Text: Michael Allen, “Personalities and Critical Controversy,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 40-55

[page 40:]

III

Of course, there is a sense in which personality has always been a constituent of journalism, in the sixteenth century as well as in the twentieth. But I shall be concerned in this chapter and the next to define certain specific ways in which literary personality functioned in early- and mid-nineteenth-century magazines. As soon as one begins to analyse the conventions, it becomes clear that they represent different manifestations of personality from those we might associate with Nashe on the one hand or with Edmund Wilson on the other. The most striking of these manifestations was that species of controversial thrust and parry which, in this period, assimilated the word “personality,” as a technical term, to itself.

 

I. THE CONVENTION OF “PERSONAL” CONTROVERSY

Traditionally, Poe's vituperative, splenetic, and controversial assaults on the New York and New England writers [page 41:] of his time have been interpreted in terms of his own psychological disorientation. Quinn suggests that the attacks were “apparently made to satisfy some bitterness of spirit which demanded expression.”(1) Edmund Wilson calls them “neurotic as all Poe's work is neurotic.”(2) It is only fairly recently that Sidney F. Moss has suggested that this contentiousness was not principally an expression of “inward sources such as spite and envy,” but a deliberate assault on the literary monopoly of the New York and New England cliques “shaped by the exigencies of attack and defence.”(3) It remains to be shown how central this convention was to the literary journalism of the earlier nineteenth century. In the Reviews, in Blackwood's and Fraser's, even intermittently in Bulwer's New Monthly, the most immediately arresting way of engaging the reader's attention was found to be contentiousness. So widespread was this journalistic convention that the word “personality” came to be used primarily to describe it. As late as 1846 there was clearly mischief in Poe's sub-title to the Godey's “Literati’ series, “Some Honest Opinions at Random respecting their Autorial Merits, with occasional Words of Personality,” despite his later protestation that ‘the legitimate meaning” which he gave to “the word ‘Personality’ “ should not be distorted into that of “private scandal or personal offense.”(4)

Of course, natural spleen and the personal feuds of individual writers gave vitality to the conflicts generated by journals and journalists. But there is no doubt that journalists of the period recognised a specific and conscious convention of conflict. Even as the editor of a small newspaper from 1818 to 1819, De Quincey, who was hardly vituperative by nature, had developed a ‘vocabulary of abuse ... copious, richly varied, always incisive, and garnished with [page 42:] the graces of scholarly illustration and allusion,” and he clearly regarded “personal” controversy as a necessary convention. “If the Chronicle knocks the Gazette down one week,” he wrote cheerfully, “the Gazette must get up and knock the Chronicle down the next ... there is no unpardonable crime but tediousness: and no sin, past benefit of clergy, but dulness ... ”(5) In this general historical context one can perhaps give some credence to Poe's claim in 1848 that his savage attack on a New York writer, T. D. English, aimed at a specific journalistic effect (without losing sight of the vindictiveness that was also involved):

Bulwer had similarly recognised the publicity value of personal attack, referring to an assault on him by Fraser's as that “calumniation which is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can bestow upon us but also the only service he will perform for nothing.”(7)

 

II. USE OF THE CONVENTION IN BLACKWOOD'S

The “personal” aspect of Poe's early reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger was seen by contemporaries as derived from the splenetic tone of British critical controversy: and when the Newbern Spectator had accused him of assuming “the tone of a Walsh, a Blackwood or a Jeffries,” [page 43:] Poe, after a sneer at the paper's ignorance, showed himself pleased to accept the comparison.(8)

The central element of Blackwood's appeal at the height of its popularity had been its livelier, coarser, and more provocative adaptation of the “personal” critical tone which the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had developed, using it to create a political and regional furor. Blackwood's slightly inflated the “gentlemanly” standards of the Reviews in order to produce the intense and snobbish social elitism with which it assaulted “pimpled Hazlitt”(9) and the other “Cockney” writers. According to the first “Cockney School” article, “All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings,” whereas the work of Leigh Hunt displayed his “low birth and low habits.” Not only was Hunt plebeian, but he had “shallow and impotent” pretensions to learning, the accomplishment of gentlemen, while his audience was a “pretty numerous’ but ‘very paltry and pitiful” one, composed of “milliners and apprentice-boys.”(10) The immense effect of this play on social and regional antipathies in London was vouched for by Hazlitt, one of its “Cockney” victims;(11) but Edinburgh Whigs and even Tory writers were castigated with the same social weapons. Coleridge was sneered at because of his association as a Unitarian preacher with tradesmen, “whose company must have been most odious to a Gentleman”; while the autobiographical note in his and Wordsworth's writing was proclaimed conceit and arrogance and contrasted with the well-bred reticence of Scott, Campbell, and Moore.(12)

The air of arrogant superiority, so characteristic of Blackwood's, was intensified by using and exaggerating the force of the authoritative plural pronoun of the Reviews: [page 44:] “We have done,” begins the last paragraph of the scurrilous article on Biographia Literaria. “We have felt it our duty to speak with severity of this book and its author’; or the reviewer assumed the omnipotence of Jehovah: “Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eye shall be upon him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him.”(13) The anonymity, which sometimes, at least, indicated in the Reviews a sense of common critical responsibility, became in Blackwood's an affectation of snobbish superiority(14) and a further source of sensation. The rhetorical superiority which this assumed aristocratic confidence gave to the Blackwood's writers allowed both abuse and pious exhortation to be directed against anyone who contravened or challenged the conventions of society. But there was more posturing than real conviction about it. In the main, the London Magazine was justified in its accusation that the “licentious personal abuse was ... the lure for one class of readers, and the ... hypocritical whine, on matters of religion and politics, the bait for another.”(15)

 

III. USE OF THE CONVENTION BY BULWER

Malcolm Elwin suggests(16) that the immense impact of Fraser's on the periodical scene in 1830 made Colburn, the owner of the New Monthly, replace his rather negative editor, Campbell, with the brilliant young Bulwer in 1831. Fraser's, fully exploiting the inherent appeal of literary conflict, had lost no time in savaging the Whig magazine and the Whig writer separately.(17) Bulwer had already replied in the dedicatory epistle to Paul Clifford,(18) and Colburn as publisher of the novel had apparently exploited the controversial [page 45:] value of this epistle and the book's satiric portrait of ‘”Macgrawler,” the Scotch critic, to increase sales.(19) Then, before Bulwer became editor, he had been challenged in one of Fraser's attacks on him to reply in the New Monthly.(20) Certainly, in these circumstances, Colburn may well have thought that Bulwer “might be expected to evoke retaliation, and infuse into the magazine a vitality palpably lacking under Campbell's regime,”(21) through a literary controversy of the Blackwood's kind.

Despite his professed intention to “wean the public taste from all relish for these disgusting personalities,”(22) Bulwer did eventually take up the challenge of Fraser's on its own ground, and followed up his assault on “the Great Unwashed”(23) in Paul Clifford, in a tone of superiority rather reminiscent of Blackwood's earlier invective: “Our readers may be aware that there exists a stupid, coarse, illiterate periodical, published once a month, and called Fraser's Magazine.” After refuting, rather too heavily, a Fraser's attack, Bulwer tentatively projects a continuation of the campaign (perhaps hoping for some support from correspondents):

But Bulwer was completely outmatched by the Fraser's writers, who handled abuse with more deftness and satiric caricature with devastating effect. For instance, in one of the many ‘”Noctes” type symposia in which Fraser's excelled, [page 46:] he was depicted as suing for the editorship of Fraser's, nodding nonchalantly to his acquaintances while a street minstrel blew a pipe by way of “pitching the proper note” for each of his periods. One of the features of the Blackwood's campaign which Fraser's took up was the mischievous invention and distortion of names called “mystification.” And in all the tricks of “mystification,” like the pretence that “L. E. L.'s” glowing portrait of Bulwer in an 1831 New Monthly was his own autobiography or the methodical confusion of Bulwer's second name with that of a stage-comedian of the time,(25) the Scotch journal had the advantage. Bulwer admitted, in a later issue of his magazine, that he was not equipped for producing this kind of scurrility. He quotes several correspondents as saying, “You are not severe enough ... You want causticity ... A little malice would improve you wonderfully ... ,” and admits, “If we look to ‘Blackwood's Magazine’ we shall certainly find that this ‘spirit’ is more attractive than the genius which the weightier articles often possess.” But he tells those who want him to “infuse more of the Devil into our pages’ that they must take his faults in this respect as inseparable from his virtues of impartiality and consistency.(26) And his other campaign of literary controversy during his editorship, though still “personal,” was at a more dignified level. His attacks on the editing, politics, and defective learning of the Quarterly Review led up to a superb piece of invective in which Lockhart's style and syntax, personal merit, and editorial integrity were subjected to withering sarcasm and lofty dismissal(27) (“Sir, I have done with you for the present”). This campaign, which effectively silenced(28) a veteran controversialist like Lockhart, can hardly have been without popular appeal. [page 47:]

 

IV. POE'S PRACTICE

Poe's bitter and vehement “personalities” of the 1840's stand in this tradition although some of them did not actually appear in magazines in their most offensive form. One must number among them the attacks on C. F. Briggs, L.. G. Clarke, and T. D. English in the 1846 Godey's series, “The Literati of New York”; the sharper versions of these prepared for book-publication; the “Reply to Mr. English and Others” (1846);(29) some anonymous articles(30) in various periodicals (on Clarke,(31) R. W. Griswold,(32) and Longfellow(33) ); and the ruder contributions to the controversy over Longfellow's “plagiarism.”(34) Poe's practice was to combine the cleaner methods of Bulwer with the more traditional weapons. He used the authoritative “we” to weight his scorn and condescension, but only in three articles did he take advantage of anonymity as the earlier journalists had done. He, too, was capable of rhetorical tricks like the insulting mistaken name,(35) the sneering reference to physical appearance.(36) But rather than assuming definite social authority as the Reviews and Blackwood's did, he asserts an intellectual superiority and allows a sneering social innuendo to creep into the argument. In this he is closer to Bulwer, as a comparison of his “Reply” to English with the latter's “Letter” to Lockhart (which he knew) demonstrates.(37) Both writers devastate the grammatical errors of their opponents and from these slide easily into the accusations of ill-education and vulgarity. “It cannot but delight my readers,” says Bulwer, “to find that he who gravely admonishes others in the highest branches of letters, would scarcely be competent to teach English to a preparatory school ... ”(38) “No spectacle,” says Poe, “can be more [page 48:] ludicrous than that of a man, without the commonest school education, busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind on topics of polite literature.”(39) Lockhart has transplanted “ ... the language of the chambermaid to the pages of a Critical Journal.”(40) English “has at least that amount of talent which should enable him to succeed in his father's profession — that of ferryman on the Schuylkill — but ... to prosper in any higher walk of life, he must apply himself to study.”(41) Poe here may lack a little of the easy detachment of his British contemporary, but there is no doubt about their shared method.

For the early reviews, in which he first made his reputation for “cutting and slashing,” Poe acknowledged a specific European precedent in the kind of high-spirited and sometimes savage critical caricature used against the “Cockneys” by Wilson in his guise of “Christopher North.” In fact, the more light-hearted critical caricaturing, which originated largely with Wilson, probably had more appeal than the vituperation of the other principal contributors. J. G. Lockhart, Blackwood's other main writer, admitted(42) that Wilson's vivid caricature of Hunt as “King of the Cockaigne”(43) was more forceful than a “ton of bitterness” from himself. And this pictorial invention lived on in Wilson's power for vivid and telling critical caricature after the libellous excesses of the magazine had been curbed. When, in 1835, Beverley Tucker complained to White about the “unbecoming” mixture of “levity with severity”(44) in Poe's notorious review of Fay's “Norman Leslie,” White had apparently passed the letter on to Poe, who answered it, defending himself by reference to a specific Blackwood's “Cockney” review: [page 49:]

The review in question(46) was of a poem called The Age, and Wilson, with his accustomed gusto, places the unfortunate author in various ludicrous situations, providing “Christopher North” with breeches (in which the critic strikes various poses), bathing in a pond (instead of the fount of holy contemplation), and so on. The tone is on the whole one of superior good humour, despite the abusive terms — ”’blockhead,” “dunce,” “idiot” — which are applied to the tailor. He is finally dismissed with an immense weight of contempt:

The ejaculations Poe mentions do not occur in the review, but they seem to represent for him the literary personality of “Christopher North,” which he vividly evokes in his review [page 50:] of Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, imagining “the long loud and jovial resonation of his wicked, uproarious ha! ha”(47)

Wilson's kind of spirited projection of the critic's personality into superior caricature and horseplay, clearly influenced “Norman Leslie” and Poe's other notorious early reviews, although the moral objection he expresses in the letter to Tucker is reflected in a milder vocabulary of abuse. Poe's most sustained piece of caricature is that in which W. G. Simms is imagined personally dedicating The Partisan to a Southern gentleman, Richard Yeadon, and in consequence being kicked downstairs by the latter.(48) All his reviews of this kind carry a forceful concluding blow although it is usually less pontifical than Wilson's. In “Norman Leslie,” after a cumulative account of the author's use of the word “blistering,” Poe concludes, “But we have done with Norman Leslie, — if ever we saw as silly a thing, may we be — blistered.”(49) In their tone, with its exuberant superiority, its scornful placing of the offending writer outside the elite, these early ‘personalities’ are very reminiscent of Blackwood's.

 

V. THE USE OF REGIONAL ANTAGONISM

The Blackwood's controversialists intensified their campaign against Leigh Hunt and his circle by stirring up regional loyalties and mounting a Scottish attack on the English literary metropolis, “Cockaigne.” And Bulwer in his feebler attack on the “Scotch Critics” was consciously trying to reverse the direction of the regional appeal. The aim in both cases was to associate true “gentlemanliness’” with a particular regional centre, and designate the opposing [page 51:] centre as “vulgar.” Poe tried to inflame regional and social feeling at once in his sorties into critical controversy in exactly this way. His early attacks on the New York writers in the Southern Literary Messenger were decidedly regional in appeal and intention. And there is no doubt that Poe saw himself as the Southern champion of a truly national literature in his later battle against the New England writers: “As we very confidently expected,” he wrote grandly in 1845,

He then launched into one of his more violent pieces of vituperation against the “Frogpondians.”

Poe's contribution to the development of a Southern regional consciousness, the literary assault on “Frogpondium,” was clearly intended as a journalistic campaign of the same kind as the famous Blackwood's social and regional attack on “Cockaigne.” Poe's efforts to stir up a sensation at the expense of the Bostonians were strenuous. His dislike of them permeated his later burlesques, “topicalities,” and criticism quite as thoroughly as did the anti-Cockney feeling in similar pieces in Blackwood's, and he urged others too to “come down on the Frogpondians.”(51) The accusation of plagiarism, which his campaign so depended on, was always a useful weapon in the British literary conflicts. (“Imitators — imitators are the Cockneys all. They can originate nothing,”(52) said “Christopher North,” [page 52:] and he devastated even the unfortunate tailor with the charge of plagiarism.) And the habits of cliquishness, self-esteem, and mutual puffery which so raised Poe's gall in the writers of the East, were those very metropolitan attributes which Blackwood's had most effectively scored off with “just so much of that kind of one-sided justice which belongs to satire, as not to seem to the ordinary public ... unfair ... ,”(53) as Bulwer put it. For Poe, with less justice, “Frogpondium” became the centre of a great literary conspiracy whereby mediocre writers were “puffed” to fame at the expense of the unknown men of genius (like himself) whose work they plagiarised. He even saw his own prospective magazine in terms of literary conflict: it was to be, he said, “a journal in which the men of genius may fight their battles; upon some terms of equality, with those dunces, the men of talent.”(54)

When Poe himself became a New York writer and fell out with other metropolitan literati, he could always fall back upon the sense of superior status which went with his provincial loyalty. “Believe me,” he wrote to G. W. Eveleth about the exchanges with English, “ ... there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.”(55) The attack on Briggs had hinged on the imputation that he “would not succeed in delineating a gentleman.”(56) Poe's private defences of his “personalities,” and indeed of all his quarrels with editors and others, imply a specific and recognisable social code, which justifies such verbal violence, and this is not difficult to identify. W. J. Cash illustrates the Southern “notions of honor and decorum, of what is proper and becoming to the gentleman, which constitute the deeper essence of aristocracy,” as they were propounded in this period from Judge [page 53:] Baldwin's account of Sergeant Prentiss of Mississippi, and the similarity to Poe's controversial role is immediately relevant:

This character, a mixture of the frontiersman and the English gentleman in the style of Steele, Sheridan, and Fox, was overplayed and idealised, says Cash, because Prentiss was a native Yankee on the way to success in Southern politics, and Baldwin, who drew the portrait, “a Southerner of the best type,” was scarcely less successful. “Do I need to add,” says Cash,

In the same way Poe's sense of himself as a Southern gentleman, when this ideal image was still in the making,(58) was an important factor governing both his habitual friendly applause and support for Southern writers (and, usually, female writers) and his way of conducting literary controversy. [page 55:] As we shall see, his optimistic idea of a plantation aristocracy as the core of a nation-wide upper-class audience was also implicitly involved. An instinctive stereotyping of one's attitudes could be as important to the Southern gentleman-journalist (even after moving to the North) as to the Southern politician. Fatally for such plans, however, the Southern planters were interested in politics but not in literature; and no chivalric ranks formed up behind Poe in his attack on “Frogpondium.” Such support as he did receive for his controversial campaign came in the earlier years from some Southern newspapers, in the later years from a few disinterested literary men,(59) and from his friends in North and South.(60) Consequently his ready resort to elitist stances in public and private became an individual eccentricity rather than a stylised appeal to the solidarity of a more civilised region. “He seems to think,” said the Brook Farm Phalanx of Poe's crusade against the New Englanders,

Poe's regional controversial crusade could only be seen finally as idiosyncratic, as contributing to that mythic quality which L. A. Fiedler(62) finds in his “literary personality.” Poe, the Brook Farm Phalanx concluded,