The World of Washington Irving

by VAN WYCK BROOKS

26

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER and his wife and daughters spent seven years largely in Paris, though they wintered in Florence, Rome, and Dresden, and Cooper stayed in Switzerland too and lived for some months in Sorrento, where he rented the supposed birthplace of the poet Tasso. Its terrace was his quarterdeck, where he paced up and down, and there, between visits to Capri, Pompeii, and Paestura, he composed the greater part of The Water-Witch. He traveled in the grand style, as he kept his own horses and carriage in Paris, for, with all his political democracy, which was sincere and consistent, he retained the pride and the way of living of an old-school American gentleman.

Moreover, while he detested courtiers quite as much as demagogues, he was glad to be received by kings and reigning grand dukes, and he was on all but intimate terms with the Bonaparte family in Rome, which still included the ancient Madame Mère. His fame was already vast and universal, and as early as 1833 every new novel by Cooper was published simultaneously in thirty-four cities of Europe. His books were translated into Turkish and Persian, and they were on sale at Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Ispahan. The “American novels” rivaled the Waverley novels. Their renown was far greater on the Continent than it was in England; and Cooper found that his name was known at custom-houses and post-offices, in government bureaus, and even in country inns. He had castles placed at his disposal, while his books were not only praised by the greatest novelists and critics in Europe but had begun to influence generations of writers.¹

Meanwhile, with his pleasure in composition and his incessant industry, he turned out novel alter novel, wherever he was, at Sorrento, Saint-Ouen, Paris, in Dresden, in Berne, keeping voluminous journals from which he drew in time no fewer than ten volumes about his travels. He had several of his books printed in English in Italy and Germany, and this naturally resulted in many typographical errors, largely in consequence of which Cooper was called a careless writer by critics who repeated one another.

He fell in love with Italy, alone of the countries he traveled through — its people, its climate, its memories, and its natural scenes, for he delighted in the grandeur of the Apennines and the Alps. Rome also stirred him deeply, although he described as “toosey-woosey” the raptures over ivied ruins that were dear to so many Americans. He was at home in Italy, which was so humane in its decay, and he indulged his passion for sailing there, hiring a felucca and crow at Leghorn for a cruise along the coast that left its traces later in The Wing-and-Wing.²

On the other hand, he quarreled with England as only perhaps an American could who had grown up in a circle that idolized it. He could never quite forgive the English for impressing American seamen, as he had seen them do in his own youth, and, proud and sensitive as he was, he visited on England the resentment he felt against Englishmen who vilified his country. Nine out of ten Europeans knew nothing of America, — they supposed that all Americans were red or black, — and Cooper met a Frenchman who t bought that America was a province of Turkey, and a German who believed it was a part of Africa or Asia. Many supposed it was wholly settled by convicts.³

All this was natural enough, and Cooper was not disposed to quarrel with anyone who disliked America and its lack of order, tone, and finish. What he could not forgive was the vindictive ill-will that led so many Englishmen to abuse the country, for, aside from the books they wrote about it, they went out of their way to affront Americans. Cooper found twenty-three insults in Continental hotel registers written by Englishmen after American names. It also annoyed him to find that Americans who became well-known were usually reported as having been born in England,⁴ while he regretted another fact, for which the English were not to blame, that American authors who attracted foreign comment held their reputation at home at the mercy of Great Britain.

The remnants of the old subserviency were still so strong that American opinion could not. carry the day in America in the face of a single English critic. But Cooper’s personal encounters were pleasant enough. In Paris he met Scott, who was writing his Life of Napoleon and with whom he dined in London in company with Coleridge — “a barrel to which every other man’s tongue acted as a spigot, for no sooner did the latter move than it set his own contents in a flow.” William Godwin came to see him, the quiet little old white-headed man who had had so much in common with Broekden Brown. Cooper was impressed by his sincerity and his obviously honest desire to benefit mankind. It amused Cooper to note the ways in which the American type had diverged in a few generations from the English.

Partly perhaps from his contact with England, Cooper became, in these years abroad, an ardent, and embattled defender of republican ideas. Instinctively patriotic, he had always lived in political circles, taking his politics more or less for granted. But, like S. F. B. Morse and Horatio Greenough, he realized in Europe how profoundly he believed in republics, and he involved himself deeply in the great European struggle between the aristocratic past and the democratic future. He was in Germany when the July Revolution broke out and the Bourbons were expelled from France in 1830, and he hastened from Dresden to Paris, to be followed soon after by Heine, who had been drawn thither for the same reason. For Paris had at once become the Mecca of lovers of liberty, and when the revolt in Poland followed, Cooper presided at mass-meetings in order to raise funds for the Polish troops.

At that very moment, Bryant was doing the same thing, raising money for the Poles at dinners in New York, and Morse was as eager as Cooper to help the Polish patriots and was passionately concerned for the freedom of Poland For the Poles of 1831 were for American writers and artists what the Spanish Loyalists were in 1937, and when Poe said he was going to Paris to join the Polish army he was acting in the spirit of later Americans who joined the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Morse rejoiced that America had “no titles of nobility, no ribbons, and garters, and crosses, and other geegaws that please the great babies of Europe” ; and, along with Cooper and Bryant, he backed revolutionists everywhere — in Poland, in South America, in Italy, in France, For in those days Americans believed in republics: they were convinced that God was tired of kings.

Cooper had been intimate with Mickiewicz in Rome and had ridden with him every day on his white horse Chingi; and his house in Paris, as a correspondent said, was the hospice of St. Bernard of the Polish refugees. Cooper welcomed republicans of every nation. He knew Béranger well and the sculptor David d’Angers, who made a famous bust of him, while his greatest friend was Lafayette, beloved by Morse as well, whom he had met in New York in 1824. He had been active in getting up the ball in honor of Lafayette at Castle Garden, where he supervised the hanging of the lanterns and the gayly colored bunting, and he saw much of the old statesman in Paris when he was finishing The Prairie,⁵ Thrice Cooper visited La Grange, galloping through the woods and fields, walking with Lafayette on his farm, and talking in his library, and he met two other officers in Paris who had fought in the American Revolution.

The royalists were determined to discredit Lafayette, who was laboring for a French republic on the American model, and in order to do so they hired a writer to prove that the American experiment had failed, that Americans paid more for the benefits of government than the French paid under the king. The pamphlet had a great effect, for, to make a fool of Lafayette, who was always preaching Americanism in France, what Letter way could have been devised than to show that he knew nothing about it and that freedom was more costly to the people than despotism? Lafayette asked Cooper to reply to the pamphlet, and Cooper, who knew it was erroneous, proved it to be so, though instead of being thanked at home for defending the ways of America, he was loudly accused of attacking a friendly foreign country.

Cooper, in fact, was treated shabbily at home, and the more he praised America, — in Motions of the Americans, for instance, — the less his countrymen seemed to like it. He had hoped in this book to correct, in the eyes of Europeans, the errors which their own travelers had spread about it, and American readers, as Mathew Carey the publisher said, appeared to prefer the sneers of Basil Hall. But Cooper loved America, though he saw and regretted its weaknesses, and, shocked by the low view of his country that prevailed in Europe, he found that republicanism was a cause to defend there. He could no longer take it for granted when American ministers and consuls praised monarchism and derided the customs of their country;⁶ for lovers of the old privileged order abounded in American diplomacy from the days of Gouverneur Morris to the days of Franco and Mussolini.

In their hatred of the rights of the masses they were virtually traitors, and it always mortified Cooper to fall in with a fellow American who professed illiberal opinions. Personally and socially aristocratic in all his tastes and instincts, he was a democrat politically against all comers, and he even disliked the toryism in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, its deference to hereditary rank and conventional laws. Had not these laws originated in force, and force alone, and had they not been continued by prejudice and wrong? Cooper, an aristocrat in temper, was a stickler for his social rights, the right to consideration, privacy, respect, and he was often at war with himself, for his tastes and prejudices were by no means in harmony with his conscience and convictions. But be did not believe in privilege or hereditary rank, and as for the principle of equal political rights, he would have fought to the death, most certainly, to defend it. He was all for confiding political power to the body of the people, however their tastes and manners offended him, and three of the novels he wrote in Europe — The Bravo, The Headsman, The Heidenmauer - were intended to demonstrate the virtue of American institutions.

His plan, like Mark Twain’s in A Connecticut Yankee, was to exhibit American ways in the light of European history, and the three novels were pictures of late medieval society in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, as a democrat saw it. Entering the feudal world of Scott, Cooper intended no doubt to break the spell that Scott had woven about it, and these novels defended the rule of the people against irresponsible oligarchies who questioned the capacity of men to govern themselves. They showed the evil of institutions that throve on the ignorance of the masses and had no proper base in the will of the nation.

27

WHILE Cooper and Irving were living abroad, Edgar Allan Poe, who had spent five years of his childhood at school in England, had grown up in Richmond as a ward of John Allan, the merchant, whose wife was the daughter of one of the Virginia planters, Edgar, petted and rather spoiled, with his air of a Little Lord Fauntleroy, graceful, exceptionally handsome, winning in manner, had become an imperious older boy, a capital horseman, fencer, and shot, and a leader of the other boys at his school in Rich mond. He swam in the river James one day six miles against the tide. Devoted to music, he played a flute, he wrote good Latin verses, he even bad more than a little talent for drawing. He made a charming sketch of one of the young girls in Richmond, and his friends later remembered the skill with which he drew fanciful pictures in charcoal on the ceiling and walls of his room at Charlottesville. These drawings were suggested by a number of illustrations for Byron, the favorite poet of all the Virginia young men Thomas Sully, a friend of the Allans, painted a portrait of Poe in a cloak in one of the romantic postures associated with Byron.

By 1826, when Poe was sent to the university, he was erect, pale, slender, and seventeen, with large, gray, luminous, liquid eyes, a brow of the sort that was often called noble, and the manners of a well-brought-up young man. One might have taken him for the type of the jeunesse dorée of Virginia, surrounded with tutors, servants, horses, and dogs, with clothes of the best that the tailors of Richmond afforded, and he was regarded in fact as the heir of one of the richest men in the state, for Allan, who had no legitimate children, had recently in hented a fortune of something round three quarters of a million dollars, The large, new, luxurious house of the Allans, with its Empire furniture and busts by Canova and the spacious octagonal parlor on the second floor, left traces in some of the w-ritings of Poe, who thought of it as home long after he had lost the right to live there.

Along with the Medici Venus and the Etruscan vases, there was a niche on the stairs with an agate lamp, and a telescope stood on the balcony, through which Poe gazed at the constellations whose beautiful names were scattered through his poems. Later he studied astronomy, as one might have guessed from reading his tales, but he knew the Pleiades as a boy in Richmond, “ Astarte’s bediamonded crescent,” and the mountains of the moon. For the rest, he had always been thrown with the sons of the cultivated lawyers and planters who rode about the streets on their blooded horses. Most of the larger Richmond houses, with porticoes and pillars, reflected the classical feeling that prevailed in the town, where the clerk of the House of Delegates was translating the Iliad during these years and lawyers often carried in their pockets a Cicero or a Horace.

On Sundays, at the Episcopal church, Poe sat behind Chief Justice Marshall, and he must have seen Madison too on a visit to town, while John Randolph sold some of his tobacco through Mr. Allan’s agency and all but certainly appeared occasionally at the warehouse.⁷ One evening, as a little boy, Poe romped with General Winfield Scott at a party in the house of the Allans. Taken twice to the Virginia springs, he visited his foster-mother’s plantation as well as the Allan plantation at Lower Byrd’s, where he heard weird tales in the slave quarters, whither his mammy took him, about graveyards, apparitions, corpses, and spooks.

His childhood was bathed indeed in the grotesquerie of the Negroes, which also certainly left traces in some of his tales, while he heard other stories of exploits at sea and adventures inthe West, related by merchants and mariners who dined with the Allans. For the firm supplied some of the Western settlements with blankets, rum, and powder and imported a variety of goods from England and Europe — the docks were crowded with barques and square-riggers, and Poe knew ships and the ways of sailors, as one soon saw in his Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. This was the tale that might have been written, in part at least, by Fenimore Cooper and that placed Poe also in the age of Moby Dick. He had crossed the ocean twice, besides sailing from Scotland to London, and he soon took several voyages on army transports. If, throughout his later life, Poe thought of Richmond as his home, it was because of the happiness he had known there as a child.

For, on the whole, he appeared to be a normal, healthy, lively boy, orderly in his way of living, punctilious in dress, and the professors at Charlottesville, as long as he was permitted to stay there, regarded him as well-behaved and a model student. The university had been opened only the previous year; the rotunda, the serpentine walls, and the terraces were new. As Jefferson was still alive, Poe must have seen him often — indeed, he probably dined at Monticello, for all the students were invited in rotation on Sundays. He certainly heard the bell toll for the death of the “American Confucius,” whose wisdom, for the rest, meant nothing to Poe; for this brilliant young man, who cared little for politics,⁸ shared none of Jefferson’s beliefs and even considered democracy a delusion and an evil.⁹ His writings were to bristle with allusions to the “rabble” and the “canaille,” to democracy as an “admirable form of government — for dogs,” to voting as “meddling” with public affairs, and republican government as “rascally,” while they also expressed the contempt of the writer for “ reform cranks " and “ progress mongers.”

Poe had no faith, as he often said, in human perfectibility or the general notions of equality, progress, and improvement that characterized the Jeffersonian vision; and if he had been politically-minded, one might have thought of him as a type of the anti-Jeffersonian Southern reaction of the moment. Temperamentally , indeed, Poe was a type of this reaction. He had something in common with Beverley Tucker, who was deeply interested in him and remembered his mother as a charming young actress in Richmond.

Meanwhile, he acquired at Charlottesville a good part of the store of learning that marked his tales and his criticism in after years. In those days, and later, Poe was accused of all manner of dodges in the way of pretending to a learning he did not possess, and critics took pleasure in pointing out the absurd mistakes that he had made and that proved him “two-fifths sheer fudge,” an impostor, and what not. It was true that he made these mistakes,¹⁰ and he sometimes seemed to lug in his learning, like his own Signora Psyche Zenobia in How to Write a Blackwood Article — the editor himself instructed this aspiring young lady to cultivate an air of erudition, to sprinkle her pages with piquant expressions from Schiller, Cervantes, and Lucan and never miss a chance to use a botanical phrase or a little Greek.

Poe often made learned allusions for the sake of their effect, but were they not occasionally admirable for just this reason? Much of the wondrous atmosphere of tales like The Fall of the House of Usher was a result of these allusions to strange and exotic books and authors. Moreover, Poe was a well-read man, especially in English, French, and Latin, and he was prodigious in the breadth of his general knowledge. He knew the language, as his writing revealed, of astronomy, chemistry, and physics, of conchology, botany, medicine, and mathematics, and no one could have written Hans Pfaall and Maelzel’s Chess-Player without a considerable knowledge of mechanics as well. As for the other modern tongues, he read a little Italian and German, though he probably picked up his knowledge of Novaks, Tieck, and Hoffmann from the papers of Carlyle and others in the British reviews. He was always a constant reader of the current magazines, and he had formed the habit of reading the foreign periodicals as a boy in the book-loft of Allan’s warehouse.

Inevitably Poe was steeped in Coleridge, Shelley, Moore, and Byron, but how, in his hurried, anxious life, could he have stowed away such a mass of erudition and information? Obviously, this was because as a boy he “felt with the energy of a man,” as he remarked of the hero of William Wilson, while he had, in a rudimentary form, a universal mind, together with astonishing powers of concentration. Poe, in the range of his curiosity, resembled Jefferson, after all, and for him a single manual of ancient history or natural science went further than hundreds of volumes in the minds of others. But this meant assiduity, too, — he was always immensely industrious,¹¹— and a few months at West Point were all the additional time that Poe was ever to have for his education. He was complimented at Charlottesville for a translation from Tasso, and he wrote “Tamerlane” there and other poems.

28

WHILE outwardly the attractive Poe was a clever young man of the ruling class, with all the advantages and prospects of a Cahell or a Lee. his life was built on quicksand really, as he had always known perhaps and certainly knew when he was withdrawn from college. John Allan had never adopted him and may have turned against him because Poe happened to know too much about his private life; but long before this, when the two fell out. Allan had called him a charity boy and threatened more than once to turn him adrift. Like some of the boys at school, he had sneered at Poe as the child of actors, and he refused to pay Poe’s expenses at college, as afterwards, at West Point, he would not pay even for the necessary textbooks and Poe did not have money enough for soap and writing-paper. Of course, he played cards for money, not for fun but to pay his way, — another humiliation, — and he usually lost, so that he was followed by duns and warrants when he left Charlottesville and had to leave Richmond under a borrowed name.

An outsider among the young Virginians, and constantly reminded of it, with a natural and lifelong craving for the sympathy of women, he was desolated as a boy by the death of the mother of one of his friends, the beautiful Mrs. Stanard of the poem “To Helen.”Then Mrs. Allan also died, the radiant foster-mother who had stood between Poe and the feelingless caprices of her husband; and a young man who was an orphan too might well have felt that the “conqueror worm was the hero of his tragedy already. For Poe the death of a beautiful woman was always the great theme of verse, — he might almost have remembered the death of his mother also, as he was to watch the long dying of his young wife, and no man was ever more alone against the world than this “Henri Le Rennet" who fled from his creditors in Richmond.

Long before Poe came of age he knew the splendeurs et misères, the sorrowful juxtapositions of luxury and squalor, that were to make him a pre-eminent type of the romantic; and who could ever have been surprised that he often seemed nervously strained as a boy, with an ominous look in his eyes of anxiety and sadness? He began to be haunted by nightmares at about the age of fifteen; and, if he broke down a few years later and showed many of the signs of insanity, was this not partially owing to his heredity as well? His sister Rosalie was underwitted, his brother died of consumption and drink, in the manner no doubt of the gay, weak, feckless father who had long since faded out of the family picture; and Poe’s disorders might all have been traced to the desperate existence of his poor little mother, dragging him with her from theater to theater as she played her wildly emotional parts. Two or three years of such a life might well have deranged the nerves of an infant, even before he was born.

This complex insecurity — physical, social, financial alike — explained in large measure the life and the character of Poe, as it also accounted for the nature of much of his writing. He had begun to drink in part because it gave him confidence, as he liked to display his prowess too by assuming the role of the man of the world whose head was full of esoteric knowledge. If he was not, he might have been the schoolboy in The Purloined Letter who won the marbles of all the other boys by observing and measuring the astuteness of his opponents; for having, of course, a mind in a million, he also liked to use it because it gave him power over others. For this reason, very largely, he longed to establish a magazine that would make him an intellectual dictator,¹² an assertion of his superiority that was also in a measure the result of this insecurity of his earlier years.

He liked to play for a similar reason the part of a solver of cryptograms, a reader of riddles and ciphers whom no one could baffle, a successful finder of buried treasure and a peerless detector of crimes for whom the official police were mere idiots and infants. For Poe projected a side of himself in Auguste Dupin and Mr. Legrand, the hero of The Gold Bug who unraveled the formidable cipher. His analytical faculty was undoubtedly astonishing, and Dickens asked him in later years if he had had dealings with the devil when he outlined in advance the plot of Barnaby Rudge. But, much as he loved these exercises,¹³ he liked to be known as a wizard too, partly because of the feeling of power it gave him; and this tendency also passed into his tales and appeared in the character of many of his heroes who were persons of ancient lineage and recondite tastes, of vaguely splendid antecedents, strange and profound in their learning and in some way disconnected from the rest of the race.¹⁴ This tendency appeared in the legend that Poe created about his life, in the need that he felt for being a romantic hero, suggested partly by the image of Byron and partly to bolster ids self-esteem in the sad and ambiguous position in which as a boy he found himself.

Already, at college, he talked of going, after the manner of Byron, to Greece, and presently he talked of having been there, and he spoke of his adventures in the Mediterranean and Arabia, which he had penetrated, and the trouble he had hail with his passport at St. Petersburg as well. He really disappeared for a while; but the explanation was simple enough. He had enlisted in the army as “ Edgar A. Perry,”a fact that he wished to conceaj at West Point, where enlisted men were looked down upon, while he also wished to account for his withdrawal from college. He had left Charlottesville, of course, to see the world, Poe was a lover of hoaxes, as anyone knew who read his tales, — he was like his own Hungarian baron who made “mystification the study and business of his life,—and he had appropriated some of the adventures of his brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, who appropriated Edgar’s poerns in turn, had seen something of the world as a midshipman in the navy. This brother had been to Montevideo, probably to the Near East, and quite possibly to Russia.

For the rest, there was much of the actor in Poe, and perhaps he inherited from his mother and father his faculty of impersonation as of elocution, for which he had won a prize at school and which made him a capital public reader: his recitals, for instance, of “The Raven” towards the end of his life were all but as famous as the acting of Junius Brutus Booth. He had sometimes the air of a stage Virginian, who exaggerated the part a little, because it was not really his by right, and his tales and his poems were full of the imagery of the theater, mimes and mummers and masquerades, shifting scenery, phantom forms, and the “gala night,” for example, of “The Conqueror Worm.”

29

POE, dismissed from West Point in 1831, informed the superintendent of his next adventure. He was about to start for Paris to obtain through Lafayette an appointment in the army of the Poles for their struggle with Russia, In fact, he went to Baltimore and joined his father’s family there, for, having lost favor with the Allans, he had sought out the Poes. He was wearing the black military cloak that made him look like a Spanish brigand, the cloak he continued to wear for the rest of his life, and in Baltimore, where he had published already his second small volume of poems, — the first had appeared in Boston in 1827, — he began his career as a writer of stories also.

The Revolutionary quartermaster, his grandfather General Poe, had won the admiration of Lafayette, and his father had once been a member of the Thespian club, but the family had fallen on evil days and Poe’s aunt Mrs. Clemm, the sister of his father, supported it as a Baltimore seamstress. She had a young daughter, Virginia, the cousin who later married Poe and who, like his sister Rosalie, remained a child; and she valiantly fought for her sad little household, her bed-ridden mother, her stonecutter son, and Henry Poe, who was drinking himself to death. She went the rounds with a marketbasket, picking up a child’s dress, a loaf of bread, a chicken or a turnip from her friends, as later in the Fordham cottage, with Poe and Virginia under her wing, she scoured the fields for dandelions and turnips at night. Poe shared the garret of the wretched little house with his drunken, dying brother, and there he wrote some of his tales. The Manuscript Found in a Bottle was one of the first

in Baltimore, he fell in with the writers John P. Kennedy and William Wirt, to whom he showed the manuscript ot his poem, “Al Aaraaf.” He had written this poem on Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, for he had been stationed at Fort Moultrie there, and he had listened to the “sounding sea ” that one heard in his poems and stories later and observed the palmetto and the myrtle that appeared in The Gold Bug. The tulip trees of Carolina and the live oaks with their streaming moss and Charleston too appeared in some of these tales, and even the “ house of Usher” might have been suggested by the ruinous old moldering mansions in the Carolina woods.

Poe’s imagination was peculiarly Southern in flavor and hue,¹⁵ while his loyalty and faith were always bound up in the South,¹⁶ and he respected the judgment of the Southerners Philip Pendleton Cooke, the poet, and the novelist Beverley Tucker above all others. He went out of his way in after years to defend Southern men of letters,¹⁷ against the sell-sufficiency of the New Englanders, for example, and in general the Southern writers appreciated him and did their best to afford him practical assistance. William Wirt, protesting his “ignorance of modern poetry and modern tastes,” — for his mind had been formed in the post-Revolutionary decades, — was yet most courteous and helptul to this brilliant beginner, and so were John H. B. Latrobeand “Horse-Shoe Robinson” Kennedy, who awarded him a prize for his Tales of the Folio Club.

Somewhat later, the Georgia poet, Thomas Holley Chivers, offered to support Poe altogether. This heroworshiping Southern physician, the son of a rich plantation-owner, had been publishing poems of his own since 1829, with no “discoverable taint of Byron or Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, as Poe remarked when he had read and met him. in fact, the “ wild Mazeppa of letters,”— Simms’s phrase for Chivers, - had a curiously original mind, without taste or discretion, a singular gift of verbal music for which he sacrificed everything else, while achieving remarkable effects with alliteration and rhythm. He “jumbled, tumbled, rumbled, raged and raved, as the euphmst Sylvester said of the furies, coining exotic, sonorous words like the “scoriac” and “Aidenn" of Poe, from whom he borrowed freely in his later poems. But Chivers influenced Poe in turn, as he interested Rossetti and Swinburne and left traces in the poems of Kipling and Vachel Lindsay, He wrote a number of plays as well, one on the Sharp-Beauchamp murder, the notorious “Kentucky tragedy” of 1825, the theme of Poe’s Politian and other plays, novels, and ballads, the most popular literary theme in America in the thirties.¹⁸

Chivers was ready to help Poe, as Kennedy and Latrobe had been; for, in spite of the legend that later arose through a natural reaction against the false witness of Griswold, who attacked his honor, Poe found the world in general well-disposed. There were always two persons who defended for one who attacked him. It was his nature, moreover, to struggle, to fight, every inch of the way, for he was proud, laborious, and devoted. He had had a good name as a student at college, as a soldier he was called “prompt and faithful,”and later, as an assistant editor, he was described by N. P. Willis as invariably industrious, punctual, and patient. He was never by choice a bohemian, he was far from irresponsible, he made every effort to be practical, in point of fact; and as he never blamed others for the “unmerciful disaster” that followed him “faster and faster" as he sped through life, so neither was he to blame, though its cause was within him.

A neurotic, for various obvious reasons, who was later disordered mentally, when a definite lesion seems to have developed in his brain, he had a heart affection too that appeared in this early Baltimore time, perhaps as a result of the nervous exhaustion of his youth. He began to break down physically about 1832. There was more of the tragic in the life of Poe than any sensitive man could bear, and be look opiates occasionally and drank too much.

Was he not, besides, a victim of the " Imp of the Per verse,” like the hero of the tale that bore this name? When Poe described perverseness as a primitive, radical sentiment, as one of the prima mobilia of the humansoul, he was picturing a trait of Iris own personality common enough but neurotic, no doubt - that would in any case have wrecked his life. The man who tells the story has committed a wondrously skillful crime, and he has no conscience or feeling of guilt about it, and yet from sheer perversity he is driven to confess the crime precisely because the confession involves his undoing. Just so, the victim of the imp of the perverse feels drawn to the brink of the precipice because his reason violently holds him back because, instead of the natural desire for wellbeing. a strongly antagonistical feeling grips him.

One saw this wayward motive at work again and again in the life of Poe — for example, in his various connections with magazines. To be a great editor, he said, was the dream of his life, and he had at one time or another in his hands a number of the most important magazines. He might easily have become and remained the greatest editor in the country had it not been for this imp of the perverse Poe’s nervous and mental organization would have made havoc of his life in any society, at any moment of time.

30

SICK or well, he possessed, meanwhile, a literary genius that had had no parallel as yet on the American scene. This genius, moreover, was supremely artistic, as Cooper’s, for instance, never was, or even the noble talent of the admirable Bryant, who was also a lover of perfection; for Poe was a craftsman of exquisite skill in prose and verse alike, a conscious master of his methods as well as his effects. Even as a reviewer of books, he affirmed that, reviews should be works of art, a point that no writer had thought of in America before, and Hawthorne alone was to rival him in the eighteen-thirties in the art of prose composition and the writing of tales.

Irving, of course, was a natural artist, but he had little of the cunning of Poe, while Cooper, a man of genius, was nothing as a craftsman, and Poe was an innovator in verse, a creator of “novel forms of beauty,” who influenced poets elsewhere for an age to come, A lover, as he said, of severe precision, " profoundly excited by music,” ¹⁹ a seeker of the perfect who constantly revised his work, while disdaining all recourse to “poetic licence,²⁰ he had taken to heart the remark of Bacon that “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” He had developed variations from the usual metrical patterns, notes that were subtly discordant and wholly unexpected, and, feeling that “the indefinite is an element of the true poesis,” he sought “the unknown — the vague — the uncomprehended.”

His images, instead of creating specific pictures in the mind, evoked a world of sorrowful associations, remote, dim, sinister, melancholy, majestic; his refrains suggested echoes from bottomless gulfs, and when be repeated a word in a rhyme the sound seemed magically altered by the new collocation, One beard in a few of these brief poems a kind of ethereal music like Tennyson’s horns of Elfland faintly blowing, though the dream-world of Poe was a wild, weird clime indeed. It was haunted by ill angels, vast and formless, “flapping from their condor wings invisible woe.

Already by 1831, when the third of his little collections was published, Poe had written “To Helen.” “The City in the Sea,”“Israfel.” “ The Lake,” and others of more than a dozen poems in which he emerged as a new voice in the language. In the end he wrote two score and ten, and perhaps fifteen of these were to hear the stamp that eternity knew as Poe’s, the poems in which he had outgrown the spell of Byron, Keats, Colendge. and Shelley and appeared as another member of their family of minds. These poems were as pure as they were unique; and were they not fixed as a constellation in the sky of the human imagination for ever? A hundred years later, at least, they were certainly to seem so. Meanwhile, the tales that Poe was writing had much in common with them, — they were sometimes even as musical in the beauty of their prose,²¹— and there one also found dim tarns, wild anti dreary landscapes, and phantom figures flitting to and fro. Evil things in robes of sorrow presided over some of these tales, with their strange effects of horror, the macabre, and the grotesque, a world of the phantasmagoric, suggesting the dreams of an opium-eater and reverberant with Thomas De Quincey’s “everlasting farewells.”

The note of Poe was truly his own — his tales, like his poems, were original, but they too sprang from a literary mood of the time, and Poe belonged to a family of minds as marked in this other sphere of prose as the family to which he belonged in the sphere of verse. He had something in common with De Quincey, with the German writers Hoffmann and Tieck, with all the contemporary strains of the bizarre and the Gothic (as well as the stately classical strain of Landor), and even with Charles Brockden Brown, the early American story-teller, the lover of melancholy, mystery, the horrible, and the dire. Some of his properties, so to speak, were the ordinary properties of the Gothic romance—decaying castles, trances, cataleptic attacks; while Blackwood’s Magazine abounded with stories of a sensational kind that resembled in certain ways the tales of Poe — stories of a man entombed alive, a man who is baked in an oven, a man who goes to sleep under a church-bell, a manuscript allegedly found in a madhouse, tales of men who are drowned or hanged and telling how they feel before they die.

American authors wrote similar stories in various American magazines, and several of Poe’s were conventional tales of the time, such as Simms and Willis, for example, were also writing, with settings in Hungary or Venice or Spain, in sumptuous palaces and vague châteaux, with the usual romantic literary bric-a-brac. If The Cask of Amonltillado had been less intense, it might easily have been mistaken for the work of Willis, as The Assignation might have been written by Simms — that is to say, if Poe had omitted the poem in this tale, the miraculous lines “To One in Paradise.”A few of his more trifling pieces were drawn from French originals, while he borrowed from Bulwer, Disraeli’s Vivian Greg, and Macaulay’s description of Benares.

For Poe was bathed in the air of his time, and he was a man of a time when people were living “Gothically” all about him, when they were building Gothic houses that recalled the school of his childhood in England, with its gates and its pointed windows and ceilings of oak. Only a step from Baltimore, at Bel Air in Maryland, where the merry Parson Weems had lived with his wife, the actor Junius Brutus Booth built a Gothic manor-house, with mullioned windows, dark passages, gables, and recesses. Booth, the Rosicrueian, might have stepped out of the pages of Poe, who was very much more, however, than a man of his time and who made something unique of these forms of the moment. In prose as well as in verse, moreover, he gave the measure of his genius during these early years in Baltimore. Before he returned for a while to Richmond in 1835, he had written Morelia and the Manuscript Found in a Bottle, the Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, Silence — a Fable, and other pieces that revealed the full range of his quality as a teller of tales. Most of the greater stories he wrote in the fourteen years before he died were amplifications and variations of these.

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Now, if one could believe the assertions of Poe, he consciously chose the impressions that formed the substance of his tales and poems, for he appeared to like to think that the essence of his work as well as its form was a fruit of the coldest artifice and the skill of the craftsman. No one could question his skill, indeed, and of course he chose some of his themes; but others, and the most characteristic, rose out of his unconscious mind as naturally and uncontrollably as nightmares, and the personality they revealed apparently offered a clue to Poe’s insistence on the power of his conscious thinking. For was it not singular, after all, that he wished to range himself with the fabricators of most of the Blackwood tales, whose writing was done in cold blood and wholly produced by the conscious mind because they had no such depths as his to work from? Was he trying to convince himself in all this show of reasoning that his own mind was not “tottering upon her throne,” like the mind of the neurasthenic Roderick Usher, that his intellect was not only great but master of his moods as well, that Edgar Allan Poe was the captain of his soul? For there was no doubt of the presence of incipient madness in the marvelous imagination that conceived these tales, an imagination all compact of gloom, despair, sepulchral thoughts, grim fantasies, and the fear of impending mental decay.

There was scarcely even a glimmer of sunlight in this world of sorrow and desolation, of shadow, disaster, horror, revenge, and crime, a world overhung with the sable wings of lunacy, perversity, hysteria, of sickness, hypochondria, ruin, dissolution, and death. The typical heroes of these tales were victims of neuroses who shared no relationships or interests with the rest of the race, who had forgotten, if they ever possessed, any ties with humankind, and whose habits and surroundings reflected and partook of their disorder.²² They suffered from a morbid acuteness of the senses, they found even the odors of flowers oppressive, while their eyes were tortured by the faintest light: they lived in dark rooms with massive shutters by the gleam of perfumed tapers that threw out only the feeblest and ghastliest of rays. They trembled at the sound of their own voices, they were enamored of the night, and they liked rooms that were closely shrouded in somber velvet draperies that fell in heavy folds to an ebony floor.

They were marked by a nervous irritability, they were unsettled in intellect, and their minds were haunted by obsessions, or they meditated crimes, or they were completely possessed by the crimes of others, while they were filled with every kind of abnormal or moonstruck sensation, with affections that were semi-incestuous and vertiginous fears. They were ridden, for example, by a conviction that they were destined to be buried alive, and they doubted the fidelity of their closest friends; they spent their days planning a coffin with levers for admitting air and light, and with springs and ropes to open the coffin and the vault. Or, as if to escape from all touch of reality, they involved their minds in abstruse studies, fantastic speculations, and intricate dreams. Meanwhile, the women of these tales, Madeline, Berenice, Ligeia, Morella, and Eleanora were mysteriously stricken and wasted away with maladies that were obscure and fatal.

There were no mornings in the world of Poe, there were only winter afternoons or dull, dark, soundless days in the autumn of the year, and one sometimes had glimpses of a river or a lake that was saffron or sickly in hue or sullen or livid in the light of a setting sun. Some of the tales were humorous, and these were perhaps the most sinister of all, for one seldom felt any warmth in the humor of Poe, although Dickens was one of his favorite writers and he was genial now and then, as, for instance, in his name for the mummy, “ Allamistakeo.” There was certainly something engaging in his reference to an Arabian book that was “scarcely known at all, even in Europe, the “Tellmenow Isitsoörnot,” and his waddling Dutchmen in Hans Pfaall were quite in the manner of Washington Irving, who wrote to Poe sympathetically about his stories.

Then his mimicry of the Irish brogue in the sketch of “Sir Pathrick O’Grandison” was no less good-natured than clever, while he was probably right in thinking that his sense of the grotesque was an unmistakable evidence of the artist in him.²³ But his humor was mainly of the sort that makes one shiver, the kind of macabre facetiousness for which nothing is so funny as the horrible and which takes delight in tweaking the nose of a corpse. There was something frightful in the nonchalance with which the characters in these comic tales were flung from the gallery of a theater into the pit or thrown about until their skulls were broken, while their ears were cut off or their arms were smashed or their sanguinary heads rolled from the tops of steeples into the gutter. They went home in high glee with dislocated necks or they placed corpses in boxes that were supposed to contain champagne, with springs to make the corpse rise when the box was opened.

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THIS was the icy facetiousness that goes with the neurotic type, and the tales of Poe were impressive precisely because they were not fabrications but involuntary ebullitions of his own sick mind. He shaped his effects with the utmost skill, but these effects had causes over which Poe had very little control indeed, and, while other writers played with the macabre and the grotesque, he lisped his horrors because the horrors came. The unkindness of an unkind fate, death, disease, and danger had left their marks in his unconscious mind, along with prenatal injuries, perhaps, and drugs; and the “indefinite sense of wrong” that Longfellow noted in Poe was a whiff of the devil’s brew at the bottom of the barrel.

Of what nature were the “nightmares” Poe was having at fifteen? And what were those wild dreams of his later life, dreams so sad and shocking that he could not bear to be left alone and besought Mrs. Clemm to sit near him and stroke his forehead? In all probability were they not those dreams “of a most terrific description " that racked the soul of Arthur Gordon Pym as he lay buried, as it were, in the hold of the ship, in which every species of calamity and horror befell him? Ghastly and ferocious demons smothered him to death between huge pillows, colossal serpents embraced him with shining eyes, and presently limitless deserts spread themselves out, forlorn, before him, and ranks of tall trees with their roots concealed in morasses. The trees waved to and fro their skeleton arms and piercingly cried to the black, still waters for mercy.

If, indeed, the dreams of Poe were not these actual dreams of Pym, they were certainly similar in kind, as were most of his stories: the story of the dungeon of the Inquisition, of the man who is walled in the vault, of the old man who is murdered for his glittering eye and the madman who gouges out the eye of the cat. The vengeful dwarf burning alive the monarch who had wronged him was an image of some deep desire in the mind of Poe, and the cold lips of the rats that writhed on the throat of the man in the pit had probably sought Poe’s lips in one of these nightmares. Had he not shared the sensations, moreover, of the man who was conscious of all the movements of those who bore him to the grave and lowered him within it and left him to his sad and solemn slumbers with the worm?

Who can doubt that ” wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow like,” before his eyes, as before the eyes of the narrator of Ligeia, visions and images of shrouded bodies, eats with a gallows outlined on them, voices issuing from “distended and motionless jaws, and the tottering figures of pallid tenants of tombs? He had heard the strains of the mad waltzes that echoed in his poems and his stories and seen the wind-blown arrases, tattered and dark, fitfully swaying on the walls of some house of the dead. This child, like De Quincey, had “been in hell, ” and it was just his personal note, the stamp of actuality, of experience, in fact, that gave the tales of Poe then authority and uniqueness.

“To dream, said the lover in The Assignation, “has been the business of my life.”So it was with Poe, who wrote the story, and in some of his dreams he carried out the dearest wishes of his heart: he had moments of happi ness there that life denied him. He could indulge in the lives of his heroes the kind of material heautv-worship that was beyond his world of shabby lodgings, and his Epicurean imagination found a fulfillment in them that poverty rendered impossible iu his own life. There he could be of ancient family, the child of time-honored hereditary halls, descended from a race that was famous for its mysterious powers, whose parents had provided him at college with an “outfit and annual establishment that enabled him to gratify all his tastes. He could “vie in prof use ness of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms ” and live in a regal magnificence and a gloomy splendor which the aut bor of I athek scarcely surpassed at Fonthill; he could be as fabulously rich, iu fact, as Ellison in The Domain of Arnheim, with ten times the treasure and the jewels in the chest of The Cold Bug. He could always have a valet, of course, like the hero of The Oval Portrait, and a personal physician, like Mr, Bedloe’s, devoted solely to his care, and he could be “skillful in Italian vintages,” like the man in The Cask of Amontillado, and a gourmet as famous as Bon-Bon. He could dine as they dined in the Maison de Sauté of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, on veal à la Ste. Ménehould and cauliflowers in velouté sauce, with bottles and baskets and cases of Clos Vougeot, and his cloak could be, like William Wilson’s, “extravagantly costly, of an inexpressibly “rare description of fur.” Then he could live in a sumptuous house, with windows of crimsontinted glass, in drawing-rooms with curtains of crimson aud ejoth of gold, and his books could be superbly bound and his pictures ²⁴ framed iu arabesques, and his antique

lamps could he filled with perfumed oil (For the author of the Philosophy of Composition was the author of the Philosophy of Furniture as well.) If this seemed rather too much in the style of some of the parvenus of 1840, one had to remember that Poe was a reader of Beckford, that his parents had been actors, and that he possessed a patrician mind that longed to out gentleman the gentle men of Charlottesville and Richmond Besides there was something infantile in Poe. as in all the Symbolists who followed him in France and elsewhere.

But, along with this childish materialism, Poe was a lover of spiritual beauty and especially classical beauty and the “glory that was Greece,” and occasionally, in his prose and verse, his love and genius crystallized and formed a gem of purest ray serene. The beauty of the little poem “To Helen ” was all but matched in a few of the tales by such bits, for example, as the picture of Aphrodite, suggesting a Tauagra figure, in The Assignation;²⁵ while his fantastic realism, as Dostoevsky called it, worked like the spell of a wizard over the mind. One absolutely believed Hie impossible when the art of POP presented it, so great were the force of his imagination and the skill with which he introduced the trivial and precise details that imparted to the whole effect an air of truth. The behavior of the cat and kittens in the basket of Hans Pfaall s balloon convinced one that the moon was actually near, especially as the feathers dropped like bullets from the ear when the atmosphere had become too rare to sustain them. It was this power of the factual detail that carried one, helpless with terror, to the bottom of the hideous gulf in the Descent into the Maelstrom and roped one down with the rats in the Spanish pit. One shared Poe’s nightmares more vividly than one felt one’s own.

(To be concluded)

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THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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