Text: Michael Allen, “Journalism as Art,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 101-112

[page 101:]

VI

In the letter he sent around to various writers in 1841 about his own projected magazine, Poe says, ‘The finest minds of Europe are beginning to lend their spirits to magazines.”(1) Here he is condensing considerably one of the facts of the previous thirty years most aired by the British magazinists themselves. “The greatest and best men of the age have not disdained to belong to the brotherhood,”(2) Wilson had written, and Bulwer admitted that the work of the great literary men of the age must be sought in the magazines.(3) In an intense young poet, forced by necessity to direct his limited energies into journalism, this participation of the great must have encouraged hopes of a fusion of high literary achievement with remuneration from the journals. In his letter to T. W. White of 1835, Poe had claimed not only that “the first men in England” had not thought magazine writing ‘unworthy of their talents,” but also that “some very high names valued themselves principally upon this species of literature.”(4) [page 102:]

 

I. LITERARY JOURNALISM AS ART

Poe was extremely logical in drawing out the implications of his position. If high art was to be written in magazines, then the forms and conventions of the magazine article must be given their own aesthetic rationale. The magazine must be seen, not as a repository for ephemeral work, the best of which is really designed for later book-publication, but as an art-field making its own unique demands upon the writer. This is the theory that, in an early review(5) of Dickens, underlies his recommendation to American writers to imitate British magazine articles; it explains the glowing panegyrics on the originality and variety of British magazine writing there and in a review of the work of an English magazinist, James Dalton (“the author of ‘Peter Snook’  ”).(6) And Poe's early view of the magazine as an art-field, making its own unique demands on the writer, produced frequent echoes of the golden age of British periodicals. “We apprehend,” the short-lived London Magazine had proclaimed in February 1821, “that Magazines will soon form the only literature of the country!”(7) Writers who were not novelists — like Lamb, Wilson, and De Quincey — had improvised their forms with the magazine particularly in mind, a different procedure, at least in intention, from the later use of magazines for the first appearance of book-material. And while Bulwer, with his novels behind him, could regret that these good writers had dissipated their talents by casting their work in such ephemeral forms,(8) De Quincey defended the form of Wilson's work, pointing out the advantageous brevity of the magazine article, the convenience of works which “lie ... in short and detached papers — that is, in the very state fitted for reading,”(9) the [page 103:] cumbersome nature of books — all of which, no doubt, provided a justification, too, for his own miscellany of magazine writings. In 1832 Blackwood's was, according to Coleridge, “an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters’ and formed “the golden — alas! the only — remaining link between the Periodical Press and the enduring literature of Great Britain.”(10) It is in this context, perhaps, that one can understand Poe's view in 1845 that American magazines had, as yet, achieved little: it was, he asserted, the originality and variety of European journalism alone which permitted him to call the magazine field “a very important branch of literature — a branch which, moreover, is daily growing in importance — and which, in the end, (not far distant), will be the most influential of all the departments of Petters.”(11)

 

II. CRITICAL “PERSONALITIES”’ AS ART

“What American writer,” Poe asked in the same article (a revision of the earlier review of Dalton's “Peter Snook),

I have quoted the passage in full to make it apparent that, despite the subordinate derogatory implications of “tawdry sophistry” and “misleads,” the tone here is primarily laudatory. What Poe admires, and calls “the perfection of Art,” is a carefully controlled manipulation of style to produce a particular effect on the reader. This is a very similar idea of “art” to that which he had developed with the short-story in mind in his Hawthorne review of 1842. Such an aesthetic notion of the critical review might seem to undermine its claims to be either true or untrue, just or unjust, and Poe's uncertain tone in the passage quoted suggests that he was partly aware of this. Elsewhere he changed the emphasis, writing that Macaulay, “ ... deeply feeling how much critical acumen is enforced by cautious attention to the mere ‘rhetoric’ which is its vehicle, has at length become the best of modern rhetoricians.”(13) But for one side of his critical activity, his “personalities,” Poe retained throughout his life a primarily aesthetic rationale.

When Beverley Tucker, in 1835, had questioned the justice of critical assaults like Wilson's on the “Cockney Tailor,” and Poe's on Norman Leslie, Poe argued that “levity” was artistically indispensable when the work under review was too foolish to be taken seriously. “How otherwise the subject could have been treated I do not perceive.”(14) And to defend his “Reply” to English in 1848, we find Poe repeating this aesthetic argument: [page 105:]

Poe had told Godey at the time of this controversy that he had “never written an article upon which I more confidently depend for literary reputation than that Reply.”(16) His concern for the aesthetics of controversy is demonstrated, too, when he criticises Bulwer's ‘Letter to the Editor of the Quarterly Review” (rather unjustly) as lacking vigour and wit and showing an “utter incapacity for satire,”(17) rather than on the basis of its degree of truth and fairness. And he seems to have seen his own criticism as falling into two categories. When, in 1845, he selected two representative reviews to send to R. W. Griswold for an anthology, one was the analytic review of Barnaby Rudge; the other was a cutting critique of a poet, Thomas Ward, which, he said, provided a fair example of the “style” of his “ ‘funny’ criticism.”(18)

 

III. MAGAZINE FICTION AS ART

Poe's most independent, and substantial account of the “art” of the magazine short-story was that presented in his Hawthorne reviews of 1842 and 1847:

This was an autonomous theory entirely appropriate to his own practice. On other occasions, however, he relied on conventional sanctions to boost the status of his fiction. One such strategy, as we have seen, was that whereby magazine fiction could be seen as involving learning and transmitting knowledge. Another, to which Poe's attitude was more ambivalent, involved attaching to fiction the higher prestige of poetry. Bulwer claimed, “Romance, though its form be in prose, does in substance belong to poetry, obey the same conditions, and necessitate the same indulgence.”(20) De Quincey justified the kind of vague imitation of German romance which he approved in Harriet Lee's The German's Tale, and wrote himself, by likening it to Shakespearian tragedy.(21) The early Blackwood's also provides examples of this “poetic” strategy. Of the tales he printed first in the early issues of Blackwood's, Wilson claimed that he had “wished to speak of humble life, and the elementary feelings of the human soul in isolation, under the light of a veil of poetry.”(22) What in fact he (and other Blackwood's writers) did was to produce a disguised prose version of “Lucy Gray,” “Manfred,” or “The Ancient Mariner”(23) with a few verisimilar details added: and for this mode critical articles and reviews in the magazine provided a theoretical rationale. “I have said already that I am a young poet, yet I am still doubtful whether to write in verse or prose,”(24) said one Blackwood's writer; “ ... the author of Waverley, [page 107:] single-handed, pours forth more good poetry in one year just now, than ever Sir Walter Scott did in two years when he was writing verses ... ”(25) said a reviewer of Wilson's tales when they were re-published as a book.

This strategy for the defence of fiction (and particularly for fiction in the German mode) was widely employed. But Poe was to some extent inhibited in using it by his habitual rigid distinction between poetry (metrical and the medium of feeling) and prose (non-metrical and the medium of truth). In his article on Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, in the Godey's series “The Literati of New York” (which he said had been hastily written), he wrote that “ ... Her prose is merely poetry in disguise. Of pure prose, of prose proper, she has, perhaps, never written a line in her life.”(26) He used the paragraph in which these words come twice more, in an 1849 review and in the book-version of the Literati(27) but in both subsequent reprintings the first sentence was excised, obviously because it clashed with his theory. Nevertheless, something analogous to the concept of “prose-poetry,” which many modern critics rely on to describe his tales, was clearly what he wanted. In his 1842 Hawthorne review he wrote that it was only in the class of rhymed poems that “the highest order of true poetry” existed, but that the “class of composition which next to such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfil the demands of high genius ... ”(28) was the prose tale. And, in his rationale of the German allegorical romance, he in fact comes close to a satisfactory theoretical justification for stories like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

His feeling that romance, as such, is suspect is apparent in 1836 when he describes German “Art Novels” as “ ... books which, in the guise of Romance, labor to the sole end [page 108:] of reasoning men into admiration and study of the beautiful, by a tissue of bizarre fiction, partly allegorical, and partly metaphysical.” He adds self-consciously, “In Germany alone could so mad — or perhaps so profound — an idea have originated.”(29) Undine troubled him, in his first review of it in 1839, by its closeness to allegory.(30) (His disapproval of allegory as essentially didactic was thus visible before he formulated it in relation to Hawthorne.) But he was clearly anxious to find a rationale for a mode to which he responded deeply, and which was close to his own. This he found in his concept of the “mystic” which he claimed to employ “in the sense of Augustus William Schlegel, and of most other German critics,” to describe “that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one.” This is, “What we vaguely call the moral of any sentiment. ...”(31) All those poems and “prose romances” which have been designated “imaginative” (Undine and the Destruction of Numantia by Cervantes are the only examples he gives of such prose romances) come into this “mystic” category. He was thus able to allow that Undine was not didactic, since its morality was “suggested”(32) rather than intrusively introduced, and here he actually called it a “poem,” though not subsequently. In his last references to the work he emphasised that this “mystic” quality conveyed philosophy and truth, though in a special way. “Beneath its obvious meaning,” he wrote in December 1844 of Undine,” there runs an undercurrent, simple, quite intelligible, artistically managed, and richly philosophical.”(33) And in the 1847 Hawthorne review the German work became an example of “allegory properly handled, judiciously subdued, seen only as a shadow, or by suggestive glimpses, and making its [page 109:] nearest approach to truth in a not obtrusive and therefore not unpleasant appositeness. ...”(34) The relevance of this intensive rationale for the artistry of the German allegoric romance to much of Poe's own work is obvious.

 

IV. THE ECONOMIC BASIS

Poe often said that journalism could fully aspire to the stature of art only in the right economic conditions, and that this was where the British magazines had the advantage. “How very rarely,” he wrote in 1845,

... are we struck with an American Magazine article, as with an absolute novelty — how frequently the foreign articles so affect us! We are so circumstanced as to be unable to pay for elaborate compositions — and, after all, the true invention is elaborate. There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine. The few American Magazinists who ever think of this elaboration at all, cannot afford to carry it into practice for the paltry prices offered them by our periodical publishers.(35)

An important aspect of Poe's interest in the British journals was his sense of the superior economic conditions under which their writers worked, compared to his own situation. Blackwood did pay his writers well,(36) following the example of the Reviews,(37) and urged them not “to harass or hurry yourself, but to print to your own mind, and at your leisure”;(38) and he claimed to be “anxious ... that able men should write upon such subjects as they themselves feel an interest in.”(39) He insisted that his material should be original or a first translation in the case of foreign material.(40) [page 110:] He continually demanded concentrated and compressed writing,(41) and returned articles for successive revisions until he was completely satisfied.(42) Above all, he valued the intellectual abilities of his main writers, shared their estimate of the importance of learning to the maga- zine, and appears from the journal itself to have given them a fairly free hand. It is the generous and tolerant respect for the writer, implied by the ethos of Blackwood's, that Poe sees as lacking. “In this country, unhappily,” he had written in 1842, “we have no journal of the class, which can either afford to compensate the highest talent, or which is, in all respects, a fitting vehicle for its thoughts.”(43)

Thus for Poe, in the kind of statements we have been examining, the British journals apparently represented the ideal conditions for his own development as a journalist, and a telling contrast with the American scene. He seems to have felt on these occasions that their successes were the result of a financially generous and intellectually tolerant respect for the writer and his art. It must be recognised, however, that Poe suggests a very different attitude to the same generosity and success in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” when Miss Zenobia is offered fifty guineas by Mr. Blackwood for her “Blackwood Article” and refuses to “sacrifice it for so paltry a sum.”(44) Here Mr. Blackwood is a sinister and cynical figure. He is prepared to pay royally for material of the right kind. But the material required is fiction written to a formula of spurious and faked-up learning mixed with sensationalism. Financial ease and success for the journalist, Poe seems to be implying in this article, can only be achieved by compromising artistic integrity.

The extent and nature of the inconsistency in Poe's literary attitudes as revealed by “How to Write a Blackwood [page 111:] Article” will be the subject of my next chapter. I shall show that Poe is there, in a mood of defensively superior elitism, recognising and rejecting the vulgarisation of high literary standards that professional journalistic commitment involved, even in the British journals. And, of course, the “quality-popularity” balance of Blackwood's made it vulnerable, on one side, to such criticism. Blackwood could become very impatient with the more highbrow opinions of his writers, showing great annoyance, for instance, when De Quincey criticised the magazine's intellectual deficiencies in 1821.(45) His main contributors not only modified their ideals with some sense of the popular audience they must attract, but were expected to some extent to do so. Lockhart, for instance, tells a learned contributor, “Of the last Welsh pieces you have sent, I am afraid most are too strictly antiquarian, and locally so for the Magazine readers in their present uninitiated state.” He asks for material “more intelligible to all to begin with.”(46) Blackwood kept ultimate control, calling Wilson his “editor” only in order to be provided with a scapegoat who could be blamed for the magazine's indiscretions.(47) And the need to maintain a rising circulation does seem to have overruled the advice of even the most influential literary advisers. Coleridge pleaded with him in 1830 to reduce the extent and the vehemence of his political articles,(48) without any apparent success. The period from 1825 to 1831 was one of economic uncertainty and large-scale indifference to literature, and Blackwood's High Tory political articles helped him to maintain a rising circulation throughout the period. “Trade of every kind is still very flat here,” he wrote to his son in 1826.

Above all, Blackwood seems to have been particularly persistent in obtaining fiction for the magazine, in the popular genres he wanted, despite the frequent irritation of his writers at what they seem to have regarded as “hack-work,” something beneath their dignity as serious scholars and writers, and done only for the money.(50)