Text: William C. Brownell, “Poe,” Scribner's Magazine (New York, NY), vol. XLV, no. 1, January 1909, pp. 69-84

[page 69:]

THERE is no more effective way of realizing the distinction of Poe's genius than by imagining American literature without him. One is tempted to add there is no other way. It is in the historio rather than in the critical estimate that his eminence appears. It owes more to its isolation than to its quality. He was extremely individual, the entire character of his mind and nature is acutely, almost painfully, certainly perversely, personal; but his originality appears chiefly in relief against the background of his environment. His figure acquires outline and edge from its contrast with the prevailing Philistine screen which he sedulously placed behind it and on which he made it the business of his life to cast the sharpest possible shadow. There is a whole literature of revolt in older countries. Our only Ishmael is Poe. But if not unprecedented in the history of letters, he was sufficiently salient among us, and the fact that so generally his hand was against every man accentuated his individuality in the natural course of apology and polemic

The established was with us still the moral and the didactic. Poe's antagonism instinctively inclined him to art. He is in fact the solitary artist of our elder literature. This is his distinction and will remain such. Hawthorne is in a degree a rival, but in form rather than in fond, as his addiction to allegory attests, and in any case his puritan pre-occupation with the moral forces invalidates his purely esthetic appeal. Poe's art was unalloyed. It was scrupulously devoid, at any rate, of any aim except that of producing an effect, and generally overspread if only occasionally clothed with the integument of beauty. As such it was in America at the time an exotic. His great service to his country is in a word the domestication of the exotic. Color, rhythm, space, strangeness were his “reals”; they fascinated his mind and took possession of his else unoccupied soul. In the large sense thus his art is in strictness to be called exotic rather than original. French, German, [column 2:] English romanticism had preceded him. In the matter of literary phase, his most convinced admirer and most thorough-going apologist observes that he came at the close of an epoch, he did not introduce one. But in his hands the method and even the material that he adopted resulted in a very striking body of work, which still has the compactness and definition of a monument. Incarnated in the vivid forms his pronounced individuality imagined, illustrated by the energy of his genius, the spirit of romanticism entered the portals of our literature and illuminated its staid precincts to the end of variety at the very least. Whatever her responsibility for the subsequent riot there, her vivifying influence is clear, and for it we are indebted to Poe.

II

THE artist, by definition, exercises his activity in exclusive concentration on his effect. In so far as his attention swerves from that he modifies his distinctive attitude. Poe's never wandered a moment, even in his poetry. Now the effect in poetry is largely a matter of technic, and a great deal of poetry is naturally over-valued, because it answers the technical test; because, in short, it sounds well. In the first place its technic is so difficult that, when it is achieved with any distinction, when, so to speak, it is “pulled off” at all, it is rewarded with at least the temporary appreciation that inevitably rewards the tour de force. Much of the admiration of Poe's poetry is of this kind. Much of his poetry itself can be admired in no other way. Moreover, the technic of poetry is so multifarious, so full of possibilities, so capable of producing pleasure by mere rhyme and rhythm, that for, many readers at all times and for all readers at some times its content is lost sight of. English literature has a wonderful example of this in Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Swinburne is incomparable, but Poe has something — a tithe — of the same richness of rhythmic resource, [page 70:] though his numbers are artificial at times and at times tenuous to a degree that removes them from even superficial classification with the opulent spontaneity and splendor of the English poet's diction. They are, too, more exclusively, as well as less richly, technical, leaning thus all the more heavily on technic. And his technic, being thus the main factor of Poe's verse, lacks a little the native felicity only to be secured by keeping its true relative position. Forced out of its proper subordination it loses its grace as a contributing element of a larger entity. It instead of the subject being the poet's main concern, its theoretic quality becomes obvious. It acquires a positively notional air with Poe at times — the air of illustrating the notions of his negligible “Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle.” Its resources seem devices. Every effect seems due to an expedient. The repetend and the refrain are reliances with him — not instrumental but thematic. At least they constitute rather than create the effect — which has therefore something otiose and perfunctory about it.

Technic of all sorts interested Poe tremendously. He had what might be called the technical temperament — a variety perhaps more familiar than widely recognized. It is the temperament that delights in terminology, labels, little boxes and drawers, definitions, catalogues, categories, all ingeniously, that is to say, mechanically, apposite and perfectly rigid. It illustrates the passion for order run to seed — activity of mind avoiding the drudgery of thought by definiteness of classification. Manner being more susceptible of classification than matter, how the thing is done interests it more than the thing itself. Such a temperament on larger lines than common, with a certain sweep as well as system, Poe possessed. It rose to the pitch of positive genius with him. He pondered, himself, and lectured his contemporaries on how literature should be written, how a tale should be presented, how a poem should be built up. His criticism is largely, almost exclusively, technical. He pursued it quite in the detective spirit. His review of “Barnaby Rudge,” of which to Dickens's amazement he divined the dénouement, is worthy of M. Dupin and is historic. His long criticisms of Cooper and Hawthorne are craftsman's criticism. And as such [column 2:] they are extraordinarily good. They contrast refreshingly with the general run of literary praise and blame in his day — and in ours — in being specific, pointed and competent, and avoiding the vague, the sentimental and the commonplaces of moralizing, though of course they have none of the over-tones, so to say, of either culture or philosophic depth that enrich criticism as well as give it a creative value. His own craftsmanship considered strictly as such is excellent. He proceeds with perfect selfpossession and deliberation, and there is this to be said for his philosophizings about it, that at least they disclosed his own method and show conclusively that his art was an art of calculation and not the spontaneous expression of a weird and gruesome genius that it seems to so many upon whom it produces its carefully prepared effect.

His theory of poetry is stated within his account of the composition of “The Raven,” which is as a whole probably in no better faith than the anonymously published editorial reference to the poem that accompanied it on its appearance. Both are mystifications which if “The Raven” were finer would tend to vulgarize it, and are only saved by being possibly derisory from being actually as risible as Mrs. Browning found the poem itself. But the theory advocated and illustrated by Poe is undoubtedly as sincere as his perverse pursuit of originality at any cost and his temperamental revolt against what is staple and standard, not to speak of what is classic, would permit. It is briefly that poetry has absolutely nothing to do with truth (to which he had an intellectual repugnance), that it is concerned solely with beauty (which he does not define, but assumes, in opposition to more conventional opinion from Plato to Keats, to be absolutely divorced from truth), and that its highest expression is the note of sadness — the sadder the better. Of these notions only the last need arrest attention. It is true that the most perfect beauty has often the note of sadness. The reason probably resides rather in its effect than in its constitution, being largely the recipient's subjective appreciation reacting even in, or especially in, the presence of perfection which contrasts so bitterly with

But it is not true that this is always the case. Who is to decide, for example, between the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on Immortality”? Poe's theory, however, and its elaborate working out, involve the inference that “The Raven” is a finer poem than either, since Wordsworth's ode is actually joyous and the idea of “The Raven” on the other hand sadder than anything in Keats's. He proves it by a plus b. Of all melancholy topics, he says, death is the most melancholy; it is most poetical when it allies itself with beauty; “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

Any force his theory might abstractly be supposed to have, assuredly evaporates in his illustrative exposition of it, and “The Raven” is certainly superior to either. But two things are made perfectly clear by such theorizing: one, that the theorist is primarily not a poet but an artist — concerned, not with expression but effect, that is to say; and, the other, that he is not a natural but an eccentric artist, since sadness voluntary and predetermined is artificial and morbid. The poem itself — undoubtedly Poe's star performance — confirms these inductions. It is not a moving poem. It has, as Mrs. Browning herself admitted, a certain power, but it is such power as may be possessed by the incurable dilettante coldly caressing a morbid mood. To be moving melancholy must be temperamental. Even a mood will not suffice. Whatever injustice is done its real genesis by Poe's farrago about it, “The Raven” is in conception and execution exceptionally cold-blooded poetry. But, distinctly on the plane of artifice, it is admirable art. Less remarkable as a pure tour de force in linguistic luxuriance than the extraordinary “Bells,” which in its way is quite unparalleled, it is nevertheless a noteworthy technical achievement. Its rhythms and rhymes are more than clever, and, together with the recurrent accent of the refrain, combine in the production of a sustained tone and effect of totality, which may almost be said to epitomize Poe's genius.

Both “The Raven” and “The Bells” have enjoyed an enormous popularity among readers impressionable by effects and insensitive to distinctions, and their poetic strain has not saved them from being [column 2:] the natural prey of the professional elocutionist — also an elaborate technician in his more or less humble fashion. Poe's more personal verse has less interest. Some of it deserves Stoddard's verdict of “doggerel,” for where his own work, verse or prose was concerned he had no standard. The lines “For Helen,” written when he was a boy, are not only astonishingly precocious but charming, far better than those “For Annie,” written when he had matured and for the most part overlaid his inspiration with artistry and encrusted it with technic. “Ulalume” is the genuinely poetic poem of his maturity, and in it one feels the sincerity which is latent in the most artificial and abnormal natures — a sincerity indeed that throws into exceptional relief the element of artifice in Poe's art and seems itself in the shadow that perhaps befits remorse, behind the apparatus of repetend and empty assonance that tries the reader's nerves. Even here one feels the aptness of Emerson's bland reference to him as “the jingle man,” and notes the artist rather than the poet and the technician rather than the artist. In any case the volume of his verse is so slight as to confine his claim to its quality, and its quality is hardly such as to place him very high up on the fairly populous slopes of Parnassus where there is more competition than he met with in his lifetime. Competition is fatal to Poe. His cue was distinctly to function outside of it, and he was wise to cultivate originality at any price.

III

As a technician his most noteworthy success is the completeness of his effect. He understood to perfection the value of tone in a composition, and tone is an element that is almost invaluable. In this respect he has no American and few foreign rivals. All of his writings attest his supreme comprehension of it — prose as well as poetry, the ablest and the most abject. Such rubbish as “ The Duc de l’Omelette, “ with its galvanic rictus of false but sustained gaiety; such elaborate and hollow solemnity as the parable “Shadow,” which ends, however, on a note of real pith and dignity; such a crazy-quilt of tinsel as “ The Assignation,” all have this unifying quality which makes [page 72:] art of them. His very deficiency in the qualities usually present in the romance-writer and absolutely vital in romance of a high order, enabled him to cultivate his own special excellences the more exclusively. Many of the tales are tone and nothing else — not even tone of any particular character, but a reticulation of relations merely in admirable unison. The false note is the one falsity he eschewed. Tinkling feet on a tufted carpet is nonsense, but it is not a false note in the verbal harmony of the artificial “Raven.” In ‘The Cask of Amontillado” the tone is like the click: of malignant castanets. And in “The Fall of the House of Usher” it reaches Poe's climax of power — a diapason of gloom, wholly voluntary, and ending none too soon perhaps, but maintained to the end with the success of a veritable tour de force. What on the other hand he did not understand was modulation. He has no variety. Probably he realized this limitation and confined himself almost wholly in prose to the short story, grotesquely prescribing, too, one hundred lines as the limit of a poem. A novel by Poe is inconceivable, and would be even if he had had the feeling for character and the human interest that the novel demands. This is partly because he lacked sustained power and the larger art of organization and dynamic development, but it is also due to the monotony which results probably from the predominance and prolongation of the mood, which makes it so easy for him to secure tone.

Thus he achieves atmosphere, but an atmosphere which is less the envelope than the content of his work, and which so enwraps the detail as to blend its accents and minimize the force of such variety as it has. Nothing takes place in “The Fall of the House of Usher” that is not trivial and inconclusive compared with its successful monotone, its atmosphere of lurid murk and disintegrating gloom. And as a consequence of this inversion of the normal artistic relations of content and envelope, I must say I think that here, where we have Poe at his best, he refuses us all satisfaction that lies beyond the scope of purely scenic art. In this one respect “The Cask of Amontillado” is better. It too is most remarkable artistically for its tone, the cascade of brilliant chatter that sustains its suspense. But it contains some psychology, [column 2:] devilish rather than human to be sure, and therefore as usual ringing false, but imaginatively thrilling in its malignity, though its monstrousness is rendered somewhat insipid by the perversity and characteristic inadequacy of its motive. And it has a situation both moral and material, and a rapidly conducted, however meagre, action. But even these two tales as they stand do not take their author out of the rank of the purely scenic artist, comparatively high as they may place him within it. The truth is that no writer of anything approaching Poe's ability has been content to remain in this rank.

There is unquestionable power in his best tales, but it is a repellent power. In fact, his most characteristic limitation as an artist is the limited character of the pleasure he gives. He has a perverse instinct for restricting it to that produced by pain. Pain and pleasure have no doubt an equivalent esthetic sanction. Metaphysically they are sometimes indeed difficult to distinguish, desire, for example, which superficially classes itself as pleasure, being probably pain in reality. The discussion of such a question would have delighted Poe, but it is unnecessary to quarrel with the legitimacy of painful effects in art — in which as in life no doubt, as Mrs. Browning declared, “pain is not the fruit of pain” — in order to appreciate the perversity of Poe's practice in this regard. The production of pain is with him an end, not a means to the production of pleasure. His design is, crassly, to wring the withers of our sensoriums.

In the most characteristic of his writings this motive is exactly that of the fat boy in “Pickwick”? who announced to his easily thrilled auditors that he was going to make their flesh creep. To accomplish this result, however, is more difficult than to announce it, unless one deals with an altogether higher order of material than Poe's and is possessed of an altogether different order of powers. The element of awe is not, of course, in question, for Poe had no awe, and there is no need to cite more august examples than that of Victor Hugo, for instance, to remind ourselves by contrast of the difference between the flesh-creeping effects produced by a master and those obtained by a charlatan who addresses not in the least the mind but exclusively [page 73:] the nerves. His success in accomplishing his desired effect at all events is fatally compromised, usually, in two ways: his motive is too plain and his means too primitive. He makes his motive so plain not only by its constant undisguised and obvious recurrence, but by actual profession (see ‘The Philosophy of Composition” and ‘’The Poetic Principle” for example), as to defeat its own end. It is impossible to meet half-way an artist whose efforts to surprise, shock, startle you are all the while in full sight. He must perforce forego the unconscious reciprocity of concern that is the essence of appreciation. A writer who declares at every turn, as the inveteracy of Poe's practice, his constant harping on the string of “horror,” declares, that he is “going to make your flesh creep,” fails in his attempt. In the face of such an announcement any flesh at all jaded by the extravagances of romanticism remains stationary. In the case of some of Poe's stories, in fact, positive paralysis ensues in the face of almost hysterical efforts on his part at galvanism; “The Pest,” for instance. For this carnomaniac purpose, too, his means are as primitive as his motive is plain. He can certainly produce his effect when the material he treats is of a nature to produce it in any one's hands. ‘The subject itself of ‘The Premature Burial” is full of horror and can be trusted to come home to the imagination of the reader under any treatment of it. So with the idea of being walled up alive, as presented in “The Cask of Amontillado.” So also with the situation in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But in most instances it may certainly be said that one does not get enough pain out of Poe to receive any great amount of pleasure from him.

He carries his “‘unscrupulousness” very far indeed — much farther than even in Arnold's estimation Kinglake could be said to! In fact, if throughout his work you feel the artist, you also feel the artistic liar. He is the avatar of the type — a type tolerably well-known in a multitude of examples from Mandeville to Munchausen, and establishing perhaps through its mere existence (if anything could) the absence of any necessary connection between art and truth. Truth stood between him and originality. It irked him equally in pursuing the egregious, in which he delighted, and in eluding [column 2:] the commonplace, which he abhorred. The esoteric attracted and the ecumenical repelled him. He was fascinated by the false as Hawthorne was by the fanciful. He was, as Henri Martin said of the Celt, “‘always in revolt against the despotism of fact.” He was an artist in whom the great purpose of art, making the unreal appear real, became the end of making the false appear true. At this flagitious game he evinced the superior cleverness of the children of this world. Nowhere is his skill more noteworthy than in securing verisimilitude for the improbable, the incredible, one of the most obvious of his expedients being the auto-biographical form, which he uses almost invariably, and which, when the material is extraordinary, gives the color of plausibility.

But the same fondness for the false appears in his occasional inversion of the process whereby the truth is made to seem incredible — marvellous beyond belief, “‘too good to be true,” in a word, but true all the same. Here of course the falsity of effect merely takes the place of falsity of material. It was all one to Poe, provided he satisfied his passion for mystification. The shortest road to producing the sensational effect that alone he sought is to controvert the established order, and for that road, apart from its being the line of least resistance, he had a native affinity. The effect he aimed at being exclusively a sensational effect, he could best secure it by falsifying his material and thus circumventing the reader's tranquillity of expectation. The fact that such sensation is valueless was of no concern to a philosopher who attached value to sensation as such and to sensation only. Hence he devoted the powers of an extraordinary intellect to producing what is to the intellect of next to no interest. The abnormal, in its various manifestations, the sinister, the diseased, the deflected, even the disgusting, were his natural theme. He could not conceive the normal save as the commonplace for which he had apparently the ‘’horror” he would have liked to inspire in others by the presentation of the eccentric. Dread of the commonplace, as was pointed out centuries ago by a far otherwise penetrating critic than Poe, is fatal to the sublime. And there is assuredly no sublimity in Poe.

Yet the tales of horror and those of the [page 74:] weird and the fantastic probably stand in the widest popular estimate as especially characteristic. And it is true that it is of these one thinks when one speaks of a Poe story. They have, many of them, the evil eminence that wilful morbidity lends to the production of its votaries of genius, and except for the effect on the nerves which a few of them are able to produce on “suggestible” sensoriums, they hold their place among other writings of a similar sort — there are none precisely like them because of their meagreness — chiefly on account of their scenic quality. been claimed for the ‘’tales of ratiocination,” as they are called. Writers before Poe have “grovelled in the ghastly and wallowed in the weird’? with considerable effect, if with an art inferior to his. But he has been called the inventor of the detective story, and thus decorated with a badge of unique distinction in the hierarchy of literature. It is always difficult to assign with certainty to any individual the invention of a literary or plastic genre. ‘’ Doubtless Homer had his Homer,’ remarks Thoreau. M. Dupin was certainly preceded by Zadig, and Voltaire is said to have invented “Zadig” after reading an Oriental prototype. And even ascribing to Poe the invention of the detective story, the lover of literature may justly exclaim, “la belle affaire!” and feel disposed rather to charge than to credit him with it. However, to start or even accelerate a literary current of magnitude, whatever its merit, is an accomplishment so rare as to be noteworthy on that account alone. Moreover, strictly as regards “ratiocination,” Poe excelled if he did not invent. In this respect ‘The Gold Bug” is probably an unsurpassed masterpiece; a masterpiece, at any rate — which is no doubt eulogy enough, though M. Lemaitre's characterization of Maupassant as “à peu pres irréprochable dans un genre qui ne l’est pas,” is certainly applicable to it. So in a less degree is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” “The Purloined Letter” is decidedly inferior and “The Mystery of Marie Rogét’‘ quite unworthy the inventor of the detective story. In ‘The Purloined Letter” the effect of M. Dupin's contemptuousness dominates that of his skill, and in ‘’The Mystery of Marie Rogét” the arrogance of the author is destructive of all interest in a tale that is also [column 2:] otherwise tedious. When Poe's personality comes to the surface the effect is always unpleasant, and it is the absence of temperamental color that gives an agreeable relief to such exhibitions of his purely intellectual activity as “The Gold Bug” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’‘; just as among his weird and fantastic tales the best are those in which there are the most evidences of his art and the fewest of his disposition.

Even in his poorer work, even in his poorest, the workmanship is always the best element. It is poor enough in some of them, but in such tales as “Four Beasts in One,” “Loss of Breath,” “The Man that was Used Up,” “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” in fact, almost all the “tales of extravaganza and caprice,” there is assuredly nothing else. In such inexplicable “extravaganzas” as “The Duc de l’Omelette” and “Lionizing” its stark salience gets on one's nerves. The excessive predominance of this kind of thing in his tales is due obviously to failure in inspiration. But more obscurely it is undoubtedly due to alcohol. “Bon-Bon,” for example, is definitely characteristic of inebriety. The effect of alcohol is well known to be the relief of that tension which the maintenance of equilibrium imposes so painfully on such organizations as Poe's, and a consequence of excessive indulgence in it is therefore the loss of that balance of the faculties which secures correct judgments. Itis impossible to account for much of Poe's writing except on the theory that both in conception and in executjon it was in this way transfigured to his mind and sense. He saw it through the mist of mental congestion and saw in its incoherence the significance that escapes sobriety. Even his egotism would be insufficient otherwise to explain it. The effects of opium in stimulating and coloring the poetic imagination — as in Coleridge's case — are familiar. But those of alcohol are pathologically quite different and quite inferior, and it does not seem to have been sufficiently remarked that in Poe's case they were undoubtedly responsible for the deterioration of his literary productions as well as for the pathetic disintegration of his life. It is a generous instinct that shrinks from dwelling on the latter, but the naiveté that ignores the obvious origin of much of his “extravaganza and caprice”’ is less generous [page 75:] than blind — and, above all, slightly ridiculous. The explanation at all events seems to reduce ad absurdum the sanction of being “thrilled” for the “thrill's” sake.

IV

THE truth is it is idle to endeavor to make a great writer of Poe, because whatever his merits as a literary artist, his writings lack the elements not only of great, but of real, literature. They lack substance. Literature is more than an art. It is art in the extended, the heightened, sense of the term. Since it is the art that deals with life rather than with appearances, it is the art par excellence that is art plus something else — plus substance. Its interest is immensely narrowed when it can only be considered plastically — narrowed to the point of inanity, of insignificance. Every art, of course, has its conventions. And so far as literature is an art it, too, leans upon them. It has its schools, its phases, its successive points of view, its academic perfections, its solecisms. But the fact that it deals with life itself rather than exclusively with appearances — which may be arranged, organized, systematized, controlled far more easily owing to their own preliminary simplification — gives it so much more range, so much greater freedom, such an infinitely greater miscellaneity of material, and material of so much more significance and vitality that it is comparatively independent of conventions and finds its supreme justification in giving anyhow, in any way, well or ill one may almost say, the effect of life, the phenomena and import of life, which constitute its substance. Thus it is that in literature substance counts so much more than it counts in any other art, however much any other may also be in its degree “a criticism of life.’ Mr. Henry James has curiously illustrated the principle in later years. Beginning as pre-eminently or at least conspicuously an artist, he has become so overwhelmed by the prodigious wealth and miscellaneity of his material — that is to say the phases of life which his prodigious penetration has revealed to him — that his art has been submerged by it. The trees have obliterated the forest. All the more important is it, one may argue, to cling to conventions of treatment, that your picture of life may be definite, coherent and [column 2:] effective. Yes, but one of these conventions is a certain correspondence with reality. The doctrine of art for art's sake applied to literature is apt to have particularly insipid results.

In short, however extravagant and capricious, any work of art is necessarily subject to its material, and the hand of every artist must, like the dyer's, be subdued to what it works in. But a literary composition, especially, cannot be conceived and executed in vacuo. The warp must be “given,” however wholly the woof may be invented, or the web will be insubstantial and the pattern incoherent. Poe could transact his imaginings in environments of the purest fancy, in no-man's land, in the country of nowhere, and fill these with “tarns” and morasses and “ragged mountains” and shrieking water-lilies, flood them with ghastly moonlight and aerate them with “rank miasmas.” Nevertheless, he could only avoid the flatness of pure phantasmagoria by peopling them with humanity. His landscape might embody extravagance and his atmosphere enshroud caprice, his figures demanded to be made human. The overwhelming interest of fiction is its human interest. Since it is peopled with human figures, neglect of its population is a contradiction in terms. Even in the fiction of adventure, in which the personages are minimized and the incidents the main concern, even in fiction in which plot figures as the protagonist of the drama, plot and incident would be sterile but for the characters that figure in them. However subordinate and undifferentiated these may be, they must make some intrinsic appeal, or we should not care what happened to them. The game even as a game is not one that can be played with counters. Yet that is precisely the way in which Poe played it. And his stories have no human interest, because humanity did not in the least interest him. Neither man nor woman delighted him enough to occupy his genius even incidentally. His tales contain, of course, no “character” — that prime essential, and most exacting raison-d’étre of normal fiction.

Indeed so great is the importance of human character to a story that deals with it at all, that I think those of Poe's tales in which the personages are the least shadowy, the least like algebraic symbols, the least [page 76:] characteristic, that is to say, are greatly helped by the fact. The stories in which he figures gain greatly from M. Dupin, who has a pedantic and censorious temperament, though his differentiation is as inferior to that of his successor, M. Lecocq, as the meagre and mathematical medium in which he exists is to the varied and entertaining field of activity, full of character and crowded with incident, that Gaboriau furnished for the latter — though without reaching eminence as a “world-author”’ in the process. “The Fall of the House of Usher” gains greatly from the characters therein, though these are merely sketches for the reader's imagination to fill out. One thinks of “Wuthering Heights” and of the place in literature that would have been assigned to Emily Brontë by Poe admirers, had she had the good fortune to be born an American. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” one of the best of the tales, it seems to me, owes much to its exceptional “psychology” as an imaginative study of real torture to which ingenuity gives real point instead of merely displaying itself as ingenuity. It is helped, too, I think, by being localized in real time and space; by the fact that there was such an institution as the Inquisition, and that the victim's rescuers had an actual and the correct nationality, though I fear these considerations would seem philistine indeed to the true Poe worshipper. Furthermore, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” forfeits a large part of its interest the moment it appears that the murderer is an ape and not a human malefactor. Ce n’est que ça, one feels like exclaiming — and repeating even when William Wilson's double dissolves into his conscience, though of course allegorically that is the point of the story, as well as being very cleverly, very ingeniously, managed. Finally one of the tales — “The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fether” — has an exceptional interest because it is an intelligent, though it does not pretend to be a profound, study of a phase of mind and character under certain conditions and in a certain environment, executed with a wholly unaccustomed lightness of touch and an aspect of gaiety. The scene, however, it will be remembered, is a maison de santé and the personages are its inmates. And nothing is more characteristic of Poe's perversity than that his most normal fiction should be the representation [column 2:] of the abnormal. The abnormal was essential to him, and he only varied his practice of achieving it in his treatment by securing it in his material. Taken with the whim of depicting human nature, he could at least select its deflected types. Even here, however, his interest is clearly in treating his material in a rather ghastly vein of contrasting and contra-indicated bouffe. He cares nothing for his “types,” and his real success, such as it is, is incidental.

Similarly with his pre-occupation with crime — almost an obsession with him. He is never concerned with sin, which is too integrally human an element of life to interest him. Crime, on the contrary, is in comparison of an artificial nature, and of however frequent, still of exceptional occurrence. Undoubtedly it furnishes apposite material to the novelist of character as well as to the portraitist of manners, and is a personal as well as a social factor in human life. But this aspect of it Poe, whose criminals are only criminals, completely ignores. He uses it not naturalistically but conventionally. It is his conventional machinery for his story. Like Mme. Tussaud and Mrs. Jarley, he finds in it the readiest instrument of his most cherished effects. And so far as he “psychologizes” it, he increases its inherent artificiality by treating it with morbid imaginativeness, endeavoring after his favorite method to give the illusion of reality to its abnormal repellency and not at all concerned about demonstrating its real character. Here he is measurably successful in such a tale as “The Imp of the Perverse,” where he utilizes the well-known tendency of the criminal to confess, and totally fails in such absurdity as “The Black Cat,” a story that could hardly have “thrilled” Ichabod Crane; but one illustrates his lack of human feeling as well as the other. And of almost all the stories into which the element of humanity enters perforce, it may be said, finally, that the residuum is not so much worth while as to earn neglect of his shortcomings in a respect normally vital to the kind of thing he is doing. In a word, the “Poe” in his stories could only be moving and effective if this element were present also.

For the only thing that can give any significance, any vital interest, any value, in brief, to the weird and the fantastic [page 77:] themselves, is to anchor them somehow in some human relationship as Hoffmann does. Otherwise they are simply phenomena that appeal strictly to the nerves. Poe's treatment of them negatives their sole sanction. “He can thrill you as no one else can,” says one of his admirers. As to that there are several things to be said. In the first place it depends a good deal on who you are, whether you are “thrilled” or not. In the next place how are you “thrilled”? As you are by the knocking at the door in Macbeth, or as you are by a bad dream or a gruesome sight in actual life? Thirdly, are you thus affected because the story is thrilling, or because, as: I have already noted, your own imagination is set at work as to how you would be affected by experiencing what you are reading of — “The Premature Burial,” for example — forgetful of the fact that personal application, than which nothing is more common, notoriously vitiates any objective judgment? Finally of what value after all is gooseflesh as a guide to correct estimates in art? Is this hyper-æsthetic reaction a trustworthy measure of real esthetic merit? To ask these questions is of course to answer them. But even accepting this effect on the nerves as evidence of Poe's power, even of his unique power — for I think no other writer ever essayed it so baldly — its essential insignificance must be admitted, because itis wholly divorced from any element of interest outside of itself. Instead of itself being an element in a composition as with Hoffmann, Poe's weirdness is the whole thing. An occasional discord has its uses in a work of harmony, but the scrannel shriek of a locomotive performs no function but that of irritation, though it may “thrill” or even deafen a listener. It is certainly more important to be moved than to be moved pleasantly, but to be moved to no purpose, to be agitated aimlessly in no direction, is an unsatisfactory experience.

It is needless to specify instances among Poe's tales that illustrate this exclusive appeal to the nerves. It would be difficult to find any among those of the weird class that do not. Besides in them it was his theory, his “scheme,” to create this precise effect and no other. The particularly crass one of “Berenice,” however, shows his method in particular relief. It is that product of his “genius” in which a madman [column 2:] recounts his fascination by the beautiful teeth of his mistress, and his exhumation of her remains for the purpose of extracting them as a last exercise of his faculties before losing them completely. Poe sometimes went too far, and did so in this instance, naively admits one of his earlier editors! As if it mattered where along that line one stopped. The partly ridiculous, partly repulsive, wholly inept quality of the performance is stamped as such at the start. The serious workmanship only emphasizes the fact that the personages are lay figures, the motif insane, the story incredible. As a ship-shape and coherent account of incoherent horror, it may contain a “thrill” for the predisposed, but it is fully as fitted to evoke a smile as a shudder, and there is obviously no standard by which to admeasure this sort of thing except that of technical execution. Any reader of “Berenice” not a neurasthenic must inevitably ask, “What of it?” Having no import it has no importance.

V

“BERENICE” epitomizes very well Poe's lack of substance and the insignificance of the fantastic element in his work which this lack of substance involves. It also illustrates the aridity of his imagination. Imagination is, in the view of most of his admirers, probably, his most striking, his most salient, possession. But it is darkening counsel to stop with this mere ascription, as if imagination were an invariable rather than a protean faculty. Poe's imagination was of a peculiarly personal kind. It intensified his divining powers, but never extended his range of thought. It was thoroughly, integrally, analytic. His “Tales of Conscience,” as they have been called, deal mechanically so far as they do not deal conventionally with conscience. There is no largely imaginative treatment of it. They summarize phenomena deduced from remorse and fear as forces and, confined to crime as they are, involve little imaginative psychology. His imaginings are largely inventive, and important as the imagination is to the inventor, the tendency to invention is apt to imply an inferior order of it. The poets are sadly lacking in the inventive faculty. [page 78:]

It is essentially logical, concatenated, mechanical. It has no spiritual and no sensuous side. Poe's inventiveness is his chief mental trait and his imagination was its servant. He is perhaps at his best in “The Gold Bug” — to Poe's partisans a miracle of imaginative invention, but only to his partisans anything else. His spiritual side is illustrated by his “Ligeias,” “Eleonoras” and “Morellas”? — which measured by a serious standard are scarcely more than morbid moonings. The ingenuity of his one spiritual tale, “William Wilson,” is far more in evidence than its imaginativeness. It is an extremely artistic piece of workmanship and shows what Poe's art could do in the service of truth instead of mystification. But only up to the point when you perceive it is mystification after all. Curiously, then the effect deliquesces — when its meaning appears — with the entrance of avowed allegory. The whole thing becomes insubstantial because his imagination is unequal to conducting his fine conception to its conclusion without destroying his illusion. His sensuousness is distinctly rudimentary, all glitter and tinsel, ebony and silver. His consecration to beauty seems a little ironical in the light of his too frequent conception of it. Witness “The Assignation,” with its “mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute censers, together with multitudinous flaring and flickering tongues of emerald and violet fire,” its “thousand reflections from curtains which rolled from their cornices like cataracts of molten silver,” its “beams of natural glory” which “mingled at length fitfully with the artificial light and lay weltering in subdued masses upon a carpet of rich, liquid-looking cloth of Chili gold” — all of which “richesse de café,” as Balzac would call it, suggests the sale's catalogue of a courtesan, raisonné by a Semitic hand; or at least Thackeray caricaturing Disraeli and Bulwer combined — those twin sources of Poe's style according to his latest editors, who however must have been thinking only of its extravagances, as his style in general is admirable.

In any case such writing is not sensuous but scenic. And Poe had no more the sensuous than the sensual strain. ‘The sensual as commonly understood does not exist for him, apparently, as it is apt not to in persons [column 2:] of his variety of nervous organization, and his writings it is to be pointed out have this signal negative merit. But he perhaps pays for it in some degree by an extraordinary aridity in the whole sensuous sphere. When he enters this he is either perfectly insignificant or else his taste deserts him. He is too insincere to succeed in it. His nature requires the element of the artificial which distinguishes the scenic. His genius was certainly a striking one, and if he was a charlatan he certainly had a genius for charlatanry. He revelled in the specious. The vivid aspect of reality he gave to his creations is due to his skill in its use, for he never felt reality and was impervious to its appeal as the true constitution of the universe moral and material. What he desired was to be striking. He says so in so many words in one of his disingenuous (or merely perverse, who knows?) argumentations, contending that any one can be original if he will. And his usual means of accomplishing it was by giving through speciousness the semblance of reality to the unreal and incredible. He relied on this far more than even on his scenic imagination, though his scenic imagination gave him great power of vivid material realization; his landscapes are stereoscopic. The scenic, however, demands scale. With Poe the scale is too small. His stage is lilliputian. He is so fond of the limelight in itself that he floods his picture with it. But for the proper play of this illuminant more time and space are needed than his cabinet canvas contains. His imagination is not rich enough to engender extension, endue it with continuity, and crowd it with action. His action is always meagre, and, one may say, deduced from, rather than largely illustrative of, his idea. Or else it is conventional, as in the “Adventures of A. Gordon Pym,” which is the acme of stereotyped “adventure,” imitating “ Robinson Crusoe” even to its religious outgivings with grotesquely mechanical effect.

On the other hand, he was full of ideas. If he lacked the visualizing moral power of the image-making faculty, if his action and incidents are meagre and gain their aspect of reality through a specious art of presentation rather than by the actual incarnation of artistic vision, what eminently he did not lack was fertility in intellectual conception. Sixty-eight stories, whatever their average [page 79:] quality, are a good many. His picture might be vague but it never lacked subject. He cannot be said to have lived in the world of ideas, in the accepted sense of the phrase, for he had but a smattering acquaintance with its established consensus. Predeterminedly original, however, he created his own. Artist as he was he was nevertheless far more predisposed to the abstract than the concrete except in the purely material sphere; he began with principle and proceeded to phenomena, in irreproachably deductive fashion. Analytical as he was he conducted his analysis deductively; he had a passion for ratiocination, but he argues synthetically. His conclusion is always his own point of departure — artistically withheld till the climax is reached in the verification of hypothesis. This is the difference between M. Dupin and Zadig, for example. He was tremendously concerned with theory, a circumstance that gives point to his criticism and coherence to his tales, however it may devitalize his poetry. His mind was highly speculative, inquiring, even inquisitional. He had a prodigious interest in problems, puzzles, rebuses — an interest that to those who do not share it is apt to seem inept. He was in a way a conjurer in literature. He delighted in mystification — which is as much as to say he had no other interest in mystery. His aim was to mystify — one impossible to the mystic. He was less of a mystic than any writer who has ever dealt with the mysterious. He had vastly more affinity with Cagliostro than with Hoffmann from whom — inexplicably — he is so often said to derive. Without the vanity he had the conceit and enjoyed the complacence of the prestidigitator.

In his early studies mathematics and in his later reading science in general attracted him most genuinely. With all his gift for language it interested him mainly as syntax, and his knowledge of languages was as superficial as his care for letters. His French for example — which is not infrequent — is what he would call in another impudently ignorant, and has circumvented his latest editors who, nevertheless, speak of having taken the liberty of rectifying his text in this respect. He may be said, indeed, to have indulged his mathematical turn in his philosophy of life — or whatever may serve to pass for such with him; of [column 2:] course, as such he had no philosophy of life. His interest in ideas did not extend to moral ones, of which he had none. The whole world of morals was a terra incognita to him — not at all the same thing as saying, which is also true, that he had no morals. Coleridge, for example, has been said to have had none, but he was immensely concerned with their philosophy. Poe's personal egotism, accentuated by his indulgences, freed him from a sense of personal responsibility no doubt, but the singular thing about him as a writer is that man's moral nature made no appeal to his imagination. Morbid psychology, to be sure, was a part of his material, but he used it almost altogether as a means, mainly mechanical, to the production of a dramatic effect. And even here his general ideas have not the scope and freedom they have in the purely intellectual sphere, but have the succinct quality that marks the “notation” of phenomena. So that even his determination to the abnormal does not in the unfamiliar moral sphere remark any law of general import — except such common-places as the tendency of the criminal to confession already noted. And of course, as regards morals in the extended sense, he had, about man's habits and customs, around which the imagination of the normal literary artist plays perpetually, no ideas at all, either general or otherwise.

In brief, his lack of moral imagination accounts for the vacuity of his writings. A writer's product is characterized in great part by what he lacks as well as by what he possesses, by his defects as well as by his qualities. It is no reproach to a theological writer to be ignorant of the fine arts unless he refers to them. The theory of criticism, however, which holds that the excellences of performance are alone worth attention, that it is, unlike a rope, to be judged only by its strongest part, and that the function of criticism is really the judicial dispensing of rewards of merit, is unsatisfactory and provincial. The whole work is there calling for critical account, and, except in the matter of emphasis and accent, its sins both of commission and omission are germane to critical consideration. In practice the other theory leads to notorious confusion and — as Americans at least must be constantly reminded — the distinction between [page 80:] good and bad is obscured by mechanically ascribing to a failure the characteristics of a performer's successes. At all events it is pertinently illuminating to find a writer of tales, criticism and poetry deficient in the philosophy of life, letters and feeling, not only because this at once ranks his product, and measures its value, but on account of the light it throws on his productive faculty itself — his imagination. It is a just reproach to Hawthorne that he suffered the genius that produced “The Scarlet Letter” to produce little or nothing else comparable with it. But the case is quite different with Poe, because tales, criticism, and poetry of real value cannot be written or can only occasionally be written with Poe's equipment. The wonder is not that he did not succeed oftener, but that he succeeded at all, as assuredly he did in his own way — one can hardly say his own genre, since he had no congeners.

It is a mistake to try to classify him. He is a very strictly sui generis. So appalling an egoist could hardly fail to be. For that reason he seems to me more personal than original, as I began by saying, since being extremely idiosyncratic, he nevertheless originated nothing in the sense of markedly and permanently modifying the preceding or the prevalent in his field of activity; of course in a restricted sense eccentricity is originality. No more superficial association was ever made than in relating him to Hoffmann, in whom the weird and the fantastic are always in close and generally in affectionate companionship with sentiment and humor. “Where form dominates,” says Balzac, “sentiment disappears,” and in the temperament of the technician humor has as little place as sentiment. Notoriously Poe had none of either. He was an artist with a controlling bent toward artifice, exaggeratedly theoretic, convinced that the beautiful is the strange and the sad the poetic, and exercising his imagination through every expedient of ingenious invention, to the end of producing effects of strangeness to the point of abnormality and of sadness to the point of horror. Compact of neurotic sensationalism and saturated with the specious, Poe's “thrilling” tales taken in the mass illustrate the most detestable misuse of imaginative powers within the limits of serious literature, and only fall within these [column 2:] limits by the intellectual vigor which oftenest they argue rather than evince. “It's a weary feast,” says Thackeray, “that banquet of wit where no love is.” And Poe's banquet is as bereft of wit as it is destitute of love.

VI

IF even his imagination was thus limited it was perhaps partly because the field of its exercise was naturally limited by his lack of culture. He had no culture properly so called. He applied the schoolmaster's rod to others with the gusto of pretentiousness, but discipline is precisely and par excellence what he lacked himself. He is the notablest example to be found among men of letters of a writer living exclusively in the realm of the intellect without developing or enriching his own. His first work is as good as his last. He read much but without purpose. In this single respect his editors have perhaps done him somewhat less than justice in saying: “His sources were, at first, books of which Disraeli's ‘Curiosities of Literature’ is a type, and in science some elementary works; generally he seems to have read books only for review, as they came under his notice at random, but he paid much attention to the magazines, home and foreign, throughout his life.” Desultory as his reading was, it was not indolent and hap-hazard. Devoid of sentiment, he eschewed “trash.” And without any spirit of swife, or any persistent amassing of knowledge, still less with any ordered and philosophic acquisition, his purely intellectual organization led him into the realm of learning, where he was distinctly at home without, however, possessing the moral purpose to benefit by his stay. He satisfied his curiosity, following an indubitable natural bent, without engaging his responsibility or really increasing his knowledge. There is no such absurd fatras in literature as the absurd “Eureka.” He found his practical account in these excursions. All was grist that came to his mill. Just as he read the current product for journalistic ends, he pursued in literature out-of-the-way paths in search of the odd and the unfamiliar with a similar motive — at least with a similar result. What he found there served to decorate his own writing with the unconventional [page 81:] and the recondite. It is bedizened with the frippery of learning often, but one suspects the truth that most of the goods, in familiar phrase, are in the shop-window. And his étalage of learning is that of the literary charlatan — an arsenal of the occult and the obscure, the abstruse and the exotic, above all the esoteric and the technical, the whole chosen and calculated to impose on the credulous and mesmerize the impressionable.

But it is doubtful if any one of his circle had as much reading. In this respect he belonged rather in the New England that he constantly jeered at as provincial and hated with a genuine and sometimes clairvoyant hatred. The weaknesses of Isaac are apparent enough to Ishmael, and though his railing at them may seem Bedouin to the Brahmin, it is not to be called Beeotian. There was probably no one within the purview of transcendentalism capable of writing the following: “Sculpture, although in its nature rigorously poetical, was too limited in its extent and consequence to have occupied, at any time, much of his attention.” Possibly Poe was not and got it from Goethe, as he certainly did the remark on the next page of “The Domain of Amheim”: “No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude” — a landscape by whom he had probably never seen. It is difficult to determine the true inventory of the predatory, but appreciation of Goethe's estheticism is in itself a distinction for Poe's time. Nor is he to be called bohemian. His habits were irregular enough, but the bohemian has no intellectual curiosity and Poe was made of it. The bohemian is content “merely to bask and ripen.” Poe wasaworker. His irregularities have obscured for us his exceptional industry. They interfered sadly with his accomplishment, but with its amount far less than with its character. In spite of them he kept at work — or at least returned to work when he could. His indigence and the heavy pressure of it on the two beings he cared for were a constant stimulus to a nature that whatever its faults knew not supineness. With even less urgent need he would have worked as hard — perhaps even, considering the instability of his nervous organization, to better purpose, since he would have been [column 2:] less harried by the cormorant care. He had the disposition of the fighter, and his failings did not mine his fortitude nor his failures discourage, however they might transiently deject, him. He was not an idler or a dreamer. His mental activity was constantly informed with purpose, and directed with assiduity. He was always full of energy when he was not hamstrung by exhaustion. No bohemian produces ten volumes. When his ambitious and sometimes arrogant plans met shipwreck, owing in general no doubt to his own evil genius, he made new ones. Never handicapped by modesty or even the prudences of self-distrust, he was undeterred by obstacles and undismayed by misfortune. If he did not have a proud soul, at least his egotism conserved his identity unimpaired even in the disintegration of his faculties, and to the last made the most of what his errors had left him. Next to his art it is his energy that, by demonstrating his capacity, distinguishes him and makes him a marked figure in our literature.

He had an English experience in impressionable school-boy days — which served him to real purpose in “William Wilson,” probably the solidest of his tales. But he never travelled, and in this respect he inevitably seems limited, even boyish, in comparison with many of his contemporaries. It is hardly necessary to say that this was a limitation he did not himself feel. But if his egotism amounted even to bumptiousness, as it did, it was naturally associated with great independence. He did his own thinking. He was constantly “sizing up” everything, especially others, and could on this account alone hardly have been popular, even among the lowly spirited to whom arrogance and imperiousness, or even the caricatures of those vices, seem not defects but qualities. They were especially evident along with more amiable ones in his criticism, which forms several volumes of his complete works, which he wrote more incisively not to say more successfully on the whole than any of his few contemporary competitors, and for which he certainly showed the aptitudes of real penetration and a philosophic standpoint. He lacks, to be sure, one of the chief qualifications of the critic, the critical temper. It is in his criticism that his “journalism” appears [page 82:] most obviously. And his journalism was that of his day, the farthest possible removed from the critical temper. It has instead the polemic temper. And his polemic was extremely personal. Its tone is often extremely contemptuous. The lining, as the French say, of his praise is sometimes abuse of those who differ with him. His praise of Hawthorne is highly spiced with contempt for the neglect of Hawthorne that he charged upon New England. He felt the sectionalism of New England, as of course no writer not himself a New Englander could fail to do. But he treats it with a self-answering excess in his references to “the Emersons and Alcotts and Fullers.” His treatment of Longfellow is another instance. Perhaps he had not enough purpose to be called malevolent. He was rather irritable than imperious perhaps in his lack of any feeling of responsibility, in which case he must be acquitted of more malign motive than that of the strutting and consciously clever Ishmael bent on self-assertion. Tocall Carlyle an “ass” and Emerson his imitator was but a way like another of calling attention to himself. So possibly were his equally extravagant eulogies. Such primitive “methods” were certainly more in vogue in his day than in ours. The journalism to which his work formally belonged or with which it had notable affiliations bristled with “ personalities,” so-called. But Poe has claims inconsistent with the cloaking of his faults by the mantle of his time, and certainly no writer of his time, even, of anything like his powers, wrote criticism of this particular order of simplicity. If it had been as prevalent as it was primitive we may be sure he would have avoided it in his consecration to “originality” and aversion to custom and the common.

His mental activity was indeed extraordinary — so much so as apparently to be deemed by him almost an end in itself. To what purpose or upon what substance his mind was engaged was of small moment so long as it functioned. But to the fact that it did function so actively is probably due the specific excellence, as his penetration is the specific quality, of his criticism, namely, that like much of his fiction it is ratiocinative and neither canonical as so much past, nor impressionist, as so much current criticism is. He was dogmatic [column 2:] enough, and absurdly autocratic, but his dogmas were not conventions. On the other hand, he had ideas about the matter in hand and did not “recount the adventures of his soul among masterpieces” — though it is to be said that acknowledged masterpieces did not greatly interest his soul, to which they doubtless afforded too little polemic material. His ideas were often mere notions. With his theoretic bent they could hardly be otherwise. But in form at least they were conspicuously rationalized. Reasons with him were as plenty as blackberries. He delighted, in French phrase, to remuer them — fussily, perhaps, rather than profoundly, and largely, no doubt, by way of what he himself calls “kicking up a bobbery,” but energetically and unceasingly. And though whistling as one goes even from excess instead of want of thought is still only whistling, nevertheless the phenomena of so much mental activity occupied with something quite other than Transcendentalism, exalting beauty to the point of declaring its incompatibility with truth, must have been interesting in his day. In fact, it still has a certain piquancy. But his reasons were not the fruit of inquiry. They were “immediately beheld” justifications of his preferences, and his mental furniture was not rich enough for the production of any a priori reflections of range and moment. He never speculated as Balzac, in similar case, observing: “There must be a cause for this singularity.” He was only too pleased to rest in the singularity, to establish and flaunt it. He was much impressed by the saying he cites more than once from “Lord Verulam”: “There is no exquisite beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportion,” but he does not press the matter farther and is too content to get authority for “strangeness” — which was precisely his affair — to appreciate that its service as an accent does not involve its value as an element even, to say nothing of his own practice of enforcing its predominance. The portion of his reasoning that — naturally — has most interest is that concerned with linguistic technic. He would have made a stimulating professor of prosody, in spite of his “crotchets,” as Mr. Stedman calls them, and his extravagance is in this field altogether more suggestive than in any other. [page 83:]

VII

HE had, in short, a fine mind which he neither disciplined, nor stored, nor developed; the unusual activity of which was stimulated and guided by intellectual curiosity; of which invention and logic were more marked traits than imagination and poetic feeling; and of which he made effective but unscrupulous usage to no particular purpose. There is nothing very sinister in Poe, except the desire to produce sinister effects. And since these, as I have said, are apt to fail through the obviousness of their motive and the crudity of their means, they leave a merely disagreeable and not a sinister, a morbid and perverse, not at all a satanic, impression of the genius they express, though it is undeniable that a good many of the tales recall Emerson's description of Mephistopheles: “pure intellect applied — as always there is a tendency — to the service of the senses.”

His legend has grown curiously since his death. The reasons for it are of course largely romantic, personal rather than literary. He is distinctly so much the most, as to be almost the only, romantic figure of our literature; and his romantic interest has greatly influenced the critical estimate of his work. In the first place it has led to the production of an unusual amount of criticism of this. And this criticism has been increasingly favorable. His contemporaries took a much less extravagant view of it. For them there was less mystery about Poe himself, and they entertained none of the illusions that time, instead of destroying as usual, in Poe's case seems to have engendered. Then, too, the appreciation of literary art has greatly increased with us — to an excess, at present, I think, which fairly matches our earlier provincialism. Moreover, the spirit of literary generosity, particularly abounding in America, toward our own authors — our own sommites in all fields — touched by the hard fate and possible injustice which Poe endured and from which his personal reputation suffered in the eyes of his contemporaries and the succeeding generation, has tended to exalt his literary reputation with no doubt the instinct that its exaltation may serve to excuse or at least obscure his infirmities.

His reputation among us has notoriously been greatly increased by foreign recognition [column 2:] of his writings. If, say his admirers, we ourselves esteem him because he is an American writer, this cannot be true of his foreign estimation; quite the contrary. This is certainly plausible. But foreign recognition sets such traps for our naivete that it is prudent to be a little on our guard in the presence of it. The theory laid down by Matthew Arnold that the foreign estimate previsaged posterity's is open to some question — aside from the fact that posterity itself may make mistakes; Aldrich, for example, acutely argued from Browning's obscurity the probable injustice of posterity, preoccupied with obscurities of its own, to his incontestable merits. But foreign recognition in the nature of the case rewards to a disproportionate extent the merits that especially appeal to foreigners. If as Arnold held, Sainte-Beuve could regard Lamartine as important to the French without implying a positive in this relative importance, it is equally true that an exotic may make an appeal out of all proportion to its intrinsic value and interest. In any event we ought to distinguish between foreign recognition of those of our writers who are classifiable with foreign ones, and this recognition when it rewards with its irresponsible applause the exceptional and extravagant which appeals to its interest in the novel and the foreign per se. As a matter of fact, foreign recognition has been most generous with regard to many of our to us least indispensable writers. To put the matter crudely, the appreciative foreigner has admirable writers of his own, what he most appreciates in our literature is the queer, the odd, the qualities from whose associated defects he feels an entire detachment. Foreign recognition therefore in the case of Poe's extravaganzas and caprices is not necessarily an imprimatur of the same authority as it is in such instances as those of Cooper and Longfellow, for example. It attests not the merit but the extraordinariness of his writings, and a little, no doubt, the extraordinariness of their being produced in America. Gautier's reference to him, besides classing him with Mrs. Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis, is chiefly depreciation of his environment. The selection of the tales was in fact entitled, published and celebrated on the Continent as “Tales Extraordinary.” And there their sponsors were not, as in the case of Cooper, [page 84:] Balzac and Sainte-Beuve, the foremost of Continental authorities at the time, one may say, but the genial and good-natured Gautier who was preaching the gospel of romanticism à outrance, and Baudelaire as to whose authority Mr. Swinburne's praise and the current rediscovery of him by the dilettanti, mainly of Mr. Swinburne's speech, is disconcertingly at variance with his treatment by the austere Scherer, our own catholic Henry James, and the trenchant but impartial Faguet, perhaps the first of living French critics, in whose admirable “Literary History of France,” his name does not appear. It is also worth bearing in mind — since prudence in such a matter is, as I say, commendable — that Baudelaire, whom Mr. James cruelly calls Poe's inferior both as a charlatan and as a genius, had nevertheless an even greater purely linguistic genius than Poe's, and that the beauty of his translation, in itself celebrated, has been an appreciable element in Poe's Continental vogue.

The cult of Poe is not in the interests of literature, since as literature his writings are essentially valueless. The interests of literature occasionally call for restraint in the indulgence of Mr. Swinburne's “generous pleasure of praising” not for the purpose — quite as frequent with Mr. Swinburne — of alternating with it the delights of censure and reprehension, but in order to maintain unobscured and unimpaired the standards of literature itself. Literature has a stronger claim than any of its practitioners, and generously or ungenerously to exalt these at its expense is to belittle and betray it. Hardly any cause is nobler and treason to few so flagrant or — since the pleasure of praising is, like most prodigalities perhaps, a generous one — so frequent. But there is a particular irrationality in American over-praise of Poe. It is this: unlike foreign literatures and English literature as a whole, American literature — as it is, perhaps fatuously but [column 2:] nevertheless inevitably, not to say conveniently, called — has no background. Its figures do not form part of a pageant relieved against a rich and varied scenic setting, but stand in silhouette before the black “drop” that isolates rather than supports them and focuses attention on their individualities from the stately lyceum lecturer like Emerson to the genial “songand-dance artist,” in all strictness too numerous to mention. Lacking — within our own exclusively American ranks, I repeat — ancestors and traditions, we are without the restrictive influences of a “stream of tendency,” an orderly evolution, without that subconscious education which saves conscious intelligence so much unintelligent performance. Our protestant and innovating temperaments have really nothing to protest against, nothing to break away from, no routine to vivify. More than that, we have, comparatively speaking, nothing to maintain, nothing to keep in mind, no standards in a word. Such a romanticist as Gautier, with the whole heritage of the noble seventeenth and the enlightened eighteenth century French literature in his literary blood, could safely practise and preach the literary freedom which with us means license — and consequent insignificance. No romantic artist can do more than “pad round” the skeleton he must have derived from his predecessors — at least in our day, the human imagination on which he leans having been so long at work. Our realists are in better case — nature being inexhaustible. Hence our disposition to magnify our extravagant and capricious writers — such as Poe and Whitman — is destructive of our hold on the standards which it is of the last importance for us consciously to keep in mind, since so only can we have them in mind at all. Only an older society than ours can with impunity cherish and coddle “les jeunes,” who with us are merely out of the ranks, however bravely we may imagine them at the head of the procession.