Text: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, [Review of Woodberry's Life of Poe],” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. 40, whole no. 1025, February 19, 1885, pp. 157-158

[page 157, column 2, continued:]

Edgar Allan Poe. By George E. Woodberry (American Men of Letters Series.) Boston, Houghton, Mifllin & Co

THE career of Edgar Poe has long been a mine for eager biograph rs, and affords, indeed st th materials for their work — genius, unhappiness, and a prolonged series of very small conundrums. So many disappointments, debts, disappearances, love affairs,and miscellaneous escapades are rarely crowded into a single career; and what with his own ingenuity in doubling these by exaggeration, and what with the accumulated contradictions and blunders of others, the task of his biographers has come to resemble those labyrinths in English pleasure-grounds where a dozen people are trying to find each other, and, although alwavs within speaking distance, can meet. Thus among Poe's chroniclers, Stoddard follows Griswold, and Ingram pursues Stoddard, and Gill goes upon the trail of Ingram, and now Woodberry winds up the chase, after all the rest, and each is sure that he and he alone has the clue to the labyrinth; and, after all, the whole area of the puzzle is but a hundred feet square. and the question arises at the end whether it is worth s much trouble. To be sure, a character is involved; but here occurs another curious thing, that, while each is engaged in vindicating Poe's reputation against somebody else, they all have to admit very much the same damaging facts. Neither Mr. Griswold, the prosecuting officer, nor Mr. Ingram, of counsel for the defence, nor Mr. [column 3:] Woodberry, who sums up in a judicial fashion, really presents anything which modifies the reputation as to truth or morality acquired by Poe during his life-time: and a very poor reputation that was.

In a detailed notice some years since (see the Nation for Nov. 18, 188), of some of the more rm cent Poe literature, we expressed the opinion that Poe's true biographer was “yet to come.” It is a satisfaction to be able to say that, if we take biography in a strict sense, Mr Woodberry has fulfilled this hopeful prediction. It is not merely that he writes later than the rest: the later a man writes, the worse for him, if the theme grows more and more perplexed and he has not the brains to disentangle it; but the advantage is, in the case of the present author, that he is the kind of man why who out to come last. He has been helped, not hindered, by the work of his predecessors; he has cleared away their cobwebs and added none of his own. Henceforth the record of Poe's life may be regarded as being, for the first time, established. There is no more correspondence to be unearthed that can essentially vary the result: no more files of obsolete newspapers; no more War Department correspondence; no more reminiscences of simultaneous and equally impassioned love-affairs. There may yet be brought to bear, on some points, even more acute and ingenious analysis of character than is here exhibited; but so far as facts are concerned, the case may be said to be closed. We may, therefore, turn to what is, for the purpose of the series of which this book forms a part, the more important matter, viz., the consideration of Poe's place in the literary history of the time. On this point, we regret to say, our praise of Mr. Woodberry's work, must be far more limited and our criticism more marked.

It becomes more and more obvious, as the two parallel stories of “American Men of Letters” and “American Statesmen” develop, that the characteristics of the two are to be very different. In the “Statesmen” there is far more of a monotone, both in treatment and in theme, than in the other series — a more level excellence and a less exciting variety of treatment. This arises in part from a greater uniformity of subject, since the statesmanlike character is more simple and less diverse than the literary character; but it also comes in part from the mode of handling. Each of the “Men of Letters” series is by a different author, whereas five of the memoirs of “Statesmen” are by Messrs. Morse and Lodge, whose point of view is somewhat similar, and who have long been accustomed to work together. But above all, there is a difference, that in the “Men of Letters” series three is generally much pains taken to exhibit the whole life and environment of the subject; whereas, in dealing with the statesmen, the treatment has kept close to what may be called the professional career, and it has sometimes been rather difficult to make sure even that the man described had a wife and children. Be that as it may, it is certain that the present collection of lives of authors exhibits a marked variety of method. Comparing only the last two, we shall be compelled to acknowledge that Dr. Woodberry's work is strong where Doctor Holmes's is weakest, in the record of personal history, and it becomes less satisfactory where Doctor Holmes is strong, in the department of literary criticism

We should say, for instance, that Mr. Woodberry errs at the very outset in laying such stress on Poe's own career as a critic, except as the secret of the perpetual hot water in which he lived. To say, for instance, that Poe's independence as a reviewer was regarded in his lifetime as his great distinction (p. 270), shows the writer to be misled by dwelling on the little world of the New York press of that day. The readers of the country at [page 158:] large hardly ever saw or heard of these criticisms. They bought, on the other hand, several thousand copies of the ‘Gold Bug’: every college student racked his brains over the ingenious plot of ‘Murders of the Rue Morgue’; and almost every newspaper in the land reprinted “The Raven.” Again, Mr. Woodberry goes too far in saying of his hero that he was “the first to take criticism from mere advertising, puffery, and friendship, and submit it to the laws of literary art” (p. 270). So far as the first part of this statement is concerned, Margaret Fuller went to New York in the same year with Poe (1844); she wrote in a journal of four times the circulation and influence of any he attempted — the Tribune; and Poe himself pronounced her reviews “‘ frank, candid, and independent” (Works [Armstrong], 5:506), at least when she agreed with him. In the next place, if Poe got rid of these objectionable methods at all, it was not to substitute in any degree the laws of literary art — for, as Mr. Stoddard has well said, he established no criterion — and he set up something as objectionable as anything he displaced. What that substitute was is stated by Mr. Woodberry himself, in his quotation from the man who of all men in New York had best opportunity to know Poe thoroughly, Mr. C. F. Briggs, his associate in the Broadway Journal. Poe's criticisms were declared by Briggs to be “purely selfish” (p. 234). “I have never met a person,” he says in another letter, “so utterly destitute of high motive. He cannot conceive of anybody's doing anything except for his personal advantage” (p. 257). For want of recognizing this, and by a rather arbitrary selection from Poe's helter-skelter criticism of what makes for his own argument, Mr. Woodberry presents a case which seems to us quite overstated.

After admitting Poe to be a reckless, erratic, and unscholarly judge (p. 270), he tries to build up for him a claim of final justice in his judgment on individuals. The means by which this is done is very obvious. Let a man scatter praise or blame broadcast to win favor or to gratify ill-temper; let him do this without the slightest attempt at consistency, and then, whether the persons about whom he writes turn out great or small, a judicious biographer can quote a prediction corresponding to the verdict. To Poe, Tennyson was at one time ‘’the greatest of poets”; at another time Elizabeth Barrett Browning was worth a dozen of him (p. 219). Which, now, shall we regard as Poe's judgment of Tennyson? At one time he pronounced Hawthorne “original at all points “ (p. 158), ant at another time ‘not original, but only peculiar” (p. 280). Is it not a misuse of language to claim that these authors, so waywardly treated, were ‘’foreknown by him when their names were still in doubt” (p. 269)? As to Lowell, the case is still worse, for here the waywardness was enhanced by selfishness. When Lowell was projecting a magazine, and was supposed to have influence with Boston lecture-courses, no praise was too great for his melodramatic early poem of “Rosaline” (p. 177); but as soon as Lowell touched Poe in his “Fable for Critics,” Poe announced that “no failure was ever more complete or pitiable” (Works, 6:24). It is easy to honor a prophet by only recording his successful guesses; and a shrewd sibyl can secure many such triumphs by judicious “hedging” — by betting, as it were, for and against every horse in the field. It would be just as easy to make out an overwhelming case against Poe by dwelling on the fact that he declared Horne's forgotten poem of “Orion” to be “never equalled” “in all that regards the loftiest and holiest attributes of true poetry” (Works, 6:489), and that his whole verdict on Carlyle was that he was “an ass” (Works, 6:167).

But it is when we come to Mr, Woodberry's [column 2:] criticisms on Poe's poetry that we feel compelled to mingle with general praise some very hearty dissent. To our thinking, he strikes a false note, at the outset, when he calls “The Raven “ a great poem. We should say that the general consensus of good criticism now regards “The Raven” as a sensational and meretricious poem, of which, as Mr. Stedman has well said, “the artificial qualities are those which catch the fancy of the general reader.” To produce or even enhance an effect by such mere jingle as “the pallid bust of Pallas” is in no sense good art. The popularity of the poem was very much like the popularity among collegians of those turgid and inflated verses beginning “I am dying, Egypt, dying”; or that of the pompous “ Spartacus the Gladiator” among schoolboys. Poe himself carried this turgid quality to the verge of disgust, or beyond it, in his “Ulalume.” But his fame as a poet really rests upon far higher ground than this — on the exquisite early verses “To Helen,” on the really great poem of “The Haunte1 Palace,” and on the wonderful melody of “Lenore” in its earlier form. Here, again, we come upon a point where we must wholly dissent from Mr. Woodberry. The whole value of his criticism is impaired when he makes the general statement that, in Poe's frequent changes of his poems, “in every instance the alteration is judicious, the step is a step forward “ (p. 253). We should say precisely the contrary — that, as Poe grew older and, if that were possible, more self-conscious, the artificial habit so grew upon him that his ear demanded more and more jingle; and he took some of his best verses and bound them hand and foot with that tiresome “repetend” which became his bane. This was a habit of closing every verse with two lines varying by a word or two only, sometimes attaining such a height of the ludicrous as in:

or, yet worse,

It is strange, in looking back, to see that even Lowell was at one time so infected by this trick as to write in his ‘Moods,” of the pine-tree,

But this was soon dropped by Lowell, and these very verses were so altered as to remove the mannerism, while Poe tended that way more and more. “Lenore,” as it appeared in the Pioneer, had a lyric motion that recalled Coleridge, but it stand, now as Poe made it after he had caught the fountain at its source, and compelled it to turn the weary mill of a “repetend.” Instead of

we have the cramped lines

But the point, after all, where Mr. Woodberry seems to have most distinctly erred — to the extent, we should say, of directly reversing Poe's own announcement of his position — is in a passage on Longfellow's versification. It is the more remarkable, because the biographer himself endorses precisely the opinion which Poe would have repudiated. We read (p. 251) that Poe made it an objection to Longfellow that he was a writer of hexameters. “In this there is so much truth as is involved in the milder statement that . . . his ear was too little refined to be offended by the spondaic flatness of an English [column 3:] hexameter”; the words omitted referring to a wholly different charge. Spondaic flatness! But Poe's whole complaint against Longfellow and the English language itself was that the latter did not afford spondees enough to fit out a hexameter handsomely. He charged it upon “Evangeline “ especially, not that it was too spondaic, but that it had the opposite fault and was too dactylic; had plenty of short syllables, but two few long ones. “We maintain,” he wrote in his paper on Longfellow's Ballads, “that the hexameter never can be introduced into our language, from the nature of that language itself. This rhythm demands, for English ears, a preponderance of natural spondees. Our tongue has few.” (The italics are our own.) “In glancing over the poem [“The Children of the Lord's Supper”] we do not observe a single verse which can be read, to English ears, as a Greek hexameter. There are many, however, which can be well read as mere English dactylic verses; such, for example, as the well-known lines of Byron, commencing ‘Know ye the | land where the | cypress and | myrtle.’ ... Now, a great many of Professor Longfellow's hexameters are merely these dactylic lines, continued for two feet” (Works, 6:387). What now becomes of the “spondaic flatness” of Mr. Woodberry?

We are firm in the opinion that it is better, in writing the life of an author, to have a final summing up of his literary character in one place, instead of distributing the criticism in fragments amid biographical details. This said, and waiving a few merely verbal criticisms on Mr. Woodberry's usually excellent style, we pronounce his book, as a whole, a very valuable addition to an important series of works. So far as the biography is concerned, he has perhaps given us the final word; so far as criticism goes, there is nothing in the book so admirable as Mr. Stedman's remark that Poe's place is, after all, rather with Doré than with the masters of art.