Text: W. Baird, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Magazine (Baltimore, MD), old series vol. 15, new series vol. VIII, no. 2, August 1874, pp. 190-203

[page 190, continued:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

———

ALL the world has heard how —

and to whatever extent we may be shocked at the ingratitude of his countrymen to the great Greek while living, there is nothing singular or surprising in the fact that his origin and birthplace are unknown. On the contrary, there is something that strikes us as natural: and fitting in the idea that this king of poets should arrive and depart enveloped in shadow and mystery. No man knows, no man ever will know, when and where he first appeared upon, or when and where he took his final leave of the earth which he so enriched and adorned, and which is so much brighter and more glorious for his coming. But while this is as it should be in regard to the “gray father of the human mind,” it is not a little singular that there should exist the slightest doubt or question as to the birthplace of a poet living in our own time and country, who was but a few years ago still among us. Yet such is the case in regard to the subject of our sketch. No Homer certainly, but a true poet for all that, endowed with no inconsiderable portion of the genuine vatic inspiration. [page 191:]

It is matter of uncertainty, then, and we think of no great moment, whether Poe was born in Baltimore in 1811, as is usually believed, or in the capital of Virginia in the same year, as has been confidently asserted, or whether his origin belongs to an earlier date and a different spot. His parents were wanderers by profession, and the actual locality of his birth was’ of course determined by accidental circumstances. The facts that it really at all imports us to know we are in full possession of. He belonged to a Maryland family, and he was raised and educated, with the exception of the period spent at school in England, to which we shall have occasion to refer again, in Virginia. He was descended from a Norman family settled in Ireland, and his great-grandfather, John Poe, who had married the daughter of Admiral McBride of the British navy, immigrated to this country somewhat more than a century ago. His grandfather, David Poe, was Quartermaster-General in the Maryland Line during the Revolution, and an intimate and highly-valued friend of Lafayette. David Poe, Jr., the fourth son of this officer, while a law-student in the office of Mr. Gwynne of Baltimore, paid a visit to Norfolk on professional business, fell violently in love with the pretty face and vivacious manners of an English actress, Elizabeth Arnold by name, and without apparently giving himself much time to consider the prudence or propriety of the step, proceeded to make her his wife. His parents, as might have been anticipated, refused to receive their new daughter, and the young student abandoned the law and became a very indifferent actor. After the birth of his first child, his parents, we are told, consented to a reconciliation; but this relenting, so far as we can discover, seems not to have been followed by any practical good effect, for after leading a precarious stage-life for several years, the unfortunate couple died of consumption within a few weeks of each other, in the capital of Virginia. It is worthy of remark that though David Poe was hardly more than a boy at the date of his marriage, and his wife several years older, we hear nothing, in spite of all the hardships and trials which followed this imprudent step, of connubial quarrels or domestic infelicity. Edgar Poe was left then, by the untimely fate of both parents, a helpless, destitute orphan, dependent entirely, with a brother and sister in the same condition, upon a charity the coldness of which has passed into a proverb. In his case, indeed, the world's charity took at first a shape sufficiently warm, and he became the adopted son and heir-presumptive of a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Mr. John Allan. Whether-this connection was on the whole of real benefit to him may be considered doubtful, but at. the time he was thought singularly fortunate, and his future seemed secure. The beautiful, wayward, precocious little orphan became a member of Mr. Allan's family, and was no doubt spoilt and flattered “to the top of his bent.” Using the word in its more comprehensive sense, the education of a sensitive, highly-gifted, imaginative child begins at an incredibly early age, and it is difficult to overrate the effect of judicious training, at once firm and affectionate, upon natures like these. The cases in which this system is pursued are so exceptionally rare that it is no severe reflection upon Mr. Allan to say that there are no indications of Poe's having had the benefit of it. [page 192:]

In 1816 the family set out upon a foreign tour, and after having travelled through England, Scotland and Ireland, the future poet was placed at school in Stoke Newington, near London. Here he remained for five years, and of his school-life and its surroundings he has given us a very vivid and interesting description in one of his shorter stories, “William Wilson.”

“My earliest recollections of a school-life,” he says, “are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town.” Then follows a passage which has for us a singular touch of pathos: “It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns.” The old, old'story, the sad experience of generation after generation of mankind: the boy straining at the leash, chafing for the hour when he shall enter the arena as man; the man looking back with vain and unutterable longing to the days of his boyhood, gathering to his weary heart its humblest associations, lingering with mournful fondness over its pettiest details.

Of his residence at Stoke Newington, in spite of its monotony and confinement, he seems, if we may judge by what he tells us in the narrative above referred to, to have retained a pleasant recollection; but the brightness of these early days we may well suppose to have been enhanced to memory by the gloom that overshadowed his later life. In 1822 he returned to Richmond with the Allans, and pursued his studies at an academy there for two or three years. The epithet “wayward” is one which we have heard applied to him by a surviving schoolfellow, and which we have no difficulty in accepting. He is said at this period to have been distinguished for his faculty of improvising interesting narratives, and, notwithstanding his delicate appearance, for his physical strength and activity. It was at this time that he performed his famous feat of swimming from Richmond to Warwick, though not, as has been stated, for a wager, nor “against a current of two or three miles an hour.” One cannot but surmise that the boy-poet's imagination was fired and his ambitious exertions prompted by recollections of Lord Byron's exploit of swimming the Hellespont from Abydos to Sestos. If this was the motive, his aspiring effort had nearly cost him his life, through fatigue and exposure to the sun.

At this period, though he has been described as wild and wayward by one of his comrades, yet we are told that his heart was tender and sensitive, easily touched, and as it would seem, lastingly impressed by kindness. He formed a deep and ardent attachment for the mother of one of his schoolmates, which even outlasted her life. He was in the habit of confiding to her all his difficulties and troubles, and her influence over him was always powerful even in his gloomiest’ moods. After her death he continued for a long time to make pilgrimages at night to the cemetery where she was buried. His affection for her is said to have inspired his lines “To Helen,” written while he was still a mere boy, the first stanza of which we quote: [page 193:]

It is pleasant to cross tracts like this in the mournful life, the records of which we are reviewing — links that serve to bind this strange, gifted, wayward poet more closely to his kind.

In the session of 1825-6, at a very early age, he commenced his career as a student at the University of Virginia, where, in spite of such irregularities of conduct as finally led to his dismissal, he established a high reputation for scholarship and talents. The premature close of his college career was followed by a rupture with Mr. Allan; and the poet, not yet arrived at manhood, with his foot but on the threshold of life, found himself without family, friends or resources, cut off from all the ordinary ties and supports of existence. A forlorn future enough for one whose prospects and expectations had been so different! His next step was to follow in Lord Byron's track again, and set out to join the Greek patriots; but he was not destined to —

”get knocked on the head for his labors,”

for he turns up at St. Petersburg instead of in Greece. Here he found himself in extreme poverty, and very soon got into trouble. He was extricated, however, and sent back to America by the United States minister, Mr. Middleton, of South Carolina.

On his return to this country, occurred the very singular episode of his residence as a cadet at West Point. It would be difficult to conceive anything more utterly unsuited to a nature like Poe's, and in no . long time the absurd experiment ended in his dismissal. He now returned to Mr. Allan's house; but the first wife, to whom he is said to have been much attached, was dead, and her place filled by another. A second and final breach followed between them, into the causes and merits of which, as we have no real means of determining them, we feel no disposition to enter. Henceforth the struggle which the poet was to sustain with the world in which he seemed so misplaced, was to be a hard and bitter one. He had his genius on his side; but genius like his was not a very marketable commodity where his lot was cast. There were magnificent prizes for talent, for second and third-rate capacity; but for the fine frenzy of the poet, starvation and posthumous fame. Henceforth his career strongly resembles some of those recorded in one of the most melancholy of all books, Johnson's Lives cf the Poets. Were we find the same want, wretchedness and destitution, the same almost hopeless struggles, the same giving way to despondency and then rousing up to resume the dreary contest once more. In his case as in theirs, disappointment produces excess, and excess leads to renewed disappointment, and so the weary circle is paced again and again. There is one notable difference, however. There are in this life, whatever else there may be, no episodes of luxurious dependence, no degrading exchanges of flattery for gold, no basking in the favor and living on the contemptuous bounty of a patron. And so far, at least, he was more fortunate than some of his distinguished predecessors. [page 194:]

Thrown, as he now was, entirely upon his own resources, his tastes and talents seem to have pointed alike in the direction of literature. He had already published in Baltimore some of his boyish productions, which, though as might have been expected from the age at which they had been written, extravagant in conception and faulty in execution, were not without passages of high promise. We are told that they were favorably received; but whatever increase of reputation they may have brought the poet, they seem to have done very little for his fortune. We soon find him reduced to the greatest straits, and there is even an idle tale that he was compelled by his necessities to enlist in the army as a private soldier. According to this account he was recognised by officers who had known him at West Point, and efforts were set on foot to obtain him a commission, but before their result could be known he was discovered to have deserted. Had this been true, not even Comberbach alias Coleridge of the Light Dragoons could have been more completely out of place. The fact is, however, that there is no reason for attaching the slightest credit to it, and the whole story should be rejected at once as a silly and awkward imitation of the passage in Coleridge's life above alluded to. When Poe next reappears on the scene, it is in the more natural and probable character of competitor for two prizes offered by the proprietors of The Saturday Visitor [[Visiter]], published in Baltimore — one for the best tale, the other for the best poem submitted to the committee appointed to award them. He sent in a poem and several prose sketches. The story is that one of the committee was attracted by the neat handwriting of Poe's MS., and pleased with the few pages, which he found so much easier than usual to decipher, called the attention of his companions to “the first of geniuses who had written legibly.” None of the other MSS., we are told, were even opened, and both the prizes were without further hesitation awarded to Poe. This story, if not strictly vero, is certainly ben trovato, as illustrative of the value of such awards. However the decision of the committee may have been arrived at, it was afterwards modified, so that the destitute young author received only the prize for the prose story, the “MS. found in a Bottle,” an extravagant but striking and highly imaginative production. His success upon this occasion was the means of his being introduced to Mr. Kennedy, of Baltimore, and later of his obtaining employment from the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, then recently established in Richmond, Va., which resulted finally in his removal to that city. Here was a gleam of something like brighter prospects; but life was not to pass otherwise than roughly with the ill-starred poet. His temperament was originally sensitive and melancholy, and many causes concurred to deepen the gloom which would, perhaps, have been inevitable under the most favorable circumstances. Conscious of high gifts, he pined for recognition and reward, and was chafed and irritated almost beyond endurance by the offensive assumptions, the arrogant airs of patronage which he had constantly to bear from confident mediocrity sincerely convinced of its own mental elevation above the head of the penniless young writer. He felt, besides, that he was wearing out his life in uncongenial labors; and ever and anon we may imagine the thought, [page 195:] so maddening to a nature like his to have intruded, that he might die after all with the genius within him not only unrecognised, but unexpressed. The truth is, there was no field open to his peculiar powers. Such a public as was wanting to him to appeal to, would have been the outgrowth of an entirely different social system from that in which he passed his life. Had he been a second-rate lawyer, plausible, fluent and shallow, fortune and reputation would have been within his grasp, with the seat of representative, senator, president perhaps, in the future. But he was only a true poet, endowed with rare and peculiar gifts; and there was no hearing for him. And thus he went on week after week, month after month, grinding out “copy” for a miserable pittance that hardly sufficed for the most ordinary wants of existence. The very productions by which he lived were no doubt a source of constant dissatisfaction and disgust to the fastidious taste of the artist himself. We use the word artist advisedly, for Poe was pre-eminently an artist in words, sensitively alive to the slightest artistic imperfection. To this in fairness should be attributed much of that critical severity which distinguished his writings, and drew upon him in such large measure the hostility of his brother authors.

We pause here for a moment before going farther in this tragic story, to contemplate what has been considered an exceptionally hopeful period of his life. The spectacle seems to us sufficiently dreary, with those golden dreams of the future so dear to the heart in youth already rudely dispelled, without the ties of home or family, or that near friendship which sometimes supplies the place, mortified in his ambition, disappointed in his hopes, dissatisfied with others, still more dissatisfied with himself, the constitutional gloom which had hung like a pall over his boyhood deepened and darkened as he advanced in life. He sought refuge from this in artificial stimulants, to the influence of which his nervous temperament seems to have rendered him peculiarly susceptible, for we are told that “with a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed.” Thus his difficulties impelled him towards dissipation, and his dissipation in its turn increased his difficulties, until the result at length was that he lost his situation on the staff of the Messenger, and with it the income, such as it was, derived therefrom. The probability is, indeed, that at all events a much inferior man would have filled more acceptably the position which Poe occupied. His “caviare” would not bring in the market the price of wares coarser and more common, but supposed to be more highly esteemed by “the general.” Whatever the cause, or causes, of this withdrawal of his meagre means of support, it left him in a forlorn and dreary position, the difficulties and discouragements of which it would be hard to exaggerate. With characteristic imprudence, or rather utter recklessness of future consequences, he had: during his residence in Richmond, and engagement with the proprietor of the Messenger, married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm, a gentle, retiring, undefined figure, attractive, so far as we can judge by the few glimpses we catch of her, as she constantly shrinks into the background. ‘This would have been a step to wonder at, perhaps to censure, in another, but in Poe the practical element seems to have been so entirely left out that we accept it with a half-smile [page 196:] as the fulfilment of our anticipations, just what might have been expected. What has he, this being, who can hardly he said to have lived in the real world at all, who passes through life with his head in the clouds and his soul in dreamland, surrounded by shapes and shadows invisible to all save himself — what has he, we say, to do with the suggestions of worldly wisdom, the dictates of ordinary prudence? It seems absurd to attempt to fetter him with the rules that govern, the motives that sway the mass of common humanity; yet the disregard of these rules and considerations works out in his case, as in that of the veriest clodhopper, its legitimate result.

But, after all, he was not without compensations. Let us turn aside for a moment from the torrent of righteous indignation, the shower of virtuous stones cast upon the unprotected head of the luckless poet, to glance at this new phase of his life. More fortunate than so many great writers, he found in his home at least a haven and a shelter. If he was stabbed, it was not with the dagger of domestic treason. From this quarter comes no voice of reproach. Even enemies and detractors, discouraged at finding no ally within the sacred citadel, are silent here; and from this silence, as well as the positive evidence which we have on the point, we may fairly infer that there was no pretext found for attack upon him in his relations with the two women (his wife and his wife's mother) who fill henceforward so large a space in his life We somewhat violate the sequence of time in order to introduce here two extracts descriptive of Poe as he appeared in his own home. The first is from the certainly by no means partial or friendly pen of Dr. Griswold: ‘. . . . When once he sent for me to visit him, during a period of illness caused by protracted and anxious watching at the side of his sick wife, I was impressed by the singular neatness and the air of refinement in his home. It was in a small house, in one of the pleasant and silent neighborhoods far from the centre of the town; and though slightly and cheaply furnished, everything in it was so tasteful and so fitly disposed, that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius.” The other is taken from a sketch written by Mrs. Osgood in vindication of Poe's memory, a short time before her death: “It was in his own simple yet poetical home that to me the character of Edgar Poe appeared in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child — for his young, gentle and idolised wife, and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. . . . I recollect one morning, towards the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay and light-hearted, Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a pressing invitation to come to them; and I, who never could resist her affectionate summons, and who enjoyed his society far more in his own home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity street. I found him just completing his series of papers entitled ‘The Literati of New York.’ ‘See,’ said he, displaying in laughing triumph several little rolls of narrow paper (he always wrote thus for the press), ‘I am going to show you by the difference of length in these the different degrees of estimation in which I hold all you literary people. [page 197:] In each of these one of you is rolled up and fully discussed. Come, Virginia, help me!’ And one by one they unfolded them, At last they came to one which seemed interminable; Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the room with one end and her husband to the opposite with the other.”

We leave traits like these to speak for themselves, and hasten to the tragic close of this tragic career. When Poe's connection with the Messenger was broken off, he left Richmond for Baltimore, where, however, he remained only a short time, removing first to Philadelphia and afterwards to New York. Late in the year 1838 he returned to Philadelphia and took up his residence. Here he became first a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, and subsequently its principal editor, at a salary wretchedly inadequate to his merits. In the fall of 1839 he published a collection of prose fictions under the title of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque; but the public were already too familiar with the compositions it contained in their original form of magazine articles, for it to meet with the success that might otherwise have attended it. In the course of the next few years he was engaged in turn upon various periodicals in Philadelphia, and made besides an abortive attempt to realise his darling ambition and establish a magazine of his own. After the failure of this effort he returned to New York, where he was employed by Mr. Willis and General Morris as critic and sub-editor of the Mirror.

Meanwhile, low as were his fortunes, at this epoch his reputation was rapidly rising. His Murders in the Rue Morgue had been translated in two French papers without acknowledgment, and had given rise to a lawsuit between them. The legal proceedings that followed brought to light the fact that the story in dispute belonged to neither of the rival claimants, but had been appropriated without ceremony from “an American writer called Poe.” This brought the American writer prominently before the reading public of France. He obtained the honor of an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and a number of his other stories were translated into French.

It was during the period of his connection with the Mirror that Mr. Willis gives the following sketch of him: “With the highest admiration of his genius, and a willingness to let it atone 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. With his pale, beautiful and intellectual face as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible, of course, not to treat him always with deferential courtesy; and 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. With a prospect of taking the lead in another periodical, he at last voluntarily gave up his employment with us, and 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 [page 198:] and ability. Residing as he did in the country, we never met Mr. Poe in hours of leisure; but he frequently called on us afterwards at our place of business, and we met him often in the street — invariably the same sad-mannered, winning and refined gentleman, such as we had always known him.”

If we have quoted these kind words at too great length, our excuse must be that kind words in reference either to the poet when living, or to his memory since his death, are but too rare and scanty. It is refreshing to meet with them sometimes. From the Mirror he passed to the Broadway Journal, but this new venture was not destined to be permanently successful. It lived about a year, and soon after its death Poe commenced the publication of his “Literati of New York City” in the Lady's Book. They attracted so much attention and excited so lively an interest that three editions of some of the numbers of the periodical in which they appeared, were called for.

Meanwhile, though his reputation had greatly increased, his fortune had by no means kept pace with it. His wife's health, which had long been delicate, grew constantly worse and worse. The struggle for existence even became harder and harder. His wife's mother, we are told, might at this period have been seen forlornly wandering from office to office with some literary production of his, by the sale of which she hoped to keep the wolf from the door, “and never, amidst all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering one syllable to escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him or a lessening of pride in his genius and good intentions.” The public was appealed to through the press, and help came at length, but in what a shape! Who can measure the depths of anguish through which this sensitive spirit passed! The picture is too painful to dwell upon. A few weeks more and the suffering was over for one of the pair His wife died, and henceforth the shadows deepen around the career so soon to close.

During the next twelve months but little is heard of him. When directed towards literary objects at all, his mind seems to have been intensely occupied with the subject of a lecture which he afterwards delivered in New York on the “Cosmogony of the Universe.” This was subsequently published under the title of Eureka, a Prose Poem, and appears to have been ani especial favorite with the author. A particular winter night is recorded upon which he spent hours pacing up and down in the open air, endeavoring to explain to his mother-in-law the theory which he afterwards developed in his lecture. He was in a state of intense excitement on the subject, and expected the most magnificent results, both in fame and fortune, from the publication. These brilliant anticipations were of course disappointed, and henceforth, during the short remainder of his life. he published but little more.

The end was now near at hand, the curtain was soon to fall upon the melancholy drama. In the summer of 1849 he set out from New York to return to Virginia. After his arrival there he met with a ley whom he had known in his youth, became engaged to marry her, and determined to spend the remainder of his days in the home of his childhood and youth. But these prospects were not destined to [page 199:] be realised. It was necessary for him to visit the North in order to make some final arrangements before the celebration of his marriage. From this visit, as is well known, he never returned. Why dwell upon the details of these last days, already so often described? The wild life was to end wildly, the sad life sadly. At the very last he was the victim of the most brutal ill-treatment, which probably caused his death. It was the day before an exciting city election, and he is said to have been confined all night in a cellar, and then drugged the next day, and carried around to be voted at eleven different wards. The day afterwards he wag taken to a hospital in a state of insensibility, and there, on the 7th of October, 1849, breathed his last. “Where am I?” he is said to have asked when he recovered consciousness. The physician in attendance replied, “You are cared for by your best friends.” “The best friend,” answered the dying poet, “is he who will blow out my brains.” A few moments afterwards he had ceased to live. He was laid to rest amidst kindred dust, in the old Westminster burying-ground, and his neglected grave is yet unmarked by monument or epitaph. Nevertheless he had one mourner, the depth and sincerity of whose attachment and whose grief it would be hard for the most skeptical to doubt. “TI have this morning,” writes his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, after receiving the intelligence of his fate, “heard of the death of my darling Eddie. Can you give me any circumstances or particulars? . . . .. I need not ask you to notice his death and to speak well of him. I know you will. But say what an affectionate son he was to me, his poor, desolate mother.” Surely it was something to have won and kept a devotion like this. Comment is useless. Let us rather leave him with all his imperfections on his head, but guarded by the deep and tender love of one who, faithful to the end, has, by her own request, been laid to rest beside him.

We have not left ourselves space for a detailed examination of Poe's various productions. As a critic, his fastidious severity had a direct tendency to make the whole race of dunces, and some besides who cannot be fairly included under that head, bitterly hostile to him. He has accordingly been unsparingly dealt with, living and dead; for what can exceed the bitterness of an enraged dunce, the venom of a small littérateur whose vanity has been wounded? As for Dr. Griswold's extraordinary memoir, all further comment seems superfluous after the pregnant sentence in which Poe's distinguished French translator and critic, Baudelaire, has gibbeted — “ce pédagogue-vampire,” in the introductory sketch prefixed to his Histoires Extraordinaires. “Il n’existe donc pas in Amérique,” says he, “d’ordonnance qui interdise aux chiens [entrée des cimitidres?” We do not propose to discuss at present the merits of these critical writings which gave so much offence in their day, for it is not upon these that his reputation will ultimately depend. We can do little more now than glance at some of the prominent peculiarities of his genius, as displayed in his purely imaginative productions. And here, on the very threshold, we are met by a remarkable element, constantly noticeable alike in the life and the works of Poe. There is something essentially, not inhuman, for we do not wish to convey any idea of censure, and there [page 200:] is abundant evidence that this charge at least cannot be brouglrt against him, but, if we may be allowed the use of the word, unhuman, about him. There is nothing else that will express the idea. He was, not hostile to, but apart from other men. He seems emphatically alone; alone in his life, alone in his thoughts. He is touched, as it were, on the outer integument, the circumference of his nature, by other natures; but the centre is never reached. He is somehow out of relation with his race. He is a man, yet not as other men. The essential difference is instinctively felt; there is a want of full sympathy, of rapport between him and them. He cannot view things from the ordinary human standpoint, and hence the great difficulty of judging him by ordinary rules. His utter indifference to matters the most exciting to his fellow-men is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, living in the age and country in which he did, he had never in his life cast a single vote, until the involuntary ones given, as we have already mentioned, on the last day of his existence. Beyond all question, a nature like his was peculiarly out of place in the country and time in which his lot was cast, as Baudelaire has not failed to observe in the remarkable essay from which we have quoted above. Théophile Gautier, also, in his sketch of Baudelaire, has enforced the same view in the strongest terms. “Edgar Poe,” says the latter, “shared none of the American notions about progress, perfectibility, democratic institutions, and other themes for declamation dear to the philistines of both hemispheres. He paid no exclusive worship to the almighty dollar. He loved poetry for its own sake, and preferred the beautiful to the useful — a monstrous heresy!” It is worth while pausing here to observe that, when foreigners speak of “American,” their meaning is strictly confined to the territory north of Mason and Dixon's line; that boundary is never crossed even in idea.

To return, whatever may be the correctness of these remarks, so far as they extend, it is necessary to go much deeper in order to arrive at the root of the matter. Poe was, so to speak, at odds with his countrymen more particularly, but also with the race at large. It is a noteworthy circumstance in the same connection, that though susceptible to the attractions and influence of women, he seems never to have had an intimate friend of his own sex. In this peculiarity, this abnormal isolation, we may find an explanation of the fact that he is is scarcely ever really either pathetic or humorous. The human element is wanting. His power lies in a domain which has little to do with the tears or the laughter of mankind; but in this domain it is real and striking. Now and then, it is true, we may meet with a passage which touches a chord common alike to the writer and his readers, which has a certain irresistible pathos of its own, heightened by the very distance from which it reaches us; but instances of this kind are rare. His real power lies in the region of the weird, the sombre, the horrible, passing sometimes into the monstrous and abnormal, It is over the realm of shadows that he reigns supreme. But the very shadows are brought before us with such force and clearness, they stand out in such bold and striking relief, that we are fain to accept them as present realities. This is partly due to the minute and conscientious fidelity with which he paints in detail. Nothing is too [page 201:] small for the microscopic keenness of his vision; not the most trivial circumstance, not the pettiest accessory can escape him. Through the medium of his vivid and picturesque style every object, as in the peculiar atmosphere of Paris, comes out with an almost startling distinctness. Thus it is that he contrives to maké his wildest fancies assume the hue of sober truth. Beneath the touch of his wand the mysterious becomes clear, the impossible real. As an instance of vivid and powerful word-painting, what could be finer than the description of the solitary traveller's approach to the doomed mansion in “The Fall of the House of Usher”? The dull, dark, soundless day in autumn, the clouds that hang so oppressively low in the heavens, the bleak walls, the vacant and eye-like windows of the house, the gray sedges, the decayed tree-stems, the unruffled surface of the black and lurid tarn, are all brought before us with ghastly distinctness. We seem to see — nay, almost to feel the “pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued,” that hangs about the old mansion and domain. It is in pictures such as this that his sombre imagination appears to revel as in its most congenial element. In the famous “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” he has carried his pitiless minuteness of horrible detail to the highest point. Indeed, it almost passes in its painful power the limits assigned by the laws of art. The most prominent feature, on the other hand, in the “Gold-Bug,” the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and other similar tales, is the wonderfully sustained power of patient and minute analysis. It is upon these fictions, of a class which Poe may be said to have originated himself, and upon a few short poems, singularly original in design and perfect in execution (we do not intend here to speak of Eureka, which has not long since been reviewed in the pages of this Magazine, and which stands entirely apart from the author's other productions, representing the scientific side of his intellect), that his place with posterity will ultimately depend.

To the literary world of France our author has had the good fortune to be introduced by no less distinguished a chaperon than Baudelaire. This writer's translations from Poe belong to that small and remarkable class of which Coleridge's Wallenstein is probably the most distinguished example, that of themselves avail to place their authors in a high rank. Of the effect they produced in France, and the reputation they conferred alike upon the original author and his translator, the following extracts from Gautier's sketch, already referred to, will give our readers some idea: “But what above all brought him [Baudelaire] into distinguished notice, was his translation of Edgar Poe; for in France one reads scarcely anything of poets but their prose, and it is the feuilletons that make poems known. Baudelaire has naturalised among us that singular genius of an individuality so rare, so sharply defined [tranchée], so exceptional, which at first rather scandalised than charmed America; not that his work in any way offends morality — on the contrary it is of a virginal and seraphic purity — but because it deranged all received ideas, all the practical commonplaces, and there was no standard by which to judge it.” Again: “These works have been translated by Baudelaire with so perfect an identification of style and thought, a [page 202:] freedom at once so faithful and so pliant, that the translations produce the effect of original works in all their genial perfection. The Histoires Extraordinaires, preceded by pieces of high criticism in which the translator analyses as a poet this talent so eccentric and so novel of Edgar Poe, of which France, with her perfect unconsciousness of foreign originalities, had been profoundly ignorant until it was revealed by Baudelaire. . . . . Curiosity was excited to the highest point by these mysterious tales so mathematically fantastic, which draw their deductions by algebraic formulæ, and whose expositions resemble judicial investigations conducted by the most subtle and penetrating of magistrates. . . . . Tender souls were especially touched by those figures of women so vaporish, so transparent, so romantically pale, and of an almost spectral beauty, which the poet names Morella, Ligeia, Lady Rowena, Eleonora, but which are merely the incarnation under various forms of an only love surviving the death of the beloved object, and continuing itself in avatars always discovered.”

Foreigners are often our best critics. They stand in some degree in the place and anticipate the judgment of posterity. We make no apology then for quoting at such length from the celebrated Frenchman, the besetting sin of whose countrymen is certainly not to welcome with imprudent haste strange literary gods into the national Pantheon. Baudelaire himself had carefully studied and been profoundly influenced by the peculiar and original genius of the Virginian poet. “He brings,” says Gautier, “to this task [that of criticising Poe], so necessary to explain a nature so removed from common ideas, a metaphysical sagacity which is unusual, and a rare keenness and delicacy of perception.” Yet it is by no means easy to find passages in his elaborate and careful criticism sufficiently complete in themselves, and still not too long for quotation. Perhaps after all, the best course would be to send the reader curious on the subject to the introductory essay upon Poe's life and works, to which we have already alluded more than once. However, though the selection is difficult, we will lay before our readers a few passages which may serve to convey some idea of the estimation in which our countryman's genius is held abroad.

“To one who has a feeling for English poetry,” says the French poet, speaking of one of our author's earliest publications, “there is already here the extra-terrestrial accent, the melancholy calm, the delicious solemnity, the precocious experience — I had almost said the inborn experience — which characterise great poets.” And again: “Poe has written but few poems: he has sometimes expressed his regret at not being able to give himself not merely more frequently but exclusively to this kind of work, which he considered the noblest of all. But his poetry has always extraordinary power [est d’un puissant effet.) It is not the glowing effusion of Byron, it is not the soft, harmonious, refined melancholy of Tennyson — for whom, by the way, he had an almost fraternal admiration. It is something deep and reflecting [miroitant] like a dream; mysterious and perfect like a crystal.” We will close these extracts by one which contains some striking reflections upon the poet's death, and the manner in which it [page 203:] was received in America: “Alas! he who had scaled the loftiest heights of esthetics, and plunged into the most secret abysses of the human intellect, he who in a life which resembled a storm with no interval of calm, had found new means, unknown modes of astounding the imagination, of ravishing souls athirst for the beautiful, has died in a hospital — what a destiny! So much greatness, so much misfortune, to raise a whirlwind of bourgeoise phrases, to become the repast and the theme of virtuous journalists! Ut declamatio fias.”

While such was the admiration excited by Poe's genius and the effect produced by his writings in France, in England the preponderating influence of the narrow and vindictive Boston clique, especially over one great organ of British critical opinion, seems to have availed for some time unduly to depress his reputation. Within a comparatively recent period, however, a decided change has taken place in this respect. The voice of intelligent and appreciative criticism has begun to make itself heard, and the fame of the author of “The Raven” is sensibly rising with the progress of time. From abroad come the notes of admiration and praise, which remind us that his fame and genius, in which all English-speaking people have a common interest, are in a peculiar manner the heritage of his countrymen of the South.

W. BAIRD.