Text: Alfred Mathews, “The Virginia Poe [Review of the Harrison edition],” New York Times Saturday Review of Books (New York, NY), September 13, 1902, pp. 609-610

[page 609, unnumbered, col. 3:]

UNQUESTIONABLY the most important reissue of an American classic author for many years is that of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe in the “Virginia” edition. It is important both in itself and as an emphatic practical exposition of faith in public fealty to Poe. Indeed, it is pleasant to think that the elaborate reissue is even an earnest of a surely founded faith in the coming of a largely augmented interest in the pioneer American romanticist and aesthete — an acceleration of judicious inquiry, and an advancement of intelligent and discriminating admiration, of which there are many signs on hand and which fully equals in force the usual literary “resurgence,” a term, by the way, not exactly applicable in the present instance, since there has never been any distinct subsistence in the devotion to Poe.

The “new” Poe issued in what is called the “Virginia” edition — not named apparently in memory of the poet's “child wife,” but, appropriately enough, in recognition of Poe's identification with the old Commonwealth and its university and the fact that the editor, Prof. James A. Harrison, and his chief assistant are of the Faculty of the latter — is issued in two forms and sizes, one nearly uniform with the many issues of “pocket” volumes that have lately become very popular, the other considerably larger and containing additional illustrations, designed more especially for the library[[.]] The former, in which the illustrations are limited to frontispieces in each of the seventeen volumes, is printed on thin but almost perfectly opaque paper, and the format is generally pleasing to the eye and promising of endurance.

As to contents, the first of the seventeen volumes is occupied entirely with a new life of Poe by Prof. Harrison; Volumes II. to VI. contain the “Tales,” with Prof. Mabie's exceedingly indecisive inquiry as to “Poe's Place in American Literature” in the first volume of the division; Volume VII. includes the poems, edited quite elaborately and introduced by Prof. Charles W. Kent; Volumes VIII. to XIII. contain the critical work of Poe, much of it here presented for the first time in book pages; Volumes XIV. to XVI. present the essays and miscellanies — the curious “Autography” and “Cryptograph,” the “Literati” series and “Eureka,” and volume XVII. concludes the series with “Letters” — Poe's own for the most part, but with many written to him. Most of these have hitherto been printed, piecemeal and scatteringly, but they have never before appeared in collected form, and their presentation thus scores a distinct point in favor of the “Virginia” edition.

As to the especial features of this edition of Poe, Prof. Harrison's biography comes first in order and is, of all the editorial matter, the most important — a scholarly and painstaking piece of work, in which some new facts are presented, several errors on the part of other biographers corrected, an, all in all, perhaps a more distinct portraiture of the man than has hetetofore been drawn; but this is not to say that the new “life” give us a more careful or elaborate critical view of the author. For this we must in a large measure “hark back” to Stedman and Woodury [[Woodberry]]. Nor do Profs. Kent and Mabie, in their respective introductions to the Poems and the Tales, supply this deficiency, though the former presents a very judicious and quite original survey of Poe as Poet. The biography by Prof. Harrison “dismisses elaborate conjectures” and really, as he claims, “sets forth the man as he was,” in so far probably as any present-day writer can, by mere array of facts and without especial endeavor to interpret character, which, it must be confessed, is a difficult and, in the case of Poe, an almost impossible task, that no biographer has performed even with approximate success, as judged from the viewpoint of those who are at once critical and sympathetic. But if the new “life” fails, as all others have done, to give us all that we feel is possible in the way of a subtle appreciation of a most subtle, wayward, elusive personality, he has not sought to gloss over the defect by panegyric. There is an occasional perfervid passage in the pages of this “life,” but the style usually is admirably temperate, the story well sustained, and the few judgements [page 610:] that are pronounced will probably seem to most Poe specialists and students thoughtful, restrained, and sanely just. An exception perhaps might be entered to the Professor's somewhat exalted estimate of Poe as the critic — “the real Poe,” as he claims — and to this we may revert.

One of the most refreshing pieces of reading in the new Poe is Prof. Kent's introductory critique on Poe's poetry. It is refreshing particularly because he does not, as so many book editors do, endeavor to make his subject the possessor of the most superlative excellence in each and every especial province of his genius. Although he is a warm admirer of Poe's vers and has long been a diligent student of the poetic phase of the great romanticist and critic, he evidently does not predicate Poe's chief claim to literary immortality upon his poetic production, but distinctly disavows a judgement that would place his subject as high as have some of his predecessors in criticism. He draws some nice distinctions, makes out quite a convincing parallel between Poe in poetry and Chopin in music — pointing out, too, some similarities in personality and history — and after reminding the reader that the two men were born and died in the same years, he says:

Then, referring to the well-known fact that Chopin wrote music for the piano, an instrument narrowly limited in its capacity and far from perfect, and often conceived in music what no pianist could render, and at other times only faintly suggested the music that he felt, so Poe, with conceptions often “far beyond his own powers of expression and often unsuited for the ordinary vehicle of verse, imperfect in itself,” depended ‘for its best interpretation upon a sympathetic reading.” He adds that “no doubt many of his conceptions were simplified to suit available language and conventional reading.” This is apologetic, the author admits, and he says further that

It is to be noted that the arrangement from that to which the reading public has been made accustomed in the innumerable republications that have followed the plan of Griswold, in which the best poems were placed first. We have here — and it is of great advantage to the student who would follow the poetic development of Poe's mind, and to some extent his personal history — an almost perfect chronological arrangement of the poems, from the youthful “Tamerland” to the more mature “Raven” and “Ulalume.” The disputed poems are relegated to the appendix which, with chapters upon “Poe and John Neal” and “Poe and Dr. Chivers,” and a great mass of notes and various readings, make up a volume of over three hundred pages.

A careful examination of the various volumes of this edition goes far to substantiate the at first thought somewhat startling claim of its editor that herein is presented “for the first time a full and accurate text of Poe.” Particularly convincing in this respect are the six volumes devoted to criticism, of which more than three and one-half are made up of material not hitherto published since its original appearance in journals and magazines, for many years almost inaccessible, even to the Poe specialists. And scarcely less plausible does the editors’ assertion appear in the light of the many evidences of immense labor in purifying the text of those greater portions of Poe's productions that have heretofore truly enough been familiar to the public, though in a more or less inaccurate and sometimes greatly garbled form. For almost everything that Poe did no leave in his own revision the editors have gone to the original text, and sometimes with most surprising and interesting results. In the masterpieces of Poe there is little change. There is little of high rank that is added to the mass of his library criticism, and yet the great bulk of the reclaimed matter, though consisting of things small in themselves, cannot but be of value when it is borne in mind that it came from the pen of one who was in his time the leading critic in America and well night the first who pushed criticism beyond mere puffery. It has distinct value, too, (as it is carefully arranged,) in showing the growth of the poet-critic's capacity, and the entire line of his production being presented the reader may gather more fully than heretofore what was Poe's changing and final conviction concerning those writers that he had most to say about.

Thus, in some cases it will be found that though there was change in his attitude there was also consistency, and that change came naturally from the progressiveness of viewpoint rather than from mere caprice or petulance, as has sometimes been averred, although Poe cannot be entirely absolved from this, even in the light of this hitherto obscured line of comment on his contemporaries.

Most curious and significant of all the discoveries made by the editor of the new [column 2:] Poe is that which we find not indeed in the volumes devoted to criticism, but in the semi-critical papers in the series known as “The literati of New York.” In their painstaking comparison and collation of the various texts the editor or editors came upon the really startling revelation that of the thirty-eight sketches hitherto ascribed to Poe five were substitutions (though in part only) by his early editor, Griswold, whom Poe himself, it will be remembered, wished should act as his literary executor, and who, as we all know, interpreted the term executor as assassin! Well, Griswold's personality, particularly in his relation to poor Poe, has not seemed to the present generation exactly fragrant — though he had his uses, as have had other things not gragrant, one of them, perhaps, being to nurture by his very vileness the late full flowering of Poe's posthumous fame — and now after many years a new element of the malodorous is made to emanate from the assassin-executor through the delvings of Poe's latest editor.

Prof. Harrison proving the spurious nature of Griswold's substitution for Poe in the “Literati” papers, promptly cast them out and restored Poe's originals, but he gives us the Griswold garblings in the appendix (of Vol. XV.) That we may compare them. The papers in question are upon Charles F. Briggs, James Lawson, Mary E. Hewitt, Frances S. Osgood, and Thomas Dunn English (or Brown, as Griswold calls him in his version, giving him his early pen name.) The most flagrant impertineneces of Griswold occur in the papers on the last two mentioned. The principle difference in the spurious and the true papers on Mrs. Osgood is that of amplification by Griswold. In the present work his version of the paper on the one-time popular woman poet makes eighteen pages while Poe's makes only about eleven. The expansion consists of quotations and rather vapid criticism. There's no harm done. But in the case of English the conditions are quite different. Poe and Griswold were alike in holding unfavorable opinion of the author of “Ben Bolt,” but in the written expression of those opinions there was a marked dissimilarity. Poe went no further than a gentleman properly might in a moderately adverse criticism. Griswold grasped eagerly the opportunity to insult a living enemy under the distinguished name of a dead friend, whose works he was editing with profit and in whose reflected light he shone brighter than with any inner light of his own.

Griswold brazenly adds about fifty per cent to Poe's sketch, or more than a pages and a half of the present work, (pp. 268-69, Vol. XV.,) besides several minor interpolations, nearly all of which is malignantly abusive — and it must be remembered was given to the world as the writing of Poe. As a matter of curious interest I quote some of the remarks on English which appear in the Griswold version and not in the Poe paper:

Mr. Brown (English) had for the motto on his magazine cover the words of Richelieu:

“In character a Windbeutel.”

And Thomas Dunn English hated the dead Poe to his own dying day. So, too, probably did Charles F. Briggs, whom Griswold similarly abused over the dead Poe's signature. These virulences of Griswold's, which have had their share of effect in impeaching his candor and in generally defaming him, and it is no small service that the editors of the “Virginia” Poe have done him in disclosing the truth at last. Poe did enough in all conscience (and beyond all conscience) to sully his fair name, and it was a cruel irony of fate that he should have been saddled with the worse sins of another.

As has been heretofore implied, the most extensive additions that have been made in these volumes to the text of Poe occur in the department of criticism. It is here that the general reader, and even the Poe student, will find the largest number of things entirely new to him in the writings of the romanced poet who was compelled by the conditions of the unripe age he lived in to be also literary hack. Many, indeed most, of the new inclusions are of the line that Poe produced in the latter function, and have comparatively slight actual value in themselves, though they throw some light upon the literary history of the times and tell plainly and pathertically of the life of drudgery and toil that one of the greatest geniuses of American letters was fetterd to in the intervals between his more congenial labors.

Criticism, at its best, is not creation, and even were a far larger profanation of Poe's criticism of the creative order than is the fact, Prof. Harrison's characterization of Poe the critic as the “real Poe” would scarcely find support in the consensus of careful judgment. With all of the added criticism found in this edition with its mass of notes, explanations, and elucidating apparatus full of curious interest and invaluable to the Poe student or the literary historian of the first half of the nineteenth century, the vital and intense interest in Poe must still attach to the incomparable “Tales” — here presented with but little change from former editions, save in a carefully expurgated and corrected text — and Poe, the weirdly imaginative creator of a new order of fiction, and Poe, the aesthetic, the apostle and prophet of beauty — must still be, in the consciousness of the [column 3:] popular masses and the critical classes, the real Poe.

The closing years of the last century gave us a kind of a cumulative definition of romanticism in English literature, as consisting first in a relaxation from classical restraint — originally lawless, gradually taking form — and, finally, in the addition of strangeness, mystery, mysticism, and aspiration to beauty — usually, it seems to the present writer, embellished and enforced artistically with suggestion and symbolism. American came toward the mid-century to furnish two widely variant illustrations of this order of literature. They were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe — the former only in small part, the latter almost wholly — save as he is sui generis — conforming to the school — if school it may be called. Not in Poe the critic, not in Poe the poet, but in Poe the romanticist, with a psychological sympathy for the German school “in spite of his disclaimers,” (as Prof. Harrison would say,) but with vivid individuality of his own — in Poe the sporadic new-world romanticist — we must still, and ever, find the real Poe. He was more than this; he was supreme melodist, subtle analyst, rare inventor, bold innovator and artist; but if we define him in a word, he was the foremost American representative of romanticism. He gave an intensely individual, wayward, and some bizarre evolution to its original aesthetic and mystic essence, while Hawthorne, upon the more serious and truly spiritual side of the original, (ignoring much of its established form and tendency,) engrafted and elaborated the ethical element, in his subtle studies of conscience and character.

ALFRED MATTHEWS [[MATHEWS]].

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 609, col. 3:]

* The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by James A. Harrison, Professor of the University of Virginia. With Textual Notes by R. A. Steward, Ph. D., and Introductions by Charles W. Kent, “h. D., and Prof. Hamilton W. Mabie, 17 vols, pocket size, (and Indexes) and De Luxe Library style, (5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches,) New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.