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

cases out of the hundred, the judgment so precipitously given is erroneous. Now, then, the plagiarist has not merely committed a wrong in itself — a wrong whose incomparable meanness would deserve exposure on absolute grounds but he, the guilty, the successful, the eminent, has fastened the degradation of his crime — the retribution which should have overtaken it in his own person — upon the guiltless, the toiling, the unfriended struggler up the mountainous path of Fame. Is not sympathy for the plagiarist, then, about as sagacious and about as generous as would be the sympathy for the murderer, whose exultant escape from the noose of the hangman should lie the cause of an innocent man’s being hung? And because I, for one, should wish to throttle the guilty, with a view of letting the innocent go, could it be considered proper on the part of any; acquaintance of Mr. Longfellow’s’ who came to witness the execution — could it be thought, I say, either chivalrous or decorous, on the part of this ‘acquaintance,’ to get up against me a charge of ‘carping littleness,’ while we stood amicably together at the foot of the gallows? “In all this I have taken it for granted that such a sin as plagiarism exists: we are informed by Outis, however, that it does not. ‘I shall not charge Mr. Poe with plagiarism,’ he says, I for, as I have said, such charges are perfectly absurd,’ An assertion of this kind is certainly funny (I am aware of no other epithet which precisely applies to it); and I have much curiosity to know if Outis is prepared to swear to its truth holding right aloft in his hand, of course, and kissing the back of Disraeli’s ‘Curiosities,’ or the ‘Mélanges’ of Suard and André. But if the assertion is funny (and it is), it is by no means an original thing. It is precisely, in fact, what all the plagiarists and all the “acquaintances’ of plagiarists, since the flood, have maintained with a very praiseworthy The poet continues, for several more paragraphs, in a similar strain; and in the following number of the Journal resumed what he styled “The Voluminous History of the little Longfellow War,” by a further reply to the “Letter of Outis.” This continuation is wiredrawn, and far from brilliant, and deferred till the following week “interesting developments” evidently with the intention of prolonging and increasing any excitement the discussion may have aroused. A few paragraphs may be cited, however: — “Here is a gentleman,” says Poe, “who writes, in certain respects, as a gentleman should, and who yet has the effrontery to base a defence of a friend from the charge of plagiarism, on the broad ground that no such thing as plagiarism ever existed. I confess that to an assertion of this nature there is no little difficulty in getting up a reply. . . . What could any judge, on any bench in the country, do but laugh or swear at the attorney who should begin his defence of a petty-larceny client with an oration demonstrating, à priori, that no such thing as petty-larceny ever had been, or, in the nature of things, ever could be, committed? . . . ‘What is plagiarism?’ demands Outis at the outset, l‘air d‘un Romain qui sauve sa patrie — ‘what is plagiarism, and what constitutes a good ground for the charge?’ . . . He answers the two questions by two others. . . . ‘Did no two men,’ he says, “ever think alike without stealing one from the other? Or, thinking alike, did no two men ever use the same or similar words to convey the thoughts, and that without any communication with each other ‘To deny it is absurd.’ Of course it is, — very absurd; and the only thing more absurd that I can call to mind, at present, is the supposition that any person ever entertained an idea of denying it. . . . “But let me aid Outis to a distinct conception of his own irrelevance. I accuse his friend, specifically, of a plagiarism. This accusation Outis rebuts by asking me with a grave face — not whether the friend might not, in this individual case, and in the compass of eight short lines, have happened upon ten or twelve peculiar identities of thought, and identities of expression, with the author from whom I charge him with plagiarising — but simply whether I do not admit the possibility that once, in the course of eternity, some two individuals might not happen upon a single identity of thought, and give it voice in a single identity of expression. Now, frankly, I admit the possibility in question, and would request my friends to get ready for me a strait-jacket if I did not. . . . “I put no faith in the nil admirari, and am apt to bo amazed at every second thing which I sea One of the most amazing things I have yet seen is the complacency with which Outis throws to the right and left his anonymous assertions, taking it for granted that because he (Nobody) asserts them, I must believe them as a matter of course. However, he is quite in the right. I am perfectly ready to admit anything that he pleases, and am prepared to put as implicit faith in his ipse dixit as the Bishop of Autun did in the Bible — on the ground that he knew nothing about it at all. . . . “He wishes to show, then, that Mr. Longfellow is innocent of the imitation with which I have charged him, and that Mr. Aldrich is innocent of the plagiarism with which I have not charged him; and this duplicate innocence is expected to be proved by showing the possibility that a certain, or that any uncertain, aeries of coincidences may be the result of pure accident Now, of course, I cannot be sure that Outis will regard my admission as a service or a disservice, but I admit the possibility at once. . . . But, in admitting this, I admit just nothing at all, so far as the advancement of Outis’ proper argument is concerned. The affair is one of probabilities altogether, and can be satisfactorily settled only by reference to their calculus.” The following week a still more voluminous budget appeared from Poe’s pen, in continuation of this interminable discussion, but from it only these lines — of biographical import — require citation: — “If Outis has his own private reasons for being disgusted with what he terms the ‘wholesale mangling of victims without rhyme or reason,’ there is not a man living, of common sense and common honesty, who has not better reason (if possible) to be disgusted with the insufferable cant and shameless misrepresentations practised by just such persons as Outis with the view of decrying by sheer strength of lungs — of trampling down — of rioting down — of mobbing down any man with a soul that bids him come out from among the general corruption of our public press, and take his stand upon the open ground of rectitude and honour. “The Outises who practise this species of bullyism are, as a matter of course, anonymous. . . . Their low artifices are insinuated calumnies, and indefatigable whispers of regret from post to pillar, that ‘Mr. So-and-so, or Mr. This-and-that, will persist in rendering himself so dreadfully unpopular’ — no one, in the meantime, being more thoroughly and painfully aware than these very Outises that the unpopularity of the just critic who reasons his way, guiltless of dogmatism, is confined altogether within the limits of the influence of the victims, without rhyme and reason, who have been mangled by wholesale. Even the manifest injustice of a Gifford is, I grieve to say, an exceedingly popular thing; and there is no literary element of popularity more absolutely and more universally effective than the pungent impartiality of a Wilson or a Macaulay. In regard to my own course — without daring to arrogate to myself a single other quality of either of these eminent men than that pure contempt for mere prejudice and conventionality which actuated them all, I will now unscrupulously call the attention of the Outises to the fact that it was during what they (the Outises) would insinuate to be the unpopularity of my ‘wholesale mangling of the victims without rhyme and reason,’ that, in one year, the circulation of the Southern Messenger (a five-dollar journal) extended itself from seven hundred to nearly five thousand-and that, in little more than twice the same time, Graham’s Magazine swelled its list from five to fifty-two thousand subscribers. “I make no apology for these egotisms, and I proceed with them without hesitation — for, in myself, I am but defending a set of principles which no honest man need be ashamed of defending, and for whose defence no honest man will consider an apology required. . . . Not even an Outis can accuse me, with even a decent show of verisimilitude, of having ever descended, in the most condemnatory of my reviews, to that personal abuse which, upon one or two occasions, has indeed been levelled at myself, in the spasmodic endeavours of aggrieved authors to rebut what I have ventured to demonstrate. . . . What I have written remains, and is readily accessible in any of our public libraries. I have had one or two impotent enemies and a multitude of cherished friends — and both friends and enemies have been, for the most part, literary people; yet no man can point to a single critique, among the very numerous ones which I have written during the last ten years, which is either wholly fault-finding or wholly in approbation; nor is there an instance to be discovered, among all that I have published, of my having set forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that wore the semblance of a reason. . . . Very many of the most eminent men in America, whom I am proud to number among the sincerest of my friends, have been rendered so solely by their approbation of my comments upon their own works — comments in great measure directed against themselves as authors — belonging altogether to that very elms of criticism which it is the petty policy of the Outises to cry down.” To this terribly lengthy discussion anent plagiarism a postscript was subsequently indited by the poet, in which he sought to prove that unconscious plagiarism “is in the direct ratio of the poetic sentiment — of the susceptibility to the poetic impression; and, in fact,” he concluded, “all literary history demonstrates that, for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets.” That the results of this “Discussion” were far from beneficial to the contemporary fame and fortune of Poe few can doubt; that it added. to the number of his enemies — who were scarcely so few or so impotent as he affected to believe — is equally certain; whilst that it could in no way increase the presumed “multitude of cherished friends,” whatever it may have effected in the quantity of his readers, needs no demonstration. It is pleasant to turn from this bitter repast to the more genial topic of the poet’s more literary work, although his gall was by no means all expended in the above profitless warfare. In the Broadway Journal for March, for instance, he contrived to deliver some very severe and, that they were true, ill-endured blows at certain national foibles, in a short article on “Satirical Poems.” In the following month he returned to his more natural manner, contributing revised versions of “The Valley Nis” and “The Doomed City,” and a new tale, “Some Words with a Mummy,” to the American Review. “Some Words with a Mummy” is written in that humorous style which was so unnatural with Poe, and which his sombre — his ultra-poetic temperament — would have prevented him from ever becoming proficient in. It is, perhaps, his best effort in that direction, and contains many of those cutting satiric touches which he bandied about so freely, if unwisely, at this transition period of his life — the period when constant collisions with journalistic sharpshooters and jealous cliques caused a more decided deterioration of his morale than did any preceding or succeeding calamities.