Text: Warren Barton Blake, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Centenary Outlook,” The Dial (Chicago, IL), vol. 46, whole no. 544, February 16, 1909, pp. 103-104

[page 103:]

I.

“The real Poe,” writes his latest biographer, “is a simple, intelligible, and, if one may dare say it, a rather insignificant man. To make a hero or a villain of him is to write fiction.” And yet to have to wail,

abandoning the legend so long cherished, — this seems too numbing to our sensibilities. Happy the suburbs of sound criticism, where he who mourned Lenore, and told of murders in a Paris street, and brought the gooseflesh to young limbs and old with Ligeia's eeriness and Morella's ghost, is still the Poe who died in hospital after a wild Byronic life, adventurous and perverted; the Poe, in fine, for whom

since now a new and unfamiliar figure has stalked stiff and unasked into our company: a Poe who overworked at book-reviews, and whose worst vice would seem to be a weakness for “superior women.” Surely, “we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts!” As Thomas Wentworth Higginson put it long ago: “If Poe fared ill at the hands of his enemy, he has fared worse, on the whole, at those of his friends.” For, without failing to establish, with a different emphasis, most of the unpleasant facts recorded but only half-proved by the “perfidious” [column 2:] Griswold, his later biographers have raised him to a demi-respectability too nearly bourgeois to be poetic, — have deprived him, then, of the companionship of Heine and Musset and Byron, for which he was a candidate. The first man of letters to romanticize his strange unhappy life was Poe himself. It was he who recounted adventures that were never his, in countries that he never visited — in France, in Greece, in Russia even. Taking the cue, his French biographers have hailed in Poe the poète-névrosé, the génie morbide; Germans have ascribed his productivity to alcoholic epilepsy or to paranoia; but now we needs must read: “The warmth of Bohemia, boulevard mirth, however stimulating to other mad bards of New York and Philadelphia, never fetched a song from him.” And it is true! Poe was less a drunkard than we — comforted by the thought that a New England conscience mates not with dark eyes “in a fine frenzy rolling,” consoled by our utter respectability for our want of genius — have fondly made him out; and in so far as he was ever drunkard, his craving came from lust of Lethe, or from the insistence of a decadent organism. If alcohol but made Poe ill, then it is clear that here was a poet as dreary in his vice as the rest were in their virtue.

Perhaps there is a moral profit in our seeing the poet stripped of all illusion, — great in spite of his weakness, and not on its account. And yet the letting in of daylight on the dark places of a Rousseau's career, or of a Poe's, seems almost as grievous an offence against æsthetics as the absurdities of pseudo-scientific criticism. The romance spun around Chatterton or our American has been the poesy of those who take their poesy in prose. “I’ve an idea,” wrote Aldrich to Stedman, “that if Poe had been an exemplary, conventional, tax-oppressed citizen, like Longfellow, his few poems, striking as they are, would not have made so great a stir.” Cheap as is the quality of fame springing from sentimentalism, if it has brought the heedless crowd under a poet's spell it may be better than truth itself. If one cannot throw the white veil over the passions of a Rousseau in France, a Hearn or a Poe in America, let us ignore the life and look but to the fine achievement. More than once has genius stood distinct from moral greatness, — though we may hold, with Lowell, that all great geniuses have that greatness too. It is an unimportant question, here; for Poe, whatever the personality, was a great artist. There need have been no sullying of his memory, or hovering over those last and painful years. “He was never the same again,” wrote the gentle Mitchell who has just left us, of the Poe who had lost his Virginia. “We have hardly a right to regard what he did after this — whether in the way of writing, of love-making, or of business projects — as the work of a wholly responsible creature. It were perhaps better if the story of it all had never been told.”

Without his finishing touch of dying in the garret, Chatterton would never have come so near to being [page 104:] read by a generation as late and antipathetic as our own. Without his vagabondage, de Nerval might by this time be forgotten. But Poe needs nothing of this histrionic glamor; and so it matters little how he died — or lived. New England critics have always seemed a little overweighted by their own sublimity in writing of this man; but if, as Lowell says, he was “three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,” we are grateful that the genius in his composition gave to the world, along with those poems that have won the popular admiration, others less obvious but more beautiful, — “To Helen,” and “Annabel Lee,” and even “Ulalume,” with tales that prove Poe, too, cognizant of “that element which, for want of a better name, we call character,” — the “William Wilson” or “The Tell-tale Heart.”

II.

It is upon the tales that present emphasis is placed; and among them “William Wilson” with its doppelgänger, “Valdemar” and “Mesmeric Revelations” with their hypnotism, “Ragged Mountain” with its hypnotism and metempsychosis mingled in one disturbing whole, have made almost as wide a stir and an even deeper impression than the cruder tales of horror, like “The Black Cat,” or the stories of what their author called “ratiocination.” Thus it is strange, to say the least, that in what must be regarded as the standard memoir of Poe, that by Professor Woodberry in the “American Men of Letters” series, no mention is made of him who, before Poe, most consistently made use of these devices — hypnotism habitually, and auto-duplication until Brandes writes of him, “To Hoffmann, the Ego is simply a disguise worn on the top of another disguise, and he amuses himself by peeling off these disguises one by one.” In Hoffmann's diary one may read: “Possessed by thoughts of death and doppelgänger. . . . Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the sixth, — imagined myself looking at my Ego through a kaleidoscope, — all the forms moving round me are Egos, and annoy me by what they do and leave undone. . . . Why do I think so much, sleeping and waking, about madness?” Though there is no proof that Poe, who shared these thoughts of multiple Ego and of madness, ever read “The Devil's Elixir,” or Hoffmann's other tales, the “phantasy-pieces” whose name he gave to his own excursions in the same weird field, it is certain enough that he knew them indirectly through the work of Scott and others, — quite as he professed to know the tales of Tieck, whom he hailed as Hawthorne's master. And there is no difficulty in exaggerating the debt of Poe and Hawthorne to the Germans, whose fiction remained Gothic, while that of the Americans struck a new note — not national so much as universal. As Poe said, “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” It is not merely in the deeper simplicity, the higher art, of our own story-tellers, that they differ from their German models — if models they ever [column 2:] found in the Hoffmanns and Tiecks and Novalis. In this very circumstance that their terror is of the soul, and not of Germany, we may find the secret of their freshness and power today. The disposition to regard Poe as a “Germanic dreamer,” however natural to continental criticism, seems to the nearer witness totally mistaken. As was pointed out in Poe's own lifetime, while occupying that dim land stretching from the outer limits of the probable into the “weird confines of superstition and unreality,” he combined qualities that are seldom united; “a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed.” There is, in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” that blending of science and romanée which makes us shiver in reading it to-day, when Tieck has become to us exciting only to the risibilities, and Hoffmann but a weaver of idle fantasies.

So in the work of Hearn, in our own generation, is there a blending of the mystic and the tangible — the matter-of-fact, almost — which moves us as true ghostliness, when ghastliness would not suffice.

III.

To-day we praise Poe as the true inventor of a class of fiction variously estimated and everywhere enjoyed. The writer himself belittled his tales of ratiocination, and complained that they should ever have had more vogue than what we hold with him his greater achievement. But for the crowd which sees in the poet only the writer of “The Raven” and “The Bells,” he will ever be, in prose fiction, the writer of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold-Bug.” It is on this side that he is most easily followed by less gifted craftsmen; and if “an entire literature” has been founded upon “The Raven,” it is no less remarkable that, although Poe was the initiator of a new genre in these tales, he has never been improved upon. In the elegant phrase of Professor Brander Matthews, Poe “rang the bell the very first time he took aim.” If, as this critic of the “short-story” has pointed out, Poe's tale differs from older tales of terror, seeking to interest us not in the horrors of a mystery but in the steps taken to untie a knotty problem, it is no less true that it differs from its developments in the hands of modern practitioners. We have the word of Sherlock Holmes's most clever manufacturer, that while his own creation is bloodless and mechanical, Poe's figures are neither mere automata nor beings “fantastically inhuman,” and that “one story by Edgar Allan Poe would be worth a dozen” such as his. If Poe's tales are too strange not to be true, perhaps the paradox of Oscar Wilde is not without its meaning, — [page 105:] perhaps literature does sometimes anticipate, not copy, life, and mould it to its purposes: life the mirror, art the reality.

Poe himself might have enunciated some such mad doctrine. Literature was his religion, said his employer, Graham, — paraphrased by an ungentle essayist who has said, “In the place of moral feeling, he had the artistic conscience.” Surely, he had both; and therein lurked a world of woe. In this early epoch of our literature was marked the passage from superstition over into a shadowy symbolism, most properly vague; the allegory was here more used by Hawthorne, but Poe used it too — and with a perfect artistry. There are, to be sure, tales which we ignore. In the exigencies of a hand-to-mouth existence, Poe wrote his arabesques, — his “Omelettes” and his “Spectacles,” — such as a kindly editor leaves out when he collects the fiction. It is in an absence of humor — and, alas! an apparent ignorance that the humor is lacking — that Poe is most deficient when we compare him with the man of Salem. Yet what a record is his for the short life he had, and the difficulties he faced! “It was he,” writes a foreign critic, “who opened up, in his ‘Hans Pfaal,’ the way of the scientific novel; he who invented the detective story with the ‘Rue Morgue,’ and the novel of spiritism with his stories of Bedloe and M. Valdemar.” And there remains his verse.

Incidentally mentioned here, that passing notice shall suffice. It is the poetry which least needs explanation, — and its body is so small, its perfection at its best so unmistakable, there is no need to recapitulate either the monstrous praises or the petty blame which it has oft evoked. “Onceas yet,” in Swinburne's well-remembered word, “once as yet, and only once, has there sounded out of it all [all America] one pure note of original song — worth singing, and echoed from the singing of no other man; a note of song neither wide nor deep, but utterly true, rich, clear, and native to the singer.” Let that estimate stand. And while it would be grateful to linger over one's favorites in the slender volume of Poe's poetry, and to discuss his theory, real and pretended, in things poetical and critical, all has been said in these hundred years which have elapsed since his birth there in Boston — child of the stage. His mysterious death, sixty years ago, is but the slightest of the bonds between him and the one name that precedes his on the roll of American poets. There was a premonition of Poe's coming, when the poet of our Revolution, Philip Freneau, composed his “House of Night”:

WARREN BARTON BLAKE.