Text: William Dean Howells, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Harper's Weekly (New York, NY), vol. LIII, January 16, 1909, pp. 12-13

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THE Europeans, and more especially the Continental Europeans, and of these yet more especially the French, have enjoyed the privilege of rating Edgar Allan Poe as a “genius”

easily prince among those who have given us standing im literature. For the Americans it has remained to say, however unwillingly, unhandsomely, uncouthly, that they do not think so and try to say whys None of us. I suppose, would like to deny him very great talent. when we least like to distinguish it from “genius.” I myself would be reluctant to say he was not a genuine poet, in spite of Mr. James’ alluring alliterative attribution of only ‘very valueless verses” to him, and in spite of the fact that I could not give my whole heart to more than three or four of his pieces, and in these not to above’ a stanza or two. Of “The Raven” itself, I would willingly part with far the greater portion to the poetically necessitous, and I would bestow in charity the untouched entirety of the “Ulalumes,” and “Lenores,” and “Annabel Lees,” and the others of that make. But I should like to keep for myself newly all of “The Haunted Palace,” especially the last stanza:

Even against the most deserving of the poor, should like to keep the whole of the poem below because of the two lines underscored

But doubtless I could not part with any portion of this loveliness, because it is so wholly beautiful. The finish, the perfection, the repose which we suppose to be characteristically Greek are embodied here in that wonderful adequacy, “without o’erflowing full,” which we suppose to be also Greek. and the two lines dwelt upon contain as much promise of immortality as can well be got into two lines. They sum up all we dream of that classic beauty: and of this poem, written in the author's early youth, what might not criticism have predicated for his later power? Everything that even the French believe of Poe when in their inaccurate adoration they hail him Poë.

Now that I have quoted this piece, and that piece of a piece. other fragments come floating down my memory from the far years when I used to read, or to read at, the poetry of the strange “genius “ whose intimate acquaintance we shall probably never really make. He had always the making of prime greatness in him, though he never got it out. But a few pieces, and still more a few pieces of pieces, attest his “genius,” and leave the judgment unable to refuse him “attenuating circumstances” at his worst. A man who could do things so good should be suffered to have done things so bad with impunity; or, if he must not, I will fever be the one to inflict their penalty. This, apparently, is getting round to the acknowledgment that whatever else he was or was not, Poe was a poet of undeniable quality; not unquestionable, for that is another matter. and leaves Time the chance hie likes of getting in his work.

I find, indeed, that as a poet, I care more-or less for Poe, but as a novelist, large or little, I care scarcely at all. I wish the reader, however, to accept this saying provisionally, for there are possibilities that before I get through here I may take it back. or give it again in modified form. What it seems to me feel sure of is that the art in his fiction is that cruder art of the past which I once brought myself under condemnation, not to say contumely, for venturing to recognize as less tine than the present art of fiction. To put the matter very concretely, very practically, very crucially, as one standing near the elbows of editors and once squaring such elbows himself may put it, I have to .ask, “Would the best of Poe's tales be accepted now by one of the leading. or one of the next following magazines.” To this question I am obliged to answer I do not think it would: no, not the best of his tales. If we take two of the best. very different in material and texture, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Murders of the Rue Morgue, we shall find the same mechanicality of motive in both. In the first the climax is effected by a succession of thrills-and chills, of which the finest is imparted by the opening passages: after these everything coarsens. In the last the dénouement is worked by means of the closest analysic mechanism, which at first interests, and then with its interwoven mesh, hampers and wearies the reader's imagination. The Mystery of Marie Roget is entirely tiresome, with its laboriously and circumstantially ingenious adaptation of a New York tragedy to a Parisian scene.

None of these stories is to-day what we should now [column 2:] call psychological in its appeal. Poe is subtle, but he “is not delicate; he is mysterious, but he is not mystical. Where he attempts to put on the mystical. as in his studies of mesmeric experience, he 1s still grossly material, for all his recondite incidents. He cannot hold his hand from horror when he would move to awe, and such an otherwise well-managed inquiry into the unknowable as The Case of M. Valdemar ends in mere loathsomeness, and you are left confronted with carrion, holding your nose.

The climax of such a story would alone prevent its acceptance by a leading, or next following magazine; I doubt if a third-rate periodical would print it, unless the author consented to change the ending. That Poe did not end it more effectively, more powerfully, but imagined that such a close was effective, was powerful, shows how close in tradition he stood to such old-fashioned horror-mongers as Mrs. Radcliffe and her succeeding generation. It is therefore right tv judge him partly by his period and wrong to judge him wholly by performance; many things are done through a man as well as by him, for which we must not blame him. We ought always to take account of fashion in sending him to his doom, or letting him go with a caution against doing the like again. But at the same time we ought to consider that there are always good fashions as well as bad fashions, and that a man's taste if not his character may be impugned if he prefers the bad fashion, and helps to make it prevail. At the time Poe was dealing with the ignoble horrors of his grislier tales. Hawthorne was touching in so delicately, so very delicately, so almost furtively, the effects of his truly psychological studies which, in spite of every change of the human mood, will still have (power upon the. human soul. To have some sense of the difference between a masterpiece and a prenticepiece, we may contrast the exquisite forbearance and in conclusion of Hawthorne's management of The Veiled Lady in The Blithedale Romance, and the rankness and roughness and physical out-rightness of Poe's constantly scienced Case of ‘M. Valdemar. To have a sense of how far he fell short in his essays at the humorous we may compare his Devil in the Belfry or his Adventure of Hans Pfall with Irving's Ichabod Crane and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which are cotemporary with them, and yet so infinitely far from cotemperamental.

The simple fact is that Poe was as lacking in imagination as he was in sincerity, and that he vainly endeavored to supply his lack with fancy and with science. Scientific subjects were always taking his fancy, which responded with inexhaustible fertility, with infinite invention. It is wonderful how much he gets in, but it is not delightful, and the curse of unreality is on all his careful plausibility. When Tourguénief or Tolstoy reports to you what a man thought or felt in the instant of death, vou know that it is true; the fact is of a mystical verity; but you know when Poe tells you a mesmeric subject spoke after death that it is not true; it would be impossible to explain how you know it, but it is somehow from your sense that the Russian masters are sincere, artists and the American master is not.

For whether the leading magazines, or those next following, would accept his stories now or not, still Poe was a master. It is partly his fault and partly his misfortune that he is an old-fashioned master. In everything but his scientiousness he is out-dated; but in this he more than once recalls or foretells Mr. H. G. Wells, who is so modern in his fancies. I am going to venture upon saying that there is more mystical poetry, more beautiful reality in a single sketch by a certain magazine-writer, now beginning to be known, about a little, badly treated motherless child, who has the vision of her dead mother, than there is in all Poe's mysteries and mystifications. I will not name this writer because I know that my praise has been fatal to many with the overwhelming public: but I will go a little further and divide my garlands of nightshade and yewberry among the whole generation of psychological fictionists now writing in our magazines, lest any one singly perish. This generation is doing work entirely surpassing Poe's in simplicity, sincerity, and beauty; and yet it is not the work of a master, and his work even in his prenticepieces is the work of a master.

It would be hard to say why: one must always lament that the truth is so difficult; but perhaps I may intimate one of my reasons. He wrote in an America still abjectly provincial, for a public crudely hungry, and eager for anything that would fill its famine, but stingy and ungrateful. To live by literature in his time a man must also die by it, and he must suffer the greater torment if he: were as ill-starred and ill-conditioned as Poe was in being born to poverty, and bred to affluence, and then cast off to destitution; if he were at times wildly a drunkard; if he were insanely made-up of weakness, pride, viciousness, cruelty, and tenderness. What a man like that must have suffered during the eighteen-forties in a poor little vainglorious, self-distrustful country such as this then was! What might he not have been in an older and greater community, with opportunity assured him, unattended by the fear of want! A man is partly what God has made him, partly what he has made himself, partly what his fellow men have made him; and this sort of triune man Poe was in all his sinning and his being sinned against. Morally, he was as responsible as men mostly are, but intellectually he was not to blame for not being the great master people have mischievously and mistakenly imagined him. No one worth minding will put him with Emerson as a thinker, with Hawthorne as a romancer, with Longfellow as a poet, with Irving as a humorist: and as a literary artisan his rank must be low, with those worth minding. Yet he was a master: his memory will not die, and his work remains constantly appealing for judgment to critics of all proportions. To condemn it without the greatest reserves would dwarf [column 3:] me from the modest measure of my own critical proportions, and I hope I shall be found far from such condemnation in what I shall have said. His work offends my tastes and prejudices at a thousand points, but I cannot honestly say that it is without justification in my reason and my judgment. It is long since I first read most of his things; I was a boy then, with formidable intentions toward the whole of literature; but I cannot boast that I made an easy conquest of Poe. Of course the poorer of his poems, the flimsier of his tales, fell before me; and I have not felt it needful to repossess these is the present purpose, but some of them I have read the tenth or twentieth time. What I have come slowly to the true sense of are those several, those three or four, great little poems in which his immortality will abide, if hers any; and I ought to add that I have read with hardly less than amazement some bf his tales which I not only did not know before, but scarcely knew of. Such a one is The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, which in its sort is an extraordinary achievement. The story of a stowaway, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a voyage in unknown seas, and a wild adventure and escape from savages Was never more unsparingly detailed, more closely and accurately and convincingly circumstanced. It is Poe's closest approach to reality; and the verisimilitude is substantiated by the creation of character in the different actors and witnesses. Character does not play any great part in Poe's fiction, though caricature, tragic and comic, is common enough. But character much more abounds in this Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. The captain's son who smuggles Pym on board his father's ship; Peters the mutineer who survives and mostly murders all his murderous comrades; the merchant adventurer commanding the English brig which picks up the shipwrecked men; even the wily chief of the savage islanders are characters as well as types. They are not all strongly personalized (except physically); they are rather accidentally and helplessly presented, but they are not mere factors, mere agents. For the apprehension of the superior imaginative qualities of this remarkable tale something finer than a mental gullet such as ingulfs the more popular inventions of the author is needed. The arithmetical gift is so common that almost any man can do sums; but for mathematics, for the exquisite science that pleasures sound into music and counts the paces to the stars and weighs the planets, some higher and finder and rarer sense is required. Such a fact may help to explain why The Murders of the Rue Morgue is a performance that stands for Poe, and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym is never “among his cloudy) trophies hung.”

I suspect that he had always a keener literary conscience than he seemed to have. I believe that he must have hated to do the many clever, vulgar things which he did, and which are reproduced in edition after edition of his works. I believe this because I cannot forget that he was always working for a living, and working overhard, with the jarred nerves and bewildered senses of the drunkard. After long misprizing him I have come to see him in his pathos, as a prodigal of wasted powers, the victim of cruel circumstances, of inherent evil propensities, with a certain majesty of nature inalienable in his moral squalor. I believe upon reflection that it will count nothing with the judicious that the leading and next following magazines would not now have him. They might not so wholly deny Poe for his ‘prentice workmanship as for his want of the properties which win them most of their readers. It is the outdated fashion of good and bad in his work which would be fatal to him; just as the actualities of Shakespeare's time are fatal to Shakespeare in the theatre of our day; for the theatres: would no more have Shakespeare now than the magazines would have Poe, except very exceptionally and upon conditions of excision and adaptation, which might also fit Poe for the modern editorial approval. I do not mean otherwise to liken him with Shakespeare; at the end of the ends, with the judicious his preference of incident to character must be fatal to him. This is his preference at his best, his subtlest, his closest, his most scientifically ascertained; what happens, and how, is the great matter with him; with Shakespeare the great matter is why it happens and to whom.

But in spite of his disqualifying qualities Poe is of a life that promises to long. Apparently there is a strongly recurrent if not continuous interest in him, though beyond — “apparently” one must not go, unless one is ready) to turn again and unlive several scores of years and be one of the actual reading public. Do the young people like Poe? I do not mean the crude and common of them, but those formed by nature and culture for discrimination. Only the young people can say, and if I know young people at all, or ever did, they cannot say honestly; they value themselves more upon their taste in literature than on their pleasure, which is, after all, the test of an author's survival. The case is difficult, and seeking my own palingenesis in a reperusal of this author's prose, I have found old young reluctances in my way. I have not read his tales again willingly; I have found myself skipping, as I should not and could not skip in the novels of Jane Austen his anterior, or in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne his contemporary. “That unsparing detail, that analysis, that series of characterless events deter me, repel me, and I am not willing to that the fault is in me. So far as I am able to be candid about it, I find that Poe's method is always mechanical, his material is mostly unimportant; but from this saying, if anybody brought me to book, I might wish to hedge in a hundred instances. With his poetry it seems to me no easier matter. Can a man continue in remembrance by virtue of pieces of two pieces, and by the entirety of one piece? Whether I think he can or not, it appears that Poe does live with the wise in these as he lives with the unwise in his inferior pieces. [page 13:]

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