Text: J. B. Wallis, “[To the Editor of The Academy],” Academy, (Covent Garden, London, UK), vol. LXIX, whole no. 1751, November 25, 1905, pp. 1234-1235

[page 1234, column 3, continued:]

To the Editor of THE ACADEMY

SIR, — Mr. John H. Ingram is mistaken, since I well knew that Poe's letter was written at the age of twenty-two. But what of that? If a man does not know his own mind at twenty-two, either science and jurisprudence (not to mention ordinary common sense) are in tremendous error, or the individual himself is an idiot. Assuming Poe's (must we say) “childish’‘ sneers to be merely the outcome of juvenile and ill-judged distaste, where is the evidence that they were ever retracted?

It is not quite fair of Mr. Ingram to represent me as a sort of ignorant literary paradoxer trying to maintain that Poe was a nonentity, his writings morbid rubbish, and his admiters few. If may [page 1235:] surely be credited with better judgment and knowledge of the facts than to have meant that; but I hope and believe that they are few who honestly admire the depressing gloom which pervades so much that Poe wrote. Other poets — Wordsworth among them — have treated of the dreadful things of life; but they have maintained a due sense of portion. They have seen nature as she is, a great cosmos of beauty, justice law; and have recognised darkness, sorrow and death, not as the ruling factors in a universe bizarre and horrible, but simply as the negative poles of sunshine, happiness, and life. In short, to be candid, they have not been monomaniacs.

Of course, Poe had a fine command of terror; but, even so, is not this ever a doubtful qualification? Perhaps one reason — I do not at all mean the sole reason — that Poe's works have lived is that their morbidity is chiefly concerned with the subject of death, about which the views of humanity at large are more or less morbid. There is nothing essentially terrifying in the fact that our lives, in common with all eternal nature's changing manifestations, must come to an end. But the theatric emotions of man have caused him to invest his dissolution with gloom, to surround this quite natural event with all that perverted sentiment could invent to make death hateful. To this universal morbidity Poe gave literary expression. To him death was a “conqueror,” something ghastly, a bony spectre lurking amid the tombstones in which human morbidity concretes.

There is no logical necessity to regard “Full fathom five thy father lies” as a morbid poem. On the contrary, this is healthy and natural, symbolising a life returned to the nature which gave it, the body's elements meantime forsaking their temporary chemical union to pass into other forms and endow other life, ‘’in order that the world may be ever new.” “Nothing of him that doth fade” is the great truth which Shakespeare, who was almost nature itself incarnate, proclaimed.

Not all that Poe ever wrote is worth Wordsworth's ‘Lines near a Abbey.” What can surpass the sanity of that great poet who felt

That a man with intellect so spacious should have had to endure the contempt of such as Poe would fill us with disgust did we not remember that Poe was really the victim of his own pathological state. Even genius is conditioned by the physiology of its cerebral cells.

J. B. WALLIS.

P.S. — Mr. Ingram is once more mistaken in calling me Mr. Coventry's copyist. Whether he credit it or no, the fact is that my former letter was written and despatched ere I had so much as seen Mr. Coventry's able article. This, I may remark at large, should be a warning to those who are so keen to detect plagiary.