{"id":4805,"date":"2018-06-17T22:07:10","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T19:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=4805"},"modified":"2018-06-17T22:07:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-17T19:07:10","slug":"e-o-smith-edgar-allan-poe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/4805\/e-o-smith-edgar-allan-poe\/","title":{"rendered":"E. O. Smith, Edgar Allan Poe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I GIVE the Allan in this name because it is generally so written; but I think the middle one should be at once and forever dropped; since it is that of a man who had befriended the poet-protected and educated him, but who finally abandoned him to his fate, leaving him to battle with the world as best he could, he, totally unable to compete with the world, with no understandable weapons for the contest, born with vast, gloomy premonitions, shadowy intimations of grandeur, stupendous day-dreams, which had no visible relation to what was passing around him \u2014 weird, unearthly visions which shut out the real \u2014 gorgeous idealisms overmastering the actual; a\u00a0demonized<\/em>\u00a0man, in the fullest sense; and when his guardian \u2014 this wealthy, conventional, every-day man \u2014 assumed the responsibility of taking such a boy in charge, he had no right to abandon him.<\/p>\n

It may be said that the errors of Poe drove his friends from him, compelled them to abandon him; this is no excuse at all to a TRUE\u00a0man.\u00a0The greater his faults the more need of the friend.<\/em>\u00a0I do not believe one tithe of what is said about the moral obliquities of Edgar Poe; and, even were he as guilty as his worst traducers represent him, there was that pale, sorrowful face of his always pleading for palliation, always seeming to say, \u201cI do not comprehend it all; I am beyond, above, or below it; I am\u00a0not of it!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

More than all this, the very appearance of the man gave the lie to these slanders. He was, to the last degree, refined in look and manner. I knew him for years\u2014met him at my own house and in society, and never once saw any of those reprehensible aspects of character which have been imputed to him. I never once saw him when he bad even looked upon the wine\u2013cup. With his delicate organization, I am sure that a very small quantity would affect him; but I am convinced he was not habitually\u00a0addicted<\/em>\u00a0to any kind of intoxicating drink, and am well persuaded\u00a0that a very little might excite nearly to madness a brain of such volume and delicacy of fiber.<\/p>\n

Others have given currency to wild tales of orgies, in which they must have also partaken, or at least encouraged. I remember to have heard a Philadelphian poet, the author of Endymion, describe a scene of the kind. To him it was amusing\u2014to me most painful. He remarked that, \u201cthe real contempt which Poe felt for his cotemporaries came out at once under the influence of the wine\u2013cup, and he ridiculed, satirized, imitated and abused them right and left without mercy.\u201d I did not think the presence of such a stimulant at all necessary for such a development; for the bearing of the man at all times, the curl of his lip, the cold sarcasm, the covert smile, each and all told of a man who measured himself with his fellows, only to feel his own superiority. And why should he not?<\/p>\n

Yes, I repeat, why should he not? I must and will speak of this man, not as he manifested himself to the world, but by the measure of his intimations, by his own estimate of himself, which is a truer mode of judgment than the world knows. Yes, this man knew what was in himself, and this it was that sustained him through all the perplexities and disheartenments of poverty, and all the abuse heaped upon him by the cruelty and malice of his enemies; and it is this faith in himself which enabled him to command the respect even of those critical in judgment and austere in practice, and which sustained him to the last, and is now fast redeeming his memory.<\/p>\n

Edgar Poe found persons of noble penetration, who could worthily estimate him. I find among my letters the following, from Sarah Helena Whitman, of Providence, R. I. I had written a critique upon Mr. Poe, published in the United States Magazine, to which she refers:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is said that all men have two natures \u2014 a higher and a lower \u2014 a divine and a demoniac sphere of life. It has been so painful for me to contemplate the lower sphere\u00a0of his life, that I have habitually turned away from it to look at the other nobler or more interior nature. In this I believe, and would fain ignore the rest. *** From any other point of view, I see that your estimate is a most kind and tolerant one. I like, especially, the passage commencing, \u2018We listen as to a dirge, but it is not of mortal sounding,\u2019 and that in which you speak of his manner toward women. I do not think with you, that his manner gave the impression of habitual insincerity. On the contrary, he seemed to me \u2014 in his private character \u2014 simple, direct and genuine, beyond all other persons that I have known. *** I believe, too, that in the artistic utterance of poetic emotion he was profoundly, passionately genuine; genuine in the expression of his utter desolation of soul\u2014his tender, remorseful regret for the departed; his love, his hate, his pride, his perversity, and his despair. He was, it is true, vindictive, revengeful, unscrupulous in the use of expedients to attain his ends; but never false and fair-seeming from an inherent perfidy and hollowness of heart. *** I feel sure that your notice will be read with interest, and will help to remove from his memory some undeserved imputations.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is now seventeen years since Edgar Poe laid aside the earthly garment, and entered within the vail, yet, so far from sinking to oblivion, we find that every year awakens a new interest in his genius. Left without a stone to mark his place of burial, his own mind has created an imperishable monument.<\/p>\n

He was born in the city of Baltimore, in January, 1811, and died in the same place, October 7th, 1849.<\/p>\n

His father was studying law in Baltimore, when he became fascinated with an English actress named Elizabeth Arnold, with whom he eloped, and afterward married. It has been asserted that this girl was the daughter of the traitor Arnold \u2014 I do not know upon what authority. She seems to have been pretty and vivacious, but nothing more. The husband abandoned the law for the stage, and the two played together perhaps a half-dozen years, without acquiring either fame or money, and then died, leaving three children, two of whom fell into total eclipse, for we hear only of Edgar, the second boy.<\/p>\n

When death entered the little dim, dingy green-room of the theater, and dropped the tinsel curtain forever between this world and the young, reckless pair, who left three helpless, uncared\u2013for little ones to the tender mercies of men, which are often only cruelty, a merchant of Richmond, Virginia, by the name of Allan, adopted little Edgar as his own child. He was a spirited, handsome boy, precocious in intellect, and of arrogant, self-willed temper. Here was, certainly, fine material upon which to work \u2014 the germs of the scholar or the hero. But nature is stronger than education. I do not believe the blood of father or mother were of the best quality to produce the most reliable results. The excitements and exhaustions of the profession are not favorable to the best maternity \u2014 the tawdry accessories of the stage are not the most desirable associations for the growing mind and heart of a young child, who has every thing to learn.<\/p>\n

Mr. Allan was childless and wealthy, and, it would seem, injudiciously indulgent to the boy, yielding quite too much to his arrogance, and far too lenient to his outbreaks of temper. But it must be borne in mind that the young Edgar was living in a society in which spirit was ranked as the test of manliness, where coercion was reserved, like the whip, for the slave only, and where the assertion that \u201che who ruleth himself is greater than he who taketh a city,\u201d is a musty, old-fogy view, unbecoming a gentleman.<\/p>\n

At length Mr. Allan, tired of the caprices and outrages of the boy\u2013genius, and having married a, second time, and now become a father, turns him out of doors, without a cent in the world; and so this child of genius, reared in luxury, after having been born in the hot\u2013bed of excitement, with his keen, precocious intellect and sensitive nerves, is a houseless beggar.<\/p>\n

Mr. Allan died, as rich men can, peacefully in his bed; and men praise him as the \u201cpatron\u201d of Edgar Poe. To my eyes he committed a grievous wrong. When he had once assumed the responsibility\u00a0of this boy, it was his duty to carry it through, and to see how the world went with him. After he had denuded him by his indulgence, it was the height of cruelty for him to cast him, defenseless as he was, upon the hard bosses of the world. It must be borne in mind that he was but a boy of sixteen, and if this youth had become such a monster, he had been ripened under the very eye of his guardian. Where was the fault?<\/p>\n

At the time when he was associated in Richmond with the excellent and simple-hearted Mr. White, as editor of the\u00a0Southern Literary Messenger<\/em>, he was but nineteen. Thus, three years after having been turned adrift in the world by his guardian, he is of sound mind enough and respectable enough in appearance to be taken into the family of Mr. White as assistant editor.<\/p>\n

Even then he had written much, not only in prose but verse also \u2014 had written great quantities of the latter before his guardian abandoned him. […]<\/p>\n

Before Mr. Poe came to New York, he traveled much, both at home and abroad; he had been partially educated at West Point, but his mind was neither mathematical, military, nor subordinate to soldierly discipline, as might have been conceived, and for this cause his relation therewith was dissolved, though he always retained the air inseparable from military training. It was said he made his way to Russia, and got into some difficulty there; be that as it may, he could not have sunk himself very low, for his looks and manner bore not the shadow of a trace of any irregularity.<\/p>\n

If he did make the mistakes imputed to him, I can only say that Edgar Poe was right royally organized, when he could rise so above every vestige of disorder, as the lion shakes the clew from his mane.<\/p>\n

While in Richmond he married his own cousin, and she a child of fourteen. Here was another error. But let us draw the vail over it, for it produced for him in the person of his aunt, and now mother-in-law, Mrs. Clem, one devoted, untiring, long-suffering friend, without whom his career would have been even sadder than it was.<\/p>\n

It must have been in 1842 that Poe first came to reside permanently in New York. He was at once admitted into its literary circles, where his superior address and remarkable conversational powers at once attracted attention.\u00a0Then there was more prestige attached to literature than at present exists. The field is now so over-filled, and the persons of marked genius so comparatively few, that the desire for companionship with literary persons is much less.<\/p>\n

At that time, at the houses of Rev. Dr. Dewey, Miss Anna C. Lynch, Mr. James Lawson, and others of scarcely less celebrity, might be found some of the finest spirits of any age, whose brilliancy entitled them to all the homage they received. It was in these circles that I first met Edgar Poe. He had criticised myself and some others, who could well survive it, very severely, but not entirely ungenerously, and I harbored no malice against him. His wife was at this time much an invalid, and rarely went out, but he was fond of naming her, and dwelling upon her loveliness of character. His manners at these reunions were refined and pleasing, and his scope of conversation that of the gentleman and the scholar. Whatever may have been his previous career, there was nothing in his look or manner to indicate the debauchee. […]<\/p>\n

Poe was an enigma to himself no less than to others, and was only happy in the few hours snatched from the actual, and irradiated by the ideal. He used to take his paper on which to write, and cut it into strips; these he would glue together as he wrote, and convert into rolls, often measuring many yards in length. His penmanship was fine, even to the utmost elegance \u2014 clear and distinct, as if from the hand of a graver. He was not an idle man. He studied much, and his contributions to the literary world comprised several volumes. They always were original and startling. His somber pictures and intricate machinery have a peculiar fascination which few can resist, while a weird, unearthly light, half angel, half devil, like his own poor self, wrought a wizard spell upon the mind. He obtained several prizes for these, and his articles generally were in demand. Indeed, we all recollect the interest felt in every thing emanating from his pen-the relief it was from the dullness of ordinary writers \u2014 the certainty of something fresh and suggestive.<\/p>\n

His critiques were read with avidity, not that he convinced the judgment, but because people felt their ability and their courage; he took the public idols so by the beard and knocked them right and left, till people saw they were no gods at all but miserable shams. Sometimes\u00a0he found the genuine, and attempted the same process with a cool hardihood; but he is a pigmy in giant\u2019s armor who does not come out magnified by the blows of an assailant. These critiques of Edgar Poe were live productions; he did not play with his pen, but wielded it. Right or wrong, all was real at the time. He was terribly in earnest. He was carried away as by an avalanche of words and emotions. Men and women with their books under their arms marched in grand procession before him, and he discovered the rich goods of one, the thefts of another, the divine art, the heavenly beauty, the profound meanings of some, while others were totally enigmatical and unrevealed to him. […]<\/p>\n

As a prose writer, his stories are finished in the highest artistic manner; they are so carefully and artistically completed, that they cease to be fictions, and not being facts, they assume the aspect of a lie. Indeed, Poe believed his own fictions for the time being, or he would have you think so; he became a part of them; he filled up incident, and iterated congruities like a man who is savagely intent upon making you believe him, while underneath he carries a Mephistophelean smile that can not be\u00a0hidden. We have no sympathy with his characters or their surroundings, but he holds us, nevertheless, as the Ancient Mariner held his victim; we read on with a ghastly interest, we hurry on to the close, we can not escape him; we are not pleased but fascinated, and that is his power, a sort of serpent\u2013holding which we can not resist. He was truly a demonized man \u2014 a man possessed: in other words, a man of genius. He will be remembered when better writers, healthier, and more beneficent, are forgotten, for though sometimes incoherent, always morbid, and reckless of results, he touched a vein to which all will more or less respond. […]<\/p>\n

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\u00a0poets<\/em>, 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 \u201cpractical\u201d 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\u2013stars of the lesser magnitude, which it is sorrowful to contemplate as fading stars, beautiful Alcyones, obliterated from the glittering galaxies of Art.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0we 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\u2019s mother, Mrs. Clemm. She never wearied in her love and thoughtfulness for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut, madam,\u201d somebody says, \u201cyou do not consider that Poe was a man, and ought himself to have been the protector.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0manly<\/em>\u00a0men, 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Hoffman used to say,<\/p>\n

\u201cI could easily die for a cause, when I could not live for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou think, then, that heroism is an impulse \u2014 a momentary madness?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Poe was spiritual, abstract, intellectual; he had a manly sense of independence, which rendered\u00a0patronage<\/em>\u00a0of 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\u00a0an atmosphere of taste and appreciation, in some little court-like that of Bavaria for instance, which so fostered the genius of Goeth\u00e9 and Schiller; but in our country the life of genius is a perpetual struggle.<\/p>\n

His marriage had been, as I have said, premature, to his cousin, a sweet, stag-eyed girl, who devoted herself to him in the same way that she would have devoted herself to a greyhound or any other handsome pet, but who could add little to his mental or moral growth. I have always regarded this marriage as an unfortunate one for the poet, who needs a more profound sympathy always, if he would sound the depths of his own genius. That he loved her tenderly none will deny, and some of his sweetest lyrics owed their inspiration to her delicious eyes and girlish affection. She was his playmate, his pretty child-wife, for she was but fourteen at the time of her marriage.<\/p>\n

Later in life, after the death of this child-wife, Mr. Poe became greatly attached to a lady of rare genius and deep spiritualism. The engagement was broken off, perhaps wisely on the part of the lady. A story is in circulation to the purport that Poe, repenting of the engagement, visited the lady in a state of intoxication, in the hope her disgust would release him. I do not place any reliance whatever upon the motive of this visit. That he might have visited her in this unfortunate state is more than possible, and that such might have been the consequence also; but that it was from no such design upon the part of the unfortunate poet I am equally confident.<\/p>\n

He may have talked wildly and in unmanly wise, after such result, but it was nothing more than the reckless language of a child who has marred some precious work. He found then, as always, persons ready to listen to the wild, mortified language of genius, and to go away and report it; but the\u00a0better<\/em>\u00a0soul of Poe disclaimed it altogether.<\/p>\n

One of his most touching and significant poems was addressed to this lady, and I am happy to, say she, who was so\u00a0well able to read and understand the true soul of a poet, despite of all that may tear the harmony of its demonstrations, has not failed to cherish tenderly his memory. She is worthy of the \u201cLines to Helen.\u201d<\/p>\n

I once heard him say,<\/p>\n

\u201cHad I known Helena sooner, I should have been very different from what I have been. I am fond of the society of women\u2014poets always are; and I have found enough to play into my foibles and palliate my defects; but a true woman, with superior intellect and deep spiritualism, would have transformed my whole life into something better.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remark has force in more ways than one. It indicates the sincerity of regret which the man must have felt in view of the past, and is also a fine tribute to the angel\u2013mission of woman. This was uttered but a few weeks before his death, when his last work, Eureka, upon which he had expended much time and thought, was beginning to attract some attention. He had expected more. He had thought this deep utterance of a poetic soul would be hailed as a revelation, and his chagrin was not to be concealed. He was ill at ease at this time. He felt his best life had not been realized. He was always grave, now he was melancholy. Circumstances painful and mortifying had transpired, and he reviewed them with grief.<\/p>\n

He called upon me one morning and found me preparing to start for Philadelphia, where I was engaged for a course of lectures, and our interview was necessarily short. He seemed disappointed\u2013grieved.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have so much \u2014 so much I wished to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recall his look of pain, his unearthly eyes, his emaciated form, his weird look of desolation with a pang, even now. […]<\/p>\n

It is asserted in the American Cyclopedia, that Edgar Poe died in consequence of a drunken debauch in his native city. This is not true.<\/p>\n

At the instigation of a woman, who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed; his friends hurried him away, and he reached his native city only to breathe his last.<\/p>\n

Mr. Poe, near the close of his life, lived in a little band\u2013box of a house at Fordham, and there his wife died. The Brothers of the Jesuits\u2019 College, in that place, contrary to their wont, gave him free access to their groves and gardens, and there he unquestionably passed the happiest years of his life. His simplicity of manners and studious habits endeared him to the good Brothers, who often saw him at midnight as they passed to their vigils, moving silently under the lofty trees, too absorbed in meditation to notice their presence.<\/p>\n

I have more than once sat spell-bound under the Shakesperean illusion of Edwin Booth as\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>, and always in the grove scene I thought of Poe. The same deep thoughtfulness \u2014 the profound expression of sadness \u2014 the weird silence and gloom which harmonize so wonderfully with the character of the shadowy Dane, served to reproduce the image of Edgar Poe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I GIVE the Allan in this name because it is generally so written; but I think the middle one should be at once and forever dropped; since it is that of a man who had befriended the poet-protected and educated him, but who finally abandoned him to his fate, leaving him to battle with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[5663,6728,7864,818],"class_list":["post-4805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-modern-literature","tag-fiction","tag-novels","tag-poe","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}