XIV. To Edgar Allan Poe

Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances
than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred
which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that certain
microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still harass your
name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and
heeded slanders in the literary papers of New York. But their persistent
animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike with which many
American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary
genius, of their country. With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to
rate native merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an
American prophet almost without honour in his own country.

The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable
study of your career ('Edgar Allan Poe,' by George Woodberry: Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it, and
teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer. How
unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or
seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary
criticism! About the writers of his own generation a leader of that generation
should hold his peace, he should neither praise nor blame nor defend his
equals; he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The
breath of their life is in the columns of 'Literary Gossip;' and they should
be allowed to perish with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture.
Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds should only
criticise the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or
fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you vexed a
continent, and you are still unforgiven. What 'irritation of a sensitive
nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,' drove you (in Mr.
Longfellow's own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we may never
ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to
the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that
knew not how to forget. 'The New Yorkers never forgave him,' says your latest
biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was
not individual vanity alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed.
'As a literary people,' you wrote, 'we are one vast perambulating humbug.'
After that declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still.
He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and