Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/90

70 was mercurial, and to break the fall from elation to hopelessness he drank. Indulgence was followed not by angry retort to those that sought to counsel him but by profound humiliation and by promise of reform. To assert that Poe found poetic inspiration in drink is to fly in the face of all the known facts. Drink did not help him; it hurt him, and he fought it as a foe of art, of thought, of personality, and of selfrespect. The very nature of his work,—with its meticulous care in details, its orderliness, its niceties of analysis, its interplay of reason and logic, its symmetry of construction, makes impossible the conjecture that he could have wrought it or any part of it while excited by drink. Poe drank but he was not a drunkard; he was dissipated but not dissolute.

No one has stated the case better than his friend, F. W. Thomas:

"If he took but one glass of weak wine or beer or cider the Rubicon of the cup was passed with him, and it almost always ended in excess and sickness. But he fought against the propensity as hard as ever Coleridge fought against it, and I am inclined to believe, after his sad experience and suffering, if he could have gotten office with a fixed salary, beyond the need of literary labour, that he would have redeemed himself—at least at this time. The accounts of his derelictions in this respect when I knew him were very much exaggerated. I have seen men who drank bottles of wine to Poe's wine glasses who yet escaped all imputation of intemperance. His was one of those temperaments whose only safety is in total abstinence. He suffered terribly after any indiscretion. And after all what Byron said of Sheridan was true of Poe—