Edgar Poe and His Critics — Sarah Helen Whitman, 1860 — reading text

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007.with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/edgarpoehiscritiOOwhituoft Edgar Poe and his Critics. Edgar Poe AND HIS CRITICS BY SARAH HELEN WHITMAN. ^. (\ < a \ wur New York: RuDD & Carleton, 130 Grand Street, (brooks building, cor. of BROADWAY.) M DCCC LX. SEEN BY PRESERVATION SERVICES DATE L'f. I9IM~ PS We Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by EUDD & CARLETON, In the Clerk's Office of tlie District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. B. OBAIGHEAD, Printer. Siereolyper, and JilectrotypoTi * Caxton SuiltJtng, 81 , S3, and 85 Centre Street. "Wild words wander here and there; God's great gift of speech abused Makes thy memory confused." " We cannot see thy features right ; They mix with hollow masks of night." Tennyson. ** With these keys we may partially unlock the mys- tery."— -Poe's Marginalia. Preface. Dr. Griswold's Memoir of Edgar Poe has been exten- sively read and circulated; its perverted facts and baseless assumptions have been adopted into every subsequent memoir and notice of the poet, and have been translated into many languages. For ten years this great wrong to the dead has passed unchallenged and unrebuked. It has been assumed by a recent English critic, that ''Edgar Poe had no friends." As an index to a more equitable ^nd intelligible theory of the idiosyncrasies of his life, and as an earnest protest against the spirit of Dr. Griswold's unjust memoir, these pages are submitted to his more candid readers and critics by One of his Friends. Edgar Poe and his Critics. The author of tlie " Original Memoir " prefixed to the volume of Poe's Illustrated Poems, recently published hj Kedfield, says, " Of all the poets, whose lives have been a puzzle and a mystery to the world, there is not one more difficult to be understood than Edgar Allan Poe." The Rev. George Gilfillan, in his very imaginative por- traiture of the poet, admits that the moral anatomists who have met and wondered over his life, have given up all attempts at dissection and diagnosis, turning away with the solemnly whispered warning to the world, and especially to its more brilliant and gifted intellects, " Beware ! " 14 Edgar Poe and his Critics. He confesses that a history so strange as, that, of Edgar Poe should prompt us to new and more search- ing methods of critical as well as moral analysis. But before such analysis can be instituted we must have fuller, more dispassionate, and more authentic records of the phenomena to be analysed. The well written, but very brief memoir prefixed to the Illustrated Poems, and the various sketches that have, from time to time, appeared in the French and English periodicals, are all based on the narrative of Dr. Griswold, a narrative notoriously deficient in the great essentials of candor and authenticity. " It is a rare accomplishment," says one of our most original writers, " to hear a story as it is told ; still rarer to remember it as heard, and rarest of all to tell it as it is remembered" If Dr. Griswold's Memoir of Edgar Poe betrays the ■want of any, or all, of these accomplishments — if its remorseless violations of the trust confided to him are such as to make the unhallowed act of Trelawncy towards the enshrouded form of the dead Byron seem Edgar Poe and his Critics. 15 guiltless in comparison, we must nevertheless endeavour to remember that the memorialist, himself, now claims from us that tender grace of charity that he was unwilling, or unable, to accord to the man who trusted him as a friend. It is not our purpose at present specially to review Dr. Griswold's numerous misrepresentations, and mis- statements. Some of the more injurious of these anecdotes were disproved, during the life of Dr. Griswold, in the New York Tribune, and other leading journals, without eliciting from him any public state- ment in explanation or apology. Quite recently we have had, through the columns of the Home Journal, the refutation of another calumnious story, which for ten years has been going the rounds of the English and American periodicals. We have authority for stating that many of the disgraceful anecdotes, so industriously collected by Dr. Griswold, are utterly fabulous, while others are perver- sions of the truth, more injurious in their effects than i6 Edgar Poe and his Critics. unmitigated fiction. But, as we have said, it is not our purpose at present to revert to these. We propose simply to point out some unfounded critical estimates which have obtained currency among readers who have but a partial acquaintance with Mr. Poe's more ima- ginative writings, and to record our own impressions of the character and genius of the poet, as derived from personal observation, and from the testimony of those who knew him. Although he had been connected with some of the leading magazines of the day, and had edited for a time with great ability several success- ful periodicals, Mr. Poe's literary reputation at the North had been comparatively limited until his removal to New York, in the autumn of 1847, when he became personally known to a large circle of authors and literary people, whose interest in his writings was manifestly enhanced by Ihe perplexing anomalies of his character, and by the singular magnetism of his pre- sence. One who knew him at this period of his life says, " Everything about him distinguighed him as a Edgar Poe and his Critics. 17 man of mark ; liis countenance, person, and gait, were alike characteristic. His features were regular, and decidedly handsome. His complexion was clear and dark ; the colour of his fine eyes seemingly a dark grey, but on closer inspection they were seen to be of that neutral, violet tint which is so difiicult to define. His forehead was, without exception, the finest, in propor- tion and expression, that we have ever seen. The perceptive organs were not deficient, but seemed pressed out of the way by causality, comparison, and construc- tiveness. Close to these rose the proud arches of ideality. The coronal region was very imperfect, wanting in reverence and conscientiousness, and pre- senting a key to many of his literary characteristics. The ideas of right and wrong are as feeble in his chains of thought as in the literature of ancient Greece." "We quote this description for its general fidelity. Its esti- mate of literary characteristics conveyed in the closing sentence we shall revert to in another place. The engraved portraits of Mr. Poe have very little 2* i8 Edgar Poe and his Critics. individuality ; that prefixed to the vohimes edited by Dr. Griswold suggests, at first view, something of the general contour of his face, but is utterly void of character and expression ; it has no sub-surface. The original painting, now in possession of the New York Historical Society, has the same cold, automatic look that makes the engraving so valueless as a portrait to those who remember the unmatched glory of his face when roused from its habitually introverted and ab- stracted look by some favorite theme, or profound emotion. Perhaps, from its peculiarly changeful and translucent character, any adequate transmission of its variable and subtle moods Avas impossible. By writers personally unacquainted with Mr. Poe this engraving has often been favourably noticed. Mr. Hannay, in a Memoir prefixed to the first London edition of Poe's Poems, calls it an interesting and characteristic portrait, "a fine, thoughtful face with lineaments of delicacy, such as belong only to genius or high blood — the forehead grand and pale, the eye dark and gleaming Edgar Poe and his Critics. 19 . ^ with sensibility and soul — a face to inspire men with' X^V interest and curiosity." \j There is a quiet drawing-room in street, New York — a sort of fragrant and delicious " clover- nook" in the heart of the noisy city — where hung, some three years ago, the original painting from which this engraving is a copy. Happening to meet there at the time a company of authors and poets, among whom were Mary Forest, Alice and Phoebe Gary, the Stoddards, T. B. Aldrich, and others, we heard one of the party say, in speaking of the portrait, that its aspect was that of a beautiful and desolate shrine from which the Genius had departed, and that it recalled certain lines to one of the antique marbles : " Oh melancholy eyes I Oh empty eyes, from which the soul has gone To see the far-off countries I " Near this luminous but impassive face, with its sad and soulless eyes, was a portrait of Poe's unrelenting 20 Edgar Poe and his Critics. biographist. In a recess opposite hung a picture of the fascinating Mrs. , whose genius both had so • fervently admired, and for whose coveted praise and friendship both had been competitors. Looking at the beautiful portrait of this lady — the face so full of enthusiasm, and dreamy, tropical sunshine — remember- ing the eloquent words of her praise, as expressed in the prodigal and passionate exaggerations of her verse, one ceases to wonder at the rivalries and enmities enkindled within the hearts of those who admired her genius and her grace — rivalries and enmities which the grave itself could not cancel or appease. Of the portrait prefixed to the illustrated poems, recently published by Redfield, Mr. Willis says, " The reader who has the volume in his hand turns back musingly to look upon the features of the poet, in whom resided such inspiration. But, though well engraved and useful as recalling his features to those who knew them, with the angel shining through, the picture is from a daguerreotype, and gives no idea of Edgar Poe and his Critics. 21 the beauty of Edgar Poe. The exquisitely chiselled features, the habitual but intellectual melancholy, the clear pallor of the complexion, and the calm eye like the molten stillness of a slumbering volcano, composed a countenance of which this portrait is but the skeleton. After reading the Raven, Ulalume, Lenore, and Annabel Lee, the luxuriast in poetry will be'tter conceive what his face might have been." It was soon after his removal to