[page 1480, column 2, continued:]

Reminiscences of Poe.

THERE is something to be said in palliation of Poe’s intemperance in drink. His natural sensitiveness, his excessive love of approbation, his domestic afflictions, and his constant struggle with poverty, were causes which sometimes might have driven him to drink. He himself urges that one of these things, his wife’s serious illness, was the cause; but he had been guilty of these excesses at Richmond and elsewhere when his wife was in perfect health. I think that poverty and the recklessness it sometimes engenders had more to do with this defect. Drunkenness, undoubtedly, is very frequently the cause of poverty, but poverty sometimes leads to drunkenness. Poe never received one-half what he deserved for the best of his productions, and his masterpiece, “The Raven,” only brought him thirty dollars, when any of our leading magazines of the present day, were it offered now for the first time, would consider it cheap at a hundred. It must be considered, however, that the prices paid at that time for literary work of excellence were not one-half, and scarcely one-quarter of that given now for productions of merit. The taste of our people has enlarged with it. On the other hand the cost of living then was much less than now.

But while his occasional lapses from sobriety may be readily excused, his constant mendacity and deceit are capable of only one explanation. The intellectual faculties of Poe overbalanced all the rest, and the animal faculties dwarfed the moral. A reference to [column 3:] some of his acts will show that he had little sense of right and wrong whenever need or resentment provoked him, and could no more be held responsible for many things that he did, than could a lunatic or an idiot. His audacity in asserting that I had borrowed money from him from time to time when he, poor fellow, rarely received five hundred dollars a year for his work, and I, especially at the time he lays his charge, was in receipt of a large salary and perquisites from official sources, when all our common acquaintances knew the facts, shows that he was perfectly reckless in his statements — a recklessness only excusable on the ground of moral idiocy. Two instances selected out of others are quite enough, as in these he himself furnishes the evidence.

One of these was his obtaining under a false pretense, through Griswold, a sum of money from the publishers of the latter’s book, “The Poets and Poetry of America.” One day in Philadelphia Poe met me, and said: “I have a good joke on Griswold”; and then proceeded to detail it. “I told him,” said he, “that I thought he had made a capital book of his ‘Poets and Poetry of America,’ and I’d like to write a favorable review of it; but I was pressed for money, and couldn’t afford the time. He bit at the bait like a hungry gudgeon, and told me to write the notice, and as his publishers could use it he would pay for them my price. So I wrote, and handed it to him, and he paid me.”

“Well?” I asked; for I saw nothing in that but one of the tricks of the trade.

“I knew he wouldn’t read it until he got home,” continued Poe; “but I should like to have seen his face when he did.”

“Wasn’t it favorable, then?”

“Favorable? Yes, to the amateur in scalping. I abused the book and ridiculed him, and gave him the most severe using up he ever had or ever will have, I fancy. I don’t think he’ll send that to his publishers; and I’m quite sure they wouldn’t print it if he did.”

“It is a good joke — of its kind,” was my answer. “You did not keep the money?”

“Keep it? No, indeed; I spent it at once.”

In a letter written to F. W. Thomas in 1842 (vide Woodberry’s book, page 175) he says of this transaction:

He evidently had not the slightest notion that he had been doing a dishonorable thing, even according to to his later version of the matter.

The Boston affair shows his lack of moral perception in a yet stronger light. He came to my room one day in the autumn — if my memory serve me right it was in October — looking so haggard and with such lack of his customary neatness, that I saw he had been on a drinking bout, and taxed him with it. He admitted the truth of the charge, averring that he would never be guilty of it again, but said he was in sore straits. He told me that he had been invited to deliver an original poem in Boston, for which he was to be paid, and had not written a line of it. I advised him to write and postpone the matter on the ground that circumstances had prevented him from carrying out the contract, and go to work to complete his task. He replied that he wanted the money; and when I told him he couldn’t expect it until he earned it, said he had thought of a plan, and so went off. The next thing I heard was through the Boston papers that he had delivered an old printed poem instead of the one expected, and that he had let out the fact afterward over some wine. Lest there be some doubt as to the facts, I give Poe’s own statement, extracted from an article in The Broadway Journal of November 1st, 1845, as follows:

A similar instance was his engagement before that time to deliver a poem before a New York society at a certain date. In this case a fit of intoxication lasting some time prevented him from fulfilling his engagement. I think in this, however, he did not receive money in advance for neglected work.

Another instance of this same lack of a sense of right and wrong, of which I was the victim, might be given; but enough has been written to show that Poe, from the defects in his moral constitution, must be relieved of responsibility for many of his crooked actions. As a poet, Poe stands, in the narrow line which he voluntarily chose, and to which his genius was particularly fitted, facile princeps among his contemporaries. In his “Coliseum,” and one or two earlier minor pieces, he showed power in a path which he abandoned. As a prose writer, he entered a gloomy and morbid line, and showed masterly skill in developing the darker shades of human motive and action. While he strongly enough showed some appreciation of such poems as the “Florence Vane” of Phillip Pendelton [[Pendleton]] Cook, and the “Old” of Ralph Hoyt, he had no love for productions in general that arouse the tender feelings or elevate the heart of humanity. His dislike of Longfellow’s work was possibly prompted by jealousy; but his distaste of Burns was because of the strong contrast between the latter and himself. He carried this so far as to assert in one of his criticisms that Burns had written nothing which any magazine of the time would accept. That might have been true then, but is not true now. If “Tam o’ Shanter” and the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” were offered in manuscript for the first time at the present day, no editor of a leading magazine would suffer either to leave the office. Burns wrote for all humankind. He had pathos, tenderness and a love for his fellow-men. His humor was without malice, and his wit without venom. Poe wrote for a few. His work was in the fantastic, the weird and the terrible; and he had no sympathy with human beings. His malice was without humor, and his venom without wit.

Of the, domestic life of Poe, which while in Philadelphia I had ample opportunity of observing, I have nothing to say. I was a guest. But I never visited his house while in New York, and, except on one or two occasions, never called on him in that city. He visited me frequently at my room, however, as I have before stated. I would gladly have whitened his memory if it had been possible; and as it was not would have given him the charity of silence. The attacks of his injudicious friends upon me have forced me to this partial exposition of his life; but I have suppressed much, because I did not consider any more was necessary for my own vindication. Had I not been assailed, Gill and the rest of them might have made an apotheosis of mendacity, meanness and ingratitude without any remonstrance from me.

Since writing the above, I submitted the manuscript to Mr. Lane, in order to be sure that I had given accurately these facts, especially in regard to the closing of The Broadway Journal, with which that gentleman was familiar. The manuscript was returned, with the following note, which I submit to the reader:[column 2:]

NEWARK, N. J.