Text: James Herbert Morse, “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Critic (New York, NY), vol. 2, November 15, 1884, pp. 229-230

[page 229, column 1, continued:]

Edgar Allan Poe.

THE war of words waged over the intellectual proportions of the giants of song is not heard long or far. It makes but a trifling noise beside the tumult which goes on in the nursery over the first new trousers, in the parlor over the turn in Adolphus's mustache, or in the political field over the Katy-did and Katy-didn't vociferations of candidates. But while it is confined to a narrow arena, and heard by a few only with very serious interest, those few are quite sure that a page of enduring history is being made, and that the color of that page depends on the windy passions of the bystanders, It is not so, History takes small note of the human voice, which dies away with the next round of hills. The shouters are but briefly recorded. Shakspeare is not known and honored because a number of men have got red in the face attacking or defending him; Walt Whitman will go down to history, if he goes at all, by what he has done and sung, and by nothing else; and Edgar Poe will have the same choice of fate. His position as a man-of-letters was hit pretty squarely many a time during his life by his contemporaries, and it is the business of the biographer now to clear away the fancies from the facts of his life, so that the few hundred, or few thousand, readers who feel inclined to turn over the leaves of his work may understand the connection between his work and his temper. This historical clearing away of fancies was one of the excellences contributed by Mr. Stoddard in the introductory Life of Poe printed in an earlier edition of Poe's works, and reproduced in the new edition of those works just issued by A. C. Armstrong & Son. The fresh contribution now made by the same writer consists in a brief critical estimate of Poe's genius, valuable because it comes from an essentially poetic mind, which can be severe, but is particularly open to generous sympathies. If the tone of this criticism is not always up to the shrill key which some of the worshippers of Poe have made their own, it is certainly much higher than would suit the sense of many stern moralists in life and purists in literary expression.

Poe was a man hard-driven by his inherited temper, and hard-pressed by his external conditions. Between his genius and his passions he had a hard time of it to elude the hounds. The sportful antics of the pursued were soon: subdued by the deep-mouthed baying of his pursuers. Mr. Stoddard furnishes the material by which we may judge the character of the chase, and get at the agony of the close of it. We see enough to justify the mingled fear and respect which characterized the attitude of literature toward Poe forty years ago; enough to make us quite [column 2:] willing to repose in the music of his voice, and to make no further effort to get at his book of acts or of thoughts. No one can read long in the fictions and criticisms that make up nine-tenths of these Six volumes without being impresscd with the ingenuity of Poe's mind and the later and growing emptiness of his heart, the grotesque tendency of his imagination, and its total lack of the bias of humanity. He feeds the intellect with puzzles and conundrums, with giants and demons, suited to the region of the nursery, or with distorted intellects and passions where miasmatic exhalations indicate the neighborhood of the mad-house, He plays tricks with our fears, conjures up evil spirits, bodiless shades —

But he has no power of lifting his creations, as Hawthorne did, into spiritual regions, for us to admire, or bringing them home to our bosoms as beings whom we might love or hate. His persons are mental images with machinery, who go through their movements with precise regularity — impelled, at best, by electricity, never animated by human feelings. When he is not framing puzzles, he is manufacturing nightmares. The ingenuity of the artist is not to be questioned; his power in the grotesque amounts to a genius. We marvel at his cleverness, and if we are still children, we shudder at his demons, or at their deviltry; but as grown men, with minds formed, and hearts educated, we are never drawn to sympathize with any of his creatures. Hawthorne could make us suffer at the possible reality of his personified sins. From the moment we enter his workshop we fall under his spell, yield ourselves to his charm, his grace of manner, his subtle intuition, his spiritual reach. He has his finger on all our embryo passions, and makes us a party, by all our possibilities, to the creation he is working. But with Poe's machinery we find ourselves not a whit connected. He has touched in us nothing that is not touched by an ingeniously contrived puppet-show. We recognize no subjective relation between ourselves and the performance; we are wholly outside of it, We see, clap our hands, pay for the spectacle, and wonder if the showman likes the business. Poe was himself a man of passion, or of morbid fancies at least, but he scarcely created anything of real passion. ‘The heart dies out in its capacity for loving and hating, and the intellect takes its place. The imagination is given full rein, and toward the end is whipped and spurred — to make it keep its paces.

This is our feeling as to Poe's prose, as we read tale after tale; and a similar sense grows on us as we read the poems — in their historical order. After the first great spurt, we feel that a conscious effort is being made through stimulants and whip to produce another. The efforts are only half successful; the effect of the stimulants is soon exhausted, and the power passes away. And yet that first spurt was splendid, and the promise of it was never quite equalled in the annals, of American poetry. In the one peculiar gift of a weird — imagination Poe was like Coleridge, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is ever in the mind while one is reading his half-dozen attempts to reach the same height. But ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is a long-sustained flight — never swerving, never drooping; and when we have watched it through, we — ask no further evidence to prove the genius of the author. With Poe, on the other hand, we ask at once, when we have read ‘The Raven,’ or ‘The Bells’ — Is it a lucky hit? Can it be repeated? If it is genius, is there breadth and — strength in the genius? And before we have read the short — list of Poe's poems through, we are obliged to answer our own questions pretty much as Mr. Stoddard answers them for himself: ‘His mind was neither opulent nor prodigal; [page 230:] he was acquainted with his resources, and very careful in drawing upon them. They must have been nearly expended before his death.” Imagination is everything in verse — sensibility to sounds, delicacy of ear, sense of proportion, make it valuable, and give it the only introduction which opens the doors of our good-will and keeps them open. Imagination working on intellectual materials was the one quality which lifted Poe. Experience, a richly-stored memory, a balanced judgment of life, feeling, except in one direction, human sympathy — these play but a very small part in his work. His imagination was powerful for situation and coloring, and the ear had the keenest possible sense of music. But in his attempt to make: situations clear and coloring vivid and music pleasing, he everywhere overreaches himself. The strain for musical words made him forget that in verse ‘more is meant than meets the ear.’ His repetitions, though often exquisitely timed, create at last a sense of mechanism, and, to the ear only ordinarily nice, suggest the workshop. Again, his straining after lurid , accessories, at first indicating a morbid condition, ends with betraying a jaded sensibility. Still, with his deep-lying faults, half-a-dozen poems of Poe's earlier life — and the whole life was a short one — stand out so far above the verse of most of his contemporaries, that we do not hesitate to place him among the most striking of American geniuses — a genius narrow, and, as Mr. Stoddard shows, only meagrely productive, but intense, piercing, original — mad.

JAMES HERBERT MORSE.