Text: Moore, Charles Leonard “The Case of Poe and His Critics,” The Dial (Chicago, IL), vol. 47, whole no. 562, November 16, 1909, pp. 367-370

[page 367, unnumbered, column 2:]

I.

I am late in bringing my anniversary wreath to the memory of Poe. Perhaps while the awkward squad had reopened fire over his grave it was just as well to be silent. What I had to say could well wait till the spattering was over.

Fortunate, as far as fame is concerned, is the man whose personality creates a legend. If there is something problematical in his character, or if various interpretations are read into his acts by others, his memory is pretty sure to be preserved. It does not matter that the legend is wholly or in part a lie; or that the problem is capable of the simplest solution. The instinct of the baser part of mankind to besmirch greatness, the more legitimate interest of the most of us in strong contrasts of character and fate, and the generous impulses of the few who spring forward to defend those whom death has left defenceless, all conspire to create: a perennial curiosity about the subject of such a legend. In this respect it is possible that Griswold's defamation has served Poe well. The slanderer has wrought the good where he only willed the evil.

You cannot kill a legend. You may riddle it with logic or explode it with facts; but the next day it is well and strong again, doing business at the old stand and imposing on the credulity of mankind by its air of venerable authority. There are just two indictments brought against Poe and measurably proved. One is that he occasionally drank too much. Now if we are going to rule out of the House of Fame all the men who have drunk too much, the ranks of the Immortals will be sadly thinned. Shakespeare and Burns and Byron, and probably Tennyson, will have to go. Considering that Poe, by the quantity and quality of his work, paid the world quite all the debt he owed it, the matter does not seem to concern the world at all. It did concern the two persons whom Poe loved and protected, but they do not appear to have minded his slight irregularities, and gave him a love and worship such as few men have won. It was no drunkard who paler such affection. It was no drunkard who did Poe's work. It was no drunkard whose mind grew keener and clearer and loftier to the last. For myself, I believe that Poe's lapses into intemperance were probably a benefit to him. They relaxed his constant tension of nerve and brain. Certainly up to the last tragic and mysterious day of his life his nature always seemed capable of rebound to hope and purposeful activity

The other charge against Poe is, that in the failure [page 368:] of his desperate industry to provide for his family, he borrowed a few small sums which remained unpaid at his death. He may possibly have owed three or four hundred dollars. Goldsmith owed two or three thousand pounds; yet he is the best beloved of English writers. Sir Walter Scott died owing thirty or forty thousand pounds; yet no one has ever impeached his honor. Both of these men incurred their debts for the purposes of vain ostentation and display. Why, then, should Poe be hounded for his pitiful borrowings, all of which would probably have been made good had he lived?

No one is perfect. Matthew Arnold says that conduct is nine-tenths of life; but he does not define what he means by conduct. The keeping of one or two commandments is certainly not all there is to it. You may be as pure as snow, as temperate as a horse-trough, and yet have no conduct at all worth speaking of. Arnold himself placed Byron in the forefront of modern poetry. He knew very well that the English poet had plenty of sins on his head, but he valued above these the courage and strength and haughty truthfulness which Byron displayed. Similarly Poe's petty failings, which have unquestionably been magnified a hundred fold, are absolutely trivial as set against his chivalrous love for his wife, his courtesy, his independence which would not cringe or flatter, the high standard to which he held his work, and the generosity with which he welcomed his rivals. He stood aside as no man of his rank ever did before, and ushered his great contemporaries, Tennyson, Dickens, Mrs. Browning, Horne, Hawthorne, Lowell, and others, into their proper places. Possibly his only serious error in contemporary criticism was his slighting tone towards Emerson. The two men were antipathetic, and we can no more blame them for not liking each other than we can blame Gray and Dr. Johnson for their mutual misprision.

Voltaire said that the French had not epic heads. Well, the Americans have not poetic heads. It cannot be helped, and they are hardly to be blamed for it. They have a score of other good qualities, of which they are justly proud. But there is no use of their strutting about like Audrey, thanking God they are not poetical. The consensus of mankind has decided that to be really and truly poetical is a vastly fine thing — that it is in fact the crown and consummation of human fate. Our American judgments are not going to alter this verdict of the ages. It was Poe's misfortune that he, the most sensitive and visionary of the children of genius, had to be dropped into the place of practicality — the domain of the Dollar. Many of my readers may have seen that experiment in physics, where a cat is placed in the glass receiver of an air-pump and then the air gradually exhausted from it. They have seen poor pussie run about, utter plaintive cries, try to stop the outlet of the chamber with its paw, and finally turn over to die. Something like that was Poe's struggle in America. [column 2:]

II.

I have written so much about the various phases of Poe's genius, that I am rather at a loss for a novel view-point. Probably I had best try to answer some of the objections that have been repeatedly urged against his work, or have recently been re-stated. The most important of these concerns his supposed lack of matter, substance, import, profundity. Now it seems to me that there are two ways of being profound in literature. One is the way of gnomic utterance, of maxims, of words tagged with a direct moral purpose; the other is the way of dramatic or pictorial projection of life, nature, and abstract imaginings. Let me go to the cognate art of painting for an illustration. Hogarth is a great moralist; he paints the plain results of vice and virtue, of industry and indolence. His pictures are embodiments of the ordinary maxims of prudence and worldly wisdom. No doubt they are impressive; no doubt they are useful. But turn to an artist like Rembrandt. He tells no story, — it is impossible to make out what some of his pictures signify. He enforces no moral, — for he paints indifferently base subjects and noble ones. Yet has any student or critic ever doubted which of these two artists had the profounder nature, — which of the two art products is best calculated to impress, ennoble, and thrill mankind? Poe has little of the capability for gnomic wisdom which men like Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe possessed, but he shares with them the power to dilate and move our minds by totality of effect. Everything he wrote, down to the merest journalistic scrap, bears the stamp of a singular and powerful nature. Like Rembrandt, he cannot escape his shadow, cannot avoid flashing forth his unearthly lights. Of course, as there are various grades of moral utterances, from the maxims of Tupper to the sayings of Shakespeare, so there are many kinds of moving or thrilling effects, suited to different orders of minds. Hawk's Eye the Detective will thrill an errand-boy more than Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” But Poe has been tested by time. Intellects of the highest order have testified to his power over them. And this power is profundity. It only remains to ask whether this profundity works for good. Alas, that is the question which besets all great art. Is it really well for us to have the sorrows, passions, vices, crimes, diseases, madnesses, and melancholy broodings of mankind realized and visualized in words? The best opinion of all ages has decided that it is — that such literature is more tonic and fortifying than visions of fools’ paradises done in rosewater. The poet's intention is everything, in the use of such material. And in Poe's case there is certainly no pandering to evil — no suggestions which would make for impurity or wrong. He is one of the purest-minded writers in literature.

A second objection to Poe is that he fails of the genuine sublime. He moves, his critics say, in a region vaulted by fogs or smoke, amid charnal-houses and among grotesque monsters, and never [page 369:] has a glimpse of the supreme things of life and nature. Again I would distinguish two kinds of sublimity. One I might call the moral sublime, and as examples of it I would quote the “God said, let there be light, and there was light” of the Scriptures. I would quote that passage in the Iliad where old Priam kneels before Achilles and kisses the hand red with his son's blood, and the mighty victor takes “pity on his gray hair and his gray beard.” I would quote the scene where Dante parts with the immortal lovers in Hell, and says: “I wailed not, so I grew of stone within.” I would quote King Lear's adjuration to the storm —

Or that other passage, where, his heart bursting in agony, he sighs out his last word, “Pray you undo this button.” Of this kind of sublime, I am free to confess there is no touch or trace in Poe. But it is most rare anywhere. Milton hardly reaches it; nor, I think, does Goethe. When I say this I do not forget the high and haughty air which Milton exhibits. There is plenty of that in Pue, — in fact, his whole work is suffused with it. Nor do I forget the wild pathos which is in Goethe. There is a whole world of sorrow and regret in Poe's poetry. But the passages I have quoted combine the utmost significance with the utmost simplicity. Words disappear in the blaze of meaning.

The other kind of sublime, the physical sublime, is common enough. It is the stuff out of which most of the masterpieces of literature are fashioned. At the risk of being tedious, I will again give instances. There is the picture in Homer of Apollo descending from the Olympian towers, the arrows rattling in the quiver on his back as he strides along, until, seating himself against the ships, he sends his shafts down, and pestilence and death and the blaze of funeral pyres follow their flight. There are the red towers of Dis flickering up through the gloom, the flaked rain of fire, the rosy figures of the messenger angels which make a little dawn in Hell, — these and a hundred other pictures are in Dante. There is the Spirit of the Cape which appears to Vasco de Gama in Camoén's poem. There is Milton's Lucifer rising from his fate, “Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved.” There is his meeting at the gates of Hell with the awful figures of Sin and Death. And there is picture after picture of strange invention in Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner.” Of this kind of sublime, I say that Poe is crowded full. Turn to the “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” or the last of the “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Consider “The Masque of the Red Death” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or that group of strange colloquies which preceeded and preluded the phantasmal imaginings of “Eureka.” In all of these, Poe works with a power of invention, a vividness of realization, not unequal to the great writers I have quoted. I judge that it was the thinness, the poverty of their ordinary themes, [column 2:] which at the last drove two of our best men, Bryant and Longfellow, to translating Homer and Dante. Poe tried, and not unsuccessfully, to rival the masters out of his own resources.

III.

Poe was in the main a tragic poet; and his necessary preoccupation with things of fear and horror gives offence. There are many who consider him merely a superior writer of shilling shockers. Well, in my judgment the shilling shocker has more in common with the masterpieces of literature than the novels of nothingness which infest the world to-day. The Agamemnon, Adipus, Macbeth, Lear, Duchess of Malfi, Bride of Lammermoor, Wuthering Heights, and Faust, are all shilling shockers, done by first-rate literary hands. Nothing in Poe exceeds — I doubt if anything equals — the sheer horror out of which those works are made.

The judgment against Poe, however, is partly his own fault; for he adopted from the German writers on esthetics the theory that Beauty is the sole aim and end of art. Such a theory is destructive of the value of the most of his own work. Not Beauty alone, but Beauty and Power together, are the rulers of art. They are the wife and husband from whose union spring the flower and flame — like children of the imagination. And they can exist separately; they do not have to lean on each other. Power can combine with Beauty and produce the noble and the heroic; but it can ignore and nullify Beauty and bring forth the terrible, the grotesque, the comic, and the ugly. Poe's gifts, in spite of his theory, tended in the direction of Power. Yet in his verse Beauty has the supremacy, though shadowed by her great and gloomy mate. And in a few of his prose pieces — “The Valley of the Many Colored Grass,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor's Cottage” — he embodies Beauty by itself. These pieces deal with landscape; they are imaginings of Edens with not enough of human presence in them to cause the serpent to enter.

Poe's lack of emotion troubles some people. He had no heart, they say. He had a hard fight with the world, and did not wear his heart upon his sleeve, perhaps; and in the mass of his work, narrative or dramatic, a display of personal emotion would have been out of place. Dramatic emotion they have in plenty; perhaps some of them are too much aquiver with nerves and sensibilities. But his poetry was mainly personal, — it rose out of and was colored by the happenings of his life. Certainly there is no lack of personal feeling, of admiration, love, sorrow, regret, in “To Helen,” “The Sleeper,” “Annabel Lee,” “For Annie,” and “The Raven.” But critics presume to say that these pieces are too poetical to be real expressions of emotion, that such is not the way they would phrase love or sorrow. Probably not. But then, beauty is the necessary result of the poet's gift. It was just as easy and natural for Poe to make those things rich and rare in imagery and music as it would be for an ordinary [page 370:] man to put his love and sorrow into commonplace words. The sonnet to his wife's mother is plain enough, yet in tenderness and sweetness it is a worthy rival of Cowper's sonnet to Mary Unwin, which Palgrave thought the most exquisite and pathetic in the language. Poe's last letters bear out the contention that he was a being peculiarly swayed by affection and emotion. I confess I do not like them; they seem to me too unrestrained, unreserved. Reading them is like holding a bird in one's hand and feeling its heart throb. Either a man should be more of a stoic, or it is a desecration to print such things. But altogether the heartless Poe is the most foolish bogey of his defamers.

Poe is one of the few masters in English literature who have succeeded in making prose perform the work of poetry. The English translators of the Bible, and Shakespeare, did this before him; but hardly anybody else. The professed writers of the so-called prose-poetry do not do it at all. The best they achieve merely makes one say, “That is very pretty.” Poe uses none of the artifices of these writers, their rhythms, alliterations, accumulations of images. His prose is generally as simple, lucid, straightforward, as that of Swift or Defoe. Yet when we put down a tale of his, one note of music is ringing in our ears, one harmony of hue is gleaming in our eyes. How does he reach this result? Mainly, by perfect fitness of detail, by harmony, by tone, all directed to a final effect. With Dante and Shakespeare, he is one of the great tone-masters of literature.

Leaving out “The Raven,” Poe got his largest and most potent effects in prose; but it is of course in verse that he reaches his highest levels of expression. In magic and melody he is overmatched among modern English poets by Coleridge, Keats, and Tennyson alone, and by them only in quantity, not in quality. Such lines as

or,

or,

these have the seal of ultimate perfection on them. And whole poems have this stamp. Longfellow's “Beleaguered City” is a fine poem, admirable in conception and adequate in execution. But when we turn to Poe's “Haunted Palace” we are in a different region of art altogether. Every phrase, every cadence glows or sings with some unique or wonderful light or sound. “Israfel” has less sparkle and color, but it too is divinely cadenced. “Ulalume” is not only the most Poesque of the poems, but it is the germ of a vast amount of recent poetry.

Is not that the pattern which Swinburne largely followed? “The Raven” is Poe's most deliberate attempt to do a large thing. It has story, characters, and scene, as well as emotion and atmosphere, and deserves its place in popular esteem. Unfortunately, there is not very much of Poe's poetry, — but then there is not much of Catullus, Collins, Gray, Coleridge at his best. Left to his verse alone, I should rank Poe somewhere amid this group — a fascinating master of words, melody, and emotional utterance, but hardly a world-power. In prose, however, he is the supreme artist of the short story; and the man who rules absolutely one of the forms of literature has his place with the kings.

One argument more. It is patent, though attempts are made to deny it, that Poe's fame is more widespread that than of any writer of English since Byron. I think we may take it for granted that the Supreme Court of European Opinion knows something. Europe has plenty of great poets and prose writers of its own; and if it adopts and imitates Poe, as it does not adopt or imitate any other recent English or American writer, it must be because he has an intense and universal appeal which these others lack. Why, I would ask, if Poe is wanting in profundity, if his sole merit is form, why is ho operative at such great distances and in other languages? Form is practically untranslatable. As is the case with the Italian poet Leopardi, it is his superior weight of meaning, the significance of his whole character and thought, which enables him to overrun the boundaries of his own country and speech. Tennyson, like that other Italian poet Carducci, is shut up at home.

The wheel has come full-circle. The strange misshapen stone rejected by the builders has become the top of the temple. For myself, I have never doubted Poe's supremacy in American literature. When I was a boy of seventeen or eighteen I wrote an elegy on him, in which, while accepting somewhat of the current estimate of his character, I placed his work where I do now. To-day I have come to believe that his nature was essentially as fine as his art. I think him a fit companion for the solemn, sweet, and wrathful Dante, whom his own city would have burned if it could have laid hands on him. I think him a worthy comrade for Spain's bravest, truest son, Miguel Cervantes, who was mocked, starved, imprisoned by his countrymen during his lifetime, and more or less hated by them for a century after his death. Wherever I turn my gaze upon Poe, whether in his early and utter destitution in Baltimore, in his period of comparative peace and prosperity in Philadelphia, or in those days of desolation when he paced the fir-shadowed slopes of the Bronx or the starlit footpath of the Harlem bridge, I can see nothing but an honest, serious, noble gentleman, a poet haunted by higher and more vivid visions than any of his compeers, and capable of expressing them in terms of a more splendid art.

CHARLES LEONARD MOORE.