Text: Anonymous, “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” Pall Mall Gazette (London, UK), vol. XXI, whole no. 3131, March 1, 1875, p. 12, cols. 1-2

WHEN Mr. Tennyson complained in an early poem of the “scandal, and the cry” that are raised about a dead poet when he scarce is cold, the scandal and the cry had not been recognized as part of the functions of criticism. But now, when the nature of a writer's genius is “deduced” from his history, his ancestry, and all his surroundings, sensitive singers must feel more reluctance than ever to let their light shine before men. No one has suffered more from posthumous Little than Edgar Allan Poe, and it must be allowed that if ever curiosity and historical criticism of a writer's private life arc justified, it is in his case. America has produced no other poet of his distinction and strange quality; no other with a music all his own, and perhaps no other with such an utter contempt for everything that she calls her ideas. It is a pity he did not live to criticise Mr. Walt Whitman. It is not only his aristocratic disdain and his manner that are unexampled in Poe; the character of his genius is so morbid, so inhuman, that it is natural to seek for an explanation in his history, and that history has been made a repulsive enigma. The biography which Mr. Rufus Griswold wrote shortly after Poe's death, and which combined the horrors of Suetonius with the insinuating tact of Tacitus, was clearly inspired by cautious hatred. It was enough to make people leave the poet's life alone, as a subject not to be touched with unsinged fingers. Mr. Ingram has had the boldness to investigate all the evidence afresh, with results that can scarcely be called satisfactory. He does succeed in exposing a number of Griswold's statements; he proves that Poe was not expelled from the University of Virginia; and asserts that he did not publish as his own a work on conchology which was really written by a Captain Brown. Besides this, he maintains that Poe's engagement to a Mrs. Whitman was not broken off in the way Griswold reported, and he leaves the business in an obscurity of which a Mr. Pabodie is the Dr. Lushington. It is admitted, however, that Poe was a gambler, a spendthrift, and at the close of his life a drunkard, though there is only the policeman's usual reason for thinking that he was drunk when he died. He was found insensible in the streets of Baltimore, which was evidence enough for the public, and for that literary policeman, Mr. Griswold.

It is hopeless to try to whitewash Poe as a moral character. It is not so difficult to show that his lot in life was as hard and perplexing as his nature was abnormal. Poe was descended, if Mr. Ingram's genealogy is correct, from the Norman family of De la Poer, which was once a ruling house in Ireland, and whose name in that country has been corrupted into Power. His parents died early, and left him to the care of an elderly Mr. Allan, who brought out his natural pride by carefully and elaborately spoiling him, and who left him without a penny. The most characteristic trait of Poe's wandering boyhood is his fervent love for a lady much older than himself. She died, and he would pass the night weeping on her grave. This passion, and this clinging of fancy to the remains of the dead, are the keynotes of half of Poe's talcs and lyrics. It has often been asked how it came about that a writer so brilliant and industrious fell into abject poverty, and could not make a living by his pen. Even if Poe had been sober and frugal, as perhaps he was by fits and starts, the answer would not be hard to find. He was, by associations and spirit, if not by birth, a Southerner, and the cliques of Boston and New York would hear of no good thing coming out of Virginia. Poe's arrogance could descend to haggling and fighting with dishonest publishers, but he never concealed his contempt for the namby-pamby versifiers, the didactic poetry, the “cultivated old clergymen,” the “great movements,” and the democratic effusion, of American literary society. “About American letters,” he says, “plain speaking is the one thing needed. They are in a condition of absolute quagmire.” “In such a Republic as ours,” he observes, “the mere man of letters must ever be a cipher.” He could not “write scriptural poems” or push himself with honourable women who scribbled for the magazines. He did not bear with fools gladly; he kept up a warfare with the North American Review, he quoted Chamfort's sayings about popularity and public opinion as if lie liked them. He declared that Hawthorne, whom he generously admired and who was long neglected, showed extraordinary and unrivalled genius; and that he was not generally be praised only because he was a poor man and was not a ubiquitous quack. American society and paying literature had no place for a writer who declared that their only delights, in taste as in house decoration, were glitter, gas, and glass. Even if Poe had been a paragon of temperance and chastity, such opinions would have made him the Ishmael he was, condemned to write for magazines that paid him at rare intervals.

With such views and such a character, it may be inferred that Poe wrote to please himself. Critics have pitied him for being compelled to work at “ penny dreadfuls,” but the tone of his poetry shows that the horrible was Poe's delight It is hard to analyze the imagination which loves to “work horrid foulness” among “the brasses and hic jacets of the dead.” Possibly Poe's nerves and fancy were haunted by thoughts that Bunyan would have set down as whispers of Apollyon; possibly he wrote stories like “Berenice” and the “House of Usher” merely by wayof facing and laying the spectres of his brain. However that may be, whether his imagination [column 2:] was allured or not by the attraction of extreme horror, he introduced a new kind of fantasy, he afflicted his readers with a new sort of shudder. In ordinary fantastic writing, the horrible and the supernatural are so managed that a kind of drcam-like effect is produced. No one really believes m the terrors of Hoffmann; they are the terrors of nightmare. The supernatural in Hawthorne is carefully subordinated; you feel that you only linger in these valleys of Unrest while you will, or, as in a dream, that you could waken if sou would, and breathe the common air again. But Poe tells his tales of catalepsy and premature burial, of hideous revenges and impos- sible cravings, as if they were real, as if he were only keeping down in the forced sobriety of his style the hysteric shriek or hysteric laughter of fear. There is no escape for the reader of “ Berenice “ or of “ The Cask of Amontillado,” or of “ The Tell-tale Heart.” These things compel you to believe that they fell out in that and no other way; that the tomb of the dead was broken, the grave of the living sealed, that the impulses of mad- ness wrought to their result, even as they are reported. This intensity and earnest insistence on details becomes overwrought and tedious in the monstrous legend of “ Arthur Gordon Pym,” a story which De Foe might have invented in a nightmare, if he had been privileged to read the “ Ancient Mariner.” It is almost painful to think of the genesis of one of those stories in the mind of Poe — the first conception of the frightful central incident, and then the slow conscientious working out, which he has described, of detail after detail. Next to his mastery of the horrible, his love of analysis is perhaps Poe's most characteristic feature. His least unpleasant story, the “ Golden Beetle,” turns on the unravelling of a cipher, and the detective stories, about the stolen letter and the murderous ape, show the same self-conscious subtlety. His unreadable prose poem « Eureka,” is an attempt to decipher the mystery of the universe, quite analogous to his readings of cryptography. But perhaps human interest in hidden treasure is more vivid than in the riddle of the world. At all events, we can follow Poe through Captain Kidd's cipher, but not through the more tangled secret writing of the universe. Short tales were, in Poe's opinion, the best form of composition, except short poems, for the display of genius. His poverty prevented him from giving time and labour to poetry, “ from making at any time any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of his choice.” His scattered verses arc really gems, mysterious secretions of a mysterious nature, strangely and darkly luminous. In many of his epithets, as “ the tottering moon,” in his love of the music of words, Poe is of the school of Shelley. But Shelley, “ meteoric poet “ as he was, is far more human; his affections are not always disembodied; his loves are women of flesh and blood; he is fired by the memory of his own wrongs, and utters, somewhat shrilly, the cry of a wronged humanity. He has hope, too, of a glittering and vaporous kind, belief in men, and affection. But Poe's muse never really touches the ground; she dwells in what a suppressed verse of “ Ulalume” calls “ the limbo of lunary souls.” Most of his poems bewail a lost love, who never seems to have lived except in a dream, or who, if she ever existed on earth, has been separated from her lover by an interval of mad- ness. There is no firmness in Poe's hopes of “a mystic Aidenn.” “ Who ever really saw anything but horror in the smile of the dead ? “ he asks, in his “ Marginalia.” The “ novel combinations,” which he rightly held necessary to beauty in poetry, he got by a mysterious melody, a mastery of the music of words, which was his own in its fantastic structure, though it contains memories of Shelley and of Mr. Tennyson, as well as anticipations of Mr. Swinburne. The poem of “Ulalume” tries to get effects out of verse, which verse has scarcely yet been made to render, and the same experiment is made with the cadences of prose in “Shadow” and in “Silence.” “And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in colour. And mine eyes fell upon a huge grey rock which stood by the shore of die river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was grey, and ghastly, and tall, — and the rock was grey.” It is easy to call this effect a trick, as Turner's effects were called, but it is a trick which no one could perform but Poe. Out of the Shadow into which all of us pass, the Shadow of his parable, came “the tones not of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, falling duskily upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.” Among that multitude of voices of departed poets, Poe's will long be heard, and will ever be a voice distinct, apart, and unmistakable.

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* “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe.” Edited by John Ingram. (Edinburgh: A. and C.Black. 1875.)