Part 11

Allan, however, did what he could to forward the young man’s newest ambition, which was to enter the Military Academy at West Point. He paid for a substitute in the army and wrote letters to men who were influential in such matters, with the result that Poe was enrolled at the Academy on July 1, 1830. He gave his age as nineteen years and five months. His prematurely old look led to the invention of the story that the appointment was really procured for Poe’s son, but the son having died the father had taken his place.

While the question of the appointment was pending, Poe spent some time in Baltimore and there published his second volume of verse, _Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems_ (1829).

The accounts of his life at the Academy are not so divergent as to be contradictory. One classmate noted the youth’s censorious manner: ‘I never heard him speak in terms of praise of any English writer, living or dead.’ Excelling in French and mathematics, Poe by intentional neglect of military duty brought about his own dismissal. He was court-martialled and left West Point on March 7, 1831. He had previously taken subscriptions among his friends for a new book of verse. It was published in New York (1831) under the title of _Poems_, ‘second edition,’ and was dedicated to ‘the U. S. Corps of Cadets,’ who are said to have been disappointed at finding in its pages none of the local squibs with which the author had been wont to amuse them.

Poe is next heard of in Baltimore, where he seems to have made his home with his father’s sister, Mrs. Maria Clemm, a widow with one child, Virginia. In 1833 ‘The Saturday Visiter’ of Baltimore offered two prizes--one hundred dollars for a story, fifty for a poem. Poe submitted a manuscript volume entitled ‘Tales of the Folio Club,’ and was given one award for his famous ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Had not the conditions of the contest precluded giving both prizes to the same person, he would have received the other award for his poem ‘The Coliseum.’

Through John P. Kennedy, one of the judges in the contest, Poe came into relations with T. W. White, the proprietor of ‘The Southern Literary Messenger,’ published at Richmond. His contributions were heartily welcomed. White then invited Poe to become his editorial associate. The offer was accepted and Poe went to Richmond. Mrs. Clemm and Virginia followed, and in May, 1836, Poe was married to his cousin. A private marriage is said to have taken place at Baltimore the preceding September.

The arrangement entered into by White and Poe was most propitious. The proprietor of the ‘Messenger’ had obtained the services of a young man with a positive genius for the work in hand,--a young man who was able to contribute such tales as ‘Berenice,’ ‘Morella,’ ‘Hans Pfaall,’ ‘Metzengerstein,’ besides poems, miscellanies, and caustic book-criticisms. On the other hand, Poe had, if a small, at least a regular income. He could not buy luxury with a salary of five hundred and twenty dollars, but it was a beginning, and an increase was promised. Moreover, he was in the hands of a man who regarded him with affection no less than admiration. Unfortunately the arrangement was not to last. Poe had become the victim of a hereditary vice.[25] Whether he drank much or little is of less consequence than the fact that after a period of indulgence he was wholly unfitted for work. Once when Poe was temporarily in Baltimore, White wrote him that if he returned to the office it must be with the understanding that all engagements were at an end the moment he ‘got drunk.’ Kennedy explained Poe’s leaving the ‘Messenger’ thus: He was ‘irregular, eccentric, and querulous, and soon gave up his place.’

From Richmond, Poe went to New York, attracted by some promise in connection with a magazine. He lived in Carmine Street, and Mrs. Clemm contributed to the family support by taking boarders. In July, 1838, was published _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_. A month later Poe removed to Philadelphia.

He contributed to annuals and magazines and had a hand in a piece of hack-work, _The Conchologist’s First Book_ (1839). This same year he became assistant editor of ‘Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly,’ a periodical owned by the actor, William E. Burton, and held his position until June, 1840. The irregularity and querulousness which Kennedy had remarked led to misunderstandings. How the two men differed in policy becomes plain from a letter to Poe in which Burton says: ‘You must, my dear sir, get rid of your avowed ill feelings towards your brother authors.’ There was a quarrel, and Poe, who had some command of the rhetoric of abuse, described Burton as ‘a blackguard and a villain.’

The year 1840 was notable in the history of American letters, for then appeared the first collected edition of Poe’s prose writings, _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_. The edition, of seven hundred and fifty copies, was in two volumes and contained twenty-five stories, among them ‘Morella,’ ‘William Wilson,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘Ligeia,’ ‘Berenice,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’.

Poe, a born ‘magazinist,’ cherished the ambition of editing a periodical of his own in which, as he phrased it, he could ‘kick up a dust.’ He secured a partner and actually announced that ‘The Penn Magazine’ would begin publication on January 1, 1841. Compelled to postpone his project, he undertook the editorship of ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ a new monthly formed by uniting the ‘Gentleman’s,’ which Graham had bought, and ‘The Casket.’ From February, 1841, to June, 1842, Poe contributed to every number of the new magazine, printing, among other things, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ Griswold succeeded him in the editorial chair. Poe gave as a reason for resigning his place ‘disgust with the namby-pamby character of the magazine.’ In the hope of bettering his fortune, he sought a place in the Philadelphia Custom House, but was unsuccessful.

Notwithstanding frequent set-backs, he had it in his power at any time to attract public notice. In 1843 he won a hundred-dollar prize for his story ‘The Gold-Bug,’ printed in the ‘Dollar Newspaper,’ and he lectured with success on ‘The Poets and Poetry of America.’ But the field was barren and Poe determined on going to New York. Within a week after his arrival in that city (April, 1844) he printed in ‘The Sun’ his famous ‘Balloon Hoax.’ In October he began work on ‘The Evening Mirror,’ Willis’s paper, and on January 29, 1845, ‘The Raven’ appeared in its columns and was the poetical sensation of the day. The next month he lectured on American Poetry in the library of the New York Historical Society. Dissatisfied with the ‘Mirror,’ he accepted a proposition from C. F. Briggs to become one of the editors of ‘The Broadway Journal.’ Later Poe became the sole editor, and for a brief time enjoyed the ambition of his life, the control of a paper of his own. He is said to have doubled the circulation in the four months during which he filled the editorial chair. Unfortunately he lacked capital and could by no means secure it. ‘The Broadway Journal’ stopped publication.

While editing the ‘Journal’ Poe was invited to read an original poem before the Boston Lyceum. He gave a juvenile piece, and when criticised, defended himself with curious want of tact. That he might lose no opportunity to alienate his contemporaries, he began publishing in ‘Godey’s Lady’s Book’ a series of papers entitled ‘The Literati,’ in which he gave free rein to his propensity to ‘kick up a dust.’ The irony of his situation might well excite pity. He who most loathed a combination of literature and fashion plates was driven for support to the journals which made such a combination their chief feature.

At the close of 1845 was published _The Raven and Other Poems_, the first collected edition of Poe’s verse. Occasionally the poet was seen at literary gatherings, where he left the most agreeable impression by his manner, appearance, and conversation. But his fortunes steadily declined, and in 1846, after he had moved to Fordham, a suburb of New York, he fell into desperate straits. His frail little wife, always an invalid, grew steadily worse. An appeal was made through the journals in behalf of the unfortunate family. Mrs. Poe died on January 30, 1847. Her husband’s grief was so poignant that it is with amazement one reads of the strange affairs of the heart following this event.

Recovering from the severe illness which followed his wife’s death, Poe resumed work. He lectured and he wrote. _Eureka_ was published early in 1847. The consuming desire to own and edit a magazine was no less consuming, and he made some progress towards founding ‘The Stylus.’

The summer of 1849 Poe spent in Richmond and was received with cordiality. He proposed marriage to Mrs. Shelton of that city, a wealthy widow, somewhat older than himself, and was accepted. On the last of September he started for New York to get Mrs. Clemm and bring her to Richmond. He was found almost unconscious on October 3 at Baltimore, in a saloon used as a voting place, was taken to a hospital, and died at five o’clock on the morning of October 7, 1849.

II

POE’S CHARACTER

Poe’s wilfulness in marring his own fortunes bordered on fatuity. At an age when men give over youthful excesses merely because they are incongruous, he had not so much as begun to ‘settle down.’ The appropriate period for sowing wild oats is brief at best. Nothing justifies an undue prolongation. It were absurd to take the lofty tone with a man of genius because at the age of seventeen he carried to extreme the indulgences characteristic of the youth of his time, or because at eighteen he ran away from a book-keeper’s desk to join the army. Impulsiveness and vacillation are not wholly bad things at eighteen; but at thirty they are ridiculous.

Poe’s abuse of liquor and opium has long been well understood, and the question of his responsibility handed over to the decision of the medical faculty. If many of his troubles sprang from this abuse, many more arose out of his unwillingness to recognize the fact that he was a part of society, not an isolated and self-sufficient being. As a genius he was entitled to his prerogative. He was also a man among men and under the same obligations to continued fair dealing, courtesy, patience, and forbearance as were his fellows. In these matters he was notoriously deficient. No one could have been more eager for praise and sympathy than Poe. He asked for both and received in the measure of his asking. Men of influence helped him ungrudgingly. They lent him money, commended his work, defended him at first from the criticism of those who thought they had suffered at his hands; but it was to no purpose. By his perversity and capriciousness (as also by an occasional display of that which in a less highly endowed man than he would have been called malevolence) Poe alienated those who were most inclined to befriend him. Nevertheless he wondered that friends fell away.

With a powerful mind, a towering imagination, a natural command of the technical part of literature, which he improved by tireless exercise, and with no little spontaneity of productive energy, Poe remained a boy in character, self-willed, spoiled, ungrateful, petulant. The sharper the lash of fortune’s whip on his shoulders, the more rebellious he became.

The affair of the Boston Lyceum illustrates Poe’s singular disregard of what is expected of men supposed to know the ways of the world. A Southern paper commenting on this affair said that Poe should not have gone to Boston. The implication was that as Poe had been attacking the New Englanders for years he could not expect fair treatment. Poe had indeed often attacked the ‘Frogpondians,’ as he enjoyed calling them, and they invited him to come and read an original poem on an occasion of some local importance. This may have been a mark of innocence on the part of the ‘Frogpondians;’ it can hardly be construed as indicative of narrowness or prejudice. Poe accepted their hospitality apparently in the spirit in which it was offered, read one of his old poems, and declared afterward that he wrote it before completing his tenth year, and that he considered it would answer sufficiently well for an audience of Transcendentalists: ‘It was the best we had--for the price--and it _did_ answer remarkably well.’

The episode is of no importance save as it illustrates Poe’s attitude towards the game of life. Poe expected other men to play the game strictly according to the rules, for himself he would play the game in his own way. And he did. But he could not go on breaking the rules indefinitely. They who had his real interest at heart told him as much. Simms, the novelist, wrote Poe in July, 1846, that he deeply deplored his misfortunes--‘the more so as I see no process for your relief but such as must result from your own decision and resolve.’ The letter should be read in its entirety. It does honor to the writer’s manly nature, and it throws no little light on the enigmatic character of Poe.

III

THE PROSE WRITER

Poe’s genius was essentially journalistic. In his prose writing he aimed at an immediate effect, and he knew exactly how to produce it. The journalist does not in general write with a view to the influence his paragraph will produce week after next. The paper will have disappeared week after next, if not day after to-morrow. Though his theme be the eternal verities, the journalist must write as if he had but the one chance to speak on that subject. He will therefore be direct, positive, clear, seeking to persuade, convince, irritate, amuse.

The most obvious characteristics of Poe’s style are found in his clarity, his vividness, his precision, in the dense shadows and the high lights, in the hundred unnamed but distinctly felt marks of the journalistic style. Whatever he proposes to do, that he does. There is no fumbling. Even his mysteries are as certain as the stage effects in a spectacular drama; they seem to come at the turning of an electric switch or the inserting of a blue glass before the lime light. In reality the process is much more complicated. Other magicians have essayed to produce like effects by turning the same switch, with disastrous result.

Poe was a diligent seeker after literary finish. He was painstaking, and would polish and retouch a paragraph when to the eye of a good judge there was nothing left to do by way of improvement. ‘He seemed never to regard a story as finished.’[26]

He was over emphatic at times, and like De Quincey, many of whose irritating mannerisms he had caught, made a childish use of italics. But he had no need of these adventitious supports. It was enough for him to state a thing in his inimitable manner. While his vocabulary was for the most part simple, he was not without his verbal affectations. He loved words surcharged with poetic suggestion. A lamp never hangs from the ceiling, it ‘depends.’ One of his favorite words is ‘domain.’ The black ‘tarn’ which mirrors the house of Usher he could have called by no other term. ‘Lake,’ or ‘pond,’ or ‘pool’ would not have done. The word must be remote, suggestive, mysterious.

His style often glows with prismatic colors, but the colors seem to be refracted from ice. There is no warmth, no sweetness, no lovable and human quality. All the pronounced characteristics of Poe’s style are intensely and coldly intellectual. It is easier to admire his use of language than to like it.

IV

_TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE_

By virtue of his journalistic gift, Poe resembled the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. He could not, like Defoe, have become general literary purveyor to the people, but he was quite ready to profit by what was uppermost in the public mind. _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_ is an illustration, as it is also a good example of Poe’s art in its most mundane form. It recounts the adventures of a runaway lad at sea. Mutiny, drunkenness, brawling, murder, shipwreck, cannibalism, madness, are the chief ingredients of the book. It is minute, circumstantial, prolix, matter of fact. The air of verisimilitude is increased by an alternation of episodes of thrilling interest with tedious accounts of how a cargo should be stowed, and the object and method of bringing a ship to. Only at rare intervals does Poe’s peculiar genius flash out.

As the longest of his writings the _Narrative_ has a peculiar value. By it we are able to get some notion of his power for ‘sustained effort,’ to use a phrase that always irritated him. That power was certainly not great; perhaps it was never fairly tested. _The Journal of Julius Rodman_ is a second attempt at the same kind of fiction. Poe was less happy in descriptions of the prairie than of the sea; the interest of the _Journal_ is feeble.

In these fictions the author holds fast to tangible things. Pym and Rodman might have had the adventures they recount. In another group of stories Poe leavens fact with imagination. Such are ‘The Balloon Hoax,’ ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,’ ‘A Descent into the Maelström,’ and the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Real or alleged science is compounded with the elements of wonder and mystery. And with these elements comes an increase of power.

Poe, who was never backward in giving himself the credit he thought his due, often failed to understand where his own most marvellous achievements lay. In ‘Hans Pfaall’ he claimed originality in the use of scientific data. Had his stories only this to recommend them, they would long since have been forgotten. Nothing so quickly becomes old-fashioned as popular science. The display of knowledge about aerial navigation in ‘Hans Pfaall’ perhaps made a brave show in 1836, but it is childish now. A Hans Pfaall of the Twentieth Century would descend on Rotterdam in a dirigible balloon, and if questioned would be found to entertain enlightened views on storage batteries. Poe talked glibly about sines and cosines and brought noisy charges of astronomical ignorance against his brother writers, but it was not in these things that his genius displayed itself, it was rather in the way this wonder-worker makes one aware of the illimitable stretches of space, the appalling vastness, the silence, the mystery, terror, and majesty of Nature. He is the clever craftsman in his account of how the Dutch bellows-mender started on his aerial travels. But when in two or three paragraphs Poe conveys a sense of height so terrific that the plain fireside reader, indisposed to balloon ascensions, grasps the arms of his chair and clings to the floor with the toes of his slippers lest he fall--then does he display a power with which popular science has nothing to do.

This is true of ‘A Descent into the Maelström.’ What scientific fact went into the composition of the piece appears to have been taken from the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, but the valuable part, the sense of life and movement, the crash of the storm, the roar of the waves, the shriek of the vortex, like the cry of lost souls, all this is not to be found in encyclopædias. The story can be read any number of times and its magical power felt afresh each time. But the first reading cannot be described by so tame a phrase as a literary pleasure, it is an experience.

Another masterpiece is the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The din of the storm is not easily got out of one’s ears. With the unnamed hero of the tale we ‘stand aghast at the warring of wind and ocean’ and are chilled by the ‘stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away, into the desolate sky.’

In another group of stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ the gruesome ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter,’ the author fabricates mysteries for the express purpose of unravelling them afterwards. Poe, who seldom attempts the creation of a character, actually created one in the person of his famous detective. Dupin is a living being in a world peopled for the most part with shadows.

Poe professed not to think much of his detective stories. The ‘ratiocinative’ tale is not a high order of literary achievement. Poe shares the honors accruing from the invention of such puzzles with Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau, and the ‘great ‘Boisgobey,’ and they in turn with the most sensational of sensation mongers.

‘The Gold-Bug’ afforded the author a vehicle for giving expression to his delight in cryptography, at the same time he availed himself of the perennial human interest in the prospect of unearthing buried treasure. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was based on a contemporary murder case. It contains a minimum of that in which Poe often revelled, namely physical horror, and a maximum of the ratiocinative element. ‘The Purloined Letter’ is in lighter vein, and illustrates the comedy side of Dupin’s adventures. Chevalier and minister cross swords with admirable grace, but no blood is drawn.

The masterpiece of the group is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ Genuinely original, blood-curdling, the story depends for its real force not on the ingenious unravelling of a frightful mystery, but on the sense of nameless horror which creeps over us as little by little the outré character of the tragedy is disclosed. We realize that in the dread event of being murdered one might have a choice as to how it was done. The predestined victim might even pray to die by the hands of a plain God-fearing assassin and not after the manner of Madame L’Espanaye.

Of the stories classified as tales of conscience, ‘William Wilson,’ ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ‘The Imp of the Perverse,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and ‘The Black Cat,’ the first is not only the best, but is also one of the best of all stories in that genre. The image of bodily corruption is not present and the interest is held by perfectly legitimate means. ‘The Black Cat’ is a fearful and repulsive piece, and at the same time characteristic. Poe hesitated at nothing when it came to working out his theme. He who had such absolute control of the materials of his art too seldom practised reticence in exhibiting the gruesome details of a scene of cruelty.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a representative story, if not absolutely the best illustration of Poe’s genius. The motive of premature burial haunts him here as often elsewhere. But the emphasis of this tragedy of a race is laid where it belongs, in the terror of the thought of approaching madness. Poe wrote many stories which can be described each as the fifth act of a tragedy. It may be doubted whether he surpassed ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’