CHAPTER IV

POE

THERE is an arresting passage in the journals of the Goncourts which is prophetic when we regard it from the standpoint of the years that have elapsed since it was written. "Poe, une littérature nouvelle, la littérature du vingtième siècle: le miraculeux scientifique, la fabulation par A +B, une littérature à la fois monomaniaque et mathématique. De l'imagination à coup d'analyse, Zadig juge d'instruction, Cyrano de Bergerac élève d'Arago. Et les choses prenant un rôle plus grand que les êtres, et l'amour, l'amour déjà un peu amoindri dans l'œuvre de Balzac par l'argent, l'amour cédant sa place à d'autres sources d'intérêt; enfin le roman de l'avenir appelé à faire plus l'histoire des chose qui se passent dans la cervelle de l'humanité que des choses qui se passent dans son cœur." 1 These lines were penned in 1856.

"The literature of the twentieth century: the

1 i. 137.

est

scientific miraculous. . . . Things assuming a more important rôle than people the fiction of the future ordained to chronicle what transpires in the brain of humanity rather than what transpires in its heart." Such phrases as these awake only too familiar an echo. Set beside them the following words of Remy de Gourmont: "Poe un Américan bien plus représentatif de l'Amèrique qu' Emerson ou Walt Whitman. Son esprit a des côté pratiques. Dénué de littérature, il eût été un étonnant homme d'affaires, un 'lanceur' de premier ordre." 1 Of how many later American writers might it not be said that "stripped of their literary clothing, they would have been remarkable business men, promoters in the highest rank of success."

It would be a fascinating problem to unravel precisely how the artist who dedicated his Eureka "to those who feel rather than to those who think" should have attracted and influenced later writers so profoundly by his rationalizing logic rather than by his indubitably great imaginative powers.

He was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. His parents were traveling players, whose livelihood was precarious. We know that his father

1 Promenades littéraires, 1904, i. 381.

experience full of Both died of conyears old, and the

was intemperate as well as impulsive, and the histrionic wanderings of both his father and his mother must have led to an nervous excitement and risk. sumption when Poe was three inheritance which they left him was a source of struggle to him until his death. He was adopted by John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, under whose protection he lived until 1827. He seems to have been petted and spoiled by Allan's first wife who was childless. From 1815 to 1820, he was at school in London, after which he returned to Richmond. We may picture a lonely boy, proud, haughty, and quick-tempered, but generous and hungry for affection. When Mrs. Stannard, the mother of a boy friend, who had been kind to him died, the youth of fifteen is recorded to have kept long night watches of passionate grief over her grave.

Poe had a breach with his foster father in 1824. Allan's wife had died, and he married again. The adulation of Allan's first wife gave place to coldness in his second wife. The breach was to widen fatally later, but in 1826 Allan sent him to the University of Virginia. He was impetuous and perhaps erratic as a student there. He con

tracted gambling debts of which Allan disapproved, and was obliged to leave college in the following year. Before entering the University of Virginia, he had fallen in love and become engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster, but she broke off the engagement. Poe seems to have remembered her always.

After leaving the University of Virginia, Allan gave him a clerkship in Richmond, but Poe ran away early in 1827. We gather that he went to Boston and entered the army under an assumed name. His discharge was purchased in 1829, and after a period of waiting, he was appointed to a vacancy in West Point in 1830, from which he was expelled in the following year. During the next four years we have little knowledge of him, but it is probable that he lived in obscure indigence in Baltimore.

There is a story at first hand, which is not otherwise confirmed, that he fell deeply in love with one Mary Devereaux.' If this is so, it must have been in 1831 or 1832. She also is said to have jilted him, and he is supposed to have loved her

1 See Van Cleef. Poe's Mary. Harper's Magazine, March,

1889.

always. The story is told that she was present in 1847 at the deathbed of Poe's wife, and that the latter said to her: "Be a friend to Eddie, and don't forsake him; he always loved you didn't you, Eddie?" One is inclined to be skeptical, but the legend would help to explain many of the preoccupations in the short stories.

Albert Mordell has built up an interesting case on this story which merits careful, though discriminating reading.1 Poe's first tales which are interesting to study in this light, found magazine publication in 1882.

In 1835, he was appointed assistant editor, and soon after editor-in-chief, of the Southern Literary Messenger, which was published at Richmond. Many of his own poems and stories appeared in its pages, and the periodical soon won reputation for itself under his editorship. He appears to have been living with his aunt Mrs. Clemm since the summer of 1833, and in May, 1836, he married her daughter Virginia, a girl of thirteen, out of generosity and family affection, I cannot help feeling, rather than unreserved freedom of choice. His love for her mother, who

1 The Erotic Motive in Literature, 1919, pp. 220-236.