rendered him material assistance, and then found employment for his pen. With the visit of Kennedy begins the last chapter of Poe's life, which endured for sixteen years, during which period, as a professional man of letters, he produced his best work--a period to him of struggles and troubles and despair, of strenuous labour to result in an undying fame. Poe, at the instigation of Kennedy, began to contribute to the Southern Literary Messenger, under the proprietorship of Thomas White, and soon became a regular monthly contributor; indeed, so valuable was his support that White desired to retain his services exclusively, and to that end engaged him in September 1835 as assistant editor, and in the following September as editor. The salary was not much more than a hundred pounds, but Poe gladly took the post, for in those days in America there was little money to be made even by the most popular author. Under Poe, the Southern Literary Messenger increased in circulation from seven hundred to five thousand; but this success weighed little with the editor, who from time to time suffered from attacks of melancholia. My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed (he wrote to Kennedy). I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before. I have struggled in vain against the influence of this melancholy; you will believe me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improvement in my circumstances. I say you will believe me, and for this simple reason that a man who is writing for effect does not write thus. My heart is open before you; if it be worth reading, read it. I am wretched and know not why. Console me-for you can. But let it be quickly, or it will be too late. Write me immediately and convince me that it is worth one's while that it is at all necessary to live, and you will prove yourself indeed my friend. . . . Fail not as you value your peace of mind hereafter. Perhaps this state of mind, combined with his demand for excellence in literary composition, had something to do with the bitterness with which he attacked the works of mediocre writers in the columns of his magazine. Griswold states that Poe was dismissed by White for drunkenness, and there has been printed by Professor Woodberry a letter from the proprietor to his editor which supports this view. I had become attached to you (White says); I am still; and I would willingly say return, did not a knowledge of your past life make one dread speedy renewal of our separation. If you would make yourself contented with quarters in my house, or with any other family, where liquor is not used, I should think there was some hope for you. But if you go to a tavern or any place where it is used at table, you are not safe. If you again become an assistant in my office, it must be understood that all engagements on my part cease the moment you get drunk. I am your true friend. But if Poe was so confirmed a drinker by this time that it was impossible to allow him to retain his position on the Southern Literary Messenger, how was it that he could assist in the editorship of the New York Quarterly Review and soon after edit the Gentleman's Magazine? This, coupled with the fact that such stories as The Gold Bug and The Mystery of Marie Roget required in their author a singularly clear brain, surely suggests that the charge, if not entirely devoid of foundation, at least requires very considerable modification. Poe at this time suffered greatly in health, and he may have had recourse to stimulants-one glass of wine, it is said, made him drunk-but it is far more probable that the irregularity, eccentricity, and querulousness which even Kennedy admits he displayed, are as likely to have been the outcome of disease as of intoxication. The rest of the career must be briefly summarised. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, not then fourteen years of age, a beautiful girl, who was so attached to him that his absence made her ill; and he tended her until her death of consumption in 1847, and her mother until his own demise. I have this morning heard 'I of the death of my darling Eddie,' Mrs. Clemm wrote to N. P. Willis. 'Say what an affectionate son he was to me, his poor desolate mother.' His wife, devoted as she was to him, can scarcely have been a companion, and he had his intellectual flirtations with other women, though that they were innocent enough the attitude of his mother-inlaw confirms; and in the last lingering illness of Virginia he devoted himself lovingly to her. After the Poems of 1831 Poe published nothing in book-form until 1838, when Arthur Gordon Pym, a work for which he had no great respect, was issued in America and England. Encouraged by the success of this volume, in the following year he gathered together his Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque. By this time he was editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, which presently was incorporated with, and thenceforth known as, Graham's Magazine; and again his popularity achieved a remarkable feat, the circulation of the periodical in little more than two years rising from five to fifty-two thousanda success almost, if not entirely, due to Poe's contributions, to his outspoken reviews, to his analytical essays, and, above all, to his stories. Poe resigned the editorship of Graham's Magazine at the end of 1842, with the intention to found a periodical of his own; but he failed to raise the necessary capital, and, after a period as a free-lance, he was compelled to accept the subordinate position of sub-editor of Willis's Mirror. The expenses of his wife's long illness and his own bad health reduced him to such penury that, without his knowledge, Willis started a public subscription for him, the result of which relieved him for a while of immediate pecuniary troubles. In 1848 he reverted to his scheme for a magazine, and for the purpose of securing the necessary funds he delivered a course of lectures. The lecture,' wrote M. B. Field, was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully. His eyes seemed to glow like those of his own. "Raven," and 6 he kept us entranced for two hours and a half.' The enterprise, however, was a failure, and Poe was compelled to return to work that only enriched others. He was now a sad and lonely man, subject to attacks of melancholy stupor; and there is no doubt that at this period of his life, weary, worn, and discontent, he occasionally sought temporary oblivion from life's troubles in drink and drugs. I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge (he wrote). It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories-memories of wrong and injustice and imputed dishonour-from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. But his struggle was nearly over. On the 4th of October 1849 he left Richmond, where he had been starving for a few months, to return to his home at Fordham. Before he set out he complained of indigestion, chilliness, and exhaustion; and at Baltimore, unable to bear a longer train journey without a rest, he left the train. Some hours later he was found in the street insensible, and was taken to the hospital, where he was found to be suffering from inflammation of the brain. He recovered consciousness and declared his identity, said to the doctor, 'It's all over; write "Eddie is no more! "' and relapsed into insensibility. He died at midnight on Sunday, the 7th of October 1849. The value of Poe's work has long since been duly appraised, and it is unnecessary in a commemorative sketch of the author to enter into a lengthy critical disquisition. If occasionally his work resembled that of another, if some of his earlier poems showed the influence of Byron, if his Man of the Crowd might have been included in Mosses from an Old Manse, even as the Devil in Manuscript could have been inserted without arousing suspicion in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, at least as a general rule the most marked feature of his best work was originality. I know several striking poems by American poets,' wrote his contemporary Alfred Tennyson, but I think Edgar Allan is (taking his poetry and prose together) the most original American genius.' Poe's genius was sombre, and in many of his writings we are confronted with the idea which haunted him through life, that the dead are not wholly unconscious of the happenings of the world. Mystery and horror are the keynotes of most of his prose tales, which may be divided into the humorous-his least successful vein-such as The Man that was Used Up; the pseudo-scientific, such as The Descent into the Maelstrom; those that treat of morals and conscience, such as William Watson and The Black Cat; and of cumulative horrors, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum; and those in which ratiocination plays a great part. This last division Fletcher Free Library includes The Gold Bug, The Purloined Letter, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, and its companion story, The Mystery of Marie Roget, in which he took for his subject a crime committed in New York, and, transferring the scene to Paris, arrived at a solution that, long after its publication, was, by the confession of two persons concerned, proved in all its details to be correct. In the same class, and not less wonderful, was his famous feat, in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post (May 1841), of anticipating from an examination of the opening chapters of Barnaby Rudge the whole course of the story. This perplexed Dickens, who thought Poe's cleverness diabolical; and it has puzzled many readers before and since; yet it is, of course, easily explained. Nothing is more clear than that every plot worth the name must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen (Poe wrote in his paper on The Philosophy of Composition, à propos of this solution). It is only with the dénouement certainly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. It follows, therefore, that in a carefully constructed novel, in the first chapters are indications of the whole. The workings of the mind of an imaginative writer had a fascination for Poe, and he regretted that no poet or story-teller had ever detailed, 'step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion.' He attributed this silence to autorial vanity' more than to any other cause. Most writers-poets in especial-prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy, an ecstatic intuition, and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought-at the true purposes, seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view-at the full-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable— at the cautious selections and rejections-at the painful erasures and interpolations-in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio. Poe, however, perhaps to show that he was not a victim to 'autorial vanity,' then takes his readers into his workshop and shows them The Raven in course of construction. But perhaps it may be that modesty rather than vanity has prevented other writers anticipating or following this course, for only a really fine literary effort could survive such an examination. For the production of The Murder in the Rue Morgue and kindred stories a combination of qualities was essential that few writers before or since have possessed. Apart from the question of the literary form, great powers of deduction and a scientific precision and coherence of logic are necessary; and these, of course, Poe had, together with the ability to humanise his characters-a gift, alas! not granted to his numerous imitators. These 'detective' stories are the most popular of Poe's works, though his Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin does not to-day receive at the hands of the general public a tithe of the tribute paid to the powers of his antitype, the amusing Mr. Sherlock Holmes. 'Poe is a writer of the nerves,' said Beaudelaire; and this is everywhere to be realised, not only in the majority of his prose tales, but also in his verses. About his poetry, however, Poe was singularly modest. In his later years he collected his poems, but under protest, and with a view, he said, ' to their redemption from the many improvements to which they have been subjected while going at random "the rounds of the press." If they must be preserved, then at least he desired they should be printed as he wrote them; but, he remarked, in defence of my own taste, nevertheless, it is incumbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making at any time any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.' 'With me,' he added, 'poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not, they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.' Yet while the sincerity of Poe's self-depreciation is not for a moment to be doubted, it is not the less difficult to believe he was unaware of his genius for poetry. Anyhow, it is in his verse that Poe is seen at his greatest; if he limited his scope-and many of his best poems have for their subject the death of a beautiful and beloved womanat least within his limits he produced most admirable results. He contrived to create the atmosphere of irremediable woe and misery in The Raven and Ulalume; to show his power over words in The Bells; but the supreme example of his muse is Annabel Lee, with its spirituality, its pathos, and its tenderness wonderfully brought out through the simplicity of the style and the exquisite music and the haunting strains of the verse : It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee. And this maiden she lived with no other thought I was a child and she was a child In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me. |