The event was announced by Griswold in the _Tribune_ with this brutal bluntness:
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. He had few or no friends.” But the _Southern Literary Messenger_ said: “Now that he is gone, the vast multitude of blockheads may breathe again.” Griswold simply elected himself mouthpiece of that host.
On Poe’s supersensitive organization stimulants told with fearful effect. Mrs. Clem said “A single cup of coffee would intoxicate him.” N. P. Willis explained the vagaries and sins of Poe by supposing him to be possessed of two antagonistic spirits, a devil and an angel, each having complete mastery of him by turns. But, says Willis, “With a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. He easily seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and was accused accordingly of insulting arrogance and bad heartedness. It was a sad infirmity of physical constitution which puts it upon very nearly the ground of temporary and almost irresponsible insanity.”
That these lapses were infrequent, instead of almost continuous, we have plenty of testimony from those who were much with him as business associates and inmates of the same house. “I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred and particularly refined,” is a certificate of one who was intimate in the family, which was confirmed by many witnesses of different periods and places. The poet Swinburne was probably right in declaring that Poe’s inebriety was “the _effect_ of a terrible evil, rather than its _cause_.” That evil lay not alone, perhaps not chiefly, in his inherited and educated predisposition to indulgence and his morbidness of mentality; but in the character and consequences of his chiefest literary work.
It is a hard enough lot, under the best circumstances and in the best times, to live by the pen. The characteristics as well of Poe’s genius as of his times made that lot a doom for him. The rewards of authorship were on an eleemosynary scale (Poe received only $10 for “The Raven,” and $10 a week as editor-in-chief of a magazine: the _North American Review_ then paid only $2 a page for matter); literary taste was unformed and, worst of all, the market was drugged and cheapened and the best public appreciation perverted by a silly school of writer who had arisen—similar to the “Della Crusca School” which a few years before had infested literature in England. Their lucubrations were both barren of ideas and bad in style. It was the lollipop stage of our literature. Now Poe possessed in high degree two parts which, when addressed to criticism, would most offend these callow writers, to-wit: The musical sense of language, and marvelous analytical powers. The most obvious quality of his poetic style is its rhythm. The musical ear led him to adopt refrains and euphonious syllables, like “Never more,” “Lenore,” “bells,” and to dwell on their cadence; it made a bad composition distract him as a discord does a sensitive musician. For him divine harmonies lay in the relation of words to each other, as if they had been notes.