“Mr. Poe,” he wrote, “is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America. It may be that we should qualify our remarks a little, and say that he might be, rather than that he always is, for he seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.... Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”
Lowell had offered to write this sketch in May, 1844, and had been supplied with biographical material by Poe himself, who moreover read the article in manuscript which Lowell sent at the end of September through their common friend, Mr. Briggs. During this winter of 1845 Poe was a lively subject of discussion by Lowell and his friends, for he was the most conspicuous figure in American literature at that time. His “Raven” appeared in The American Review for February, and his series of papers on plagiarism, with their acuteness, their ostentation of learning, and their malice, was trailing through the Mirror and The Broadway Journal. His name was linked with that of Briggs in the editorship of the Journal, and Briggs sometimes found it difficult to make clear to his friends just how responsibility was apportioned between them. It was impossible to regard this very insistent figure as an intellectual or æsthetic abstraction, and his personality was always getting in the way of a fair judgment. In a letter to Briggs, 16 January, 1845, Lowell remarks: “From a paragraph I saw yesterday in the Tribune I find that Poe has been at me in the Mirror. He has at least that chief element of a critic—a disregard of persons. He will be a very valuable coadjutor to you.” Briggs, who was at this time a warm defender of Poe, had read the article in the Mirror, which was a review of the “Conversations,” and assured Lowell that it was extremely laudatory and discriminating, and a few days later, after strongly praising “The Gold Bug” which he had just read, he says: “Do not trouble yourself about anybody’s gloriometer.... I have always misunderstood Poe from thinking him one of the Graham and Godey species, but I find him as different as possible. I think that you will like him well when you come to know him personally.” Briggs copied “The Raven” into his magazine and wrote enthusiastically to Lowell about it. But Lowell was deeply offended by what he termed “the grossness and vulgarity” of Poe’s treatment of Longfellow, especially in his offhand allusion to Mrs. Longfellow and her children. Briggs again came to Poe’s defence. “The allusion to Mrs. Longfellow,” he wrote, “was only a playful allusion to an abstract Mrs. Longfellow, for Poe did not know even that Longfellow was married; look at the thing again and you will see that it contains nothing offensive. Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for Longfellow, and so he will say before he is done. For my own part I did not use to think well of Poe, but my love for you and implicit confidence in your judgment led me to abandon all my prejudices against him, when I read your account of him. The Rev. Mr. Griswold, of Philadelphia, told me some abominable lies about him, but a personal acquaintance with him has induced me to think highly of him. Perhaps some Philadelphian has been whispering foul things in your ear about him. Doubtless his sharp manner has made him many enemies. But you will think better of him when you meet him.”
Lowell, however, refused to be convinced. “The Rev. Mr. Griswold,” he said petulantly, “is an ass, and, what’s more, a knave, and even if he had said anything against Poe, I should not have believed it. But neither he nor any one else ever did. I remain of my old opinion about the allusion to Mrs. Longfellow. I remain of my old opinion about Poe, and I have no doubt that Poe estimates Longfellow’s poetical abilities more highly than I do perhaps, but I nevertheless do not like his two last articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.”
Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through correspondence.[49] A few weeks later, when he was returning from Philadelphia to Cambridge, he called upon him, but the interview gave little satisfaction, due to the fact, mentioned by Mr. Briggs, that Poe was tipsy at the time. A few weeks later Lowell defended himself, in a letter to Briggs, against a charge of plagiarism made by Poe, and summed up his impressions as follows: “Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call character. It is something quite distinct from genius,—though all great geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri, of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,—while of such men as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the author of this and that. As I prognosticated, I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service.... Poe wishes to kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is welcome. But he does not attack me at a weak point. He probably cannot conceive of anybody’s writing for anything but a newspaper reputation or for posthumous fame, which is much the same thing magnified by distance. I have quite other aims.”
Finally, Briggs himself lost all patience with Poe, and replied to this letter: “You have formed a correct estimate of Poe’s characterless character. I have never met a person so utterly deficient of high motive. He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist; he cannot conceive why the world should not feel an interest in whatever interests him, because he feels no interest himself in what does not personally concern him.”
In all his critical writing after this time, Lowell never discussed Poe. His offhand characterization in “A Fable for Critics,”
“Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,
. . . . . . . .
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,”
passes at once into a lecture on his treatment of Longfellow. Poe was not a blackboard on which Lowell wrote his own virtues, but it is an illustration of the dominant ethical note in Lowell’s nature, especially at this time, that open as he was to the influence of poetry, and keenly sensitive to the melody and color to be found in exquisite language, he could not detach poetry from character. In his leaning toward reform, he tried to take poetry with him as a fellow-worker, but I do not think this really affected his judgment of Poe, and Briggs’s amusing report of Poe’s consignment of reformers to the mad-house was not likely to gall him; his sense of humor would correct any irritation. But Lowell did hold his head high and was intoxicated with the spirit of idealism; he and his wife stimulated each other, and breathing this air, he was not in a mood to be indulgent toward what he conceived to be lower ideals. The biographical essay which a few years later he wrote on Keats shows clearly how desirous he was of bringing the few known facts of that poet’s life into accord with a lofty conception of the poetic spirit; standing uncomfortably near Poe, he was in danger of interpreting his poetry by the comment which his life afforded.
Although literature then as always was the constant factor in Lowell’s resolve, the circumstances in which he was placed, and his own uneasy sense that he ought to bear his part in the moral uprising, led him to expend a good deal of energy this winter in political and ethical writing. He was living in the midst of the Society of Friends and breathing an atmosphere of anti-slavery reform; the great debate on Texas was raging, and, more than all, his wife by his side kept a steady flame of zeal burning. He let himself out once in verse when he sent to the Boston Courier some stanzas headed “Another Rallying Cry by a Yankee,” in which, with a vehemence that allowed little breathing space for wit or humor, he declaimed against the iniquity of the Texas resolutions, then on the eve of passage, and made a passionate appeal to his native state to hold herself aloof from any compromise with slavery.
“O Spirit of the noble Past, when the old Bay State was free,”