Text: Edith M. Thomas, “A Few Words on a Master-Mechanician,” Harper's Weekly (New York, NY), vol. LIII, January 16, 1909, p. 14

[page 14:]

To the Editor of Harper's Weekly:

MAY we not consider the principle of nil nisi bonum removed in case of those whom the world has very generally agreed to call its Immortals? Voted not dead, we may then speak of them as we would of the living. This being granted me. I shall be at liberty, sans reproche, to offer a few harmless words that shall, surely, seem like attempted detraction, to very many, but shall be, perhaps, to a small minority, as the voice of their own stealthy conviction. I would speak of the author of “The Tales,” of “The Raven,” of “The Bells,” and other verse, all indicating the Master Mechanician — plus. here. Imagination; plus, there, the disordered outgivings of cauchemar! It is of the verse rather than of the prose that I would speak. And should I hesitate so to speak. I am reminded that he whose work I venture to challenge, in some of its aspects, did not in his own day shirk the utter annihilation of those whom he regarded as “mean knights, little men,” in the great tilting-field of letters.

A Master-Mechanician — but I do not think he would himself have objected to this addition. He invites it, if ever poet did invite such “eternal blazon” set as an affiche over his own door! As that door opens — in the pages of “The Philosophy of Composition” — I am aware of a handsome face, with a cynical upcurl of the lip, which, for an instant only, suggests that the

revelation which the Master proposes to make regarding the operations of the laboratory, is but a specious one. He will fill our curiosity to the top of its bent! Yet, we can but take him at his word's worth. It is all very interesting — one might say very “instructive” — this revelation, wherein, process by process. Poe shows us how he produced that singular, anomalous, and magical composition, “The Raven.” He declares that similar expositions of the laboratory would have been long ago offered by other practisers of the art of Poesy, had not their “autorial vanity” forestalled. If Poe has any of this vanity autorial, if would seem to be in his professed atheism as regards Divine Afflatus — no Plato's Poet for him! But, since Poe has no objection, let us walk in and examine the methods and the “properties of the literacy histrio.”

Our “histrio” tells us that he always prefers “commencing with the consideration of an effect.” Also (how airily!) that he “keeps originality always in view”: since a man would be “false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest” (a fact that should immediately be transferred to the Syndicate's “Hints to Young Authors!”). He proceeds to say to himself: “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” So, all is “occasion” — all is prepense; select your effect or impression — preferably, that of “the soul” — and then Go Ahead! Now. it is a curious fact that Poe always insists upon “the soul.” Turn the leaf, and you will find him saying. “It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul.” He will have nothing of the “intellect”; or, if these at all, they must be so subdued in the scheme as not to antagonize beauty — ” that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, of the soul.”

The substance of my search can be compressed into few: Does the work of Poe (his verse), as a rule, either excite or elevate the soul? When and where does it achieve that psychic exaltation to which he refers when he warns us. “Beauty, of whatever kind in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.” When, I would ask. has the sensitive soul wept over any Ululumes [[Ulalumes]], any Irenes, any Lenores even? “The Raven” is a poem of very wondrous perfect mechanism, and therein exhibits the same master-methods which its author pursues in the building of his most famous and unexcelled “Tales.” It is an edifice of Busyrane. built under the wand of the arch-enchanter: but there is no live inhabitancy of that edifice. It is soulless — at least, it is soulless to those whose “soul” finds its “pleasurable elevation” in the kind of imaginative work in which “The story's heart still beats against its side.” It seems to me that “The Raven” stirs not at all that deeper sensibility which Beauty” in its supreme development “has been promised to do. The necromantic lines do, indeed, stir us; but is not our “reaction” rather to mystery, glamour, sensuous fascination, than to pathos? I find myself not a little affected, by “the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain”; much by the “cushion's velvet, violet lining, with the lamplight gloating o’er”; somewhat less by “The seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor”; but my “intellect,” “heart,” or is it “soul”? suffers an obdurate dulness, or indifference, to the pathetic lure of “sainted maiden” — “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore.” And I am unsalvably uncompunctious toward the woes of him whose head at east reclined on the aforesaid cushion with “velvet, violet lining”! It is the fancy — and not “the soul” — that is affected. The fancy is, indeed, [column 2:] thrown into a haunted, expectant state where it remains captive, from beginning to end of this marvellous, spellbinding production. With the most ardent of the Poe-idolaters, withal, I am never done admiring the strategic effects of measure and stanza achieved in this poem (effects whose management the author confides to his reader with a real artistic sincerity that seems wanting somewhat in his other confidences).

I have discovered that it is rank heresy — nay, it is little less than sacrilege — to the good Poe-worshipper, to impugn either the sound or the sense, the shadow or the substance, of such poems as “For Annie” or “Ululume [[Ulalume]].” Yet, so I am constrained to do. braced by the courage of conviction! I am not going to be hoodwinked here, by any prodigious conjure-words (as I was, willy-nilly, by the “kind nepenthe” — the grim enticement of “The Night's Plutonian Shore,” in “The Raven”). No “misty mid-region of Weir,” no “dank tarn of Auber”: neither “boreal pole,” nor “Mount Yaanek” itself, nor any other quasi-geographic allurements: nor wheedlings by “Psyche,” nor fear of the crescented, duplicate-horned “Astarte.” — shall turn aside my determined and merciless quest for meaning — for entity, of some sort! When I do not find these, but “Darkness there and nothing more,” and when I turn elsewhere on similar quest, no “Naphaline River of Passion Accurst” is going to daunt an investigating spirit! Compare the maundering conclusion of “Ululume [[Ulalume]]” — for the evocation of pure spiritual despair and horror — with that now little-read ballad of John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” From the former:

Compare with that knight-at-arm “so haggard and so wobegone,” in his meeting with those fellow prisoners of the woven pace:

A recent critic actually singles out for admiration, “The Conqueror Worm,” rating this production above “The Raven” even. Let us sample most briefly:

But enough! A more sickeningly revolting and tasteless piece of mortuary business it would be hard to find in the whole realm of the gruesome in verse. If, as Emerson observes of Swedenborg, this great writer would always frighten away “girls and boys,” because of his propinquity to the “charnel-house,” how much more so would adolescence be warned away from the dire precincts of the muse of Edgar Allan Poe. So it would seem.

But the obsession singularly remains, more especially, we venture to suggest, for the “boy and girl” devourer of Poe's verse; far less for any reader of maturity.

“For Annie” is, if we may call it so. a posthumous cri du cœur. From its supposed note of personal, subjective experience. this particular poem has been held as almost sacrosanct — quite removed from the frail criticism of the living, and of the dully solar “soul.” I will only ask. What would an editor of nowadays say to a poem that came to his desk, with a stanza

like the following, with its flavor as of double entendre, in the repeated last word of the fourth and the sixth verse?

inclining one to add. with a dash and a supplementary, corrective line (in true Poesian manner) — seemingly, afterthought, suggestively, a time-gainer —

Also, what editor of to-day would view seriously the statement as to the now soothed condition of the “tantalized spirit” of the bard, as set forth in the following?

I recall that the late Richard Hovey in one of his metrical Arthurian romances represents the desire of Lancelot to be permitted to drown himself in the tresses of Guinevere; but I seem to recall, also, that this-pleasing little extravagance on the part of Lancelot did not encounter favor at the hands of the hardy race of critics. When, in the course of recent re-readings, I turned to “Annabel Lee.” I hoped to find there, at least, something of the charm that in childhood had attended the recital of that extraordinary concatenation of sonant syllable. A faded remnant of that charm. I found, still, attached to

But, for the most part. I was forced to confess, for myself, there was only infinite hollowness — the attenuated shadow of passion and tragedy in an impossible “No Man's Land.” And when I came on the jigging cadence of the penultimate couplet of the last stanza,

I experienced a sense of mental vertigo and illness. Then, still cherishing the belief that I should find something definitely to excite, to elevate, the soul, in the lofty-spirited “Israfel” and his lyre, with

I was amazed to meet anti-climax with a vengeance (or such it seemed to me) in the trivial, childish, put-yourself-in-his-place conclusion of the whole matter, as contained in the following:

an obvious and needlessly tamed conclusion!

But I found, in my rereadings, one rare song — I fear its appeal is more to “the heart” than to “the soul” — the lines entitled “To Helen,” and said to have been written when the author was but fourteen years of age. The golden charm of this poem remained, as indestructible as that of Troy's Helen herself — with its “Nicæan barks of yore,” with the rich and tender glow of that “agate lamp” in hand; rounding with the almost impassioned

Let us hark back once more to the laboratory, and to the examination, piece by piece, of “The Raven” in construction. When in the process of this creation it becomes time to consider the matter of “refrain,” the selection of a word, or words, that shall best serve the “predetermined” tone of “ melancholy,” we are told that “ in such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word, ‘Nevermore.’” Now, I have, in my heresy, often speculated as to the why of that “absolutely impossible,’‘ and have then remembered that Poe was a scholar of no mean attainments, especially in the languages. He must have heard, however faint and far away, the plaintive wailing of poor Gretchen, in the little song of her despair, “Mein Ruh’ist hin, mein Herz ist schuwer, Ich finde sie nimmer und nimmer mehr!” It seemed yet more certain that Poe, a confessed admirer of Shelley, must have been familiar with that “melodious sign” to which its bard gave no title save “A Lament” — two brief stanzas, of a spiritual sweetness and an ecstasy of sadness :wild with all regret” — never excelled, I believe, in expressing these ideas. Here are the lines:

Was it here — just here — that Poe did not “overlook the word, ‘Nevermore,’” with its wonderful, conjuring possibilities? Be that as it may, it is a part of my heresy, to ask my friends, of the extreme Poe cultus, whether, to their instantaneous vision, the image of Poet looms largest, most unmistakable, behind this delicate and subtle weft of Shelley's “Lament,” or, as seen through and beyond the marvellous elaborations of “The Raven.” I will add. to do them justice (or is it to do them injustice?), there have been those who, unguardedly, perhaps, came over to the persuasion of heresy!