time to attract public notice. In 1843 he won a hundred-dollar prize
for his story ‘The Gold-Bug,’ printed in the ‘Dollar Newspaper,’ and
he lectured with success on ‘The Poets and Poetry of America.’ But
the field was barren and Poe determined on going to New York. Within
a week after his arrival in that city (April, 1844) he printed in
‘The Sun’ his famous ‘Balloon Hoax.’ In October he began work on ‘The
Evening Mirror,’ Willis’s paper, and on January 29, 1845, ‘The Raven’
appeared in its columns and was the poetical sensation of the day. The
next month he lectured on American Poetry in the library of the New
York Historical Society. Dissatisfied with the ‘Mirror,’ he accepted
a proposition from C. F. Briggs to become one of the editors of ‘The
Broadway Journal.’ Later Poe became the sole editor, and for a brief
time enjoyed the ambition of his life, the control of a paper of his
own. He is said to have doubled the circulation in the four months
during which he filled the editorial chair. Unfortunately he lacked
capital and could by no means secure it. ‘The Broadway Journal’
stopped publication.
While editing the ‘Journal’ Poe was invited to read an original
poem before the Boston Lyceum. He gave a juvenile piece, and when
criticised, defended himself with curious want of tact. That he might
lose no opportunity to alienate his contemporaries, he began publishing
in ‘Godey’s Lady’s Book’ a series of papers entitled ‘The Literati,’
in which he gave free rein to his propensity to ‘kick up a dust.’ The
irony of his situation might well excite pity. He who most loathed a
combination of literature and fashion plates was driven for support to
the journals which made such a combination their chief feature.
At the close of 1845 was published _The Raven and Other Poems_, the
first collected edition of Poe’s verse. Occasionally the poet was seen
at literary gatherings, where he left the most agreeable impression by
his manner, appearance, and conversation. But his fortunes steadily
declined, and in 1846, after he had moved to Fordham, a suburb of New
York, he fell into desperate straits. His frail little wife, always an
invalid, grew steadily worse. An appeal was made through the journals
in behalf of the unfortunate family. Mrs. Poe died on January 30, 1847.
Her husband’s grief was so poignant that it is with amazement one reads
of the strange affairs of the heart following this event.
Recovering from the severe illness which followed his wife’s death,
Poe resumed work. He lectured and he wrote. _Eureka_ was published
early in 1847. The consuming desire to own and edit a magazine was no
less consuming, and he made some progress towards founding ‘The Stylus.’
The summer of 1849 Poe spent in Richmond and was received with
cordiality. He proposed marriage to Mrs. Shelton of that city, a
wealthy widow, somewhat older than himself, and was accepted. On the
last of September he started for New York to get Mrs. Clemm and bring
her to Richmond. He was found almost unconscious on October 3 at
Baltimore, in a saloon used as a voting place, was taken to a hospital,
and died at five o’clock on the morning of October 7, 1849.
II
POE’S CHARACTER
Poe’s wilfulness in marring his own fortunes bordered on fatuity.
At an age when men give over youthful excesses merely because they
are incongruous, he had not so much as begun to ‘settle down.’ The
appropriate period for sowing wild oats is brief at best. Nothing
justifies an undue prolongation. It were absurd to take the lofty
tone with a man of genius because at the age of seventeen he carried
to extreme the indulgences characteristic of the youth of his time,
or because at eighteen he ran away from a book-keeper’s desk to join
the army. Impulsiveness and vacillation are not wholly bad things at
eighteen; but at thirty they are ridiculous.
Poe’s abuse of liquor and opium has long been well understood, and
the question of his responsibility handed over to the decision of the
medical faculty. If many of his troubles sprang from this abuse, many
more arose out of his unwillingness to recognize the fact that he was
a part of society, not an isolated and self-sufficient being. As a
genius he was entitled to his prerogative. He was also a man among men
and under the same obligations to continued fair dealing, courtesy,
patience, and forbearance as were his fellows. In these matters he was
notoriously deficient. No one could have been more eager for praise
and sympathy than Poe. He asked for both and received in the measure
of his asking. Men of influence helped him ungrudgingly. They lent him
money, commended his work, defended him at first from the criticism
of those who thought they had suffered at his hands; but it was to no
purpose. By his perversity and capriciousness (as also by an occasional
display of that which in a less highly endowed man than he would have
been called malevolence) Poe alienated those who were most inclined to
befriend him. Nevertheless he wondered that friends fell away.
With a powerful mind, a towering imagination, a natural command of the
technical part of literature, which he improved by tireless exercise,
and with no little spontaneity of productive energy, Poe remained a boy
in character, self-willed, spoiled, ungrateful, petulant. The sharper
the lash of fortune’s whip on his shoulders, the more rebellious he
became.
The affair of the Boston Lyceum illustrates Poe’s singular disregard
of what is expected of men supposed to know the ways of the world. A
Southern paper commenting on this affair said that Poe should not have
gone to Boston. The implication was that as Poe had been attacking the
New Englanders for years he could not expect fair treatment. Poe had
indeed often attacked the ‘Frogpondians,’ as he enjoyed calling them,
and they invited him to come and read an original poem on an occasion
of some local importance. This may have been a mark of innocence on the
part of the ‘Frogpondians;’ it can hardly be construed as indicative
of narrowness or prejudice. Poe accepted their hospitality apparently
in the spirit in which it was offered, read one of his old poems,
and declared afterward that he wrote it before completing his tenth
year, and that he considered it would answer sufficiently well for
an audience of Transcendentalists: ‘It was the best we had--for the
price--and it _did_ answer remarkably well.’
The episode is of no importance save as it illustrates Poe’s attitude
towards the game of life. Poe expected other men to play the game
strictly according to the rules, for himself he would play the game
in his own way. And he did. But he could not go on breaking the rules
indefinitely. They who had his real interest at heart told him as much.
Simms, the novelist, wrote Poe in July, 1846, that he deeply deplored
his misfortunes--‘the more so as I see no process for your relief but
such as must result from your own decision and resolve.’ The letter
should be read in its entirety. It does honor to the writer’s manly
nature, and it throws no little light on the enigmatic character of Poe.
III
THE PROSE WRITER
Poe’s genius was essentially journalistic. In his prose writing he
aimed at an immediate effect, and he knew exactly how to produce it.
The journalist does not in general write with a view to the influence
his paragraph will produce week after next. The paper will have
disappeared week after next, if not day after to-morrow. Though his
theme be the eternal verities, the journalist must write as if he had
but the one chance to speak on that subject. He will therefore be
direct, positive, clear, seeking to persuade, convince, irritate, amuse.
The most obvious characteristics of Poe’s style are found in his
clarity, his vividness, his precision, in the dense shadows and the
high lights, in the hundred unnamed but distinctly felt marks of the
journalistic style. Whatever he proposes to do, that he does. There is
no fumbling. Even his mysteries are as certain as the stage effects in
a spectacular drama; they seem to come at the turning of an electric
switch or the inserting of a blue glass before the lime light. In
reality the process is much more complicated. Other magicians have
essayed to produce like effects by turning the same switch, with
disastrous result.
Poe was a diligent seeker after literary finish. He was painstaking,
and would polish and retouch a paragraph when to the eye of a good
judge there was nothing left to do by way of improvement. ‘He seemed
never to regard a story as finished.’[26]
He was over emphatic at times, and like De Quincey, many of whose
irritating mannerisms he had caught, made a childish use of italics.
But he had no need of these adventitious supports. It was enough for
him to state a thing in his inimitable manner. While his vocabulary was
for the most part simple, he was not without his verbal affectations.
He loved words surcharged with poetic suggestion. A lamp never hangs
from the ceiling, it ‘depends.’ One of his favorite words is ‘domain.’
The black ‘tarn’ which mirrors the house of Usher he could have called
by no other term. ‘Lake,’ or ‘pond,’ or ‘pool’ would not have done. The
word must be remote, suggestive, mysterious.
His style often glows with prismatic colors, but the colors seem to be
refracted from ice. There is no warmth, no sweetness, no lovable and
human quality. All the pronounced characteristics of Poe’s style are
intensely and coldly intellectual. It is easier to admire his use of
language than to like it.
IV
_TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE_
By virtue of his journalistic gift, Poe resembled the author of
_Robinson Crusoe_. He could not, like Defoe, have become general
literary purveyor to the people, but he was quite ready to profit by
what was uppermost in the public mind. _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym_ is an illustration, as it is also a good example of Poe’s art in
its most mundane form. It recounts the adventures of a runaway lad at
sea. Mutiny, drunkenness, brawling, murder, shipwreck, cannibalism,
madness, are the chief ingredients of the book. It is minute,
circumstantial, prolix, matter of fact. The air of verisimilitude is
increased by an alternation of episodes of thrilling interest with
tedious accounts of how a cargo should be stowed, and the object
and method of bringing a ship to. Only at rare intervals does Poe’s
peculiar genius flash out.
As the longest of his writings the _Narrative_ has a peculiar value. By
it we are able to get some notion of his power for ‘sustained effort,’
to use a phrase that always irritated him. That power was certainly
not great; perhaps it was never fairly tested. _The Journal of Julius
Rodman_ is a second attempt at the same kind of fiction. Poe was less
happy in descriptions of the prairie than of the sea; the interest of
the _Journal_ is feeble.
In these fictions the author holds fast to tangible things. Pym and
Rodman might have had the adventures they recount. In another group of
stories Poe leavens fact with imagination. Such are ‘The Balloon Hoax,’
‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,’ ‘A Descent into the
Maelström,’ and the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Real or alleged science
is compounded with the elements of wonder and mystery. And with these
elements comes an increase of power.
Poe, who was never backward in giving himself the credit he thought
his due, often failed to understand where his own most marvellous
achievements lay. In ‘Hans Pfaall’ he claimed originality in the
use of scientific data. Had his stories only this to recommend them,
they would long since have been forgotten. Nothing so quickly becomes
old-fashioned as popular science. The display of knowledge about aerial
navigation in ‘Hans Pfaall’ perhaps made a brave show in 1836, but it
is childish now. A Hans Pfaall of the Twentieth Century would descend
on Rotterdam in a dirigible balloon, and if questioned would be found
to entertain enlightened views on storage batteries. Poe talked glibly
about sines and cosines and brought noisy charges of astronomical
ignorance against his brother writers, but it was not in these things
that his genius displayed itself, it was rather in the way this
wonder-worker makes one aware of the illimitable stretches of space,
the appalling vastness, the silence, the mystery, terror, and majesty
of Nature. He is the clever craftsman in his account of how the Dutch
bellows-mender started on his aerial travels. But when in two or three
paragraphs Poe conveys a sense of height so terrific that the plain
fireside reader, indisposed to balloon ascensions, grasps the arms of
his chair and clings to the floor with the toes of his slippers lest
he fall--then does he display a power with which popular science has
nothing to do.
This is true of ‘A Descent into the Maelström.’ What scientific fact
went into the composition of the piece appears to have been taken from
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, but the valuable part, the sense of
life and movement, the crash of the storm, the roar of the waves, the
shriek of the vortex, like the cry of lost souls, all this is not to be
found in encyclopædias. The story can be read any number of times and
its magical power felt afresh each time. But the first reading cannot
be described by so tame a phrase as a literary pleasure, it is an
experience.
Another masterpiece is the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The din of the
storm is not easily got out of one’s ears. With the unnamed hero of the
tale we ‘stand aghast at the warring of wind and ocean’ and are chilled
by the ‘stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away, into the desolate
sky.’
In another group of stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ the gruesome ‘Murders
in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined
Letter,’ the author fabricates mysteries for the express purpose of
unravelling them afterwards. Poe, who seldom attempts the creation of a
character, actually created one in the person of his famous detective.
Dupin is a living being in a world peopled for the most part with
shadows.
Poe professed not to think much of his detective stories. The
‘ratiocinative’ tale is not a high order of literary achievement. Poe
shares the honors accruing from the invention of such puzzles with
Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau, and the ‘great ‘Boisgobey,’ and they in turn
with the most sensational of sensation mongers.
‘The Gold-Bug’ afforded the author a vehicle for giving expression
to his delight in cryptography, at the same time he availed himself
of the perennial human interest in the prospect of unearthing buried
treasure. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was based on a contemporary
murder case. It contains a minimum of that in which Poe often revelled,
namely physical horror, and a maximum of the ratiocinative element.
‘The Purloined Letter’ is in lighter vein, and illustrates the comedy
side of Dupin’s adventures. Chevalier and minister cross swords with
admirable grace, but no blood is drawn.
The masterpiece of the group is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’
Genuinely original, blood-curdling, the story depends for its real
force not on the ingenious unravelling of a frightful mystery, but on
the sense of nameless horror which creeps over us as little by little
the outré character of the tragedy is disclosed. We realize that in
the dread event of being murdered one might have a choice as to how it
was done. The predestined victim might even pray to die by the hands
of a plain God-fearing assassin and not after the manner of Madame
L’Espanaye.
Of the stories classified as tales of conscience, ‘William Wilson,’
‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ‘The Imp of the Perverse,’ ‘The Tell-Tale
Heart,’ and ‘The Black Cat,’ the first is not only the best, but
is also one of the best of all stories in that genre. The image of
bodily corruption is not present and the interest is held by perfectly
legitimate means. ‘The Black Cat’ is a fearful and repulsive piece,
and at the same time characteristic. Poe hesitated at nothing when it
came to working out his theme. He who had such absolute control of the
materials of his art too seldom practised reticence in exhibiting the
gruesome details of a scene of cruelty.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a representative story, if not
absolutely the best illustration of Poe’s genius. The motive of
premature burial haunts him here as often elsewhere. But the emphasis
of this tragedy of a race is laid where it belongs, in the terror of
the thought of approaching madness. Poe wrote many stories which can be
described each as the fifth act of a tragedy. It may be doubted whether
he surpassed ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’
‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘Morella’ are highly successful experiments
in the realm of the morbidly imaginative, and might be grouped
under Browning’s discarded title of ‘Madhouse Cells.’ The themes
are monstrous, and are only saved from being absurd by the author’s
consummate ability to carry the reader with him. Poe could scale a
fearful and slippery height, maintaining himself with the slenderest
excuse for a foot-hold. A dozen times you would say he must fall, and
a dozen times he passes the perilous point with masterly ease. In the
hands of a lesser artist than he, how utterly absurd would be a scene
like that in ‘Ligeia’ where the opium-eater watches by the bedside of
his dead wife.
‘Metzengerstein’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ are stories
of metempsychosis. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘Hop-Frog’ turn on
the motive of revenge. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ an episode of the
Inquisition, is a study of the preternatural acuteness of the mind
while the body undergoes torture. ‘The Assignation’ is a Venetian tale
of love and intrigue, and would have been conventional enough in the
hands of any one but Poe. The most powerful story in the group is ‘The
Red Death,’ a lurid drama of revelry in the midst of pestilence.
Difficult as are the themes, and skilful as is the handling, these
tales are in a way surpassed by the extraordinary group of romances in
which Poe describes the meeting of disembodied spirits. ‘The Power of
Words,’ ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros
and Charmion’ are excursions into a world unknown to the rank and file
of literary explorers, a world where the most adventurous might well
question his ability to penetrate far. In these supermundane pieces, in
the prose-poems ‘Silence’ and ‘Shadow,’ in ‘Ligeia,’ and in ‘The Domain
of Arnheim,’ Poe’s art is indeed magical.
Poe seems to have been fully persuaded in his own mind that he had
the gift of humor. The extravaganzas and farcical pieces bulk rather
large in his collected writings. In too many of them the author cuts
extraordinary mental capers in the most mirthless way. ‘The Literary
Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,’ ‘How to write a Blackwood Article’ and its
sequel, ‘A Predicament,’ satires all on the ways of editors and men
of letters, are examples of Poe’s manner as a humorist. The rattling
monologue and dry, hard, uncontagious laughter of a music-hall comedian
is the nearest parallel. The effect is wholly disproportionate to the
bewildering activity of the performer.
In farces like ‘The Spectacles,’ ‘Loss of Breath,’ and ‘The Man that
was Used up,’ the motives would be revolting were not the characters
manifestly constructed of wood or papier-maché. The figures are neither
more nor less than marionettes. If Madame Stephanie Lalande (aged
eighty-one) dashes her wig on the ground with a yell and dances a
fandango upon it, ‘in an absolute ecstasy and agony of rage,’ it is
what may be expected in a pantomime. Whoever wishes to laugh at the
hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign, when he is discovered sans
scalp, sans palate, sans arm, leg, and shoulders, is at liberty to do
so, but he must laugh as do children when Punch beats his wife.
There is no question of the vivacity displayed in these pieces.
‘Bon-Bon,’ ‘The Duc de l’Omelette,’ ‘Lionizing,’ ‘Never bet the Devil
your Head,’ ‘X-ing a Paragrab,’ ‘Diddling Considered as one of the
Exact Sciences,’ ‘The Business Man,’ and ‘The Angel of the Odd’ are
sprightly with an uncanny sprightliness. It must always be a matter for
astonishment that Poe could have written them. The mystery of their
being read is explained by the taste of the times.
On the other hand, ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ is genuinely amusing. The
description of the peaceful estate of the pleasant Dutch toy village
of Vondervotteimitiss, where the very pigs wore repeaters tied to
their tails with ribbons, and the sad story of the destruction of all
order and regularity by the advent of the foreign-looking young man
in black kerseymere knee-breeches, are most agreeably set forth. This
extravaganza is not only the best of Poe’s humorous sketches, but ranks
with the work of men who were better equipped and more gifted in such
work than was Poe.
V
THE CRITIC
Poe brought into American criticism a pungency which it had hitherto
lacked. He was entirely independent, and had urbanity companioned
independence the value of his critical work would have been greatly
augmented. He could praise with warmth and condemn with asperity;
he could not maintain an even temper. Swayed by his likes and his
dislikes, he was but too apt to grow extravagantly commendatory
or else spiteful. ‘He had the judicial mind but was rarely in the
judicial state of mind.’[27] He was not unwilling to give pain, and
easily persuaded himself that he did so in a just cause. There was a
pleasurable sense of power in the consciousness of being feared. Yet
the pleasure thus derived can never be other than ignoble. A man of
Poe’s genius can ill afford to waste his time in attacking other men
of genius whose conceptions of literary art differ from his own. Still
less can he afford to assail the swarm of petty authors whose works
will perish the sooner for being let alone. Of all harmless creatures
authors are the most harmless and should be allowed to live their
innocent little lives. But Poe took literature hard, and authors had a
disquieting effect on him.
Accused of ‘mangling by wholesale,’ Poe denied the charge, declaring
that among the many critiques he had written during a given period of
ten years not one was ‘wholly fault-finding or wholly in approbation.’
And he maintained that to every opinion expressed he had attempted
to give weight ‘by something that bore the semblance of a reason.’
Is there another writer in the land who ‘can of his own criticisms
conscientiously say the same’? Poe prided himself on an honesty of
motive such as animated Wilson and Macaulay. He denied that his course
was unpopular, pointing to the fact that during his editorship of
the ‘Messenger’ and ‘Graham’s’ the circulation of the one had risen
from seven hundred to five thousand, and of the other ‘from five to
fifty-two thousand subscribers.’ ‘Even the manifest injustice of a
Gifford is, I grieve to say, an exceedingly popular thing.’[28]
Poe’s critical writings take the form of reviews of books
(‘Longfellow’s Ballads,’ ‘Moore’s “Alciphron,”’ ‘Horne’s “Orion,”’
‘Miss Barrett’s “A Drama of Exile,”’ ‘Hawthorne’s Tales,’ etc.),
polemical writings (‘A Reply to “Outis”’), essays on the theory of
literary art (‘The Poetic Principle,’ ‘The Rationale of Verse’), brief
notes (‘Marginalia’), and short and snappy articles on contemporary
writers (‘The Literati’).
His theory of literary art may be studied in the lecture entitled ‘The
Poetic Principle,’ where he maintains that there is no such thing
as a long poem, the very phrase being ‘a contradiction of terms.’ A
poem deserves its title ‘only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the
soul.’ This excitement is transient. When it ceases, that which is
written ceases to be poetical. Poe even sets the precise limit of the
excitement--‘half an hour at the very utmost.’
He then attacks ‘the heresy of The Didactic,’ protesting against the
doctrine that every poem should contain a moral and the poetical merit
estimated by the moral. ‘The incitements of Passion, or the precepts of
Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may be introduced into a poem with
advantage, but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down
in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the
real essence of the poem.’
Poe then proceeds to his definition of the ‘poetry of words,’ which
is, he says, ‘_The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty_.’ Its sole arbiter
is Taste. ‘With the Intellect, or with the Conscience, it has only
collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever
either with Duty or with Truth.’
In his concrete criticism Poe never hesitated to prophesy. ‘I most
heartily congratulate you upon having accomplished a work which will
_live_,’ he wrote to Mrs. E. A. Lewis. Of some poem of Longfellow’s he
said that it would ‘not live.’ Possibly he was right in both cases, but
how could he know? Here is shown the weakness of Poe’s critical temper.
He affirmed positively that which cannot positively be affirmed.