Text: Harriet Monroe, “Poe and Whistler,” Poet Lore (Boston, MA), vol. XXI, September 1910, pp. 391-396

[page 391:]

BETWEEN Poe and Whistler, the two finest artists, each in his province, that America has yet produced, there is a close spiritual kinship. Whistler was much the more fortunate of the two: first, in having a sense of humor; second, in not having a hereditary love of drink; third, in being born twenty-five years later into a less opinionated age; fourth, in escaping from his provincial America of the mid-nineteenth century into a world more aware of art; and fifth, in living long enough to fight his battle to a finish and enjoy his triumph. Whistler accomplished more; his genius was more prolific, of broader range and of more human quality than Poe's was, or, perhaps, had a chance to be. Poe lacked some of Whistler's weapons, notably the sharp wit which drew blood from the Philistines, and he was heavily handicapped by the disease whose attacks made him half insane, and finally killed him at little more than half the age Whistler fortunately reached. Moreover, his imagination leaned toward sombreness and Whistler's toward gayety. One is tempted to believe that Whistler had the larger vision and was the greater man of the two, because he stood to his guns, cheerfully endured siege after siege, led many a dashing sortie, and finally ‘made good,’ carried his point with the reluctant world, and died victorious. But who shall balance the ifs and measure success and failure? Who can tell which is the abler soldier — he who wins his long fight against heavy odds and plants his banner high on the crest of the citadel, or he who leads a forlorn hope and falls with the flag, overwhelmed by numbers and treachery?

More important than apparent success or failure is the cause a man lives for and the work he does in loyalty to it. In these two lives the cause was the same — the austerity of beauty and the reticence of art. Whistler may have been quite ignorant of Poe; neither of them invented the principle. But in their time it was revolutionary, and loyalty to it, or indeed to any artistic ideal beyond the crude taste of the crowd, meant a perpetual struggle. Both men abhorred sentimentality and crudity, and delighted in artistry, that clearness of line and delicacy of touch which chooses and eliminates and refrains. To such a temperament the fatuous facility of ‘Evangeline’ and of Royal Academy painting was anathema, and the wonder is, not that [page 392:] Whistler vented his righteous wrath in irony, but that Poe could remain courteous in exposing the prosiness of Longfellow's alleged dactylic measures. Poe's criticism of the poetry of his day remains in its essence sound, and his essay on the ‘Rationale of Verse’ written thirty years before Sidney Lanier's great book, was the first sure word ever uttered in English on the subject, ut he was firing in the air; his missiles flew far over the head of the solidly intrenched New England School. And he did not live long enough, as Whistler did, to gather the ‘ fit audience though few’ together, and watch it grow into a world.

Poe did not live to down his enemies; and even now, strangely enough, a hundred years after his birth, and nearly sixty after his death — even now they are strong enough to deny him justice. We still hear, in the echoes from the centennial comments, that old familiar note of personal dislike and temperamental enmity, shrill insistence of the naggings and denials which irritated the poet almost to insanity and kept him miserably poor throughout his life, which slandered his memory and would have liked to stamp out his fame, Since Emerson obliterated him as ‘ the jingleman/ and Lowell considered it beneath his dignity to have a controversy with him, a curious antagonism between Poe and the truly authoritative among his fellow-countrymen has persisted even into the twentieth century. And as no superior person can ever be a fair judge, as the last word about a man and his work must always be said in sympathy, his fame still appeals for justice ‘to man's charitable judgments, to foreign nations and the next age’; Poe's rather carping fellow-countrymen do not yet pronounce the verdict of time.

We feel this antagonism in Mr. Brownell's elaborate analysis, which tries so hard to say all that it says nothing; which turns a cold light upon Poe's poor misguided genius, studies it from all possible points of view, and so covers it with contradictory tickets and labels as to obscure it altogether. We feel it still more strongly in Mr. Howells's article, in which a kindly man makes a desperate effort to be generous, but cannot help betraying temperamental antipathy at every step. Poe is an immortal, he decides, by virtue merely of one entire poem and two lines besides; and his best tales, though conceded to be ‘the work of a master,’ would not win admission to-day into the sacred pages of our magazines. The unconscious humor of this verdict, which is intended as a criticism of the tales and not of the magazines, its delicious ascription of supernal wisdom to the modern editor, is perhaps inevitable after a lifetime spent in the editorial atmosphere. But not inevitable is the grudging tone of whatever praise he accords the poet's work, praise as eager and happy as though extracted by a surgical [page 393:] operation; still less the bitter severity of his estimate of the poet's character.

Poe has always been unlucky in his biographers; at best they have been cold and distant, as if ashamed to make friends with a person of habits so irregular. But the first of them, Griswold, was slanderous both in his statements and his omissions. The lies and exaggerations which he offered as facts to satisfy some obscure unconscious malice still prejudice Poe's fame; yet it is surprising to hear Mr. Howells, in his benign old age, saying that Poe was ‘insanely made up of weakness, pride, viciousness, cruelty, and tenderness.’

Now what is the basis of this heavy indictment repeated by three generations of the people whose aesthetic perceptions Poe did so much to quicken and inspire? Pride and tenderness may be admitted as fundamental in his character; also certain obvious and superficial weaknesses, combined, however, with a profound strength, the strength of an inevitable loyalty to a disprised ideal. But how and wherein was he vicious or cruel? True, he drank to excess, and the occasional sprees of his youth developed, through those later years of privation and bereavement and despair, into a heavy slavery to the dark hereditary mania. But why should this evil habit, battled against to the bitter end, a habit which modern science calls a disease rather than vice, earn for the poet that very complete little adjective ‘vicious.’ Other men of letters have drunk to excess, even the amiable and admirable Addison, whom generations of school children are taught to revere. Burns drank himself to death, and clogged his genius with other vices which the more delicate nature of Poe shunned with Puritanic austerity. But we do not, for this reason or greater reasons, dismiss these men as ‘vicious.’ Most of us, with Poe and Burns, lapse into vice, fall and fight, conquer or are conquered; but he only is vicious who prefers vicious practices, who loves evil and has a contempt for good.

And this over-emphasis of Poe's weaknesses is not balanced by any mention of his virtues. We hear nothing of the ‘uniform gentleness of disposition and kindness of heart,’ which, even in so cold a biography as Professor Woodberry's, are testified to by a score of the poet's friends. Mrs. Osgood's description is typical of many. ‘It was in his own house,’ she says, ‘that his character appeared in its most beautiful light. There he was playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child. Even in the midst of his most harassing literary duties he had, for his young, gentle, and idolized wife, and for all who came, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention.’ Poets’ marriages are not always pleasant reading — how forbearing the world has been in spreading a mantle of charity over the marital failures of Shelley, Byron, [page 394:] Burns, Coleridge, even the lofty-minded Milton! Why, then, do we hear so little of the devotion of Poe and his frail little child wife through the ten years of their marriage? They were poor, but their little cottage home was simple and beautiful, and ‘she idolized him.’ There was ‘never an impatient word,’ even when the poverty became wretchedness, even when there was not enough food and fire for the dying woman, and her husband had to nurse her night and day, and spread his great-coat over the meager blankets on her bed. Is this cruelty and viciousness? Is it even the heartlessness of which we hear him accused? How many poets, how many men, though born without Poe's craving for drink, could endure a strain like this for months, for years?

But enough of all this; it makes one impatient to have to defend Poe's private character against his censorious fellow countrymen. His loyalty to his invalid wife was typical of a more heroic loyalty in him which is more our affair, and of which we hear no mention. He kept his intellectual integrity; he was unflinchingly true to his ideal of art; he fought and starved for it in a world which had not the remotest idea of what he meant or what he was trying to do. In those arid eighteen forties, banished for life, with his passionate love of the inner subtleties of beauty, to a ‘poor little vainglorious, self-distrustful country, still abjectly provincial’ Poe fought the same battle which Whistler waged so gallantly to a happier end. Whistler, keenly American as he was by temperament, had to cross the ocean to gain even a reluctant hearing, even a mocking response; his own country was still too barren of art — who can imagine him achieving anything through the heroic din and turmoil of the civil war ? Poe never found his way to the cosmopolitan world of which he was born a citizen, never, except in extreme youth, had the chance to cross the sea; and even if he had reached Europe with his message his time was out of joint, not yet ready to understand him. He was obliged to fight blindly, and with increasing sorrow and bitterness, a battle in the air; while the great and wise of his day, that firmly intrenched group up in New England, looked on smilingly, as from a height, unmoved even to scorn until the Quixotic swordsman dared point a thrust at Longfellow.

Yet if we may estimate a man's genius by its fecundity, which of all those Bostonians may stand with him? Even Emerson, the wise and gentle and noble, proves not, on the whole, such a modern; to-day he is not so intensely and passionately alive as this jingle man he despised. Mr. Brownell says, ‘We cannot imagine American literature without him’; and we have clouds of witnesses, from Baudelaire to Conan Doyle, to prove him the only American writer whose power has been fruitful in other lands [page 395:] and tongues. As Whistler had his way with modern graphic art, compelling the painters and etchers of our time and later times to follow the trend of his footsteps, or at least to feel in their veins the quickening influence of his blood and fire, so, to a somewhat less degree and in a narrower sense, Poe has influenced literary art and clarified its ideals. His battle in the air dispersed clouds and put demons to flight. We perceive, as his contemporaries did not, that it was fought for certain inviolable principles of beauty, which had been obscured and ignored; the same principles, essentially, of which Whistler, in his ‘ Ten O’Clock,’ a full half century later, so brilliantly reminded the British Philistine world.

If Poe's spirit listened to that lecture, how he must have rejoiced! f Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress/ ‘ She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only, having no desire to teach/ ‘ Beauty is confounded with virtue!’ ( As the laws of their art were revealed to them (the artists) they saw, in the development of their work, that real beauty which, to them, was as much a matter of certainty and triumph as is to the astronomer the unification of the result, foreseen with the light given to him alone. In all this, their world was completely severed from that of their fellow-creatures with whom sentiment is mistaken for poetry; and for whom there is no perfect work that shall not be explained by the benefit conferred upon themselves/ The voice was Whistler's, but Poe must have risen from his unquiet grave to join the ghostly company of masters who inspired it. Here across the tides of time, was his comrade, his fellow-workman, abler, more efficient than he, and of a happier star.

Thus there is a familiar ring in Miss Edith Thomas's long arraignment of Poe as ‘a master mechanician.’ He was a master mechanician, as every artist should be, and if Miss Thomas can see nothing more in him, so much the worse for Miss Thomas, Hers is the old familiar minor-poet attitude, that also of the forgotten minor painters who flung similar epithets at Whistler, for these ladies and gentlemen have always been sentimentalists. One must wear one's heart on one's sleeve to persuade them that one has a heart; they detect no ‘ feeling ‘ in a feeling for pure beauty, no ‘ tenderness * in reticence from unmelodious clamor.

Is there no feeling, no tenderness in

or in

or

or ‘To My Mother,’ or the second ‘To Helen,’ or the ‘Dream Within a Dream,’ or ‘Annabel Lee,’ or ‘Israfel,’ or ‘ El Dorado,’ or the lightly touched ‘ Romance ‘ and ‘Fairyland’? Each of these perfect poems is inspired by feeling too profound to need over-emphasis and too exquisite to indulge in it; feeling in no haste to display the roots it springs from, but reserved until it blooms into a flower.

Now and then a string of Poe's harp is strained, more rarely it breaks, as in the case of every master who keeps an instrument of rarest quality at concert pitch. Now and then we detect the artificial note of virtuosity rather than the pure clear tone of art. ‘The Raven,’ for example, is rather deliberately overwrought, the extravagant playing of a master whose hands outrun his theme for once, who indulges his skill with a passionate joy. ‘The Bells,’ of course, makes no higher pretense than this, is frankly a virtuoso's happy exercise in verbal felicities — a tour de force, like a Paganini cadenza, in whose gay abandon of ingenuity all the world delights with the artist. But in the small volume of Poe's verse mere virtuosity is rare; in fact, the most subtle beauty of his art is its instinct for stopping short of precise perfection, of that mechanical rigidity of form which is so essential to the mere technician. Here again the parallel with Whistler holds. The best of Poe's poems are like the Venice etchings — masterpieces of arrangement, of luckily contrasted light and shadow, with figures suggested, half outlined, against backgrounds emerging in beauty from the universal mystery; and all expressive of that feeling which is of all feelings deepest in the heart of man, the delight in life, the commanding sense of its beauty and tragedy, the passion to share in its great creative processes, to leave some record of a phase or two of its elusive, evanescent charm.

Poe's verse, in short, has the magic touch. He had an instinct for words as fine as Whistler's for line, an instinct which always baffles analysis, always puzzles, often even enrages the square-toed critic keen for faults and sure of rules. To read his poetry is to bathe in limpid waters by moonlight or sunlight, to sift pearly sands on the shore of an infinite sea. The sands are a mere handful, the waters a mere pool in a forest, the poems mere love songs or little ecstasies of grief or joy, but the magic makes of these trifles the very essence of the elements, the stuff out of which worlds are builded and hearts are born, the mystery through whose far free spaces dreams take flight.