University of Virginia Library

EDGAR ALLAN POE—AFTER FIFTY YEARS.

WHEN Rufus W. Griswold, "the pedagogue vampire," as he was aptly termed by one of his contemporaries, committed the immortal infamy of blighting a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works, which he found ready at hand, by supplementing his perfunctory labors with a calumniating memoir of the poet, nearly fifty years ago, there were many protests uttered by the poet's contemporaries at home and abroad. Charles Baudelaire, the Poe of French literature, in his tribute to the dead poet, indignantly wrote: "What is the matter with America? Are there, then, no regulations there to keep the curs out of the cemeteries?" In view of the fact that the Griswold biography of Poe has been incontestably discredited, and proved to be merely a scaffolding of malevolent falsehoods—the outcome of malice and mendacity—the deference paid to Griswold and his baleful work in the memoir accompanying the latest publication of Poe's writings seems well-nigh incomprehensible. Professor Woodberry excuses the detractions of Poe's vilifier, "in view of the contemporary uncertainty of Poe's fame, the difficulty of obtaining a publisher, and the fact that the editorial work was not paid for." Most amazing reasons, indeed, in justification of Griswold's interposition as the poet's biographer—an office that had been specially bequeathed by the dying genius to his bosom friend, Nathaniel P. Willis. Had Willis shirked this responsibility, there might have been some excuse for Griswold and his horde of gutter-snipes, who wreaked their venom upon the name of Poe, outraging every tenet of common decency; but Willis performed his delegated duty reverently, sympathetically, and adequately. No publisher with any sense of justice would have presumed to include any other memoir than that of Willis in the original edition of Poe's works.

The Griswold memoir was, on its face, a piece of officious audacity—not only a libel upon Poe's fair fame, but an insult

to the best standards of literary biography. It is certainly to be wondered at that so enterprising a city as Chicago should have been unable to find fresher material at hand for a biography of America's most original genius than a rechauffé of the scandalous estimate of "the Catullus of American literature," voiced by one who frankly wrote, forty years ago, speaking of his attitude toward Poe: "I was not his friend, nor was he mine."

It may be safely answered that, in the present instance, the "editorial work" of this malicious biography, which accuses the poet of "a habit of intoxication," which no literary expert in his sober judgment can honestly believe existed, was, probably, not given to the publishers without adequate compensation, however Griswold may have fared with his disingenuous original memoir. The calumnies of puritanical bigots, like the late Charles F. Briggs, should not be permitted to stand against the poet's own analysis and the testimony of many near associates, during his life—as N. P. Willis, Thomas Cottrell Clarke, William Gowans, and George R. Graham.

Poe's own defense of himself from the attack upon his character by William E. Burton, which, unfortunately, was not made known by the late Dr. J. E. Snodgrass until long after Griswold's memoir of Poe was published, cannot with impunity be ignored in any printed record of the poet's career. In a long and exhaustive reply to Burton's charges, Poe writes to Dr. Snodgrass:

"In fine, I pledge you before God the solemn word of a gentleman that I am temperate even to rigor. From the hour in which I first saw this basest of calumniators to the hour in which I retired from his office in incontrollable disgust at his chicanery, arrogance, ignorance, and brutality, nothing stronger than water ever passed my lips. It is, however, due to candor that I inform you upon what foundation he has erected his slanders. At no period of life was I ever what men call intemperate; I never was in the habit of intoxication [the italics are Poe's]; I never drank drams, et cetera; but for a brief period, while I resided in Richmond and edited the Messenger, I certainly

did give way, at long intervals, to the temptation held out on all sides to the spirit of Southern conviviality. My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an every-day matter to my companions. For some days after each excess I was invariably confined to bed. But it is now quite four years since I have abandoned every kind of alcoholic drink—four years, with the exception of a single deviation that occurred shortly after my leaving Burton, and when I was induced to resort to the occasional use of cider with the hope of relieving a nervous attack. You will thus see, frankly stated, the whole amount of my sin.

"The accusation (Burton's) can be disproved by each and every man with whom I am in the habit of daily intercourse. I have now only to repeat to you, in general, my solemn assurance that my habits are as far removed from intemperance as the day from the night."

And this was also the consensus of opinion of those who knew Poe intimately up to the time of his death. He had unquestionably an abnormal sensitiveness to drink—a single glass of the mildest liquor would affect him to the point of stupefaction; but he was in no sense a habitual drinker or a dissolute man, as he has been painted by his detractors for fully half a century—since his untimely death at the hands of the political "repeaters" of Baltimore. Alas, poor Poe! Was not your punishment in life, your poverty, your anguish of privation, a sufficiently terrible expiation for your occasional lapses of will, that your memory should be held up to the execration of posterity by those unfit to loose the latchets of your shoes?

To-day we honor Willis, who in life fraternized with Poe as a companion and a gentleman, worthy of the friendship of the ideal Chevalier Bayard of his time. We concede the laurel of genius to the lamented Poe, but we stab him in the back while proffering it, and prelude the study of his matchless genius with materialistic and abhorrent pictures of his personal character.

We are told that a Poe propaganda, which will reform all the injustice that has been done to the immortal author of "The

Raven," is to illumine the closing hours of the waning century. We who honor not our own prophets, but have given most liberally of our tribute to the memorials of English authors and have aided in preserving the homes of Shakespeare, Carlyle, and other luminaries of the mother tongue, are asked to believe that public interest will, at no distant day, be awakened in "the unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster."

In the half-century that has passed since the spirit of Poe "conquered the fever called living" in his untimely death at Baltimore, the world of letters has awakened to a realizing sense of the majestic proportions of this chameleon-like genius—"this diamond that sparkled even in the darkness," as the late Edwin P. Whipple has said. And when another decade has rounded out a full century since his birth in that eventful year (1809) which also gave to the literary world a Charles Dickens and an Oliver Wendell Holmes, we may look for a recognition of the great Southern poet that shall be worthy of his peerless genius.