Text: John R. Thompson, “Chapter I: The Story of a Painter,” The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 1929, pp. 1-4 (This material may be protected by copyright)

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There is a story of a painter, who, early in the practice of his art, was so captivated by the celestial beauty of a child he met in the streets, that he begged permission of its parents to make a picture of it as an embodiment of the angelic idea. Long and patiently he worked upon the painting — he threw his whole soul into the work, and his easel bore no other piece until the brush had given the latest touch to that exquisite portrayal of innocence and tenderness, than which the cherubs of Raphael's masterpiece were not more inexpressibly beautiful. For years the picture remained in the artist's possession — it had established his fame, and he was unwilling to part with a work which was at once the accepted type of heavenly loveliness and the poetic expression of his own most exalted conceptions in art. But he was seized with the ambition to paint a companion picture which should set forth with the most frightful fidelity the idea of a devil.

He desired to go beyond the lost spirits of the Sistine Chapel and without recourse to the contortions of the limbs or the accessories of final punishment, to depict in the human countenance a wickedness so diabolic and a despair so appalling, that the painting should inevitably suggest to the beholder consummate depravity and an everlasting doom. Protracted and unavailing was his search for a model. He plunged into the worst haunts of vice — he visited the most reckless and abandoned [page 2:] criminals in the dungeons of the continent; he attended executions; he sought the galleys, in the hope of finding there the ideal demoniacal features, but among all the wretched victims of guilt, he saw no one face which combined in hideous perfection all the elements of diabolism. At length, when he had given up the hope of securing his model, he saw one day in a crowded thoroughfare a man, prematurely old, who glared at him with a fierceness and repulsiveness of aspect that horrified and fascinated him. It was the very face he had so long looked for, the eidolon(1) of infernal hatred and debasement. He followed the man to his miserable lodgings, he bargained with him for a sitting, and at last the companion picture was completed and the demon was hung up by the side of the angel. But a strange resemblance in the outlines of the two faces oppressed his mind — the explanation was given by the sitter — the demon and the angel were the same individual! Years of dissipation and crime had changed the cherubic sweetness of the child into the horrible malice which blended with unutterable woe in the lineaments of the outlaw.

The story has a moral and a pathos of its own, and yet we may all of us, perhaps, find a parallel for it in our experience of life. Years ago, in a household of wealth and refinement in the town of Richmond, Virginia, there might have been seen a boy, with bright eyes and soft, clustering hair, whose face, lighted up with intelligence, might well have attracted the notice of an artist. Had [page 3:] Jarvis, who lived at that time in Richmond, transferred it to canvas, the picture would now be considered among the most valuable and interesting works of the American pencil. The child was remarkable for a tenacious memory and a musical ear, and he was accustomed to declaim the finest passages of English poetry to the evening visitors of the house with great effect. The most insensible of his audience could not fail to be struck with the justness of his emphasis and his evident appreciation of the poems he recited, while every heart was won by the ingenuous simplicity and agreeable manners of the pretty, little elocutionist.(1) Perhaps his beautiful and popular actress-mother never received heartier applause before the footlights than did the infant Edgar in the drawing-room.

A third of a century passed by, and in a hospital of Baltimore a man, whose fame was coextensive with the march of the English language around the globe, expired in the ravings of delirium, a spectacle from which the most stolid might have turned with pain. Few, indeed, of those who had known him in his days of innocence, would have recognized in the haggard and remorseful countenance of the dying sufferer, the Edgar Allan Poe whose boyish beauty and precocious talents had given another charm to the elegant mansion where those days were spent.

Yet in the interval which elapsed between this sunny childhood and this mournful death, what a career may [page 4:] we trace of strange adventures and startling contrasts, of penury and privation, of intellectual triumphs and fearful excesses! The chapter is the saddest and not the least instructive one, still unwritten, in the history of literature in America, and it is with the sincere desire of arriving at a juster estimate of the genius and character of Edgar Allan Poe, albeit with an unaffected distrust of being able to treat fully and fairly so difficult a subject that this work is offered you by one who knew him well as a writer and as a man.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 2:]

1 See Poe's “Dream-Land,” line 3.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 3:]

1 This and the preceding sentence appear, almost verbatim, on p. 558 of Harpers New Monthly Magazine, for September, 1872, in an article, “Edgar Allan Poe,” by R. H. Stoddard. In that article also appear some brief Poe reminiscences of J. R. Thompson.