Text: Arthur Ransome, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Temple Bar (London, UK), vol. CXXIV, no. 12, December 1906, pp. 481-496

[page 481:]

THE life of Edgar Allan Poe has been a battleground for his biographers. There is scarcely a fact in any one of the books that have been written about his career, that is not vehemently denied in another. His adventures or lack of adventure, instead of being a part of history, have become a wild kind of fairy tale, which all men twist all ways. The best life of him is that written by Mr. G. E. Woodberry, who very patiently disentangled as much as he could of this jumble of assertion and denial, and, verifying as many of the facts as possible, built the only book on Poe that induces any confidence in its trustworthiness.

The important facts of Poe's life were his works; I have made the following selection of comparatively unimportant details.

His head was remarkable for its breadth across the temples, and height above the ears. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes grey, and so luminous as to be noticed by almost everyone who took the trouble to describe him. His mouth was immobile, contemplative. In the [page 482:] wrinkles that fell from his nostrils was expressed something of his intellectual pride, in the two pronounced furrows that separated his brows, something of the struggle that made his life a continuous strain. He dressed quietly, spoke in a low though at the same time voluminous voice, and was, as a rule, exceedingly gentle in his manners, The exaggerated extravagant Poe of vulgar tradition showed himself only when drink, of which a quantity negligible by ordinary men was sufficient to unbalance him, had taken command of his faculties.

He was born at Boston in 1809, the son of a harum-scarum father and a delicate mother, both poor players. When they left him an orphan before he was three years old, a Mr. Allan, a tobacco manufacturer, somewhat unwillingly adopted him, and brought him up as his son. The character of his precocious childhood and mistaken upbringing is well indicated by one of his early accomplishments. At the age of six he used to stand on Mr. Allan's dessert table, drink healths to the company and make speeches. About this time the family moved to England, and he spent five years in a school at Stoke-Newington, whose master considered him clever but spoilt by too much money. In later life Poe seldom suffered from the same complaint. When he returned to America to finish his schooling he had already begun to write verse. At fourteen he had his first real experience of tragedy in an episode that, some have thought, determined the bent of his genius. He fell in love with a lady of thirty, whose death a year later filled him with [page 483:] absolute despair, and sent him at night to her grave. The episode was an indication rather than the cause of his tendencies towards melancholy brooding. At seventeen he entered the University of Virginia, where he lived riotously, lost money at card-playing, had no friends, and was so unsatisfactory that his guardian removed him in disgrace at the end of his first session, and gave him a stool in his counting-house.

With the independence that already characterised him, he discarded Mr. Allan almost at once, went to Boston, and published a slim book of verse. Reduced to penury, he enlisted as a private soldier, doing, curiously enough, quite well. He was a Sergeant-Major when, in 1829, Mr. Allan took him again into favour, procured his discharge, and got him admitted to West Point. Here, however, “his wayward and capricious temper made him at times utterly oblivious or indifferent to the ordinary routine of roll-call, drills, and guard duties,” and in 1831 he was dismissed by Court Martial, and went without any money to Baltimore. He existed somehow or other, and when a Baltimore paper offered a prize for a short story, he was able to send in six, very neatly written out in a book, entitled “The Tales of the Folio Club.” One of them, “The MS. found in a Bottle,” secured the prize, and made its author richer by a hundred dollars, the friendship of some local men of letters, and his first definite encouragement.

From this time he began regular contributions to the weekly papers, living with a widowed sister of his father, and her child Virginia, whom [page 484:] he married in 1836, when he was twenty-seven and she not yet fourteen. For the next dozen years his life was spent in writing and re-writing, and in editorial work, now on one paper now on another, as, while his brains made him valuable, his irregularity brought him continual quarrels. He was perpetually bringing out new magazine schemes that were to capture the American public, and seems to have had very lofty ideas of the importance and dignity of journalism. He was not content, however, with the publicity of the newspaper columns, but published his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” in book form in two volumes, which were well reviewed but did not sell. He wrote poetry, most often founded on his earlier efforts, essays of various kinds, and criticisms of an outspoken, honest sort that were not common in those days, and made him exceedingly unpopular. He wrote more of his fantastic tales, and continually added to his reputation as a magazine writer, without much affecting the sale of his books. “The Raven,” which he published in 1845, set him instantly in the front rank of American authorship. It is still the most famous thing he wrote.

During these years he moved about, now to Philadelphia, now to New York, as his work led him, settling at last in a pretty little cottage at Fordham. Here he lived with Virginia, now a very delicate woman of twenty-five, and her mother, who cared for him as if he had been a son. The house was also occupied by an assortment of pets, a bobolink, a parrot, and a tortoise-shell cat. In 1847 Virginia died, and, two years later, after [page 485:] writing “Eureka,” and driving himself frantic with incomplete love affairs, and drink, he died also, in hospital, on Sunday, October 7, 1849. It was a melancholy and undignified ending to an uncomfortable life.

It is with definite relief that we turn from watching that painful, sordid struggle for existence and self-respect, to the examination of his mind. There is something restful in the uniformity of his intellectual attitude, that was miserably lacking in his harassed career. Poe's work is remarkable for its versatile genius, but it is still more remarkable for the uniformity of its character in spite of its versatility. The man who writes many very different things, things so different as to suggest a dual, triple, or quadruple personality is not an uncommon phenomenon, but it is very rare to find a writer who produces so many varieties of work in so consistently uniform a spirit. Most people know Poe only by a single poem, “The Raven.” The tales are second to that in popularity. Few read his magazine articles, and fewer still his criticisms, while I have scarcely ever met a man who had read “Eureka” through. For a true conception of the extraordinary consistency of his mind a knowledge of all these things is needed, even the apparently futile fragments like the essays on “Maelzel's Chess Player” and “Cryptography,” contributing their confirmatory evidence. In every one of them the spirit of workmanship is the same. Each one of these most diverse works might be referred to any other or to Poe. His mind was so vividly, so consciously itself, that [page 486:] it could not, or did not take the trouble to alter its dress, even for the most different forms of labour. It is as if a man wore the same clothes for tramping, for dancing, for afternoon tea, for navvying or for speaking in the House of Commons. Whatever, Poe does, his manner is the same. At his moments of communion with the eternal stars, he is estimating their distances, he still wears his plain black coat, is even then ready to hazard one of his ridiculous and exasperating puns. It is consequently possible in discussing any one of his activities to discuss all — a grateful fact to the author of an article as short as this, where it would be impossible to consider even two of them, the stories and the poems, in sufficient detail to make the discussion worth while.

What is the essential element in Poe's mind that, blurred by his lack of humour, half obliterated occasionally by wild descents into extravagance and bathos, still marks every one of his works as peculiarly his own? A note of self-revelation in his “Marginalia” suggests though it does not supply the answer. “It is the curse,” he says, “of a certain order of mind that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.”

Poe is always quite as delighted with the way of doing a thing as with the thing when done. He is always so interested in his methods that his works have about them a weird atmosphere, as if he had not written them, but had been present, [page 487:] passionately observant, while they were being written by somebody else. Sometimes this fantastic supposition is made even more credible by other writings of hisown. More than once he used his pen to make a new thing out of a discussion of an old one, and on these occasions he dissects his own motives in so impersonal a fashion that it is difficult for the reader to remember that the author examining is in any way connected with the author undergoing examination. “The Raven,” for example, a profound piece of technique, quite apart from its matter (the relation between the matter and the form of Poe's works must be considered in a moment) is scarcely more profound, and certainly not as surprising as “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which its construction is analysed in the minutest detail, and Poe callously explains, as a fact of scientific rather than personal interest, that the poem arose from the refrain “Nevermore,” and that this particular refrain was chosen on account of the possibilities of protracted emphasis given by “the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the most producible consonant.”

Analysis, analysis, and again analysis was the predominant passion of his mind. To every one of his works this passion contributed; in every one of them it is apparent as the habit of their author's mind. Some of his articles are built of nothing else; “The Chess Player,” for example, in which he analyses the construction and motions of an automaton, and exposes the human agency that controlled it, or the essay on Cryptograms, [page 488:] where he made good his claim to the power of solving any cipher that might be brought before him. In most of his work, however, this analytical passion only regulated the form, and, in doing this, distinguished it from that of any other writer of his day, and exercised, and still exercises a powerful influence on the development of literature in every department to which Poe contributed. But in some, even of the stories, the matter as well as the form was given him by his analytical powers. The three great stories, “The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” are perfect examples. Indeed, few of his imitators realised that there was anything specially remarkable in the form of these tales, while all of them saw very clearly the immense possibilities of the analytical matter. If they had seen the other also, modern detective tales would not have so contemptible an average level. It is well that we should examine these three, and one or two others in which the matter is similarly analytical, before proceeding to discuss those other stories, equally famous, that he built out of the stuff of dreams.

The motive of the detective tales is curiosity, the mainspring of the analytical workings of man's intellect. They are constructed accordingly to state a difficulty and to secrete an explanation, that is gradually reached by the reader, who unconsciously identifies the processes of his own mind with the reasonings of the analytical hero of the tales, Dupin, the detective. We are accustomed, sick almost to death, of such [page 489:] arrangements to-day, but they were new things when Poe used them. And it is noticeable that even our weariness of detective fiction does not affect our enjoyment of them, or abate our admiration for their inventor. It is clear then that their greatness does not depend on the novelty of their conception. Modern storytellers, who have learnt the trick, can build just as pretty houses of cards about a secret crime, and pick the cards off one by one, with an equally delectible dexterity, and yet, in spite of all, they leave us unthrilled. They hold us for a moment, but we put them down with disappointment. We had thought that they were alive, but know that they are dead. There is the secret. Thought without passion is dead, like modern dissective storytelling. The vitality of these stories is due to the greatness of Poe, who was not only an analyst, but a passionate analyst. He made his stories great by the greatness of his passion for the manner of mind of their leading character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but analysis. He is’ the embodiment of the analytical spirit of all mankind. It is for this reason that some have complained of his lack of individuality. He is not individual, but universal.

In the October number of this magazine, Mr. Cecil Chesterton compared the detectives of various detective storytellers. In particular he compared Sherlock Holmes with Gaboriau's Lecocg. Holmes, he thought, was too perfect, whereas Lecocq, by muddling, made the story. “Lecocq,” he said, “was a bungler, because [page 490:] Gaboriau was an expert.” Both Lecocq and Holmes are on a different level from Dupin. They are both, at their highest, studies of men; at their lowest, useful contrivances. Dupin is always a study of humanity. They are frequently pegs to hang tales from. Dupin is never less than one of the attitudes of man's brain. Lecocq and Holmes are useful characters in stories. Dupin is every story in which he appears.

It is only occasionally that Poe allows his passion for analysis, for deduction, for puzzle-solving, for minute inference and calculation to be, instead of to influence, the story. But in even the most emotional of his tales the completeness of the effect is often largely due to the analytical attitude, the seeking in small things for indications of great, and wherever this is so, it is remarkable, impressive. Such touches, for example, as that in “The House of Usher,” where he is induced to obey Roderick's summons, from noticing the evidences of nervous agitation in the handwriting of his letter, are quite unforgetable. And, of course, in “The Gold Bug,” where avarice and curiosity are the main motives, the real interest of the story lies in Legrand's reasoning about the parchment, and in the elucidation of its cipher, letter by letter, in the reader's presence. Such observations, such passages Poe enjoyed writing. They were characteristic of him, and consequently inherit the lion's share of his vitality.

But we come now to an interesting point. Poe wrote a number of tales that would be valueless before too impertinent a curiosity, and that hold [page 491:] their reader not by fascination of reasoning, but by concentrated, forceful emotion. Ideas that others would have made vapid, inane, sentimental, he made powerful, haunting, inevitable. As obviously as the tales of pure intellect, they belong to him and to no other, because of their perfect construction, possible only to a man of his analytical powers. They depend for their success on the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds designed by the coldestblooded reason. If Poe had been merely a skilled constructor, like so many of his imitators, we should have had from him work no less valueless than theirs. In the type of story that we have already examined, his greatness lies in the passion of his analysis, in this in his power of dissociating his passion from his analysis, in his power of retaining the poetry, the energy of his imagination after submitting it to his constructive science, and then, when the moulds had been made, bringing it out, red-hot and molten, as if in the primal vitality of its conception. Uncanny ideas, like the self-murder of William Wilson, in its original and simplest form no more than a fantastic notion to be laughed and shuddered at over a dinner table, like the hypnotic preservation of the unfortunate Valdemar, simply a fanciful but perfectly logical scientific supposition, like the idea of the old love taking the place of the new on her deathbed, really no more than a simple old candlelight haunting tale, he worked up into big things, with broad, inevitable effects, brilliant colour and motion, deep psychological or philosophic [page 492:] studies, that, once read, can never be forgotten. And the point of interest lies in the cold manner in which he did these things. He did not, like the old storytellers, run away with himself in a wave of his own emotion. His stories are not loose, indefinite records of his own travels in sensation, that succeed through the contagion of sympathy alone. The emotional material, weird, sentimental, even scientific, is not emptied carelessly in front of the reader. Chosen scraps of it are laid before him one by one, producing a more powerful effect, than the unrestrained discharge of the whole.

Minds similar to Poe's had existed before, and one of them, I feel sure, exerted a very considerable influence on him in this direction. Poe refers often to William Godwin, the author of “ The Enquiry concerning Political Justice,” the friend of Hazlitt, and the writer of a novel now most undeservedly half forgotten, called “Caleb Williams.” It is seldom possible to point to any one book as the sign-post towards a literary revolution, but there can be no doubt that in “Caleb Williams” we observe the starting point of self-conscious construction in storytelling. It is usual to say that Poe himself was the first to choose his effect and then plan his story to fit it. But “Caleb Williams” was published in 1794, and, in one of the later editions, in a preface that must have fascinated Poe, its author gave his methods away. On him also lay that interesting curse of the desire for self-explanation. He wrote:

“I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful [page 493:] interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first.”

On this text Poe remarks (in the “ Philosophy of Composition ”): .

“I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect . . . Keeping originality always in view, I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select? Having chosen a novel first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combination of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.’”

Here we suspect that he is exaggerating actual facts to make his meaning more clear. It is difficult to believe that he really worked in that way, but it is certain that he worked in that spirit. A writer of Poe's fertility of imagination would surely be at least biassed in choosing his effect by consideration of material already in his mind. It would probably be nearer the actual truth to say that he examined his material for the effect it was best calculated to produce, elaborated a suitable form, and then worked his material into that form, with passionate concentration on the end which he had chosen. This was the spirit that made his results so powerful. He left nothing to chance. Nothing that could contribute to the intensity of his effect was omitted. The first sentences of a story brought its readers into the peculiar atmosphere [page 494:] demanded by its conclusion. In the “Masque of the Red Death,” the simplest example we could take, revolting horror is the emotion on which he built. So, from the terrible opening lines:

“The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal and so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution” . . .

to the end,

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel, and died, each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

We are led on in a continuous, consciously created atmosphere of disquietude and terror. And so with the other stories, so with most of the poems. In each one Poe decided on the supreme effect his material was to produce, and subordinated everything to its production.

With such principles and such a mind, it is curious that he should have failed as frequently as he did. And yet when we examine his failures they are not difficult to explain. They are due in every case, if we except his foolish attempts at being funny, which read like hangman's jokes, to sudden rents in the veils of his illusions, made by single impossible phrases, whose impossibility he seems to have been unable to recognise. We could give a hundred examples, but perhaps none [page 495:] better than the excruciating line in an otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that:

Lapses such as that are only too common in his works, and destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmospheres he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being an American citizen.

America is a curious country, where the sublime is a very slippery tightrope stretched over the ridiculous. It may be that Americans take themselves always so seriously as to be unable to perceive when they are only jokes instead of writings flaming on the wall. It may be simply that they are without a tradition. Traditions are cramping like etiquette, but, again like etiquette, they do help in keeping people from making fools of themselves. Whatever may be the reason, Americans are never safe from the pitfalls perpetually laid for them by a language that is older than their nation.

Of all that energetic people, Whitman and Poe alone have had any considerable influence on European literature. Whitman's influence was like a rush of fresh air, Poe's like the cold breath that sweeps away the exuberance of the summer, and prepares for the precision of winter. It was natural, for more than one reason, that his influence should be most felt where the contrast between his work and that of the last reigning influence was strongest, that is to say, in France. In thinking of his sarcasm, the subtlety of his analysis, the energy and scarcity of [page 496:] his convictions, the indifferently restrained sentimentalism that plunged him with equal completeness into horror, or the grotesque, or the morbidly sad, it is impossible not to perceive that we are considering a personality with which Frenchmen were sure to be at least sympathetic. In thinking of his attitude towards his work, his foresight, his precision in accomplishment, his niggardliness of inessential things, it is impossible not to perceive that here was something so beautifully different to the attitude of which Frenchmen were tiring, that it provided so perfect a reaction from the ideals of the romanticists, that it was sure to be imitated with enthusiasm. It was. People were seriously discussing Poe in France, before we had begun to think of him in England. Baudelaire did him the service of translating him so perfectly that Walter Pater chose to prefer his version to the American original. Merimée's short stories, Baudelaire's poetry made it impossible that his influence should be forgotten. It is through these men and their successors, that his influence has been felt by English artists, and it is, I suppose, because his influence has been indirect, that we still accord him almost grudgingly, a lower, and less dignified position than he deserves.