Chapter 26
"Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and peculiar as that for cards. It was not the _taste_ of the beverage that influenced him. Without a sip or smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, without water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp. This frequently used him up; but if not, he rarely returned to the charge."
This, for a lad of seventeen, with an excitable temperament, was sufficient to sow the seeds of all his future woe. The youthful brain inflamed with alcohol never really recovers its normal condition, even when abstinence follows, and Poe's life-long struggle with his adversary began at this tender age. Dr. Day, long connected with the inebriate asylum at Binghamton, N. Y., once had an opportunity to examine the brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed and lived for some years as a teetotaller. He found to his surprise that the globules of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol and resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid condition of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been habituated to liquor falls so easily under its sway again in spite of every moral reason for refraining. Doubtless he was right, and poor Poe was only one of a vast number of men of brilliant intellects and kind hearts, who after a life-long struggle are defeated by the enemy they have taken into their stomachs to destroy their brains.
It is not our purpose to trace the poet through all the devious windings of his life, but to dwell for a little while upon the course of his domestic life and give some of the striking points in his character. We will pass over the close of his college career and the episode at West Point, as well as the publication of his earliest volume of poems, and look at him as we find him in the summer of 1833, living in Baltimore. He had a home here with his father's widowed sister, Mrs. Clemm, who with her daughter Virginia lived in a very humble way in that city. The little Poe could earn--for he was then at one of his lowest financial periods--went into the common stock, and the three struggled along together. Virginia was a child of eleven, beautiful, delicate, refined; and Mrs. Clemm was then, as always thereafter, the best and kindest of friends to the poet. She had little to offer him, save kindness and motherly love; but she gave these most abundantly, and they were of priceless value to Poe. For many months he kept himself from his besetting sin, and worked faithfully at whatever literary work he could get to do. But he was poor to the point of destitution, and the mental strain upon him was great, with his extraordinary pride and sensitiveness. He had been well reared, with fine and delicate tastes, and accustomed to money; and privation was very bitter to him. He was naturally an aristocrat, too, and found in the associations to which he was almost compelled by poverty a heavy cross. At the end of two years he felt himself forced to leave Baltimore, and thought he could obtain employment in Richmond. He had become greatly attached to Virginia, and she was equally so to him; and although she was but a child of thirteen, Poe proposed to marry her and take her and Mrs. Clemm with him to his new destination. The youth of Virginia seems to have been the only obstacle in the mind of Mrs. Clemm, who had conceived the deepest affection for Poe and had great confidence in his abilities. She was friendless and unable to take care of herself and her daughter, and after some hesitation she consented to the marriage. It did not take place, however, till Virginia was fourteen years old.
Ill-starred and ill-timed as this marriage seemed to be, it was the one bright and beautiful thing about the life of Poe. He remained passionately devoted to the youthful wife as long as she lived; and it is thought by those who knew him best that, despite his numerous romantic passages with ladies after her death, Virginia was the only woman he ever really loved. In spite of the bad habits which clung to him so persistently, he seems to have been a really kind and devoted husband to the end. She, on her part, worshipped him with a supreme infatuation that was blind to all his faults. The romance of the first months of married life seemed never to wear off, and through all their sorrows--and they were many and bitter--their love burned as brightly as at first.
To Mrs. Clemm, also, Poe was always a devoted son, and through all his waywardness; and folly and sin she clung to him with the devotion of a true mother. The sturdy figure of this woman shows through all the dark spots of his life, casting a gleam of brightness. She was a strong, masculine-looking woman, full of energy, and took upon herself all the practical affairs of the little household. She received the money from Poe, and expended it in her own way; and she had a faculty of getting a good deal of comfort out of a very little money. So their home was almost always comfortable, even when they were poorest. And she never gave way to reproaches, even when Poe was at his worst. She seemed to consider his failing only in the light of a misfortune, and never blamed, but always pitied him. She worshipped his genius almost as blindly as did Virginia, and it is pleasant to think that with all their misfortunes and privations, they had much real happiness in their little home. Poe was very proud and very fond of Virginia, and liked to take strangers to see her. She had a voice of wonderful sweetness and sung exquisitely, and in some of their more prosperous days she had her harp and piano. One evening when she was singing she ruptured a blood-vessel, and for a time her life was despaired of Poe describes the affliction long afterwards in a letter as follows:--
"Six years ago a wife whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. At the end of a year the vessel again broke. I went through precisely the same scene. Then again--again--and even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death, and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive,--nervous to an unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of possible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank--God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity."
Although Poe's word is not always to be taken in regard to his own affairs, this doubtless describes his feelings over Virginia's condition quite truthfully; and whether the drinking was cause or effect we shall probably never really know.
During one of the periods of Virginia's improved health Poe took her and went to New York, leaving Mrs. Clemm behind to settle up domestic affairs. In a letter which he wrote to his mother-in-law, we have a glimpse of the kindlier side of the man's nature and of his real affection for this devoted friend, as well as some hints of the straits of poverty to which they had been accustomed, by the fulness of his descriptions of the plenty upon which they had fallen. He is speaking of his boarding-house:--
"I wish Catarina [the cat] could see it; she would faint. Last night for supper we had the nicest tea you ever drank,--strong and hot,--wheat and rye bread, cheese, tea-cakes (elegant--a great dish), two dishes of elegant ham and two of cold veal, piled up like a mountain and large slices, three dishes of the cakes, and everything in the greatest profusion. No fear of starving here. The landlady seemed as if she couldn't press us enough, and we were at home directly. For breakfast we had excellent-flavored coffee, hot and strong,--not very clear and no great deal of cream,--veal-cutlets, elegant ham and eggs, and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the eggs and the great dishes of meat. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any, and had no night-sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop--so that I hope soon to get out of trouble. The very instant I scrape together enough money I will send it on. You can't imagine how much we both do miss you. Sissy had a hearty cry last night because you and Catarina weren't here. We hope to send for you very soon."
It is hard to read of the straits to which Poe was often reduced for a little money, and to know that all this time he was writing those immortal tales which would now make a man's fortune as soon as produced. It is true that he had two or three times good salaried positions,--good for that day,--but he never kept them long, and his chronic state was one of poverty, if not of destitution.
Mrs. Osgood, who knew him in the later days in New York, says of him:--
"I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred, and fastidiously refined. To a sensitive and delicately nurtured woman there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect."
The home in the suburbs where he lived in the last days of his wife's life is described as a story-and-a-half house at the top of Fordham Hill. Within on the ground floor were two small apartments,--a kitchen and sitting-room,--and above, up a narrow stairway, two others, one Poe's room,--a low, cramped chamber lighted by little square windows like port-holes,--the other a diminutive closet of a bedroom, hardly large enough to lie down in. The furnishing was of the scantiest, but everything faultlessly neat.
"Mrs. Clemm, now over sixty, in her worn black dress made upon all who saw her an impression of dignity, refinement, and deep motherly devotion to her children. Virginia, at the age of twenty-five, retained her beauty, but the large black eyes and raven hair contrasted sadly with the pallor of her face. Poe himself, poor, proud, and ill, anticipating grief and nursing the bitterness that springs from helplessness in the sight of suffering borne by those dear to us, was restless and variable, the creature of contradictory impulses."
Virginia now failed rapidly, Poe was ill, and the household was reduced almost to the starving-point. Winter was upon them; and when at last a sympathizing friend found them she thus describes the situation:--
"There was no clothing upon the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet. Mrs. Clemm was passionately fond of her daughter, and her distress on account of her illness and poverty and misery was dreadful to see."
This friend at once interested some benevolent people in the case, and poor Virginia's last days were made comfortable by their aid. Poe's heart seemed filled with inexpressible gratitude to all who aided him in this sorest crisis of his life; and although he was much broken by his loss, he rallied once more and was sober and industrious for a time. Mrs. Clemm stood faithfully by him, and even watched over him through some of the fearful seasons of delirium which followed his complete giving up to the habits of drinking and of taking opium.
Of the final scenes of this unhappy life it is needless to write. They have been often described, and though the accounts vary, the sum and substance are the same. Poe was attacked with delirium-tremens in Baltimore, and died in a hospital in that city in October, 1849. Beautiful, gifted, and sensitive, proud, ambitious, and daring, endowed with a subtle charm of manner as well as of person, amiable and generous in his home life, loyal and devoted to his family, a very pleasing picture is presented of the man if we look but on this side. Could he have overcome the fatal fascination of drink, we might never have seen the reverse side of all this. As it is, let us cover his follies with our mantle of charity and dwell only upon his genius and his virtues.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.
During a portion of Thackeray's life there seemed to be in the public mind a complete misapprehension of the character of the man. Superficial readers of his books, who knew nothing of him personally, were fond of applying the name of cynic to him; and he was even accused by some of these of being a hater of his kind, a misanthropist, a bitter satirist, a hard, ungenial man.
As no adequate personal memoir of him has ever been written, it being understood by his family that such a publication would have been distasteful to him, it has taken time to correct all the false impressions that have gained credence in regard to the great humorist; but at the present time his character has been practically cleared of the former false charges. As one by one the friends who knew him personally have spoken, it has been discovered that this cynic was one of the tenderest and kindest men that our time has produced; this hater of his kind, a man so soft-hearted and full of sensibility that it was really a serious drawback to him in life; this misanthropist, one of the most genial and kindly companions in the world; this bitter satirist, a man who never made an enemy by his speech; this hard man, one who actually threw money away, as all his friends thought, by bestowing it upon every applicant whether he could afford it or not.
So great a change in the world's estimate of a man has seldom been made after the man's death. It is to be accounted for by the fact that while he was living his friends never told what they knew of him, and that only very gradually did they reveal his virtues, even after he had gone, feeling always that he would have preferred them to be silent; and by the other fact that he often appeared other than he was, to cover up his excessive sensibility, of which he was very much ashamed.
The world will come to a truer knowledge of him still some day; and then it will be found what a great, loving, noble heart was hidden behind his thin crust of cynicism,--what gentleness, what tenderness, what wise kindness he was capable of,--what loyalty to his friends and to his principles, what reverence for sacred things, what infinite depths of pathos, lay beneath that mocking exterior. Let us gather together a few of these personal traits as they have been given us by different hands, and try to make thus a true likeness of the man as he appeared to those who knew him best. The events of his life were few and by no means striking.
He was born in Calcutta in 1811, and brought to England when six years of age. At eleven he was placed in Charter-House School, where he is described as a rosy-faced boy, with dark curling hair, and a quick intelligent eye, ever twinkling with good-humor. For the usual school sports he had no taste, and was only known to enjoy theatricals and caricatures, for which he retained his taste throughout life. He was wonderfully social and vivacious, and the best of good company, even at this early day. Merry, light-hearted, unselfish, not very industrious, but a fair classical scholar, and possessed of a wonderful memory,--so he is remembered by those who knew him at this time. In a great school, where nearly all the boys bullied those who were beneath them, he was noted for his invariable kindness to the smaller boys, and it was remarked of him, even at this age, that for one who had such powers of sarcasm he made very few wounds by his tongue. At eighteen he entered Cambridge University, but left it at nineteen and went to study art in Paris. Here he remained for several years, and began his literary work. Here, too, he was married, when twenty-six years of age, to Miss Isabella Shawe, and here they passed the first happy days of their married life together. He has himself sketched a picture of the time, in these words:--
"The humblest painter, be he ever so poor, may have a friend watching at his easel, or a gentle wife sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles or silence, or both, cheering his labors."
For a few short years they were very happy together, and three children were born to them. Then the most terrible misfortune of his life fell upon him,--his wife, after a severe illness, became hopelessly insane. For some time Thackeray refused to believe that it was more than an illness from which she would recover, but at last the terrible truth was forced upon him that he had lost her forever, and in a way so much more cruel than death. She was placed in the home of a kind family employed to care for her, and there she remained until death released her. His grief was of the most hopeless kind, and it made a melancholy man of him throughout life. At times and seasons his natural gayety would return to him; but he was a sad man at heart from that dreadful day when the horror of her fate was revealed to him. He never spoke directly of his grief, but once in a while he would speak of it in parable, as when he talked to a friend about somebody's wife whom he had known becoming insane, and that friend says:--
"Never shall I forget the look, the manner, the voice, with which he said to me, 'It is an awful thing for her to continue to live. It is awful for her so to die. But has it ever occurred to you how awful the recovery of her lost reason would be, without the consciousness of the loss of time? She finds the lover of her youth a gray-haired old man, and her infants young men and women. Is it not sad to think of this?'"
His mother came to live with him, and his children grew to maturity beneath his roof, one of them the Miss Thackeray now so well known as a novelist. But tenderly as he was attached to them,--and there could have been no fonder father,--he no doubt felt all the sadness of the thought that
"The many make the household, But only one the home."
In one of the "Roundabouts" he says:--
"I own, for my part, that in reading papers which this hand formerly penned, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes. It is not the words I see, but that past day, that by-gone page of life's history, that tragedy--comedy it may be--which our little home company were enacting, that merry-making which we shared, that funeral which we followed, that bitter, bitter grief which we buried."
That he should live much in that vanished past, was but natural; yet it was hard for a man like Thackeray, who had naturally such great capacity for the enjoyment of life.
That his home was a pleasant and goodly place, all who have ever visited it bear witness. He made it his refuge from all outer troubles, and practised a genial and kindly hospitality there. It was a long time before he was able to buy a house, though he made a good deal of money from his books, his free-handed generous ways always keeping him back financially; but when he was enabled to buy one, he took great pride and pleasure in it, and decorated it according to his artistic tastes. To make a little more money for his daughters, that they might be independent when he was gone, he began lecturing, and was twice induced to come to America for that purpose, much as he dreaded leaving home, and especially crossing the ocean.
His speech at the farewell dinner given him before leaving for America the last time, expressed this dread in a very comical manner, and was received with great cheering and uproar. "I have before me," he said, "at this minute the horrid figure of a steward with a basin perhaps, or a glass of brandy and water, which he will press me to drink, and which I shall try to swallow, and which won't make me any better. I know it won't." This with a grimace which put the whole table in a roar. Then he went on to tell of the last dinners given to criminals and convicts, and how they were allowed always to choose what they would have, in a manner so droll that all thought him in the happiest mood, while he was scarcely able to keep up, so sad was his heart at the prospect of leaving home. Next morning, we are told by a spectator, "he had been round crying in corners; and when the cab finally came, and the luggage had all been bestowed, and the servants stood in the hall, 'This is the moment I have dreaded,' said Thackeray, as he entered the dining-room to embrace his daughters, and when he hastily descended the steps to the door, he knew that they would be at the window to cast one loving, lingering look. 'Good-by,' he murmured in a suppressed tone, 'keep close behind me, and try to let me jump in unseen.' The instant the door of the vehicle closed behind him, he threw himself back in the corner, and buried his face in his hands."
His allusion to his little girls, in the poem of "The White Squall," is well known, and shows how constantly he had them in his thoughts:--
"And when, its force expended, The harmless storm was ended, And as the sunrise splendid Came blushing o'er the sea, I thought, as day was breaking, My little girls were waking, And smiling, and making A prayer at home for me."
His love for these little girls, to whom he felt he must be both father and mother, gave him unusual tenderness for all children, and he once said he never could see a boy without wanting to give him a sovereign. This he did very often too in England, where children, like servants, are allowed to receive "tips" from their parents' friends; and when in this country he felt it quite a hardship that the children of his friends were not allowed to take his money.