Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Poe and his Biographers,” Temple Bar (London), vol. LXIII, no. 4, August 1883, pp. 530-539

[page 530:]

THE city of New York no longer lacks a memorial to Edgar Poe. Hitherto the only external and visible tribute to the one original poetical genius that America has yet produced, has been the monument which was placed some few years ago over his grave in Baltimore. Poe was in one way and another specially connected with that city. There the first youthful labours of his Muse were published; there his literary talents were first recognised; there, indeed, he was until recently believed to have been born; and there he did, in fact, close his short and fevered career in circumstances of peculiar sadness. But to a memorial in Baltimore cannot, of course, belong the national distinction of a memorial in New York. We are unable indeed to follow an ingenious theory that was then set up, that such a commemoration was tantamount to a “kind of formal cancelling of Poe's moral attainder on the part of the United States;” but all — and they are fewer, we fear, than could be wished — who are content to appreciate the poet without too curiously dissecting the man, will learn with pleasure that the first city in the country which gave him birth, at length vouchsafes to one of its most gifted, if unfortunate, sons an honour that had been too long delayed. And our readers will, we think, be inclined to agree with us that the delay had been caused rather by a national inability to recognise his claims to that honour, than by any national abhorrence of his moral delinquencies. In truth, Poe's admirers in any country, though assuredly not wanting in enthusiasm, have ever been select rather than numerous. With the peculiar qualities of his fanciful and morbid genius, the somewhat practical mind of America never has been, and we fancy even now is not, in much sympathy; while that part of him which was unfortunately but too apparent to every eye was assuredly not of a nature to suggest to his countrymen the propriety of a national tribute. On the whole, we are, we think, not far wrong in attributing the somewhat tardy action of New York rather to a deference to European, perhaps to English opinion, than to a national though tardy recognition of native merit.

Unfortunate as Poe was in his lifetime, it may almost be questioned whether he has not been yet more unfortunate since his death. If there be haply any truth in his favourite theory of “the sentience of the dead,” what misery and shame must have been his portion during the thirty years and more that he has lain in his grave at Baltimore! [page 531:] Many men — it would be scarcely, perhaps, an extravagance to say most men — have been more or less unfortunate in their biographers, but no one, we think, has. been so unfortunate as Poe. His own countryman, Rufus Griswold, a name that has recently been rescued from oblivion only to be assailed with a ferocity far in excess of any of his alleged assaults on Poe, was the first to profess to unfold the miserable story; the last has been Mr. John H. Ingram, a countryman of our own.* Between these two extremes lie a host of essays, memoirs, “monographs,” critical and biographical, English and American. Of these the most valuable, perhaps, as evincing, unlike most of its peers, a certain degree of sobriety of thought, together with some appearance of impartiality, is the work of Mr. Gill,† an American, who has practically anticipated Mr. Ingram on all essential points. Assuredly the most remarkable is the production of a lady,‡ who had been personally acquainted with Poe, and who, if we may be permitted to judge by her work, appears to have been, in the phraseology of Mr. Lafayette Kettle, “one of the most remarkable women in the country.” It is assuredly one of the most remarkable books ever published in any country; nor do we know where in literature to look for its parallel, unless haply it might be found in the effusions, of which unhappily a small part only has been preserved, of the two Literary Ladies who played so conspicuous a part at the levée held by the Honourable Elijah Pogram. Of the celebrated essay by Baudelaire, of which both Mr. Gill and Mr. Ingram speak in terms which are intelligible only on the supposition that they have never read it, we shall have somewhat to say presently. It is with Mr. Ingram's latest work, however, that we are chiefly concerned, and which we shall take as the base of the few remarks we propose to offer on the subject of our article. Our choice has been determined less by the intrinsic value of the work, than by the position its author has claimed for it as a triumphant and lasting vindication of a maligned and suffering man, and by the extraordinary complacency, to employ no harsher term, with which Mr. Ingram's reviewers have suffered his claim to pass unchallenged, or even acknowledged and guaranteed it. Most heartily do we wish that it were possible for us to say what we have it in our heart to say without reopening a miserable controversy, already protracted far beyond all necessary limits, and which, in truth, a little discretion and good sense should have rendered unnecessary from the first. [page 532:] Most gladly, could we find it consistent with our duty, would we refrain from lifting so much as a finger against the idol which Mr. Ingram has set up. Indeed, had the idolatry been confined to this single worshipper, we could be well content to leave him to the free enjoyment of his self-imposed rites. But unfortunately he has called, and somewhat peremptorily called, upon the world to come and worship with him at the altar of this strange god; and there is danger lest the world, generally but too willing to listen to whomsoever will cry loud enough, should be converted to this new belief. The profession of literature has its duties not less than the profession of charity; and it is in the interest of the former that we find ourselves compelled, though we shall do so as gently as truth and common sense will permit, to disregard the softer appeals of the latter. We must console ourselves with the dignified comment of Johnson on a somewhat similar subject: “If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.”

It is an ill thing to stand between a man and his conscience, and if, as Mr. Ingram asserts in his preface, he has been really moved to the composition of these volumes by a sense of duty, we must content ourselves with wishing that he could have found his duty more compatible with ours. It would, indeed, be impossible for a biographer at all burdened by conscience to make the tale of Poe's life other than pitiful and unpleasing; yet most assuredly it should be neither tedious nor uninstructive. Mr. Ingram is unhappily both. These are, perhaps, to be regarded as misfortunes rather than faults, but he has imparted a third quality to his work, which is undeniably a fault and a very grave one — he is one of the most didactic, one of the most aggressive of biographers. On all his predecessors (save Baudelaire, whom we fancy he does not perfectly understand, and the “Literary Lady,” to whose style he has, indeed, not seldom paid the sincerest compliment of imitation) — on all, we say, whether friendly to his idol, or hostile, he falls with equal violence. Not one brave man is allowed to have lived before this truculent Agamemnon. Only a very strong case, indeed, will support such a mode of attack, and there is no question that Mr. Ingram's case, a very delicate one from the first, has been very seriously damaged by it.

The life of Edgar Poe forms one of the saddest chapters in the history of literature. There are, indeed, too many chapters in that history which it is impossible to read without great sorrow and pity. The names of Marlowe, Otway, Butler, Hook, Boyse, Savage, Chatterton, will occur at once to every reader. And there are many others doubtless whom a research in the obscure annals of Grub Street would serve to recall from the oblivion which has been their only portion. [page 533:] But the name of Poe stands, we think, pre-eminent on this unhappy roll. It may contain some more conspicuous by their genius, many more conspicuous by their misfortunes; but it contains no one, we submit, of equal genius and equal misfortunes who persistently threw away so many and such fair opportunities. To none, indeed, of these we have named can be ascribed that peculiar odour of sanctity which is supposed on poetical tradition to belong to

“A brave man struggling in the storms of fate.”

Much of the misery which was the lot of such spirits as Savage and Chatterton, was the result of their own misdoing; out of their own vices were made the whips with which Fortune scourged them through the world. Yet it may fairly be pleaded for them that they were born into an atmosphere of poverty and hardship, and that the long struggle of their life was fought with unequal arms, and with every disadvantage of ground. But with Poe the case was different. His parents were, it is true, but two poor, though well-born, actors, whom a merciful fate removed from the scene before their time. But the child himself was taken almost from his cradle into a home where every happiness that affection could suggest, and wealth supply, was his. His new parents were, indeed, less discriminate than kind, nor was his early treatment such as to qualify a naturally wayward temper to correct the defects of injudicious indulgence. But the wretchedness of his subsequent career, the struggles and disappointments of his manhood, the shame and sadness of his end, arose in the first instance solely from his own perverse and ill-regulated disposition. His patron was not less long-suffering than kind. He forgave his foster-child, not once, but many times; and whatever may have been the cause of the final rupture, it is but common justice to credit Allan with having exhausted the ordinary stock of human patience, before he closed his doors against the headstrong and ungrateful youth. When every allowance has been made for him that reason will allow charity to suggest, it is still impossible for common sense to regard Poe as the victim of an abnormal combination of circumstances too strong for human control. Tried he surely was by great temptations, against which neither his training nor his temperament had supplied him with the capacity of resistance; but for the strength of the combination and the weakness of the resistance, he, and he only, was responsible.

And really, despite his protestations made, we are willing to believe in all honesty, it is difficult to see what Mr. Ingram has done for this unhappy creature, save to drag once more into public notice the pitiful story of his wasted life. Griswold has, indeed, been convicted of a few inaccuracies and exaggerations which may or may not have [page 534:] been the result of deliberate malice. But this had been already done, as we have said, by Mr. Gill in America, and by Mr. Ingram himself in this country in the memoir prefixed to his edition of Poe's works, published at Edinburgh in 1874. With regard to the charge of deliberate malice which Mr. Ingram asserts and reasserts against Griswold, it is difficult at this distance of time to decide the truth, based as the charge practically is on nothing more than assertion. It is certain, however, that more discretion and more charity would have better become one who was in some measure entrusted with the defence of the dead man's memory. But the inaccuracies cannot be disputed. Here again, however, it should be remembered that Griswold, writing under extreme pressure of time, was forced to rely for a great part of his materials on the information previously supplied to him by Poe himself, and how trustworthy a source that was may be gathered from the single fact that Poe was ignorant even of the date of his own birth. Nor do we think that Mr. Ingram need have pushed the charge of inaccuracy so very sternly home, when we find him commencing his own memoir of the poet, prefixed to the edition of 1874, with the statement that Poe was born in Baltimore on the 19th of February, 1809, when one of the few facts, of which we are really certain, in Poe's life is that he was born in Boston on the 19th of January, 1809. But on this head it were idle to waste more time. Our readers can collate for themselves the labours of the two biographers, and form their own judgment on the value of the latter's refutation.

As for the new “facts” which Mr. Ingram claims to have been the first to bring to light, they seem scarcely, in our estimation, of importance to justify two new volumes. Of what aid, for example, is it to our estimate of a man's character or genius to learn that, through the kindness of a friend, his wife was buried in a linen shroud instead of a cotton one; or are we to be dragooned into a belief that a man is a suffering, slandered innocent, because his voice was “melody itself,” and his brow “fine and expressive”? Parts, indeed, of Mr. Ingram's book bear a strong family likeness to some of Poe's own papers on the “Literati” of America, in which criticism, or what in those days passed for criticism, is mingled with such valuable scraps of information as “in person he is tall, nearly six feet, with large bones,” or “he has thick whiskers meeting under the chin, and much out of keeping with the shirt collar à la Byron.” Nor is Mr. Ingram's sense of proportion much more conspicuous than his sense of the ludicrous. He devotes several pages to a ridiculous schoolboy freak at West Point, which will scarcely strike the impartial reader as conclusive evidence of sobriety of conduct or a strict attention to study; while Poe's fleetness of foot and prowess as swimmer are to him apparently irrefragable proofs of the [page 535:] inherent greatness and goodness of the man. Like the lover in Moore's poem, “Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame,” Mr. Ingram remains constant still to his idol. He can see no discredit, for example, in the letters addressed to Mrs. Whitmore and “Annie.” To the former Poe had engaged himself in marriage in the year following the death of that wife for whose loss he professed himself, and was believed to be, heartbroken; and scarcely had the lady wisely cancelled the engagement than he writes to “Annie,” to express “how great a burden is taken off my heart by my rupture with Mrs. W——,” and to avow his determination from that day forth to “shun the pestilent society of literary women. . . a heartless, unnatural, venomous set, with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem.” In these and similar “philanderings,” proofs, we presume, of “Poe's invariable courtesy towards women,” Mr. Ingram can see nothing but the evidences of a poetic temperament, and alludes to them eloquently as the bright incidents that aided the poet in his “lonesome latter years”!

It is curious how, in some points, Mr. Ingram has changed his opinions since his earlier memoir. Space will not permit us more than one instance, but one will, we think, be sufficient. Writing in 1874 he violently denounces, as proceeding from “the anonymous author of a scurrilous paper,” a ridiculous story which placed Poe for a second time in England as the associate in friendship and labour with Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook, and other men of that rank in letters; as though a stranger, and above all an American stranger, of such peculiar temperament and qualities, could have made, for how short a time soever, one of such a society, and left no mark behind. In the present biography Mr. Ingram contents himself with offering the story on the evidence of one “claiming a personal knowledge” with Poe, as a very plausible explanation of a mysterious blank in the latter's chronology. It is impossible, indeed, to fill this blank from June 1827 to March 1829 with any degree of certainty. It has been supposed by his admirers that, fired by Byron's noble death, he left America with the intention of devoting his life to the cause of Grecian independence. Whether he ever reached his destination they do not pretend to say, but Mr. Ingram gravely prints an astounding tissue of absurdities, dictated by Poe in the intervals of delirium, according to which the wanderer visited France, had various successful love affairs, one of which resulted in a duel and a severe wound; wrote a novel, which was attributed to Eugene Sue, and performed a variety of equally romantic exploits, not one of which is on the face of it half so credible as the story related by Griswold, that he was involved in some disagreeable consequences through a drunken frolic in St. [page 536:] Petersburg, from which he was rescued by the American Minister and sent home to his friends. It is but fair to say, however, that this story is no more true of Edgar Poe than the one Mr. Ingram has told. Yet it has at least this much more excuse for it, that William, Edgar's elder brother, a sailor, appears in the course of his voyages to have visited Russia, and might, very possibly, as sailors sometimes will, have got into a scrape in that country. Mr. Gill, whom Mr. Ingram contemptuously ignores, save only to allude to him once as a writer of “proven unreliability,” proffers the direct testimony of Mr. Neilson Poe, a cousin, following the profession of attorney in Baltimore, that, to his certain knowledge, Edgar, after his return from his English school in 1825, never again left America at any period of his life. As Mr. Ingram offers no tittle of evidence to the contrary, save that of Poe's own distempered dreams, we can see no reason why Mr. Gill, who does offer direct evidence, which has never met, so far as we are aware, with any direct contradiction, is not to be believed.

Again, one of Mr. Ingram's favourite charges against Griswold and, indeed, against nearly every one who has ever presumed to write on the subject, is that of malicious suppression of facts to Poe's credit. Now, so far as the dignity and usefulness of biography are concerned, it matters not a whit whether the facts suppressed are to the credit or discredit of the subject, so long as they are essential to the truth. We should certainly be sorry to bring any such charge against Mr. Ingram, whose faults, whether of commission or omission, we honestly believe to be due solely to that curious but not uncommon disease, which Macaulay has happily styled the Jues Boswelliana, rather than to any wilful distortion of fact. But we must say that he has on more than one occasion brought himself within the possibility of such a charge. We will content ourselves with one instance. Among the many quarrels which Poe had so unfortunate a knack of fixing on men able and willing to help him, was one with Burton, a retired actor, who had established a ‘ Gentleman's’ magazine in Philadelphia, and in May 1839 engaged Poe for his editor. Even the latter's most partial witnesses, always, of course, excepting Mr. Ingram, admit that it was impossible to place much reliance on him in that capacity, however brilliant a contributor he might, and did, prove. Yet he held the post for upwards of a year, nor was it till after great and repeated provocation that Burton was compelled to sever the connection. Mr. Ingram publishes a letter from Poe to Burton, the insolent intemperance of which can only be excused, if, indeed, such an excuse may be admitted, by the supposition, for which the internal evidence is tolerably strong, that the writer had not wholly recovered from what one of his admirers has gently described as the “injudicious [page 537:] acceptance of friendly hospitalities.” Mr. Ingram praises Poe for the “habitual carefulness” with which his business accounts were invariably kept, but the specimen of carefulness proffered us in this letter, which consists of a mistake in simple addition for which a child of six years old would deserve punishment, hardly bears out the praise. Nevertheless this letter is published, mistake and all, to throw, in Mr. Ingram's words, some light upon the affair. But there also happens to be extant a very kindly letter from Burton, which “throws such light on the affair” as will enable all, save those who refuse to see, to understand the true state of the case; and this letter Mr. Ingram has entirely suppressed! It is not necessary to adopt Griswold's coarse relation of the immediate rupture, but it is very clear that Burton suffered long and in silence before he had recourse even to remonstrance.

In truth, it is sorry work going back over the story of such a life, but any course is permissible which may serve to prevent readers from wasting their tears over the suffering saint that Mr. Ingram has tried to draw, or from enshrining Poe in that imaginary gallery of men of genius “of whom the world was not worthy.” A man of genius he certainly was, of a very delicate and original genius, which in happier circumstances nd under a more regular and temperate system of education, might have expanded into a ripe and wholesome maturity. He is pre-eminently one of those writers whose works require careful and judicious sifting. Out of the four thick volumes of the edition of 1874 one small volume might be composed on which his fame would securely rest, and in that volume would be many pieces, both in prose and verse, of rare and ‘particular merit. But the greater part of his work, written, as it necessarily too often was, to supply the wants of the passing hour, had far better have been left to perish. His knowledge of the classics was infinitely below that which numbers of clever boys carry up every term from our schools to our universities. Immense as Mr. Ingram pronounces his learning to have been, it could not prevent him from ascribing the Cidipus Coloneus to Aischylus, or from charging the whole Greek Drama with an insufferable baldness or platitude, “the inevitable result of inexperience in art, which pedantry would force us to believe the result of a studied and supremely artistic simplicity alone” — a sentence which we take to be, on the whole, the most astounding example of impudent ignorance whereof the annals of literature bear record. His philosophy, where original, was sheer nonsense, and tawdry, ranting nonsense to boot. He was wholly devoid of humour, and despite the elegant form of much of his best work, singularly deficient in taste. But worst of all has his fame been served by the republication of what Mr. Ingram is pleased to [page 538:] call his “slashing critiques,” which can only now excite a feeling of wonder as to what the condition of literary criticism must then have been in America when such pretentious, superficial, and, we must add, vulgar work could rank among the best.

To sum up, posterity has done, we think, full justice to Poe as a writer, and but very little less than justice, we fear, to him as a man. That he was tried by strong temptations all have been ever ready to admit; how far those temptations arose from the injudicious training of his eaily years, how far they were due to his own perverse and diseased temperament, it is, perhaps, impossible at this distance of time to decide. The full benefit of the doubt should therefore be given to him, as, though Mr. Ingram will probably refuse to believe us, it always has been given to him by impartial thinkers. But it is evident that even in those early years he was wayward, headstrong, proud, and irritable. Dependent from his birth on a rich and indulgent, but foolish patron, the faults of the boy easily and naturally developed into the vices of the man. He had his chance, as all men have, if they can recognise it, and that not once, nor seven times, but seventy times seven, and he threw them all away. There are many men now living who know of an infinity of kind actions done to Poe, and of many more that would cheerfully have been done, had not his own misconduct persistently neutralised all attempts to benefit him. It was, in truth, impossible to befriend him. He was both false and ungrateful, arrogant when sober, insolent when drunk. This is the truth which the world has recognised of Poe, and would have recognised had Griswold never written a line of biography, and will continue to recognise, despite the misguided enthusiasm of romantic sentimentalists. Yet the world, had it been suffered, would have been well content to admire the genius, and to forget the man; it is Mr. Ingram and his school who insist that the world shall not forget. The facts remain, and with what charity is willing to forego, sobriety and honesty alike refuse to sympathise. Let the miserable chapter of Poe's life by all means be closed for ever, but let us not, in the name of common sense and common decency, be asked to mourn the “hapless poet,” the “victim of calumny,” the “winning and refined gentleman.” Such false sentiment, such vicious appeals to our sympathy are to be deprecated greatly, not only for the mischief they are themselves capable of causing in young and untutored minds, but also for the unpleasantness of the antidote it is necessary to apply. A Baudelaire may be permitted to rave about the “phosphorence of putrefaction,” and the “odour of the hurricane,” which he found so splendid in Poe and his works, and to talk with sympathetic admiration of the poor wretch's fits of drinking as a “method of work appropriate to his passionate nature.” Such nauseous folly falls fitly [page 539:] from the pen of the author of ‘Les Fleurs du Mal.’ But it is to be hoped that the day is far distant when Englishmen will be unable to appreciate the true lesson of such lives as that of the miserable idol of Mr. Ingram's worship, or suffer their pity to degenerate into sentiment, and their sentiment, as experience proves it inevitably will, into admiration.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 531:]

*‘Edgar Allan Poe, his Life, Letters, and Opinions,’ by John H. Ingram. 2 vols. London. 1880.

†‘The Life of Edgar Allan Poe,’ by William F. Gill. Third edition, revised and enlarged, London. 1878.

‡‘Edgar Poe and his Critics.’ New York. 1860.