Text: Anonymous, “Life of Edgar Poe,” Pall Mall Gazette (London, UK), vol. XXXI, whole no. 4771,June 8, 1880, p. 12, cols. 1-2

[page 12, column 1, continued:]

MR. INGRAM has a distinct title to write the book which he has written, and this is perhaps more than can be said of the authors of most of the bocks which issue from the press. For many years he has in different magazines busied himself with rehabilitating Poe's damaged reputation, and in 1874-5 he gave to the English public the first complete and convenient edition of the “Works,” accompanied by a short memoir of a somewhat polemical kind for the most part. It was known by most people, even before Mr. Ingram's labours, that Poe had had something very like foul play in the editing and introducing of the standard edition of his works by Rufus Griswold. Different parts of Griswold's malicious biography had been from time to time attacked and overthrown, but nothing like a complete vindication had appeared, and still less anything like a substitute for the obnoxious document. Poe in fact had, if possible, worse luck after his death than in his life, and the railway accident which shattered his intended monument was only typical of the difficulties which were to lie in the way of a durable literary memorial of him. Calumniated as he has been, there were undoubtedly circumstances about his latter days which might have made his friends unwilling either to have much of his company while living or to dwell on their reminiscences of him after his death. He was moreover quite out of the recognized set of American men of letters, the weaker of whom he unmercifully criticised, while he was accustomed to speak with considerable freedom even of those whose merits he admitted. To the present day, indeed, the ordinary literary representatives of his own country are very cool towards Poe; and it was but a year or two ago that perhaps the most accomplished of the younger generation of American litterateurs committed himself to the astounding statement that Poe's verses were “valueless.” Two different persons who made collections for the purpose of writing his life at a time when materials might have been obtained more easily than at present abandoned their intention for different reasons. Baudelaire, it may be remembered, used to interrogate al! the Americans he could get hold of — and in Paris he must have had abundant opportunities — with almost the solitary result of finding one gentleman who was able and willing to inform him that Poe's conversation was “point du tout conséquioutive.” Until the appearance, therefore, of Mr. Ingram's short memoir six years ago, there may be said to have been no life of Poe, but only a legend (“Fausse comme toutes les légendes,” as Guizot said of his own). Since that memoir not a few lives have appeared in America (based, as Mr. Ingram declares, with considerable likelihood, on his own); and time, by removing some of Poe's correspondents from the scene, has left the biographer at somewhat greater liberty to employ his materials. A longer and definitive life might therefore be fairly demanded of Mr. Ingram, embodying the facts and documents his piety has collected. We shall not say that the present volumes are altogether satisfactory. Much of what they lack is doubtless due rather to Mr. Ingram's misfortune than to his fault. The task that the biographer has to achieve is, in the first place, to keep the thread of his narrative always clearly before the reader while indulging in all due and necessary digression, and in the second to keep the personality of his subject still more clearly en évidence. Now this Mr. Ingram does not succeed in doing. Except at the last, the actual man Poe is, as the greatest of living biographers would say, “dark to us.” We hear of him as living in this cr that place, as doing this or that work; but he does not live and move before us. Many of the persons most closely connected with him — an understanding of whose personality is necessary to enable us to understand his — more especially the child-wife who was celebrated by so many names, and whom it would appear he was so falsely accused of maltreating, also remain just as much names and nothing more as they have hitherto been.

In spite of this drawback, which it shares with nineteen out of twenty biographies, the book still contains much that is new and interesting. That Edgar Poe was of “kenned folk,” that his mother was a beautiful English actress, that his father took to the same profession, that both died young, that he was adopted (“in accordance with a practice not unusual in Republican [column 2:] countries,” says Mr. Ingram, with rather incautious generalization) by a wealthy person of the name of Allan, that he came as a boy to England and was at school at Stoke Newington, are points in which legend and history coincide. They differ about his residence at the University

Virginia, where legend says that he was dissolute, drunken, and finally incurred expulsion. History shows that the last assertion is absolutely false, and that there is no record of his indulging in vice or malpractice except gambling. Unluckily this last was probably the very vice which his adopted father would have preferred that he should not have. Mr. Allan's displeasure, one of the earliest of his many sentimental love affairs, and a supposed sympathy with the Greeks, made him in 1827 quit America and depart into space. Even Mr. Ingram's ingenuity has not availed to throw any great light upon this mysterious escapade, though he tells a story (said to be taken down from Poe's own dictation) which Mr. Chadband would have been justified in describing as a story “ of a Cock and of a Bull and of a Lady and of a Duel and of a Wounded Stranger.” Then he came home, was entered at West Point, but dismissed for insubordination — there is no doubt about this — quarrelled with Mr. Allan in a manner variously represented or misrepresented, and again disappeared into space for two years. From his reappearance in 1833 till his death in 1849 his life was simply that of a literary hack, too frequently in hot water with somebody or other, and latterly subject to constant fits of mania or dipsomania, which, according to his own account, were due to the mental agony felt by him at the long illness of his wife. After that poor girl's death he became engaged to Mrs. Whitman, and the story of the engagement as here told is one of the most extraordinary on record. The legend says that it was broken off because of his forcing his way in a state of intoxication into his intended bride's house the day before that arranged for the marriage. According to the lady herself, the only occurrence which actually bore some faint resemblance to this took place before the engagement, and this latter was actually broken off because Mrs. Whitman was informed that Poe had broken his pledge of temperance. His letters, of which many are given, are certainly not these of a sane man even in the greatest ferment of passion, and it is significant that almost before this correspondence with “Helen” came to an end a similar one was begun with “Annie.” The tone of the whole affair with Mrs. Whitman may perhaps best be judged from the lady's account of the closing scene: — “I knew that he had irrevocably lost the power of self-recovery. Gathering together some papers he had entrusted to me I placed them in his hands without a word of explanation or reproach; and, utterly worn out by the mental conflicts and anxieties and responsibilities of the last few days, I drenched my handkerchief in ether and threw myself on a sofa, hoping to lose myself in utter unconsciousness.” Thus, instead of alcohol on the gentleman's part there appears to have been ether on the lady's. Poe's melancholy and mysterious death took place about a year afterwards, and Mr. Ingram has thrown no light upon it. He seems disposed to accept the current Baltimore theory (which is rather attractive, and certainly appropriate in its hideous grotesqueness), that, there being an election at the time, Poe was kidnapped, drugged, made to vote, and then turned loose to die as he might. The thing seems, incredible as it would be here, to be possible or to have been possible in America.

To say that Poe was of the first order of writers would be hardly more of an exaggeration than Lamb's similar statement about Ford. The best of his verses, the best of his tales, the best of his criticisms are of the very first order each in its own kind. But the gold is mingled with an immense quantity of dross, and few writers are responsible in proportion to the bulk of their work for more shambling doggerel, more pointless narrative, more untrustworthy criticism than Poe. His entire want of the comic faculty, and the terribly dreary burlesque which he mistook for humour, may be set down to his want of discipline rather than to any other cause. Poe is thus one of the most difficult of critical studies, and we do not know that anything has yet appeared in the way of a criticism of him which does justice at once to his faults and his merits. Perhaps in some degree this may be due to the repulsive aspect which, in the hands of the amiable Griswold, his character has been made to wear. For it must be remembered that the Poe legend made him, in plain colloquial language, not merely a scamp but a black-guard. Mr. Ingram has succeeded in clearing him of almost all the most odious and discreditable of the charges under which he has laboured, and in presenting a really pathetic picture of the terrible state of mental excitement and bodily suffering into which he finally passed. It is certain that in his better nature he was both loveable and loved; that his faults were rather the result of constitutional eccentricity and unhappy circumstance, than of a bad heart or a vicious temperament; and, lastly, that since literature became a lucrative profession, few men of such genius have received so singularly little of this world's good things from it. In his literary relations Poe's hand was too often against every man, and the band was too often the unsavoury weapon called mud. Nor can he be freed from the accusation of caprice in his relations with colleagues and employers, of a certain Bohemian impatience of regular labour, and, finally, of irregular habits, for which there may have been some excuse in his state of mind and circumstances, but which in their turn must have made those circumstances worse. It is difficult to believe that even with greater advantages he would have been a happy or a successful man. But this does not affect the consideration of his work, and, imperfect as much of that work undoubtedly is, much of it also is of the very best that the United States have yet produced. In “Annabel Lee,” in “The Haunted Palace,” carried in to perhaps Ulalume,” the power of vague musical suggestion in poetry is its the utmost power limits “The House of Usher,” in “Ligeia,” in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the frisson nouveau is created with unapproached skill. In many of the “Marginalia,” and here and there in the reviews, reflections of astonishing justness and originality occur. Here, and not in any narrative of his unhappy and in great part wasted life, we, for our part, prefer to seek and to be acquainted with Edgar Poe.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 12, column 1:]

* “Edgar Allan Poe: his Life, Letters, and Opinions.” By J. H Ingram. (London : J. Hogg. 1880.)