Text: Robert Armistead Stewart, The Case of Edgar Allan Poe: A Pathological Study Based on an Investigation of Lauvriere, Richmond: Whittel and Shepperson, 1910

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The Case of Edgar Allan Poe.

Of all the geniuses whose life and work have given rise to a riot of bickerings — a strife of tongues, Edgar Allan Poe holds the luckless palm. Ever since his first rise to fame he has been the object of passionate admiration and of equally passionate dislike. To his admirers he is the blameless master, the discerning critic, the one American of supreme literary renown. To his adversaries he assumes the role of “high priest of Beelzebub, the scandal-monster of the literary world, pariah of letters, beggar, vagabond, unprincipled, base and depraved, silly, vain, and ignorant — not alone an assasin [[assassin]] in morals, but a quack in literature, a cool plagiarist, one who succeeded in combining in his single person, all the vices which genius had up to then showed itself capable of attaining in its most eccentric orbits;” these and many other epithets which sweep the whole gamut of billingsgate and vilification. The veneration of his disciples, on the other hand, has reached its sublimest and most exaggerated expression in the prayer of Baudelaire addressed to God, the fountain of all strength and wisdom and justice; to his mistress, Mariette, and to Poe. Thus we see a single man at once adored, as deity and yet execrated as the vilest and most degraded of mortals. The quintessence of spleen, however, is vented by a contributor to the Living Age of 1855, who declares the poet a “brute, the American yahoo, a pig of genius, possessed of the three spirits of perfidy, fury and immortality, of raving devil who runs and howls in the darkness, of a monstrous bastard of demon and genius,” and ends his pious litany with this unpharasaical exclamation, “Why, O Lord, hast Thou created this man in vain?”

It is into this babel, then, that any one who has to do with [page 4:] Poe must, perforce, enter, till before he realize it, the most placid of men will find himself involved in the clatter of tongues, and immersed in that atmosphere of contention in which Poe moved and had his being, and in which it appears his spirit must wander forever. His life, indeed, was one ceaseless strife with foes real or imaginary. Those he dubbed “titmice,” the Brahmin plagiarist, the dilettante poetaster, and the hireling who wrote under the inspiration of Mammon and not of the Muse, felt the crushing vigor of his invective. Boston, then the literary Mecca, became a Sodom for his wrath. “We like Boston,” said he; “we were born there and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact. The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkins pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good. Their common is no common thing and the duck pond might answer if its answer could be heard for the frogs.” When he aroused the “Frogpondians” to frenzy by his charge of plagiarism against Professor Longfellow, the consequences were obvious to the accuser. “Outis,” says he, in his Longfellow controversy, “Outis considers me a fool; and this opinion on the part of Outis is what mankind have agreed to denominate an idea; and this idea is also entertained by Mr. Aldrich, and by Mr. Longfellow — and by Mrs. Outis and her seven children, and by Mrs. Aldrich and hers, and by Mrs. Longfellow and hers, including the grand-children and great-grandchildren, if any, who will be instructed to transmit the idea in unadulterated purity down an infinite vista of generations yet to come.” In the excessive unreason of this obstinate combativeness we read the cause of Poe's countless disasters. He became obsessed with an idea and pursued it relentlessly, though he devoted his memory to execration and his fame to detraction, but for his abnormal nature to have done otherwise would have been as if he had sought to fly in fetters or go up aeronauting in a leaden balloon. [page 5:]

The literary atmosphere of the time, which would have stifled a Keats of a Shelley, was almost intolerable to Poe. The infant nation, hitherto servilely imitative of the mother-country, now devoted itself to the patriotic duty of creating a literature. As hot-pressed and gilt-edged inanities poured forth from the groaning presses, patriotism dictated that this jargon should be read and admired, and shameless critics became complacent tasters of insipidities while inconsequent penny-a-liners exhausted them- selves in quackery and puffism over the twaddle of some ambitious blockhead. The mob applauded with a feeling of self-conscious vanity, as every brainless partisan feels himself invested with some part of the glory of a countryman whom he thus blindly exalts. Then as now, there was crying need of a fearless critic to arise in the land-a critic equipped for his task with fine discriminating taste, wide reading, a logical bent, and a courageous heart. Such a one then arose in Edgar Poe — a man who was Argus-eyed for the literary pilferers, in serene unconsciousness of the fact that one day the paternity of his own Raven would be charged to an Italian parrot. This champion of Truth and Beauty, with quixotic recklessness, set to tilting with the empty windmills of the day, and, although charity perhaps dictated a milder course, administered to scores of victims a mangling which they, in most cases, richly deserved. That Poe was also generous with his praise, no one who has read his hundreds of critiques can conscientiously deny, and even if censure pre-dominated over praise, this, says he, is the natural and inevitable tendency of all criticism in this age of so universal authorship, that no man in his senses will pretend to deny the vast pre-dominance of bad writers over good. Imagine a like critic to arise these latter days and state the just measure of fashionable follies that form the literary staple of the majority of our idle readers who pass over the best and noblest to gorge on the offal of the literary pander. [page 6:]

The most virulent of all the hornets stirred up by Poe was a reverend blackguard, Rufus Griswold, “grim by name,” as Stevenson says, “who makes so repulsive a figure in literary history that he might well have been coined in the morbid fancy of his victim,” This gentleman, who was associated with Poe on Graham's Magazine, had at various times, together with a quantum of praise, come in for some very caustic censure from the exacting critic, and bided his time to get a full revenge. This season came after the death of Poe when the latter, by some strange vagary, left his deadly enemy as his literary executor. The result was an edition of the works of the unhappy author, incomplete, garbled and mutilated, and a memoir of such outrageous bitterness and perfidy that it should have excommunicated the writer from the fellowship of all true and honorable men. Though the poet's friends, Willis, Wilmer, John Neal and Graham expressed themselves sympathetically and kindly in the press and periodicals, it was the infamous legend of Griswold, made enduring by its association with Poe's collected works, that directed the opinion of the world, and this malicious document became the father of lies innumerable, as each succeeding enemy sought to ring changes more atrocious on its calumny.

It being thus with the memory of Poe, it behooves the impartial and scientific-minded student to inquire rigorously into the true state of this case, accepting no single opinion without mature investigation. We know that human nature and the human soul present countless anomalies. We are aware that it is a perilous task to attempt to fathom the human heart. To even his intimates every man is more or less of a mystery. Of the thousands of thoughts, emotions and impulses that pass through the mind, only a tithe, at best, are accessible for inspection and analysis. Despite the old adage, “Nihil de mortuis nisi bonum,” Alfred de Vigny was not afraid to say, “One must dissect only the dead. The fashion of trying to open the brain of a living being is false and wicked.” [page 7:]

As it has been sixty years since the death of Poe we may presume that his character is ripe for inspection. We must then set to work to study his ancestry and early environment; we must pry into his domestic life; we must rifle his private letters; we must submit his facial measurements to a Lombroso; we must hold a clinic over his literary remains, and decide how much of himself he incorporated into his works. Now of Poe, Briggs said years ago, “It will be long before the true character of the gloomy poet will be exposed in its nudity to the public eye. There was among those who knew him intimately a generous disposition to bury in the shadow of oblivion his weaknesses, or rather the distinctive traits of his personality, and insist only on his literary productions. Poe was a psychological phenomenon; and one would do more good than evil by giving a clear and impartial analysis of his character. But when shall we find a man bold enough to expose himself to the reproach of being ill-intentioned because he shall have dared to make all the revelations that such a task demands.” Here then is the cue, and, acting on this, M. Lauvrière was the first to make an exhaustive study of this most remarkable case. Poe was a psychological phenomenon. “Indeed,” says Lauvrière, “the case of Poe presents one of the richest and at the same time strangest products of those contradictory ferments that are worked by Mother Nature into the human paste. The most striking feature of his character was the intermittent, impulsive, brutal alcoholism which characterizes the unhappy poet. Now this special alcoholism has in medicine an exact name; it is called dipsomania, and this dipsomania is but a feature, most prominent in this case, as in many others, of a nervous state of general disequilibrium called degeneracy. All the traits of this degeneracy Poe has as profoundly inscribed in his flesh as in his soul; in his poor haggard face of inspired Bohemian, as in the most immortal pages of his prose and verse.” [page 8:]

Properly speaking, Poe was not a drunkard, but a dipsomaniac. For long periods he touched no stimulant, and when he gave way to his irresistible “imp of the perverse” it was with a horror unspeakable. For the dipsomaniac is to the drunkard as the kleptomaniac is to the robber. The drunkard wishes to drink as the robber wishes to steal. The dipsomaniac, on the contrary, cannot help drinking as the kleptomaniac cannot help stealing. Now all impulsive monomanias, dipsomania, kleptomania, pyromania, the suicidal mania, etc., are merely varied exhibitions of mental degeneracy. Recognizing in Poe's case this unmistakable taint we should investigate its earliest sources and trace its development. It has been well said that a child's education should begin before it is born; but we must begin with remote generations if we are to ward off the possibilities of a malicious heredity. We find Poe the child of parents eminently fitted to bring into the world an abnormal offspring. The father, David Poe, was a scapegrace and a consumptive. The mother, sprung from a probably defective father, passed through the excitement and wear of a stage career to an early grave from the same disease as her husband. That alcohol was the scourge of the Poe family appears from the letter of a cousin warning Edgar against the immoderate use of the bottle. Now alcohol, as morphine, opium, and all other poisons that attack the nervous system, is one of the most powerful factors of degeneracy; and with a fruitful soil for the malady it remains to be seen what education and training can do to ward off the noxious effects of heredity. “Ill. born children,” says a great alienist, “should be submitted to special surveillance, all the efforts of which should be to combat natural tendencies — to avoid all nervous excesses and emotions. Let us now examine the early career of Poe.

As is well known, Edgar, after the death of his mother, was adopted by the Allans, of Richmond, who, contrary to the general opinion, were by no means rich at this period.. That the boy was [page 9:] reared in excessive luxury is impossible; but that he was petted and spoiled by his adopted parents is undoubted. His precocious talents, chief among which was his aptitude for declaiming verses, were admiringly encouraged and applauded. “Romance,” said he, “taught me my alphabet to say — to lisp my very earliest word, while in the wild wood I did lie, a child with a most knowing eye.” The history of his earlier years is too meagre for us to draw positive conclusions, except that, despite his athletic proclivities and his occasional indulgence in wholesome boyish pranks and fisticuffs, he was developing a distinctiveness and unsociability of temper that marked him to his playmates as peculiar. Five years in the romantic old English school of Doctor Bransby doubtless increased his contemplative nature, and if we are to credit his quasi-biography, “William Wilson,” he experienced here the first awakening of a morbid conscience.

On his return to Richmond we find him again distinguished by athletic prowess, but no favorite with his school fellows on account of his gloomy and forbidding temper. He was now com- posing his earliest poems and giving marked evidence of that seething intellectuality that was soon to dominate him. And at this impressionable age of pubescence occurred his first violent explosion of Platonic love for a woman of thirty-one, whose early and pathetic death threw him into a delirium of despair. For hours at a time he would lie stretched upon her grave regardless of autumnal wind and rain, and it was here doubtless that he developed that belief in a painful survival of sense in the decomposing corpse, which, mingled with magnetism and spiritism, was for so long to take the place of religion in the mind of the poet. He had hardly recovered from this first shock to his affections when he became enamored of a girl slightly younger than him- self, in whom he seemed to see the ideal of his soul. “The. boyish poet love,” said he years afterwards, “is indisputably that one of the human sentiments which most nearly realizes our [page 10:] dreams of the chastened voluptuousness of heaven.” To him Sarah Elmira Royster was the Egeria of his visions — the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts,” This lady, however, slighted his advances, to marry a man of riper charms, and we seem to find the poet's bitter disappointment voiced in those later lines:

In 1826 Poe went to the University of Virginia where some of the distinctive traits of his later life began to come out in bold relief. Through his ready intellect he accomplished creditably his chosen studies, while his restless disposition impelled him to the worse excesses of college life. He resorted to the gaming table, and frequently drank to excess with that wild frenzy which Baudelaire calls drinking like a barbarian. We remark, too, peculiarities that became accentuated in his later life. He was developing the conception of his own mission, and brooding over the things of the soul on his long solitary walks in the Ragged Mountains where he later laid the scene of one of his wierdest tales. His precocious taste for strangeness was becoming more pronounced. When he is busy writing and a friend chides him with inattention to what his visitor is saying, he declares that he is simply practicing his mind to follow two trains of thought at one time. Again, he invites a friend to his room, and in the absence of fuel breaks up a table and throws it, together with some books, into the grate. These incidents mark the progress of his growing singularity and the morbid culture of the ego which were to enclose him in a fatal isolation [page 11:] and to render his will less and less capable of resisting the trials and misfortunes of life, till his final complete collapse.

At the end of the college year, Edgar, piqued because his adopted father declined to pay certain debts of honor, left his home and set out on his path of wretchedness and renown. His first volume of poems, published obscurely in Boston, is, although of trifling literary merit, an interesting index of the youthful author — exhibiting his idealism, his restless ambition, and his excessive exaggeration of the ego. It was doubtless this craving for self-exaltation that incited him to set afloat the ridiculous fabrication of his European journey of adventure at a period when he was serving as a very exemplary common soldier in the Army of the United States, that inspired him to enhance his apparent precocity by constantly tampering with the date of his birth, and that was responsible for other fables worthy of a Chatterton or a Hugo. Although his army career appears unexceptionable, his West Point period was wildly tempestuous and came to an abrupt end by his summary dismissal. He had all the restiveness of a Schiller under military duress, but lacked the German's discipline and self-control.

We now meet Poe in Baltimore at the age of twenty, and here, by his own confessions and the testimony of his friends, we are informed of the progress of the terrible malady which was to bring the ecstatic dreamer to the verge of madness. From his earliest tales we deduce the morbid attitude of his mind — the obsessions of Berenice, the mysticism of the MS. Found in a Bottle, the suicidal mania of the hero of the Assignation. During his editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond we find him writing to his friend Kennedy appealing for assistance in overcoming his temptations, to which he gave way, not constantly, but at long intervals, and which were invariably followed by spells of appalling depression. His stay in Philadelphia, as editor of Burton's and of the Gentleman's Magazine, was wonderfully [page 12:] fruitful, but he was constantly harrassed by the numerous enemies aroused by his unsparing critiques, and finally left his position in a rage at finding Griswold in the editorial chair, thus displaying that habitual instability — that fatal instability of a man too dissatisfied with the present not to be ever careless of the future. We see in these years in Philadelphia more serious and numerous symptoms of his malady — obsessions, impulsions, superstitious fears, fancies of persecution, delirium of grandeur — all signs and precursors of a fatal insanity. Behind his now permanent mask of sad and gloomy gravity we detect a profound inequality of humor — exaggerated enthusiasm in his correspondence with Snodgrass, an exaltation bordering on the insanity of greatness in his letters to Lowell — and Poe was too minute an observer of himself not to be aware of this continual instability of his being.

“I can very well understand,” he writes to Lowell, “that constitutional indolence of which you complain, for it is one of my own habitual faults. I am extremely inactive, and prodigiously industrious, by fits. There are periods when every sort of mental exercise is a torture to me, and when nothing pleases me except to commune in the solitude of mountains and woods — those altars of Byron. I am thus lost in dreams and in vagabond wanderings for entire months, to awaken finally a prey to a sort of mania for writing. Then I scratch the whole day and read all night while this malady lasts.”

What more definite confession could we desire than this, of those impulses and fits of depression to which he was now subject? The ego, which in the days of Tamerlane, was naively self- sufficient, invested with imperturbable pride, henceforth conceals itself, through the influence of long and severe trials, in a restless egotism, sensitive, always watchful, prepared for action, vengeance and attack. The futile human glory, which after the manner of Byron, he affected to despise, he sought by every means in his [page 13:] power. Through his flamboyant articles, by his correspondence with men of letters, he sought to extend his fame. To have his name in the mouths of men, to have his books read by the thousands of copies, to hear publicly praised the rare merits of his genius — that was a sort of ambition, if not very noble, at least common enough for Poe not to blush to confess it. And to attain this publicity Poe resorted to clap-trap, mystifications, Balloon hoaxes and other sensations which added rather to his notoriety than to his renown. This noisy and irritable ambition had its excuse in disinterest. Poe, who had so cheerfully sacrificed his chance of inheritance from the Allans, did not love money. “I have,” said he, “supported cheerfully poverty, the thousand affronts and all the ills that result from it in America, where more than in any other country on earth to be poor is to be despised.” Here we observe a fault of character as well as an error of judgment. Poe's follies caused many of the miseries that fell upon his family, but it is doubtful how much he was responsible, or whether he was even conscious of his errors. Obsessed as he was by his mystical ideas, he was ever at a loss how to adapt himself to his surroundings. In the midst of this mental deterioration Poe was tenderly devoted to his child wife, Virginia. despite whatever sinister inferences some biographers may draw from the Black Cat and the Raven. We have the testimony of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, that Edgar was never lacking in fidelity and was devoted to his dear Cissy to her last hour. The truth is, in our opinion, that he had vowed to Virginia, along with a zealous tenderness, that exalted, ethereal, immaterial cult which, since his earliest youth, had been the spontaneous issue of his ardent nature. He loved, in this pale childish figure, of such sickly grace, perishing through invisible causes — this gradual death of the carnal nature — the incarnation of his own. morbid ideal formed of Beauty and Death. The poor consumptive, like the Helen of his childhood, devoted to a premature end, [page 14:] was the living prototype of his Ligeias, his Morellas, and his Eleonoras, as later of his Leonores and Ululumes, all impalpable heroines, consumed by a mysterious malady. In the earlier form of Metzengerstein, he glorifies the same hideous disease, in these words: “The beautiful lady Mary! How could she die? — and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the heyday of the young blood — the heart all passion — the imagination all fire — amid the remembrances of happier days — in the fall of the year — and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!” Virginia was, in her real presence, as for the smoker of opium (and Poe was addicted to the drug), the suggestive image that transfigures ecstacy — that stimulates the radiant creatures of a ravished imagination. So when this being threatened to disappear, it was as if, in the words of Eleonora, “The voluminous cloud uprose and abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into the regions of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from the Valley of the Many Colored Grass.”

In a letter written to a friend he referred to Virginia's bad health as responsible for much of his condition. “I am,” said he, “constitutionally nervous in a very unusual degree. I become [[became]] insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank — God knows how often or how much. As a matter of course my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.” Like many other victims of chronic ills Poe exaggerates one of the occasional causes. However, that incurable, although intermittent malady of Virginia, must have contributed singularly to throw into disequilibrium a nature as ill poised as his and to prepare those fits of depression which are, according to alienists, the most fruitful soil for dipsomaniacal impulsions. We know his extreme sensibility and impressionability to trifling things. Says Graham, [page 15:] “Even when he was absorbed in his work, I observed that a sudden breath of air, a noise that one could hardly notice, would make him start. Once he said to me: ‘I surely believe that demons take advantage of the night to lead imprudent persons astray. And yet you know I don’t believe in them.’”

Now one of the most frequent cerebral effects of alcohol is that curious panphobic state that holds the victim in suspense — a prey to inexplicable terror. That Poe did not stop at alcohol alone we may be assured, for we are taught that dipsomaniacs resort to other drugs to appease their cravings. That he made use of opium we find suggested in his earlier works in the reveries of Morella, of Berenice and later in the Assignation, as also in certain passages in Loss of Breath and of The Oval Portrait, both of which were eliminated in later revised forms of these tales. This last, published in 1842, contains a passage of De-Quincyesque vigor that is too vivid and verisimilar not to be autobiographic.

“At length, I bethought me,” says his hero, “of a little pacquet of opium which lay with my tobacco in the hookah case; for at Constantinople I had acquired the habit of smoking the weed with the drug. Pedro handed me the case. I sought and found the narcotic, but when about to cut off a portion I felt the necessity of hesitation. In smoking it was a matter of little importance how much was employed. Usually, I had half filled the bowl of the hookah with opium and tobacco cut and mingled intimately, half and half. Sometimes when I had used the whole of this mixture I experienced no very peculiar effects; at other times I would not have smoked the pipe more than two thirds out when symptoms of mental derangement which were even alarming, warned me to desist. But the effect proceeded with an easy gradation which deprived the indulgence of all danger. Here, however, the case was different. I had never swallowed opium before. Laudanum and morphine I had occasionally used, and about them I should [page 16:] have had no reason to hesitate, but the solid drug I had never seen employed. Pedro knew no more respecting the proper quantity to be taken than myself — and thus, in the sad emergency, I was left altogether to conjecture. Still I felt no especial uneasiness; for I resolved to proceed by degrees. I would take a very small dose in the first instance. Should this prove impotent, I would repeat it; and so on, until I find an abatement of the fever, or obtain that sleep which was so pressingly requisite, and with which my reeling senses had not been blessed for now more than a week”

Perhaps it is to this habit precociously begun that we may at- tribute the ecstatic states and gloomy revery remarked by his West Point classmates, and the intoxication in the early morning that White observed in Richmond. Poe was doubtless seeking to combat the one poison with the other; but in passing from the vulgar orgies of alcohol to the so-called aristocratic ecstacies of opium, the poor impulsive who thought that he was liberating himself was merely changing masters. Thus we see, under the double toxic influence of these two passions, the habitual crises of exaltation and depression constantly increasing in frequency and gravity, and despite some phases of ephemeral glory and melancholy joy, their powerless victim, haggard, unbalanced, worn out before his time, rushing desperately towards a ruin, the more tragic that is at once the more conscious and the more inevitable.

We are now approaching the last stage of Poe's career — the melancholy days in New York, where, to the crowning catastrophe of the death of his beloved Virginia, disasters trod close on disasters, in these days of the Raven. On the gloomy January morning of Virginia's death, the skies were “ashen and sober,” and the wind so sharp that the poet had to envelop himself in his old military cloak, which last relict, after having warmed a body now icy in death, was to protect for two winters [page 17:] a being menaced by the same destiny. “No man,” Poe had said, “can boast of having the right to complain of fate when he preserves even in his adversity the unchanging love of a woman.” Now that he had this love no longer what was to become of the unhappy poet.

It was not long before the wretched widower sought consolation and sympathy. Almost immediately after a heartrending adieu to his friend, Louise, he became desperately enamored of a woman of letters whom he had scarcely seen — the “Helen — Helen of a thousand dreams.” To show clearly the state of Poe's mind at this period, we find him, in his correspondence with Mrs. Whitman, doing violence to the memory of his beloved Virginia, swearing that he never truly loved her, and that Mrs. Whitman possessed his first and only affection. Almost immediately after the rupture that was brought about by the intervention of Mrs. Whitman's friends, we find him making violent love to Annie. And again on his trip to Richmond another platonic outburst gives further evidence of the instability of his mind. After this last ray of sunshine in his home city, there followed so soon his mysterious and tragic death.

We must now face a problem much easier to state than to solve. To what point was this unhappy being responsible? In spite of the poor discipline that reigned in the home of the Allans it is not doubtful that for the average child this adoption would have been a great stroke of good fortune; but as it was to make of Poe, from his adolescence, an irreparable outcast, it must be acknowledged that the consequences were the more disastrous in that the victim found himself, on account of his unstable nature and proud aspirations, devoted to permanent wretchedness and irritation. Although success was not entirely lacking in his career, how much more numerous and durable were the disasters. If there were occasional manifestations of frank and genuine sympathy, how much more frequent and more persistent were the [page 18:] outbursts of venon [[venom]]. We must add, too, that Poe's infirmity exposed him more to the bad than to the good treatment of his kind. It revealed to him, in selfish humanity, much less that tolerance, that indulgence, that pity, that fraternal charity so theoretically vaunted than the cold indifference, perverse glee, black perfidy, and cynical cruelty of the human beast; illusions, insinuations, calumnies, insults public and private, duplicity. How can we then be surprised that the famous milk of human kindness turned so early within him, had made him incredibly bitter and sour? Indeed a genius must be well poised not to be contemptuous of the petty actions of petty men, especially in this unfruitful America, where genius gets less coddling than any where else in the civilized world. To Poe's sea of troubles abroad was added his great domestic concern. To behold his fragile wife perpetually tossed between life and death must have been most depressing and exasperating for this hypersensitive being, condemned to fearful helplessness before a spectacle of unceasing suffering. In short, there was, perhaps, nothing incontestably happy in the destiny of Poe, except the presence of his mother- in-law, Mrs. Clemm — the persistence of that sane affection some- what blind, eminently helpful, truly providential, which guided her unhappy charge through many of the perils that beset him. Now if, as Brisquet declares, the best treatment for hysteria is happiness, how could the poor wretch who knew it so seldom, ever be cured? What could his will accomplish, in the midst of so many malevolent exterior influences — that will by turns the servant of the lowest passions and the aid of the highest aspirations, never adapting itself to the exigencies of his milieu or the conditions of his own nature. Though fully conscious of his unstable character, Poe was not the more apt to control it, as he was no longer the master of his own actions. His pretended free will was a lure so much the more dangerous as he believed in it blindly. [page 19:]

The moral derivable from such an existence is obviously very simple — it is a lesson of kindness. Since Poe's faults were so deeply rooted in his organism that they could perish only with himself, we must necessarily approach the deplorable spectacle of his errors and his shortcomings with sentiments of indulgence. Who, unless he be narrowly bound up in a limited egotism, can boast of completely escaping, through the mysteries of his birth as well as the unforeseen complications of his life, from the multiple and subtile laws of degeneracy? Who can boast that friends or neighbors, those who are nearest and dearest to one, will always escape from it? Science does not cease to repeat to us that mental equilibrium is more unstable than physical equilibrium — that it fails suddenly in individuals as well as in families in which no anterior accident ever could have predicted it. There arises manifestly from the determinism of unkindly nature a complete code of altruism — a powerful lesson to add indulgence to intelligence and to complete reason by kindness.

From the memorable existence of Poe there arises another lesson which all alienism proclaims. Happy are the mediocre if they know their own happiness. Sainly [[Saintly]] tempered, they are born ready adapted to the ways of existence. Properly framed from their earliest infancy for the conquest of common joys as well as for the accomplishment of common tasks they find in complacent optimism the highest formula of their unconscious egoism. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” — this, as has been said, is mediocrity. “Under such conditions,” declares Moreau de Tours, “man may be endowed with good sense, a judgment more or less sure, a certain degree of imagination; his passions will never be intense; he will ever be master of himself; he will never be a great criminal nor will he be afflicted with that mental malady which is called genius.” On the other hand, woe to exceptional mortals! They rarely find, amid the hazards of life, circumstances which fit their abnormal natures; in seeking to flee the vulgar throng, they [page 20:] wander astray; seeking to rise above, they fall below; incapable of accommodating themselves to every-day realities, they are the constant victims of irremediable defects. Their superiority is their woe, “Genius,” says Lamartine, “bears within itself a principle of destruction, death, and insanity, as the fruit bears the hidden worm.” Let the mediocre, then, rejoice; but let us at least respect the genius even in his weakness; for by sacrificing himself he has made for the progress of the race. Baudelaire has said: “One should always be drunk — on wine, poetry or virtue, as you choose. Not to be the martyred slave of Time; get drunk; get drunk unceasingly.” Poor Israfel; always intoxicated with alcohol or the ideal, why hast thou been so un- lucky as to have experienced the wings of the archangel? Thou wouldst not have suffered so much if thou hadst known how to clip them; the few dizzy flights in the direction of Beauty and the Beyond which they afforded thee would not have cost the appalling misery of being dragged through bloody mire. Guilty or not, victim of life, we shall not pity thee the less.

It is now important to study the influence of this morbid condition on the work of Poe, and to seek to explain the fantastic element that has there so prominent a place. Granting the unbalanced nature of our hero and his ecstatic moods, all the unreality of his tales is explained; this fancy is merely the spontaneous product of his acquired and cultivated malady; this unreality is the natural fruit of his acknowledged blemishes. Thus Poe persistently lends to his characters abnormal states. Berenice, epilepsy and to Medeline [[Madeline]], catalepsy. The fantastic vision of the Oval Portrait proceeds from the beginning of delirium which the author himself attributes to a recent wound. It is also the beginning of a delirium well known to surgeons that explains, from the avowal of the narrator, the abnormally acute sensations, the subtilely exaggerated sensations, of the victim of the Inquisition. A maniac attacked by a hereditary malady, a [page 21:] melancholy dreamer, a prey to fixed, incoherent, superstitious ideas is that Metzengerstein who feels quivering in his fierce steed the implacable hate of ancestral enemies. The simultaneous double suicide of the Assignation proceeds logically from the magnetic influence of a too ardent dreamer who, carried away by pride, prefers to the ruin of his chimerical imaginations, the pomp of a solemn double death. There is also latent madness in the de- lirious fancies of Prince Prospero who sees suddenly rising amid the false security of his lordly and festive palace the horrible bloody mask of the Red Death. There is hysterical hilarity; there is also latent madness in that deathly vision of the seven drinkers of Ptolemais, who, in the heavy intoxication of their gloomy orgies, see prophetically arise before the door of bronze forever closed, above the plague-distorted corpse of their sneering companion, the immovable though indistinct phantom of Death. There is also madness — a strange inception of insanity, when the trembling nervousness of Usher passes so tragically from the most enervating hypochondriasis to the most delirious telepathic pre- science. There is likewise symbolized in the strophes of the Haunted Palace the lamentable spectacle of reason dethroned. Madness also in the cold sneering exultation of Monstresor and of Hop-frog, fixedly determined on their projects of atrocious vengeance; madness is the wandering mania of the Man of the Crowd, incapable of shaking off the mortal tyranny of his crimes and his remorse; madness also is that double nature, now so well known, of Wilson, forced implacably to stifle the phantom of his own conscience; madness, the worst of all insanities, the impulsive criminal insanity that ends in the monstrous vampirism of Berenice, and the odious murders of the Tell-tale Heart, of the Imp of the Perverse, and of the Black Cat.

Let us now observe the three characteristic aspects of Poe's unhappy malady — its fears, impulsions and intuitions. In the first place fear is so prominent a feature of the Tales of Poe [page 22:] that the first critics saw in it merely a German influence. But Poe was, by his nature, that is — by his heredity as well as by his course of life, greatly exposed to the special action of this condition. Poe, alcoholic, was condemned to physical fear — he was condemned to horror. We know from his biography that he was the victim of frightful visions, Often by night a sudden fear would invade him, and he would not become calm until Mrs. Clemm had caressed his forehead and soothed him like a little child. Is it then surprising that his genius should begin to ex- ploit this fantastic legacy of alcoholic terrors inherited from his ancestors and actively enlarged through his own acquisitions? To this was added the influence of opium which lends to spontaneous visions of terror attributes of eternity and immensity. His genius worked on the wild tissue of delirium and gossimer Fabric of dreams. An indescribably wierd phantasmagoric dreamscape, peopled by spectral women, wraiths, and demons, he fills with haunting music caught from the sighing of the blast ‘mid mouldering ruins; shrieks of despair in the dark; the roar of the destroying tempest; the gurgling of buried streamlets; the sighs of lone fir-trees; the wails of lost souls; the hoot of birds of ill omen; the triumphant clamor of the whirlwind; the regurgitation of the devouring and engulphing deep; the laughter of derisive demons — all those compelling sounds of nature — all those figments of fancy that awaken the soul to awful premonitions of impending and unavoidable woe.

One of the critics has said: “Here Poe is master. Collect all the most horrible pages from universal literature; certain songs of Hell; the brutal scenes of the Shakespearean dramaturges; the phantasies of Swift; the most childish terrors of Godwin and Ann Radcliffe, mingle with these certain pages of Norse epics; Russian and Spanish chronicles; inquisatorial Malleu; voyages of missionaries in China; add then to passages of Suetonius, certain chapters of our treatises on pathology; all these images of blood [page 23:] and suffering will pale before the chilling horror, disgust, enervation, and deadly anguish which are caused by reading cer- tain very short and calm tales of Poe.”

One of the most curious morbid phenomina [[phenomena]] of Poe is impulsion, which he knew under two forms — the common and the rarer type which is gradual, persistent and intensive. The first is a mere infraction of the rules of self-government, such as is illustrated by many of the follies of Poe himself. This state is intensified by alcohol, and there is on record the case of a dipsomaniac who treated his cat very much as the hero of the Black Cat treated his. Bad as this impulsion is, a worse form is that of a state, where, instead of being hasty, it assumes the form of a fixed obsession, such as the morbid desire of Egeus to possess the teeth of the buried Berenice. Who ever made a more pro- found study of criminal impulse than Poe in his five pages of the Tell-tale Heart? What does Poe say of his criminal heroes? That they are excessively nervous. What does he say of insanity? That is a superacuity of the senses. What does he say of genius? That it is a malady of the mind. With his intuition of superior degenerate who felt seething within him both the best and the worst in human nature, Poe partly foreshadowed the declarations of contemporary science, “Crime and insanity are separated only by social prejudice; they are united by their common character of fatality.” If one hesitates to accept this intimate relationship, there are practical proofs that present themselves at once to the mind.

If fear is a malady of the sensibility and impulsion a malady of the will, it seems clear that a certain curiosity, intense, imperious, intemperate, is a true malady of the intelligence. Frequently in his works, Poe speaks of an insatiable curiosity. “I was, just at that epoch,” says he in the Oblong Box, “in one of those moody frames of mind that make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles.” He expresses himself again in the lover [page 24:] of Morella, under the mask of Dupin and Legrand, seeking to solve the riddle of human crime, and in Usher and Egeus plunging into abstruse reading and mystic meditations. In Pym he exhibits the curiosity of the adventurer to discover unknown lands. He sets forth new Icaruses, one to cross the Atlantic in a balloon, another to make a voyage to the moon. The mysteries of life he sought to penetrate, and no one has peered so inquisitively into the dark possibilities of death as this morbid dreamer. No mortal has more vividly depicted the terrors of Azrael — not death in its actual infinitesimal duration, but that haunting obsession that magnifies the moment of dissolution into an eternity of agony. At times he has brooded on death till he has idealized it; he induces a shudder, but does not nauseate; again, as in the case of M. Valdemar, he becomes as repulsive and loathsome as de Maupassant in his most horrid revel of corruption.

After mention of these morbid elements of the mind of Poe it now remains for us to examine his more or less intellectual qualities — imagination, logic, and style.

One who casts an eye over his work is at once struck by the richness of his invention. The most personal of his tales, such as Bernice, Morella, Ligeia, the Fall of the House of Usher, and Eleonora, on the one hand, the Assignation, Silence, Shadow, and the Red Death, on the other, as well as William Wilson, the Black Cat, Tell-tale Heart, and the Imp of the Perverse, seem to have issued spontaneously from the dark depths of his being. Though in some cases there may be found a suggestion of forerunners, yet Poe's treatment in every case is absolutely unique. One may say that he is realist as well as idealist, for when he wishes he imitates reality so well that apparently he himself believes it. Now this realism of Poe is the more remarkable in that he was a dreamer. The dreaming faculty we see in his great exaggerations, for the meditating soul refracts and changes the truths that float within it. In many of his tales we find his imagination [page 25:] amplifying and enlarging without reserve, and it is to this imagination, perhaps, that we owe the vagaries of his own biography, the desire to make himself out younger than he was, and the invention of a trip to Europe. Another trait of his imagination was decoration. He delights in gorgeous tapestries and other settings of oriental splendor; and in all he sought to exemplify his Baconian doctrine, “There is no beauty without some strangeness in its proportions.”

In his madness, however, as Polonius said of Hamlet, there was method. If Poe was able to transform into works of art the products of his abnormal imagination it was owing to those rigid intellectual qualities that never deserted him. He promulgates rules and adheres strictly to his somewhat whimsical theories of Art and Beauty. The principal of his traits is his intensity. By this feature it is possible to recognize the least page of Poe. What he always aimed at was the maximum of effect in the minimum of space. Tortured by this desire he polished his work repeatedly till the residuum was crystaline in its perfection.

One of the most marvellous exhibitions of the morbid curiosity and self-reliance of Poe is exhibited in his attempt to solve the riddle of the Universe. This curiosity, so justly called the appetite of the soul, characterizes the mental life of Poe. “Those who dream by day,” says he in Eleonora, “are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity and thrill on awakening to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret.” Thus Poe attacked the gravest and most abstruse problems with full confidence in his powers to solve them. We have seen him at school, astounding teachers and pupils by his obstinacy in pursuing the impossible solution of momentous problems. His first poems show that he was a prey to illusions of ecstacy; he believed himself at every instant upon the verge of the great secret, in spiritual company with angels, in intimate communion with [page 26:] Godhead. When he descends to lower things the same curiosity pursues him. Sometimes it is a complicated plaything, as the automatic Chess Player; sometimes it is a recent discovery, such as Anastatic Printing, which opens to his ingenious imagination an infinite perspective of industrial and economic applications. Cryptography at times tempts his patient and tenacious sagacity by the provoking enigma of its complicated combinations; for human ingenuity, says he after Bacon, cannot compose any cipher that human ingenuity cannot solve. The mystery of individual character haunts him not less, and he attempts to solve its secrets by the sciences of phrenology and of autography. There are few of his tales that do not pretend to cross that reputedly uncrossable frontier of the terrae incognitae of the human empire. How then be surprised when his unwearying mind sought to solve that eternal question of humanity — the metaphysical problem of creation? For cosmogony is one of the most attractive of the demi-sciences and ceases not to draw the mind towards those infinities of time and space where there is nothing stable and sure. Here Poe stepped in with the eloquent and lyric madness of the Eureka, whose limitations are painfully evident to the sane, but to the de- tracked mind of Poe it possessed the certainty of a creed of faith. Not less than the slow genesis of its elements, the sudden execution of the complete Eureka is frankly pathological. After the brain fever caused by the death of his beloved Virginia, when an intense super-activity masked the real dilapidation of his physical being, Poe brought forth from the chaotic depths of his thoughts the bold though tottering edifice of the Eureka. Poe pontifex, Poe reveler, Poe founder of a sect, such is the last evolution of the intuitive philosopher carried away by ecstatic madness. Cosmic romance, the incidents of which take place in the intellectual world, philosophical poem which wanders into pantheism, artistic prophecy which believes itself scientific, Eureka worthily crowns with its frail metaphysical architecture the fantastic work of the great American author. [page 27:]

The famous question of the origin of genius and madness obtrudes itself as imperiously with regard to Poe, as Poe himself has put it. The question is, besides, as old as the world. The Greeks had but one word mania to designate enthusiastic inspiration and furious delirium, just as the Latins called poet and prophet alike vates, “Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae,” was in fact an adage of ancient wisdom. Among modern writers allusions to the same fact abound. Erasmus makes a eulogy of madness. Shakespeare whose intuitive genius has so profoundly penetrated into insanity that one may say that in his King Lear any alienist could analyze senile dementia; in Hamlet, aboulic insanity; in Ophelia, melancholia; in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, criminal insanity — did not this Shakespeare say in his Midsummer Night's Dream, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact” — are alike the dupes of a frenetic imagination? On this subject hear Poe speak “That highest genius — that the genius which all men instantaneously acknowledge as such — which acts upon individuals, as well as upon the mass, by a species of magnetism incomprehensible but irresistible and never resisted — that this genius which demonstrates itself in the simplest gesture — or even by the absence of all — this genius which speaks without a voice and flashes from the unopened eye — is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion — so that no one faculty has undue pre- dominance. That factitious “genius” — that “genius” in the popular sense — which is but the manifestation of the abnormal pre-dominance of some one faculty over all the others — and, of course, at the expense and to the detriment, of all the others — is a result of mental disease, or rather, of organic malformation of mind: — it is this and nothing more. Not only will such “genius” fail, if turned aside from the path indicated by its predominant faculty; but, even when pursuing this path — when producing those works in which, certainly, it is best calculated to succeed — will [page 28:] give unmistakable indications of unsoundness, in respect to general intellect. Hence, indeed, arises the just idea that

Of this extreme type of genius the world shows many examples. In America we find but one, Whitman, who is a worthy pendant to Poe. In England, beginning with the visionary author of Piers Plowman we meet at the Renaissance that unbalanced band of Bohemian geniuses who rival in pathetic horrors the intense Shakespeare, — especially Marlowe and Green, whose lives were not less tragic than their works; in the seventeenth century the fantastic abstractor of quintessence Burton; the madman poet Denham; the poor Nathaniel Lee; the depraved Rochester, brutal rival of the versatile Dryden; the fanatical although sublime Milton; the hallucinated Bunyan; the suspicious DeFoe; the irritable dwarf Pope; the morbid and alcoholic Parnell; the impulsive and spendthrift Steele; the malevolent Warburton; the choleric and scrofulous pedant Johnson; the pusillanimous Beattie with his curious manias; the melancholy and contradictory Sterne; the rake-hells Fielding, Smollett and Sheridan; the mad bastard Savage; the bitter Churchill; the misanthropical Swift, destined, as he said, to perish from his head; the irresponsible Goldsmith; the three impostors — Logan, the refined; Chatterton, the precocious; Macpherson, the skilful; the irrepressible Smart; the exquisite Collins; the amiable Cowper, madmen all; the vibrant Burns, victim of two irresistible passions; finally, the incoherent Blake. To the paralysis of Southey, of Scott, and of Hood; to the consumption of Keats and of Mrs. Browning, the nineteenth century adds the sad spectacle of the eccentricities of Beckford and Maturin, the romantic extravagance of Lord Byron, the amorous inconsequences of Shelley, somnambulist and hallucinated, the invincible passion of DeQuincy and of Samuel Coleridge for [page 29:] opium, of Hartley Coleridge for alcohol, and of Rossetti for narcotics. This melancholy list might be extended indefinitely by additions from foreign literatures, but surely this will suffice.

Alas! the thunderbolt seems to prefer the summits, and those unhappy heads that rise above the average of mortals are most accessible to the shocks of destiny. Rare indeed are those stable geniuses like Voltaire, Goethe and Tennyson, who pursue to a term of long life their irreproachable tasks. As to the unhappy ones — a pious veneration for their genius should make us shut our eyes to their follies. And Virginia, whom Poe delighted to call his native state should do herself the honor of rearing in her capital city a statue of her greatest literary genius, not as a reminder of his weaknesses, but as a tribute to that cult of pure beauty and ideality which he fearlessly proclaimed, and as a small amend to his manes for all the ignominy that he has suffered through the ignorance and inhumanity of man. Poe is immortal because he has wrought an inimitable thing; he has touched chords of the human heart that had never been so touched before; he has opened windows of light on some of the dark and mysterious corners of the human soul; and above all he has preached the gospel of ideality in the face of a crass and materialistic age. Through Halls of Fame reject him, his renown is as secure in the hearts of all worshippers of Beauty as if his name were carved with stylus of steel on tables of adamant. Though he be com- pared to that statue of Lucan with surface of Parian marble and interior filled with rags, let us remember that in all his works there is no taint of sensuality, and as he said of Lord Brougham, “His known deficencies as well as his known capacities were precisely those of a chivalrous heart not less than of a gigantic understanding.”