Text: H. F. Harrington, “Poe not to be Apothosized,” The Critic (New York, NY), ns. vol IV, October 3, 1885, pp. 157-158

[page 157, column 1, continued:]

Poe not to be Apotheosized.

TO THE EDITORS OF THE CRITIC:

It pained me to read in your issue in a review of Vol. XIX. of ‘The Encyclopedia Britannica,’ an unqualified endorsement of the laudatory estimate placed by the Britannica on the moral character of Edgar A. Poe, knowing as I do that estimate to be signally one-sided and false. These are THE CRITIC'S words: ‘It is gratifying to find Prof. Minto outspoken as regards the cruel exaggerations and downright lies foisted on the world for many years as facts in the life of Edgar Allan Poe.’

Turning to the monograph in the ‘Britannica,’ I find it to be an impassioned exculpation of Poe from every aspersion which has ever been cast on his character, and an embittered denunciation of every biographer who has accused him of degrading habits. And the impression is deliberately left on the mind of the reader, that — excepting in his later years, when, with ‘the wolf at the door and his affections on the rack,’ he sometimes had recourse to dangerous stimulants (a very pardonable thing under such conditions, we are led to infer) — he was a model of purity, industry and truth. This is an utter and a disgraceful misrepresentation of him, as every one knows who was familiar with his habits, or in a position to obtain an accurate knowledge of them. It is disgraceful, not simply because it is untrue — a sufficient disgrace in ‘a work of such magnitude and pretension as the ‘Britannica,’ — but because it is accompanied by a studious effort to brand the writers who have set forth the honest truth about Poe as a band of conspirators, consciously devoted to the task of damaging his fair and honorable reputation. If Prof. Minto puts faith in the old Latin adage, ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum,’ and therefore was disposed to quarrel with those who had thus told the truth, he should have contented himself with assailing their disregard of what he holds to be a hallowed principle ; if he recoiled with indignation from memoirs saturated with malignity — as Dr. Griswold's, perhaps, must be admitted to be — he should have discriminated carefully between the temper and the facts; when he attempts to acquit his idol by a total subversion of the truth, no language is too harsh to stigmatize the wrong.

For another and a stronger reason I take exception to Prof. Minto's monograph. I have had a great deal to do with the education of youth, and have learned to watch their moral exposure with anxious solicitude. One of the [column 2:] most insidious temptations of this class, which besets them at the present time, arises out of the tendency of public opinion in our country to make the culture of the intellect paramount to the activity of the moral sense as the safeguard of our free institutions ;and such a deification of genius irrespective of its persistent treachery to virtue as the One in question, is a fearful lurch in the same direction. It is an open lesson to our youth that the exhibition of lofty powers in the walks of literature will condone the unbridled revel of the passions in sensual indulgence. I denounce it, therefore, as a treatment of departed greatness which is pregnant with incalculable harm.

I am aware that I have freely accused Prof. Minto, in apparent disregard of both logic and justice, as though he had been fully convicted of misrepresentation. To my mind he has been virtually thus convicted. I am willing to concede only so much as this — that he may not be conscious of the wrong which he has done to truth and history. When he prepared his memoir he may have derived his data from deceptive sources, or been blinded by pre-existing prejudice. But even this apology will not rescue him from the pressure of my charge. For, in the preparation of an article for such a work as the ‘Britannica,’ a sin of omission is as culpable as one of commission. He had no business to give the rein to prejudice, and it was his special business to gather in his testimony, with scrupulous fidelity, from trustworthy sources. Such testimony could have been had in plenty for the seeking. In the first place it is an unheard-of thing, that a man whose reputation for sensual excesses was notorious during many years of his life and up to the period of his death, attaching to him in every community in which he lived, and even in the circles of indulgent friends, should be imagined by any judicial mind to be the helpless victim of slanderous misconceptions and wholly above reproach. The old adage holds good, ‘Where there is a deal of smoke there is sure to be some fire.’ No doubt many discreditable things were said of him which were not true; but they were growths from the seed which he himself had planted, and this, had Prof. Minto sought the truth with a candid mind, he could readily have verified. He should have started in his investigations with admitting to himself the antecedent probability that he would discover dark threads running through the warp and woof of Poe's checkered career. At the time of Poe's death, and for some years afterward, while his moral lapses were fresh in the minds of numberless contemporaries, few who took public notice of him were so rash as to assert his innocence; and in subsequent years memoirs of him were written, that were satisfactory in every particular, by those who either knew him well or had received their impressions from his associates, and who weighed his character with judicial impartiality. These memoirs are dispassionate and charitable, but they tell the truth; and to them and to the representations of Poe's unbiassed acquaintances who still survive and might have been consulted, Prof. Minto should have deferred, to some extent at least; but he has chosen to denounce them all, and to pin his faith on Ingram, whose life of Poe is one of the most contemptible pieces of prejudiced whitewash that was ever palmed on the public under the name of biography. I have been governed in what I have written by a sense of duty. I am indignant that so false a story as the ‘Britannica's’ sketch of Poe should go down to posterity as the final verdict of enlightened scholarship respecting his character; still more indignant that those who have told the truth about him should be branded in that sketch as conscious defamers. It is sacrificing too much and too many for the sake of one.

In this connection I will present some facts out of my personal knowledge of Poe. That I am not impelled by a hostile motive is sufficiently proved by my long silence. I should have been silent still but for this memoir in the ‘Britannica.'Some time in the year’ 47 I visited New York City and called on my relative, Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, [page 258:] She was just getting into a hack accompanied by the well-known author, Mrs. Kirkland, to carry, as she said, some articles of comfort to Mrs. Poe, who was ill in Fordham. When she returned, she described Mrs. Poe's condition to me — how that the poor wife, neglected, penniless, lay dying on a comfortless bed in a cottage that lacked many of the commonest essentials of domestic need and convenience, and was dependent on her friends for ministrations to her daily wants, while her husband was spending his time in the city in a round of selfish indulgences. While I was in New York Mrs. Osgood made repeated visits to Fordham on the same kind errand, and the sufferings of the wife as well as the genius and character of the husband were repeatedly topics of conversation between us.

It might have been about a year afterward, when, returning to my home in Albany, after an absence in the city of New York, Mrs. Osgood, who was then on a visit to my family, related that while I had been gone Poe had sought an interview with her alone in my parlor, and in passionate terms had besought her to elope with him. She described his attitudes as well as reported his words — how he went down on his knee and clasped his hands, and pleaded for her consent; how she met him with mingled ridicule and reproof, appealing to his better nature, and striving to stimulate a resolution to abandon his vicious courses; and how finally he took his leave, baffled and humiliated, if not ashamed.

Not long after, when again in New York City, I sought the home of a family of which I had repeatedly been a guest. It consisted of a husband and his beautiful wife, who loved each other with confiding affection; and their home was bright with the sunshine of innocence and peace. I learned from mutual friends that it was now no more. It had been ruthlessly destroyed. Poe had marked the poor unsuspecting woman for his victim, had wound his insidious snares about her, weaned her affections from her husband, and accomplished her ruin.

I will add no further transcripts from my recollections of him and of his life. The three head-lights to which I have pointed attention — a neglected, dying wife; a seduction deliberately attempted ; and a second seduction, with its attendant ruin, as deliberately accomplished — show clearly enough the trend of his character and the range of some of his pursuits. The picture is sufficiently complete. Let the truth prevail. As a writer, Poe's name stands among the very highest on the glory-roll of American authorship. I heartily agree with Prof. Minto that ‘there is no English author of the present century whose fame is likely to be more enduring.’ But as a man, he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And let his failure to display the triumphs of a pure and noble manhood be set forth in fitting terms side by side with the chronicle of his mental greatness. Let it be presented in sharp contrast with the attractive personal record of his exalted cotemporaries — a Longfellow, a Holmes, a Whittier, and a Bryant, — enforcing the cardinal truth on the minds and hearts of ambitious youth, that one of the most sparkling gems in the coronal of a great author's greatness is the immaculate purity of his daily life.

H. F. HARRINGTON.

NEW BEDFORD, MASS., Sept. 15, 1885.

[Mr. Harrington is mistaken in supposing us to have defended Poe's memory from all aspersions. Prof. Minto does not attempt ‘to brand the writers who have set forth the honest truth about Poe as a band of conspirators.’ His monograph is a reply to Griswold alone, whose memoir Mr. Harrington himself at least suspects of being ‘saturated with malignity.’ Surely Mr. Woodberry is not an apologist of Poe; yet Prof. Minto has not a word to say against his Life of Poe published last winter in the American Men-of-Letters Series. Our own stand on this subject was taken very distinctly in the review of that book which appeared in these columns on the 31st of January. ‘ There is no face — certainly no story — in all literature,’ we said, ‘more tragical [column 2:] more unheavenly. The thirst for drink meandering like a line of fire from one end of Poe's career to the other; the bitter temper involving itself in a thousand contradictions toward friend and foe; the all-swallowing egoism that burnt its perpetual taper day and night before the shrine of Self; the envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness of a vindictive career, — all these come out page by page, not on a mission of malice, but as the sculptured lines of an actual portrait, leering and livid as it may be, counterbalanced by great excellences to be sure, but for all that the true and perfect likeness of the man Poe.’ — EDS. CRITIC.]