International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1

When he accepted the invitation of the Lyceum he intended to write an original poem, upon a subject which he said had haunted his imagination for years; but cares, anxieties, and feebleness of will, prevented; and a week before the appointed night he wrote to a friend imploring assistance. "You compose with such astonishing facility," he urged in his letter, "that you can easily furnish me, quite soon enough, a poem that shall be equal to my reputation. For the love of God I beseech you to help me in this extremity." The lady wrote him kindly, advising him judiciously, but promising to attempt the fulfillment of his wishes She was, however, an invalid, and so failed6. At last, instead of pleading illness himself, as he had previously done on a similar occasion, he determined to read his poem of "Al Aaraaf," the original publication of which, in 1829, has already been stated.

The last number of the Broadway Journal was published on the third of January,1846, and Poe soon after commenced the series of papers entitled "The Literati of New-York City," which was published in The Lady's Book in six numbers, from May to October. Their spirit, boldness, and occasional causticity caused them to be much talked about, and three editions were necessary to supply the demand for some numbers of the magazine containing them. They however led to a disgraceful quarrel, and this to a premature conclusion. Dr. Thomas Dunn English, who had at one time sustained the most intimate relations with Poe, chose to evince his resentment of the critic's unfairness by the publication of a card in which he painted strongly the infirmities of Poe's life and character, and alleged that he had on several occasions inflicted upon him personal chastisement. This was not a wise confession, for a gentleman never appeals to his physical abilities except for defense. But the entire publication, even if every word of it were true, was unworthy of Dr. English, unnecessary, and not called for by Poe's article, though that, as every one acquainted with the parties might have seen, was entirely false in what purported to be its facts. The statement of Dr. English appeared in the New York Mirror of the twenty-third of June, and on the twenty-seventh Mr. Poe sent to Mr. Godey for publication in the Lady's Book his rejoinder, which would have made about five of the large pages of that miscellany. Mr. Godey very properly declined to print it, and observed, in the communication of his decision, that the tone of the article was regarded as unsuitable for his work and as altogether wrong. In compliance with the author's wishes, however, he had caused its appearance in a daily paper. Poe then wrote to him:

"The man or men who told you that there was anything wrong in the tone of my reply, were either my enemies, or your enemies, or asses. When you see them, tell them so, from me. I have never written an article upon which I more confidently depend for literary reputation than that Reply. Its merit lay in its being precisely adapted to its purpose. In this city I have had upon it the favorable judgments of the best men. All the error about it was yours. You should have done as I requested—published it in the Book. It is of no use to conceive a plan if you have to depend upon another for its execution."

Nevertheless, I agree with Mr. Godey. Poe's article was as bad as that of English. Yet a part of one of its paragraphs is interesting, and it is here transcribed:

–"Let me not permit any profundity of disgust to induce, even for an instant, a violation of the dignity of truth. What is not false, amid the scurrility of this man's statements, it is not in my nature to brand as false, although oozing from the filthy lips of which a lie is the only natural language. The errors and frailties which I deplore, it cannot at least be asserted that I have been the coward to deny. Never, even, have I made attempt at extenuating a weakness which is (or, by the blessing of God, was) a calamity, although those who did not know me intimately had little reason to regard it otherwise than a crime. For, indeed, had my pride, or that of my family permitted, there was much—very much—there was everything to be offered in extenuation. Perhaps, even, there was an epoch at which it might not have been wrong in me to hint—what by the testimony of Dr. Francis and other medical men I might have demonstrated, had the public, indeed, cared for the demonstration—that the irregularities so profoundly lamented were the effect of a terrible evil rather than its cause.—And now let me thank God that in redemption from the physical ill I have forever got rid of the moral."

Dr. Francis never gave any such testimony. On one occasion Poe borrowed fifty dollars from a distinguished literary woman of South Carolina, promising to return it in a few days, and when he failed to do so, and was asked for a written acknowledgment of the debt that might be exhibited to the husband of the friend who had thus served him, he denied all knowledge of it, and threatened to exhibit a correspondence which he said would make the woman infamous, if she said any more on the subject. Of course there had never been any such correspondence, but when Poe heard that a brother of the slandered party was in quest of him for the purpose of taking the satisfaction supposed to be due in such cases, he sent for Dr. Francis and induced him to carry to the gentleman his retraction and apology, with a statement which seemed true enough for the moment, that Poe was "out of his head." It is an ungracious duty to describe such conduct in a person of Poe's unquestionable genius and capacities of greatness, but those who are familiar with the career of this extraordinary creature can recall but too many similar anecdotes; and as to his intemperance, they perfectly well understand that its pathology was like that of ninety-nine of every hundred cases of the disease.

As the autumn of 1846 wore on, Poe's habits of frequent intoxication and his inattention to the means of support reduced him to much more than common destitution. He was now living at Fordham, several miles from the city, so that his necessities were not generally known even among his acquaintances; but when the dangerous illness of his wife was added to his misfortunes, and his dissipation and accumulated causes of anxiety had prostrated all his own energies, the subject was introduced into the journals. The Express said:

"We regret to learn that Edgar A. Poe and his wife are both dangerously ill with the consumption, and that the hand of misfortune lies heavy upon their temporal affairs. We are sorry to mention the fact that they are so far reduced as to be barely able to obtain the necessaries of life. This is indeed a hard lot, and we hope that the friends and admirers of Mr. Poe will come promptly to his assistance in his bitterest hour of need."

Mr. Willis, in an article in the Home Journal suggesting a hospital for disabled laborers with the brain, said—

"The feeling we have long entertained on this subject, has been freshened by a recent paragraph in the Express, announcing that Mr. Edgar A. Poe and his wife were both dangerously ill, and suffering for want of the common necessaries of life. Here is one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of our country, whose temporary suspension of labor, from bodily illness, drops him immediately to a level with the common objects of public charity. There was no intermediate stopping-place-no respectful shelter where, with the delicacy due to genius and culture, he might secure aid, unadvertised, till, with returning health, he could resume his labors and his unmortified sense of independence. He must either apply to individual friends—(a resource to which death is sometimes almost preferable)—or suffer down to the level where Charity receives claimants, but where Rags and Humiliation are the only recognized Ushers to her presence. Is this right? Should there not be, in all highly civilized communities, an Institution designed expressly for educated and refined objects of charity—a hospital, a retreat, a home of seclusion and comfort, the sufficient claims to which would be such susceptibilities as are violated by the above mentioned appeal in a daily newspaper."

The entire article from which this paragraph is taken, was an ingenious apology for Mr. Poe's infirmities; but it was conceived and executed in a generous spirit, and it had a quick effect in various contributions, which relieved the poet from pecuniary embarrassments. The next week he published the following letter:

"My Dear Willis:—The paragraph which has been put in circulation respecting my wife's illness, my own, my poverty, etc., is now lying before me; together with the beautiful lines by Mrs. Locke and those by Mrs. –, to which the paragraph has given rise, as well as your kind and manly comments in The Home Journal. The motive of the paragraph I leave to the conscience of him or her who wrote it or suggested it. Since the thing is done, however, and since the concerns of my family are thus pitilessly thrust before the public, I perceive no mode of escape from a public statement of what is true and what erroneous in the report alluded to. That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what feelings I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been heightened and precipitated by her reception at two different periods, of anonymous letters,—one inclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs. –, for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.

"Of the facts, that I myself have been long and dangerously ill, and that my illness has been a well-understood thing among my brethren of the press, the best evidence is afforded by the innumerable paragraphs of personal and literary abuse with which I have been latterly assailed. This matter, however, will remedy itself. At the very first blush of my new prosperity, the gentlemen who toadied me in the old, will recollect themselves and toady me again. You, who know me, will comprehend that I speak of these things only as having served, in a measure, to lighten the gloom of unhappiness, by a gentle and not unpleasant sentiment of mingled pity, merriment and contempt. That, as the inevitable consequence of so long an illness, I have been in want of money, it would be folly in me to deny—but that I have ever materially suffered from privation, beyond the extent of my capacity for suffering, is not altogether true. That I am 'without friends' is a gross calumny, which I am sure you never could have believed, and which a thousand noble-hearted men would have good right never to forgive me for permitting to pass unnoticed and undenied. Even in the city of New York I could have no difficulty in naming a hundred persons, to each of whom—when the hour for speaking had arrived—I could and would have applied for aid with unbounded confidence, and with absolutely no sense of humiliation. I do not think, my dear Willis, that there is any need of my saying more. I am getting better, and may add—if it be any comfort to my enemies—that I have little fear of getting worse. The truth is, I have a great deal to do; and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done. Sincerely yours,

"December 30th, 1846. EDGAR A. POE."

This was written for effect. He had not been ill a great while, nor dangerously at all; there was no literary or personal abuse of him in the journals; and his friends in town had been applied to for money until their patience was nearly exhausted. His wife, however, was very sick, and in a few weeks she died. In a letter to a lady in Massachusetts, who, upon the appearance of the newspaper articles above quoted, had sent him money and expressions of sympathy, he wrote, under date of March 10, 1847:

"In answering your kind letter permit me in the first place to absolve myself from a suspicion which, under the circumstances, you could scarcely have failed to entertain—a suspicion of discourtesy toward yourself, in not having more promptly replied to you…. I could not help feeling that should you see my letter to Mr. Willis—in which a natural pride, which I feel you could not blame, impelled me to shrink from public charity, even at the cost of truth, in denying those necessities which were but too real—I could not help fearing that, should you see this letter, you would yourself feel pained at having caused me pain-at having been the means of giving further publicity to an unfounded report—at all events to the report of a wretchedness which I had thought it prudent (since the world regards wretchedness as a crime) so publicly to disavow. In a word, venturing to judge your noble nature by my own, I felt grieved lest my published denial might cause you to regret what you had done; and my first impulse was to write you, and assure you, even at the risk of doing so too warmly, of the sweet emotion, made up of respect and gratitude alone, with which my heart was filled to overflowing. While I was hesitating, however, in regard to the propriety of this step, I was overwhelmed by a sorrow so poignant as to deprive me for several weeks of all power of thought or action. Your letter, now lying before me, tells me that I had not been mistaken in your nature, and that I should not have hesitated to address you; but believe me, my dear Mrs. L–, that I am already ceasing to regard those difficulties or misfortunes which have led me to even this partial correspondence with yourself."

For nearly a year Mr. Poe was not often before the public, but he was as industrious, perhaps, as he had been at any time, and early in 1848 advertisement was made of his intention to deliver several lectures, with a view to obtain an amount of money sufficient to establish his so-long-contemplated monthly magazine. His first lecture—and only one at this period—was given at the Society Library, in New York, on the ninth of February, and was upon the cosmogony of the Universe: it was attended by an eminently intellectual auditory, and the reading of it occupied about two hours and a half; it was what he afterward published under the title of "Eureka, a Prose Poem."

To the composition of this work he brought his subtlest and highest capacities, in their most perfect development. Denying that the arcana of the universe can be explored by induction, but informing his imagination with the various results of science, he entered with unhesitating boldness, though with no guide but the divinest instinct,—that sense of beauty, in which our great Edwards recognizes the flowering of all truth—into the sea of speculation, and there built up of according laws and their phenomena, as under the influence of a scientific inspiration, his theory of Nature. I will not attempt the difficult task of condensing his propositions; to be apprehended they must be studied in his own terse and simple language; but in this we have a summary of that which he regards as fundamental: "The law which we call Gravity," he says, "exists on account of matter having been radiated, at its origin, atomically, into a limited sphere of space, from one, individual, unconditional irrelative, and absolute Particle Proper, by the sole process in which it was possible to satisfy, at the same time, the two conditions, radiation and equable distribution throughout the sphere—that is to say, by a force varying in direct proportion with the squares of the distances between the radiated atoms, respectively, and the particular center of radiation."

Poe was thoroughly persuaded that he had discovered the great secret: that the propositions of "Eureka" were true; and he was wont to talk of the subject with a sublime and electrical enthusiasm which they cannot have forgotten who were familiar with him at the period of its publication. He felt that an author known solely by his adventures in the lighter literature, throwing down the gauntlet to professors of science, could not expect absolute fairness, and he had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor. Meeting me, he said, "Have you read 'Eureka?'" I answered, "Not yet: I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to see—sorry if it be true—suggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the 'Vestiges of Creation;' and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be of all the professors, in temper one of the most habitually just, thinks that while you may have guessed very shrewdly, it would not be difficult to suggest many difficulties in the way of your doctrine." "It is by no means ingenuous," he replied, "to hint that there are such difficulties, and yet to leave them unsuggested. I challenge the investigation of every point in the book. I deny that there are any difficulties which I have not met and overthrown. Injustice is done me by the application of this word 'guess:' I have assumed nothing and proved all." In his preface he wrote: "To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think; to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this book of truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:–let us say as a Romance; or, if it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die: or it by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the life everlasting."

When I read "Eureka" I could not help but think it immeasurably superior as an illustration of genius to the "Vestiges of Creation;" and as I admired the poem, (except the miserable attempt at humor in what purports to be a letter found in a bottle floating on the Mare tenebrarum,) so I regretted its pantheism, which is not necessary to its main design. To some of the objections to his work be made this answer in a letter to Mr. C.F. Hoffman, then editor of the Literary World:

"Dear Sir:—In your paper of July 29, I find some comments on 'Eureka,' a late book of my own; and I know you too well to suppose for a moment, that you will refuse me the privilege of a few words in reply. I feel, even, that I might safely claim, from Mr. Hoffman, the right, which every author has, of replying to his critic tone for tone—that is to say, of answering your correspondent, flippancy by flippancy and sneer by sneer—but in the first place, I do not wish to disgrace the World; and, in the second, I feel that I never should be done sneering, in the present instance, were I once to begin. Lamartine blames Voltaire for the use which he made of (ruse) misrepresentation, in his attacks on the priesthood; but our young students of Theology do not seem to be aware that in defense or what they fancy to be defense, of Christianity, there is anything wrong in such gentlemanly peccadillos as the deliberate perversion of an author's text—to say nothing of the minor indecora of reviewing a book without reading it and without having the faintest suspicion of what it is about.

"You will understand that it is merely the misrepresentations of the critique in question to which I claim the privilege of reply:—the mere opinions of the writer can be of no consequence to me—and I should imagine of very little to himself—that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:—'This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode—the noble art of guessing.' What I really say is this:—That there is no absolute certainty either in the Aristotelian or Baconian process—that, for this reason, neither Philosophy is so profound as it fancies itself—and that neither has a right to sneer at that seemingly imaginative process called Intuition (by which the great Kepler attained his laws); since 'Intuition,' after all, 'is but the conviction arising from those _in_ductions or _de_ductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason or defy our capacity of expression.' The second misrepresentation runs thus:—'The developments of electricity and the formation of stars and suns, luminous and nonluminous, moons and planets, with their rings, &c., is deduced, very much according to the nebular theory of Laplace, from the principle propounded above.' Now the impression intended to be made here upon the reader's mind, by the 'Student of Theology,' is evidently, that my theory may all be very well in its way, but that it is nothing but Laplace over again, with some modifications that he (the Student of Theology) cannot regard as at all important. I have only to say that no gentleman can accuse me of the disengenuousness here implied; inasmuch as, having proceeded with my theory up to that point at which Laplace's theory meets it, I then give Laplace's theory in full, with the expression of my firm conviction of its absolute truth at all points. The ground covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats; nor has he the slightest allusion to the 'principle propounded above,' the principle of Unity being the source of all things—the principle of Gravity being merely the Reaction of the Divine Act which irradiated all things from Unity. In fact no point of my theory has been even so much as alluded to by Laplace. I have not considered it necessary, here to speak of the astronomical knowledge displayed in the 'stars and suns' of the Student of Theology, nor to hint that it would be better to say that 'development and formation are, than that development and formation is. The third misrepresentation lies in a foot-note, where the critic says:—'Further than this, Mr. Poe's claim that he can account for the existence of all organized beings—man included—merely from those principles on which the origin and present appearance of suns and worlds are explained, must be set down as mere bald assertion, without a particle of evidence. In other words we should term it arrant fudge.' The perversion at this point is involved in a willful misapplication of the word 'principles.' I say 'wilful' because, at page 63, I am particularly careful to distinguish between the principles proper, Attraction and Repulsion, and those merely resultant sub-principles which control the universe in detail. To these sub-principles, swayed by the immediate spiritual influence of Deity. I leave, without examination, all that which the Student of Theology so roundly asserts I account for on the principles which account for the constitution of suns, &c.

"In the third column of his 'review' the critic says:—'He asserts that each soul is its own God—its own Creator.' What I do assert is, that 'each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator.' Just below, the critic says:—'After all these contradictory propoundings concerning God we would remind him of what he lays down on page 23—'of this Godhead in itself he alone is not imbecile—he alone is not impious who propounds nothing. A man who thus conclusively convicts himself of imbecility and impiety needs no further refutation.' Now the sentence, as I wrote it, and as I find it printed on that very page which the critic refers to and which must have been lying before him while he quoted my words, runs thus:—'Of this Godhead, in itself, he alone is not imbecile, &c., who propounds nothing.' By the italics, as the critic well knew, I design to distinguish between the two possibilities—that of a knowledge of God through his works and that of a knowledge of Him in his essential nature. The Godhead, in itself, is distinguished from the Godhead observed in its effects. But our critic is zealous. Moreover, being a divine, he is honest—ingenuous. It is his duty to pervert my meaning by omitting my italics—just as, in the sentence previously quoted, it was his Christian duty to falsify my argument by leaving out the two words, 'in part,' upon which turns the whole force—indeed the whole intelligibility of my proposition.