Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Academy (London, UK), August 5, 1899, p. 137, cols. 1-2

[page 137:]

Edgar Allan Poe.

So much ink and ire have been spent in discussing the character of the author of “The Raven “ that it is difficult to feel sanguine about any new attempt to give Poe his due. And a careful perusal of the appreciation of Poe which Mr. Vincent O'Sullivan prefixes to a quarto reprint of The Raven, and The Pit and the Pendulum (Smithers) does not weaken this sceptical mood. Mr. 0’ Sullivan romps through the problem, but the effect is that he deranges rather than solves it. He abuses a great many people who had to do with Poe, and yet is not kind to the poet himself. We have a tremendous discussion of Poe's drink ing habits. Mr. O'Sullivan suggests that Poe drank with the deliberate intention of bringing himself down to the level of the people who surrounded him, and so deaden the pangs of superiority.

We confess this seems to us a too neat and perfect explanation, as much too satisfactory as Poe's description of the way in which he evolved “The Raven.” Poe never exhausted the possibilities of friendship; he never tried assiduously to find worthy mates. And what is the gain to his memory if we believe that he soberly drowned his superiority in wine ? Mr. O'Sullivan makes the same defence of Poe in his dealings with women. Just as he got drunk with cold deliberation in order to be at peace with vulgarians (an end he never achieved), so he wrote love-letters with the cynical purpose of pleasing women who were “glutted and besotted with Byronism.” Mr. O'Sullivan actually says: “Read in this light, with all hope of their sincerity and good faith abandoned, these letters become interesting and tolerable.” Do they? Can they? Mr. O'Sullivan may find “something curiously and attractively diabolic in this attempt of Poe to play the lover by calculated effects — to make the intellect do the work of the senses”; but we hope he is not under the impression that he is doing Poe's memory a service by this line of argument. Poe may have abused wine and women by algebra, but to say he did so is not to defend him. And to say he did so is to be too cocksure about the hidden things of the human heart. The heart knoweth its own bitterness and frailty. Surely it is kinder to think that Poe erred in the old human way, and that the palliation is to be found, not in “calm intention,” but in the impulses communicated by a nerve-racked body and a too fine and febrile mind. We do not believe that Poe was at the mercy of a particular set. Does Mr. O'Sullivan think that if Poe had been asked into those Boston drawing-rooms in which Emerson and Longfellow and Holmes and Lowell prattled he would have maintained his self-respect on tea, and fed his heart with prudent love? That he was not asked to meet these men may be a matter for regret and surprise. Mr. O'Sullivan says that they thought Poe “ a man without sweetness and light, a hack journalist, a compromising person to know; if not quite a ruffian, at least a ‘ loafer.’ “ We suspect they did think Poe “a man without sweetness and light.” This is the one severe thing which we think is worth saying about Poe. With all his brilliance, ingenuity, and grace, he seems to have been a man without much sweetness and light; both his life and his writings declare it. The Boston set may have held its prigs, but in the men and [column 2:] women who composed it culture and character were blended in a very amalgam. Whereas Poe's asset was an aesthetic sense and sensitiveness of febrile intensity in America unique. His genius was too new to be more than a wonder and a doubt which sought information in the man. But the man was a moral and temperamental invalid. He had that fatal wish to possess beauty without the earth in which it is rooted. Mr. O'Sullivan, who writes extremely well, is near the mark when he says:

The keystone of Poe's character was his hatred of humanity; had that been removed you would have had a different man. a different artist. Dogs avoid by instinct the man who hates dogs; and in likewise men and women instinctively recognise the man who loathes and despises them, and they let him go by. 80 it was that Poe, since he could not be an Emperor, went through life solitary, proud, and discontented, having really as little to do with the community of the earth as a lonely eagle winging its way above a humming town. The friends of death are often the enemies of life, and Poe was a friend of death. Mr. Stoddard relates that one rainy afternoon in New York, as he was walking up Broadway, he saw Poe, who looked wet and cold, standing for shelter in a doorway. Mr. Stoddard says that he had an impulse to cross the street and offer Poe his umbrella, but that something — certainly not unkindness — made him refrain. It was this “something” that enwrapped Poe like an infected garment.