Text: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Recent Works on Edgar Poe,” The Nation (New York, NY), February 18, 1880, pp. 360-361

RECENT WORKS ON EDGAR POE.*

IT is certainly a strong tribute to the unique genius of Edgar Allan Poe that there should have appeared within a month or two no less than three elaborate biographies or critiques in regard to him. Simultaneously with the appearance of Mr. Ingram's extended memoir we have a more condensed biography by Mr. R. H. Stoddard, said to have been prepared expressly for a volume of ‘Select Works of Poe,’ though based on a previous memoir; and we have also a reprint of Mr. E. C. Stedman's careful critique, which first appeared in Scribner's Monthly. These publications are a recognition of Poe's genius, but they are also, in part, the fruit of whatever was bizarre or melodramatic in his career. No sober poet, who pays his bills regularly and keeps the ten commandments — who, in the immortal words of Hosea Biglow, “stays to hum and looks arter his folks” — can afford such tempting material to a biographer [column 2:] as one who, if less gifted, yet occasionally disappears for a year or two without trace of his wanderings, and who, when his whereabouts are best know sometimes gives his friends most reason to wish him still a wanderer. All that makes Poe's career least defensible — his vices, quarrels, desperate strait, attempted suicides, ardent and sometimes simultaneous love-affairs — all these afford great resources for the biographer, who has reason to be grateful for a subject who did not dwell in decencies for ever. It is almost amusing to see how each new memoir of Poe professes to be the first to tell the real story of his life; and how each, while denouncing the obvious malice of Griswold, ends by re-establishing almost all the damaging facts which Griswold left only half-proved. If Poe fared ill at the hands of his enemy, he has fared worse, on the whole, at those of his friends. With every disposition to make the best of the man, we must honestly own that we never thought so ill of him as on closing the last page of Mr. Ingram's two bulky volumes.

Of the three books before us, that of Mr. I am is the work of a laborious and not very discriminating annalist; while Mr. Stoddard's is that of a man of much poetic feeling, who is, however, too fond of disguising him as a jaunty and rather cynical man of the world. Both these are essentially biographies, tempered, in Mr. Ingram's case, with a little criticism, and Mr. Stoddard's with more. Mr. Stedman's essay is pure criticism, and is, like all his work in that direction, of very high character. There is sometimes a little prolixity and perhaps over-refining; a touch of judicial self-consciousness, a dallying with his golden chain, like Tennyson's chancellor — we sometimes wish for the abrupter decision of Mr. Stoddard's more trenchant strokes; yet these are but a small abatement of the praise due for such admirable work. In these respects the English biographer is at great disadvantage, compared with the American critics; he adds a good deal to our detailed information, but scarcely anything to our critical resources.

Probably no man living has taken so much pains as Mr. Ingram to collect all possible memorials of Poe, and he deserves hearty thanks for this zeal. On the other hand, it is probable that the hastiest American writer has the advantage of knowing more of Poe's milieu, and of the influences around him, than his English biographer. Mere remoteness makes it hard for Mr. Ingram to understand the society in which his hero mingled, the people whom he loved or hated, and the opportunities and temptations that surrounded him. It also leads him into biographical inaccuracies, as in his assumption (i. 165) that the first two-volume collection of ‘Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque’ made no impression upon the public. Contrast this with the personal reminiscence of Mr. Stedman, which we can heartily confirm, in regard to this very collection of stories: “With what eagerness we caught them from hand to hand until many of us knew them by heart” (Stedman, p. 35). But in a more general way this want of local knowledge mars the work of Mr. Ingram. We can pardon the high-sounding sentence with which the memoir opens, “Edgar Allan Poe was of gentle birth,” although the plain, unvarnished fact is that he was the son of two strolling players, and that his paternal grandfather was an Irish wheelwright. The whole theory of descent from the Le Poer family is disowned by the American Poes, and was apparently a bit of romantic enthusiasm on the part of Mrs. Whitman, whose maiden name was Power, and who liked to fancy herself a blood relation of her betrothed (Ingram, ii. 248). This social ambition is a common weakness of biographers, and is not to be severely censured. But Mr. Ingram's explaining the fact of Poe's adoption, with his brother and sister, into other families after the death of their parents, as being “in accordance with a custom not uncommon in republican countries” (i. 9), becomes amusing in view of the fact that M. La Vigne has just called attention to the prevalence of the same practice in Russia; and nothing can well be more preposterous than seriously to attribute the unpopularity of Poe's writings with some of his countrymen to the fact that in his “Some Words with a Mummy” he describes thirteen Egyptian states as governed by a tyrant named Mob. After fully stating the bearing of this jeu d’esprit, Mr. Ingram adds these words: “The Americans being too susceptible to relish a joke at their own expense” (ii. 13). Probably a single day of a Presidential canvass would convince even an English biographer that if there is anything in which Americans revel, it is in jokes at their own expense; all branches of the English race fortunately take such jokes with a relish, and the countrymen of Mark Twain most of all. It was really Poe, not his readers, who had no relish for a joke; there was not an impulse of innocent play about him; every jest must either carry a sting or be saturated with the atmosphere of sepulchres.

It shows the unconsciousness of Mr. Ingram's frequent partisanship that he sometimes gives on the same page his impressions and the facts which refute these impressions. If there was anything for which Poe habitually “chivalrous” attitude; he used to say to his female admirers, “I cannot point an arrow against any woman” (Mrs. Weiss in Stoddard, clxv.) Accordingly his biographer takes him at his word, assuming, as a thing undoubted, “Poe's invariable courtesy towards women” (ii. 46), and then takes pains to preserve, in the very next paragraph, a vulgar personal assault upon Miss Walter, of the Boston Transcript, a dignified and most estimable [page 361:] lady, whose only offence was in properly reproving the conduct of Poe — which Mr. Stedman justly calls “absurd and outrageous” — in connection with his poem before the Boston Lyceum. How much lower deeps even than this could be fathomed by this chivalrous poet in flinging slander against a woman who had offended what Stedman (again) calls his “measureless self” will be seen when we turn to Mr. Ingram's exhibition of his duplicity toward Mrs. Whitman.

It is hard to recall, among all the sad revelations of literary biography, anything so utterly dastardly as the whole record of Poe's life, as revealed by his own letters, during his brief betrothal to this unselfish and generous woman. Something of this may have been before suspected, but Mr. Ingram gives the whole evidence, sparing us no damning detail of date, and showing conclusively that during the very period when he was writing to this lady as ardently and as reverentially as ever lover wrote to his betrothed — while she was using all her influence to redeem him from his debasing habits, and was undergoing agonies of doubt and fear for his sake — he was constantly solacing himself by writing other letters equally ardent, and often on alternate days, to a lady whose name Mr. Ingram discreetly veils as “Annie”; while the worthy Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, was apparently using all her influence to detach him from his intended wife, and to cultivate his romantic passion for her rival. Let us consider some steps in the affair. On October 18 he wrote to Mrs. Whitman as his “best and only-beloved Helen”; even after this she hesitated about marrying him, and all her friends tried to prevent it; he attempted suicide in Boston, passed a night of wild delirium in Providence, had a terrible ne with her in the morning, and she decided to be his wife “in the hope of being enabled to preserve him from his impending doom” (Ingram, ii, 179). She then gave her pledge, “upon condition that he never touched intoxicants again.” Poe went to New York to make arrangements for his marriage, and wrote to her on November 14: “Beloved of my heart, of my imagination, of my intellect — life of my life, soul of my soul — dearest, beloved Helen, how shall I ever thank you as ought?” In letter written a few days afterward he describes a cottage where he dreamed of himself and his beloved as dwelling, afar from the world (Ingram, ii. It almost surpasses belief when we find that on the 16th of November he was writing in a strain quite as impassioned to “Annie,” telling her that she must come to him, that he cannot live,” and conjuring up another picture of a cottage, far from the world, as attractive as the first one, with her near him as his guardian angel:

‘’It is not much that I ask, sweet sister Annie. My mother and myself would take a small cottage — oh! so small — so very humble — I should be far away from the tumult of the world — from the ambition which I loathe — I would labor day and night, and with industry I. could accomplish so much. Annie! it would be a Paradise beyond my wildest hopes. I could see some of your beloved family every day, and you often. Do not these pictures touch your inmost heart? . . . Farewell, here and hereafter. For ever your own Eddy” (Ingram, ii. 194).

With this “heartrending epistle,” as Mr. Ingram calls it, from a lover who had just been moving heaven and earth to get himself betrothed to somebody else, Mrs. Clemm also sends “Annie” a note written by herself under this same date of Nov. 16, saying: “He raved all night about you, but is now more composed.” If this were a solitary instance, it would be less humiliating; but the thing was chronic. This spiritual bigamy seems to have been just the condition in which Poe revelled, in his then half-insane condition; and all through that month, by Mr. Ingram's merciless showing, he was alternately turning the stops of emotion for “Helen” and for ‘’ Annie.” He kept on writing to Mrs. Whitman, by Mr. Ingram's statement, “a series of idiosyncratic epistles” (ii. 178), and almost on the same day he would write in an equally idiosyncratic manner to the other lady, who seems to have had, for a time at least, sufficient propriety not to answer them. Thus he wrote (Nov. 22) to “sweet Helen”: “My sole hope now is in you, Helen. As you are true to me or fail me, so do I live or die” (ii. 180). Then he wrote on the very next day (Nov. 23) to “Annie's” sister “If there is any pity in your heart, reply immediately to this and let me know why it is I do not hear from Annie. . . . Her silence fills my whole soul with terror, . . . Let me but hear from her once more, and I can bear whatever happens. . . . You would pity me if you knew the agony that is in my heart as I write these words” (ii. 196).

This is bad enough, but worse follows. He broke his pledge of abstinence, and Mrs, Whitman dismissed him. Yet on the 11th of January he had the baseness to write to his other correspondent that the engagement was broken off by himself, and to exult in it: “I need not tell you, Annie, how great a burden is taken off my heart by my rupture with Mrs. W.; for I have fully made up my mind to break the engagement “ (Ingram, ii. 202). Worse yet, he wrote a letter to Mrs. Whitman, about Jan. 23, sent it to “Annie for herself and friends to read, with the request that it should then be sealed and posted (ii. 204), and then closes with this crowning infamy: “But of one thing rest assured, Annie — from this day forth I shun the pestilential society of literary women. They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable [column 2:] set, with no te self-esteem. Mrs. Osgood is the only exception I know (ii. 205).

When one reads this sentence, so plainly aimed at her whom he had deceived, wronged, and now maligning; her who was his “guardian angel” so long as he allowed it, and who went to her grave his faithful lover and staunch defender — not knowing, let us hope, to her dying day how he wrote about her to “Annie” — no manly reader can that whatever Griswold may have done to injure the memory of Poe, the revelations of Mr. Ingram are more fatal. The indulgent public will, as in the case of Goethe, pardon almost any number of love affairs to a poet so long as he makes them consecutive, but it is absolutely impossible to throw any glamour of personal honor about a sentimentalist who is remorselessly torturing two women's hearts at the same time.

It is due to Mr. Ingram to say that, though he almost uniformly takes Poe's side during his whole life of quarrels — and this without much judicial weighing of the facts — he yet recognizes in a general way the defects of his favorite. ‘Thus, he finds the limitation of his genius to be shown in his repetitions (i. 152); admits that criticism was not his forte (i. 249), and regrets some of his ‘ill-considered critiques” (i. He acknowledges that the majority of Poe's works “subdue the intellect only” (i. 181): “he owns that the poet's irregularities destroyed his hopes and placed his reputation in the hands of foes (i. 215); admits that his “insatiable love of hoaxing” renders it very difficult to put confidence in anything he wrote (i, 255); a shows that every woman who attempted to befriend him “deemed it necessary to let him go his ways” sooner or later (ii. 192). In view of these admissions, it is idle to treat Poe as a lofty hero obliged to herd with his inferiors, and to deprecate his descending into the arena to “combat blackguards” (ii, 86) The simple fact is that Poe loved a fight like any Irishman, and was commonly the first to toss his own hat “into the arena.” Worse yet, he gave fine names to this quarrelsomeness, and made his boast, “I uniformly tacked, where I attacked at all, those who stood highest in power and influence” (ii. 172), whereas three-quarters of his bitterest onslaughts were on those who were already unpopular or unimportant. Only once, in the case of Professor Longfellow, did he fairly strike Bois-Guilbert's shield; and it is possible that he knew, as the result proved, that Bois-Guilbert would be too good-natured or too magnanimous to notice the thrust. Mr. Stoddard handles this whole matter far more wisely than Mr. Ingram, and his verdict on Poe's critical controversies will be the final one: “He advanced no critical principle which he established; he attacked no critical principle which he overthrew. He broke a few butterflies on his wheel, but he destroyed no reputation “ (Stoddard, Ixxxix.)

In summing up, we can say that the public is indebted to Mr. Ingram for a considerable addition to the materials for a life of that his book leaves us, as did the far inferior work of Mr. Gill — which, by the way, Mr. Ingram studiously omits to mention in his bibliography — with the impression that Poe's true biographer is yet to come. It is hardly to be expected that a full memoir will ever be written in the spirit of Mr, Stedman's criticism — so clear, so just, so strong. On one literary point we think this agreeable writer wholly wrong: his vindication of Poe's tiresome “repetends” (p. 59), which Mr. Stoddard more justly condemns. We are surprised, too, that he should speak of “Lenore” as “one of the simplest of ballad forms” (p. 60), ignoring the fact that in its original form, as first printed in Lowell's “Pioneer,” it had a lyrical play and exaltation almost as fine as that of “Israfel,” which Mr. Stedman places among the first of English lyrics. The present jingling and commonplace form of “Lenore” was only one of Poe's calamitous afterthoughts, when he had become thoroughly given over to the “repetend.” But most of Mr. Stedman's essay seems to us simply admirable, and many of his special points and phrases rank igh in critical art, as where he classes Poe with Doré rather than with the great masters (p. 76); where he points out that, after all, the poet “loved his share of pain” and took a keen delight in the tragedy of his own existence (p. 101); where he contrasts Poe with Hawthorne, and shows that “the Puritanism by which Hawthorne's strength was tempered was also the source from which it sprang” (p. 6S); and when he points out the honorable fact, in view of Poe's indebtedness to French literature, that “there is not an unchaste suggestion in all his writings” (p. 93). has in Mr. Stedman has given us much good criticism; Mr. Stoddard many good facts, including some which the ampler English memoir contrives to leave out, such as citations from Poe's plagiarized book on ‘Conchology’; and Mr. Ingram has given us only too ample an array of information, covering almost all points except this alleged plagiarism. A debt is thus due to each writer, and yet we cannot help thinking how hugely it would delight Poe, were he still alive, to break his combative lance against all three.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 360, column 1:]

* ‘Edgar Allan Poe: his Life, Letters, and Opinions. By John H. Ingram.’ With portraits of Poe and his Mother. London: John Hogg. 1880. 2 vols.

‘Select Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Poetical and Prose. With a new memoir, by R. I. Stoddard,’ Household Edition. New York: W. J. Widdleton. 1880.

‘Edgar Allan Poe By E. C. Stedman.’ Boston: Loughton, Mifflin & Co. 1881.