Text: Francis Gerry Fairfield, “Two Lives of Poe,” The Library Table (New York, NY), vol. IV, no. 2, whole no. 31, November 10, 1877, pp. 27-29

[page 27:]

The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. By William F. Gill. Boston: William F. Gill & Co. 1877.

Poems of Edgar A. Poe. With a New Memoir. By Eugene L. Didier. New York: W. J. Widdleton. 1876.*

There was point as well as pith in the sarcastic definition of metaphysics given by one of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century-” An ingenious method, in vogue among theologians, of demonstrating that which is not and denying that which is”; and, albeit Mr. William F. Gill's “Life of Edgar Allan Poe” is not exactly a metaphysical work, but one sadly in the manner of the average newspaper reporter, he has probably furnished one of the finest illustrations of the witticism that has been offered to the reading public for many a day; not even excepting Mr. Eugene L. Didier's rhapsodical biography, of which the severest that can be said in criticism is [page 28:] that, fortunately for the author, Poe is not living to review it. It appears from Mr. Gill's preliminary statement, and alike from Mr. Didier's, that each has written the only authentic, exact, well-verified, thoroughly redacted, and in all respects meritorious biography of the meteor of American literature that has ever been written, dreamed of, excogitated, conceived, or in any manner mentally adumbrated, since the meteor descended and its lurid luminosity went out in premature encephalitis. It appears, also, from a perusal of their respective prefatory notes, that both conceived the idea of writing a biography nearly simultaneously, -at about the date when a movement to erect a memorial shaft to the defunct poet was first agitated, and when there was a remote prospect that a biography would sell, and its author obtain a little ephemeral notoriety. It is one of Mr. Widdleton's misfortunes, for which he has the writer's hearty condolences, that, in the momentary Poe fever that supervened upon the dedication of the monument, he was entrapped into a promise to publish Mr. Didier's rhapsodizing, which describes Poe as an Apollo, compares him favorably with the handsomest divinities of Greece and Rome, and likens his critical fulminations to the bolts of Jupiter Tonans artistically feathered with lightning. But as it is penalty enough to the publisher just now to have that fact mentioned, and as the London Athenæm, in an article from the pen of Mr. Ingraham, Poe's European biographer, has mercilessly enumerated Mr. Didier's errors of fact, no possible purpose could be subserved by recapitulating the blunders of a book that really passed from the press into sudden oblivion. Nevertheless, it is something to have been permitted to compare Poe to Apollo and Adonis in a biographical preface to his poems, even though the doing so, in the instance of his Baltimore admirer, is coupled with an affectionate inclination to errors of syntax; and, pour passer le temps, the preface is worth reading as an example of the imp of the perverse that Poe mentions in one of his tales, playing grotesque antics with the rules of English grammar. There are volumes, as well as men, to which a decent burial in the dozy old kennels of cob-webbed Nassau street is merciful; and, save for the poems it preludes-one of the most sumptuous editions of Poe's poems that has ever been issued, such must have been the destiny of Mr. Didier's memoir. Ne tentes, aut perfice!

On the other hand, Mr. Gill's work is entitled to a certain qualified commendation, in that the author has industriously ransacked obsolescent sources of information, bringing to light dusty anecdotes and broken bits of gossip; and has rummaged among old magazines and newspapers for stray waifs of poesy and book review, having in this manner contributed very materially to the data to be used by some future littérateur, competent to the task, in constructing a coherent biography. It has been his aim, according to his preface, to give an impartial-” unpartisan” -transcript of the life of the poet, being to his faults and foibles a little kind, while performing the whole duty of a biographer as concerns such episodes and reports as have operated to his moral discredit. Accordingly, by way of evincing his independence, he rejects Poe's own story of the origin of the “Raven,” as developed in one of his most ingenious essays, and propounds a new theory which receives the sanction of Mr. George R. Graham, the Nestor of magazine publishers. While in his published writings Poe always tried to represent his compositions as deliberate intellectual creations, the will acting normally, to his intimes he frequently indulged in brilliant descriptions of the states of ecstacy that prompted and went with his poems. Mr. Graham attributes this [column 2:] morbid passion for mystifying to an extraordinary sensitiveness that shrunk from giving general readers even a passing glimpse into the secret picture gallery of his teeming imagination-peopled with ghosts, ghouls, and with the distorted and terrible spectra of a destiny that impended always, and in the vain struggle with which this modern Laocoon was at last throttled. In some strange manner our nerves apprehend the doom that lies perdu in our own secret natures, and the imagination translates the nervous impression into a prévision as unerring in its prophecy as its processes are hidden and obscure. With the personal notes of Mr. Graham, who knew him well in all his moods, one seizes the clue to the terrible but fantastic sincerity of superstition and the magnetic terror that form the motif of the “Raven.” “Even when absorbed in writing,” says Mr. Graham, “ I always noticed that a sudden breath of air, a noise unheard by others around him, would startle him. He disliked the dark, and was rarely out at night when I knew him. On one occasion he said to me, ‘I believe the demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary, — only, you know, I don’t believe in them.”

This singular faculty of perceiving the presence of a ghost-life in night, when, to less morbid natures, the artist moonlight transforms rocks into ancient castles, and impending crags into impalpable fortresses of realizing a præternatural significance in the weird waving of restless trees under the starshine-of hearing gnomes talking together in the murmur of reeds by the oozy river-of catching the sigh of a ghoul in the bubbles that break with a single note upon the surfaces of stagnant tarns-of extracting a nervous terror from all things half in shadow, inconsistent as it seems with the wonderful faculty for exact analysis exhibited in his reviews, forms, perhaps, the one dominant element of his psychological organism, and is the underlying motive (the potential energy transformed by the process of ideation) of his imaginative, as distinguished from the rational and analytic intellect. Although by no means a great poem, the “Raven” is the supreme expression of this attitude of a soul-a soul burdened with the unrest of a neurotic temperament. Of the supernatural he had no conception; of the præternatural, an everpresent vision. The building in which the poem was written, old and weather-beaten, still stands on Eighty-fourth street, a little west of the Bloomingdale road-like a motionless spectre in the shape of a house, overlooking the glassy Hudson, which he, of many a moonlit night, had seen crawling sullenly to the sea. His wife was sick all that memorable winter, -subject to cataleptic attacks that must have had an appalling fascination to one committed to the theories and dreams since developed into a literature of ghostland by the expositors of Spiritualism. Mr. Gill's view is that from his weird night vigils with the patient came the inspiration of the poem-its potent spell of terror — its motif. He was paid ten dollars for it.

Unfortunately for Mr. Gill's theory, in his criticism on “Barnaby Rudge,” written long previous to this period, Poe had already outlined the “Raven” as it was elaborated at a later date, and under circumstances that only served to deepen and intensify the sombre conception, but were not responsible for its origination. “Between the raven and the unfortunate Barnaby,” says Poe in the final paragraph of one of his acutest critiques, “might have been wrought out an analogical resemblance that would have vastly heightened the effect of the story.” And so on, and so on, developing the idea for several sentences. It is exactly this analogical [page 29:] resemblance that he worked out, with singular fidelity to the terms of his criticism, in one of the strangest and most exotic creations of modern literature. Contradictory of Mr. Gill's view, and of Mrs. Clemm's statement, also, that the “Raven” was written at a sitting, is the fact that Poe always wrote with difficulty; that no poet, living or dead, was ever less happy in improvising stanzas, and that his compositions were evolved slowly from germs of poems of no great import in their earlier and cruder form. The “Bells” that elaborate monody, than which no more perfect masterpiece of sounding phrases occurs in English literature-supplies an unanswerable example of the slow accrescence by which all his poems were gradually created. As originally published it contained only two stanzas:

It is sacrilegious, perhaps. But compare the almost doggerel puerility of this snatch of cradle melody with the splendid sonorousness of diction and the ghastly magnificence of imagery in the following:

Than which, albeit dashed with a little puerility, as his poems always were — and as even the “Haunted Palace,” his finest conception, is-English prosody has no weirder stanza. For an analogous instance of the slow accretion of a poem, rhyme by rhyme, fancy by fancy, that marks Poe's style, compare the earlier form of “Lenore” with the later, as it appears in his published works. The ultimate source of that puerility that curiously interweaves itself with his dreamiest imaginings, is obvious to him who studies literature with psychological method. There was always a vestige of insincerity running like an undertone through his life and works-a vestige that had its origin in the same neurotic taint that manifests itself in his offensive egotism as well as in the sombre, half real, half affected fatalism and perception of impending doom, which dominated his life as well as his literature. Hence, lacking the true inspiration that comes from an imagination rooted in an ever-active intuition of the beautiful — the dream within the dream of human life — he resorted to structure as a compensation for poetic vitality. Nowhere is this better illustrated that in the lapses from music that occasionally reveal the latent insincerity of his verse, and of which “Ulalume” furnishes several striking examples. The spectre of the [column 2:] to be-life constantly realizing itself in higher beauty — is something that never haunted him.

But if Mr. Gill's theory of the “Raven” is unfortunate, his version of the several disputed episodes in Poe's life is yet more so. That acute, almost microscopic critic, Mr. Oliver B. Bunce, in Appleton's Journal for November, notes the disingenuousness of Mr. Gill as concerns the Washington episode. In relation to the affair with Mrs. Whitman his story is self-contradictory; on one page denying in set terms that any engagement existed at the date of Poe's visit to Providence; on another quoting a letter from the late William J. Pabodie, of Providence, proving most unequivocally that such an engagement did exist, and that Poe wrote a note to the Rev. Dr. Crocker, the next morning after the scene quoted by Griswold, requesting him to publish the banns at the earliest opportunity — a curious liberty to take with the name of a lady to whom he was not formally engaged. There are other liberties taken with attested facts that Mr. Gill will find it advisable to correct in a second edition, if, haply, his biography ever finds readers enough to exhaust the first.

FRANCIS GERRY FAIRFIELD.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 27, column 2:]

*Before entering upon this review, particularly as the writer's name has been bandied about pretty freely by Messrs. Didier and Gill, a personal explanation appears to be necessary. Some two years ago, I published an article on Poe, entitled “A Mad Man of Letters,” in Scribner's Monthly, taking the only tenable scientific ground respects the etiology of his strange career. Mis Sarah Helen Whitman, of Providence, rejoined in a letter to the Tribune, denying certain statements contained in the article certain other statements, enumeration of which is not essential. I replied, requesting Mrs. Whitman to bring forward her facts, and giving a transcript of my own data. At the same time, in a private note to Mr. Whitelaw Reid, I requested him, in case Mrs. Whitman presented the facts to sustain her view, to say that Mr. Fairfield waived the points in controversy, in consideration of her access to data and personal acquaintance with Poe and his confrères. Mrs. Whitman did not, however, attempt to refute the statements of my letter, and the implication by Messrs. Didier and Gill, in their respective books, that that lady has presented any refutation of the article in Scribner, is, therefore, simply and unequivocally untrue. As to the article itself, it was prepared soon after I commenced my studies as a medical student; was submitted by Dr. Holland to a no less expert than Dr. Kellogg, formerly of the State Asylum at Utica, and now in the same capacity at Poughkeepsie, and was accepted upon his judgment.

F. G. F.