Biographers may ignore the alleged fact, but in doing so, they are in the company of such biologists as Francis Galton and his pupil and successor, Karl Pearson, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of heredity, acceptable and accepted.
Dr. Robertson has a way of making an arbitrary statement which savours of arrogance. For instance, “Genius develops early and is characterised by precocity.” I suppose Pasteur was a genius. He was the founder of the science of bacteriology, the architect of a diseaseless world. There is every reason for believing that he was not precocious. Few people would deny that Thomas Edison is a genius. He certainly was not precocious. Though the names of youthful dullards in the roll of men of achievement are not legion, I recall those of Davy, Linnæus, Humboldt, Watt, Fulton, Schiller, Heine, Goldsmith, Beecher, Whistler, Patrick Henry and Rousseau.
“Precocity of necessity foretells early decline,” says the author. John Stuart Mill, for instance, who could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease when he was eight and began a thorough study of scholastic logic when he was twelve! J. St. Loe Strachey is still going strong, and any one who doubts that he was precocious is referred to The Joy of Living. “I view brilliancy in the child as an abnormal heredity that must pay the price of premature decay.” Shades of Beethoven and Alexander Pope! No one would deny artistic genius to Richard Wagner. At the age of thirteen he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey for amusement; at seventeen his first production as a composer was performed at the Leipzig theatre; and at sixty-nine the music of “Parsifal” was completed.
Dr. Robertson is bound to show that Poe did not die of delirium tremens, and he characterises the statement of Dr. J. J. Moran, who was resident physician of the Washington University Hospital, where Poe died, as “an intelligent statement covering the details of a death due to brain inflammation or engorgement.” But brain inflammation or engorgement is the condition of the brain and its membranes that is found in every case of delirium tremens that comes to autopsy, especially when the delirium has occurred in an individual whose resistance to alcohol has been impaired by prolonged use of that intoxicant or of drugs. The plain truth is that our greatest poet used alcohol intemperately and opium indiscreetly; that he died of delirium tremens; that his father drank excessively; that his conduct, drunk or sober, did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew him, possibly even not of the majority. But he put the United States of America on the literary map and he put it there more indelibly than any individual who preceded him or who has so far followed him. This is not the opinion or judgment of the writer, but of countless students and critics who have written of him during the past half century. Why whitewash the crown that posterity has put upon his brow? Why not leave the golden shimmer of the original burnish?
Merely to expose the quality of the whitewash which Dr. Robertson has applied to the poet’s crown, and not from any desire to call attention to the weakness of the man who wears it, one incident may be cited of Poe’s action as a critic. This is his estimate of Estelle Anna Lewis, a Brooklyn poetess, of whom he wrote:
All critical opinion must agree in assigning her a high, if not the highest, rank among the poetesses of her land. Her artistic ability is unusual; her command of language great; her acquirements numerous and thorough; her range of incident wide; her invention generally vigorous; her fancy exuberant; and her imagination—that primary and most indispensable of all poetic requisites—richer perhaps than any of her female contemporaries.
Such an estimate could only go to prove that critics often make mistakes and that Poe as critic was not the peer of Poe as poet and story-writer, were it not for the fact that this poetess, prior to the appearance of the notice in which the quotation appeared, had paid Poe one hundred dollars to review one of her books, and when she complained of his failure to do so he remarked that if he reviewed her rubbish it would kill him.
Such incidents could be multiplied. But to what purpose? Poe was a genius and he is immortal. As a man he was a pathetic figure, a moral weakling. It can not add to the lustre of his immortal genius to expose the pitiful skeleton of the man over whom the dust of time has spread a merciful veil and the radiance of his crown has cast an indulgent shadow. Nor can Dr. Robertson enhance the world’s estimate of the writer by piling up words to convince it that Poe, the man, was full of fine qualities only, but at times committed acts for which he could not be held responsible because he was under the temporary influence of a “neurosis”; and that this “neurosis” had no effect upon the quality of his writing.
Edgell Rickword’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the decadent, is too laudatory, too apologetic, too condoning; but it reveals penetrative insight, sympathetic understanding, and a measure of critical acumen.