came; and in this period it was, on his own account, that in a state of absolute frenzy between his woe and his bitter poverty,1 which seemed to league itself with disease against the young victim, he first gave way to delirious alcoholism. His wife's death left him heart-shaken, the long agony of her decline having deepened his feeling for her into a passion of pitying worship. As years passed on, the unstrung emotionalism of the man made him turn first to one and then to another woman for sympathy and love this while he maintained to the outside world, save in his lapses, his grave, lofty, high-bred calm of manner; and bated no jot of skill or thoroughness in his artistic work. While he makes distracted love to Mrs. Whitman, he never slackens in his keen derision of the transcendentalists, whose cloudy philosophy he could not abide. He writes his story of Hop Frog with his old impassable artistic aloofness, and writes about it to "Annie" in a letter touched with hysteria. "Forced, unnatural, false," "strained, exaggerated, and unnatural," are the terms Mr. Stoddard applies to these loveletters and letters of ecstatic friendship; and we cannot gainsay him here, save in so far as he imputes falsity. The case is one which Mr. Stoddard's primitive scalpel cannot dissect: what seems to him bad acting is neurosis. On the side of the affections Poe's sensitiveness becomes absolute disease; till the man who was accused of having no heart is wrecked by his heart's vibrations. But the intellect is never really subjected: it is shaken and dethroned at times by the breaking temperament; but it is unconquered to the last. He becomes almost insane when his engagement with Mrs. Whitman is broken; but he again collects himself, and he goes his way in silence. It is eminently significant that, as Mr. Ingram notes, he shows no resentment at being charged with aspiring to be a "glorious devil," all mind and no heart,2 as he

1 In an article in Harper's Magazine for May, 1887, entitled "The Recent Movement in Southern Literature," the writer, Mr. Charles W. Coleman, jun., says he has before him a series of letters written by Poe's employer on the Richmond Literary Messenger, in which it is complained that Poe "is continually after me for money. I am as sick of his writings as I am of him, and am rather more than half inclined to send him up another dozen dollars, and along with them all his unpublished MSS.," most of which are called "stuff." For his Pym story Poe asks three dollars a page. "In reality," says the employer, "it has cost me twenty dollars per page' a statement which is not explained. At last comes this: "Highly as I really think of Mr. Poe's talents, I shall be forced to give him notice in a week or so at the furthest, that I can no longer recognize him as editor of the Messenger." One is not highly impressed by the tone of the writer; but Poe's neediness seems clear.

2 Mr. Stedman in his latest criticism of Poe (Introd. to vol. vi. of new ed. of Works, p. 24) says of him, more in the manner of Griswold than in that of Mr.

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was by some of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. The explanation, I think, clearly is that while he was conscious of his tendency to turn emotions into reasonings, he also knew his danger from his malady, and was eager to have it overlooked. "In the strange anomaly of my existence," says the narrator in Berenice a story which offers abundant data for the "epilepsy" theory — "feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind;" and here there is a certain touch of self-study; but we must not be misled by the phrase. Passionately quick, on the one hand, to resent moral aspersions, and extravagant in his emotional outbursts, he had the pride of intellect in a sufficient degree to wish, in his normal condition, to be regarded as above emotional weakness. One who knew him in his latter days thought there was to be detected in him a constant effort for self-control.

Looking back on his hapless career, and contrasting his deserts with his lot, and with his reputation, one realizes with new certainty the worthlessness of most contemporary judgments. There are stories of his scrupulous conscientiousness and of his social considerateness such as could be told of few of his detractors; and yet we find one of his women friends resorting to inaccurate phrenology to account for the defects she inferred in his moral nature. Absolutely innocent in his relations with women, though his unworldly romanticism in their regard carried him into some

Stedman's earlier essay: "A 'speck of reservation spoiled for him the fullest cup of esteem, even when tendered by the most knightly and authoritative hands. Lowell's A Fable for Critics, declaring 'three-fifths of him genius,' gave him an award which ought to content even an unreasonable man. As it was, the goodnatured thrusts of one whose scholarship was unassailable, at his metrical and other hobbies, drew from him a somewhat coarse and vindictive review of the whole satire." It is true that Poe's review is bad in tone; but that does not put Mr. Stedman in the right, or bear out his zealous panegyric of Mr. Lowell. He oddly omits to cite the "two-fifths sheer fudge," though he seems to think that Poe ought to have welcomed Mr. Lowell's kicks for the sake of his sixpences. As against this addition to the countless one-sided verdicts on Poe, I must point out, (1) that Poe in his critique exhibits anger only over Mr. Lowell's very coarse attack on Southern slaveholders in general; (2) that though Mr. Lowell's lines on Poe were sufficiently impertinent he makes no protest on that head; (3) that Mr. Lowell's versification, on which Poe spends most of his blame, was really excessively bad, whatever his "scholarship" may have been, and cried aloud for a retort from the assailed metricist; and (4) that Poe's show of vindictiveness is as nothing compared with the passionate resentment exhibited in one of Mr. Lowell's letters, recently published (Vol. I. p. 109), on the score of Poe's having charged him with a plagiarism. An obvious blunder in Poe's citation of the passage imitated, he actually declares to have been a wilful perversion, though the easy exposure of it would at once tend to discredit Poe's charge. For the rest, Mr. Lowell's critical treatment of Thoreau makes it difficult for some of us to see in him the "knightly and authoritative" critical paragon of Mr. Stedman's worship.

miserable embroilments, he came to be reputed an extreme libertine; and his one fatal failing lost him some of the friendships he most needed;. virtue and goodness being not always as merciful as might be - not to say a trifle stupid. One of the most intensely concentrative and painstaking of writers, he has been stigmatized as indolent and spendthrift. To quote once more from the judgment of Professor Minto in the Encyclopædia Britannica, a vindication which, it is to be hoped, will set the current 1 of a true appreciation of the man: "Poe failed to make a living by literature, not because he was an irregular profligate in the vulgar sense, but because he did ten times as much work as he was paid to do a species of profligacy perhaps, but not quite the same in kind as that with which he was charged by his biographer." Pity and praise, we repeat finally, are far more his due than blame. Morally he lives for us as the high-strung, birth-stricken, suffering man, "whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster,' till, instead of the proud, noble countenance of the earlier days, we see in his latest portrait, as M. Hennequin describes it in his vivid French way, a face as of an old woman, white and haggard, hollowed, relaxed, ploughed with all the lines of grief and of the shaken reason; where over the sunken eyes, dimmed and dolorous and fargazing, there is throned the one feature unblemished still, the superb forehead, high and firm, behind which his soul is expiring." The pity of it all, and of the inexpressibly tragic conclusion, is too profound to be outweighed by the remembrance that the "delicate and splendid cerebral mechanism" remained, for its ratiocinative purposes, almost intact to the end. But it is by that magnificent endowment that the world is bound to remember him. Among the crowd of men of one or of a few capacities, winning distinction by giving their whole strength to this pursuit or that, and living with hardly any other intellectual interest, he stands forth as an intelligence of singularly various equipment and faculty. Science was not too dry for him; the analysis of style not too subtle or frivolous: he could frame exquisite verse and stringent logic with equal mastery and equal zeal. As a boy he had a turn for swimming such as would have led many men into a career of sheer athletics; in a paper on The Philosophy of Furniture he embodies a passion for

1 In the dearth of adequate estimates of Poe, it is much to be able to add to Mr. Minto's that of Lord Tennyson, published after this essay was first written. According to the newspaper report, the Laureate in conversation or correspondence ranked Poe highest among American men of letters, describing some more popular writers as "pygmies" beside him.

minor æsthetics such as can serve some men for a life's mission. For him there were no parochial boundaries in the world of the intellect: he was free of all provinces; overproud of his range, perhaps, but with an unusual title to be proud. And thus it is that we are fain to think of him as more than a poet, more than a critic, more than an æsthete, more than a tale-teller, more than a scientific thinker; a strange combination not seen in every age, and lastingly remarkable as such. He was a great brain.

VIII

JOHN DRYDEN

(1631-1700)

PREFACE TO THE FABLES

(1700)

'Tis with a poet, as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short in the expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So has it happened to me. I have built a house, where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman, who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he had contrived.

From translating the first of Homer's Iliads (which I intended as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the twelfth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of the Trojan war. Here I ought in reason to have stopped; but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk them. When I had compassed them, I was so taken with the former part of the fifteenth book (which is the masterpiece of the whole Metamorphoses), that I enjoined myself the pleasing task of rendering it into English. And now I found, by the number of my verses, that they began to swell into a little volume; which gave me an occasion of looking backward on some beauties of my author, in his former books: there occurred to me the Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the goodnatured story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope