Effects of poverty. Cp." Vic

torian Poets": p. 81.

His sensitive temperament.

forced to write by the column for their weekly board. 'Poverty has this disease: through want it teaches a man evil." More, it limits the range of his possibilities. Doudan has said, with truth and feeling, that he who is without security for the morrow can neither meditate upon nor accomplish a lasting work. The delicate fancies of certain writers are not always at quick command, and the public is loath to wait and pay for quality. Poe, more than once, fell into disgrace by not being able to meet his literary engagements on time. His most absurd and outrageous articles, such as the one put forth after his Boston lecture, were the bluster of a man who strove to hide a sense of humiliation and failure. Doubtless, he secretly invoked the gods in his own behalf. He knew, like Chénier going to his death, that it was a pity — he was worth saving. Generous efforts, in truth, were made to save him, by strong and tender friends, but these were quite in vain. He carried a death-warrant within him. Well might he feel that a spell was on him, and in one tale and another try to make the world which he affected to despise comprehend its fatality, and bespeak the sympathetic verdict of the future upon his defeat and doom.

"all

It is just that well-balanced persons should rebuke the failings of genius. But let such an one imagine himself with a painfully sensitive organization, touch, all eye, all ear"; with appetites almost resistless; with a frame in which health and success breed a dangerous rapture, disease and sorrow a fatal despair. Surmount all this with a powerful intelligence that does not so much rule the structure as it menaces it, and threatens to shake it asunder. Let him conceive himself as adrift, from the first, among adverse surroundings, now combating his environment, now

HIS UNMORALITY.

struggling to adjust himself to it. He, too, might find his judgment a broken reed; his passions might get the upper hand; his perplexities bring him to shamelessness and ruin. It was thus the poet's curse came upon him, and the wings of his Psyche were sorrowfully trailed in the dust. I have said to friends as they sneered at the ill-managed life of one whose special genius perhaps could not exist but in union with certain infirmities, that instead of recounting these, and deriding them, they should hedge him round with their protection. We can find more than one man of sense among a thousand, but how rarely a poet with such a gift! When he has gone his music will linger, and be precious to those who never have heard, like ourselves, the sweet bells jangled.

269

The price

less rarity

of genius.

Making every allowance, Poe was terribly blam- Lack of able. We all are misunderstood, and all condemned self-poise. to toil. The sprites have their task-work, and cannot always be dancing in the moonlight. At times, we are told, they have to consort with what is ugly, and even take on its guise. Unhappily, Poe was the reverse of one who "fortune's buffets and rewards has ta'en with equal thanks." He stood good fortune more poorly than bad; any emotion would upset him, and his worst falls were after successes, or with success just in sight. His devotion to beauty was eagerly selfish. He had a heart, and in youth was loved. In this respect he differed from the hero of "A Strange Story," born without affection or soul. But his dream was that of "The Palace of Art" a lordly pleasure-house, where taste and love should have their fill, regardless of the outer world. It has been well said, that if not immoral, Not imhe was unmoral. With him an end justified the means, and he had no conception of the law and limitations

loyal to those he

moral, but unmoral.

of neurotic disorder?

At

of liberty, no practical sense of right or wrong.
the most, he ignored such matters as things irrelevant.
Now it is not essential that one should have a creed;
he may relegate theologies to the regions of the un-
knowable; but he must be just in order to fear not,
and humane that he may be loved; he must be faith-
ful to some moral standard of his own, otherwise his
house, however beautiful and lordly, is founded in the
sand.

Is genius
The question always will recur, whether, if Poe had
the product been able to govern his life aright, he would not also
have been conventional and tame, and so much the
less a poet. Were it not for his excesses and neurotic
crises, should we have had the peculiar quality of his
art and the works it has left us? I cannot here dis-
cuss the theory that his genius was a frenzy, and that
poetry is the product of abnormal nerve-vibrations.
The claim, after all, is a scientific statement of the
belief that great wits are sure to madness near allied.
An examination of it involves the whole ground of
fate, free will, and moral responsibility. I think that
Poe was bounden for his acts. He never failed to
resent infringements upon his own manor; and, how-
ever poor his self-control, it was not often with him
that the chord of self passed trembling out of sight.
Possibly his most exquisite, as they were his most
poetic, moments, were at those times when he seemed
very wretched, and avowed himself oppressed by a
sense of doom. He loved his share of pain, and was
an instance of the fact that man is the one being that
takes keen delight in the tragedy of its own existence,
and for whom

"Joy is deepest when it springs from woe."

Wandering among the graves of those he had cher

FATAL LACK OF WILL.

271

ished, invoking the spectral midnight skies, believing himself the Orestes of his race -in all this he was fulfilling his nature, deriving the supremest sensations, feeding on the plants of night from which such as he obtain their sustenance or go famished. They who do not perceive this never will comprehend the mysteries of art and song, of the heart from whose recesses these must be evoked. They err who commiserate Poe for such experiences. My own pity for Secret of him is of another kind; it is that which we ever must feel for one in whom the rarest possibilities were blighted by an inherent lack of will. In his sensitiveness to impressions like the foregoing, he had at once the mood and material for far greater results than he achieved. A violin cracks none the sooner for being played in a minor key. His instrument broke for want of a firm and even hand to use ita virile, devoted master to prolong the strain.

Poe's dis

asters.

Poe's demand for his present wish was always strong, yet it was the caprice of a child, and not the determination that stays and conquers. He was no more of an egoist than was Goethe; but self-absorption is the edged tool that maims a wavering hand. His will, in the primary sense, was weak from the be- No real ginning. It became more and more reduced by those strength of habits which, of all the defences of a noble mind, attack this stronghold first. It was not able to preserve for him the sanity of true genius, and his product, therefore, was so much the less complete.

"O well for him whose will is strong!
He suffers, but he will not suffer long."

Poe suffered, in bitter truth, and the end came not
through triumph, but in death. His fame is not what
it might have been, we say; yet it is greater than he

will.

Fame waits on

worth and work.

dying with a sense of incompleteness - probably expected it to be, and more than he could have asked. In spite, then, of the most reckless career, the work a man really accomplishes both for what it is in itself and for what it reveals of the author's gift in the end will be valued exactly at its worth. Does the poet, the artist, demand some promise that it also may be made to tell during our working life, and even that life be lengthened till the world shall learn to honor it? Let him recall the grave, exalted words which Poe took at hazard for his "Ligeia," and stayed not to dwell upon their spiritual meaning: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his own feeble will."