Text: Irving Browne, “Concerning the New ‘Poe’,” The Critic (New York, NY), January 26, 1895, pp. 66-67

[page 66, column 2, continued:]

Concerning the New “Poe”

TO THE EDITORS OF THE CRITIC: —

To those who want all that Poe wrote, the new edition of his works, to be completed in ten volumes, by Stone & Kimball; will be welcome, although many will find the type rather ‘small for evening reading by aging eyes. But there are doubtless a great many who do not want all he wrote, and would gladly dispense with the tediousness of “Pym,” the foolishness of “Xing a Paragrab,” the penny-dreadfulness of “Hop Frog,” and the uncomfortable drunken craze of a good many other of his tales; his wearisome and incomprehensible abstrusities; and the mass of his abusive and ephemeral criticism; and would like instead two volumes, in good-sized type, embracing the poems and about thirty tales, The collection need not be quite so select as a one-volume edition published some years ago, from which “The Fall of the House of Usher” was omitted. Perhaps the present publishers will deem it worth while to issue such an edition after the prevailing anaconda-like demand shall be satisfied.

Out of curiosity let me inquire what authority your Chicago correspondent has for pronouncing Poe's appetite for strong drink and opium “hereditary”? That is what Poe called it, but it seems to have been one of his “imperious dreams” — the common case of finding a convenient scape-goat for sins that a man has not resolution enough to lay aside.

It also seems to me that Miss Monroe is a little too hard on Mr. Woodberry. His is an ungrateful task. To blame him for want of ‘sympathy’ with his subject is like demanding of the stage-villain that he should “assume a cheerful expression.” The hard facts of Poe's unprincipled life do not leave much room for the play of sentiment or sympathy. The “mystic harmonies” must [page 67:] be listened for in the man's writings and. not in his life. After showing how Poe contracted “debts of honor” to the amount of $2500 while a school-boy; how he lied about his age to get into West Point; how he procured or allowed a friend to swear to a lie about Virginia's age in order to enable him to marry her; how he got money out of the depised Boston people by false pretenses and afterwards boasted of the “hoax”; how he made love to three women almost simultaneously, when his heart was in the grave with his lost Virginia, and deliberately got himself drunk in order to avoid the appointed marriage with one of them; how he lied about his “reform”; how his life from first to last exhibited a shocking and uncommon ingratitude, unfaithfulness and impudent disregard of principle and moral and social obligation: — after showing all this, calmly and without prejudice or denunciation, Mr. Woodberry should not be required to lay flowers on his grave, and to own himself the prey of that ‘’ magnetism” which led so many confiding men to lend Poe money and so many silly women to fall in love with him, The: appropriate lesson to ‘’ the flower of American manhood “‘ is best conveyed as Mr. Woodberry has preached it. Poe is to be admired in his works, not in his life. Mr. Stedman has properly summarized the merits of the one; Mr. Woodberry has properly set forth the demerits of the other. The more “Philistines” like Woodberry and Leslie Stephen, who dare to tell the truth, the better for biography; and the sooner the world is disabused of the notion that vice is in any degree vindicated by genius, the more sensible and the better the world will be. Let us give fewer bouquets and Thanksgiving turkeys to felons, and have less sympathy with bad men because they wrote pleasing verses and stories.’

IRVING BROWNE,

BUFFALO, N. Y., 12 Jan., 1895.