Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems
and romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the
indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men,
will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your
own generation, still harass your name with their malevolence, while old
women twitter out their incredible and heeded slanders in the literary
papers of New York. But their persistent animosity does not quite
suffice to explain the dislike with which many American critics regard
the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their
country. With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native
merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an American
prophet almost without honour in his own country.
The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects
admirable study of your career ('Edgar Allan Poe,' by George Woodberry:
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have
forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it, that you were,
unfortunately, a Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how
deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence
into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary criticism! About the
writers of his own generation a leader of that generation should hold
his peace, he should neither praise nor blame nor defend his equals;
he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The
breath of their life is in the columns of 'Literary Gossip;' and they
should be allowed to perish with the weekly advertisements on which
they pasture. Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds
should only criticise the great who have passed beyond the reach of
eulogy or fault-finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What 'irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,' drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse
we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for
pardon comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. 'The New Yorkers
never forgave him,' says your latest biographer; and one scarcely
marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity
alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed. 'As a literary
people,' you wrote, 'we are one vast perambulating humbug.' After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities
yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still.
He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in
settling above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
pen, and that in an age when the author of 'To Helen' and' The Cask
of Amontillado' was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than
that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were inevitable
and assured. No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his
birth--_infelix opportunitate vitae_. Had you lived a generation later,
honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have
been yours. Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the
profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the
rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the
contemporary of Mark Twain and of 'Called Back.' It may be that your
criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of
the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least
you had a respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such
words as 'objectional' in the new biography of yourself, and might ask
what is meant by such a sentence as 'his connection with it had inured
to his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself,' and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition
of poetry, 'the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' exhaust your
theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural
bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined
to make you too intolerant of what you call the 'didactic' element in
verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact
proportion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the
Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the
case must always be the largest public.
'Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,' so you
wrote; 'the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should
be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive), is precisely what we
should aim at in poetry.' You aimed at that mark, and struck it again
and again, notably in 'Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in 'The Haunted
Palace,' 'The Valley of Unrest,' and 'The City in the Sea.' But by some
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,
the poet of one poem--'The Raven:' a piece in which the music is highly
artificial, and the 'exaltation' (what there is of it) by no means
particularly 'vague.' So a portion of the public know little of Shelley
but the 'Skylark,' and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the
raven, bear each of them a poet's name _vivu' per ora virum_. Your
theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of
'Kubla Khan') the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long
distance would come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote 'Golden
Wings,' 'The Blue Closet,' and 'The Sailing of the Sword;' and, close
up, Mr. Lear, the author of 'The Yongi Bongi Bo,' and the lay of the
'Jumblies.'
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Moliére. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the
deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic does not seem to hold
water. The 'Odyssey' is not really inferior to 'Ulalume,' as it ought to
be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor 'Le Festin de Pierré to
'Undine.' Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your
poetic practice, to your poetic principles--principles commonly deserted
by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system.
Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like
Fielding, 'a barren rascal.' But how can a writer's verses be numerous
if with him, as with you, 'poetry is not a pursuit but a passion...
which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations
or the more paltry commendations of mankind!' Of you it may be said,
more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that 'to ask you for
anything human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton.'
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success--the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted
all those ideas of 'progress' which 'came from Hell or Boston.' On
this point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M.
Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism
and universal suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your
ultimate ideas is perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your
prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them
as 'Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good
deal of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at
his command. He was a great writer--the greatest writer in prose fiction
whom America has produced. But you and he have not much in common,
except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories
about the workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen's favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic,
he is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute
of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of 'Daisy Miller.' You would admit the unity of effect secured
in 'Washington Square,' though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of 'The House of Usher' or the vindictive triumph of 'The
Cask of Amontillado.'
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered
to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet
among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a scholar's
training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.