POE AT THE END OF A CENTURY. 



MY HAMILTON \V. MAM IK. 



CENTURY has passed since Edgar Allan Poe 

 was born and sixty-nine years since he died; surely 

 the lime has come for a just estimate of the 

 quality and value of his work. It lias been partly 

 his fault and partly his misfortune that opinion about him 

 has been so confused and conflicting; that he is, in the judg- 

 ment of many, the must original figure in American literature; 

 and that he is. in the opinion of others, a man of notable but 

 unreal talent; a magician who achieved extraordinary effects 

 by mechanical, artificial and insincere methods; a writer whose 

 art was largely a subtle dexterity and not a skill of the soul. 

 This divergence of opinion found some justification in the 

 confusion of Poe's life, its serious and undeniable faults, the 

 disastrous weakness of his will. In so far as inadequate 

 recognition of his genius has been due to moral weakness and 

 to the limitations of his art. Poe has been paying the price 

 exacted and rightly exacted of every man born in a world in 

 which — to quote John Morley — morality is not in the order 

 of thing>: it is the order of things. 



But Poe's misfortunes have greatly outnumbered his faults. 

 His prose and verse were written at a time when our literature 

 was definitely and almost of set purpose didactic; when the 

 moral feeling" and teaching were so obvious that even the way- 

 faring man. though in great haste, could not escape them: 

 when the passion for reform in the literature-producing sec- 

 tion of the countr) was steadily rising; when, to quote Lowell. 

 " all New England was a pulpit "; when to be a preacher was 

 a part of every man's vocation because a hosl of Americans 

 could not recognize any other form of teaching: when the 

 meaning and function of art were so little understood in a 

 new country sorely pressed by its tasks that they were negli- 



