Text: John R. Thompson, “Chapter II: Poe's Intellect and Morale,” The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 1929, pp. 5-9 (This material may be protected by copyright)

[page 5:]

I have said that this chapter in our literature is still unwritten, and yet there is scarcely any other writer of our times of whom personally so much has been said in eulogy and censure as Poe. His works have been reviewed again and again by critics of every degree; they have been translated into French and published in the feuilleton(1) of the journals of Paris; in Germany his stories have enjoyed a popularity almost equal to that of “Hoffman” or of “Heine” whom Poe in some respects resembled. His life has been taken many times over by murderous biographers unsparing of his errors, and controversies have arisen as to his personal qualities between literary men who look at him only in his writings, and who err on both sides by thinking that his character, like Burke's

Among all these reviewers and critics, however, there is perhaps not one who does justice at once to his intellect and his morale. Of the biography which accompanies the complete American edition of his literary remains and which has excited most of the angry discussion concerning the man, I shall not speak.(2) The author of it is [page 6:] in his grave, and the same charity which should have induced him to deal tenderly with the dead poet, constrains me to forbear any comment on the spirit which pervades the memoir (See appendix “C” for J. R. T.'s review in the Whig for October 1, 1850) ; he was honest, I believe, in his convictions and had, it is to be feared, too much reason for forming them, but it were better that he had consulted by his silence the Christian advice of Southey

The same reticence of commentary is not imposed upon us, indeed, with regard to the article in the Edinburg Review,(1) which may be characterized as one of the most truculent and unwarrantable attacks upon the dead that the records of literature can furnish. Nothing can justify such language as it employs, for no good purpose is to be served by vilifying a name which has for years been inscribed upon the tomb, and when the writer tells us that Poe was a “blackguard of undeniable mark” we feel that he cannot, if he knows himself, be altogether unfamiliar with this variety of human character. Had this posthumous abuse appeared in the Quarterly, we might not have wondered at it, for, from the day when that periodical killed poor Keats, down to the time when it snatched Tom Moore from his latest repose and held him up to the scorn of the world, it has exhibited a vampire-like propensity to prey upon graveyards, but we [page 7:] might have expected from the decorous and dignified Edinburgh a more kindly treatment of misguided genius. The Review in which the most brilliant and accomplished of modern writers has celebrated the apothesis of Warren Hastings and thrown a veil over the sins of Byron and the rapacities of Clive, might have been content, surely, to leave in shadow the foibles of a poor, gifted, erring, friendless, unhappy child of song.

The latest essay which has appeared on Poe is an eloquent apology for his life and a touching appeal from the severe judgments of his critics by a woman(1) — full of all a woman's charity and gentleness, and betraying on every page that wonderfully ingenious special pleading that belongs to the sex when they would arouse pity and deprecate resentment, with which we cannot quarrel, be it ever so misemployed. Blessed be woman for her loving kindness! Graceful and sweet as are her ministrations of tenderness, there is no act of hers so beautiful as that of laying flowers upon a tomb and no dew that can descend upon them so nourishing as her tears!

In coming to regard our subject more closely, and without reference to what has been written of him heretofore, the chief difficulty lies in the order in which we shall consider the manifestations of his original intellect and his singular being. Poe was eminently what the Germans would call a many-sided person. His acquirements were remarkable, but they did not overlay his mind in what he wrote — his fame was built up at the same time, [page 8:] indeed, but in quite a different way from that in which his notoriety was acquired; there were several Poes at work simultaneously, but apart from each other, all the while that the Poe of flesh and blood was keeping up an unequal fight with poverty whose stronger ally was drink: — there was Poe the critic, a wild man with tomahawk and scalping-knife, greatly dreaded by young authors and deemed by them wholly destitute of human sympathies — there was Poe the romancer, we had almost said the necromancer, forever wandering about in “a wild, weird clime, out of space, out of time”(1) and narrating wonderful accounts of abnormal creatures and supernatural phenomena with so much of vraisemblance that hundreds believed him as implicitly as we believe “Livingstone” and “Dr. Kane” — there was Poe the poet, with his singing robes about him, and flinging out notes of wondrous sweetness burdened with an inarticulate human woe, as if “the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute”(2) had come down to sing on this earth, this valley of bleeding and of broken hearts in which we live — and there was Edgar Allan Poe, known to the tailors and innkeepers of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, as a somewhat impecunious individual, given to neglect of bills and sleeping in the markethouse, and to others in those cities as a man of seedy and yet respectable appearance, his countenance “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” his coat threadbare but [page 9:] well brushed, the most polite of “poor gentlemen,” — the most easy, opulent and suggestive conversationalist of his age and country.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 5:]

1 “The French feuilleton corresponds to the first page of our newspapers, which is generally filled with a story, or some new poems, * *” — Graham's Magazine, November, 1845.

2 The first collected works of E. A. Poe, New York, 1850-56; edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-57), author of A Book of Consolation for Those Who Mourn, Boston, 1844.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 6:]

1 See Appendix “B.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 7:]

1 Edgar Poe and His Critics, by Sarah Helen Whitman, New York, 1860.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 8:]

1 From Poe's “Dream-Land,” lines 7 and 8, reading:

2 From Poe's Israfel.