To me Poe was more spectral than human, and I used often to feel a deep sadness when I heard persons of ordinary perceptions and little idealism speak of him with severity. In this country there is no niche for the men of genius; everybody writes verses, but we have few poets, and very few with singleness of purpose to admire the patient toil of the student in the realms of Art. In Europe it is otherwise; there the severe rules of common life are not applied to the child of genius. He is recognized as exceptional, and fostered with genial care. The hardening process necessary to adapt our poets to the requirements of the Republic, is most likely to destroy the finer threads of his being, and by becoming “practical” he ceases to be ideal. Some few giants in literature are able to combine the actual and the ideal; but there exists a large class who are not strong, but are most lovely–stars of the lesser magnitude, which it is sorrowful to contemplate as fading stars, beautiful Alcyones, obliterated from the glittering galaxies of Art.
There were many rumors as to the parentage of Poe, which it is of little consequence to consider, for the fact must remain, that father and mother, one or both, must have possessed organizations exquisitely fine and intellectual. Their child was a poet in every sense; certainly he was not like any other person we ever met; he was entirely original, if the worse for it, and without any adaptability to the circumstances around him. I do not know how it would have fared with him had he not found one true, patient, devoted friend in the person of his wife’s mother, Mrs. Clemm. She never wearied in her love and thoughtfulness for him.
“But, madam,” somebody says, “you do not consider that Poe was a man, and ought himself to have been the protector.”
I know that is the traditional and conventional opinion of the masculine sex, which I, from my stand-point of observation, do not think is at all carried out in the experience of life. I am not telling of manly men, able to brunt the fight, but of a class by no means adapted to its rough encounters, although every one of these men, ay, and these women too, have an ideal of themselves, justified, too, by some internal consciousness, by which they could meet the utmost that may befall humanity without a groan; and I think they would have done so. It was the dull canker of everyday life which fretted and corroded them.
Mr. Hoffman used to say,
“I could easily die for a cause, when I could not live for it.”
“You think, then, that heroism is an impulse — a momentary madness?” I said.
“By no means; the last act may be sudden, but it must proceed from a heroic make, just as cowardice may exist in the man undetected, till the emergency betrays it. Our acts are prompted by what lies deeper than ordinary observation.”
Mr. Poe was spiritual, abstract, intellectual; he had a manly sense of independence, which rendered patronage of any kind repugnant to him. I do not think he ever found any very appropriate sphere in this life; genial moments, green oases in the dreary waste he certainly found, for he, in one phase of character, had an almost childish desire for companionship. I have often thought how happily such a man as Poe, and some others, might have been, placed in an atmosphere of taste and appreciation, in some little court-like that of Bavaria for instance, which so fostered the genius of Goethé and Schiller; but in our country the life of genius is a perpetual struggle.
