Text: Michael Allen, “Poe and the American Reality,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 129-156

[page 129:]

VIII

There can be no doubt that between 1835 and 1842 at least, Poe's attention to British precedents and the dictates of his own particular literary gifts demonstrated a defective sense of reality. He may well have felt his own talents to be admirably suited to the type of literary journalism still extant in Europe. But around him was a new society which was feeling the need to develop its own journalistic modes.

 

I. THE AMERICAN SITUATION

American magazines on the British pattern were not likely to flourish in the American situation for a variety of reasons. In the first place, as Margaret Fuller said in 1846,(1) there was “not a great deal of wit and light talent in [the] country” of the kind such journalism required. Poe was exceptional, even unique, in the flexibility and range of his writing: other American journalists were either more solemn [page 130:] or more easily and simply sentimental. Furthermore, a good magazine of the European kind was bound to cost $5 per annum, and it had to compete on the same ground with the eclectic journals(2) which pirated British material (at $3) and with the American reprints of the British journals which sold at a club-rate of five for $10 per annum. In face of this competition, it is not surprising that the old-style American magazines could rarely pay their contributors;(3) or that the usual history of American magazines on the Furopean pattern in the early nineteenth century was, in the New York Mirror's words, to “put forth their young green leaves in the shape of promises and prospectuses — blossom through a few numbers,” and then perish because of “bills due and debts unpaid.” “The average age of new periodicals in this country,” added the Mirror, “is found to be six months. ...”(4) Inevitably a new kind of magazine was establishing itself in response to the American situation. As Hervey Allen says, when Poe was beginning his journalistic career, a new journalism, ‘moralistic, democratic and namby pamby,” was challenging the dominance of “the more robust, though stuffier, classically minded literature of the old school.”(5) This second great wave of nineteenth-century journalism, with which Poe found himself contemporary, looked for its audience to the great widening circle of those reaching the middle classes during economic expansion and made literate by the new system of public education. On a technological level, the increasingly widespread use of stereotyping, since its introduction into America in 1813,(6) had made possible the low-price, large-circulation form which has prevailed with such journals ever since.

All the essential elements of this new journalism are visible in a magazine like Godey's Lady's Book. An advertisement [page 131:] for Godey's which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post(7) throughout 1848, although claiming to show the subscriber “what amount of reading and how many embellishments she will receive for $3,” gives most of its attention to the embellishments:

This is crude by modern standards, but the kind of ethos evoked is very familiar. Popularly literary articles and tales were “packaged” in the modern way with material of the kind most of the consumers wanted: sentimental love tales, gossip, recipes, popular songs, and fashion news, and plates; and the latter material guaranteed the circulation. Thus there is a certain amount of educational material with strong feminine bias: “Influence of Females,” or “Female Education,” or “Mothers as Christian Teachers,”(9) the latter by the popular Mrs. Sigourney. But other intellectual material is very small in bulk. One gets from time to time a half page on “Talleyrand,” ‘”Virgil's Tomb,” or “Ilustrations of Mythology”; literary portraits of well-known writers, Moore and Campbell, “Monk” Lewis and Shelley(10) are occasionally introduced two to a page. But the tone of educational articles is carefully adapted to its audience: ‘Our fair readers,” proclaims an article on “The Meteoric Shower,” “need not be under any serious apprehensions of alarm ... as we are not going to explore the mysterious depths of science. ...”(11) And the vast bulk of the magazine's material has no pretensions to any kind of serious [page 132:] significance, and consists overwhelmingly of sentimental love stories varied with the occasional crime story. There is little fiction which, like Poe's “The Visionary,”(12) clearly appeals to a higher intellectual level than the rest of the magazine. There are from time to time overtly literary contributions, a “tragedy” called “Ormond Grosvenor,”(13) “allegories” like “Genius and Feeling, an Allegory,”(14) which may add “tone” to the magazine, but are basically as conventionally sentimental as the staple fiction. In the ‘thirties there was often a cheapness of appearance and vulgarity of tone, which disappears with the greater confidence and affluence of the later issues; but the formula remains, on the whole, remarkably consistent.

This is no doubt partly because the forces which standardise the modern mass-circulation magazine and its contents were rapidly coming into operation. William Charvat, in his book Literary Publishing in America,(15) describes how sensitive the new-style editors like Godey and Graham were to the “taste of the hinterland,” how they accepted and encouraged writers who could satisfy it, and how the masscirculation of their journals from centres like Philadelphia and New York gradually “homogenised” the taste of the South and West. Another factor in this process was the activity of magazine agencies, which tended to encourage the mass-circulation journals at the expense of the others. F. W. Thomas told Poe in a letter of 1840 that the local agencies merely arranged subscriptions for the higher-priced journals, but, “If the publication can be put low enough by the publishers they will order so many copies on their own account each month. ...”(16) It was magazines like Godey's which had hit on a successful formula to meet the American situation. [page 133:]

 

II. THE SOUTH AND POE'S EARLY LITERARY ELITISM

Poe's initial resistance to this tendency is easy to explain. Enough has been made by biographers and critics of the significance of Poe's Southern upbringing for the roots of his early attitude to be clear. Poe came to his first magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, after growing up in a South that was extending an aristocratic code from the original Virginia gentry to the whole region to consolidate it against Northern pretensions.(17) This process was considerably assisted by British literary and cultural sources, and the British conservative attitudes to the “many” and to the “trade” of writing fitted well into this milieu of cultural conservatism. Professor J. B. Hubbell points out that Congreve's view of himself as a gentleman, not a writer, was very similar to the Southern gentlemanly attitude.(18) W. J. Cash, more bluntly, makes it clear that the Southern attitude was strongly influenced by the British gentlemanly style of Steele, Sheridan, and Fox.(19) With aspirations to be a writer in this social milieu, Poe could hardly fail to distrust the mass-audience and the “trade” of writing, and to display, at least initially, elitist attitudes to literature.

Scott, Byron, and Moore, more gentlemanly than Wordsworth or Coleridge, were the favourite writers in the South, and it was from their works that the South as a whole was absorbing its vague aristocratic principles. But, as we have seen, when Byron actually formulated his socio-literary attitudes, he saw the status of the writer and his relation to the mass-audience in more ambivalent terms than did gentlemanly eighteenth-century writers. And Scott showed a similar uncertainty. He may have made derogatory remarks about his popular poetry,(20) and may have seen fiction [page 134:] as having little value compared to “real history and useful literature”;(21) but he also claimed that the most popular writing of an age could be equally well received by posterity.(22) In public he may have lived a gay gentlemanly life which seemed to preclude work;(23) but in his Journal he discussed the “management” and “profit” of his “property,”(24) the Waverley Novels, with bluff commercial acumen, “Quality-popularity,” a balanced acceptance of both the “few” and the “many,” made it difficult for Byron and Scott to retain completely the traditional elitist attitudes. Moore, it is true, deplored “the lowering of the standard that must necessarily arise from the extending of the circle of judges; from letting the mob in to vote, particularly at a period when the market is such an object to authors.” “Those ‘who live to please,’ “ he said, “‘must please to live,’ and most will write down to the lowered standard.”(25) But for British expressions of the really thorough-going elitist position in the 1830's, one has to go to a few strongly conservative writers, for example, Sir Egerton Brydges. “It is a vile evil,” wrote Brydges, “that literature has become so much of a trade all over Europe.” For him, “What is called the spread of literature is ... a very doubtful good.” He claimed, “Merit is now universally estimated by the multitude of readers that an author can attract.” The “corruption, prejudice, selfishness, and ignorance” of the massaudience was one reason for this; the other was a deliberate conspiracy between those writers who “manufactured” popular books “to suit the transient curiosity of the public for the day,” and those who reviewed them to gain “an opportunity of expressing their own opinions”(26) in the magazines.

Such views were practically extinct in Britain by the [page 135:] 1830's, at least as far as writers for the magazines were concerned. The susceptibilities of the “many” as well as those of the “few” had to be considered. As a young man of aristocratic leisure and expectations,(27) Bulwer shared Sir Egerton's view of popularity;(28) later, as a successful novelist and journalist, he asserted that really popular literature ‘cannot appeal to vulgar and unworthy passions.”(29) The New Monthly, in an article on one of Brydges's books in 1826, claimed with some justice that his extremely conservative view of the literary situation would be unacceptable to Whig and Tory alike.(30) But such views were still viable in the magazines of the American South as weapons against Northern literary merchantilism, in the hands of “Southern gentlemen.” “American authorship,” declares a writer in the Southern Quarterly Review for April 1853, “ ... is fast becoming a trade,” and American literary endeavour lacks “proper motive”;

In the South, the more conservative British literary attitudes were preserved in an almost fossilised state as a contribution to the region's self-differentiation; and it was in the heart of the old South, in Richmond, Virginia, that Poe began to write. Like the young Bulwer or the young John Wilson, he cultivated as a young man the role of the “poet and gentleman” in this Southern context, and he was not in the first instance a journalist at all, preferring to play the traditional role. “He is at work upon a tragedy, but I have [page 136:] turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money ... ,”(32) wrote Kennedy of the poverty-stricken young man who had made such courteous apologies for being unequipped to dine with him.(33) And in some moods Poe remained the poéte manqué throughout his life. “Events not to be controlled,” he wrote in the preface to his 1845 volume of poems, “have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.”(34) Bulwer had also inclined towards poetry in his youth, and in the preface to his poem “The Siamese Twins” refers patronisingly to his other works “in humbler prose.”(35) One senses in both writers here a hint of distrust of the mass-audience, reflecting in both, no doubt, the youthful literary ideals of the period before they were forced to earn a living. But there can be no doubt that Poe's “gentlemanly” pose, in the context of the aspiring Richmond middle class of the time, would be a good deal more self-consciously contrived than that of the British writers like Bulwer who were his, models.

It is as a result of the whole Southern milieu that one finds in Poe's earliest journalism so many declarations of what for the 1830's was an archaic elitism, even by British standards. This sense of his own role in journalism might be suggested by his words in the Messenger for May 1836:

According to his own account,(37) it was in this period that he first formulated the plan for his own literary magazine, [page 137:] the “Stylus,” which was to embody his literary ideals, and appeal to an upper-class audience drawn largely from the South. And his earliest references to the audience in the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham's Magazine were often extremely conservative and elitist, even in comparison with the European journals of the time, entirely accepting the subordination of the “many” to the “few. He prophesied that “none but le vulgaire ... will ever think of getting through with” a book called Confessions of a Poet; and that Bird's The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow, while it may add to the author's popularity, “will not, at all events, among men whose decisions are entitled to consideration, advance the high opinion previously entertained of his abilities.” In denying G. P. R. James's popularity, he did not mean, he said, to imply that he was highly estimated by the “few”: “He has fallen apparently, upon that unlucky mediocrity permitted neither by Gods nor columns.” He agreed that literary success may result from a sympathy between the mediocrity of the writer's ideas and the mediocrity of those of the public; works which the mass-audience was capable of reading, he claimed, did not involve thought and were not “literature”; Dickens might be thought to offer an example of a writer who could be good and popular, but in fact, said Poe, Dickens was too good a writer to achieve the greatest popularity. And, like Sir Egerton, Poe adopted a conspiratorial theory of audience. He explained the reputation achieved by popular works as being the result of the chicanery of the small writer who knows how to exploit the influence of the reviewers, and of the puffery whereby members of a clique advance each others’ work into the public eye, as well as of the vulgarity of the mass-audience.(38) The principles according to which Poe repudiated, [page 138:] in some moods, the more popular elements of the Blackwood's type of journalism are clearly visible in these early reviews.

 

III. ELITISM AS A DEFENCE OF FAILURE

It was obviously not only the Southern tendency to ape elitist English attitudes that was involved. Poe's peculiarly sensitive and self-protective temperament certainly gave underlying force to the acquired rhetoric. As L. L. Schick. ing says:

Poe's haughty self-identification with the “few against the “many” in such statements must also have reflected his sense of the unacceptability of his own characteristic work to the mass-audience. When he was defending them to White in 1835, Poe's “Grotesques” and “Arabesques” were in fact several years behind the current trend rather than in the fashion of the age, as most commentators suggest. The “Grotesque” or burlesque was not popular in the American mass-circulation journals of the time. And the steady stream of horror tales reprinted in Godey's from Blackwood's and the New Monthly had dried up by 1834 to be replaced by pirated sketches from Dickens's early work.(40) White and his [page 139:] editorial advisers seem to have been consistently aware of the changing fashion. White's editorial notes on Poe's stories praise their literary qualities, but are always critical of “too much German horror” and of the blending of “the shadows of the tomb with the clouds and sunshine of life.”(41) James M. Garnett had written to tell White that Poe would “rather injure than benefit” the Messenger because of his incomprehensible scholarship and obscure style.(42) White rejected “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839 because the large majority of his readers had little relish for tales of the German school, and J. E. Heath in giving Poe this news said,

Some of Poe's fellow writers had, of course, admired his work from the time when he was awarded the Baltimore Saturday Visiter prize for “wild vigorous and poetical imagination,” “rich style,” ‘varied and curious learning,”(44) the characteristic qualities of the older journalism. The Harper's objection to Poe's tales (in a letter to J. K. Paulding in 1836) was that “there is a degree of obscurity in their application, which will prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift. ... It requires a degree of familiarity with various kinds of knowledge which they do not possess. ...”(45) Or, as they put it to Poe himself, “The papers are too learned and mystical. They would be understood and relished only by a very few — not by the multitude.”(46) In both letters they confirmed the earlier advice [page 140:] given by Poe's first publisher, H. C. Carey, through Kennedy(47) that short-stories, particularly when reprinted from magazines, had little popular appeal. Now Paulding was asked by Harper's to convey to Poe the advice that he should “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehen. sion of the generality of readers.”(48) One way for Poe to preserve himself from “torturing, galling, incapacitating doubts” in the face of this criticism was to number himself within a superior literary elite in the way we have seen.

 

IV. THE NEED TO ADAPT

But even in his work for the Southern Literary Messenger Poe must have at least partially recognised that such elitism was inapplicable to the situation of the American journalist, forced into a practical dependence on the massaudience. Certainly his success in raising that journal's circulation gives this impression, as does a considerable amount of his more run-of-the-mill reviewing. His departure from the Messenger in 1837 for New York and Philadelphia and his subsequent employment on mass-circulation journals, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (from 1839 to 1840) and Graham's Magazine (from 1841 to 1842), must have made increasingly necessary a partial reconciliation between Poe's theoretic elitism and the practical exigencies of his situation. And if economic pressures made it necessary for him to come to terms with the mass-audience, follow the advice that he had been given, and simplify his style and subject-matter, his unintegrated personality offered few obstacles. His sense of his own temperamental tendencies in this regard is reflected when he says in “Marginalia” that [page 141:]

To the moods in which he scorned ambition his elitist attitudes were, and continued to be, appropriate — but in moods in which ambition predominated he spasmodically tried to change his techniques, as far as he could, in the way his friends had suggested, and make his fiction, particularly, more accessible.

From about 1839 on, Poe's work shows an intermittent but increasing effort to simplify style and manner, and choose his subjects with the mass-audience in mind. This adaptation is apparent in 1840 with “Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Arm in a Sling,” a piece of crude comic horseplay, and ‘”The Business Man.” The latter clearly attempts to find satiric material in American society: Paulding had suggested earlier that Poe should “apply his fine humor, and his extensive acquirements ... to the faults and foibles of our own people. ...”(50) In 1841 “3 Sundays in a Week” exploited the same kind of stale cliché as had “The Little Frenchman,” the mood of these pieces being less self-consciously “literary” than anything Poe had written before. He began to write sentimental “set pieces” of the kind popular in Godey's, “The Island of the Fay” (1841), “Landor's Cottage” (1842), “The Elk” (1844): if one compares “The Island of the Fay” with the typical Sartain engraving(51) that illustrated it in Graham's, one sees how such a tale would fit into the ethos. He was, at the same time, producing rambling and stereotyped stories like [page 142:] “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and “Thou Art the Man” (both of 1844). His own characteristic mode of in. ternal horror was now presented in tighter, simpler fictional terms in “The Tell Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” (both of 1843), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), and “Hop-Frog” (1847): the morbid psychological interest had now a smoothly theatrical, rather than a wildly metaphysical, exposition. A comparison of “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841)(52) with the “M.S. Found in a Bottle” of 1833 shows his tendency to choose less erudite protagonists, to avoid learned reference and affectation, to simplify syntax and vocabulary, and to chop up his periods:

... presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the counter, and bore us with it as it rose — up — up — as if into the sky. I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. And then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream. (“A Descent into the Maelstrom”)(53)

Meanwhile his comic impulse was channelled into rather regrettable efforts like “The Spectacles,” or burlesques on the American literary scene (“The Literary Life of Thingum Bob”). His talent for hoaxing through verisimilitude came to rely less upon the formal style, the extended and abstract pseudo-scientific interest of “Hans Pfaall” [page 143:] (1835), adopting instead a direct journalistic bluffness in “The Balloon Hoax” (1844), and drawing on a more crude popular science in “The Facts in The Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845). The most obvious modification in his criticism lay in the paragraphs of gossip and personal description of writers that Poe increasingly introduced, culminating in the popular “Literati” series of Godey's.(54) As a result, Poe could afford, by 1845, to accept and acknowledge the grounds upon which his advisers had criticised his early work:

 

V. SELF-DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES IN POE'S LATER CRITICISM

Poe's attempts to adapt his work to the American situation inevitably produced modifications in the terms in which he discussed the literary audience. But throughout his life his attitudes to the audience showed the kind of acute vacillation which he described as being “the prominent feature of genius,” moving between increasingly exaggerated elitism and an alternating attempt to defend an increasing practical commitment to the mass-audience.

His employer on the Southern Literary Messenger, T. W. White, assumed that in the American hinterland the writers themselves composed the only homogeneous group with distinct literary interests. He saw his readers as divided [page 144:] for practical purposes into the “critics” on the one hand, and on the other “that larger, unsophisticated class, whom Sterne loved for reading and being pleased ‘they knew not why and care not wherefore.’ ”(56) And in those moods when his faith in a literary elite ran low, Poe also would reduce the “few” to the critics, accepting a dichotomy between the popular taste and critical opinion.(57) Thus he backed his own opinion of A Fable for Critics with the assertion that by publishing it Lowell had “lowered himself at least fifty per cent in the literary public opinion,” or his campaign against Longfellow with the claim to be echoing “the sentiment of every man of letters in the land beyond the immediate influence of the Longfellow coterie.”(58) But the literary tastes and principles embodied in his own work and propagated in his criticism were too blatantly at odds with those of the other American writers of the day for Poe to have any real sense of solidarity with them. His campaign against simplicity, sincerity, and didacticism, his convinced aestheticism, set him very much apart, both as writer and as critic. So, more and more, he developed a purely rhetorical elitism, speaking of the “few” and the “many” when the former group is imaginary and is defined only by its agreement with himself. Perhaps his retention of the authoritative “we” of the British Reviews necessitated the assumption that he represented, if only rhetorically, some group in society. This was a sound enough procedure when, for example, Poe agreed with the “few” who regarded Macaulay “merely as a terse, forcible, and logical writer, full of thought, and abounding in original views ...” and dismissed the “many” who looked upon him as “a comprehensive and profound thinker. ...”(59) But when he attempted to promote a climate of opinion in which his own [page 145:] work could be appreciated, the qualifications required of his “few” became very exact indeed. He agreed, for instance, that a far greater number of readers were excited by Byron's passionate poems than by “Œnone” or “The Sensitive Plant,” but this proved only that “the majority of mankind are more susceptible of the impulses of passion than of the impressions of beauty.” “Readers do exist, however,” he insisted,

An elite such as Poe describes here must be very small and very idiosyncratic: it shrinks in size so sharply with his final words that it is questionable whether anyone but himself could be included in it. And the particular intensity of the passage suggests that he was justifying himself here in face of the failure of literary America to give his poetry and his literary ideals any real measure of recognition.

While in some moods he responded to lack of support by diminishing his imaginary elite, in other moods Poe was opening the door to the only real audience to which he had [page 146:] any access. Thus we find him tentatively suggesting that the voice of the people does not always represent a corrupted taste, or claiming parenthetically (to justify whimsical or fanciful effects in verse) that the popular feeling which approves these qualities is “unfailingly poetic. ...”(61) From his earliest criticism he had assumed a self-defensive and elitist conspiratorial theory, which attributed popularity to the exploitation of the vulgar by small writers and reviewers. But Poe gradually adapted this conspiratorial theory to defend not only the good and unpopular writer, but also the mass-audience, which might have a saner taste than the press led one to imagine. Perhaps, he suggested, the public opinion had not been “fairly ascertained,” perhaps it was only so far as the popular mind was reflected in ephemeral journalism that it could be said to be corrupt. When the popular voice goes with the popular heart, he claimed, the popular voice is right. And he began from time to time to invoke the opinion of the mass-audience to ratify his own judgement, attacking Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America with reference to “the tide of public disapprobation which has set in so strongly upon” its author, and claiming that puffery by the poet's friends had “inoculated nine. tenths of the community” with the opinion that William Lord's poems were “contemptible.”(62) The first extended statement of this developing movement of thought is the 1842 review of Barnaby Rudge in which Poe reversed his earlier view that Dickens, being a great writer, could not be completely popular. While agreeing that popularity in itself is no measure of worth, he saw Barnaby Rudge here as an illustration of the fact that a book can “suit, at the same time, the critical and the popular taste ...,” and claimed that in fact the popularity of the book was the “legitimate [page 147:] and inevitable result of certain well understood critical propositions reduced by genius into practice. ...” Criticism was simply the theory governing practical writing, and “a theory is only good as such, in proportion to its reducibility to practice”; a similar critical acumen on the part of Defoe and Goldsmith had previously resulted in the popularity of Robinson Crusoe and The Vicar of Wakefield.(63) This review appeared in Graham's for February 1842, immediately following Poe's only really successful series of articles for that mass-circulation magazine, and it may be conjectured that Poe's mood of confidence in the power of the skilful writer over the mass-audience sprang from his own current success. In the previous issue of Graham's [[Graham's]] to that in which he reviewed Barnaby Rudge, Poe had wound up the popular “Autography” series, claiming that its popularity

This momentary faith in his chances with the mass-audience seems to have faded by the March issue of Graham's, where Poe returned to his alternate stance of extreme and solitary elitism, and laboriously modified the implications of the Barnaby Rudge review accordingly. Against any contention that popularity implied excellence, he argued that in fact popularity is prima facie evidence

He denied that there could be any literary value in the “particulars of the work which are popular,’ allowing however that a half or two-thirds of the matter of a book might be “susceptible of popular appreciation,” and the remaining portion “the delight of the highest intellect and genius and absolute caviare to the rabble.” The writer who looked “to his own interest” would “combine all votes” in this way, and Poe conceded that the skill with which “the lower taste of the populace” was addressed might be admired and commended by the critic. But it was nevertheless a “grievous wrong to his own genius” for Dickens or any writer to appeal “to the popular judgment at all.” Indeed, that any “true spirit” should respond to “the incense of mere popu- lar applause” was “a thing inconceivable, inappreciable — a paradox which gives the lie unto itself — a mystery more profound than the well of Democritus.”(65) As usual, Poe's purposive self-justification, in the face of non-recognition, betrays itself in the rather wild rhetoric. And it was in a similar mood that Poe, in his next statement on this theme, reduced the elite to himself, dismissing the whole question of audience, with his very influential version of “art for art's sake.” R.H. Horne explained in the introductory “Note” to his “Epic Poem in Three Books,” Orion, that he had composed it as a “novel experiment upon the mind of a nation” (echoing Scott's description of the epoch-making Waverley as an “experiment on the public taste”). Poe opposed any consideration of the audience by the writer, claiming that if Horne had “listened to the dictates of his own soul,” he could not have failed to see that there was [page 149:] no nobler literary enterprise than the poem “written solely for the poem's sake”(66) It was characteristic of Poe that he dragooned Horne's inner soul to his own support, finding no outer sign of sympathy with his own current view In Horne's statement.

I said earlier that Poe had developed a conspiratorial theory to explain the failure of genius to receive its due appreciation; and that he extended this theory to blame unscrupulous journalists, rather than the mass-audience itself, for this failure. Poe's next approach to the question of audience is his most characteristic presentation of his conspiratorial theory. It is particularly interesting because its descriptive form gives full expression to Poe's divided soul and its conflicting impulses. He first identifies himself with the accepted author within a literary community. An “‘author accustomed to seclusion” who becomes accepted within the literary elite, meets, so Poe tells us, unanimous agreement with all his own original judgements about the literature of his time. Why then, asks Poe, does he meet such very different opinions of the merits of the same authors in the literary press? To explain this anomaly Poe identifies himself with the journalist, saying, ‘We put on paper with a grave air what we could not for our lives assert personally to a friend without either blushing or laughing outright,” and, “That the opinion of the press is not an honest opinion, that necessarily it is impossible that it should be an honest opinion is never denied by the members of the press themselves.” Poe then defends the press for its praise of bad books, blaming this entirely on the effrontery and persistence of unscrupulous quacks who wear down the hardworking journalist, so that he accepts and prints glowing reviews of their work. Finally Poe depicts the “men of [page 150:] genius” who are generally “too indolent and careless about worldly concerns,” too much governed by their “pride of intellect” to seek publicity in such unworthy ways, so that their works “are utterly overwhelmed and extinguished” in the flood of the “apparent public adulation” of toadies and quacks.(67) Thus, at the same time as he secures and defends his status as an unappreciated genius, Poe exonerates himself as journalist from any blame which might be thought to result from his dealing with the mass-audience. “The passage, which he rewrote and used as an introduction to the Godey's “Literati”(68) series, represents the nearest that Poe got to a synthesis of his two literary selves — conspiring journalist and unappreciated genius.

Poe's last recorded attitude to the audience in the 1847 Hawthorne review represented a period from June to December 1846, in which he was exultant about the effect that “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” had been having in both America and Europe.(69) This may help to explain the review's explicit commitment to the mass-audience, It affirms triumphantly the conspiratorial position taken in the Barnaby Rudge review and subsequently suppressed. He sharply contradicts the usual idea that very original writers are not likely to become popular, claiming, “It is, in fact, the excitable, undisciplined and childlike popular mind which most keenly feels the original.”(70) The stress on the “childlike popular mind” is significant, since Poe always took an immense delight in the way people were taken in by his hoaxes. Elizabeth Barrett,in a letter (which Poe quoted in several of his own letters of the time, and apparently used to read to visitors)(71) spoke of the effect of “M. Valdemar” as one of “dreadful doubts as to whether ‘it can be true’ as the children say of ghost stories.”(72) Hawthorne, [page 151:] Poe's argument goes on, was not popular because he was not really original. Hawthorne had, of course, not been condemned for his unpopularity by “the few who belong properly to books, and to whom books, perhaps, do not quite so properly belong,” that is, by the literary elite. But this is only because the ‘few’ mistakenly valued Hawthorne according to his potential rather than his actual performance, while their taste had been warped by “long pondering upon books as books merely. ...” “ ... The simple truth is,” says Poe aggressively, “that the writer who aims at impressing the people is always wrong when he fails in forcing that people to receive the impression.”(73) Here we see Poe dissociating himself explicitly from any literary elite, and accepting instead the kind of conspiratorial attitude to the mass-audience of which the gentlemanly tradition had always disapproved.

 

VI. DEVELOPING ANTI-ELITISM AND AMERICAN NATIONALITY

It could be argued, I suppose, that the elitist artist in Poe was his ‘European’ self, the conspiratorial mass-journalist his “American” self; that the conflict I have outlined is that “rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe” which according to D. H. Lawrence lies “deep in every American heart.”(74) Certainly the dislocation in Poe's literary attitudes was bound to express itself in terms of a more general dislocation, the dislocation of parent and child nations with its confused loyalties and antipathies. The issue between masses and elite had become submerged in American journals in that between the advocates of a democratic national literature and those whom they saw as representing in [page 152:] America the “aristocratic principle” in politics and its corollary, the “anti-democratic habit of feeling and thinking” imbibed from “the copious, and it must be confessed delicious, fountain of the literature of England. ...”(75)

The idea of the national literature which filled the journals of Poe's day was, to a large extent, a reaction to the literary dominance of British writers and British criticism in America and the kind of partisan unfairness to American writers classically associated with Sydney Smith's query, “. ... Who reads an American book?”(76) “ ... The formation of a literature of our own — a National American literature — is the dearest idol of our heart,” said a writer in Knickerbocker; and earlier in the same article, “We ... do not despair of witnessing the time when, in this country, the noble language which we speak, shall, in structure indeed be English, but in tone, in character, in power, purely and decidedly American.(77) But as F. L. Mott says, “When the critics of the period spoke of ‘nationality’ they thought not so much of national unity in the literature as of independence from Europe.”(78) And there was, of course, a strong conservative opposition to what many literary men considered a species of literary chauvinism: after the Revolution, wrote Lowell, it was decided that the United States

And later in the same article he said, “Nationality, then, is only a less narrow form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of [page 153:] clownishness and ill-manners.”(79) Poe's attitude to the whole issue was always international in its emphasis: he believed that over-subservience to European opinion and chauvinistic arrogance about American achievements were both to be deplored, that “the world at large” was ‘the only proper stage for the literary histrio.”(80) But between 1833 and 1840 his emphasis seems to have fallen more on the conservative side of the controversy, although he recognised that some American books and articles were undervalued because of their national origin.(81) The shift in emphasis which is noticeable in Poe's criticism from about 1841 may be illustrated by comparing two statements of his critical internationalism, the one in the ‘”Drake — Halleck” review of 1836 and the other in the well-known ‘Exordium” of 1842. In the earlier statement the respect which Poe pays to nationalist sentiment has the hollow ring of lip service, and shows itself in tactful subjunctives and adjectives that do not disguise the side on which his real emphasis falls. American servility to British critical dicta, though excessive, found ‘a shadow of excuse” in the strict justice of the principle from which it issued: a “slight basis of reason” existed for this “grotesque” subservience, and even now “perhaps” it would not be far wrong to assert that such a basis of reason “may still exist.” This defensive rhetoric encircles an orotund encomium on

In the 1842 “Exordium,”(83) however, which largely repeats the earlier statement, this latter passage of pro-European sentiment has been excised; and while the international critical balance is maintained, there is a new wholehearted and confident identification with the national literature at its best. Poe's mature criticism usually evaluates American writing fairly judiciously against British examples in the same genres.(84) It reflects the confidence of the “Exordium,” however, not only in its savage attacks on subserviency to Britain(85) and the patronising attitudes of British reviewers,(86) but in a sense of literary liberation, expressed in terms of a representative and a unified national literature. “We have, at length, arrived at that epoch when our literature may and must stand on its own merits, or fall through its own defects,”(87) he wrote in the issue of Graham's following that in which the “Exordium” appeared. In 1846 he excised the commendation of the “Blackwood Article” which served in the 1842 Hawthorne review as an illustration for his theory of the Tale of Effect; he replaced it in the new version, published in 1847, with a mention of several American tales by Simms, Neal, Willis, and Irving.

 

VII. THE REJECTION OF BLACKWOOD'S, 1845

The process whereby his attitude changed, the “rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe,” can be traced in the context of Poe's journalism. Only when one recognises that for Poe and other Americans the voice of Blackwood's and of John Wilson was the representative voice of British literary judgement does Poe's interest in, and changing attitude to, Wilson become understandable. Poe said(88) in 1839 that [page 155:] a favourable review had been promised by Wilson for his forthcoming Tales. And it is probably in the light of his desire for British recognition that one can best understand his claim in the same letter to have been profitably engaged to write for Blackwood's, as well as his later statements that he had contributed substantially to two British journals:(89) one of his friends had clearly been led to believe him to be a contributor to Blackwood's as late as 1847.(90) These references to European publication were in the life-sketches he supplied to Griswold and Hirst, which also included the fabricated adult visit to Europe, and it seems likely that they too are a fabrication: they do of course demonstrate a similar sense of the importance of European links for literary success.

When one turns to Poe's direct statements about Wilson, it is apparent that the favourable attitudes I have quoted earlier are all to be found in the work before 1842. The review of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays by Christopher North(91) in that year is still very favourable, but it sees clearly that Wilson's audacity and exuberance, rather than his critical power, are notable. Between 1842 and 1845, Poe is silent about Wilson, and in 1845 his developing confidence in himself and his work must have initiated that overturning of the British idol which he accomplished in the pages of the Broadway Journal, the only magazine which Poe ever controlled. After admitting in his own review(92) that Wilson's review of Elizabeth Barrett's The Drama of Exile is the only one of merit, he puts all his weight into contemptuously contending Wilson's every point, saying with ironic wonderment, “And this is the criticism — the British criticism — the Blackwood criticism — to which we have so long implicitly bowed down!”(93) This article is followed [page 156:] shortly afterwards by a review of Wilson's Genius and Character of Burns(94) which is much less friendly in its general attitude than the 1842 review: after approving Wilson's “ideality” Poe says self-assertively, “Of one who instructs we demand, in the first instance, a certain knowledge of the principles which regulate the instruction.”(95) It was at about this time that, in the August Godey's, Poe first expressed positive hostility to Wilson, placing him among the cultural influences he most disliked, “Emerson-izing in prose, Wordsworth-izing in poetry, and Fourier-izing in philosophy, Wilson-izing in criticism. ...”(96) Next, in the Broadway Journal, comes the article in which, after complaining bitterly about American subservience to British opinion, Poe lashes out at the “ignorant and egoistical Wilson” with particular reference to his insulting review of Lowell and his “indecencies” of slang and abuse. And in the last number of the Journal, its accustomed praise for the current Blackwood's reprint is replaced by a surly note that “the papers are remarkably dull, and the poetry especially. bad.” There is also the little verse which is probably Poe's handiwork and was certainly introduced by him: