Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Province of the Critic,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 274-295 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 274:]

XI  •  The Province of the Critic

 

ALTHOUGH Poe's prospects for publishing his own magazine were not very promising in the fall of 1841, there were many reasons for him to feel confident about the future. The subscriptions to Graham's were coming in “at the most astounding rate,” he wrote Frederick Thomas. In January of 1842, 25,000 copies would be printed. Poe had never had such an audience, and he had a relatively free hand in writing the kind of reviews he wanted to write.(1) Previously he had had to smuggle his demands for critical reform into his reviews, but in January he was able to publish his first, indeed his only, full-length essay on the function of criticism. The title of the essay, “Exordium,” indicated that it was an explanatory preface which would define what Poe intended to do in criticism, and it was precisely that — Poe's definition of critical imperatives. [page 275:]

As was customary with him, Poe took his lead from an article in a contemporary journal, Arcturus, the organ of a politico-literary group in New York called “Young America.” Since Perry Miller has given a lively account of this group and its relations with Poe and Melville,(2) it is sufficient to say here that Cornelius Mathews, one of the editors of Arcturus, was one of the most vociferous advocates of literary nationalism. This alone would have been enough to make him a tempting target for Poe's tomahawk; but when Mathews declared that “criticism ... dismisses errors of grammar, and hands over an imperfect rhyme or a false quantity to the proof-reader,” he was belittling Poe's method. To make things even worse, Mathews broadened criticism to include “every form of literature except perhaps the imaginative and the strictly dramatic.” A criticism, he wrote, could be “an essay, a sermon, an oration, a chapter in history, a philosophical speculation, a prose-poem, an art-novel, a dialogue; it admits of humor, pathos, the personal feelings of autobiography, the broadest views of statesmanship.”(3) If such views were accepted, then everything that Poe had advocated for the five years he had been a practicing critic would be disallowed. A rebuttal was necessary, and “Exordium” is a point-by-point refutation of Mathews, but it is more: it is a testament to the value of criticism and an account of the imperative duties of a critic.

The public, Poe asserted, was beginning to display an unusual interest in literary criticism. Periodicals were treating it as a “science” instead of an expression of opinion. Because of “subserviency” to British critical dicta, America had lagged behind in this science, but finally, in a “revulsion of feeling,” American critics had gone to the other extreme of a perfervid nationalism, praising books merely because they were American. Our magazines had spoken of “tariffs” and “protection” for native genius as if “the [page 276:] world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary histrio.” At the moment, however, this “anomalous state of feeling” was subsiding, and Americans had begun to “demand the use — to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism — to regard it more as an art based immovably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas.” This sounds like wishful thinking on Poe's part, but perhaps he believed it, for he was firmly convinced that a literary magazine, featuring his kind of criticism, would be a financial success.

Although they were beginning to recognize the danger of uncritical nationalism, American critics, Poe averred, were running into another danger, that of “a most despicable species of cant — the cant of generality.” This had occurred because of their slavish imitation of the British quarterlies. Foreign quarterlies had originally reviewed books properly, by analyzing the contents of the book and passing judgment upon merits and defects. Now, however, because of the pernicious system of anonymous reviewing, the natural process had lost ground. The reviewer, being known only to a few, had no reputation to defend and sought only to turn out as many pages as he could “at so many guineas per sheet.”

Poe's analysis of the reason for the popularity of the essay-review tells us more about him than it does about the history of criticism. Poe liked to sign his publications, though he was not always able to do so. He signed his poems in the Messenger in spite of the fetish of anonymity in the South, and he liked to see his name on the masthead as being responsible for the criticism of a magazine. He was angry when because of the system of anonymous reviewing someone else's “twaddle” was attributed to him. Poe wanted to build a reputation; he wanted recognition and was not always completely scrupulous in the ways he sought to gain it. This is one of the reasons he could barely tolerate being a subordinate editor of a book review section in which the anonymous reviews of others could be confused with his own. Whether the result were adulation or damnation, Poe wanted to be known as America's foremost critic, but for this he had to have a magazine of his own.

A second reason that uncritical reviews were proliferating, Poe [page 277:] asserted, was that critical analysis required much time and mental exertion. It was much easier to summarize the book under consideration and to generalize one's impressions, or to write a “diffuse essay on the subject matter of the publication.” The essay-review, the most prevalent type, gave the appearance of learning and effort, but it was simply not criticism: “Now, while we do not mean to deny that a good essay is a good thing,” wrote Poe, echoing by a curious feat of memory the words of a correspondent who had challenged him on the Messenger,(4) “we yet assert that these papers on general topics have nothing whatever to do with that criticism which their evil example has nevertheless infected in se.”

It was this kind of review — the general essay — that Cornelius Mathews had spoken of as the characteristic growth of the nineteenth century. Not so, said Poe, it was only a development of the last two or three decades in Great Britain. The French reviews, which preserved “the unique spirit of true criticism,” did not generalize. Neither did the “magnificent critiques raisonnées” of the Germans — Winckelmann, Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, and the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. Their criticism did not differ in principle from that of the eighteenth-century British critics, Dr. Johnson, Lord Kames, and Hugh Blair, “for the principles of these artists will not fail until Nature herself expires.”(5) The Germans, however, were more thorough and profound in the application of the principles than their British predecessors had been.

Taken out of its context and surveyed in the light of literary history, Poe's argument seems odd, to say the least. Why should the rationalist Johnson, the psychologist Kames, and the rhetorician Blair be linked with the German Frühromantiker? Yet if we think in terms of approach, as Poe was doing, his statement makes sense. A criticism in any age, Poe thought, should be a judgment of the [page 278:] literary quality of the work criticized. Furthermore, he thought, any act of judgment must be based upon standards, and these standards could come only from an analysis of human nature. Art exists for the needs of an audience, and it is the critic's task to evaluate its success in meeting those needs. Therefore a criticism in one period of history should not be any different in principle from a criticism in any other period. To say that it should is to “insinuate a charge of variability in laws that cannot vary — the laws of man's heart and intellect — for these are the sole basis upon which the true critical art is established.” Consequently, criticism in 1842, as well as in the time of the Dunciad, could not without neglecting its duty ignore such matters as bad grammar, imperfect rhymes, or mixed metaphors, those flaws which could keep a literary work from meeting the intellectual and emotional needs of the audience. The rules, if based, as they should be, upon the “laws of man's heart and intellect,” should be observed by both author and critic; and the sole function of the critic was to criticize: “Criticism is not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art-novel, nor a dialogue. In fact, it can be nothing in the world but — a criticism.” Poe, then, would “limit literary criticism to comment upon Art.” The critic should not be concerned with the opinions expressed in a book, for it is his function “simply to decide upon the mode in which these opinions are brought to bear.” For evaluation of the concepts of a book, ideas which must be judged for their truth or falsity, “the work, divested of its pretensions as an art-product, is turned over for discussion to the world at large,” particularly to the appropriate specialist in the subject, say the historian or the philosopher. Criticism is “the test or analysis of Art,” and it is “only properly employed upon productions which have their basis in art itself. ...”

The statement above is one of the most satisfactory generalizations that Poe ever made about the function of literary criticism, and he is to be applauded for adhering to his own principle except in the few reviews in which he objected to the idea of progress, to transcendental philosophy, and, in one case, to abolition sentiment. [page 279:] Needless to say, critics who have involved themselves in various causes would find fault with Poe's statement, but as a first principle for literary criticism it is faultless.

As for the critic himself, Poe appropriated a statement from the often maligned Bulwer to describe his qualities: “he must have courage to blame boldly, magnanimity to eschew envy, genius to appreciate, learning to compare, an eye for beauty, an ear for music, and a heart for feeling.” To this Poe added, “a talent for analysis and a solemn indifference to abuse,” no doubt speaking from his own experience.

2

Poe was never quite able to maintain the ideal standards he described, but in the forthcoming reviews in Graham's he was to make his best effort. One indication of a maturity of attitude appears in his review of the Essays of Christopher North (John Wilson),(6) whom he once had admired and defended. Having made a public commitment to responsible criticism, Poe perceived the errors of his former model. Although North displayed commendable wit, humor, imagination, sarcasm, and power of analysis, his tone was too often flippant and his scholarship was superficial (this in spite of the fact that Wilson was a university professor). Frequently, Poe continued, Wilson was betrayed into gross injustice by the strength of his personal feelings. Far from displaying the objectivity of a scientist, Professor Wilson allowed emotion to dominate his judgments.

Significantly, Poe criticized Wilson for some of the very faults that had marred his own first reviews; the implication is that this review represents at least a temporary repudiation of the satirical method. Ideally a critic should rise above the quagmires and fogs of personal controversy; he should soar to see the sun, Poe wrote a few years later in his “Marginalia.”(7) The judgment of the critic should [page 280:] not be invalidated by personal feeling, political affiliation, or provincial bias. His work should be as objective as science.

So much for the attitude of the critic. In actual practice the critic should be just as alert for faults as for virtues, Poe declared (soon he was to say that excellence speaks for itself). The undiscriminating mass of readers should be advised of the defects of a literary work. Since Poe had spoken well of Blair in “Exordium,” it is not surprising that he should have mentioned this particular critical responsibility, which had been assigned by the old rhetorician. The final judgment on a work of art, Blair had written, must always be rendered by the public, but the “first applause” that greeted a new work was likely to originate in a superficial appeal to temporary passions and prejudices. It was sometimes the office of criticism to condemn while the public praised, but eventually the public would have to agree with the critic. Criticism was designed to correct the faults of genius, for no “human genius is perfect.” True criticism, Blair had said, was “an art founded wholly on experience,” which meant that the rules or laws of criticism were derived from human nature, a constant that could be relied upon in any period of history, ancient or modern.(8) Poe reaffirmed this proposition in “Exordium.”

Since the public could easily be misled by sensational material, it was the critic's responsibility to avoid the common error of estimating the worth of a book by its popularity. This was the case with Stanley Thorn, a novel by Henry Cockton.(9) Such a work would almost inevitably be popular with semiliterates, Poe wrote, because it appealed to the animal spirits. It required no thought, no reflection; instead it repelled thought, as a “silver rattle” repels the “wrath of a child.” In reading it, one experienced a “tingling physico-mental exhilaration, somewhat like that induced by a cold bath, or a flesh-brush,” but this exhilaration had no bearing on literary merit. A lively account of exciting incidents was not a novel, of which the chief idiosyncrasy was thought, not deed.

The critic could not legitimately object to any work that gave pleasure — the end of art was pleasure, not instruction, in spite of [page 281:] the error of Wordsworth and the didactic Lake School. Stanley Thorn should not be condemned merely on the ground that it pleased the public, but it deserved censure because it was only a practical joke. It was beneath the level of literature, and Cockton had stolen the incidents and style from his betters — Smollett, Fielding, and Dickens.

Another error prevalent in American criticism was overpraise of native authors. Poe had a case in point, the reputation of the poet John G. C. Brainard:(10) “No poet among us has composed what would deserve the tithe of that amount of approbation so innocently lavished on Brainard.” To prove the poet unworthy of his reputation, Poe chose to analyze one poem from Brainard's collection, “The Fall of Niagara,” which was usually called the author's best poem and the best ever written on the subject. Poe's analysis is a specimen of his rhetorical criticism as distinguished from his philosophical. When Poe was Blair-ing it, as he was in this review, he looked for mixed metaphors, for bathos, for imperfect rhymes, bad grammar, and impropriety in diction. Obviously he had meant it when he said in “Exordium” that a modern critic should neglect such faults no more than a critic in the time of the Dunciad, for he used the neoclassic definition of the bathetic to condemn Brainard's attempt at sublimity in describing Niagara Falls. There was a sinking of effect when the poet wrote of the Falls as being poured from the hollow of God's hand. Even when we think of God in human form (“at best a low and most unideal conception”), we associate ordinary size with the image of a hand. Such a figure reduced the mighty torrent of Niagara to a “trifling quantity of water.” The image was “contemptible.”(11) The rest of the stanza was equally bad: “The handful of water becomes animate; for it has a front — [page 282:] that is, a forehead, and upon this forehead the Deity proceeds to hang a bow, that is a rainbow. At the same time he ‘speaks in that loud voice,’ etc.; and here it is obvious that the ideas of the writer are in a sad state of fluctuation; for he transfers the idiosyncrasy of the fall itself (that is to say its sound) to the one who pours it from his hand.” Thus the whole first stanza of the poem was composed of “the most jarring, inappropriate, mean, and in every way monstrous assemblages of false imagery.” But in the second stanza, the poet recovered by following, no doubt unconsciously, a rule which Poe was pleased to state in full, italicized: “subjects which surpass in grandeur all efforts of the human imagination are well depicted only in the simplest and least metaphorical language. ... ,”(12) Yet even at his best Brainard erred, for he did not immediately discard all imagery.

In his Messenger review of Bryant, Poe had claimed that metaphor was more imaginative than simile, but he had also suggested that an imaginative poet rarely used figurative language. It was not made clear in this early review why figurative language was relatively unimaginative, but now it appears that Poe felt that pure beauty or sublimity could not be evoked by comparisons, however apt. Beauty and sublimity in their most nearly absolute qualities could only be suggested because there was no basis for comparison with anything else. A sublime subject like Niagara Falls required language that evoked sublimity, something like Milton's mighty line, and Poe was able to say something good about Brainard only when the poet made a verbal gesture in Milton's direction: [page 283:]

These lines are too rhetorical for modern taste, perhaps even for Poe's, but he found little enough in Brainard that he could admire, and, for the moment at least, he was trying to be judicially impartial. The rules did not condemn elevated diction, so long as the obvious faults were avoided.

As if the poetry of Brainard did not provide a fitting illustration of the havoc a critic could create on legitimate grounds, Poe found another victim at hand in Cornelius Mathews, with whom he had already clashed in “Exordium.” Mathews was fair game. The trouble with the young man, as Perry Miller has described it, was that he appointed himself the tutelary genius who would lead American literature out of its wilderness by producing the great American novel (The Career of Puffer Hopkins, published serially in Arcturus), the great American literary journal (Arcturus), and the great American epic (Wakondah). Mathews’ brash ego put him at odds with most of the journalistic writers in New York, and only Evert Duyckinck's support kept him afloat. Mathews represented nearly everything Poe held in contempt: a journalist who “puffed” his own work in his own magazine; a member of a literary clique; a proponent of literary nationalism; a critic who espoused the “cant of generality”; and an inferior author. Within two years Poe was to move to New York and associate himself with the Young America group to which Mathews belonged, but this future alliance, always an uneasy one, was necessary for Poe's survival. He had already antagonized the powerful Whig journal, the Knickerbocker, edited by his enemy Lewis Gaylord Clark; and although Poe was a Whig,(13) [page 284:] he could gain support in 1844 only by joining Clark's opponents, the Democrats. But this was 1842 and he was still in Philadelphia. He could review the great American epic Wakondah with all the savagery he reserved for pretentious asses like Cornelius Mathews.

If the ideal critic displayed “calm breadth and massive deliberation,” as Poe had written in his review of Christopher North, if he avoided being flippant and sarcastic, if he never let personal bias interfere with his judgment, then Poe fell considerably below his own standards in reviewing Wakondah.(14) First he informed the world that Mathews had published the poem in his own journal, Arcturus, “very much ‘avec l’air d’un homme qui sauve sa patrie.’ ” But, Poe continued ironically, the poem was not the leading article of the number. “It did not occupy that post of honor which, hitherto, has been so modestly filled by ‘Puffer Hopkins.’ ” Still Mathews had given his own work precedence over that of Longfellow. This alone was enough to convince Poe that Mathews was placing himself above his betters.

Feigning regret, Poe claimed that out of courtesy to a fellow editor he had not wished to review the poem and would not have done so had it not appeared as a book. But now his hand was forced and he would have to do his duty. However specious Poe's regrets may appear to be in this case, he did his duty with all the élan of a crusader against vice. The cleverly managed apologies were soon discarded, and he began the direct assault. The pertinent [page 285:] passage is worth quoting in full, for it shows that Poe's “tact” was sometimes as satirically destructive as his outright vilification:

This was plain English indeed, and Poe's pretense at having been inhibited by editorial courtesy would have been amusing to the informed reader of the time who knew that in magazine reviewing both in England and in America there was little courtesy except [page 286:] among editors of the same clique, or the same political party, or sometimes the same geographical region. A Philadelphia critic would have no compunction about attacking a New York editor, just as New York critics had no compunction about assailing editors in Boston. Mathews was a special case. Nearly everyone wanted to take some of the brashness out of the Centurion (as he was called) except his cohorts in the Young America group, which was publishing Arcturus. There was certainly no reason for Edgar Poe to be squeamish. Still, if he wished to live up to the standards of criticism he had recently announced, he should do more than make generalizations about Mathews’ “epic.”

In spite of his call for objectivity and fairness in the “Exordium,” Poe reverted in this review to broad sarcasm and direct ridicule. The poem begins, he said, with an oration by Wakondah, the Master of Life, an oration which “to be plain, is scarcely equal to a second-rate Piankitank stump speech.” Then there is a second oration, and the two, “taken altogether, are the queerest, and the most rhetorical, not to say the most miscellaneous orations we ever remember to have listened to outside of an Arkansas House of Delegates.”

Then, making a show of fairness, he looked for something to commend in the poem and found it in a stanza that describes the great bulk of Wakondah as intercepting and blotting out the light of the moon

Surprisingly, Poe ignored Mathews’ obvious imitation of Milton's Satan in this description and asserted that the “general conception of the colossal figure on the mountain summit, relieved against the full moon, would be unquestionably grand were it not for the bullish phraseology by which the conception is rendered abortive.” That Wakondah's bulk could continuously shut out the light of the rising moon is a denial of physical fact, Poe asserted, because however big he was the moon would soon soar over him. This was [page 287:] common sense with a vengeance. Poe could be very strict about adherence to physical fact whenever he chose to be.

In addition to his error in rendering a “grand” concept, Mathews violated most of the rules. Poe found mixed metaphors, flaws in rhythm, incomprehensible gibberish, redundancy, imitation (amounting to plagiarism), inconsistency in stanza form, faulty rhymes, misspelled words, and flaws in both grammar and logic. In fact, Poe said, with a final flourish of his hatchet, the best stanza in the poem is ridiculous because it compares Wakondah's head, falling in dejection to his knees (“the thing could not be done by an Indian juggler or a man of gum-caoutchouc”), to a high city being toppled by an earthquake. How can we compare a single descending head, Poe asked matter-of-factly, to “the innumerable pinnacles of a falling city”?

Poe's judgment of Wakondah is defensible, but his lack of fairness is not, for he would be content with nothing less than utter destruction. He exaggerated flaws by claiming certain lines incomprehensible which actually offer no more difficulty than most images. One such “incomprehensible” line, “Its feathers darker than a thousand fears,” is inflated rhetoric, but its import is clear enough. A point of interest here is that Poe was examining the logic of metaphor as strictly as if each metaphor were a scientific proposition to be proved. Sometimes he did explain why a given metaphor was bad — as when he objected to the phrase, the “sea-blue sky.” In this image the element of similarity was too great. There was no metaphorical extension in comparing the blue sea to the blue sky. More frequently, however, he simply quoted the faulty lines and claimed that they were meaningless. Examined for logical meaning, they are. “A sudden silence like a tempest fell” is a faulty comparison, as is “A sorrow mightier than the midnight skies.” Had Poe gone on to correct the second figure as he sometimes did in a review, he might have indicated that Wakondah could have been overwhelmed by sorrow even more completely than the sky is overwhelmed by night, but his review was already lengthy and he closed it with a random selection of loose, “meaningless” comparisons. [page 288:]

Obviously Poe varied his approach according to his preliminary estimate of the book he was reviewing. A thoroughly bad work should be exposed by a close examination of its inanities, and all the devices of ridicule should be employed as well as the rules of rhetoric. One could not expect to find imagination in such a work as Wakondah, so the reviewer's tone and method had to be lowered in order to administer the proper chastisement. Mathews was a dull schoolboy in art who could learn only if he were subjected to a “remorseless flogging.” Yet even by Poe's own standards the flogging was more merciless than necessary. Lockhart or Gifford could scarcely have improved on this:

After this review the Centurion should never have risked another line, but Mathews’ skin was thicker than most; besides, he had the support of Evert Duyckinck and William A. Jones. The review is important chiefly as it demonstrates that Poe, whatever theoretical announcements he might make regarding the proper attitude and function of the critic, did not hesitate to punish literary offenders.

3

Next we find Poe at his most pragmatic level, attempting to demonstrate that a theory was only as good as its practice. If analysis could be used to show up a bad writer, it could also be used to show that even a writer of genius had flaws when his work was [page 289:] measured against an ideal standard. Poe opened his review of Barnaby Rudge(16) by examining what he considered to be a popular fallacy: “We often hear it said, of this or of that proposition, that it may be good in theory, but will not answer in practice; and in such assertions we find the substance of all the sneers at Critical Art which so gracefully curl the upper lips of a tribe which is beneath it. We mean the small geniuses — the literary Tit Mice — animalculae which judge of merit solely by result, and boast of the solidity, tangibility and infallibility of the test they employ.” By result Poe meant the test of popularity, for the “small geniuses” measure the value of a book by its sales.

In 1841, in his review of Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, Poe himself had stated that popular esteem had some value as a test; Dickens’ characters would not have “lived in the public estimation” for one hour had they been the caricatures that some critics had claimed. In the review of Barnaby Rudge Poe made the necessary discriminations. Popularity in itself was not a test of excellence, but popularity and literary excellence were not incompatible. He would give the literary titmice “the very kind of demonstration which they chiefly affect — practical demonstration — of the fallacy of one of their favorite dogmas ... that no work of fiction can fully suit, at the same time, the critical and popular taste. ...” By doing this he would also refute their contention that “the disregarding [page 290:] or contravening of Critical Rule is absolutely essential to success beyond a very certain and limited extent, with the public at large.” He would accomplish his practical demonstration by showing that the “vast popularity” of Barnaby Rudge should be regarded less as the “measure of its value than as the legitimate and inevitable result of certain well-understood critical propositions reduced by genius into practice.”

The review of Barnaby Rudge, then, continued the argument which Poe had initiated in his review of The Old Curiosity Shop and continued in “Exordium.” Genius, by its “happy modification of Nature,” established the standards for art. Theory was good only “in proportion to its reducibility to practice,” but in a true genius, like Dickens, theory and practice were inseparable: “the former implies or includes the latter,” and “if the practice fail, it is because the theory is imperfect.” The mere popularity of Barnaby Rudge did not necessarily prove anything, but criticism, by locating the violations of critical rule in the novel, could provide an appropriate measure of artistic value. Excellence as such need not be demonstrated; therefore the traditional opinion that the “beauties” of a work must be pointed out was in fact a concession to imperfection. The critic who described the “errors of a work” did all that was necessary to reveal its qualities. There was no better way to teach “what perfection is” than by “specifying what it is not.” Accordingly, Poe intended to review Dickens in such a way as to demonstrate how the novelist, with more care, could have achieved an even greater art than that to which the novel itself attested. It goes without saying that in so doing Poe would also indicate to his public the indispensability of a critic who had the capacity to carry the practice of genius back to the theory upon which it was founded. From the works of genius, he had said earlier, a critic could deduce the rules, but even genius sometimes failed to reach the ideal standard. In the book at hand, Dickens did not perform at the level which “his high and just reputation would demand.” Therefore it was Poe's duty as a critic to show just where he failed.

Actually, no rules existed for the conduct of a mystery story, but this was no handicap for Poe, who could deduce the theory from [page 291:] the practice. The thesis of a mystery novel, he declared, is derived from curiosity. It is necessary for the secret, or the solution of the mystery, to be kept from the reader until the denouement, but, to obey the self-evident rule, it “becomes imperative that no undue or inartistical means be employed to conceal the secret of the plot.” The author does not err if a falsehood which misleads the reader is placed in the mouth of a character who is ignorant of the secret, but when the author himself misleads the reader the rule has been violated. Dickens occasionally exhibited this flaw.

Furthermore, the author fails when his secret is not preserved. Poe modestly supposed that many must have solved Dickens’ mystery very quickly, in spite of the false leads, since he himself solved it on the seventh page of the 323-page novel.(17) These defects might seem trivial to the uninformed, Poe admitted, but actually they are violations of principles that are essential to the mystery novel, and it was Poe's duty to exhibit them to the public. A critic must not be blinded by the popularity of a work or by the excellence of previous books by the same author if he is to do justice to the work at hand, and only by rendering justice can he serve as a mediator between the writer and the public. Thus, in his review of Dickens, Poe illustrated the function of the critic which he had described in the “Exordium,” the improvement of the public taste by the analysis of the faults of genius, a role sanctioned by tradition and prescribed by Dr. Hugh Blair.

4

Poe had devoted the January and February columns of Graham's to an exposition of the proper function of a critic and to the public need for a critic who had the knowledge and the courage to perform this function. Whether he would have continued in precisely this vein is impossible to say, but a personal tragedy slowed the impetus [page 292:] of his campaign. About the middle of January his young wife Virginia became very ill, and Poe wrote his friend Frederick Thomas of his agonies of fear and grief.(18) Amazingly, he was able to keep up his steady production of book reviews, but we have no way of knowing whether the book reviews that appeared in the March and April numbers were composed before or after Virginia's misfortune. Poe had said in a previous letter to Thomas that the magazine had to go to press one full month in advance of the day of issue. This would mean that his reviews for the March number would have to be ready in January and those for the April number in February. He did manage to publish three reviews in March, two of which represent a continuation of his effort to inform the public of the prevailing errors of the journalistic critics; but these reviews have neither the zest nor the confidence of the January and February reviews.

One of them, a brief notice of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems,(19) is devoted primarily to an exposition of the fallacy of that “antique adage, De gustibus non est disputandum — there should be no disputing about taste.” Such an assumption would indicate, Poe wrote, “that taste itself ... is an arbitrary something, amenable to no law, and measurable by no definite rules.” This might be true if there were no psychological science, Poe argued, but he believed that one important use of phrenology would be in the “analysis of the real principles, and a digest of the resulting laws of taste.” These principles, he continued, “are as clearly traceable, and these laws as really susceptible of system as are any whatever.”

Poe's employment of phrenology as a critical tool has already been described, but we should note here that he used the term “taste” instead of the phrenological word “Ideality.” Seemingly an insignificant variation, this change of terminology signals a reversion to an older aesthetic psychology. His use of principles derived from Blair or an equivalent source in his reviews during this period, his view of a work of genius as “nature methodized,” and his increasing tendency to invoke reason and common sense in his reviews [page 293:] during the next four or five years all show a reaction against romantic criticism. Paradoxically, his teleology of art evidences a romantic idealism like that of Shelley. These contradictions will be examined in due course; it is sufficient to say here that Poe's concern with the psychology of taste was distinctly archaic. His master Coleridge had written a fragmentary essay on taste, but had proceeded little further than to define it as a metaphor for the aesthetic response.(20) The debate about the laws of taste had been carried on in the preceding century, but Poe, having announced that a critic must deduce and apply the rules, needed laws to enforce his standards. The current essay-reviews, whether exercises in literary history or paeans of appreciation, needed no such laws. To almost everyone except Edgar Poe, the rules were obsolete.

In his review of Longfellow, although Poe admitted that he had no space to do it, he proposed to explode the fallacy that the modern poets appealed because of “novelty, ... trickeries of expression, ... and other meretricious effects.” He would demonstrate that only the kind of poetry written by the romantics “has fulfilled the legitimate office of the muse; has thoroughly satisfied an earnest and unquenchable desire existing in the heart of man.”(21) But this demonstration had to wait for the proper occasion, which turned out to be an extensive review of this same book by Longfellow in the April number of Graham's. [page 294:]

In the only other review in the March number which is pertinent to Poe's effort to demonstrate the proper function of the critic, he simply continued his argument that popularity alone was invalid as a criterion of quality. The book under consideration, Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon,(22) had been even more popular than the “inimitable compositions” of Charles Dickens, and the “ephemeral press” had been nearly “unanimous in its praise.” The praise, however, had not been based upon specific merits; in fact, it had failed to show that the book had any literary merit whatsoever. Therefore popularity was not, as many people thought, “prima facie evidence” of quality. It could indicate instead that the writer had lowered himself to gain mass appeal, and that he had deliberately catered to “uneducated thought,” “uncultivated taste,” and “unrefined and misguided passion.” Still, it was not impossible for a popular book to have elements that would appeal to the discriminating, or, for that matter, for a work of art to appeal to the masses — witness the ingenuity with which Dickens had addressed the general taste. Poe, however, wanted to record his own “positive dissent” from the “usual opinion” that Dickens had done justice to his genius by appealing to the general taste at all. Genius had its office, God assigned. “But that office is not a low communion with low or even with ordinary intellect. The holy — the electric spark of genius is the medium of intercourse between the noble and more noble mind.”

The statement above almost has the force of a contradiction instead of a qualification. In two previous reviews Poe had praised Dickens for having the kind of genius that reduced theory to practice and appealed not only to the mass but to the discriminating audience. Now he qualified his position stringently by saying that it was not impossible for a popular book to have elements that would appeal to the discriminating, but that a genius should never deliberately address himself to a popular audience. Thus it would appear that Poe had changed his mind and did not want to bring art to the public after all. In the context of his continuing justification of the office of criticism, however, we see that he was merely concluding his argument. The genius owes it to himself to write at the top of [page 295:] his bent, and at the top of his bent he will appeal only to like minds. He is lowering himself when he deliberately attempts to reach a mass audience, though it is not impossible for him to do so. It is the duty of the critic, not the literary genius, to be the mediator between the highest products of and the public, and it is also the duty of the critic “to uphold the true dignity of genius, to combat its degradation, to plead for the exercise of its powers in those bright fields which are its legitimate and peculiar province.” The genius should not lower himself to the public; instead criticism should help lift the public taste, insofar as it can be lifted, toward appreciation of the work of genius.

As for the popular Charles O’Malley, a brief critical examination would prove that it had no claim to literary merit at all. The plot was loaded with absurdities, incidents were repeated ad nauseam, and the structure was anecdotal. Suspense was achieved only by the “silly trick” of “whetting appetite by delay.” Even the jokes that could amuse the reader were tactlessly narrated. The whole book was marked by a vulgarity of thought which was reflected in the ungrammatical colloquialism of the language.

The review of Charles O’Malley concluded for all practical purposes what Poe had to say about the relationship between popularity and art. He had begun the new year with an exposition of the function of literary criticism, and for three months he had tried to show that a critic not only could guard the public against popular hackwork but also could mediate between a work of art and a public not prepared to appreciate it, thus elevating the public taste. Furthermore, the critic could perform a valuable function for the writer himself by pointing out his idiosyncratic weaknesses, thus forcing him to live up to his innate talent. Next Poe was to engage in a defense of poetry. To him the poet represented the highest type of literary genius, and as a poet-critic he had to inform the public of the intrinsic value of poetry and prove that this value was grounded in the very nature of things, that it was a response to the human need for beauty. He was to make this attempt in his second review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems, published in the April, 1842, number of Graham's Magazine.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 274:]

1.  Unlike Poe's previous employers White and Burton, Graham appears rarely to have pressured him to mitigate his tone. Even then, Poe became angry when Graham asked him to speak favorably of some local Philadelphians. Early in 1842, Poe wrote to Frederick Thomas that he had been “weak enough to permit Graham to modify my opinions. ...” He had been asked to praise Judge Robert T. Conrad, an important political and minor literary figure of Philadelphia, and to “speak well” of Thomas G. Spear, Ezra Holden, and Charles J. Peterson. Since this requirement was in connection with Poe's “Autography” series which had been initiated in the Messenger and continued in Graham's for November, 1841, it was understandable. The series pretended to analyze each subject by his handwriting, and Poe's remarks, often satirical, could be taken as personal affronts. His comments on Conrad in the “Autography” do represent unenthusiastic praise, while those on the other three were perfunctory favors indeed, for in all items except the Conrad Poe inserted an uncomplimentary remark. Spear was a minor poet, Peterson a journalist who worked for Graham, and Holden the editor and publisher of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, a literary weekly. As incautious as ever, Poe did not mind antagonizing those “ninnies” Holden, Spear and Peterson, but Graham was more careful. Fuming over this unimportant matter, Poe acted as if his reputation had been ruined and exclaimed to Thomas, “Let no man accuse me of leniency again.” See Letters, I, 193. For Poe's uncharacteristic “leniency,” see “Autography,” Works, XV, 210-11, 212, 232-33, 235.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 275:]

2.  Miller, The Raven and the Whale. See also John Stafford, The Literary Criticism of “Young America,” (Berkeley, 1952).

3.  The quotation from Arcturus is omitted in Works. I have used the text printed by Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O’Neill (eds.) in The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1946), II, 929-33.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 277:]

4.  The editor of the Washington Telegraph had criticized Poe's approach in these words, “Now he who gives a good essay, gives a good thing.” Quoted in Supplement, Southern Literary Messenger, 11 (1836), 136.

5.  Although he had made an unacknowledged and perhaps even an unconscious use of eighteenth-century principles, this is the first time that Poe spoke well of the eighteenth-century critics.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 279:]

6.  Review of Christopher North's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, in Graham's Magazine, XX (1842), 72.

7.  Works, XVI, 81.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 280:]

8.  Blair, Lectures, I, 36-43.

9.  Works, XI, 10-15.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 281:]

10.  Ibid., 15-24.

11.  In a footnote Poe quoted a description of Niagara he considered appropriate to the sublime, italicizing the more striking lines: “When o’er the brink the tide is driven / As if the vast and sheeted sky / In thunder fell from Heaven.” Curiously, these “magnificent” lines are from Drake's The Culprit Fay, which Poe had reviewed adversely in 1836. According to the psychology of the sublime, Drake's figure would elevate the impression of grandeur rightly associated with the falls.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 282:]

12.  Even this rule, which appears to be of Poe's own devising, is implicit in Blair, who had taken exception to Longinus by declaring that figurative language was not effective in generating the emotion of the sublime. The sublime object, Blair wrote, should be described with “strength, with conciseness, and with simplicity.” The least intrusion of an “ornamental” figure relaxed the “tension of the mind” and “emasculated” the feeling. A specific fault was the “frigid” style, characterized by “sinking” or bathos. Instead of heightening the enthusiasm of the reader, this style, as its label indicates, chilled it by degrading the sublime object or sentiment. In handling the sublime, a writer must avoid demeaning his subject by elaborate images, unworthy conceptions, or “low” descriptions. Blair, Lectures, I, 59-60, 66, 78.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 283, running to the bottom of page 284:]

13.  In 1841 Poe began to discover an interest in Whig politics, or at least in what political influence could do. His friend Thomas secured what was apparently a sinecure in Washington at a thousand dollars a year. Enviously, Poe wrote to Thomas that any appointment, even a five-hundred-dollar one, would be better than being an assistant editor: “To coin one's brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is to my thinking, the hardest task in the world.” June 26, 1841, in Letters, I, 170-72. With Thomas’ help Poe [page 284:] hoped to use the influence of Robert Tyler, the President's son, to secure an appointment to a Customs House, and he also hoped to interest the Whig administration in backing his magazine in return for political support. Through no fault of his own, he failed to get the Customs appointment, but he was at least partly responsible for the failure of his magazine project. He succumbed to wine at a Washington party and evidently behaved in such a way as to preclude political favor. For Thomas’ account of this affair, see Works, XVII, 137-38. The pertinent correspondence is also quoted in Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 377-81. For a detailed account of Poe's relations with Thomas and the Tylers, see my article, “Poe Among the Virginians,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXVII (1959), 30-48.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 284:]

14.  Works, XI, 25-38.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 285:]

15.  Poe's remark that Mathews was connected with one of the best journals in the country was evidently sincere. William A. Jones, an excellent journalist and critic, did most of the editorial work. See Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 88-89. After Poe found it necessary to cultivate Mathews, he wrote what must be taken as a hypocritical letter of apology for this review. Ibid., 116.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 289:]

16.  Works, XI, 38-64. This was actually Poe's second review of Barnaby Rudge; the first was printed in the Saturday Evening Post of May 1, 1841. Gerald Grubb has described the misleading aspects of this second review and suggested that it was timed to appear while Dickens was visiting America. Poe's friend, John Tomlin, had written him on December 1, 1841, that Dickens was coming to America soon, and Poe published Dickens’ letter to Tomlin in Graham's, XX (February, 1842), 83-84. Poe wrote to Dickens for an appointment and enclosed a copy of his review. Dickens granted the appointment in a letter dated March 6, 1842; in Works, XVII, 107. Evidently Poe was attempting to persuade Dickens to interest a British publisher in Poe's tales, but Dickens’ attempt was unsuccessful. See Dickens to Poe, November 27, 1894, ibid., 124-25. It is, of course, possible that Poe was attempting to curry favor with Dickens by a favorable review, but he had praised Dickens just as highly in previous reviews as in this one. See Grubb, “The Personal and Literary Relationships of Dickens and Poe,” 122,101-20,209-21, for a detailed discussion of these questions.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 291:]

17.  Using the dates of the novel's serial publication, Gerald Grubb has argued that Poe must have had thirteen chapters available when he wrote his first review. If he actually solved the secret by the seventh page, we have only his word for it. See “The Personal and Literary Relationships of Dickens and Poe,” 9-11.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 292:]

18.  February 3, 1842, in Letters, I, 191.

19.  Works, XI, 65-68.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 293:]

20.  “Fragment of an Essay on Taste,” in Biographia Literaria, II, 247-49. Like Poe, Coleridge raised the question of whether there were any fixed principles of taste, but he considered the question of the possible relativity of taste more seriously than Poe did. Every person, Coleridge wrote, is unwilling to consider his own taste as universal, but he does “demand the universal acquiescence of all intelligent beings in every conviction of his understanding.” This is as far as Coleridge got.

21.  Probably Poe derived this opinion from his interpretation of Schlegel, who had distinguished between ancient and modern literature on the ground that the poetry of the ancients was that of enjoyment, while that of the moderns expressed the longing of the exile for his distant home. Schlegel, Lectures, 26-27. If Poe was remembering Schlegel, however, he was appropriating the letter but not the spirit. Schlegel never undervalued the poetry of the ancients, as Poe was prone to do. Schlegel's distinction was based upon the influence of Christianity in turning man's eyes from earth toward Heaven.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 294:]

22.  Works, XI, 85-98.