Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/89

Rh exotic with no roots in the soil of his nativity," neither a person nor a personality but a "fantastically disembodied" spirit. If Hawthorne, the man, were similarly interpreted, if he were judged solely from his greatest works, we should think of him as tortured day and night by a brooding sense of guilt; we should picture him as living under the shadow of a curse, merited or inherited, that left no peace to his stricken conscience. It would be a false conception, however, because we know from other sources that Hawthorne was not abnormal in the pathological sense. But in the case of Poe there have been no other sources. The stories and poems have been requisitioned as autobiography, as the only autobiography. They are the autobiography of the artist, an artist who has again and again recorded his conviction that art is concerned primarily with beauty, and that beauty, to be appealing, must be garmented in strangeness.

But Poe's personality has also been interpreted in terms not of his art but of a habit that clung to him to the last. It is needless to go into the old sifted and re-sifted question of the exact amount of alcohol necessary to render Poe irresponsible. There is no doubt that he drank to excess and more frequently than his defenders have admitted. There is no doubt also that he fought the habit, fostered by inheritance and environment, with every power of will and every prompting of duty that he could muster. The evidence is plain that the temptation to drink was strongest during those quick descents from confident hope and exaltation to pitiless and intolerable dejection. George Eliot writes of "the still melancholy that I love." Poe did not love it, nor was it habitual with him. His