Text: Norman Douglass, “Edgar Allan Poe from an English Point of View,” Putnam's Magazine (New York, NY), vol. 5, no. 4, January 1909, pp. 433-438

[page 433:]

MUCH has been written of late concerning Poe, but his personality splits up so much more easily than that of other authors into separable fractions, that it is still difficult to estimate him as a harmonious whole, an individual. There is the Poe of French writers, the Poe of Ingram and of Griswold, the Poe sane or insane (to adopt the classification of Mr. Willis), Poe the critic, the husband, the drunkard, the martyr and so forth. Professor Woodberry has disentangled and re-arranged certain of these aspects with patient but chill discrimination. To present them in such a manner that their coherence is seen to be inevitable is the task of a literary biographer; but before the fabric can be erected, each part must be considered and appraised in its relation to the whole. Poe's views, for example, upon domestic architecture and furniture are pronounced; they form a minute but integral portion of himself. Until they have been judged in their relation to the other portions and traced to their sources in his reading, his age and his heredity, how shall the picture be complete?

Nor can his literary personality be regarded otherwise — at this time of the day — than as an expression of bodily organization. Enough and to spare has been written upon certain aspects of his moral life. We all know that he drank. But not all critics are yet equipped with a [column 2:] knowledge of the pathology of mind sufficient to enable them to pass judgment upon the sombre, lovable and mysterious being, as he is depicted by those who sympathized with him in the closing years when he was tossed in an ocean of vain hopes and vain regrets. Who is not moved by Mrs. Weiss's account of that visit to the Hermitage? Some of Poe's epistolatory effusions, on the.other hand, leave a bad taste in the mouth. His last years both as a man and a writer are full of jarring notes, of conflicting elements which must be separately analysed before they can be welded into a homogeneous whole. Not every critic possesses the requisite sensitiveness, veracity and sheer learning for this work of reconstruction.

The “good woman,” unfortunately, has a knack of coming too late upon the scene, and when at last she does appear, she is apt to eke out lack of sense with superfluity of feeling. Such was not invariably the case with the tender ladies whose names are associated with Poe's later life, yet they certainly failed to understand the case of Edgar Poe as a whole: how else shall we explain the posthumous publication of his miserable outpourings to them? Such an act savors little of wisdom or womanly modesty. To brandish aloft the scalp of a conquered enemy may suit the humor of a redskin, but not of a civilized lady who has been honored with the confidences of a distraught and dying genius. If the hearts of all men and of all women were laid bare with the same remorselessness, how few would stand the test! [page 434:]

There is Poe the American, whose patriotic labors have perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated by his countrymen. It is not easy, nowadays, to realize the low position which American letters then occupied in the world's opinion, and the slavish adulation with which every product from the European literary market was greeted in the United States; not easy, therefore, to estimate the extent of Poe's labors — how he encouraged American writers of every stamp, coaxed them, drove them, pushed them the way they should go. Some talk of:his “regrettable scarification” of the New York literati. They must have been a thinskinned generation, these literati!

“Is there no honor — no chivalry left in the land? Are our most deserving writers to be forever sneered down, or hooted down, or damned down with faint praise?”

That does not sound like scarification. Taking his criticisms one by one, it will be found that the proportion of favorable, indifferent and unfavourable ones is, approximately, as 3: 2: 1 — showing that for each unfavorable review there were five not unfavorable. Surely this is a high allowance, considering the amount of trash before him. An equal number of similarly incapable British scribblers would not have been let off so easily. One author is surprised that none of his critiques is “unreservedly laudatory.” This simply means that they are conscientiously written.

Essentially, however, Poe was both non-American and non-English. The promptings of his blood were Celtic and Latin. He had a classic sense of analysis, form and measure. For this justesse he has been held in high repute by French writers, and it is certainly not without a feeling of propriety that he has given French names and extractions to the heroes of his tales of ratiocination (Dupin, Le Grand). Truth versus Goodness is the keynote of his intellectual strivings. He had a bald love of truth which puzzled and pained [column 2:] many good folks. Lowell observed that he “seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art” — in other words, that scientific criticism, as Poe conceived it, is in a manner un-moral. Lowell, to be sure, wrote in 1845. But Mr. Stoddard has also remarked of some of Poe's tales that “the power of such writing is certain: its use, its good, its sanity, are not so certain.”

Are we never to grow out of this doctrine? A healthy person, who refuses to be hampered with preconceived notions of wrongness or ugliness, will find that Poe's ghoulish tales, like many “unhealthy” writings, deal with interesting subjects in an interesting manner. What more shall be expected of an author? Doctors tell us that hypersensitiveness in the matter of what is morbid or immoral is far from being always a good sign. And it has ever been the misfortune of writers possessing mathematical consciousness of purpose that they are exposed to the criticisms of others who, in their anxiety to save their souls from hellfire, have not acquired the mental outfit necessary for grasping their initial proposition.

A consideration of Poe's tales would be a good occasion for discussing the question of local color in fiction. Where precision in data is required, no one is more precise than Poe. But it seems to me indisputable that, for the subjects generally chosen by him, his own indefinite atmosphere is the most suitable. To-day this is a matter of sentiment, but the reader of the future, approaching these questions with increasingly scientific canons of taste, will be enabled to draw increasingly truthful conclusions upon them.

There is a more general agreement that Poe was right as regards the length of his tales. The English public alone continues to think somewhat strangely upon this subject, for a generation fed upon the gross fare of the Victorian epoch has naturally acquired a palate too vitiated to savour the delicacy of simple tales. To them such entremets, [page 435:] which none save a real chef can prepare, are things of air — things French, dilettantish. And yet, as if to convince them of their error, the English language boasts of some of the finest specimens of that ideal microcosm, the short story. Its proper length is suggested by the organic laws of our own body — one hour's continuous careful reading. The author must be allowed time to engross, by means of his intellect, that of the reader; for a short story is a self-consistent entity, with head, body and tail all complete, and not a mere “taste of your quality”; yet if it be too long, the reader's attentive faculty is strained beyond the capacity of esthetic appreciation. In this form of composition, the author will exercise a judicial sense of measure; in the more personal prose poem, which conveys, rather, certain fleeting dispositions or emotions, he may allow free rein to his fancy, his humor, his erudition, his spleen — so long as he attains his end: the awakening, in the reader, of a particular mental mood. If these rules are correct, it will be seen with what unerring instinct Poe conformed to them in both these classes of composition.

His women have been described as imponderable: Yet they are not, like many women in fiction, evanescent. Ligeia is a phantom, but a phantom that has come to stay. I confess that it needs a robust imagination to conceive Berenice smoking cigarettes and eating strawberries at a picnic. Morella was not much of a flirt. They are hopelessly unfit for the ordinary routine of life, for charity bazars and the bringing-up of children; they have nothing of that air of probability which distinguishes most of our flesh-and-blood acquaintances. But perhaps for that reason they have ceased to be nonentities. A few more such shadows might profitably be acquired in exchange for a herd of our amazingly lifelike heroines of fiction.

It is not to be supposed that Poe ever came in touch with the East, but his artistic feeling suggested to [column 2:] him both its uses and its limitations as a subsidiary ornament. He lacked the broad human sympathy requisite for writing Oriental tales; he never attempts to smother us in harems and such like paraphernalia. Like the gold flakes in the chinks of some faded masterpiece, the Orientalism of Poe is so sparingly dispersed — an almost imperceptible touch, here and there — that none save a connoisseur is able to feel what the loss would have been, if that touch had not been given. Note, likewise, his parsimonious but judicious use of the Gothic. “Some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine”; or “The pomps and pageantries of a stately Court, and the mad clangor of arms . . . oh, bright was the seraph Ermengarde!’‘ What an instantaneous disposition of mind is awakened by this artifice! Yet it is a singular fact that Poe was deficient in all sense of the peculiar lustre of Gothic and Saxon words; his prose is redundant in Latinisms which weaken its effect incalculably, though the formal solemnity of some of his compositions is thereby enhanced. Strange to think that, in a matter of this kind, Herbert Spencer (‘The Philosophy of Style’’) should have a truer insight than Poe the artist.

Monsieur Hennequin has insisted upon the originality of Poe. He is original — he is always Poe, although some of his tales, like “Hop-frog,” “William Wilson” and possibly “The Landscape Garden,”* can be traced to earlier sources. From the first to the last of his writings is revealed little change in the texture of his mind. ‘’Eureka”’ is embedded in “E; Araaf [[Al Aaraaf]],” “Eleonora” in “Tamerlane.” In “Landor's Cottage,” one of the last of his studies, will be found reminiscences of at least six previous tales. Poe was prodigious in intellectual versatility — in variety of material, [page 436:] singularly poor. But this organic poverty must not be confounded with artificial simplicity, with the deliberate repetition of set words and images whereby the haunting charm of his verse and tales is often contrived. Perhaps, under the influence of stimulants, there arises a tendency to reproduce identical modes of thought; even as a dream, interrupted, may be resumed when the conditions which: gave it birth are repeated. It is probable that some of his best writings are the direct result of alcohol.

The “Assignation” (“The Visionary”), an early and relatively poor performance, is in this respect perhaps the most characteristic of his tales. It reeks of alcohol; it displays alike the power and the weakness of the delirious imagination which flows from the bottle. The reader is oppressed with I know not what sense of distortion and dislocation. There is a restless flicker of fantastic metaphors and inconsequential interjections. Sometimes the imagery glows in steadier blazes, as in the fine passage beginning “The eye wandered from object to object, and rested upon none,” which is further interesting as exemplifying Poe's dearth of material — the carvings of Egypt recurring in “Ligeia,” convolute censers and trembling draperies likewise; crimson-tinted glass in “The House of Usher” and in the “Philosophy of Furniture,” carpets of gold in the last-named and in “Ligeia” — and so forth. An unusually good “alcoholism” occurs in “Monos and Una”: “Issuing from the flame of each lamp (for there were many) there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone.” Future physiologists may investigate what condition of the cerebral structure is requisite to produce an image of this kind.

What is Poe's life-work? His influence upon literature as a civilizing and purifying agency. Poe is a great anti-vulgarian. As such, he has discarded the ethical moment, [column 2:] and in doing so, he has followed the footsteps of the masters of all ages. Why is it that didacticism in poetry was so offensive to him? Because it constitutes an intrusion of ethics into art, an intrusion which arouses, even in ordinary minds, a sense of incongruity and impropriety.

This whole question of morality in art is neither too difficult nor too delicate to be probed to the bottom. Philosophers may grow gray in theorizing upon the growth, the laws and limitations, of the moral sense of mankind; but there is, and there can be, nothing new about morality in the ordinary acceptation of that term: the whole body of it is reducible to a single word — charity — and that word is plain to an infant's understanding. To burden dainty verses with a load of maxims regarding the inadvisability of coveting one's neighbor's wife and other matters that we babbled on our nurses’ knees, is as incongruous as serving tripe and sausages (healthy fare, no doubt) upon a platter of Benvenuto Cellini. There is no poiesis in a didactic work of art, and whoever eliminates the moral moment will discover often that he is eliminating, simultaneously, the vulgar moment. For morality is the property of the crowd; it bears an inscription that damns it for all purposes of art: connu! The minutest hint of a moral. lesson is a generalization: generalizations cannot awaken emotions like single images, and therefore morality should not intrude where the awakening of emotions is the primary object.

Without professing to any special knowledge on the subject, I should say that Poe's influence upon the development of American letters is somewhat underestimated, not as a direct model for prose or poetry, but in a general way for the principles of truth and honesty laid down by him that are naturally difficult to trace to their source, seeing that they have become so thoroughly assimilated by the national literary mind that it forgets whence it drew them. [page 437:] They have indeed become part of the mental atmosphere necessary to every decent writer.

But he has had a number of direct imitators. “Hans Pfaal’‘ has inspired Jules Verne, and the Sherlock Holmes series could not have arisen but for Poe. The author of that series has thought so highly of him that he has embodied the spirit, or spiritualized the body, of another of Poe's tales (‘The Cask of Amontillado”’) under the title of “The New Catacomb,” in the collection known as “The Green Flag.’

Some authors, Mr. Andrew Lang among them, have suggested the question whether Poe was not born at an inopportune moment; meaning, presumably, that under other circumstances of time and place he would have met with a more sympathetic reception. Likely enough he exemplified, in more ways than one, the irruption of an older type into an immature stock, and suffered accordingly. For at that period of national growth there was little tolerance of anti-social habits among the cultured society of the States; the phenomenon known as the New England Conscience seems to have been, geographically speaking, less localized than at present. But this ill-treatment of Poe by his contemporaries has been absurdly exaggerated. It would be nearer the truth to say that he was surrounded by firm friends of both sexes who helped him whenever they could, and who defended his memory with quixotic ardor after death, though his peculiarities while living must often have repelled and exasperated them. It is frequently said that the time is not ripe for this or that man of genius. If one cares to pursue this line of argument at all, it may pertinently be asked, where is the time or country that needed Poe as badly as the America of 1830, when Poe reached manhood? His appearance at that hour was singularly appropriate. We must hence conclude that such men ought to be born twice; once, to teach their lesson [column 2:] to humanity, and again, to profit by it themselves.

Mr. Briggs once made a remark which seems to express a still current opinion, to the effect that Poe had “an inconceivably extravagant idea of his capacities as a humorist.” I cannot but think that this whole aspect of Poe's literary career has been wrongly interpreted. Poe, to whom pecuniary assistance in moments of direst distress was galling, probably simulated this opinion of himself in order to hide the true state of affairs, even as he is known to have assumed relative affluence to dissimulate his poverty. It is hardly conceivable that he should have been mistaken in his self-analysis — he knew better than most authors his own strength and weaknesses. And among his deficiencies is certainly to be reckoned a total lack of humor.

Like many individuals of flawed brain-structure, he took himself au grand sérieux, and could not unbend to laughter. He never passed out of the “misunderstood” stage.

Thus sang the boy, and felt the man. But it is unlikely, I think, that a writer of his exquisite sensibility could have written these “ humorous” sketches with any other feeling than repugnance; he must have writhed while prostituting his pen for this drivel. Yet it was paid for, as we know, at the same rate as his best work; and starvation was the alternative. The sad multiplicity of these tales of humor would proclaim his frequent and extreme destitution, did we not know it from other sources. “We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon.”

Though the world, alas! has seen other cases of a strain of humor appearing under a strain of hunger, it is not easy to discover, in the [page 438:] whole range of literature, more piteous documents than these particular tales of Edgar Poe. Baudelaire, who was joined to him by elective affinity, or, as Poe himself would have expressed it, by “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature,” has hit upon a happy phrase for this unhappy state — les stérilités des écrivains nerveux. And how aptly De Quincey, himself of this class, has described that agony of paralysis, that anguished suspension of all the powers of thought:

Suppose the case of a man who has helpless dependents of this class upon himself, summoned to face some sudden failure of his resources: how shattering to the power of exertion, and, above all, of exertion by an organ so delicate as the creative intellect, dealing with subjects so coy as those of imaginative sensibility, to know that instant ruin attends his failure.

Might he not have had Poe in his mind's eye during one of those moments when the poet stood, helpless and distracted, beside his wife, who lay dying upon a straw mattress with not even a blanket to protect her from the wintry frost? Under such conditions, that lasted for [column 2:] months, let any endeavor to write of Verse.”

In judging of Poe's sufferings, his own nature, that intensified them a thousandfold, must not be left out of account. The stupendous Beethoven is the most awful example of such a fate — awful from the contrast between the sublimity of his mind and the meanness of his daily cares. But Beethoven had lighted his torch at no earthly altar; he was no mortal, but a Titan smiling with Promethean composure upon the vultures that devoured his heart. Poe was only a neurasthenic Jittérateur, tortured with a lamentable craving for alcohol, and with a craving for beauty and refinement which, considering the circumstances wherein Fate ordained he should live, was hardly less lamentable. His life and his life's work have been widely, though not universally, misunderstood. Time will give the unhappy writer his deserts. An eminent critic has remarked that the literary case of Poe must be periodically re-judged. The same applies to his moral case.

And each time, let us hope, we shall attain a nearer approximation to verity.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 435, column 2:]

* A. J. Downing. A treatise on the theory and practice of Landscape Gardening, adapted to North America, with a view to the improvement of country residences. 8vo, 1841. I have not seen this work, but I understand it has little in common with Poe's story. Yet the title may have given him the idea. Pueckler-Muskau, Lenne and others had made the subject popular.