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

the rest, you do me gross injustice; and you know it. As usual, you have wrought yourself into a passion with me on account of some imaginary wrong; for no real injury, or attempt at injury, have you ever received at my hands. As I live, I am utterly unable to say why you are angry, or what true grounds of complaint you have against me. You are a man of impulses; have made yourself, in consequence, some enemies; have been in many respects ill-treated by those whom you had looked upon as friends — and these things have rendered you suspicious. You once wrote in your magazine a sharp critique upon a book of mine — a very silly book — Pym. Had I written a similar criticism upon a book of yours, you feel that you would have been my enemy for life, and you therefore imagine in my bosom a latent hostility towards yourself. This has been a mainspring in your whole conduct towards me since our first acquaintance. It has acted to pre vent all cordiality. In a general view of human nature your idea is just-but you will find yourself puzzled in judging me by ordinary motives. Your criticism was essentially correct, and therefore, although severe, it did not occasion in me one solitary emotion either of anger or dislike. But even while I write these words, I am sure you will not believe them. Did I not still think you, in spite of the exceeding littleness of some of your hurried actions, a man of many honorable impulses, I should not now take the trouble to send you this letter. I cannot permit myself to suppose that you would say to me in cool blood what you said in your letter of yesterday. You are, of course, only mistaken, in asserting that I owe you a hundred dollars, and you will rectify the mistake at once when you come to look at your accounts. Soon after I joined you, you made me an offer of money, and I accepted $20. Upon another occasion, at my request, you sent me enclosed in a letter $30. Of this 30,1 repaid 20 within the next fortnight (drawing no salary for that period). I was thus still in your debt $30, when not long ago I again asked a loan of $30, which you promptly handed to me at your own house. Within the last three weeks, three dollars each week have been retained from my salary, an indignity which I have felt deeply but did not resent. You state the sum retained as $8, but this I believe is through a mistake of Mr. Morrell. My postage bill, at a guess, might be $9 or $10 — and I therefore am indebted to you, upon the whole, in the amount of about $6o, More than this sum I shall not pay. You state that you can no longer afford to pay $50 per month for 2 or 3 Pp. Of MS. can be shown by reference to the year with you I have written Your error here Magazine. During my In July 5 pp. „ AllguSt 9 „ Sept. 16 „ Oct. 4 + 5 copied-Miss McMichael’s NNis. + 3 Chandlers. „ Nov. 5 „ Dec. 12 „ Jan. „ Feb. „ March „ April „ May „ June 9 12 1f 17 14 9 132 (sic) “Dividing this sum by 12, we have an average of 11 pp. per month — not 2 or 3. And this estimate leaves out of question everything in the way of extract or compilation. Nothing is counted but bonâ fide composition. 11 pp. at $3 per p. would be $33, at the usual Magazine prices. Deduct this from $50, my monthly salary, and we have left $17 per month, or $4 25/100 per week, for the services of proof-reading; general superintendence at the printing office; reading, alteration, and preparation of MSS,, with compilation of various articles, such as Plate articles, Field Sports, &c. Neither has anything been said of my name upon your title-page, a small item, you will say — but still something, as you know. Snowden pays his editresses $2 per week each for their names solely. Upon the whole, I am not willing to admit that you have greatly overpaid me. That I did not do four times as much as I did for the Magazine was your own fault. At first I wrote long articles, which you deemed inadmissible, and never did I suggest any to which you had not some im mediate and decided objection. Of course I grew discouraged, and could feel no interest in the journal. “I am at a loss to know why you call me selfish. If you mean that I borrowed money of you — you know that you offered it, and you know that I am poor. In what instance has any one ever found me selfish? Was there selfishness in the affront I offered Benjamin (whom I respect, and who spoke well of me) because I deemed it a duty not to receive from any one commendation at your expense? . . . I have said that I could not tell why you were angry. Place yourself in my situation, and see whether you would not have acted as I have done. You first ‘enforced,’ as you say, a deduction of salary: giving me to understand thereby that you thought of parting company. You nest spoke disrespectfully of me behind my back — thus as an habitual thing to those whom you supposed your friends, and who punctually retailed me, as a matter of course, every ill-natured word which you uttered. Lastly, you advertised your magazine for sale without saying a word to me about it. I felt no anger at what you did none in the world. Had I not firmly believed it your design to give up your journal, with a view of attending to the Theatre, I should never have dreamed of attempting one of my own. The opportunity of doing something for myself seemed a good one — (and I was about to be thrown out of business) — and I embraced it. Now I ask you, as a man of honor and as a man of sense — what is there wrong in all this? What have I done at which you have any right to take offence? I can give you no definitive answer (respecting the continuation of Rodman’s Journal) until I hear from you again. The charge of $100 I shall not admit for an instant. If you persist in it our intercourse is at an end, and we can each adopt our own measures. “In the meantime, I am, “Yr. Obt. St., “EDGAR A. POE. “WM. E. BURTON, — Esq.” Whatever soreness there may have been at this time between the co-editors, it appears to have ultimately worn away, for Poe spoke in friendly terms of Burton in his subsequent papers on “Autography,” and Burton wrote defending the poet when, upon his decease, his character was assailed. Doubtless an amicable arrangement was subsequently arrived at, and, in all probability, Poe repaid his indebtedness — set forth in this letter with all his habitual carefulness — by a certain amount of “copy” to be used, and which was used, apparently, in the magazine after it passed out of the possession of its founder into the hands of Mr. Graham. After his severance from the Gentleman’s, Poe endeavoured to found a new monthly journal of his own, to be called the Penn Magazine, but the project fell through after the prospectus had been circulated among the members of the publishing world. The chief wording of this prospectus was subsequently adopted for the basis of a later project, to be adverted to hereafter, and need not, therefore, be cited from. Want of the necessary funds, and inability to secure a sufficient number of subscribers doubtless caused the failure of the poet’s scheme. * In a MS. note, on a revised copy of the tale in my possession. — J. H. I. * Vide Medwin’s Life of Shelley, vol. II, pp. 300, 301. * Vide Account of “Action for Libel, Poe v. Evening Mirror,” vol. ii., p. 113. * In the London Mirror for November 3rd, 1877. John H. Ingram, “Chapter 12,” Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Letters, and Opinions (1880), pp. 181-206 CHAPTER XII. EDITOR OF GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE. FOR the five months following Poe’s secession, nothing of his of any consequence appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The purchaser, Mr. Graham, was not only a man of literary proclivities but also a shrewd man of business, and he speedily recognised the value of the ex-editor’s services. In November, therefore, he arranged with Poe to resume his former post on the magazine, which from the beginning of the forthcoming new year was to be amalgamated with another periodical styled the Casket, and henceforward was to be known as Graham’s Magazine. To the last — the December — number of the Gentleman’s, Poe contributed his gruesome sketch, “The Man of the Crowd.” This weird record of the solitude-dreading mortal — this impersonation of La Bruyere’s “grand malheur de ne pouvoir étre seul” — appeals more strongly to the human heart than any of its author’s other prose works, the majority of which, as is so generally acknowledged, subdue the intellect only. What a fascination for the thoughtful, whose thinking is prompted by heart as well as brain, lurks in these opening sentences of the tale! “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘es läszt sich nicht lesen’ — it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes, die with despair of heart and convulsion in throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.” The description of a convalescent’s feelings of serene contentment in the return of health, when he finds himself “in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui — moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs,” is a faithful portrayal of the experience of many, and is, therefore, widely different from Poe’s usual psychological observations, which are mostly based upon the outre and the abnormal. “The Man of the Crowd” stands forth as a specimen of its author’s real genius-his masterly powers of combined suggestiveness and description. From the beginning of 1841, and for some time henceforward, the history of Edgar Poe is merged into, and becomes chiefly, the recital of his literary labours, the most remarkable of which now consisted of contributions to Graham’s Magazine. The worthy proprietor of that publication speedily received due reward for his appreciation of Poe’s talents. Indeed, it is declared that in a little less than two years the number of subscribers to the magazine increased from five to fifty-two thousand, and this, although aided by Mr. Graham’s liberality to his contributors, was mainly due to the new editor. His daring critiques, his analytic essays, and his weird stories, following one another in rapid succession, startled the public, and compelled it to an acknowledgment of his powers. New enemies were created, however, by the dauntless intrepidity with which he assailed the fragile reputations of the small bookmakers, especially in his pungent papers on “Autography.” In the April number of Graham’s appeared Poe’s world-famed story of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It was the first of a series-the series aptly termed by Eaudelaire, “une espéce de trilogie” — illustrative of an analytic phase of its author’s complex mind. The particular idiosyncrasy in which the tale germinated is thus introduced in the exordium: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition. “The faculty