Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/60

40 that he had himself witnessed, of love and devotion at the sick bed of master and slave, evince a native sympathy and susceptibility of which Poe's stories give only scattered hints. Though abolition had made but little headway at this time, Poe seemed to have an intuitive conviction that slavery was doomed. "It is a sort of boding," he says, "that may belong to the family of superstitions. All vague and undefined fears, from causes the nature of which we know not, the operations of which we cannot stay, are of that character."

Partly because of his defense of slavery and partly because of his views on southern literature, the charge has often been made that Poe was partisan and sectional. But he was neither. His loyalty to certain definite principles of criticism is evident in all that he wrote. It was not men or parties or sections of the country that Poe defended; it was rather those bases of thought and feeling which had come to have for him the authority of ultimate truth. If a southerner violates these principles Poe's blade pierces his armor as surely as though he were a New England transcendentalist or incorrigible abolitionist. Take the case of William Gilmore Simms, the novelist and poet, of South Carolina. Poe is constantly complaining that Simms and other writers not born in New England are omitted in popular compendiums of American literature, but he is unsparing in pointing out the defects of Simms as a writer, defects which no one questions to-day. Poe's contention is not that southern writers are better than others but that they at least deserve consideration in every survey of American literature that claims to be representative. Totality rather than