Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “The Progress of Art,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 376-401 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 376:]

XVI  •  The Progress of Art

 

IN July of 1845 Poe and Bisco, the publisher of the Broadway Journal, succeeded in forcing Briggs's resignation, leaving Poe in charge of the literary editorship of the paper. By October, Poe had bought the journal from Bisco on borrowed money and had undertaken the strenuous task of running it largely by himself.(1) Whether because of personal problems or because of his tremendous work load, his reviews deteriorated in quality. Those that were not simply cribbed from his previous work were often tendentious or ill-tempered, as he used them in his skirmishes with the New England transcendentalists or the New York literati. For the most part these reviews fail to perform what he had considered in 1842 to be the high function of the critic: the mediation between the writer and the public with the end of elevating the public taste. Instead, he all too frequently made dogmatic statements about the rules of literary compositon without much attempt to validate the rules.

An exception to the general mediocrity of his criticism of this period, however, was his commentary upon the drama. Poe had been interested in the drama almost from the beginning of his career as a critic, but never before had he reviewed live theater. Now, as editor of the Broadway Journal, he received passes to Broadway productions and made the most of his opportunity. Poe's dramatic criticism and his knowledge of the drama has been examined in detail by N. Bryllion Fagin(2) and will not be explored in this study except as his reviews reflect a shift in his concept of composition.

Poe thought that each literary genre should be examined in terms of its purpose and its mode of being. The drama was by its [page 377:] very nature mimetic, and its purpose was to hold the mirror up to nature. Yet Poe, a stickler for the distinction between what was nature and what was art, declared that a dramatic production was not nature itself. It was a fiction, an imitation of nature that had to observe the general proprieties of art and the necessities of stage production. In his first extended review of live drama, Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt's comedy of manners, Fashion,(3) Poe deplored her use of the conventions of the theater: “Their hackneyism is no longer to be endured,” Poe wrote. “The day has at length arrived when men demand rationalities in place of conventionalities.” Mrs. Mowatt's play was “theatrical but not dramatic,” because it used stage tricks instead of observing “the natural laws of man's heart and understanding.” Then Poe proceeded to attack the stage conventions of the soliloquy, the reading aloud of private letters, and “preposterous asides.”

In brief, Poe demanded on the stage the verisimilitude that in previous years he had applauded in the novel. Dramatic action, he insisted, should give an illusion of reality to the audience; and the conventions that dramatists of the past had used to overcome the handicaps of stage presentation were simply “monstrous inartisticalities,” which any “person of common ingenuity” could dispense with if he observed nature instead of imitating the old dramatists.

One thing that the playwright would have to do if he followed nature would be to consider the reactions of his audience and refuse to fatigue their understanding by complexity of plot. Undue complication would prevent the play from having its intended effect. This had been the trouble, Poe said, with the Spanish dramas of intrigue, which were the “worst acting dramas of the world.”(4)

Considering the affinity of the romantic poets for closet drama, [page 378:] it may seem surprising that Poe insisted that all plays be actable, but such a requirement was logical in his teleological approach. The purpose of a play was to be presented on the stage. Therefore any author of common sense would accommodate his technique to the needs of an audience. Man had progressed in his understanding of human nature, Poe thought, and the art of the drama would have made progress too had it not been for slavish imitation of the ancient conventions. Now that man had more knowledge, he should use it rationally instead of copying the errors of the past. If he did use this knowledge, there would be a revival in the drama. It had declined simply because of the spirit of imitation. This spirit, characteristic of the dramatic medium, had so affected playwrights that they did not follow nature itself but merely did what had been done before them.

The drama of the future, Poe ventured to predict in a second review of Mrs. Mowatt,(5) might be “neither tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomine, melodrama, or spectacle” — those traditional types that modern authors were too prone to imitate — but it might include elements of all “while it introduces a new class of excellence as yet unnamed because as yet undreamed-of in the world.”(6) In Poe's new emphasis upon the science of composition, grounded on reason and common sense, he was prepared to abandon all precedent and create an art unshackled by tradition and convention, a somewhat startling development in the critic who had said only a few years earlier that the principles of Kames, Blair, and Johnson would not be invalidated until nature itself expired. It was not really a contradiction, however. The principles remained the same; art progressed in terms of the progressive discovery of those principles. The arts should progress, even as man's knowledge of science and human nature had progressed.

In his revolt against the past Poe had an opportunity to review a revival of Sophocles.(7) The Antigone, as it had been anciently performed [page 379:] formed at Athens, might have been satisfactory to the relatively primitive Greeks, but the play was marked for a modern audience by “an insufferable baldness, or platitude, the inevitable result of inexperience in Art. ...” The alleged virtue of simplicity in the Greek drama, unlike that of ancient Greek sculpture, was not the simplicity of nature, but the simplicity of ignorance. “In a word, the simple arts spring into perfection at their origin. The complex as inevitably demand the long and painful progressive experience of ages.” Only a pedant, Poe claimed, would insist upon producing a Greek play before a modern audience. Even if a modern producer could present the play as it had been presented at Athens in the vastness of a Greek amphitheater, it would still be a “monstrous folly,” but to present it on a restricted modern stage such as that at Palmo's made it seem like a burlesque, and only as a parody could it be well received by a modern audience.

Unlike such Hellenists as Matthew Arnold, Poe was unwilling to concede that the grandeur of the action of the Greek drama made it a universal model. If it seems strange that Poe, conservative in respect to the industrial and social progress that enchanted many nineteenth-century Americans, should plump for progress in the arts, it should be recognized that in his special field he was a journalist, very much a man of his times. For all of his romantic enthusiasm for the poetic ideal, the beauty beyond the grave, Poe never lost sight of the necessity of contemporaneity. He believed that the advance in psychological knowledge and the increasing sophistication of the public required new techniques. A simple art for a simple people; a sophisticated art for a sophisticated people.

Insofar as Poe was developing a thesis in his reviews during 1845 and 1846, it was that art, like science, had to be progressive. He had said as much in his review of The Drama of Exile, and he repeated it with polemical exaggeration in his reviews of the drama. The drama existed only in terms of its appeal to a mass audience; accordingly, it should be guided by reason and common sense directed toward uncovering the basis of its appeal. As always with Poe, the effect was the thing, not merely the play.

Perhaps Poe was influenced in his rejection of the past by his [page 380:] temporary affiliation with Young America, his allies against Lewis Gaylord Clark and the Whig Knickerbocker, but the fact is that he remained Whiggish himself in his social and political opinions. His demand for a revolution in drama had no relation to politics. It was a logical development from his premise that art must be adjusted to the requirements of a changing culture.

In Poe's last extensive article on the drama, he emphatically demanded a revolution in the dramatic arts.

This quotation has been given at length because it is a striking illustration of the change in emphasis in Poe's criticism. In his first critical document, the “Letter to Mr. —— ——,” he had enthusiastically championed a spontaneous art — a poet should protest, not think. In 1836, however, he had declared that the ability to analyze cause and effect was more important in a poet's mental equipment than imagination. In 1842 he had claimed that art was the handmaiden of the taste, making the imagination the servant of the aesthetic sense. In 1845 he still considered taste necessary in the choice of the raw materials of art, and the imagination, its agent, combined those materials into an aesthetic object; but these [page 382:] intuitive faculties had to be guided and controlled by reason and common sense.

This shift of emphasis does not mean that Poe had changed his mind about the purpose of art; it does mean that he had begun to emphasize method, particularly as method contributed to audience appeal. Poe's demand for rational control was extreme during the middle years of the 1840's, and it was during these years that he deplored the inspirational aesthetic of the romantic period and the expressionistic purpose of much romantic art. Only the short lyric remained for Poe the pure expression of the soul. All other forms of composition had to submit to the control of the intellect. The conventionalities of the past had to be cast off, and new forms created.

To serve this revolutionary end, Poe considered an objective criticism necessary. The critic had to survey the dramas of the past not as history but in terms of the qualities of each play as an autonomous construct, irrespective of time and place:

From this statement it is clear that Poe thought that a rationale of dramatic form could be devised and that the “merits and defects” of particular plays could be estimated by their adherence to the rationale, which, of course, would obey the laws of nature.

Poe applied these laws as criteria in an examination of Willis’ Tortesa, The Usurer, a play he had reviewed briefly in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839. Instead of cribbing from the old [page 383:] review, however, Poe pointed out the leading defect of Willis’ play, complexity of plot, and proceeded to elaborate his dictum that stage plots should be relatively simple. It was the fault of August Wilhelm Schlegel's “somewhat overprofound criticisms,” Poe claimed, that many critics had admired mere intrigue, such as that found in Spanish comedy. Willis had fallen into this trap and had neglected “the dicta of common sense.” Common sense would tell anyone that needless complexity of plot would result in fatigue as the mind made an effort to comprehend what was going on, and that this fatigue would deprive the audience of pleasure. When plot elements were developed through “lacquies and chambermaids,” the audience would fail to grasp what was going on because they would expect plot development to be confined to the principals of the cast. Such needless mystification was embarrassing, and ennui increased in proportion to the embarrassment.(10) A playgoer does not go to a performance to exercise his talent at analysis. He goes to be entertained.

There was such a thing as a perfect plot — and Poe here took the opportunity to repeat his definition of the perfect plot, one from which no element could be detached or disarranged without “destruction to the mass” — but a perfect plot was not essential to the drama at all. It could be appreciated only by the connoisseur of art. The soul of the drama was “life-likeness,” and good plots were not found in life, only in art. Pleasure in plot was simply the pleasure found in any exertion of human ingenuity, but after a time such pleasure palled. In a comedy of intrigue, where “underplot is piled upon underplot ... and all to no purpose,” ingenuity was self-defeating.(11)

As usual, Poe in this review was not content to rest his argument upon immediate causes; he had to extend it to ultimate principles, the nature of the universe itself. The only perfect plot was the universe, because God was the artist. To amplify this point Poe quoted a comment he had made in the “Marginalia” upon the Bridgewater treatises. In the Divine plot, there was complete “mutuality of adaptation,” in which cause and effect were reciprocal. [page 384:] In human plots, however, “a particular cause has a particular effect — a particular purpose brings about a particular object; but we see no reciprocity.”(12) The implication was that in human plotting the artist should always have an end in mind, since his purpose would determine his method. In the drama of intrigue, subplots had the effect of “after-thoughts” and as such were inadmissible.

Poe's chief argument was that the pleasure in drama was derived largely from its mimetic aspect, not from its form. As Bryllion Fagin has stated, Poe's demand for a measure of naturalism in the drama was needed at the time. Drama in America, as Poe recognized, had imitated not life but the old conventions of the stage, and realistic drama was yet to appear. Poe was one of its few harbingers. One qualification, of course, should be made of Poe's views. He did not demand or want photographic realism.(13) Truthfulness to nature should be preserved, he said, but not in the sense of taking a plot directly from life. Instead the artist should combine naturalistic elements in accordance with what Poe usually called the “general intention of Nature.” The test was “verisimilitude.” In actual fact, a playwright could combine elements that were not closely joined in reality so long as his combinations met this test. Like any other art form, the play was a fiction, and its truth did not consist in the reproduction of natural fact. Even in a mimetic art, the elements of experience had to undergo the transformation that was inherent in the medium. Being true to the general intention of nature, in Poe's idiom, meant obeying the laws of physical and psychological nature.(14) [page 385:]

The only other play Poe examined in his article was Longfellow's The Spanish Student. This was a closet drama, but to Poe there should be no such thing as a closet drama.(15) A play had to be acted, and The Spanish Student “could not be endured upon the stage.” It was admittedly imitative of Cervantes’ La Gitanilla and Thomas Middleton's The Spanish Gypsy, which deprived it of originality in subject matter, but it also lacked originality in incidents and in tone. Like most of the American dramas of the period, The Spanish Student was an imitation of foreign models.

It would have been better as a poem, Poe argued: “Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more.” Longfellow's was neither. Its poetic quality could be admired only when “we separate the poem from the drama.” As for the dramatic structure, it failed miserably in plot construction. There were irrelevant incidents that had nothing to do with plot development and “deficiency in the dramatic tact” in the highly important scenes of recognition and reversal. Longfellow made the reversal appear to be accidental, “a happy chance,” instead of obeying the rules of necessity and probability. Poe, like Aristotle, would have the change in fortunes of the characters come about not fortuitously but as a necessary consequence of the previous action. Lacking both in originality and in plot construction, Longfellow's play had no dramatic virtue whatsoever. It could be admired, if at all, only for the occasional beauty of the poetic passages.(16)

Thinking as always in terms of effect, Poe demanded more richness of expression and more lifelikeness in detail than the older plays afforded. In his view the drama had to walk a tightrope between the enormous complexity of life and the comprehensible [page 386:] form that was necessary for art. Simplicity was demanded, not the simplicity of action of the Greek drama, but the simplicity of nature interpreted as general principles, a few basic laws that governed the interaction of all phenomena. In such a way, Poe thought, a rich simplicity could be achieved. Richness would come from the management of subject, style, and tone within the limits of stage presentation. The play as a whole would be attuned to the psychological limitations of the audience, but even within this limit, Poe thought, the “capabilities” of drama were immense, for all life was its subject. Totality of effect in the drama did not derive from plot construction but from the emotional impact of a felt relatedness of part to part and part to whole. This in Poe's aesthetics was the artistic mode of simplicity. It was not a primitive restriction of action but a conscious manipulation of materials to provide a simplistic response. By such a psychological ordering of his raw materials the playwright would insure the first value of all art — pleasure.

That the arts had to progress along with man's knowledge of the universe was one of the cardinal principles of Poe's aesthetic theory. In trying to justify art, he had concluded, along with many other theorists of the romantic and Victorian periods, that the artist had a responsibility to mankind; but, like most Americans of the nineteenth century, Poe was pragmatic — he was interested in efficiency. Each tool had to perform the function for which it was designed, or efficiency would be lost. Truth was the object of science, and in literature the efficient instrument to convey the truth was prose. Pleasure was the object of art, so art must be made into an efficient instrument to convey pleasure. The only way to justify art as being more than frivolous entertainment was to justify pleasure, certain kinds of pleasure, as being not only a gratification of the senses but also an enabling factor in man's spiritual development. Science and reason could be used to make art a more efficient means of gratification, and only the quality of the gratification should be scrutinized. Art should excite the mind and the spirit, not the passions. It should make us “beautiful-minded,” [page 387:] which in turn would make us loathe the disorder represented by the evil in man's experience. To this end Poe developed his strategies of gratification, and to this end he wrote the philosophical essays in which he attempted to ground artistic purpose in the nature of things. These essays will be examined in due course, but first it is necessary to take a brief look at some of Poe's last reviews, reviews which demonstrate vividly how his career as a critic was damaged by the necessity of surviving in a journalistic jungle.

2

With the exception of his criticism of the drama, Poe's book reviews during the remainder of his career as a journalistic critic belong largely to the history of his controversies. Occasionally he did make an evaluation on the basis of his established principles, but often it was done in a captious manner that did not reflect his ideal standard of scientific objectivity in criticism. Of the “Longfellow War,” the skirmishes with the Bostonians, and the verbal duels with various New York literati enough has been said by his biographers, by Professor Sidney Moss, and by the late Professor Perry Miller. This examination of Poe's later reviews will be confined to those which illustrate Poe's final positions in regard to the necessity of universal appeal and of a method to insure that appeal. A few reviews will be cited to show that at last Poe declined into the provincialism he had always deplored in an attempt to gain sectional support for his cherished project of establishing a magazine. It is probable that the decline in the quality of Poe's criticism toward the end of his short life can be blamed on circumstances rather than on a deterioration of ability, but the circumstances were such that a decline in mental health would seem inevitable. We can only applaud his courage in fighting against what for a man of his temperament must have been intolerable.

On July 19, 1845, during the same period in which he was publishing his best reviews of the drama, Poe quoted in the Broadway Journal an excerpt from a long review by Edwin Percy Whipple, a [page 388:] Massachusetts critic, with whom Poe declared himself in perfect accord. The quoted passage is a tribute to Tennyson, and the gist of it is that Tennyson was a consummate artist: “ ‘It seems to us that the purely intellectual element in Tennyson's poetry, has been over-looked, owing perhaps to the fragility of some of his figures and the dreariness of outline apparent in others. Many think him to be a mere rhapsodist, fertile in nothing but a kind of melodious empiricism. No opinion is more contradicted by the fact. Examine his poetry minutely, and the wonderful artistical finish becomes evident. There are few authors who will bear the probe of analysis better.’ ”(17) No wonder Poe agreed with Whipple. He had always demanded that a work of art be able to stand the test of analysis, and only six months earlier, in his review of The Drama of Exile, he had lauded Tennyson as a skillful artist.

Yet not quite a year later, in the context of a review of William Cullen Bryant, Poe seemingly disparaged Tennyson while attacking the “new licentious ‘schools’ of poetry.” The “Tennysonian and Barrettian schools,” Poe claimed, had “in their rashness of spirit, much in accordance with the whole spirit of the age, thrown into the shade necessarily all that seems akin to the conservatism of half a century ago.”

It would appear from this statement that Poe had suddenly repudiated progressivism in art in one context while demanding it in another. Yet a careful reading of the review, with Poe's previous criticism in mind, will clarify his position. For more than a year Poe had been deploring imitativeness — which bred “schools” of poetry. In the review of The Drama of Exile he had stated that Miss Barrett had imitated the early Tennyson, who in turn had served his apprenticeship in that “school which arose out of Shelley.” Tennyson had revolted against his early manner, but the schools of imitators, though at one remove from Shelley, were still copying the licentiousness of the great model without his compensating genius. The point that Poe was stressing was that the spirit of revolt in itself was valueless, for it condemned even justifiable conventionalities simply because they were established in the past. A skillful poet, such as Bryant, would be undervalued because he was an accurate metricist and obeyed the established conventions of verse. In fact, Poe admitted that he had undervalued Bryant himself and was now disposed to make a correction. He was prepared to do justice to Bryant's skill as an artist without considering him “a genius of the loftiest order.” Bryant did have genius, but it was being overlooked by the modern schools because his work was deficient in “those externals which have become in a measure symbolical of those schools.” Bryant's work, as described by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, lacked passion, but in Poe's opinion the fact that the emotion in Bryant's poetry was not passionate showed him as a true artist: “It is precisely this ‘unpassionate emotion’ which is the limit of the true poetical art.”(19)

Ever since he had become a literary critic, Poe had consistently denied that passion was a proper element in poetry. In his limitation of poetry to the “unpassionate emotion” of art, he was simply restating his credo that art existed only to serve an aesthetic purpose, not to stimulate emotions that were sensual in nature. To arouse a response to art, the artist had to possess skill. Bryant should be valued because of his consistent devotion to artistry. The very “correctness” which had been undervalued by the “licentious” [page 390:] schools would help eliminate the current prejudice against artistry that had been the unfortunate influence of the inimitable genius of Shelley, as transmitted through Tennyson and Miss Barrett.

This review, then, should be seen not as a disparagement of Tennyson but as a re-evaluation of Bryant designed to stress the point Poe had been making during his middle period, that the artist should know the laws of his craft. It was the school of the Spasmodics that Poe rightly condemned as licentious, and in spite of his admiration for Tennyson and Miss Barrett, he regretted that some of their verse belonged to what he had earlier called the “school of all Lawlessness” that had magnified the errors of the great romantic poets.

Most of the contradictions in Poe's reviews resulted from his continuing dialectic of art. He sometimes elaborated an argument begun in an earlier review by shifting his approach and modifying his strategy. Sometimes, as in the review of Bryant, he admitted that he had changed his mind, but at other times, although he had not changed his mind, he would modify his strategy and appear to contradict himself. This is the reason it is difficult to assess Poe's critical theories and his practice by examining only a few reviews. His writing desk was his laboratory, in which he discovered, tested, and refined his ideas with the object of developing a consistent theory of art that would serve as a guide to evaluation and composition. Unlike the experiments of the scientist, which are not exposed to the public view until they are perfected, Poe's reviews are open to scrutiny, with all of his procedural errors and modifications of approach pitilessly revealed.

Poe assumed that he had a constant audience which would be aware of the continuity of his argument; accordingly, he referred to previous proofs without repeating his demonstrations. In the review of Bryant, for instance, he refused to explain why he denied passion as a legitimate theme for poetry because he had “repeatedly shown” that passion was ineligible in a pure art form and he did not wish to do his work over again. Instead he referred the reader to his review of Mrs. Welby, published about a year earlier. There he had explained that strong emotion stimulated the imagination, [page 391:] but that when the imagination was stimulated the emotion itself was subdued; thus the artistic imagination would triumph over passion. In this Poe's psychology of art was valid. The imaginative transformation of a strong emotion into artistic form sublimates the emotion itself. Therefore to Poe, “a passionate poem is a contradiction in terms.” The emotion that went into the poem was not the emotion that came out of the poem, a valid argument. Poe's reputation as a critic would be greater if he had managed to place his more lucid explanations within the context of his better known essays and reviews. Unfortunately he did not, and his reputation has suffered.

In another essay-review, which must also be considered as a reevaluation, Poe undertook to explain why Hawthorne, whom in 1842 he had called a man “of truest genius,” had failed to win regard from the public at large.(20) With his increased emphasis upon universal appeal Poe found it necessary to explain why an artist gifted with both imagination and skill should fail to please the public. In 1842 he had said that Hawthorne's tales “belong to the highest region of Art — an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order.” In 1847, however, Poe was disposed to make genius subordinate to art. The eccentricities, the mannerisms of genius, had to be controlled in the interest of universal appeal because these very eccentricities would be mistaken for originality, and true originality should always appeal. Thus, to avoid the paradox of asserting that Hawthorne was an original genius who still failed to command a large audience, Poe found it necessary to re-examine his concept of originality in relation to idiosyncrasies which repelled instead of attracted. “It is often said, inconsiderately, that very original writers always fail in popularity — that such and such persons are too original to be comprehended by the mass. ‘Too peculiar,’ should be the phrase, ‘too idiosyncratic.’ It is, in fact, the excitable, undisciplined and childlike popular mind which most keenly feels the original. ... The fact is, that if Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail of making himself felt by the public.” What, then, was true originality? “This true, or commendable originality ... [page 392:] implies not the uniform, but the continuous peculiarity — a peculiarity springing from ever-active vigor of fancy — better still if from ever-present force of imagination, giving its own hue, its own character to everything it touches, and, especially, self impelled to touch everything.”

Examined in the light of this Coleridgean definition, Hawthorne, Poe claimed, was not original, and those who credited him with originality simply meant that he differed from the other authors they were familiar with. The alleged unpopularity of original authors, Poe went on to affirm, sprang from the confusion of literary with metaphysical originality. Metaphysical originality, in Poe's sense, meant “combinations of thought, of incident, and so forth, ... [that] are ... absolutely novel.” Literary originality, on the other hand, “is that which, in bringing out the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting the more delicate pulses of the heart's passion, or in giving birth to some universal sentiment or instinct in embryo, thus combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egoistic delight.”

If a reader was confronted with metaphysical originality, Poe insisted, the burden upon his intellectual faculties was too great and he was pained instead of pleased. Novelty was of no value unless it was appreciated; hence it was novelty of effect rather than novelty of matter that counted. By striking the common pulse, by giving birth to a universal sentiment that existed only embryonically in the reader, an artist could double the reader's pleasure by giving him the delight of discovery. “He feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer — and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing. Henceforward there is a bond of sympathy between them, a sympathy which irradiates every subsequent page of the book.”

This passage shows how far Poe the mature critic had moved from the young romantic tale-writer of the 1830's who exploited the terrible. Now originality was measured by the author's ability [page 393:] to express the implicit universals of the imagination and the emotions so that the audience, recognizing these universals, would share the pleasure of creativity. The audience, Poe felt, could not share an author's idiosyncrasies. These personal elements of feeling, tone, and expression served only as agents of alienation and were at root egotistic, as if the author were proclaiming, “Look! How different I am from all others!” Poe, in his zeal to bring art to the people, thus repudiated the cult of personality and self-expression. Art should appeal to all mankind, and the eccentricities of genius had to be governed by the necessity of universal participation in the experience of art.

Along with his demand that the artist achieve the universal in thought and feeling, Poe praised what he called the “natural style,” even claiming that it was an aspect (in a lower degree) of the “true original.” The natural style was “but the result of writing with the understanding, or with the instinct, that the tone, in composition, should be ... the tone of the great mass of humanity.” When a reader encountered such a style, he was inclined to accept the import of any given passage as representing universal thought, thought which had “occurred to all the rest of the world.” Addison, Irving, and Hawthorne had achieved this naturalness of style, but it did not serve to make Hawthorne popular simply because Hawthorne's allegorical method removed him from mass mind and feeling. People do not think in allegorical terms, Poe insisted, nor are their feelings aroused by allegory, because its aim at truth dispels the illusion created by the fiction: “One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction.” Allegory destroys the pleasure that comes from identification with the virtual life, that illusion which is necessary in fiction. This pleasure was denied by Hawthorne, for the allegorical strain was his peculiarity, and he imposed it on his work. Like all writers, Hawthorne wanted to be read, but “the simple truth is that the writer who aims at impressing the people, is always wrong when he fails in forcing the people to receive the impression.”

At this point in his review Poe described what the short tale should be, but since he merely quoted from his 1842 review of [page 394:] Hawthorne, a discussion may be omitted. For the first time, however, Poe used sarcasm on the New England author he had admired. In conclusion he stated that Hawthorne possessed all the qualities of authorship — style, taste, scholarship, humor, pathos, imagination, and ingenuity. He had failed only because he had attempted to be a mystic. Poe's advice to. the New England writer was simple but pungent: “Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of ‘The Dial,’ and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of The North American Review.’ “Except for this jocular conclusion Poe's re-evaluation of Hawthorne appears more as principle than prejudice. For several years Poe had asserted the right of the noncreative public to share the aesthetic pleasures hitherto confined to the few. It was not the duty of the artistic genius to reform the populace or to inform them; it was his duty to make them aware of potential harmony, to give them a sense of form, felt form, through which disorder and deformity could be recognized in whatever guise. To perform his duty the genius would have to express the half-formed thoughts and feelings of mankind in a style devoid of mannerisms and obscurities. His imagination would touch everything and select what could be brought together in a harmony of combination. If he were a true artist, he would express what everyone would almost think and almost feel for himself, thus giving every person the egotistic delight of apparent discovery. This, to Poe, was the only universality that counted — the appeal to all mankind. Was he only a journalist trying to rescue popular art from the opprobrium of the intellectuals, or did he ascribe to art a redemptive power that should be extended to everyone? An attempt to answer this question has already been made, but the final argument must be reserved for Poe himself, and he made it in his philosophy.

3

After the collapse of the Broadway Journal in January of 1846 Poe had no regular outlet for his criticism. Some of his reviews, like [page 395:] the two just examined, were published among the fripperies of a woman's magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, and a few others in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's personal situation, after the bankruptcy of the Broadway Journal, was deplorable. His own health was poor, and his wife Virginia was in her terminal illness.

Moreover, as he wrote to Thomas Holley Chivers, he was “ground into the very dust with poverty,” and he had not been able to write “one line for the magazines for more than five months.” The articles which had appeared in Godey's had been written and paid for much earlier.(21)

In this period Poe was living in a cottage at Fordham, New York, and during the winter of 1846-47 the predicament of the Poe family became more serious. In December the New York Express entreated his friends to come to his aid, and the faithful Willis wrote an editorial in the Home Journal the same month defending Poe as a person and asking for help. Poe's pride was offended by the publicity given his situation and particularly by a statement in the Saturday Evening Post that he was without funds and friends. Accordingly, he wrote a brave letter to Willis claiming that there were a hundred people in New York to whom he could have applied for aid if it had been absolutely necessary.(22)

Virginia died on January 30, 1847, and Poe experienced a nervous collapse. His enemies showed no mercy, however. The Saturday Evening Post had published a charge of plagiarism against him, which his correspondent George W. Eveleth brought to his attention, and he was engaged in a suit against the New York Mirror (no longer edited by Morris and Willis) for slander. The Mirror had published a vicious attack by Thomas Dunn English that accused Poe of forgery. The occasion of English's attack was a series called “The Literati of New York City,” which had been published in installments in Godey's Lady's Book during 1846. Poe's opinions of the lesser authors of New York, sometimes malicious, are interesting, but they are not criticism. In fact, Poe himself wrote to Eveleth that he had to drop the series because [page 396:] “people insisted on considering them elaborate criticisms when I had no other design than critical gossip.”(23) But his gossip was sometimes offensive, and English had retaliated unscrupulously, charging that Poe had obtained money from him under false pretenses and that he had given Poe a “sound cuffing” the last time he saw him. English's charges were slanderous and Poe won his suit. He was awarded $225 plus costs, which afforded at least temporary relief. The money he got from his few articles during this period would have done no more than keep him alive.

After Virginia's death, Poe's health, both mental and physical, was precarious. The few letters he wrote during 1847 were concerned chiefly with his attempts to defend himself against the charges of his enemies. By January of 1848, however, he had recovered enough to start trying to re-establish himself in journalism. He wrote Eveleth that he had resolved to be his own publisher and that he would travel through the South and the West to work up a subscription list for his projected magazine, the Stylus.(24) At the same time he was delivering lectures on the “universe,” which later became his prose-poem Eureka; and his enthusiasm over both his magazine project and his cosmology appeared in his correspondence.(25) Busy with the composition of Eureka, his plans for his magazine, and a frenetic love affair with Sarah Helen Whitman, an ethereal and sickly poetess some six years his senior, Poe had no time to write reviews, and the few he did write must be examined in the light of his attempt to gain support in the South. By the end of 1848 he had re-established a connection with the Southern Literary Messenger (now managed by John R. Thompson) and proceeded to try to win the South to his cause by exploiting sectional feeling.

There had been a cordial relationship between Poe and James Russell Lowell in 1843 and 1844, with a frequent exchange of letters, and there had been a proposal that the two authors write biographical sketches of each other. Poe had reviewed Lowell favorably [page 397:] in Graham's for March, 1844, even going so far as to say that Lowell's new volume of poems would put him “at the very head of the poets of America.”(26) He had objected only to Lowell's didacticism, which by Poe's standards was an objection on principle. But once Poe moved to New York and began writing for the Mirror, the relationship became strained and finally was broken. Lowell's description of Poe in A Fable for Critics (1848) infuriated him, and he retaliated by reviewing the satire in the Southern Literary Messenger for March of 1849.(27) The retaliation, however, was almost exclusively in terms of sectional prejudice:

Poe went on to claim, in answer to Lowell's amusing description of Poe's talking “like a book of iambs and pentameters, / In a way to make all men of common sense d——n metres,” that common sense had been the basis on which he had always conducted his criticism, in “contradistinction from the uncommon nonsense of Mr. L. and the small pedants.”

Poe's review of Lowell, then, sprang partly from personal pique, but it was intended to rouse Southern opinion in his favor by exploiting [page 398:] Southern defensiveness about the lack of recognition of Southern writers in the North. White had founded the Messenger with the promise to publish Southern writers, and Poe, hoping to gain backing in the South, was simply demonstrating that he would serve as a champion of Southern letters. As he wrote to John R. Thompson, the editor of the Messenger, “There are many points affecting the interests of Southern Letters — especially in reference to Northern neglect or misrepresentation of them — which stand sorely in need of touching.”(28) Experienced controversialist that he was, Poe presented himself as just the critic to do it. In a letter to F. W. Thomas dated February 14, 1849, he damned Lowell, Margaret Fuller, and “her protege, Cornelius Matthews [sic],” and expressed a desire to “use them up en masse.”(29)

While exploiting the possibilities of the South, Poe did not neglect the West, as his letters to E. H. N. Patterson, a possible backer in Oquawka, Illinois, reveal. He had received a proposal from young Patterson, who had inherited a newspaper from his father, to publish a “cheap” magazine with Poe as editor. Poe, as always, was opposed to an inexpensive publication and wrote to Patterson that only a five-dollar journal could possibly succeed. With Patterson's money, Poe was able to start on his publicity tour and left New York for Richmond at the end of June, 1849. In Virginia, during July and August, he delivered his lecture “The Poetic Principle” to appreciative audiences.

Poe's hopes were never higher. The South had welcomed him home, and Patterson had promised to support not a “cheap” three-dollar magazine but the five-dollar journal Poe had demanded, if Poe could only procure a list of one thousand subscribers. Poe was to meet Patterson in St. Louis on October 15. The scheduled meeting never took place. Poe left Richmond for New York toward the end of September and was found in Baltimore on October 3 in a semiconscious condition. He died on October 7, without ever explaining what had happened to him on the trip.

Of Poe's posthumously published reviews, the only one of any interest is an essay upon contemporary American critics, in which [page 399:] he analyzed the work of William A. Jones and Edwin Percy Whipple.(30) In the review he paid tribute to Macaulay for using “the perfection of that justifiable rhetoric which has its basis in common sense.” Poe had continued to push the thesis that he had stressed since 1845, that “the highest genius” would be benefited by “availing itself of that Natural Art which it too frequently despises.” Jones and Whipple had imitated Macaulay, which was not to imply disparagement. However, the two critics should not be content with “tamely following” in Macaulay's footsteps, but should endeavor to surpass him in his own method, by following “a path not so much his as Nature's.” This odd statement, phrased in diction reminiscent of the eighteenth century, was Poe's valediction to criticism. Since 1842 he had worked to invest criticism with the dignity of an art. It was an art scarcely less significant, to his mind, than the creative art. What man had put together with his creative faculties, man could take apart with his analytical faculties. The analytical faculties were not to be despised, because in a fully developed intellect they coexisted with the creative in that harmonious adaptation which represented the fully realized intention of nature. As Poe had written in the “Marginalia,” man's “chief idiosyncrasy” was reason: “The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which this chief idiosyncrasy irresistibly impels him; and not until he attains this position with exactitude — not until his reason has exhausted itself for his improvement — not until he has stepped upon the highest pinnacle of civilization — will his natural state be ultimately reached, or thoroughly determined.”(31) The literary genius, be he critic or poet, shuddered at imperfection, and the “highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility.”(32) It was the function of genius to “combine the original [page 400:] with that which is natural ... in the artistic sense which has reference to the general intention of Nature.”(33) This, Poe had maintained during his last years as a critic, could be done only when the beauty recognized by the taste was shaped into expression by the harmonious combinations of the imagination, then adapted to the needs and limitations of an audience by the use of the reason and the common sense. Yet because this combination of intellect and feeling was rarely to be seen, criticism was necessary to point out the common faults of art works and to remind both the artist and the public of the natural principles by which all art should be constructed, the principles which could be discovered by an examination of the nature of the universe and the nature of man. An art work, Poe held, was a construction, and the person who knew how to analyze a construction could also build it. “To say that a critic could not have written the work which he criticises, is to put forth a contradiction in terms.”(34)

Such a statement as the last scarcely bears repeating, but in his generalizations Poe usually invoked the ideal. To him the ideal critic, or the ideal artist, could carry the “most shadowy precepts into successful application.”(35) Pragmatic to a degree that few Americans in a nation of pragmatists ever were, Poe finally achieved a faith in intellect that is startling. Whatever existed, he maintained, could be understood. No mystery was too deep for the mind to solve, not even the mystery of the creative powers of God and man. It was the duty of the critic to understand whatever was put before him, however mysterious it seemed to the unenlightened. “Now, it is the business of the critic so to soar that he shall see the sun, even although its orb be far below the ordinary horizon.”(36) Thus it appears that Poe, who as a critic had prescribed unusual limitations for the artist, might have prescribed those limitations because he thought he knew just what the artist could hope to achieve with the means that were available to him. The limitations were two: the imperfection of the artist's materials and the imperfection of his audience. Within these given limitations, Poe thought, all could be understood, all could be analyzed, and all [page 401:] could be reduced to practice. At the end of his career it would seem that Poe's mind was not that of the romantic artist yearning toward the incomprehensible and the mysterious, but that of the scientist, who knew that the rhythm of the universe and the ebb and flow of human feeling could be described in numbers. The critic had to soar to see the sun, for the laws of planetary motion were the same laws that governed a poetic line. Understanding the universe, the critic could prescribe a natural art that could not fail, because it would be founded on the only enduring principles.

By the very nature of his profession Poe was required to evaluate literary works before he had an opportunity to develop, or at least to express, a theory that would validate his practice. As has been indicated throughout, he had to express his critical theories in his book reviews. Eventually, however, he saw that if he were going to proclaim that he was following nature in his method, he would have to describe the nature that he was following. To some, following nature would have meant imitating the appearances of the phenomenal world, but to Poe this was not art. To others, following nature would have meant emphasizing the intuitional and the inspirational at the expense of method. But to Poe, following nature meant obeying the laws of the physical universe and the psychological laws of man. Accordingly, it was necessary for him to develop a cosmology. This he did during the last ten years of his life, disguising his speculation as fiction but at the same time describing the kind of universe in which his questions could be answered and his conflicts reconciled, a universe which was consistent even in its contradictions.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 376:]

1.  For an account of Poe's acquisition of the Broadway Journal see Mott, A History of American Magazines, 757-62, and Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, II, 141-46.

2.  The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 103-32.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 377:]

3.  “The New Comedy by Mrs. Mowatt,” in Works, XII, 112-21.

4.  At every opportunity Poe paraded this bit of knowledge about the Spanish drama, probably derived from Schlegel's Lectures but expanded by his own reading of Calderón, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes. As early as 1836, Poe appears to have read Cervantes’ The Destruction of Numantia, for he cited it in a note to his review of Drake and Halleck. For Poe's knowledge of dramatic literature, see Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 96-102.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 378:]

5.  “Prospects of the Drama. — Mrs. Mowatt's Comedy,” Works, XII, 12429.

6.  Only in this statement did Poe lapse from his customary genre criticism.

7.  “The Antigone at Palmo's,” Works, XII, 130-35.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 381:]

8.  “The American Drama,” ibid., XIII, 33-37. The fact that this essay was published in the American Whig Review has some significance. This was a new journal established to counter the influence of the Democratic Review, and George H. Colton, who had published a poem, “Tecumseh,” in honor of the Whig hero General William Henry Harrison, was the editor. At last it appeared that Poe's Whig affiliations were bringing a reward. This cannot be entirely the case, however. Lowell had suggested to Colton that Poe be accepted as a contributor, and Poe continued to publish in the Democratic Review. His chief concern was price per page. Godey's Lady's Book gave him five dollars a page, Colton three dollars, and the Democratic Review only two. Poe to Philip Pendleton Cooke, April 16, 1846, in Letters, II, 314. For several years Poe continued to publish with Colton, apparently running into difficulty only with “The Rationale of Verse,” which Poe claimed would have involved Colton in embarrassment with his “personal friends in Frogpondium” (Boston). See Poe to George W. Eveleth, January 4, 1848, and February 29, 1848, ibid., 354, 360, for his account of his relationship with the Whig editor.

Poe had become hostile to Young America, particularly Mathews, whom he associated with Margaret Fuller and the transcendentalists. It might appear that the progressivist doctrine in “The American Drama” would not have appealed to the conservative party, but the Whig Review featured dramatic criticism and Poe's call for progress was founded on “reason and common sense,” an approved Whig premise. Progress based upon some kind of mystic intuition of a democratic deity who unfolded himself in the creation was less palatable. Poe displayed his Whiggish attitude in his contempt for “Orphic” rant. See Mott, A History of American Magazines, 750-56, for a sketch of the American Whig Review and Poe's relationship with Colton.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 382:]

9.  Works, XIII, 37.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 383:]

10.  Ibid., 44.

11.  Ibid., 46-47.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 384:]

12.  Ibid., 45. Nowhere did Poe reveal his Enlightenment orientation more than in his first principle of art, that means must be adapted to a preconceived end. He never showed any inclination to accept the romantic aesthetic principle of art as discovery.

13.  Cf. Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 115-16.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 384, running to the bottom of page 385:]

14.  Poe pressed this point in many reviews, but he stressed it in a review of Hazlitt's The Characters of Shakespeare. See Works, XII, 226-27. Unerringly he singled out the error of romantic criticism as typified by Hazlitt: the character of Hamlet was interpreted as if he had really lived instead of being the creation of Shakespeare's mind. Shakespeare must have known, Poe said, that in certain kinds of excitement there is an impulse to simulate greater agitation than is actually felt. The character of Hamlet was constructed [page 385:] on this psychological premise, Poe thought. Shakespeare, knowing that his character would have been driven to “partial insanity” by his father's ghost, exaggerated the insanity for dramatic effect.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 385:]

15.  In a review of Robert T. Conrad, Poe had written, “A closet-drama is an anomaly — a paradox — a mere figure of speech. There should be no such things as closet-dramas. The proof of the dramatism is the capacity for representation. In this view it will be seen that the usual outcry against ‘stage effects’ as meretricious, has no foundation in reason.” Graham's Magazine, XXIV (January — June, 1844), 242.

16.  Works, XII, 69-73.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 388:]

17.  “Alfred Tennyson,” ibid., XII, 182-83.

18.  “William Cullen Bryant,” ibid., XIII, 129.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 389:]

19.  Ibid., 131.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 391:]

20.  “Tale Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne —,” Works, XIII, 141-55.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 395:]

21.  Poe to Chivers, July 22, 1846, in Letters, II, 325-27.

22.  December 30, 1846, ibid., 338-39.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 396:]

23.  December 15, 1846, ibid., 331-33.

24.  January 4, 1848, ibid., 354-57.

25.  See Poe to Eveleth, February 29, 1848, ibid., 360-62.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 397:]

26.  Works, XI, 243-49.

27.  Ibid., XIII, 165-67.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 398:]

28.  January 13, 1849, in Letters, II, 415-16.

29.  Ibid., 426-28.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 399:]

30.  “About Critics and Criticism,” Works, XIII, 193-202.

31.  Ibid., XVI, 6-7.

32.  Ibid., 163. This particular statement in the “Marginalia” is listed by George E. Hatvary among those Poe plagiarized from H. B. Wallace's novel Stanley. Yet the mere fact that Poe printed it indicates his agreement with the proposition, even if he had not made similar assertions elsewhere. Since in Poe's ethics sensitivity to beauty created an aversion to vice, the genius would have to be morally noble.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 400:]

33.  Works, XVI, 57.

34.  Ibid., 69.

35.  Ibid.

36.  Ibid., 81.