Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Living Age (Boston, MA), seventh series, vol. XLII, no. 2, February 1909, pp. 500-504

[page 500, continued:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

While artists and critics will dispute to the end of time whether the state of a man's soul has all or nothing to do with his work, the general public has quite made up its mind on the question. Poe it speedily comprehended. For, finding no definite defection in his history so far as appertains to Mrs. Grundy's own peculiar province of ethics, it summed up its indictment against him in the one word “morbid.” It is a vague, borderland word, that may be used freely, and with effect, by all. Unfortunately, indefinite and partial charges such as these, besides being extremely difficult to meet, are impossible to rebut, since they are invariably founded on fact. It is certainly true that to America's most distinctive and most widely-acknowledged author mankind owes a debt resembling that which the rather sinister proprietor of the opium den solicits from his halfwilling but regular devotee. If life on earth be but a brief series of reminiscences, then Poe has whispered in our ear many that might more prudently have been left undisturbed. Take up his stories, and with fuming torch in hand he will lead you down into a labyrinth of gloom and foreboding as deep as that which Fortunato [column 2:] thridded in cap and bells to sip of the Amontillado. It is a region of the imagination — this principality of Poe's — to which fever, drugs, insanity give ingress. It lies deep in sub-consciousness, all but undreamed — of by many, peeped into, and as hastily as possible withdrawn from, by less fortunate adventurers. Poe breathed at ease in its suffocating atmosphere. It was to him as fire is to the salamander. Whole and hale, who thinks of pain? — against whose unimaginable activities insensitiveness is but the door on latch. So, too, for many wholesome minds fear and horror scarcely exist at all. But it is in early youth, before experience has taught him to appreciate the charms of sobriety in literature as well as in life, that Poe waylays his victim. His monstrous tales, with their heightened vocabulary, their crafty refrains, and all their bizarre and antique lumber, even their names, Ligeia, Morella, Berenice, capture the fancy. To come across them for the first time, or to read them again, later in life is still a remarkable, but it is not quite so overwhelming, an experience.

Had Poe in these stories “of the arabesque and the grotesque,” as they were first entitled, confined himself to [page 501:] horrors of the fancy and imagination; could he but with his originality and enterprise have foreseen the psychical enigmas that now engage us — his tales would certainly have gained in subtlety and power. But he habitually indulged what no art or dexterity can make really telling, an unsavory sense of the physically repulsive. His stories are gray with mould and mildew. Poison, plague, consumption, death-he is an expert amateur in their cumulative, fleeting, or confounding effects. He never wearies of prying and probing, even of sniffing. He makes no apparent effort to surmount the humiliating facts of our mortality. He cannot charge with beauty even the torturers’ tools, as does Webster in The Duchess of Mali. Swift has repelled many a reader, but his nastiness rarely failed to convey a hint of satire or irony. Poe was infatuated with the simple fact that when the golden bowl is broken tarnish sets in. Green graves fatten no mutton for him. He counts the maggots in Yorick's skull and ignores his jests. Never, perhaps, lived man before so generously endowed with waking and articulate nightmare; never, surely, one so fascinated by the paraphernalia of the charnel-house. It is a venial weakness of intelligence that revolts against the transmutations of disease and death. But Poe's mind, in this as in many other respects, like the minds of so many men of genius other than the greatest, was out of focus with the normal experience of humanity. He surveyed the world now through a telescope, now beneath a minifying-glass. He never knew the quietness and peace that a judiciously restricted outlook may bring even to those who might as deliberately have chosen otherwise. It was the misfortune of his temperament, the defect of his wonderful qualities.

It is not only the power of his imagination that makes Poe one of the few [column 2:] masters of the short story. Busy in its service were a logical lucidity, a keenness of intellect, a passion for proportion, for climax and crisis. The masterly combination of these diverse qualities is the secret of his art and its effects. However weird, however distorted his theme may be — and it was rarely anything else — Poe's presence of mind never fails him. His plot advances, without haste, with the clearest attention to every detail, to its overwhelming conclusion. Beneath all the vaporings and incoherence of the subject, we see M. Dupin of the Rue Morgue, rational and alert, dotting the “i's,” and crossing every “t.” Each blur of the mind in monomania is set in place, each nuance of a horrifying situation exactly adjusted. We may be in a lunatic asylum, but Poe at least is physician in charge. In his earlier and more beautiful work, in “The Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” in the “MS. found in a Bottle” he has not yet discovered the secret of his method. He writes simply of what possesses him. The genius is clear and engaging, the exultation in the work naïve and sincere. His later stories suggest the art of the conjurer who knows precisely what he is proposing to do and is a little tired of so often doing it, a little contemptuous of the spectator's credulity. And yet after discovering virgin and golden soil for these imaginative and analytical faculties to work on in harmony one with another, and with perfect ease and success — the unravelling of crime — he founded only three short stories on such a theme, “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” With such excellent opportunities as a talent for cryptogram and the hunt after buried treasure afforded him, he wrote only “The Gold Bug.” Others have garnered what he scattered. He was a pioneer. He staked out a claim; [page 502:] dug up a Koh-i-noor and wearied, yet restless, struck camp and ventured further.

Ordinary human affairs, the jog-trot of life, interested Poe, so far at least as his stories are concerned, scarcely at all. Even the murderer of the Rue Morgue is a gorilla. He gloried in darkness, in gigantic and spectral light. His moon is bewitched. His seas are supreme in volume and mystery; and they stretch from Pole to Pole. His sense of the mere drip of time from the tiny phial of life into the unechoing silence of eternity is unique. The churchyard is his chosen haunt, but no Elizabethan glowworm creeps upon its clods. He can fill a closet, a gallery, the firmament itself, with horror and darkness; he can mount into space with Hans Pfaall, and descend into indescribably horrible dungeons. His banquets would tempt a Beckford. His domestic economy resembles that of a Richmond Roy. He wanders craven and penniless in the solitude of a swarming and indifferent city in “The Man of the Crowd.” He squanders millions in “The Domain of Arnheim.” One week's diet in “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” includes olives, searotted ham, pickled tortoise, barnacles, with a garnishing beloved of the Anthropophagi. All is vast, abnormal, far-fetched. He scarcely alludes to quiet, delicate, lovely things; the familiarity and homeliness of life he left completely unrecorded. As for his humor, it is more revolting than the mesmerized corpse of M. Waldemar. When humor is wedded to horror, we get that atrocity “A Predicament.” His nebulous characters are moved by hatred, suspicion, remorse, exotic passion. The conscience of “Arthur [[William]] Wilson” is retributory and hostile, not the still, if somewhat inaudible, voice that haunts the inward ear of most of his fellow-creatures. Had Poe written these stories alone we should have [column 2:] gathered from them but a vague and incomplete knowledge of his personality. Hawthorne we know as intimately from his “Scarlet Letter” as we know Shelley from his “Epipsychidion.” But what precise ghoul, or phantom, is the author of “The Black Cat,” of “The Telltale Heart,” of “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

It is in his poems that we learn most, of the man himself. Yet even here is evident the curious duality of his mind. He imagines and creates; he analyses and goes very near to destroying. However vigorously we may reject his own critical dicta (so often and so clearly expressed) in their entirety or in their extremes, his own practice follows obediently on his own principles. So entirely in accord are they that we are tempted to believe that he discovered these principles by an arduous analysis of his own verse. He maintained that poetry has intrinsically nothing to do with truth or morals; that its only office and purpose is to give pleasure; that its only subject-matter is beauty; that its aim is indefinite, and music its chief instrument and delight. He denied that a long poem was even possible. There is little to quarrel with here, so far, at any rate, as lyrical poetry is concerned. But subjected to the too stringent application of this test the greater part of his contemporaries’ verse melted away. Tennyson, Moore, Hood, he considered, survived it. Longfellow, Emerson, and hosts of lesser men he laughed out of court. But apply it to “Ulalume,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Israfel,” “Lenore,” Poe triumphantly survives the ordeal. Indeed, in one of his many hoaxes of a very gullible public he professed to have evolved his most popular poem, “The Raven,” from its first emotional conception to its last technical trick of rhyme and metre, on the simple formula of supply intelligently answering to demand. “The average man has a craving for this kind [page 503:] of thing: here it is.” Hoax though it was, it betrays the analytical bent of his mind tampering with the creative. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” however, occurs the following passage: —

That (except for the “artificial”) is much nearer a true account of the actual conditions that have attended the making of every lyrical poem ever written, including Poe's own. Elaboration is a less instinctive, a more conscious affair. Even here Poe supplies his own example. “The Bells,” as it was originally published, consisted of nineteen lines; that was its nucleus. Poe, the craftsman, elaborated it into above a hundred. But he seems never to have been content with his miracles; they must be miraculous miracles. Not only must he possess genius, but, like Aladdin, he must be absolute and conscious master of that genius. And so he often wasted his rich mind on laborious trivialities. He wasted time and reputation too, reiterating charges of plagiarism against his contemporaries, small and great. He had little need to fear. His poems are essentially original in subject as in style; he alone made, he marred them. The verse has little grace and flexibility of rhythm, and much too much mere trickery. Even over so restricted a range of subject recurs a flatness of phrase, a deadness of thought in his poems that casts a doubt even on the sincerity of the emotion that evoked them. Yet, despite grave and vital defects, Poe's poems are saturated with some mysterious emanation. They haunt the memory beyond the exorcising of criticism and scoffing common sense. In every one lurks something of his mysterious personality, that phantom which never ceased for one instant of his life to absorb and to possess him.

It has been recorded by more than one of Poe's biographers that a single glass of wine was sufficient to intoxicate him. It is not difficult, by the aid of this one fact regarding his temperament, to realize how solitary and how beset with all the pains of over-sensitiveness such a man must have been. He lived in a world happily inconceivable to the great majority of his fellow-creatures. He not only lived in such a world; with unfaltering vigilance he watched himself, his every thought and action, during his sojourn there. He dissected every emotion, probed every wound, caged every fantasy. He analyzed his love of beauty, his ideals; and the analysis endangerd all. It is now conventional to talk of environment. Poe's imagination was his chief and his lifelong environment. All else by comparison was faint and immaterial. America justly, but not always too warmly, claims his genius. He was, however, a man of no time and of no place. He was an Ariel who had hob-a-nobbed — a little too intimately for his own peace — with Caliban. He is himself, in many thin disguises, the sole living and intelligible character in all his stories and poems — himself and that clouded, unearthly, beautiful abstraction called in turn by every lovely name he knew. His heart was in his intellect; and both were keenly engrossed in every remote problem and fantastic theory he invented or encountered. And such a man — arrogant, impulsive, intensely egotistic, passionate, and capricious Fortune, like the gentle Walton with his frog, used consistently as if she loved [page 504:] him. His father and mother died in his childhood in abject poverty. In his youth he was pampered and spoiled by a capricious and wealthy foster-father, to be banished in early manhood into the maelstrom of American journalism. What that life of incessant struggle against poverty must have meant for him the author of “The Premature Burial” never deigned to confess.

But Poe has survived and triumphed. In his own chosen and definite province of literature few approach him in power or achievement. He squandered ideas which countless men of talent and more than one man of genius have worthily inherited. The skill, the scrupulous patience, and the imaginative reach of the best of his stories are a joy to his fellow-craftsmen. Mr. Guthrie, in a portfolio of beautiful drawings just published so opportunely in view of his centenary by the Pear Tree Press (30s.) is one more of [column 2:] many artists who have found in him their impulse and inspiration. Work of vivid imagination is apt to oppress that of its reader. Poe's is verifying and suggestive. Even if in these illustrations there is little of the extravagance and fantasticalness so conspicuous in his work, and a more serene beauty, they are not the less witness to the power of the poems they enrich. Whether Poe misued or wasted his talents are questions graceless as they are vain. A passion for moral perfection — we cannot too often remind one another — is nothing but admirable if kept strictly for private use. But the world too gladly plays the cynical valet to its men of genius. The heart knoweth its own bitterness. And though few writers have striven as waywardly as Poe for their own undoing, it is now a matter of little moment that his friend and first biographer vainly endeavored to bury his fame at the crossroads.

The Times.