Text: Anonymous, “New York Letter: Reminiscences of Edgar A. Poe, &c.,” Richmond Dispatch (Richmond, VA), (no volume designated), whole no. 11,718, January 20, 1889, p. 7, cols. 4-6

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NEW YORK, January 19, 1889.

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FRESH REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR A. POE.

The art critics say that engraving is extinct; and, really, they are right. Who recalls even the names of the old engravers? Do you remember John Sartain? It was he who introduced the mezzotint process in this country, and whose name became a household word among art lovers. It was he who founded Sartain's Magazine; befriended Edgar Allan Poe; was made Chief of the Bureau of Art of the great Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876; was decorated by the King of Italy and the Princess Marie de Luioguan, and who has just ended his labors as superintendent of the art department of the American Exhibition in London. He has lived for many years in a modest-looking house on Sansom street surrounded by beer-saloons and warehouses, but within this little house is a palace of art. One awaits the coming of its master in an ante-room, whose inlaid floor was designed and constructed in Germany and whose walls are hung with the best achievements of the old engraver, his incomparable half-tint portrait after Sir Thomas Lawrence and his “Battle of Gettysburg,” after Rothermel, who adorned the ceiling of an adjoining room, with Cupids and rose-wreaths. Yes, the house is a gem. You pass under an arch in which is inscribed the pretty legend from Gœthe: “Take me to your arms, my books, and shield me from the ills of life” — into a wonderful library, and a life-time collection of invaluable paintings, among which one notes a strange, dim panel covered with the vaguest coloring — a Ghirlandajio.

But it is not the house of Sartain which interests us. It is Sartain himself. Do you know he is eighty years old? That, nevertheless, his eyes serve him in his delicate work, where yours and mine would fail; that his digestion is so sound that he may at times with impunity wash down his viands with a “Veuve Cliequot”; that he works incessantly and often a dozen house a day; walks with springy step; talks with charming vivacity and unfailing good humor of the days of Fannie Kemble and Tom More; and after drawing upon a memory as unimpaired as it is prolific, speaks confidently of future enterprises as though he had plunged into the fountain of youth.

SARTAIN ON POE.

A pony of brandy is not more stimulating than a chat with John Sartain, nor an hour with an encyclopedia more instructive. I asked him some time ago his opinion of Poe. “A brilliant enough fellow,” said he, “but erratic and always untrustworthy. I remember that Butler, the publisher, Rufus Griswold, Poe's excoriator, and Thomas Buchanan Reid, the painter-poet, were seated with me one day in my den when Poe joined us, lugubrious and impecunious as ever. I don’t recollect how, but presently the conversation turned upon poetry and Griswold laid down the law that hard writing was easy reading, that the best poetical works were the result of strenuous effort at expression. Poe sneered at this. The genuine poet, he insisted, was always inspired, and that expression which was not spontaneous did not issue from an inspired man. [column 6:] ‘Prove it,’ said Butler. ‘I will give $5 for a poem if you will write it here and at once.’ Poe readily accepted the offer, and, seizing pen and paper, dashed of an exquisite eight-line verse, and received in return a $5 bill. But the point is that we learned soon after that this poem had been laboriously composed some time before. Poe simply carried it in his head. I discredited his claims to spontaneity of expression because I knew with what exceeding care and difficult he polished and pruned his verse.

THE POET'S CURSE.

“Poe,” continued Mr. Sartain, “was rendered irresponsible by drink. His memory, unfortunately, will always be tarnished because of the many reprehensible things he was led to do by his besetting sin. It was his habit to sell the same manuscript to several publisher. I remember he brought ‘The Bells’ to me when it was written in the rough and I returned it to him. Afterwards he burnished it into its present brilliant shape and I accepted it. He came to me once in a very disordered frame of mind. His enemies, he said, were plotting to kill him. They had followed him over from New York, had confined him in a prison, and looking out between the iron bars of his window he had seen them that night on top of a parapet, plunging the body of his mother into a barrel of vitriol. He wanted me to give him laudanum, but I would not. He then grew suspicious of me and feared lest I would turn him over to his enemies. The only foundation for his weird story lay in the fact, as I learned later on, of his having been put in the lock-up overnight for drunkenness. He insisted upon my walking out with him in the evening. We went to the old tower that used to stand on the bank of the Schuykill, at Fairmount. There in the moonlight he gave loose rein to the fantastic vagaries of his disordered imagination. He talked as I have never heard a man talk before or since. Several times I was afraid lest he might dash himself down the river.”

A QUEER STORY.

Mr. Sartain's reminiscences are not only endless, but wholly delightful. He told me a queer story — whether of himself of friend I cannot recall; at any rate, of one of them having many years ago been on a very foggy day in a certain dingy street in London. He was suddenly surprised by the spectacle of a naked man looming out of the fog before him and then swiftly vanishing, enveloped in its misty folds. Years after he found himself surveying a famous canvas in a house in the identical street. The remembrance of the curious spectacle he had seen flashed back upon him, and he narrated it to his companion, an artist. The latter started as it shot; inquired the date of the adventure, and then gravely said that he was the naked man himself. On that day, he explained, a company of jolly fellows were assembled at his rooms when one of them wagered him that he would not run naked across the street. He accepted the wager and won it. Mr. Sartain tells this story with as much detail and glee ad though it were a memory of but forty-eight hours instead of as many years. It is true, as I said in the beginning, that he has outlived his art but by no means his usefulness. He tells me that some day he intends to write an autobiography. Rest assured that if he lives to do so the book will be worth reading. I wish he could reveal the secret of how never to grow old. When I asked him this he only smiled and said, “I am a Rosicrucian.”

A QUEER OLD PLACE.

Making this mention of Poe reminds me that there is another man in the Quaker City who relates strange stories of the melancholy poet. There is the queerest little den on Seventeenth street you ever saw. It is kept by a seedy-looking old man, of wrinkled parchment skin, whom you never see if you only enter his place allured by the sign of “Liquor,” for the drink you demand is passed out to you by trembling bony fingers through a pigeon-hole. But when you come to know the aged Harris and win his confidence and regard, he admits you with much ceremony into a wee little backroom, utterly devoid of decoration save for the terrible wooden figure of Satan set in a niche in one corner. Here you may meet a select covey of prominent Philadelphia lawyers who are fond of the mysterious atmosphere of the place and find the southern whiskey of old Mr. Harris very much to their liking; of if the old many is quite alone, and the weather without is particularly ugly and the wind howls to a demonical degree in the chimney, it is likely he may sit shrunken and dim in his high back, home-made chair with the fitful glow of the grate on him, like another Mr. Smallwood, and speak to you in whispers of his quondam friend. This much you may be sure he will tell you: that Poe assured him that the sweetest poem ever written was that of “Florence Vane,” the effort of an obscure Virginia, beginning —

You should hear the old man intone it.