Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions — John H. Ingram, 1880, volume II — reading text

conclave, and, Heaven forgive us, we could not make head or tail of it, It might as well have been in any of the lost languages, for any meaning we could extract from its melodious numbers. I remember saying that I believed it was only a hoax that Poe was passing off for poetry, to see how far his name would go in imposing upon people. But here was a situation. The reviewer had been actively instrumental in the demolition of the gaiters. “Of course they will publish the poem,’ said I, ‘and I will ask C —— to be quick about it.’ “The poem was paid for at once, and published soon after. I presume it is regarded as genuine poetry in the collected poems of its author, but then it brought the poet a pair of gaiters and twelve shillings over.” Upon Mrs. Gove-Nichols’ next visit to Fordham, the poet became very confidential with her: — “ ‘I write,’ he said, ‘from a mental necessity — to satisfy my taste and my love of art. Fame forms no motive power with me. What can I care for the judgment of a multitude, every individual of which I despise?’ “ ‘But, Mr. Poe,’ said I, ‘there are individuals whose judgment you respect.’ ‘“Certainly, and I would choose to have their esteem unmixed with the mean adulation of the mob.’ “ ‘But the multitude may be honestly and legitimately pleased,’ said I. “ ‘That may be possible,’ said Poe, musingly, ‘because they may have an honest and legitimate leader, and not a poor man who has been paid a hundred dollars to manufacture opinions for them and fame for an author.’ “ ‘Do reviewers sell their literary conscience thus unconscionably?’ said I. “ ‘A literary critic must be loth to violate his taste, his sense of the fit and the beautiful. To sin against these and praise an unworthy author, is to him an unpardonable sin. But if he were placed on the rack, or if one he loved better than his own life were writhing there, I can conceive of his forging a note against the Bank of Fame, in favour of some would-be poet, who is able and willing to buy his poeme and his opinions.’ “ ‘He turned almost fiercely upon me, his fine eyes piercing me. ‘Would you blame a man for not allowing his sick wife to starve?’ said he. “I changed the subject, and he became quiet, and we walked along, noting beauties of flowers and foliage, of hill and dale, ‘till we reached the cottage.’ “At my next visit,” resumes Mrs. Gove-Nichols, “Poe said, as we walked along the brow of the hill, ‘I can’t look out on this loveliness till I have made a confession to you. I said to you, when you were last here, that I despised Fame.’ I remember,’ said I. “ ‘It was false,’ said he; ‘I love Fame. I dote on it; I idolise it; I would drink to the very dregs the glorious intoxication. I would have incense ascend in my honour from every hill and hamlet, from every town and city on this earth. Fame! glory 1 they are life-giving breath and living blood. No man lives unless he is famous! How bitterly I belied my nature, and my aspirations, when I said I did not desire fame, and that I despised it.’ “I suggested that the utterance on both occasions might be true to the mood that suggested them. But he declared that there was no truth in his first assertion. I was not as severe with him as he was with himself.” The summer months flew by, taking with them the strength of his beloved young wife, and unnerving and unfitting the poet for all literary exertion. He was unable to work, and, even if he had been able, the but too successful career of his “Literati” sketches had caused many magazines, edited by the reviewed or their allies, to close their pages to him. The dangerous censorship he had assumed in this series, says Mrs. Whitman, “exposed him to frequent indignant criticism, while, by his personal errors and indiscretions, he drew upon himself much social censure and espionage, and became the victim of dishonouring accusations from which honour itself had forbidden him to exculpate himself.” The worse his wife became, the less able became the poet to labour with his pen, so that the situation of the family grew more deplorable daily. The dreary months dragged along, and no help appeared. “The autumn came, and Mrs. Poe sank rapidly in consumption,” resumes the narrative of Mrs. Gove-Nichols. “I saw her in her bed chamber,” she relates. “Everything here was so neat, so purely clean, so scant and poverty-stricken, that I saw the poor sufferer with such a heart-ache . . . There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in hair husband’s greatcoat, with a large tortoiseshell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer’s only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands, and her mother her feet. “Mrs. Clemm was passionately fond of her daughter, and her distress on account of her illness and poverty and misery was dreadful to see. “As soon as I was made aware of these painful facts, I came to New York and enlisted the sympathies and services of a lady, whose heart and hand were ever open to the poor and miserable. A feather bed and abundance of bed clothing and other comforts were the first-fruits of my labour of love. The lady headed a private subscription, and carried them sixty dollars the next week. From the day this kind lady first saw the suffering family of the poet, she watched over them as a mother watches over her babe. She saw them often, and ministered to the comfort of the dying and the living.” Mrs. Shew (afterwards Houghton), the lady whose unostentatious sympathy Mrs. Nichols had so happily invoked, knew nothing of the poet or his family, save that they were helpless and needed aid; but that was all that was necessary to call forth her friendly services. * Vide Appendix D. * Proprietors of the New York Evening Mirror, in which the libel appeared. — J. H. I. * The Hon. Henry A. Wise, then United States Minister to France, who entirely ignored his libeller. — J. H. I. * The person referred to here was Mrs. Osgood. — J. H. I. * To Judge Neilson Poe. August 19th, 1850. * Compare with description of grass in “Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage.” — J. H. I. † This is a mistake; there were, and still are, two rooms on each floor. — J. H. I. * “A fit horror,” vide vol. I, p. 274. † A reviewer one; “the other, a person who wrote laudatory notices of books, and borrowed money or favours from their flattered authors afterwards.” — J. H. I. John H. Ingram, “Chapter 17,” Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Letters, and Opinions (1880), pp. 98-128 CHAPTER XVII. MARIE LOUISE SHEW. THE facts of Poe’s poverty, illness, and inability to write soon became public property. One consequence of these circumstances being published was the outbreak in the papers of an epidemic of literary and personal abuse of the unprotected poet. In another instance, an implacable woman, still smarting under a hastily-uttered and bitterly-repented remark of Poe’s,* actually tortured his dying wife by sending her some of the scurrilous attacks on her unfortunate husband, and by so doing, so the poet firmly believed, shortened her life. But there was a bright side to this too gloomy picture. Commenting upon a paragraph in the columns of a daily contemporary that, without Poe’s knowledge or connivance, had brought the poor proud poet’s unhappy circumstances before the world, N. P. Willis made an appeal to the public on his friend’s behalf. In this article, which appeared in the Home Journal, he took the opportunity of suggesting that the poet’s case was a strong argument in favour of founding an hospital for well-educated persons in reduced circumstances. Some of Willis’s remarks are worth repetition, although it is to be believed that, at the time, they had Little other effect than making Poe’s misery still more notorious. He said: — “The feeling we have long entertained on this subject has been freshened by a recent paragraph in the Express, announcing that Mr. Edgar Allan Poe and his wife were both dangerously ill, and suffering for want of the common necessaries of life. Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labour, from bodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public charity. There is no intermediate stopping-place — no respectful shelter where, with the delicacy due to genius and culture, he might secure aid, unadvertised, till, with returning health, he could resume his labours and his unmortified sense of independence. He must either apply to individual friends — (a resource to which death is sometimes almost preferable) — or suffer down to the level where Charity receives claimants, but where Rags and Humiliation are the only recognised Ushers to her presence. Is this right I Should there not be, in all highly-civilised communities, an institution designed expressly for educated and refined objects of charity — a hospital, a retreat, a home of seclusion and comfort, the sufficient claims to which would be such susceptibilities as are violated by the above-mentioned appeal in a daily paper?” This suggestive article of Willis speedily reached Poe’s hands. He was intensely horrified at having his private matters thus thrust before the public, and immediately sent the following letter to the editor of the Home Journal, in which publication it appeared, within a week after the article that had called it forth: — “MY DEAR WILLIS, — The paragraph which has been put in circulation respecting my wife’s illness, my own, my poverty, &c., is now lying before, me; together with the beautiful lines by Mrs. Locke and those by Mrs. ——, to which the paragraph has given rise, as well as your kind and manly comments in the Home Journal. “The motive of the paragraph I leave to the conscience of him or her who wrote it or suggested it. Since the thing is done, however, and since the concerns of my family are thus pitilessly thrust before the public, I perceive no mode of escape from a public statement of what is true and what is erroneous in the report alluded to. “That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what feelings I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been heightened and precipitated by the reception, at two different periods, of anonymous letters — one enclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs. ——, for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.* “Of the facts, that I myself have been long and dangerously ill, and that my illness has been a well understood thing among my brethren of the press, the best evidence is afforded by the innumerable paragraphs of personal and cf literary abuse with which I have been latterly assailed. This matter, however, will remedy itself. At the very first blush of my new prosperity, the gentlemen who toadied me in the old will recollect themselves and toady me again. You, who know me, will comprehend that I speak of these things only as having served, in a measure, to lighten the gloom of unhappiness, by a gentle and not unpleasant sentiment of mingled pity, merriment, and contempt. “That, as the inevitable consequence of so long an illness, I have. been in want of money, it would be folly in me to deny but that I have ever materially suffered from privation, beyond the extent of my capacity for suffering, is not altogether true. That I am ‘without friends’ is a gross calumny, which I am sure you never could have believed, and which a thousand noble-hearted men would have good right never to forgive me for permitting to pass unnoticed and undenied. Even in the city of New York I could have no difficulty in naming a hundred