friend (Mrs. Shew) visited them at Fordham. The worst was confirmed.
“There was no clothing on the bed—which was only straw—but a snow-white spread 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. Poe died January 30, 1847. Captain Mayne Reid, the novelist, who visited often at her house, thus describes her: