Text: Whitelaw Reid, “The Poe Centenary,” London Commemorations, London: Harrison and Sons, printers, 1909, pp. 3-14

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Under the auspices of the Authors’ Club a dinner was given last night at the Hotel Métropole in memory of Edgar Allan Poe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presided, having on his immediate right and left Mr. Whitelaw Reid, the guest, and Mrs. Humphry Ward; and among the company, which numbered about 250, were Admiral Charles H. Stockton (American delegate to the Naval Conference), Mr. J. Ridgely Carter, Secretary to the American Embassy, Captain Poe, Mr. Humphry Ward, Mrs. George Cornwallis West, Mr. E. Marshall Fox, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Douglas Freshfield, Mr. G. Herbert Thring (Secretary of the Incorporated Society ofAuthors) and Mrs. Thring, Mr. Newton Crane, Mr. F. C. Van Duzer (Secretary of the American Society in London), Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Mr. R. N. Fairbanks and Mrs. Fairbanks (President of the Society of American Women in London), Sir Arthur and Lady Trendell, the Rev. Henry C. de Lafontaine, the Hon. Mrs. Alfred Felkin (“ Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler ”), Lady Abinger, Lady Lister Kaye, Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dashwood, Mr. A. Laurence Felkin, Mr. Robert J. Wynne (Consul-General, U.S.A.), Mr. J. Arthur Barratt, Mr. Isaac N. Ford, Mr. G. J. Codrington Ball and Mrs. Ball (née Poe), Mr. Justin McCarthy, Mr. Webster Glynes and Mrs. Glynes (“ Ella Dietz ”), Mr. W. Archer, Mr. E. Price Bell, Mr. George A. Mower, Mr. Thomas L. Feild [page 4:] (President American Society in London) and Mrs. Feild, Mr. Edward Morton, Mr. J. T. Grein, Dr. Ashley Bird, Dr. G. E. Herman, Mr. Francis Gribble, Commander Claud Harding, Mr. John H. Ingram, Mr. Ernest Brain, Mr. J. Newton Beach, Dr. F. Hewitt, Mr. Sidney Low and Mrs. Low, Mr. Kingsley Conan Doyle, Sir John and Lady Brickwood, Captain Acheson, Mr. Franklin Lieber, Mr. Harold Hartley, Mr. James Purefoy Poe, Mr. T. Cato Worsfold, Mr. Charles Garvice (Chairman of Committee) and Mrs. Garvice, Mr. Algernon and Mrs. Rose, Dr. Bernard Hollander, Mr. Duncan Irvine (Secretary of the Arts Club), Dr. P. W. Ames (Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature), Mr. Robert Machray, Mr. Henry Longman, Dr. S. Stephenson, Mr. St. John Lucas, Mr. Morley Roberts, Mr. Horace Wyndham, Dr. E. Law, Sir Bruce and Lady Seton, Mr. Percy White, Mr. Albert Gray, K.C., Dr. Stanton Coit, Mr. John Lane and Mrs. Lane, Mr. B. Van Praagh, and Dr. J. Todhunter. In the recess at the rear of the chairman was an enlargement of a medallion portrait of Poe, executed by Mr. Albert Bruce Joy, supported by the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. The tables and walls were decorated with American and British emblems, and at the top of the table, in front of the chairman, was the American eagle . The work of organizing the celebration entailed much labor and correspondence, the greater part of which devolved upon Mr. Algernon Rose, the honorary secretary of the Club, who is to be congratulated on the success which attended the occasion. Mr. Whitelaw Reid, who was cordially greeted, said: —

It is quite true that my countrymen ought to have the first interest in the very noteworthy centenary you celebrate. But this is far from implying that their official representative in this country is at all entitled to the place your partiality has assigned him; or that America [page 5:] in general has shown adequate appreciation in the past for this son of hers whose memory you have met to honor.

The celebration to-night is a little late, for reasons well known and quite sufficient —— over a month after the actual date, a hundred years ago, on which Edgar Allan Poe entered upon his troubled life. The fact itself is quite in keeping with his career. Everything came to him too late, in life as in death, especially in his own country. Even when good fortune seemed ready to press itself upon him more than once during his life, his temperamental waywardness, heedlessness, irresponsibility, kept him from appreciating the opportunity until too late. Now, long after his unhappy death, and long after your English and French literary tribunals have accepted him as one of the immortals, his countrymen yet wait, even beyond the century, still hesitating to place him with their other literary figures, some surely far smaller, in their Hall of Fame. [page 6:]

Few of them indeed would to-day go so far in his honor as do some of your British authorities. They would pause, for instance, at the decision of one that “Poe is the most interesting figure in American literature”; and they would be almost startled at the further dictum that “ few English writers of the nineteenth century are likely to have a more enduring fame. “ Americans confronted with that verdict would be apt to recall the great Georgian and Victorian roll of English writers, and would then reflect that they had themselves a writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne, and another named Ralph Waldo Emerson, and another named Benjamin Franklin. In fact, my countrymen for once have been slow (laughter), unusually slow, to think well of the native American product. There is still a higher estimate of this one American writer by England and France than has been conceded even yet, in his own land. His genius, so promptly and generously recognized abroad, is of course no longer [page 7:] questioned. But we take pains to remember that it ran within certain narrow and sharply defined channels; that it frequently failed to reach the highest and best human emotions: that it was often morbid and sometimes repulsive.

Yet, with all abatements, Poe's place was surely in the front rank, if not at the very head, among the world's tellers of short stories. ( Cheers.) Who has since given us, in such perfect English, the indefinable mystery and the shuddering sense of implacable fate, pervading air, earth and sky, lake and forest, house and people, which we all recall whenever we think of “ The Fall of the House of Usher “? Where has the fiendish perfection of revenge been presented more powerfully or more briefly, or with more artistic reserve than in “ The Cask of Amontillado “? Nay, gentlemen, may I venture to ask in this presence, and in view of the generous reference already made to the subject by the chairman, who was the [page 8:] legitimate and inspired forerunner of the immortal Sherlock Holmes himself, if not the author of “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue “? ( Laughter.) And who pointed the way to “ Treasure Island “ if not the author of “ The Gold Bug “? Where indeed are the “ Tales of the Arabesque and the Grotesque “ to be surpassed in their own field in the literature of America, or of England, or of France, or of the world? (Cheers.)

But when his poetry is mentioned, some of you who may have coincided tolerably thus far with what I have been saying will surely dissent. I am not able to think Poe's place in poetry so high or so secure as his place in the telling of short stories. I admit, at once, the incomparable rhythm, the mastery of the wonderful music that may be married to English verse, the sad, haunting tenderness, melody and mystery. The technique of Poe's poetry is perfection. The general American public, more generous to him here than in any other feature of his work or his life, would [page 8:] legitimate and inspired forerunner of the immortal Sherlock Holmes himself, if not the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”? (Laughter.) And who pointed the way to “ Treasure Island “ if not the author of “The Gold Bug”? Where indeed are the “Tales of the Arabesque and the Grotesque “ to be surpassed in their own field in the literature of America, or of England, or of France, or of the world ? (Cheers. )

But when his poetry is mentioned, some of you who may have coincided tolerably thus far with what I have been saying will surely dissent. I am not able to think Poe's place in poetry so high or so secure as his place in the telling of short stories. I admit, at once, the incomparable rhythm, the mastery of the wonderful music that may be married to English verse, the sad, haunting tenderness, melody and mystery. The technique of Poe's poetry is perfection. The general American public, more generous to him here than in any other feature of his work or his life, would [page 9:] probably put “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “Lenore” among the finest poems, perhaps would pronounce them the very finest, in the literature of the New World; while a judicious few would surely place beside them “To Helen, “ ”Israfil [[Israfel]],” “Ulalume,” and some others.

Yet, perfect as they are of their kind, they still seem to me to lack the highest poetic merit — the soul is not in them. How could it be? Here is a man of rare genius who enters the poetical field with the avowed and serious belief that a long poem cannot exist; that the epic is a mania, and the didactic a heresy; that the truth has no sympathy with the myrtles; that, in fact, poetry must be solely and exclusively the rhythmical creation of beauty: that with the intellect or conscience it has only collateral relations, and no concern whatever either with duty or with truth. Do not think I am misrepresenting him. These are his own expressions, not from some mad extravaganza of his unhappier hours, but from his soberest and most deliberate effort to define the nature of the poetic art. On such a conception [page 10:] how could the uttermost heights be attained? Not so was born the immortal poetry that reverberated through the organ notes of Milton. On no such theory of poetic limitations were conceived the sonnets and plays, touching human nature with infallible truth at a thousand points, by the myriad-minded Shakespeare. Far different was the inspiration of the great Georgian poet who wrote the “Ode to Duty” — “stern daughter of the Voice of God,” or of that supreme master of the didactic and the beautiful, the author of “In Memoriam.” Far different indeed the inspiration of that later gallant spirit who from his bed of constant pain set the soul of an empire to verse in “ What have I done for you, England, my England?” (cheers) : or of that other (of whom Mark Twain finely said at Oxford that his fame envelops the world like an atmosphere), who put the heart's prayer of that empire on a great occasion into words in his “ God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line. “ (Cheers.) [page 11:]

There have been Americans, too, who thought poetry might relate to truth and duty and country; and broke the withes in which Poe sought to bind it. I spare you a multitude of examples, from the “ Concord Hymn “ and the “ Building of the Ship, “ and the “ Song of the Camp “ and the “ Chambered Nautilus,” and the “ Harvard Commemoration Ode,” and the stirring lyrics of our Civil War, and many more. But may I read to you just one stanza by a poet with as many vagaries as Poe himself, and as many passions, but whose best passions were truth and his country? It relates to a great American, one of the great men of all time, whose centenary fell also in the same year and within less than a month of Poe's, and I take it merely as the first stanza, not the best, in the short poem:

But because in poetry Poe perversely limited himself, we must not fail to acknowledge how high he rose within those unreasonable limits. If I say that, considering his work merely in his own chosen light, as the rhythmical creation of beauty, in that sole field not even Swinburne has surpassed him, perhaps I have said enough.

We ought not to forget that Poe was also a brilliant critic — if the authors here consider that a merit! (Laughter.) He was more; in the main he was also a just and sound critic. He had, to be sure, an impish dislike of Longfellow, perhaps because of what he thought the oppressive respectability of the Cambridge poet (laughter); but when that is remembered, it may well be offset with his early and prompt appreciation and his praise of his only generous contemporary rival in his own field of the short story Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Hear, hear!)

Finally, let us never forget his hard fate [page 13:] in his own choice of a literary executor and biographer. Not till this generation did he get bare justice at home — and then best perhaps in the definitive edition of his works and biography issued a few years ago by two associates, Professor Woodberry, of Columbia man and the prominent and lately mourned loved to call of letters whom New Yorkers their banker-poet, but who must always live with some of us as the cheeriest in memory and the most chivalric of friends of comrades — dear, gallant, debonair Ned Stedman.

It was a pathetic story which these editors had to deal with and we have to remember to-night. I am not going to dwell on it; I am only going to protest against Griswold's version of it. Poe was not a bad man; in many ways he was tender, and lovable, and loyal. Certainly he was not wicked as he was painted; only pitifully weak. Let those who are perfect cast stones.

And, ladies and gentlemen of the Society of Authors, if there is any moral we want to draw for ourselves from the life and death [page 14:] and work of the brilliant creature we have been considering, it can only be the old one that the Bohemianism which is apt to fascinate us in our youth is not a spur to genius, but a clog; and that, after the proper development of such powers as God may have given us, there is nothing in the whole world so surely helpful for us, whether in literature or in life, as Character. (Cheers.)