Text: Joseph Osgoode, “Chatper VI — Poe: The Artist,” in Tell it in Gath, Sewanee, TN: University Press of Sewanee Tennessee, 1918, pp. 140-182

[page 140:]

TO POE the world at large has long conceded the foremost place among American men of letters. Nor has the most adverse of hostile critics ventured to pronounce upon him a judgment much less favorable. His right to a position so eminent is apparent to anyone conversant with the literature of England and the United States. It is, perhaps, less apparent why some of his own countrymen have labored to obscure the fame of his writings by making much of matters which have no concern with them. In their estimation, the real or imagined vices of Poe, the man, balefully eclipse the merits of Poe the author, albeit they have established no proof of relation between these fancifully contrasted characteristics. While readily disregarding or condoning similar failings in Coleridge, De Quincey, Daniel Webster, Goldsmith, and others, whose literary standing has never been affected by such considerations, they urge against Poe's claims to preeminence that he was wayward and thriftless, a drunkard and an opium eater. But it does not lie in their power to point to a single passage of his writings wherein appears the taint of the vices charged against him. On the page of no other author is more clearly revealed the magic impress of vigorous and unclouded intellect, subtle invention, perfect design, unwavering purpose, and faultless execution, united and combining in glorious harmony. It is noteworthy that the critics who affect to hear echoes of evil and perversion in all that Poe wrote have found nothing of the kind in Fitzgerald's translation of tippling Omar Khayyám, or in the braggart ribaldry of Walt Whitman. On the contrary, Fitzgerald has been more admired for [page 141:] conjuring up through translation a strange, half-Oriental figure as an addition to the novelties of literature than as if he had produced a work of native worth and excellence. Condemners and contemners of Poe read complacently such lines as, —

or, —

Shocked as they profess to be by Poe's egotism, irreverence, or what not, they see neither wilfulness, perversity, folly, nor sacrilege in these gloomy verses. What would they have said of Poe, if, instead of his own conceptions, his writings had contained much or little of the borrowed or distorted ideas of others, of such sort, or in such form as this?

Against the author of Lenore his most malignant enemies can never bring the charge of indecency. But those who profess to discern some evil lurking behind all that he wrote find neither indecency, license, nor waywardness in such frolic outpourings of the chaste muse of Walt Whitman as, —

Had Poe foisted such stuff as this upon the world, his immediate rewards in ready cash might well have been more generous than the poor doles with which the world repaid him for a wealth of poems, stories, essays, and critiques, which fascinated the reader, brought profit to the publisher, and yielded the author a bare subsistence as the only material compensation afforded by his times for the mental and physical exhaustion entailed by his ceaseless literary labors. Despite all efforts on the part of would-be posthumous candid friends to prove the contrary, it is plain that he was more sinned against than sinning. It cannot be shown that he ever made it any part of his business to injure others, as others made it theirs to injure him and his. He never stooped to the mean [page 142:] and vulgar views and purposes of those who have pursued his memory with slander. Whatever their scope, his works were uniformly executed with the conscientious industry, intense concentration, and exquisite taste of a great artist. Ranking among the foremost of their kinds in the literatures of England and America, they were their author's gift to his own and to future ages. For what reason have certain of his countrymen striven to spurn both gift and giver?

One sufficient reason, at least, is clear. The envy of maligners could hardly find a more shining mark than Poe has offered them. He has been hated for real, undeniable merits far more than for any defects, real or suppositious, of his life or works. In other respects a true type of the Southern gentleman, he was in literature an exponent of the independent thought, free outlook, original conception, genial humor, unobtrusive yet commanding dignity, exquisite refinement, and sound and penetrating judgment characteristic of a true son of the South. These qualities could not endear him to the self-elected autocrats of the contemporary literary oligarchy which strove to dominate American thought, and whose notice or favor he naturally disdained to court. Penury could not sink him to the level of a hack, nor flattery transform him into a tool for others. He was neither toady, mountebank, herald and satellite of mediocrity, nor purveyer of cheap and nasty writing of any sort. He refused to write by the yard after the approved fashion of a literary automaton, or prostitute his genius to tickle the idle, vulgar, and licentious humors of tasteless readers. He produced works which even a censorious critic (Lowell ) was fain to pronounce “far the best of their kind,” and their kind, meagre as were the author's opportunities and rewards for doing his best, was unmatched in range and quality on either side of the Atlantic. It is but stating an obvious fact to say that alone among his contemporaries Poe stood foremost alike in poetry, romantic fiction, and literary criticism — a varied excellence displayed neither by Cooper, Hawthorne, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Dumas, Heine, nor any other author of the nineteenth century. Some of these wrote more than Poe. None of them proved himself a master in so many departments of literature. Such an eagle in the domain of letters was odious to all owls and bats, a terror to tame geese and turkeys, a fearless apparition to baser creatures generally. What could reviewers or anyone else do [page 143:] with a writer who madly refused either to be written down or to regard himself as the property of publishers or public? Yet how could literary sedition such as his pass unnoticed? Presumption so flagrant must never go unpunished! And so it was that the greatest of American writers was brought to a post-mortem trial before various tribunals — the frivolous Vehmgericht of Puritan dogmatism, old and new; the bloody assize of the Jeffrys of noisy mediocrity; the tumultuous courts of the Jack Cades of so-called popular opinion — all of which, on the initiative of the first, have dismissed his memory and his works under sentence of death — a judgment which has been executed much as the curse of the Harpy was fulfilled upon Aeneas and his companions. Besides, their fell verdict has been pronounced so many times in tedious and vain repetition, that to those familiar with its terms — and who is not? — the evidence upon which it rests is of more interest. And as the witnesses by whom it was furnished have been consistent in nothing but falsehood and nonsense, the evidence is its own best refutation.

Time has effaced some of the stains with which slander has striven to sully Poe's memory. It is now evident that he died drugged and poisoned by certain public-spirited citizens whose patriotic zeal easily outran their discretion, and not as the outcome of a drunken debauch, as sundry charitable biographers long insisted. Together with the death-bed speeches invented to prove him a horrible example of riotous, ruinous dissipation may be dismissed all criticisms of his writings animated by the same malevolent spirit. However these may vary in trivial details, their general import remains the same. The sage critics who penned them assure us that his verse has no human interest; that his prose fiction broods upon scenes and details of gloom and horror; that his essays and criticisms are marred now by the vagaries of an erratic and wayward genius, and again by the spiteful animadversions of a carper. A tone of Rhadamanthine severity implying censure much graver than this pervades the written judgments upon Poe issued by these Nupkinses of literature. According to their august decisions his literary excellence were but the flaming and poisonous blossomings of the secret vices of his character; each furnishing further reason for condemning this wayward scapegrace of letters. Indeed his whole work is a mere mirage — a No-man's land of empty dreams, bordered by [page 144:] sloughs of envious error an array of marble images so cold as to defy any Pygmalion of the spirit to kindle them into warm and glowing life. Their author was an apostle of selfish pride of intellect, in whom, as Lowell truly intimated “the heart was squeezed out by the mind.” Would it not have been better if the vagabond had never lived to write, or if his writings were swept into oblivion, no longer to waste the time of grave reviewers or foppish readers? All these damnatory implications, and many more, reverberate in the ominous tones of various critics of Poe, whatever occasion they find to speak of him.

But more ominous even than the solemn accents of their condemnation are certain palpable facts of the case which all these grave judges overlook or evade. For hitherto none of them has deigned to display on his own pages — just by way of demonstrating how idle are the tricks of that false enchanter — any of the literary magic which he concedes to Poe. None of these Aarons of literature has thrown down any staves of verse to transform themselves into true serpents of Old Nile, and swallow The Raven, Lenore, The Poetic Principle, The Philosophy of Composition, or any other of the reptiles cast abroad by this idolatrous Egyptian in the New Israel. Nothing which their genius has invented enters into rivalry or comparison with his writings — even the words of death-bed remorse ascribed to him are unconvincing as the voice of Jacob. In the scales of reason the emptiness attributed by them to the works of an author whom they would fain condemn is mysteriously outweighed by the vacuity, the nothingness of their own achievement in prose and rhyme. And is this barrenness of creative accomplishment to be accepted as their qualification for passing judgment upon works beyond their power to conceive, much less to produce? A dim sense of their own infinite inferiority in this particular has driven the more intelligent of Poe's detractors to frankly acknowledge his perfect mastery of the technique of his art. Truly comical is their inability to see that such an admission exposes the fallacy of their judgment of him; for their judgment, reduced to its simplest expression, is that he was a very great poet, and a very bad man — a statement which is a simple contradiction in terms. Through all their discordant round of a thousand parts the loudest note is that of partisan rancor [page 145:] against a genius whose art rises far beyond the level of their comprehension.

Small wonder then, that an indictment drawn up in ignorance of the issues involved has broken down beneath the dead-weight of its own absurdities. Nor have its authors presented the details of their case in such fashion as to regain any share of the credit thus irrevocably forfeited by their ludicrous incapacity. Every particular adduced by them is but a further manifestation of their ignorance of all that belongs to poetry, to literary criticism, to truth in life and art — a further illustration of the excellence of what they deride. The burden of their accusations of Poe, the author, is that his finest works, his poems, the rarest productions of his happiest inspiration, deserve praise only for great external beauty — the inference being that this outer fairness conceals a skeleton of intellectual barrenness and moral perversion. Such verses are but vain fancies, mere cobwebs of a brain so poorly busied in spinning such mazes of floating threads as to furnish another most lamentable illustration of the old proverb — “an idle mind is the Devil's workshop.” Therefore — were they not frightened from their purpose by the knowledge that foreign critics of note have rendered a very different verdict, — these discerning judges would consign Poe and all his works to his master, the Devil, whom they esteem the patron saint of art and artists. But here, as elsewhere, fashion is not to be lightly defied; and as it has become a fashion to repeat uncritically the favorable criticism of the foreign critics aforesaid, Poe's enemies have been fain to respond in dismal echo where his praises are thus sounded, striving nevertheless to give their echo the tone of a murmur of dissent. They hint that his verses are unsubstantial pageants faded, leaving not a wrack behind if brought in contact with the facts of a workday world. The idle genius who wrote them has given us abundance of airy nothings, but has conspicuously failed to give it anywhere a local habitation and a name; and airy nothings they remain to the majority of his countrymen, the sane, practical men and women who have made the Anglo-Saxon world what it is. Yes, Poe's lyrics — his tales — indeed, all that he wrote, say these sedate and assured critics, are glittering bubbles which burst and vanish at the slightest contact with the realities of life — vain illusions whose emptiness is a melancholy token of the vanity of their author's life and nature. [page 146:] The steadfast testimony of these grave advocates irresistibly recalls the more cheerful utterance of a very similar idea in the words of Tennyson's Village Wife:

The village wife could not read, and brushed literature lightly from the pathway of her thought; and Poe's defamers, who are not much her superiors in that respect, have hit upon much the same easy, wholesale method of disposing of what they cannot understand and are only interested to condemn. Their Bill of Attainder against his poetry never gets beyond its solemn preamble. Their attacks on his prose are directed against imaginary faults which their own exhibits in high perfection. Abandoning the narrow path of argument and proof for the open field of unreasoning assertion, they are content to conclude their tirades with what seems to them final evidence of the imposture of this Simon Magus of American Literature. Poe's tales and poems, they triumphantly affirm, are prized only by those strange creatures who love “art for art's sake.” This is their last word on the subject of his literary merits and demerits. It has little weight with any, who in stubborn infatuation persist in a perverse admiration of Poe and others like him; and as Socrates and Plato, his disciple, were self-confessed lovers of “art for art's sake”; and as the world has not yet forgotten something that Cicero said of his own preference for going wrong with Plato to being right with other philosophers; a question forthwith presents itself to all whose judgments of art and literature are borrowed from others. — Is it better to be right with Messrs, Griswold and Company, or to be wrong with Poe, Whistler, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Velasquez, Titian, Shakespeare, Cicero, Plato, Socrates, Pindar, Hokusai, and other loungers of the idle tribe of artists?

The name “art” is properly applied to any work demanding in its perfect execution an unusual degree of skill and good taste in the one by whom it is done. Such power of performance can be developed only through the unremitting exertion and concentration of every faculty which the work requires. While rigorously subordinating to its own development all other interests, art by no means excludes them from the life of those who follow it. Recreation, diversions, relaxation, [page 147:] friendship, affection are as much necessities to the true artist as to anyone else. But none of these can turn him from the path which his genius finds or makes through all impediments. None of these can absorb those faculties which his work alone calls into full play. The motto, “Art for Art's Sake,” may be paraphrased as “The devotion of knowledge and skill to the increase of our understanding and enjoyment of beauty.” Many who have found the phrase trifling and meaningless have approved much stranger doctrine. Have not Puritans from Prynne to Ruskin preached “Goodness for Goodness’ Sake,” and been roundly applauded for their most unintelligible performances? Others, again, who love to admire virtue from afar off — whose admiration increases in direct proportion as the square of the distance — who see only darkness in “the light of other days” when that light is kindled anew in their own — and who will therefore have none of this foppish nonsense of “art for art's sake” — nevertheless cherish boundless uncritical admiration of the Socratic theory of good workmanship as unfolded in Plato's Republic, though the phrase which they deride is but a corollary of the theory they profess to approve. For Socrates’ theory of good workmanship is simply this — that with the true workman excellence of accomplishment in his calling takes precedence of every other motive. Such misunderstanding is but the infatuation of intellects enthralled by the vulgar notions of an age dominated by commercial and pseudo-scientific superstitions. Minds so enslaved see Art not as a wonder-working force, unshackled by environment, unconfined by time or place, finding and revealing beauty everywhere, but as a dead commodity to be measured, weighed, and exchanged for cash, like any other product of the soulless machine from which it has issued. Every true artist works for his art alone. That art is his life, the voice of his soul, the image and expression of all by which and for which he lives. It cannot become a secondary purpose of his existence. The rewards of wealth and fame, when they come to him, come unsought for themselves, and do not alter the essential character of his work except in so far as they afford scope for wider and freer development. The pursuit of these as ends in themselves leads away from the one interest which absorbs his creative powers. To follow any such ulterior objects is to forego that interest, to relinquish those powers to atrophy, to lose sight of art, to cease to be an [page 148:] artist. Those who labored to condemn or confute Whistler, Poe, and other prophets of the message “Art for Art's Sake” have in so doing merely revealed an absurd and ignorant insensibility.

The delight which an artist may feel in others’ applause must ever be preceded by the assurance of his own certain knowledge that he has worthily attained the object of his endeavors. Pursuant to the good old theory that artists have no right to speak or judge of their own work, one wise critic has styled Poe's preface to the 1845 edition of his poems “proud.” Deplorable as is the fact that such an author should have had occasion to write it, this introduction is one which any author, under similar circumstances, might well be proud to have written: —

Many who dissented from the views here expressed, because these views happened to be Poe's, have cordially approved Longfellow's tamer statement of a similar idea: —

And here the neo-Puritan would object that Poe's heart was corrupt and become abominable, and that any work proceeding therefrom must of necessity be altogether vile. But this worn-out [page 149:] story answers its purpose no longer. Besides, the English-speaking world has not forgotten how the poetic passion of certain Puritans improved the Psalms of David into the sorriest doggerel ever inflicted upon the children of men — to say nothing of later “triumphs of civility” such as the Twentieth Century (Limited) New Testament. What poet has escaped the censure of these saintly ones? What poet has deserved their praise? Criticism from such quarters never touches the truth of literature; and Poe's verse remains to be judged on its merits, according as our experience and sensibility enable us to appreciate them.

Amusement mingles with surprise when one severally recalls his poems, after hearing all that obtuse critics can say in depreciation of them. Where may we find the unreality, the chilling gloom, the empty jingling euphony divorced from all substantial significance of which those wise ones were forever prating? Do these faults appear conspicuously in Annabel Lee, for example? Those Puritans who tolerate love-poems at all insist that such compositions must be free from every suggestion of sensuality — a condition perfectly fulfilled by every love-song that Poe ever wrote. But our critics are hardly to be foiled thus. They swear that the women of Poe's verses are phantoms — mere spectres whom no man could truly love-an objection suggestive of the comment ascribed to a certain popular painter — “Titian's women are magnificent — but who would care to kiss one of them?”

Of course it cannot be denied that the opening stanza of this lyric is extremely vague: —

As a good Republican, Poe had no more business lugging kingdoms into his poetry than to make a No-man's land of the one he did lug in by placing it on a sea to which he gives no name. Shakespeare's “coast of Bohemia” was bad enough, but nothing to this. And worse yet, worse even than the snivelling nonsense of the last two lines, he has the insufferable impertinence to tell us that we “may know” this dream-maiden [page 150:] maiden of his wool-gathering fancy “by the name of Annabel Lee.” If he means to interest us, let him give us business-like details — Susannah Sniggers sounds more like the life we know than his drivelling “Annabel Lee” — her age, height, appearance, dress, manner, and mien — the color of her hair, the size and make of her shoes — her postoffice address, street and house number; the sort of house she lived in; a list of her relatives, friends and acquaintances; all of which could have been easily included in the poem, had it been long enough, which, according to its author's own canons of criticism, it is not.

The foregoing is an unexaggerated statement of the substance of the adverse criticisms which Poe's lyrics have aroused among those voluble partisans whose ignorance and effrontery have gained them, among the uncritical, al secure reputation as judges of philosophy, art, and literature. And if they have never expressed their opinions in precisely such terms as these, it has been for the sufficient reason that his fame has awakened in the blindest of them a dim sense of the necessity of making some effort to rise to the level of their topic when dealing with his works. Beneath the spell of a subject which inspired him to do his best and worst, Griswold was seen to put forth all his powers in the foolish lampoon which he wrote on the occasion of Poe's death. It is thus that those who approach the temples of genius to profane them prostrate themselves involuntarily as they enter the precincts. But whether active or passive in their malice, the upshot of their prattle is the same. To them the artist's work is abhorrent either as a negation of vulgarities congenial to their temper, or as “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” In Poe's case they maintain either that his writings are bad, or “so good as to be good for nothing” — that is to say, superlatively worthless.

To such Malvolio-Aguecheek criticism one can only answer, with Fabian, “Very brief, and exceeding good-senseless!” For one cannot but feel the charm of Annabel Lee in the very name of the poem — a name full of melody and brightness, beauty and gladness, whose sound is as the first notes of the lark that “at heaven's gate sings” to bid “my lady sweet arise.” Is it barely possible, by any chance, that Poe meant his readers to catch in its music some echo of the beauty, the loveliness, the joyous and gracious presence of this lady of his vision? As we read or recall the poem, may not this name [page 151:] suggest to our imagination or remembrance some such story, memory, or association as Rembrandt's portraits bring before us on the walls in Dresden where Saskia smiles forever upon lovers of “art for art's sake?” Shall these masterpieces share the fate of those of King Charles's collection and be consigned to the flames because we know so little of Saskia? Would their beauty, their magical and suggestive charm, be less even if we knew nothing of her?

Had we known the story of Saskia's life, some Griswold of painting would long since have filled the world with lamentation that Rembrandt's time and powers had been so deplorably wasted in immortalizing a woman so utterly uninteresting.

The mention of kingdoms in Annabel Lee is of course inexcusable. Still, bearing in mind that the daughter of a distinguished President of the United States was hailed as “Princess” — with a capital P — by the voice of popular applause, not exactly “many and many a year ago,” as such events transpire, the indulgent reader may let it pass. And while the sea to which reference is made cannot be identified satisfactorily with the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Caspian, the Black, the White, the Red, or the Dead Sea, its whereabouts are as clearly identified for the literal-minded as are those of the ocean of Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, or Longfellow's Ultima Thule. And none who can read English can fail to be impressed by the transparent and charming simplicity of language and expression which characterizes the poem throughout: —

What possible meaning can attach to such words as “a love that was more than love”? No doubt this phrase has been a sore puzzle to Puritans, delvers into the difficulties of Browning, and “psychological” students of literature generally.

“I was a child”! How masterly in its apparent artlessness is this poem! How many have succeeded, as, with no hint of incongruity, Poe has here succeeded, in giving to man's deepest and tenderest affection the sweet unsullied utterance [page 152:] of a child. For any parallel to Annabel Lee since the days of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Crashaw, one must go to the song of Jean Prouvaire in Les Misérables; though this, with its echoes of a noisy outer world, the melancholy of its ending, and its hint of the wasting flight of time and the shadows of later life, belongs to a less ethereal atmosphere — a lower plane of thought and emotion: —

Another parallel may be seen — though the sentiment of the poem is of a kind altogether different — in Mrs. Browning's My Kate.

Doubtless many a. Puritan has stood’ aghast at the impiety of these words, —

But where has color shown true to jaundiced eyes? Do we rejoice in Shakespeare's

only to scorn Poe's

Here, then, is a characteristic product of Poe's genius in the field of lyric poetry; and meagre are the rewards of any search in its verses for the faults which carping detractors have imagined in the best of all that he wrote. No pall of gloom or anguish overhangs this exquisite creation, this flower of gentle memories blooming in melodious verse, whose sadness is eclipsed in the triumph of its ending, where happy and innocent love emerges victorious over death. And that sadness [page 153:] is of a nature and degree inseparable from the subject of the poem. In this, as in all his finest lyrics, Poe's rendering of the theme is consistent and masterly. In each of those poems noble thoughts find fitting and vivid expression in words thrilling with emotions whose depth and might put to shame all futile exaggeration and excess. And in all of them, however diverse their excellences, is revealed a sense of measure and harmony truly classic in its subtle power. This faculty Poe shared with the Greeks, and with master-artists the world over. In Annabel Lee it is exerted to enhance the general effect by producing an enchanting contrast of varying emotions. Mingled with the tender and profound regrets, the joyous remembrances tempered by transcendent sorrow, there appears a tranquil, half-jesting disdain of a life's calamity, a saddened playfulness, which infinitely deepens the quiet pathos everywhere pervading the poem, but perfectly accords with the clear notes of serene triumph sounded in the concluding stanzas. So subtly, therefore, is revealed that profound pathos, which is here a distinctive, though secondary quality, that, while rendered with surpassing power, it is not fully apparent in casual reading, save to a sympathetic and awakened spirit. A poet may succeed where a painter has failed or vice versa. In this unique love-song Poe has gloriously attained a result incomparably higher than that which Watts labored to compass in his picture Love and Death.

But who was Annabel Lee? From what incident in its author's life did this poem originate? Such are the questions that vex the Puritan and the “psychological” critic. In this instance the question is not hard to answer. There is no doubt that Poe's young wife is the original of Annabel Lee and Eulalie, and the “lost Ulalume” of the poem which bears that name. But questions as to the particular event or experience in which a work of art is rooted are often irrelevant. They are interesting only in so far as they expand) our understanding and heighten our appreciation of that work. Those who investigate such points too narrowly might as well busy themselves in making charts of the spot shown in Turner's Ulysses and Polyphemus, or in tracing the ancestry of the girl in Velasquez's Spinners, as essential to our knowledge and enjoyment of those paintings. All that here concerns those who love the poetry and glory of our life is that out of the tangled threads of a checkered and tragic experience Poe has woven radiant [page 154:] figures which emerge in cloudless splendor from the sable ground of his sorrows, frailties, and misfortunes; and to one of these shining forms he gave the name Annabel Lee.

If this be vagueness, then is poetry a misty realm indeed. For who can tell the name of the supposed speaker in Browning's Ride from Ghent to Aix? The horse's name appears, but not the rider's. Who was the adventurous youth in Longfellow's Excelsior? or the young soldier in his Killed at the Ford? And setting these aside, how many readers can say whether or no Victor Galbraith is a real or a mythical person? Yet solemn commentators assure us that Poe is all cloudiness and mirage. Endless are the vagaries of reasoners whose premizes are irrelevant to the subject of their discussion.

How many artists have painted the Crucifixion? What two ever painted it the same? Everyone contradicts the others. Therefore all are liars, the scene they represent unreal, and their pictures arrant trifling. Such is Puritan logic. For has not one of the neo-Puritans of modem ethics, Frederick Harrison, proclaimed Jesus to be a myth and St Paul the real founder of Christianity, despite the testimony of St. Paul him- self, who undoubtedly believed in the existence of Jesus, and preached “Christ and Him Crucified”? If this view be correct, the whole Christian religion sprang from some obscure figment of the imagination of St. Paul, — if St. Paul himself was not also a myth. What then becomes of the primitive Puritan theology and the systems of ethics which their successors have based upon it? But such points are evaded by those in whose favorite theories they are involved; for capricious reasoners never press their principal argument to its logical conclusion. And so it is that, with logic and proofs as good as Mr. Harrison's, the neo-Puritans, the Emersonians and other kindred spirits iterate and reiterate that Poe's muse is a vain enchantress beguiling wastrel spirits to wander in a void of deceitful imaginings.

The plain truth is that Poe's art is unreal to followers of the cult of ugliness — to those to whom all beauty is unreal — to slaves of dogma, and blind frequenters of the oracles of mobs. If ever poet had unshaken hold of the realities of life — of those influences through which our lives endure — it was he. It is well to compare his attitude toward those realities with that of some who profess to deal with nothing of less [page 155:] moment. In a treatise entitled Educational Reformers the impartial author writes as follows: —

“So says Wordsworth, and if this assertion cannot be verified neither can it be disproved.” Had Wordsworth not said so, this gentleman would scarcely have ventured to make the same statement on his own responsibility. It did not occur to him that a statement which can neither be verified nor disproved is irrelevant to any question; and therefore undeserving of notice by anyone. And as Wordsworth's poetry was written in accordance with the principles set forth in the foregoing verses, it is therefore as worthless as they. That Wordsworth's “assertion” required no proof did not enter the mind of this drowsy philosophizing pedant. If we do not live by admiration what, for example, is the purpose of all ornament and decoration in architecture, furniture, costume, etc.? If we do not live by hope, what is the meaning of all investment, speculations, preparations for the future, promises, and prayers? If we do not live by love, why does anyone care more for kindred than strangers, or for home and the home- land than for foreigners and foreign countries ? And if we do not “live by admiration, hope, and love,” do we live by con- tempt, despair, and hatred ? Muddle-headed pedants who mis- take uncertainty for impartiality invariably fail in any concrete application of the abstractions which they mistake for universal truths, and usually end by taking what seems to them the safe side in questions of art by writing down the poet or painter as a madman or an ass. It is thus that sundry sage reviewers have decided that Poe's Philosophy of Composition, with its account of the method applied by him in writing The Raven, is a hoax; and it was thus that various wise and upright judges of painting scouted Whistler's Ten O’clock Lecture.

To all such timorous and feeble spirits the worst, the in- corrigible vice of Poe was his originality. Whether as artist or critic his thoughts were his own, alike in conception and expression. In the domain of his art he recognized no superiors, for none were there; and for this he was not to be forgiven. No man, it is true, is so self-sufficing that his thoughts or [page 156:] his work are all his own. They are wholly derived from others — as theirs from one another or from others before them, through the endless succession of preceding generations. What remains his, and not theirs, is the form and impress given by his genius to the material which he selects for a given purpose. One man retails a dull story to wearied hearers. Another repeats the story and holds his listeners spell-bound, or thrilling with ecstatic merriment. Waggoners fetch a block of marble from the quarry. Michelangelo carves out of it a statue of Moses or David. A Greek or Roman poet tells the oft-repeated story of the princess of Crete. Titian, who knows the story, paints Bacchus and Ariadne. But who can trace the ultimate source of the masterpiece itself — of the forms, colors, tones, into which the artist wrought the substance of his work? — in which, as in all work animated by the same creative spirit, and shaped by the same creative impulse, the power, mystery and sacredness of life are gloriously manifest.

Preachers of the gospel of mediocrity have made the mosf of the fact that for the material of his creations the genius is dependent upon others. For the choice and use of that material he depends upon himself alone. His choice and use of it will be the best possible for the purpose which he, better than anyone else, knows how to fulfil. Hence the infinite variety displayed in the works of genius. Each artist is a king, holding unquestioned sway in a realm which he has conquered. Vermeer is not so great an artist as Rembrandt, but renders sunlight as well for the effects which he has chosen to set upon canvas. And who shall decide whether Rembrandt or Velasquez, or Rubens of Tintoretto, is the greater; or rather, who shall raise questions so idle? Here comparisons are odious, because quite futile and wearisome. Of the greatest artists we can but say that they are different — that one attracts us more than the other. We can hardly say that one is greater than another. It is but an idle fancy to set Shakespeare against Homer, or Milton against Vergil in barren controversy as to the absolute superiority of one over the other. Where excellence is of different kinds the varying degrees in those kinds in which it manifests itself afford no criterion of absolute superiority.

It is not to one another, but to servility, imitation, and timorous mediocrity that great minds, in art or elsewhere, [page 157:] are opposed. And from the other side servility, imitation and mediocrity totter with withered and shackled limbs to feeble war against them. Bitter and impotent has been its hostility to Poe. He dared display in his work and advocate in his writings the independence which was the boast of American patriotism; and the Puritan denounced him and his work as alien and un-American — an interloper of literature whose thoughts could strike no root in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. From all that the magic of his genius wrought he gave the world the fairest and the best; and his enemies swore that the flowers of his verse were but dead wax, not worth one honest pumpkin-blossom of homely, familiar imagination; that his jewels were paste set in gilded brass of a mad fantastic “pattern. The gloom, bereavements, and agonies of his life bore hard upon him and cast deep shadows on his pages; and pious critics called him a hyena, battening upon carrion of the mind. Of this last cry, indeed, his defamers are never weary. A moral miasma, they dolefully reiterate, exhales from Poe's writings, as from the reptile-haunted sloughs of some poisonous fen, whose reeking depths are hidden by the blooms of a rank luxuriant vegetation. His thoughts dwell longest upon themes of death and corruption. It is thus that a certain biographer-critic of Poe called one of his lyrics ?the ghoulish lines For Annie.”

Of course these bungling critics are here, as always, in the wrong. Of all Poe's verses those which touch upon mortality, upon the frailty, falsity, sorrow, and evil of life are the most marvelous in the story they unfold of the beauty, the grandeur, even the joy which his immortal genius wrung from the skeleton grasp of death. The awful silence and sickening chill of the grave could not palsy an intellect nor quench a spirit which dwelt in ecstatic reverie upon his own eternal rest, or in charmed and awful contemplation of the haunting questions of life and death, and of a world forever devoured by decay. Whatever of horror or gloom is proper to the themes of these poems is lost in the beauty and majesty with which a sublime imagination has invested them. Like Annabel Lee, of which in certain respects it is an exact converse, For Annie is a song of love triumphant over death. In the former poem the life of the bereaved lover is brightened and exalted by memories of her whom he has lost. In the latter the grave itself, otherwise but a refuge from the dreary [page 158:] agonies of life, becomes a joyful home through the remembrance of a woman's tender affection for the dead.

No doubt this last is a most extravagant fancy; and it is but a morbid view of life that calls our existence “the fever called living.” But there is perhaps equal extravagance in our everyday sayings about turning over in one's grave, or the stones of the street crying out against wrongs. And must Shakespeare stand rebuked for making Macbeth talk of “life's fitful fever”? or Kent of “the rack of this tough world” ? Are Hamlet's words to Horatio mere idle whimpering? —

How monstrous, too, the extravagance of the reflection ascribed by Homer to the king of the gods of Olympus as he looks down upon the immortal steeds of dead Patroclus — “Ah, hapless twain, why gave we you to the chieftain Peleus, that is but a mortal ? and ye two are free of old age and deathless! — Was it that ye might have miseries among ill-fated men? For of all the things that breathe and crawl upon earth nowhere is there aught more wretched than man.” And how inexcusably morbid is the concluding stanza of Burns's Man was Made to Mourn!

It would seem, therefore, by the foregoing example, and others which might be cited, that the play of Poe's imagination upon life and death was not so fantastic after all. And if he leads our way along paths untrodden by his critics, why heed their warnings against being lost with him? Is it any vagary to dwell, as did Dante, in the fascination felt by all who thoughtfully contemplate the terrors and mystery of the tragedy of life — for how vain to deny that, on one side, our life is tragedy! Was his imagination more feverish than those which created Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; Cocytus, Styx, Lethe, Phlegethon; Charon and Cerberus; the Gorgon, the Harpies, the Furies? Was he raving when he wrote the lines? —

These “ghoulish lines,” For Annie, are among the most beautiful in our language. Once we understand their motive, there is nothing frightful or grotesque in them. The glowing imagination which fused their various elements in subtle and glorious unity has purified those elements of every trace of the dross of gloom and earthiness. The genius which chose them for the structure of the fabric wherein they lie magically combined has wrought them into forms of delicate and surpassing beauty; and in the tragic opening stanzas the glory which illumines the later ones is heiglitened. No cries of horror, no tones of passionate grief are heard-nothing but a single deep sigh of mingled weariness and relief, as the free spirit bids farewell to life's ruinous cares and sorrows, to dwell in heavenly thoughts and memories of the love that glorified its latest moments.

A certain analogy of conception may be traced between For Annie and the following passage of Hugo's Les Misérables, which was written, some ten years later:

And it is not impossible that some who see, or affect to see, sublimity in those words, find nothing but inane or ghastly trifling in the lines of Poe: —

Some who would find nothing in this poem — a work of art beyond praise — might well prefer the real emptiness and sounding brass of Omar's “Turn down an empty glass,” or “Yet Ah! that spring should vanish with the rose,” etc. Others again would set a higher estimate on Bryant's Thanatopsis, with its impersonal treatment, its austere abstraction, and rather colorless and barren moralizing. In Bryant the contemplation of nature can dispel the gloom arising from thoughts of death. To how many, to whom, for whatever reason, that source of strength and consolation is closed, has Thanatopsis given comfort? Like many an author of Puritan ancestry Bryant had no wide range of sympathy. In the philosophy of Thanatopsis there is no room for human affection: —

This question of Bryant's finds an answer in the lines of Gray: —

Thanatopsis reflects the ideas and feelings of a time when the descendants of the Pilgrims of Plymouth had lost their belief alike in the hell of Jonathan Edwards and the heaven of St. John and in immortality altogether — when they secretly acknowledged a materialistic belief which they were ashamed or fearful to profess openly. “Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust approach thy grave,” Bryant bids his reader, who may well reply, “In what is my ‘unfaltering trust’ to repose?” Compared with For Annie, Thanatopsis is cold, lifeless, even somewhat self-satisfied and pedantic. Dr. Bryant offers us, as it were, a panacea strange to the taste and of questionable efficacy; for, like the doctor in Macbeth, he concludes his prescription by virtually telling the patient to be his own physician. There is better healing for us in Poe's Conqueror Worm, in whose Aeschylean grandeur is lost that numbing horror of death which Bryant, apparently, would have us merely disregard. Poe has drained to the dregs the cup which Bryant will not taste, and finds in it a truer inspiration. For after all his communing with Nature, Bryant says [page 161:] much less, and what he does say to much less purpose, than Wordsworth in the last of the sonnets to the River Duddon: —

In the concluding lines of this sonnet of Wordsworth's appears the underlying thought of The Conqueror Worm. Ludicrous, hollow, pitiful, grim, and vile is the “motley drama” of our life in many of its aspects; yet “an angel throng” are the spectators gathered to witness it; and not in base, futile mockery, but in awe-stricken, wondering sorrow, does Poe tell of the dread mysterious play upon which celestial witnesses are looking down: —

It was Matthew Arnold who, “with excellent intent,” called poetry “a criticism of life. “ If it had been his way to mention the writings of his greatest contemporaries for other purposes than fault-finding or making fastidious comment upon such merit as he saw fit to notice or understand in them, what would he have said of this poem, according to the terms of his own definition? —

It might be said that this sublime song of death bears comparison with any other of its kind in the language. But how many of the kind does our language offer for comparison? Before Poe, where shall its parallel be found? The dirge of Fidele in Cymbeline stands apart, unique, incomparable; but The Conqueror Worm is not a dirge. Gray's Elegy deals with another aspect of death. Poe's matchless lyric is something more than an elegy. And if with either of these comparison is impossible, it is quite futile when we turn to other poets, early or late. Alone among the masters of our language has Poe compelled death's horror to render beauty. From the thoughts of mortality forgotten or shunned by other poets he drew supreme inspiration. If his glorious utterance is anywhere approached, it is only by such as have striven to emulate his transcendent example; and only in such attempts does any parallel to his masterpiece appear. One recalls Swinburne's Forsaken Garden as perhaps nearest in treatment of the same subject. But beside The Conqueror Worm, this poem is cold rhyming prose, with no touch of the passion, the Titanic agony, the awful grandeur, the ineffable beauty of Poe's marvelous verse. Far less will Rossetti's Cloud Confines bear the test of comparison. [page 163:]

It is needless to dwell upon those works of Poe which have commanded the world's admiration from the time of their first appearance. Even to the dullest the merits of these are evident in some measure. But it is an interesting, an instructive, a delightful occupation to examine those features and qualities of his works which hostile critics ascribe to him as defects, but which investigation soon reveals as excellences.

Certain sagacious editors and critics have a knack of demonstrating their own infinite superiority by pointing out what they consider absurdities and inconsistencies in the productions of the great men whom they profess to admire, but really distrust and despise. It was not for Poe to escape a fate which has befallen every other child of genius. In the concluding stanza of The Raven one sage observer has noted that ebony bird beguiling his sad fancy into smiling by casting a shadow on the floor while perched above the door on a bust of Pallas! Now what impossibility does this phenomenon present? The raven's shadow may be thrown upon the floor by a lamp shining through a light of glass in a wall above bird and bust and the door over which the bust is set — for we are nowhere informed that this room with its rich furnishings and silken curtains has but one door — that it can be entered only from outside the house. Nor is this the only explanation of the supposed inconsistency so glaring in the microscopic vision of a hair-splitting critic.

Quite another objection is that raised by a phalanx of commentators equally minute in their method, who, arrayed beneath the banner of Emerson, repeat his sneer at Poe as “the jingle man” — whatever a “jingle man” may be. Now this derision is an irresistible reminder of Emerson's unavailing efforts to persuade Walt Whitman to expunge or omit from his forthcoming Leaves of Grass certain passages unique in their way, and admired by some, abhorred by more, but quoted by none. And in its turn, this remembrance awakens a recollection of the “Good Gray Poet's” comment upon the Sage of Concord, made, no doubt, as a partial consequence of Emerson's having found these blades of Whitman's poetic pasture much too coarse and foul to crop. “At times, it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer, or Shakespeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes superb verbal [page 164:] polish, or something old or odd — Waller's Go, Lovely Rose, of Lovelace's lines To Lucusta (sic) — The quaint conceits of the old French bards, and the like. Of power he seems to have a gentleman's admiration — but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of God and Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, conceits, polite kinks and verbs.”

Emerson called Poe “the jingle man,” and Emerson's most uncouth, most chaotic, and withal, most applauded admirer, Walt Whitman, finally called Emerson “a lover of polite kinks” — whatever is implied in this term. It is when censurers of Poe begin censuring one another, however, that some force is apparent in their animadversions; for the faults of the censurers aforesaid are writ so large that he who runs may read them, and the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot err therein. One of the collaborators of that ingenuous symposium, The Cambridge Modern History, remarks of Poe — whom he calls “a sporadic man of genius” — “But if it is asked what he really had to say, the answer must be the same as that of any similar question concerning Bryant or Cooper, or Irving, or Brockden Brown; namely, not much.” Now if the reader asks what this peremptory chronicler has to say, in his turn, of American art, the answer can only be, much less than nothing. Here is his account of the matter — “In fine arts other than that of literature America has not yet found very characteristic expression. Its sculpture and its painting have been so far modelled on the contemporary work of Europe that the only American sculptors or painters who have attained high excellence have generally been resident abroad.” Such a statement clearly reflects the ignorance of the bookworm who has no idea of the purpose and meaning of art. That individuality is everything in painting and sculpture; that the painter or sculptor is more than a suave imitator or docile copyist; that the phrase “the art of Europe” is meaningless except as it indicates the difference existing between and within the art of France, of Spain, of England, Italy, Norway, Russia, Serbia — of every country in Europe possessing art of its own; that American artists are none the less American for having resided or studied in Europe; none of these facts appears to have come within the range of the mental vision of this sapient critic, who does not even mention Whistler, Sargent, Inness, French, La Farge, and other American artists, whose achievements in painting and sculpture were [page 165:] certainly equal to those of their countrymen foremost in the field of letters.

Such are the critics who assure us that Poe's verse is a jingle of euphonious nothings. Bret Harte, who seems to have held a similar opinion, expressed it indirectly, but with more emphasis, in his attempted burlesque of Ulalume, which he seems to have regarded, not only as a meaningless jingle, but a jingle of monotonous and exasperating repetitions. One may vainly search the works of Poe, however, for any trace of the over-elaborate humor of Harte's A Venerable Imposter, or the floundering smartness of his Stage-Driver's Story, in one of which the astute author jokes with very apparent difficulty; while in the other he is so sharp as to cut himself with a clumsy tool appropriated by him to a stupid use.

Poe's poetry is called vague, meaningless, jingling, trifling, etc., etc., for the same reasons that Whistler's painting was called slight, thin, smudgy, foggy, meaningless, and the like. And this is as it should be, for those who make such statements simply know not whereof they speak. Poe's theory of art was much the same as Whistler's, and his practice a rigorous application of the theory.

The one artist wrote his poems in accordance with the same principles on which the other painted his pictures. Assuredly the “repetitions” observed in Poe's lyrics have a well-defined object. In the sense conveyed by hostile critics most of them are not repetitions at all, but skilful variations of fine, telling phrases, pregnant with meaning, and rich in rarest melody, whose recurrence advances the intended effect of the poem just as the calculated “slight” successive strokes of Whistler's brushes — sometimes no more than fifty in three hours — developed and heightened the effects of the masterpieces upon which they were set. Ulalume, a target of ignorant scorn for Bret Harte and others, is a case in point. In setting, it is like one of Whistler's Nocturnes. In its apparent repetitions, it is suggestive of his Symphonies in White; and just as one of his Arrangements in Black, or in Black and Brown, merely gains in depth and atmosphere, power and charm, through comparison with a full-length portrait by another artist, so at the challenge of comparison with the lyrics of any other English poet does Ulalume reveal depths of beauty not at first apparent: — [page 166:]

The county map does not, of course, indicate the whereabouts of Lake Auber or the forest of Weir; so much the worse for the county map at such a juncture. We do not read poetry for lessons in geography, chemistry, physics, or even psychology. And anyone who cannot appreciate the excellence of the means by which Poe heightens the impression which he intends to convey in this passage will do well either to quietly reflect upon the quality and effects of such poetry as he can truly appreciate; or to follow the example of His Gracious Majesty King George II, of blessed memory, so far as poets and their works are concerned. A work of art, whatever the medium in which it is rendered, is but the reflection of a certain conception of him whose creation it is; and in the finished embodiment are mirrored the multitudinous ideas and impressions which his conception involves. Necessarily, the artist, if a master, alone can decide whether or no a given work reflects his conception well or ill; for he alone knows precisely what his ideal was. For him, therefore, to accomplish a finished work is to reproduce his conception — to convey to himself, so to speak, a concrete impression of that conception as exhaustive as his mastery of the medium of his art enables him to effect. If, when this is done, the reader, auditor, or spectator, remains unmoved by the masterpiece, his want of appreciation is but the outcome of defects of observation, experience, or sensibility. Such is the case with the critics who have sneered, laughed, or blankly wondered at Ulalume. How admirably, in a few expressive words, has Poe pictured the shadowy region in which the scene of the poem is cast! With what simplicity, vividness, and truth, does his verse mirror the haunting terror of those mysterious woodland waters which linger so dismally in his memory! Here, as elsewhere throughout the poem, are found the happy effects of the subtle variations employed by him. “The dim lake” — dim with its [page 167:] perennial mists, offering little to the eye, and much to the imagination, imparts a feeling of mystery; “the dark tarn,” an emotion of ominous repulsion from the gloomy lake — an emotion which subsequent passages arouse in increasing intensity until its climax is reached in the concluding stanza, where the dread secret of this strange forboding is disclosed. In this passage Poe's second touch is stronger, more definite than his first. Exactly the same is true of the parallel phrases “the misty mid-region of Weir,” “the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. “ Like others of the sort, this apparent repetition is in reality a masterly variation, throwing the feature presented into vivid and magical relief. A converse effect is seen in the lines: —

“Pointed to” is a more decided and definite expression than “hinted of”; too decided, indeed, without modification, to present the intended final effect; for it apparently implies that morning was at hand. This idea is, therefore, appropriately qualified, and the true meaning of the phrase given, in the next line; for the star-dials cannot point to the morning-hour which renders them invisible. Their pointing is but a hinting of the coming of day. In the subsequent verses Poe reverts to his former method of variation, with an effect more easily felt than described; for in a context like this, to attempt any such description is

What poet of our language has pictured the mild mysterious glories of the rising moon and the starlit heavens in words of power and charm more subtle and varied than Poe has displayed in this poem of the night — this nocturne in verse, which bears us far into the depths of the weird realm of Dis?

So much, then, for the “jingle” of Poe's verses. All music is “jingle,” all art trifling to the barbarian and the carper. [page 168:] As for the meaning of the poem — the “psychological significance,” which is the only significance pedants can see, or think they see, in poetry — its language is surely clear enough to make that meaning plain to anyone who understands English. But what of the thought ? What has Poe to say to us here? Nothing, replies

What has Mozart to say? Again, nothing. What has a lark or a nightingale to say? Still, nothing. What has the mocking-bird to say? Why, something when he mimics another bird; nothing when he sings his own song. What, then, has a frog to say? Something very distinct, occasionally. What has a parrot to say? Oh, a great deal! Ah! we are on the right road at last. What has a dinner-bell to say? A world — a universe — an infinity of fine things? So runs the full text of this passage in the catechism of every Shakespeare's Ajax who has spoken of art only to jeer at Poe, Whistler, Rembrandt, Sappho — at everyone who has expended thought, feeling, and energy in filling the world with beauty for men to admire and owls to hoot. “The Viscount” and Mr. Pip abhorred Shakespeare's plays as a collection of sermons. The Puritan and Philistine despised them because they were not sermons. Shakespeare himself spoke of finding sermons in stones and good in everything. That Poe found good in every- thing his poems are decisive proof. Keats discovered matter for discourse in a grasshopper and a cricket, and Shelley found in the cloud something possibly as good as a sermon. But little “thought,” of course, appears in his poem of that name. And yet it might have been well for the eighteenth century wiseacres who sneered at Hogarth and! for Sir George Beaumont and other nineteenth-century Daniels come to judgment upon such heretics of the palette as Constable and Monet, if they had had some inkling of the meanings expressed and implied in Shelley's phrase “the million-colored bow.” A lit- tle knowledge of this sort would have kept them from talking nonsense on the subject of color in nature and in painting. And the acute critics who took Whistler's Old Battersea Bridge for a fire-escape, and the barge underneath it for a fiddle-case are of the same breed as those who find no “thought” in lyrics such as Ulalume; for of the thought which goes to create such a work of art neither sort have any conception. [page 169:]

In the tempestuous voyage of his life Poe had encountered many a school of these critical porpoises. The value which he set upon the wisdom of such “Solomon Don Dunces” is perhaps more clearly shown in playful passages like his jeu d’esprit, An Enigma, than in any of his criticisms — none of which are directed against intellects of such calibre as theirs, except in merry banter.

There is little doubt that Poe's speculative opinions, as expressed in various writings, drew upon him charges of pantheism and atheism, and the ban of Puritanic theologians. These opinions found final utterance in Eureka, which, with apparent inconsistency, he published as a poem, though the entire composition is prose.

The germ of Eureka is to be found in Poe's Island of the Fay, where, indeed, occur the very words with which the larger work ends: —

“Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand — notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood — that space, and therefore, that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately such, as, within a given surface, to include the greatest possible amount of matter; — while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it. And since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle — indeed, so far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the operations of Deity — it is scarcely logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, — where we daily trace it, — and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within cycle without end — yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit divine? In short, we are madly erring, through self- esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or future [page 170:] destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast ‘clod of the valley,’ which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he does not behold it in operation.”

The underlying idea of Eureka is the same as that of Tennyson's Higher Pantheism and Flower in the Crannied Wall. The same thought may be found in many passages in Wordsworth, notably Tintern Abbey, Hart-Leap Well, and Laodamia. None of these poems evoked condemnation from the literary oracles of New England. And Poe was hardly to be blamed for offering to sympathetic spirits “this book of truths,” as he called Eureka, “not in its character of truth-teller, but for the beauty which abounds in its truth, constituting it true” — words not far removed in meaning from Keats's

The criticism of Eureka advanced by his enemies is merely this — that he used what scientific knowledge he possessed as a basis upon which to found the theme of his poem, and that his scientific knowledge was so faulty that the poem was left upon a foundation altogether insecure; that its science is false, and its poetry illusory. But Poe intended Eureka to be a poem involving science, not as a piece of science with a poem subjoined to it. Eureka cannot be assigned to any single branch of science, while relationships with every branch are implied in the assumption upon which it rests — the assumption that man and the universe which he inhabits are emanations and embodiments of Deity. This view has been scouted and roundly condemned alike by certain men of science and certain theologians; for in modem science, as in the theology of the past, there have appeared men who would circumscribe all thought within the narrow and rigid limits beyond which their own fossilized intellects never venture. Poe was ridiculed for the preeminent importance which he ascribed to intuition among mental operations — for saying specifically that Kepler guessed the laws which bear his name. The attitude of his critics in this matter finds an appropriate commentary in the following passage from Lafargue (The Socialist Ideal): —

Poe's critics, it seems, discerned the scientific errors of Eureka by intuition alone; for none of them ventured, unaided, to demonstrate what and where those errors were. Their criticism of the poetic merits or demerits of this work is another matter well worth considering, in its way. Thus Mr. Woodberry, Poe's New England biographer, confesses himself unable to make any original criticism of the scientific [page 172:] arguments contained in Eureka; and states that this portion of his life of Poe was supplied by a California professor. But Mr. Woodberry's criticism of the poetic shortcomings of Eureka is not merely original, but altogether unique. Here it is: —

“Nor, were Eureka to be judged as a poem, that is to say, as a fictitious cosmogony, would the decision be more favorable; even then so far as it is obscure to the reader it must be pronounced defective, so far as it is understood, involving as it does in its primary conceptions incessant contradictions of the necessary laws of thought, it must be pronounced meaningless.”

This is indeed a monumental, or as some have said, a “pyramidal” censure, in which an apex or vanishing-point of literary judgment is gloriously attained. The significance of the whole passage is expressed in the last word, “meaningless,” which, incidentally, renders superfluous all that precedes it. Whether Mr. W. was indebted to himself, or to some vicissitude of typography, for the form and punctuation of his last words on Eureka is not clear. But such is the form in which they appear in his biography of Poe. The only sense to be gleaned from them is that Eureka “must be pronounced defective,” and “must be pronounced meaningless.” Well may the reader retort in the words, though not in the spirit of Shylock, —

What meaning can attach to the phrase here employed by Woodberry — ”the necessary laws of thought”? The laws of such thought as a Woodberry can comprehend, perhaps; and, by the way, what is a “necessary” law of thought?

A later and more appreciative biographer has taken exception to the humorous passage of Eureka. But as the Bible abounds in passages not altogether dissimilar; and as Homer and Shakespeare are by no means devoid of downright fun in certain apparently strange contexts — as witness the opening lines of Book 22 of the Odyssey, or the Porter scene in Macbeth — perhaps Poe also may be excused on this score.

By his enemies, especially his New England critics, Poe was regarded as irreligious, skeptical, flippant, frivolous, ac- cording to their somewhat arbitrary and uncertain standards [page 173:] of thought and conduct How would they have jeered had anyone hinted that he was a prophet such as they talked of, but of whose existence — except in legend — they themselves were ultra-skeptical. Yet when we consider the pseudo- philosophers of his own and of later times — the Benthams, Mills, Spencers, Proudhons, Lombrosos, Nordaus — and review the course of events in the world at large since his day, particularly those of the last decade, is it possible to deny the profound insight of the following passages from his Colloquy of Monos and Una? —

“You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers — wise in fact, although not in the world's esteem — had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term ‘improvement’ as applied to the progress of our civilization. . . . Occasionally the poetic intellect — that intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of all — since those truths which to us were of the most en- during importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight — occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men, the poets, living and perishing amid the scorn of the ‘utilitarians’ — of rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title which could have been properly applied only to the scorned — these men, the poets, pondered piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days, when our wants were not more simple than our enjoyments were keen — days when Mirth was a word unknown, so solemnly deep-toned was happiness — holy, august, and blissful days, when blue rivers ran undammed, between hills unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and unexplored.

“Yet these noble exceptions from the general misrule served but to strengthen it by opposition. Alas! we had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days. The great ‘movement’ — that was the cant term — went on: a diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art — the Arts — arose supreme, and. once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect [page 174:] which had elevated them to power. Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of Nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God — in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven — wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil — Knowledge. Meanwhile huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and the far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone-that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded-it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the mousike which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the soul! Alas for him and for it! since both were most desperately needed when both were most entirely forgotten or despised.

“Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly! ‘que tout notre raisonnement se réduit á céder au sentiment’; and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing was not to be. Prematurely induced by the intemperance of knowledge, the old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. [page 175:] But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all arts. In history of these regions I met with a ray from the Future. The individual artificialities of the three latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied; but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be ‘born again.’”

These words are worth recalling today when the world has seen the deadliest, the most destructive and the most insane of wars precipitated upon it by the nation which Western civilization had long acclaimed as foremost in arts and sciences -as leader in every field of knowledge.

A convincing example of the degree to which “civilized” man latterly became “infected with system and abstraction” may be found in that blossom of German science, Nordau's Degeneracy. When the learned author of this most ponderous volume assured the world from the pages of his Bible of putrefaction that feeble-mindedness is betokened by the use of such expressions as “of course,” “generally speaking,” “to a certain extent,” “in the rough,” “as they say,” and the like, the reading public took him seriously, of course, and listened with due solemnity to all that he had to say on the subject of art, and literature, and every other subject which he chose to touch-particularly the future of civilization. In a word, he was recognized as a newly-risen prophet of science, whether true or false. In Poe's country, a book of anonymous authorship, yclept Regeneration, was written to confute Nordau; and to point the fire of this masked battery, the volume was prefaced with an introduction by a professor of a wellknown university, who hit upon the excellent device of binding a false magician in the malign spell of his own black art by applying to Nordau his own favorite epithet “degenerate.” In doing this the ingenious professor lost sight of two trifling circumstances; first, that, in adopting Nordau's undefined and meaningless phraseology, he merely realized the old saying “Imitation is the sincerest flattery”; second, that Nordau was [page 176:] not a degenerate — whatever that is — but simply an ass, whose pretended science is merely a wallowing in the mire of stupidest misconception. Behind it all, one finds in this supposed seer of psychology the most vulgar prejudices against Belgium, France, Norway, England, Russia — against every nationality but the writer's own; and whether Nordau is a German Jew or a Hebrew German is hard to say.

Of Nordau's “master,” Lombroso, to whom the pupil rendered such solemn homage in his preface of Degeneracy — a homage which the “master” had sense enough to partially reject, for he condemned the lumbering lampoon when it appeared-a suggestive glimpse is given in Lafargue's essay on The Woman Question: —

“History contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra-scientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that always and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had been shut up in the house in the woman's apartments; if such had been her lot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the positive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois philosophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better: he seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority of woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male criminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the statistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferiority.”

It is not surprising that, amid the stupidities in which the pursuit of “science falsely so-called” has involved our civilization — “science” which we now see bent to a world-wide, self-renewing task of havoc, pillage, and destruction — that amid these ineffable stupidities, mankind should become illiterate in exact proportion as their self-imposed mental and spiritual bondage bereft them of sincerity and kept them in ignorance of all matters where good taste and true feeling are essential. Many moderns, who laugh at the mediæval practice of referring all reasoning to dogma, see nothing anomalous in their own incorrigible propensity of thinking according to formula. The modern philosopher or critic constructs a sort of intellectual sausage-machine, into which he empties all the material of his thought, and out of which, by undeviating process, [page 177:] he grinds his infallible product. Nordau's Degeneracy, and Taine's History of English Literature are two examples of the working of this convenient method, which takes an honored place among the many things “made in Germany.” The author who thinks as he writes, and, when pressed in argument, advances demonstrations afforded by his own reason and experience, and declines to fall back on proofs furnished solely by authority, is looked at askance by the neophytes of modern science. Such was the fate which overtook Karl Marx in political economy; Tennyson in poetry; Whistler and Poe in artistic criticism. That Poe was well aware of such vicious and servile tendencies in modern thought is evident from the tenor of all his works, and appears quite clearly in the following extract from his Domain of Arnheim: —

“That the true result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles, is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The negative merit suggested appertains to that hobbling criticism, which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, while that virtue which consists in the mere avoidance of vice appeals directly to the understanding, and can thus be circumscribed in rule, the loftier virtue, which flames in creation, can be apprehended by its results alone. Rule applies but to the merits of denial — to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed how to built a “Cato,” but we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an Inferno. The thing done, however: the wonder accomplished; and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now found the loudest in applause.”

In one of the Marginalia Poe exposes a most ludicrous dogma originating in the perverted reasoning characteristic of the pedants of science both of his times and of our own — a dogma to which we owe much of the absurd practice of modern education: —

“The theorisers on Government, who pretend always to ‘begin with the beginning,’ commence with man in what [page 178:] they call his natural state — the savage. What right have they to suppose that his natural state? Man's chief idiosyncrasy being reason, it follows that his savage condition-his condition of action without reason is his unnatural state. The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which his 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.”

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some unmistakable token of “the loftier virtue, which flames in creation” appears everywhere throughout Poe's writings. The subtle, incommunicable method of genius, its mastery of the material of its art, speak from his every page. How vividly are his varied and countless effects produced! How profoundly suggestive do we find his quiet, apparently commonplace, words and phrases, which one hardly appreciates at the first reading — such, for example, to quote but two, as the following from William Wilson: —

“At this moment I felt a hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear.”

Certain writers of the present day make a sprawling fumble at forcible expression by using the word “sense” as a verb meaning to perceive by whichever of the senses the reader finds hinted at in their nonsense. Poe knew his business better. He tells us that the whisper was felt — not heard, as most writers would have been content to put it.

Equally significant of his magical power is this other passage from the same story: —

How much of the tragedy of this incomparable tale centres in those three words, “with a slight sigh”! Poe knew the [page 179:] values and uses of language as the values and uses of structural materials, colors, and sounds, are known to the architect or artisan, the painter, and the musician. And because he did not scatter abroad the treasure to which he was born an heir, and which throughout his life he infinitely increased — because he did not scatter his wealth abroad, as a drunken sailor flings coin among a crowd, he has had no such following as Walt Whitman, Browning, and some others, who survive as founders of cults of oddity in literature.

The final test of virtue is that it is true to itself to the end. That Poe's genius fulfilled this test — confirming his own saying that “the highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility” — is clearly proven by the fact that besides Eureka, which occupied his latest years, several of his finest poems belong to the close of the same period. The Bells, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, and For Annie, were written in the year of his untimely death. And when his critics have said and done their worst, these poems are no more the work of a drunkard or an opium-eather [[opium-eater]] than Lenore or The Raven — than Adonais, or Crossing the Bar. When we consider the themes of Annabel Lee, Ulalume, and For Annie, and the circumstances under which these poems were written, we can only say of their author, in Shakespeare's words :

There was, indeed, much method in what Poe's enemies considered his madness, which escaped their obtuse perceptions altogether. This was one reason why the refined humor of his comic tales was lost on them. Their dull apprehensions saw nothing but purposeless extravagance in such stories as The Man that was Used Up, or Lionizing, with its incomparable sketch of the lions at dinner — Sir Positive Paradox, Aestheticus Ethix, Bibulus O’Bumper, Ferdinand Fitz-Fossilus Feltspar and the rest, each taking his own “specialty,” and finally, the hero talking his own: —

“There was myself. I spoke of myself: — of myself, of myself, of myself; — of Nosology, of my pamphlet, and of myself. I turned up my nose, and I spoke of myself.”

“How absurdly overdrawn!” exclaimed Poe's critics, disconcerted and chagrined to see their world depicted to the life [page 180:] in a few deft strokes. Surely never was such preposterous, flaunting egotism, as Poe's caricature presents. Nevertheless, something of the identical sort appears in the writings of Matthew Arnold — as e. g., in his Celtic Literature: —

However Matthew Arnold conversed, this is how he wrote — occasionally. And Matthew Arnold was by no means the most egotistical man of his day.

The more one studies Poe as a man, the more is one impressed by the facts that tell so decisively in his favor. He was what modern pedants call “inefficient” in the sense in which Mr. Nupkins applied the term to the special constable. He failed as a hack, and as a sleek, prosperous nonentity. But he triumphed gloriously as a representative of his country in the world of art. He died, says one hostile and fastidious critic, under circumstances of exceptional gloom, distress, and ugliness. The same statement may be made with equal truth, of Simon de Montfort, Wallace, Joan of Arc, Raleigh, Nathan Hale, most of the twelve apostles, and some thousands more who died in various fashions unworthy of their desert, but of whom little record survives. And this critic, like all the rest of his tribe, is careful not to go into exact detail as to how Poe came by his death. He lived and died a martyr to the indifference of the majority of his countrymen, the hostility of the literary cliques of his day, and the adverse conditions under which his profession labored. This latter feature of the situation is revealed in his own incisive comment: —

Of the thousands who have shed recurrent floods of tears over the woes of an imaginary “Uncle Tom,” how many have wept or blushed at the servitude imposed upon the literary [page 181:] helots of America, as described by Poe in his Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House?

Woodberry, whose Life of Poe is Griswold and water, was driven to make the following significant confession among various others: —

“The constraint and inconsequence of general talk,” by this showing, seems to have been a characteristic feature of the society in which Poe encountered the various luminaries of the contemporary galaxy of New England genius, of which Margaret Fuller was one bright particular star. Perhaps Woodberry was careless in this bit of description. But his statement seems fully borne out by Lowell's verses descriptive of a fashionable gathering of that time: —

On the whole it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world of his day would have been none the worse had Poe been placed beyond the reach of poverty, and full scope given for the exercise of his powers in a field of his own choosing. And much, if not all of the waywardness and eccentricities of his conduct may safely be ascribed to his never having known the love and guidance of wise parents in his youth. He had, indeed, a kind stepmother. But it does not appear that her nature or experience enabled her to take the place of the mother whom he lost so early, and so tragically. Until he married, Poe never had a real home; and what home meant to him maybe seen in his Eulalie, which glorifies the happiness which his young wife brought into his lonely existence; in the dirge Ulalume, and the threnody Annabel Lee. [page 182:]

And Poe's own funeral song — is it not written among his poems? Was not the story of his end already told in those last, prophetic lines of Lenore? —

And may not our final judgment of him find partial expression in the very words in which he apostrophized one of the heroes of his own romances? —