that to this day perhaps most people who have heard of Poe regard him as what he himself called "that monstrum horrendum,1 an unprincipled man of genius," with almost no moral virtue and lacking almost no vice. It was an ex-clergyman, Griswold, who launched the legend; and another clergyman, Gilfillan, improved on it to the extent of suggesting that the poet broke his wife's heart so as to be able to write a poem about her. The average mind being, however, a little less ready than the clerical to believe and utter evil, there at length grew up a body of vindication which for instructed readers has displaced the sinister myth of the early records. Vindication, as it happened, began immediately on the publication of Griswold's memoir; only, the slander had the prestige of book form, and of the copyright edition of Poe's works, while the defence was at first confined to newspapers; hence an immense start for the former: but at length generous zeal triumphed to the extent of creating an almost stainless effigy of the poet stainless save for the constitutional flaw which was confessed only to claim for it a human pity, and the faults of tone and temper which came of nervous malady and undue toil. Then there came a reaction, the facts were more closely studied and more unsympathetically pronounced upon; the unsleeping ill-will towards the poet's name in his own country still had the literary field and favour, and the last and most ambitious edition of his works is supervised by a none too friendly critic.2 Good and temperate criticism has been forthcoming between whiles; but there is still room, one fancies, for an impartial re-statement of the facts.

3

"It would seem," writes Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the American poetess, sometime the fiancée of Poe, and one of the vindicators of his memory, "it would seem that the true point of view from which his genius should be regarded has yet to be sought." The full force of that observation, perhaps, cannot be felt unless it be read in context with some of the sentences in which Mrs. Whitman sets forth her own point of view:

"Wanting in that supreme central force or faculty of the mind, whose function is a God-conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar Poe sought earnestly and conscientiously for such solution of the great problems of thought as were alone attainable to an intellect hurled from its balance by the abnormal preponderance of the analytical and imaginative faculties."

1 [Horrible monster.]]

2 This holds true, unfortunately, of the still later complete edition, by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry.

3 Edgar Poe and his Critics, p. 59.

"These far-wandering comets, not less than 'the regular, calm stars,' obey a law and follow a pathway that has been marked out for them by infinite Wisdom and essential Love." 1

The theism exemplified in these passages appears to be the reigning religion in the United States, and is doubtless common enough everywhere else; and it certainly seems sufficiently clear that for people whose minds oscillate between conceptions of Poe's intellect as hurled from its balance and as wisely guided by a loving God who deprived it of the faculty of God-consciousness for such people the "true point of view from which his genius should be regarded" must indeed be far to seek. That point of view can hardly be one from which you explain the infinite while perplexed by the finite; it is to be attained not à priori but à posteriori; that is to say, Poe's life and his works have to be studied with an eye, not to discovering a scheme of infinite wisdom, or even to finding a "point of view," but simply to the noting of the facts and the arranging of them. The true point of view is surely that from which you see things.

Much, of course, depends on methods of observation. At the outset, we are confronted by the facts that Poe's father married imprudently at eighteen, and that the lady was an actress. That is either a mere romantic detail or a very important fact, according as Poe is regarded as an organism or as an immortal soul. Here indeed, the point of view means the seeing or the not seeing of certain facts; but as most people to-day have some little faith in the operation of heredity, it may be assumed that the significance of Poe's parentage is admitted when it is mentioned. Recent investigators have come to the conclusion that David Poe was not merely romantic and reckless, but given to the hard drinking which was so common in the Southern States in his time; and thus, coming of a father of intemperate habits and headlong impulses, and of a mother whose very profession meant excitement and shaken nerves, Poe had before him tremendous probabilities of an erratic career. As fate would have it, the man who adopted the little Edgar on the death of the young parents (they both died of consumption) did everything to aggravate and nothing to counteract the temperamental flaws of the life he took in charge. We know that Edgar's brother, William Henry, who may or may not have been equally ill-managed by the friend who adopted him, turned out a clever scapegrace and died young; but certain it is that Mr. Allan was

1 Edgar Poe and his Critics, pp. 33-34, 60.

no wise guardian to Edgar. The habits of the house were Southern and convivial; the clever child was petted, flattered, and spoiled; and it seems that Poe might have been made a toper by his surroundings even if he had no bias that way. Again, Mr. Allan was rich, and Poe had no prospective necessities of labour, no sense of obligation to be methodical; which makes it the more natural that his later life should be a failure financially, and the more remarkable that he should exhibit unusual powers of close and orderly thought. Finally, the boy's shifting life; his four years' schooling in England (where in the opinion of his teacher, his guardian did him serious harm by giving him too much pocketmoney), and later at Richmond; his brief military cadetship at West Point, his headlong trip to Europe, and his year's stay there, of which nothing seems to be now known, and his studentship at the Virginia University — all tended to deprive him of the benefits of habit, which might conceivably have been some safeguard against his hereditary instability; and at the same time his training tended to develop, though inadequately and at random, his purely intellectual powers, while supplying him with no moral guidance worth mentioning. Such a character required the very wisest management: it had either bad management or none. It was therefore only too natural that the youth should be self-willed and insubordinate at West Point, and much given to gambling at college.

The other side of the picture, however, must be kept in view. While apparently loosely related to life in respect of the normal affections (he seems to have had little communication with his brother, no very strong attachment to his sister, and no attachment to Mr. Allan), he was very far from being the unfeeling and loveless creature he was so long believed to be. He seems to have described himself accurately when he wrote of his uncommon and invariable tenderness to animals; and the intensity of his affections where they were really called out is revealed by the story of his passionate grief on the death of the lady, the mother of one of his comrades, who befriended him in schoolboyhood. Abnormal in his grief as in the play of all his faculties, and blindly bent even then on piercing the mystery of the sepulchre, the boy passed long night vigils on her grave, clinging, beyond death, to the first being he had learned utterly to love. And an important statement is made as to the manner of his marriage by a lady who knew him and his connections well. The majority of respectable readers, probably,

1 Art. "Last Days of E. A. Poe," in Scribner's Magazine, March, 1878.

K

have regarded Poe's marriage to his beautiful and penniless young cousin as one of his acts of culpable recklessness; but according to the account in question, it was rather a deed of generous devotion. He had acted as a boy tutor to Virginia Clemm in her early childhood, and when, after his final rupture with Mr. Allan, he went to reside with his aunt,1 the young girl acquired a worship for him. According to this story it was on Mrs. Clemm's impressing on him, when he contemplated leaving her house after being an inmate for two years, the absolute absorption of the girl in his existence, that he proposed the marriage. She was hardly fourteen, poor child, but she was of the precocious Southern blood, and her youth seems to have made her mother only the more fearful of the effect of separation from her adored cousin. Poe's marriage was on this view an act not of free choice but of prompt generosity. Whatever the truth may be, he was a very good husband. Devoted as she was up to her death, Virginia never gave him the full intellectual companionship he would have sought in a wife; but there is now no pretence that he ever showed her the shadow of unkindness, and it is admitted that in her last days he was tenderness itself. All which is a fair certificate of good domestic disposition, as men and poets go.

What then was there in Poe's life as a whole to justify detraction? When the testimony is fully sifted the discreditable charges are found to be: first and chiefly, that he repeatedly gave way to his hereditary vice of alcoholism; secondly, that he committed one lapse from literary integrity; thirdly, that he was often splenetic and sometimes unjust as a critic; fourthly, that he showed ingratitude and enmity to some who befriended him. Setting aside his youthful passionateness and prodigality, that is now the whole serious moral indictment against him. The insinuations and assertions of Griswold, to the effect that he committed more than one gross outrage, are found to be either proven false or wholly without proof; and many of the biographer's aspersions on his disposition have been indignantly repudiated by those who knew him well — as Mr. G. R. Graham and Mr. N. P. Willis, both of whom employed him. As for the alleged ingratitude to unnamed friends, it seems only fair to ask whether any such faults, if real, may not

1 Mr. Ingram says (Life, I, 106-7) that Mrs. Clemm never did know" where Poe went after the rupture (1831); and that "extant correspondence proves" that Poe did not live with her in 1831-2, "and, apparently, that he never lived with her until after his marriage."

ease.

be attributed to the havoc ultimately wrought in Poe's delicately balanced temperament by fits of drinking. Mr. R. H. Stoddard 2 has given an account of some very singular ill-treatment he received from Poe while the latter edited the Broadway Journal treatment which at once suggests some degree of cerebral derangement on Poe's part; and a story told of his resenting a homethrust of criticism by a torrent of curses, goes to create the same impression. This was in his latter years, at a time when a thimbleful of sherry could excite him almost to frenzy, and when, according to one hostile writer, he had developed incurable cerebral disSetting aside the question of his fairness as a critic, which will be discussed further on, there remains to be considered his one alleged deflection from literary honesty. He did publish under his own name a manual of Conchology which apparently incorporated, without acknowledgment, passages from a work by Captain Brown published in Glasgow; and it is alleged by Griswold, and implied by Mr. Stoddard, that the American book is substantially based on Brown's. But there is really no proof of anything like important plagiarism, and the slightness of the evidence is very suggestive of a weak case. Mr. Stoddard, who exhibits a distinct and not altogether unnatural bias against his subject, prints parallel passages which do seemingly amount to "conveyance"; but he unjustifiably omits to answer the statement on the other side, that the Manual of Conchology was compiled under the supervision of Professor Wyatt; that Poe contributed largely to it; that the publishers accordingly wished to use his popular name on the title-page; and that, finally, the book, though corresponding in part to Brown's because avowedly based, like that, on the system of Lamarck, is essentially an independent compilation. Such is the statement of Professor Wyatt, and the matter ought to be easily settled.3 What Mr. Stoddard does is to convey the impression that Poe copied wholesale, though only a few appropriations are cited. Now, whereas naked appropriation of another man's ideas in his own wording, in a work of ostensibly original reasoning or imagination, must be pronounced a serious act of literary dishonesty, the

1 In the memoir prefixed to the last edition of Poe's works, it is stated that he resorted at times to opium as well as to alcohol; and this seems likely enough. In that case there would be all the more risk of bad effects on character.

2 In his memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, 1880.

3 See, on this and all other matters concerning Poe, the Life by John H. Ingram, a work of painstaking vindication which earns the gratitude of every one interested in Poe. The American Life, by W. Gill, is mainly compiled from it.