Text: Anonymous, “The New Edition of Edgar Allan Poe,” New-York Tribune (New York, NY), vol. LIV, whole no. 17,605, January 27, 1895, p. 20, cols. 3-5

[page 20, column 3, continued:]

THE WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. Newly Collected and Edited, with a Memoir, Critical Introductions and Notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry. The Illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner. In ten volumes. Octavo. Vols. I, II and III. Chicago: Stone & Kimball

In this new collection of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a collection in ten volumes, of which the first three have just appeared, we find what promises to be the classic edition of the prose writer and poet. Not until now has he been set forth in such adequate form, with so clearly established a text and with such judicious editing. At no time in the future is it probable that the labors of his present editors and publisher will be superseded. Through their good offices he has been assured at last the permanent library form which he should long ago have enjoyed. Mr. Woodberry's memoir is thorough and concise; it places the reader in intimate relations with the external development of his author's career. Mr. Stedman takes up the interpretation of Poe where the biographer leaves off and in a subtle introduction to the tales he carries the inquiry deep into the sources of their power.

The volumes thus far issued in this new edition comprise, in addition to the memoir and introduction above mentioned, a large proportion of the major works of Poe in prose. The arrangement adopted may be briefly summarized as follows: In the first volume are grouped as “Romances of Death” the “Overture,” which Poe called “Shadow — A Parable”; the “Terrestrial” tales of which “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the first and most remarkable; the “Celestial” dialogues typified by “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”; and the “Finale” entitled “Silence — A Fable.” Completing the book are seven examples of “Old World Romance,” which include “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Volume second, devoted to “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,” contains five “Tales of Conscience,” among which “The Black Cat” is perhaps the most illustrative; four “Tales of Natural Beauty” in the manner made familiar by “The Domain of Arnheim,” and eight “Tales of Pseudo-Science,” which may be represented either by “The Descent into the Maelstrom” or “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The third volume has the same general title as the second, but is subdivided into two groups. The first of these gathers together five “Tales of Ratiocination,” the most important being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and its equally celebrated sequel. The six “Tales of Illusion” which make the second group are led off by “The Premature Burial” and include also “The Spectacles.”

It will be surmised from this partial abstract that the editors have followed a system of close analysis in their arrangement of the tales. To some extent they have the deliberate sanction of Poe himself. In still greater measure they have the authority of internal evidence. Mr. Stedman clearly shows the strong specific character of each facet of the genius of Poe, and the unity of impression which each made when permitted to shine in more or less isolated brilliancy through [column 4:] the texture of his work. All his gifts were held in solution by the one heaven-born attribute of poetic imagination, but he cultivated with a quite sophisticated sense of its unique possibilities every faculty of design which his inventive impulse developed. Thus he is found to be the parent at once of the modern detective story and the brief rhapsody of super-psychological fantasy, the leading representative in modern fiction of that picturesque romance which borrows its mysterious colors from midnight and the grave, and the founder of the macabre school in every one of its special ramifications — saving that of physiological dry rot. To a phase of temperament any production of Poe's can be traced, and there were many phases. Running through them all and giving his work the distinctive quality by which his genius is recognized is the imaginative inspiration to which allusion has been made. To revert to that is to see at once that while Poe's versatility was remarkable and much to be considered in any estimate of him, it is not one of his pre-eminent traits. In the fine flowering of his individuality there is a subtler secret to be apprehended. Mr. Stedman touches it happily in his reference to Poe as “the nympholept seeking an evasive being of whom he has glimpses by moonlight.” It is the impalpable, invisible ideal brooding over his fancies, far more than any of his constructive or decorative characteristics, which gives the key to his fascination. This fact may be developed into an interesting proof of his originality.

None of Poe's predecessors in the province of fantastic and grewsome literature ever reached the point of verisimilitude to which he attained without any effort. In the forbidding tales of revenge which foreshadow “The Cask of Amontillado,” in Boccaccio, Bandello and even lesser novelists of the Italian Renaissance, there are horrors on which to sup, and other fruitful literary properties; but there is much more in Poe, there is great and enduring charm, and it is there because, as Mr. Stedman points out, “with Shelley he vowed he would dedicate his powers to beauty.” In other words the poet in Poe walked side by side with the designer, the inventor of mental puzzles, the dreamer in ghastly solitudes and the lover of romantic incident. Sometimes the poet may seem to be quiescent before the imperious will of Poe's mathematical instinct or his ineradicable fondness for throwing dust in the eyes of his reader; but both his turn for the geometry in human affairs and his love of a hoax were in the long run colored by his more spiritual emotions. It is as a poetic genius certainly that Poe separates himself from Hoffmann, whose “Weird Tales” are so often bracketed with the masterpieces of the American author. Compared with the early Italian writers we have mentioned, Poe enforces the distinction between passion sublimated by poetic fire and the raw material of human adventure in moments of dramatic suspense and fury. A similar distinction is apparent when he is considered in relation to the romanticists of Germany, with Hoffmann at their head. He rises superior to the upholstery on which they lay so much stress. Ingenious as he was in the fabrication of a plot, enamoured as he was of color, quaintness and pictorial embellishment, he has rarely the transparent melodramas of the Germans and nothing at all of their frank reliance upon furniture, upon stage contrivances, so to speak. These are but subsidiary motives in his conception, which is above all metaphysical, imaginative and concerned with the mystery, the remote suggestions of his theme. If he lavished as much fancy as he did upon the scenic elements in his tales it was chiefly in obedience to the sensuous, artistic instinct in him, which gravitated to what was grotesque, bizarre and strange.

This much Poe shared with the romantic schools of Germany and France, a taste for distance and uncertainty in the horizon. He had more than that. He was not merely exotic, he was quivering with divinations of such scenes and souls as could not be found anywhere upon the actual earth. He had the Gothic scope of imagination, the Gothic audacity which belongs to the mediaeval art, the hysteric impetus which adorned the great European cathedrals with gargoyles of the Middle Ages and produced the impish improvisations of German and Netherlandish painters. At once “a Jew, a Grecian, and a Goth,” in Mr. Stedman's words, he was most of all a Goth: and while he was incapable of producing in his most characteristic phase any such mere mechanism of horror as “Frankenstein,” he was always sympathetically moved by the contemplation of an intrinsically abnormal idea or situation. There is a curious resemblance between him and the only Frenchman after Beaudelaire [[Baudelaire]] with whom it is fair to mention his name, Charles Meryon. He has the inherent taste that gives that poetic etcher his distinction. Just as Meryon moved with enthusiasm and feeling among the gargoyles of Notre Dame and dwelt imaginatively upon the Morgue behind that edifice, so Poe wandered through the “House of Usher[[”]] or conjured up “The Masque of the Red Death,” revelling in the sense of unearthliness phantom beauty which he could invoke. Mr. Stedman objects that Poe's “taste was not pure,” and adds that “the element of strangeness,” on which he laid so much stress, is not essential to the highest art, and the grotesque and the bizarre are at most but secondary resources.” This just observation gains in strength when reference is had to a story of Poe's like, for example, “The Black Cat.” One feels, in the presence of that grisly nightmare, that Ossa has been piled upon Pelion with something of the dexterity of a juggler and a little of his solicitude for the applause of the gallery.” Yet if you appeal to “The Descent into the Maelstrom,” to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to “Hop-Frog” or to any of the numerous tales which stand on the same plane with these, it is perceived at once that the grotesque was an essential ingredient of Poe's art, whatever abstract principles may have to say; and one of the triumphs of Poe, one of the vindications of his genius, is that he proves, as every great poet proves, that he is right. In this respect he and Rudyard Kipling are alike. The impression received from “The Jungle Book” is that animals must live the lives and speak the speech therein described — it could not be otherwise — and if there never was a white seal discovered before, it has been because the hunters hadn’t the wit to run him down. This conviction carried by Mr. Kipling is the result of inspiration first, of artistic verisimilitude afterward. In both respects Poe has unsurpassed mastery, and it is because, paradoxically, his ghostly figures have such tremendous vitality that they are irresistible and raise the author's bizarrerie into the region of great literature.

It was Poe's gift to create a new world, a world in which all the heart-shaking shadows of those disordered imaginations which had gone before him in letters were given a blacker reality, a darkness that, like Milton's, could be felt. In this dim sphere, vibrating with unseen influences, and lit, when lit at all, by a light flashed to the very heart of an agonized emotion, Poe wrought his enthralling figures. He gave them, if not a human existence, at any rate a being as plastic, as vivid, as convincing as anything in human life. Whether you pause upon the concrete anguish of “The Pit and the Pendulum” or turn to the dreaming of “Eleonora,” “Berenice” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” the ultimate sensation is the same, that of having been lifted into another environment different from our own, but equally vivid in its effect. This close connection between the incident of a tale by Poe and the soul with which he endowed its personages or scenery is further elucidated aptly by criticism of Mr. Stedman on the writer's style, or absence of style, in the current acceptation of the word. The individuality of Poe's work, he says, “is not so much a style as a method; and not so much a method as a manner. The force of nature sustains it in the rhetorical flights which it would now be bad form to essay.” The last clause is eloquent. It was a natural force which controlled the evolution of Poe's tales and poetry. It is trend of Mr. Stedman's introduction to show nothing more [column 5:] conclusively than the generic quality of Poe, the raciness of his genius, the absolute correspondence between the atmosphere of the tales and the atmosphere of that wayward, impulsive, introspective and melancholy life which Mr. Woodberry's memoir unfolds. It is not necessary at this time to traverse that life in detail. Its broad outlines are known. Yet the reader will be peculiarly indebted to the editors of these volumes for the tact and completeness with which they have supplemented one another, the biographer's sketch of Poe's personality and the critic's analysis of his work combining to throw a serviceable light upon the character of his genius. Later volumes will contain notes and further prefatory matter, with variorum readings of the poems. These will be awaited with the liveliest curiosity, but at the present stage of their work it is plain that all concerned in the publication have amply fulfilled their obligations. Mr. Sterner's illustrations, though not inspired, are sympathetic and well executed, and the publishers have spared no pains to make their books a downright luxury for the lover of good paper, print and binding. The type is of admirable size and of equally gratifying clearness. It leaves a sufficient margin on a page that is soft in texture, exquisite in tone, and rendered finally perfect by just the right taste in the gilding of the top and the uncut edges. Each volume contains in the neighborhood of three hundred pages, is light in weight, and not only opens without cracking, but stays open in the hand without effort on the part of the reader. In each volume thus far published the handsome title page is faced by an authentic portrait of Poe. The edition is dedicated “in honor of the University of Virginia.” It will remain an honor to American literature.