Text: John R. Thompson, “Chapter III: Poe, the Critic,” The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 1929, pp. 10-16 (This material may be protected by copyright)

[page 10:]

Let us speak of these characters in the order in which they have been mentioned, and first of Poe as the savage critic, the Ishmael of letters, with his pen against everybody and everybody's pen against him. The French have a maxim to the effect that a wise man learns to shave on the chin of a fool. It was Poe's fortune to acquire a familiarity with the critical razor upon the auctorial chins of the representatives of this numerous class. His labors began in the editorial management of the Southern Literary Messenger, and he so belabored mediocrity there as to give it for a time a sort of fame and to endow its possessors with a claim to remembrance as the victims of a new martyrology. The earlier volumes of this periodical are as full of dead men as the last act of “Romeo and Juliet,” and as we read we seem to see their ghosts flit about with the melancholy protest of a reproachful stare against “the deep damnation of their taking off.” And though Poe afterwards handled “without fear, favour or affection,” the most eminent writers of the day, he never lost sight of the fools to the last. Not one of them brought out a volume that he did not look with a trembling solicitude to what this merciless critic would have to say of it, and we can fancy the author's disembodied spirit addressing them in the epitaph designed for Robespierre,(1) [page 11:]

which we may translate —

Few if any of the victims of Poe's criticism ever undertook to review their reviewer — such as survived the review avoided a literary encounter with him for very much the same reason that the cockney gave for declining to go on a wolf hunt in the Pyrenees — ”for you see,” said he, “that if you do not kill the wolf, the wolf will kill you.”

Notwithstanding the injustice that is sometimes done to inexperienced writers of real talent by the slashing school of criticism, there can be no doubt that on the whole it accomplishes a vast amount of good by keeping down the pretenders and charlatans who impose on a long-suffering public with shallow learning and mawkish sentimentality. No man of one-half Poe's keenness and severity has, since his death, sat in judgment upon authorship in America, and the consequence is that numbers of young men and women have rushed into print, not having the fear of the scalping-knife before their eyes, who had much better have been occupied with daybooks and sewing machines. Could he reappear at the head of one of our standard periodicals of the present day, his first impulse would be to lay about him right and left amongst poets and novelists, and the sauve qui peut of the panic-stricken offenders would be heard through all the realms of Yankeedom and Dixie. [page 12:]

As a critic in the same sense that Jeffrey and Macaulay were critics, Poe was not however entitled to the highest rank. Wonderfully acute and analytical, he saw at once through the whole mechanism of a poem, a story, a scientific treatise or a philosophical discourse, and seized upon the halting measures, false rhymes and stolen passages of the poet, the inconsequential incidents, unnatural movement and forced plot of the novelist, and the inaccurate deductions and untenable positions of the writer on physics or political economy, and exposed them with remarkable clearness and precision. His powers of analysis and synthesis were almost equally wonderful. No puzzle ever gave him more than a very short period of perplexity. He solved the “Automaton Chess Player” of Maelzel while all the world was in amazement at its performances, and the modern mechanical contrivance of the “Sphinx” he would have seen through at a glance. He was exceeding fond of occult writings in cypher and would get at the key of the most difficult alphabet with extraordinary facility. In the story of the “Gold-Bug,” which in England has been published as the “Gold-Beetle,” because in England the word bug is something not to be named to ears polite, he has shown how invaluable he would have been as a detective, but these qualities of dissection and construction did not make him a great critic.

Apart from the personality which always gives a certain piquancy to style, his criticisms are not at all more agreeable reading than demonstrations of the propositions in Euclid. They wanted that element of vital sympathy [page 13:] which must enter into literary judgments, not less than into the judgment of human character, to make them effective, and cause the reader to adopt the critic's own opinions — they were wholly without that pomp and prodigality of diction which can be inspired only by warmth of feeling in a writer who is all aglow with the sentiments he wishes to enforce, and they never rose to those broad views of life which comprehend the whole unbounded landscape of thought as from a Pisgah height of contemplation, where the eye loses the trivial in the extent and grandeur of the dominion it surveys.

In Poe's critical writings, therefore, there is an incompleteness, a fragmentary and unsatisfactory treatment of the subject which prevents their being classed among the highest efforts in this department of literature. We should value Poe's criticisms more highly if we had fuller confidence in their honesty, but he was sometimes the mere creature of personal feeling in his bestowal of praise or blame, and would as often endeavor to write up a mere maker of silly verses to secure a private end as to write down a man of real genius to gratify a private animosity. Always more or less connected with his quarrels with the authors concerned, his criticisms became at last but mere paragraphs, sometimes very pointed, it is true, but sharpened rather by personal pique than by legitimate, liberal commentary upon inherent weaknesses. Many such paragraphs are to be seen in his “Marginalia,” of which we may say as the old lady, whom Sir Walter Scott found reading Johnson's Dictionary, said of that work — ”Braw stories, but unco [page 14:] short.” These brief pencillings exhibit in a striking degree the acuteness of the writer's mental vision, and they furnish perhaps the best specimens of wit that are to be met with in all his works. For it is strange that a mind so perceptive of the hidden relations of things to one another, and so fond of startling surprises — in a word, so well constituted for the production of wit, should have betrayed it so rarely. But the following from “Marginalia” must be regarded as witty. Speaking of an American dramatist, he says he “is busy in attempting to prove that his play was no fairly d — d, that it is only ‘skotched not killed;’ but if the poor play could speak from the tomb, I fancy it would sing, with the opera heroine:

At the period of his life when the “Marginalia” were written, Poe was forced to undergo much of that wearisome drudgery which is the most painful part of the poor author's experience, writing upon compulsion for obscure and worthless magazines and newspapers, and wasting the golden hours of the poet's life in producing a given quantity of manuscript for bread. Hood did a deal of this dreary task-work, and the records of literature are full of sad examples of the kind. Apart from the sympathy inspired in us by the mournful wear and tear of mind and body involved in such unprofitable labors, we cannot but feel a deep sense of the bad economy of mental power thus exhibited. Fancy the engines of the Great Eastern employed in driving a sawmill — [page 15:] imagine Gladiateur and Asteroid hitched in double harness to a Jersey wagon — suppose Carl Formes engaged to use his glorious bass in crying periwinkles in the streets of London — think of John Marshall presiding over a moot-court, or Beauregard leading the armies of Liliput against Blefuscu, and you have no extravagant illustration of the man of genius and sensibility who becomes the slave of the popular weeklies and is compelled to bring down his divine faculties to the standard of the newsboy.(1)

In the volume on the “Literati”(2) we may learn the number and the bitterness of Poe's personal antipathies. The fact is that he was so constantly engaged in sharp controversy that he found the excitement of wrangling absolutely necessary to his mental equipoise; like the old engraver of the Middle Ages, whose motto was, “I keep on engraving that I may not hang myself,” Poe kept on exchanging hard blows with others that he might not turn upon his own consciousness. His reference to the North American Review, one of whose contributors had reminded him of this propensity, is the hardest of his hits that I remember.

It may be here remarked that Poe never once recognized the claim of Boston to literary supremacy. He was accustomed to speak of that city as “the Frog Pond” and its authors as “Frogpondians,” and he ridiculed the hexameters of Mr. Longfellow in some very absurd lines of the same measure beginning:

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 10:]

1 Quoted by Thompson in “The Late Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, November, 1849, page 694.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 15:]

1 Thompson had tasted of these things himself more than once. “Four years of hard labor find me in debt, my small patrimony exhausted and myself utterly unfitted for any sort of employment. I have followed the will-o’-the-wisp, literary fame, into the morass, and it has gone out, leaving me up to the arm-pits in the mud.” Mss. to R. W. Griswold, 2, December, 1851. On his return to Virginia after the Civil War, he had further experience along this line.

2 Volume 3 of the 1850 Griswold first collected edition of Poe's works, entitled “The Literati: Some Honest Opinions About Autorial Merits and Demerits, With Occasional Words of Personality, Together with Marginalia, Suggestions, and Essays.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 16:]

1 From Poe's “Marginalia,” Southern Literary Messenger, April, 1849.