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from Scribner's Monthly, May, 1880.
The law of chance, that has so much to do with the composition of a man, that makes no two alike, yet adjusts the most of us to a common average, brings about exceptional unions like the one from which [Edgar Allan Poe] sprang. A well-born, dissolute Maryland boy, with a passion for the stage, marries an actress and adopts her profession--taking up a life that was strolling, precarious, half-despised in the pioneer times. Three children were the fruit of this love-match. The second, Edgar, was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. From his father he inherited Italian, French and Irish blood; the Celtic pride of disposition and certain weaknesses that were his bane. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, an actress of some talent, was as purely English as her name. Two years after his birth, the hapless parents, wearied and destitute, died at Richmond, both in the same week. The orphans "found kind friends," and were adopted--the oldest, William, by his grandfather Poe, of Baltimore; Edgar and Rosalie by citizens of Richmond. Edgar gained a devoted protector in Mr. Allan, a person of great fortune, married, but without a child. The boy's beauty and precocity won the heart of this gentleman, who gave him his name, and lavished upon him, in true Southern style, all that perilous endearment which befits the son and heir of a generous house. Servants, horses, dogs, the finest clothes, a purse well-filled, all these were at his disposal from the outset. Great pains were taken with his education, the one element of moral discipline seemingly excepted. When eight years old he went with Mr. Allan to England, and was at the school in Stoke-Newington, to which it is thought his memory went back in after years, when he wrote the tale of "William Wilson." At ten we find him at school in Richmond, proficient in classical studies but shirking his mathematics--already writing verse; instinctively
"Seeking with hand and heart The teacher whom he learned to love Before he knew ‘twas Art."
His grace and strength, his free, romantic, and ardent bearing, made him friends among old and young, and at this time he certainly was capable of the most passionate loyalty to those he loved. Traditions of all this--of his dreamy, fitful temperament, of his early sorrows and his midnight mournings over the grave of a lovely woman who had been his paragon--are carefully preserved. He was a school-boy, here and there, until 1826, when he passed a winter at the University of Virginia. He ended his brief course in the school of ancient and modern languages with a successful examination, but after much dissipation and gambling, which deeply involved him in debt. His thoughtlessness and practical ingratitude justly incensed an unwise, affectionate guardian. A rupture followed between the two, Mr. Allan finally refusing to countenance Edgar's extravagances; and the young man betook himself to his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, of Baltimore, in whose house he found a home for about two years. Her daughter Virginia was then six years old, and Poe interested himself in the training of the sweet and gentle child, who loved him from the first, and made his will her law through girlhood and their subsequent wedded life. At this period he brought out his first book, a collection of his juvenile poems. In 1829 his heart was touched by news of the death of Mrs. Allan, who had always given him a sympathetic mother's love, and he easily effected a reconciliation with the widower in his hour of loneliness and sorrow.
Poe now was asked to choose a profession; he selected that of arms, and his benefactor secured his admission to West Point. Here we find him in 1830, and find little good of him. Though now a man grown, he was unable to endure discipline. After a first success, he tired of the place and brought about his own expulsion and disgrace, to his patron's deep, and this time lasting, resentment. But here he also arranged for the issue, by subscription, of another edition of his poems, which was delivered to his classmates after his departure from the academy. A new personage now comes upon the scene. Mr. Allan, naturally desiring affection from some quarter, married again, and after a time heirs were born to the estate which Poe, had he been less reckless, would have inherited. The poet, returning in disgrace to Richmond, found no intercessor in the home of his youth. This change, and his manner of life thus far, render it needless to look for other causes of the final rupture between himself and his guardian. it was the just avenge of fate for his persistent folly, and a defeat was inevitable in his contest with a lady who, by every law of right, was stronger than he. Poe went out into the world with full permission to have the one treasure he had seemed to value--his own way. Like a multitude of American youths, the sons or grandsons of successful men, he found himself of age, without the means proportionate to the education, habits and needs of a gentleman, and literally, in the place of an unfailing income, without a cent. Better off than many who have erred less, he had one strong ally--his pen. With this he was henceforth to earn his own bed and board, and lead the arduous life of a working man of letters. For the struggle now begun his resources of tact, good sense, self-poise, were as deficient as his intellectual equipment was great. It would not be strange if the disputed legend of his enlistment as a private soldier, under his first sense of helplessness, should prove, in spite of its coincidence with an episode in Coleridge's life, to be founded on fact. Soon after the loss of a homeright, which he forfeited more recklessly than Esau, his professional career may be said to have begun. It embraced a period of years,--from 1832 to December 7th, 1849, the date of his untimely death. Its first noteworthy event was the celebrated introduction to Kennedy, Latrobe, and Miller, through his success in winning a literary prize with the "MS. found in a Bottle." This brought him friends, work, and local reputation,--in all, a fair and well-earned start.
Seventeen years, thenceforward, of working life, in which no other American writer was more active and prominent. I have considered elsewhere the influence of journalism upon authorship. It enabled Poe to live. On the other hand, while he rarely made his lighter work commonplace, it limited the importance of his highest efforts, gave a paragraphic air to his criticisms, and left some of his most suggestive writings mere fragments of what they should be He discovered the pretentious mediocrity of a host of scribblers, and when unbiased by personal feeling, and especially when doing imaginative work, was one of the few clear-headed writers of his day. He knew what he desired to produce, and how to produce it. We say of a man that his head may be wrong, but his heart is all right. There were times enough when the reverse of this was true of Poe. I do not say there were not other times when his heart was as sound as his perceptions. What, after all, is the record of his years of work, and what is the significance of that record? We must consider the man in his environment, and the transient, uncertain character of the markets to which he brought his wares. His labors, then, constantly were impeded, broken, changed; first by the most trying and uncontrollable nature that ever poet possessed, that ever possessed a poet; by an unquiet, capricious temper, a childish enslavement to his own "Imp of the Perverse," a scornful pettiness that made him "hard to help," that drove him to quarrel with his patient, generous friends, and to wage ignoble conflict with enemies of his own making; by physical and moral lapses, partly the result of inherited taint, in which he resorted, more or less frequently, and usually at critical moments--seasons when he needed all his resources, all his courage and man- hood--to stimulants which he knew would madden and besot him more than other men. None the less his genius was apparent, his power felt, his labor in demand wherever the means existed to pay for it. But here, again, his life was made precarious and shifting by the speculative, ill-requited nature of literary enterprises at that time. From various causes, therefore, his record--no matter how it is attacked or defended--is one of irregularity, of broken and renewed engagements. From 1832 to 1835 Poe had but himself to support, and a careless young fellow always gets on so long as he is young, with one success and the chance of a future. The next year his private marriage to his sweet cousin Virginia, still almost a child, was reaffirmed in public, and the two set up their home together. The time had come when Poe, with his sense of the fitness of things, could see that Bohemianism, the charm of youth, is a frame that poorly suits the portrait of a mature and able-handed man. So we are not surprised to find him engaged, for honest wages, upon "The Southern Literary Messenger." That his skillful touch and fantastic genius, whether devoted to realistic or psychological invention, were now at full command, is shown by his "Hans Pfaall," and by his first striking contribution to the "Messenger," the spectral and characteristic tale of "Berenice." In short, he did uncommon work, for that time, uponthe famous Southern magazine, both as tale-writer and critic, and increased its reputation and income. Yet he felt, with all the morbid sensitiveness of one spoilt by luxury and arrogance in youth, the difference between his present work-a-day life, and the independence, the social standing, which if again at his command would enable him to indulge his finer tastes, and finish at ease the work best suited to his powers. From this time he was subject to moods of brooding and despair, of crying out upon fate, that were his pest and his ultimate destruction. And so we again are not surprised to find this good beginning no true omen of the fifteen years to come; and that these years are counted by fittings here and there between points that offered employment; by new engagements taken up before he was off with the old; by legends of his bearing and entanglements in the social world he entered; by alternate successes and disgraces, in Richmond, Philadelphia, Boston, New York,--by friendships and failings out with many of the editors who employed him,--the product, after all, with which we are chiefly concerned being his always distinctive writings for the "Quarterly," "The Gentleman's Magazine," "Graham's," "Godey's," "The Mirror," "The American Review," and various other fosterers and distributors of such literature as the current taste might demand. We begin to understand his spasmodic, versatile industry, his balks and breaks, his frequent poverty, despondency, self-abandonment, and almost to wonder that the sensitive feminine spirit--worshiping beauty and abhorrent of ugliness and pain, combating with pride, with inherited disease of appetite--did not sooner yield, was not utterly overcome almost at the outset of these experiences. So have I wondered at seeing a delicate forest-bird, leagues from the shore, keep itself on the wing above relentless waters into which it was sure to fall at last. Poe had his good genius and his bad. Near the close of the struggle he made a brave effort, and never was so earnest and resolved, so much his own master, as just before the end. But a man is no stronger than his weakest part, and with the snapping of that his chance is over. At the moment when the poet, rallying from the desolation caused by the loss of his wife, found new hope and purpose, and was on his way to marry a woman who might have saved him, the tragedy of his life began again. Its final scene was as swift, irreparable, black with terror, as that of any drama ever written. His death was gloom. Men saw him no more; but the shadow of a veiled old woman, mourning for him, hovered here and there. After many years a laureled tomb was placed above his ashes, and there remain to American literature the relics, so unequal in value, of the most isolated and exceptional of all its poets and pioneers. Poe's misfortunes were less than those of some who have conquered misfortune. Others have been castaways in infancy and friendless in manhood, and have found no protectors such as came at his need. Others have struggled and suffered, and have declined to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. They have sought consolation in their work, and from their cruelest experiences have won its strength and glory. The essential part of an artist's life is that of his inspired moments. There were occasions when Poe was the master, when his criticism was true, when he composed such tales as "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," poems like "The Raven," "The Bells," " The City in the Sea." It must be acknowledged, moreover--and professional writers know what this implies--that Poe, in his wanderings, after all, followed his market. It gradually drifted to the North, until New York afforded the surest recompense to authors not snugly housed in the leafy coverts of New England. Nor did he ever resort to any mercantile employment for a livelihood. As we look around and see how authors accept this or that method, of support, there seems to be something chivalrous in the attitude of one who never earned a dollar except by his pen. From first to last he was simply a poet and man of letters, who rightly might claim to be judged by the literary product of his life. The life itself differed from that of any modern poet of equal genius, and partly because none other has found himself, in a new country, among such elements. Too much has been written about the man, too little of his times; and the memoir containing a judicial estimate of his writings has not yet appeared.
His story has had a fascination for those who consider the infirmity of genius its natural outward sign. The peculiarity of his actions was their leaning toward what is called the melodramatic; of his work, that it aimed above the level of its time. What has been written of the former--quite out of proportion to the analysis derivable from his literary remains--frequently has been the out-put of those who, if unable to produce a stanza which he would have acknowledged, at least feel within themselves the possibilities of his errant career. Yet, as I observe the marvels of his handicraft, I seem unjust to these enthusiasts. It was the kind which most impresses the imagination of youth, and youth is a period at which the critical development of many biographers seems to be arrested. And who would not recall the zest with which he read, in school-boy days, and by the stolen candle, a legend so fearful in its beauty and so beautiful in its fear as "The Masque of the Red Death," for example, found in some stray number of a magazine, and making the printed trash that convoyed it seem so vapid and drear? Not long after, we had the collected series, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." With what eagerness we caught them from hand to hand until many of us knew them almost by heart. In the East, at that time, Hawthorne was shyly putting out his "Mosses" and "Twice Told Tales," and it was not an unfruitful period that fostered, among its brood of chattering and aimless sentimentalists, two such spirits at once, each original in his kind. To-day we have a more consummate, realistic art. But where, now, the creative ardor, the power to touch the stops, if need be, of tragedy and superstition and remorse! Our taste is more refined, our faculties are under control; to produce the greatest art they must, at times, compel the artist. "Poetry," said Poe, "has been with me a passion, not a purpose,"--a remarkable sentence to be found in a boyish preface, and I believe that he wrote the truth. But here, again, he displays an opposite failing. If poetry had been with him no less a passion, and equally a purpose, we now should have had something more to represent his rhythmical genius than the few brief occasional lyrics which are all that his thirty years of life as a poet--the life of his early choice--have left to us.