Text: Lewis Gates, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in English Studies and Appreciations, New York and London: Macmillan, 1900, pp. 110-128

[page 110:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE

POE is a better poet in his prose than in his poetry. A reader of Poe's poetry, if he be quick to take umbrage at artificiality and prone to cavil, feels, after a dozen poems, like attempting an inventory of Poe's literary workshop — the material Poe uses is so uniform and the objects he fashions are so few and inevitable. The inventory might run somewhat as follows: One plaster bust of Pallas slightly soiled; one many-wintered Raven croaking Nevermore; a parcel of decorative names — Auber, Yaanek, Zante, Israfel; a few robes of sorrow, a somewhat frayed funeral pall, and a coil of Conqueror Worms; finally, one beautiful lay figure whom the angels name indifferently Lenore, Ulalume, and Annabel Lee. Masterly as is Poe's use of this poetical outfit, subtle as are his cadences and his sequences of tone-colour, it is only rarely that he makes us forget the cleverness of his manipulation and wins us into accepting his moods and imagery with that unconscious and almost hypnotic subjection to his will which the true poet secures from his readers. [page 111:]

In the best of his visionary Tales, on the other hand, Poe is much more apt to have his way with us. He works with a far greater variety of appliances, which it is by no means easy to number and call by name; the effects he aims at are manifold and not readily noted and classified; and the details that his imagination elaborates come upon us with a tropical richness and apparent confusion that mimic well the splendid lawlessness and undesignedness of nature. Moreover, even if the artifice in these tales were more palpable than it is, it would be less offensive than in poetry, inasmuch as the standard of sincerity is in such performances confessedly less exacting. The likeness in aim and in effect between the tales and the poems, however, cannot be missed — between such tales as Ligeia and Eleonora and such poems as The Raven and Ulalume. Mr. Leslie Stephen has somewhere spoken of De Quincey's impassioned prose as aiming to secure in unmeasured speech very many of the same effects that Keats's Odes produce in authentic verse. This holds true also of the best of Poe's romances; they are really prose-poems. And, indeed, Poe has himself recognized in his essay on Hawthorne the close kinship between tale and poem, assigning to the poem subjects in the treatment of which the creation of beauty is the ruling motive, and leaving to the prose tale the creation of all other single effects, such as horror, humour, and terror. Both poem and [page 112:] tale must be brief, absolutely unified, and must create a single overwhelming mood.

The world that Poe's genuinely fantastic tales take us into has the burnish, the glow, the visionary radiance of the world of Romantic poetry; it is as luxuriantly unreal, too, as phantasmagoric — though it lacks the palpitating, buoyant loveliness of the nature that such poets as Shelley reveal, and is somewhat enamelled or metallic in its finish. Its glow and burnish come largely from the concreteness of Poe's imagination, from his inveterate fondness for sensations, for colour, for light, for luxuriant vividness of detail. Poe had the tingling senses of the genuine poet, senses that vibrated like delicate silver wire to every impact. He was an amateur of sensations and loved to lose himself in the O Altitudo of a perfume or a musical note. He pored over his sensations and refined upon them, and felt to the core of his heart the peculiar thrill that darted from each. He had seventy times seven colours in his emotional rainbow, and was swift to fancy the evanescent hue of feeling that might spring from every sight or sound — from the brazen note, for example, of the clock in The Masque of the Bed Death, from “the slender stems” of the ebony and silver trees in Eleonora, or from the “large and luminous orbs” of Ligeia's eyes. Out of the vast mass of these vivid sensations — “passion-winged ministers of thought’‘ — Poe shaped and fashioned the world in. which his romances [page 113:] confine us, a world that is, therefore, scintillating and burnished and vibrant, quite unlike the world in Hawthorne's tales, which is woven out of dusk and moonlight.

Yet, curiously enough, this intense brilliancy of surface does not tend to exorcise mystery, strangeness, terror from Poe's world, or to transfer his stories into the region of everyday fact. Poe is a conjurer who does not need to have the lights turned down. The effects that he is most prone to aim at are, of course, the shivers of awe, crispings of the nerves, shuddering thrills that come from a sudden, overwhelming sense of something uncanny, abnormal, ghastly, lurking in the heart of life. And these nervous perturbations are even more powerfully excited by those of his stories that, like Eleonora and Ligeia, have a lustrous finish, than by sketches that, like Shadow and [[and]] Silence, deal with twilight lands and half-visualized regions. In The Masque of the Red Death, in The Fall of the House of Usher, and in A Descent into the Maelstrom, the details of incident and background flash themselves on our imaginations with almost painful distinctness.

The terror in Poe's tales is not the terror of the child that cannot see in the dark, but the terror of diseased nerves and morbid imaginations, that see with dreadful visionary vividness and feel a mortal pang. Poe is a past master of the moods of diseased mental life, and in the interests of some one [page 114:] or other of these semi-hysterical moods many of his most uncannily prevailing romances are written. They are prose-poems that realize for us such half-frenetic glimpses of the world as madmen have; and suggest in us for the moment the breathless, haggard mood of the victim of hallucinations.

It must not, however, be forgotten that Poe wrote tales of ratiocination as well as romances of death. In his ability to turn out with equal skill stories bordering on madness and stories where intellectual analysis, shrewd induction, reasoning upon evidence, all the processes of typically sane mental life, are carried to the utmost pitch of precision and effectiveness, lies one of the apparent anomalies of Poe's genius and art. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter, Poe seems sanity incarnate, pure mental energy untouched by moods or passions, weaving and unweaving syllogisms and tracking out acutely the subtlest play of thought. What in these stories has become of Poe the fancy-monger, the mimic maniac, the specialist in moodiness and abnormality?

After all, the difficulty here suggested is only superficial and yields speedily to a little careful analysis. We have not really to deal with a puzzling case of double personality, with an author who at his pleasure plays at being Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. In all Poe's stories the same personality is at work, the same methods are followed, and the [page 115:] material used, though. at first siglit it may seem in the two classes of tales widely diverse, will also turn out to be quite the same, at any rate in its artificiality, in its remoteness from real complex human nature, and in its origin in the mind of the author. Certain instructions that in an essay on Hawthorne Poe has given to would-be writers of tales are delightfully serviceable to the anxious unraveller of the apparent contradictions in Poe's personality.

To him who would fashion a successful short story, Poe prescribes as follows : He must first of all pick out an effect — it may be of horror, it may be of humour, it may be of terror — which his short story is to aim to produce, to impose vibratingly on the temperament of its readers. This effect is to give the law to the whole of the short story, to regulate its every detail, both of incident and character, its background of nature or town, its texture of sensations, its imagery, phrasing, wording, tone, even the cadences of its sentences. The very first sentence must in some divining fashion prepare for this effect, and every bit of material that is used must help in the preparation, must be premonitory, must whet curiosity, must set the nerves nicely a-tremble, must make the reader more and more ready to fall a prey to the final catastrophe. In short, the tale, as Poe conceives it, is a marvellously ingenious set of devices for so tuning a sensitive temperament and giving it intensity of timbre [page 116:] that at just the right moment a special chord of music may be struck upon it with overwhelming power and richness of overtone and resonance. This formula applies alike to Poe's romances of death and to his tales of ratiocination; and one of the first suggestions it carries with it has to do with the artificiality of the material that Poe uses in all his fiction. Whether the effect that Poe aims at is a shiver of surprise at the sudden ingenious resolution of a riddle, or a shudder of horror at the collapse of a haunted house, his methods of work are substantially the same, and the stuff from which he weaves his tale is equally unreal and remote from what ordinary life has to offer; it is all the product of an infinitely inventive intellect that devises and plans and adroitly arranges with an unflinching purpose to attain an effect. The better poetry, the more feigning; and Poe is an excellent poet in these prose-poems. He can invent with endless ingenuity and plausibility, play-passions, play-moods, play-sensations, play-ideas, and play-complications of incident. He is an adept in fitting these mock images of life deftly together, in subtly arranging these simulacra of real feeling and real thought so that they shall have complete congruity, shall have the glamour and the momentary plausibility of truth, and shall rally together at the right moment in a perfect acclaim of music. But whether the tale deal professedly with abnormal life or with rational life, its seemliness and [page 117:] beauty and persuasive power come simply from Poe's immense cleverness as a constructive artist, as a technician, from his ability to play tunes on temperaments, not from his honest command of human life and character. In all that he does Poe is emotionally shallow but artistically, like Joey Bagstock, “devilish sly.”

The shallowness of Poe's treatment of life and character is almost too obvious to need illustration. Not only does he disdain, as Hawthorne disdains, to treat any individual character with minute realistic detail, but he does not even portray typical characters in their large outlines, with a view to opening before us the permanent springs of human action or putting convincingly before us the radical elements of human nature. The actors in his stories are all one-idea’d creatures, monomaniac victims of passion, or grief, or of some perverse instinct, or of an insane desire to guess riddles. They are magniloquent poseurs, who dine off their hearts in public, or else morbidly ingenious intellects for the solving of complicated problems. The worthy Nietzsche declares somewhere that the actors in Wagner's music-dramas are always just a dozen steps from the mad-house. We may say the same of Poe's characters, with the exception of those that are merely Babbage calculating machines. Complex human characters, characters that are approximately true to the whole range of human motive and interest, Poe never gives [page 118:] us. He conceives of characters merely as means for securing his artificial effects on the nerves of his readers.

The world, too, into which Poe takes us, burnished as it is, vividly visualized as it is, is a counterfeit world, magnificently false like his characters. Sometimes it is a phantasmagoric world, full of romantic detail and sensuous splendour. Its bright meadows are luxuriant with asphodels, hyacinths, and acanthuses, are watered with limpid rivers of silence that lose themselves shimmeringly in blue Da Vinci distances, are lighted by triple-tinted suns, and are finally shut in by the “ golden walls of the universe.” When not an exotic region of this sort, Poe's world is apt to be a dextrously contrived toy universe, full of trap-doors, unexpected passages, and clever mechanical devices of all sorts, fit to help the conjurer in securing his effects. Elaborately artificial in some fashion or other, Poe's world is sure to be, designed with nice malice to control the reader's imagination and put it at Poe's mercy. In short, in all that he does, in the material that he uses, in the characters that he conjures up to carry on the action of his stories, in his methods of weaving together incident and description and situation and action, Poe is radically artificial, a calculator of effects, a reckless scorner of fact and of literal truth.

And, indeed, it is just this successful artificiality that for many very modern temperaments constitutes [page 119:] Poe's special charm; he is thoroughly irresponsible; he whistles the commonplace down the wind and forgets everything but his dream, its harmony, its strenuous flight, its splendour and power. The devotees of art for art's sake have now for many years kept up a tradition of unstinted admiration for Poe. This has been specially true in France, where, indeed, men of all schools have joined in doing him honour. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote an eulogistic essay on him as early as 1853, an essay to which he has since from time to time made various additions, the last in 1883. Baudelaire translated Poe's tales in several instalments between 1855 and 1865. Émile Hennequin published, a few years ago, an elaborate study and life of Poe; and Stéphane Mallarmé has of late conferred a new and perhaps somewhat dubious immortality upon the Raven, through a translation into very symbolistic prose. In truth, Poe was a decadent before the days of decadence, and he has the distinction of having been one of the earliest defiant practisers of art for art's sake. In his essay on the Poetic Principle, he expressly declared that a poem should be written solely “ for the poem's sake,” — a phrase which almost anticipates the famous formula of modern æstheticism. The drift of this essay, Poe's opinion elsewhere recorded, and his practice as a story-teller, all agree in implying or urging that art is its own justification, that the sole aim of art is the creation of [page 120:] beauty, and that art and actual life need have nothing to do with one another. To be sure, Poe's comments on everyday life have not acquired quite the exquisite contempt and the epigrammatic finish characteristic of modern decadence; yet the root of the matter was in Poe — witness a letter in which he boasts of his insensibility to the charms of “temporal life,” and of being “profoundly excited “ solely “ by music and by some poems.”

Poe and his heroes curiously anticipate, in many respects, the morbid dreamers whom French novelists of the decadent school have of recent years repeatedly studied, and of whom Huysmans's Des Esseintes may be taken as a type. The hero in The Fall of the House of Usher, with his “cadaverousness of complexion,” his “eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison,” his “habitual trepidancy,” his “hollow-sounding enunciation,” “his morbid acuteness of the senses,” and his suffering when exposed to the odours of certain flowers and to all sounds save those of a few stringed instruments, might be a preliminary study for Huysmans's memorable Des Esseintes. Usher has not the French hero's sophistication and self-consciousness; he suffers dumbly, and has not Des Esseintes's consolation in knowing himself a “special soul,” supersensitive and delicate beyond the trite experience of nerves and senses prescribed by practical life. He does not carry on his morbid experimentations debonairly as does Des Esseintes, and he takes his [page 121:] diseases too seriously. But he nevertheless anticipates Des Esseintes astonishingly in looks, in nerves, in physique, and even in tricks of manner. Poe's heroes, too, are forerunners of modern decadents in their refinings upon sensation, in their fusion of the senses, and in their submergence in moods. As Herr Nordau says of the Symbolists, they have eyes in their ears; they see sounds; they smell colours. One of them hears rays of light that fall upon his retina. They are all extraordinarily alive to the “unconsidered trifles” of sensation. The man in the Pit and the Pendulum smells the odour of the sharp steel blade that swings past him. They detect with morbid delicacy of perception shades of feeling that give likeness to the most apparently diverse sensations. The lover in Ligeia feels in his “intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes” the same sentiment that at other times overmasters him “in the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, . . . in the falling of a meteor, . . . in the glances of unusually aged people, . . .” and when listening to “certain sounds from stringed instruments.” Moods become absorbing and monopolizing in the lives of these vibrating temperaments. “Men have called me mad,” the lover in Eleonora ingratiatingly assures us; “but the question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence; whether much that is glorious, whether all that is profound, does not spring from disease of thought [page 122:] — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” Finally, Poe's heroes anticipate the heroes of modern decadence in feeling the delicate artistic challenge of sin and of evil: they hardly reach the audacities of French Diabolism and Sadism; but at least they have the whim of doing or fancying moral evil that aesthetic good may come.

All these characteristics of Poe's work may be summed up by saying that his heroes are apt to be neuropaths or degenerates. And doubtless Poe himself was a degenerate, if one cares to use the somewhat outworn idiom of the evangelist of the Philistines. He had the ego-mania of the degenerate, a fact which shows itself strikingly in his art through his preoccupation with death. In his poetry and prose alike the fear of death as numbing the precious core of personality is an obsession with him, and such subjects as premature burial, metempsychosis, revivification after death, the sensations that may go with the change from mortality to immortality (see the Colloquy of Monos and Una), had an irresistible fascination for him. Moreover, throughout Poe's art there are signs of ego-mania in the almost entire lack of the social sympathies. Where in Poe's stories do we find portrayed the sweet and tender relationships and affections that make human life endurable? Where are friendship and frank comradeship and the love of brothers and sisters and of parents and children? Where are [page 123:] the somewhat trite but after all so necessary virtues of loyalty, patriotism, courage, pity, charity, self-sacrifice? Such old-fashioned qualities and capacities, the stuff out of which what is worth while in human nature has heretofore been wrought, are curiously unrecognized and unportrayed in Poe's fiction. They seem to have had no artistic meaning for him — these so obvious and commonplace elements in man and life. Perhaps they simply seemed to him not the stuff that dreams are made of.

When all is said, there is something a bit inhuman in Poe, which, while at times it may give a special tinge to our pleasure in his art, occasionally vitiates or destroys that pleasure. His taste is not immaculate; he will go any length in search of a shudder. Sometimes he is fairly repulsive because of his callous recital of loathsome physical details, for example in his description of the decimated Brigadier-General, in The Man that Was Used Up. In King Pest, The Premature Burial, and M. Valdemar, there is this same almost vulgar insensibility in the presence of the unclean and disgusting. At times, this callousness leads to artistic mischance, and causes a shudder of laughter where Poe wants a shiver of awe. Surely this is apt to be the case in Berenice, the story where the hero is fascinated by the beautiful teeth of the heroine, turns amateur dentist after her death, and in a frenzy of professional enthusiasm breaks open her [page 124:] coffin, and extracts her incisors, bicuspids, and molars, thirty-two altogether — the set was complete.

When this inhumanity of Poe's does not lead to actual repulsiveness or to unintentional grotesqueness, it is nevertheless responsible for a certain aridity and intellectual cruelty that in the last analysis will be found pervading pretty much all he has written. This is what Barbey d’Aurevilly has in mind when he speaks of Poe's sécheresse, the terrible dryness of his art. And looking at the matter wholly apart from the question of ethics, this dryness is a most serious defect in Poe's work as an artist. His stories and characters have none of the buoyancy, the tender, elastic variableness, and the grace of living things; they are hard in finish, harsh in surface, mechanically inevitable in their working out. They seem calculated, the result of ingenious calculation, not because any particular detail impresses the reader as conspicuously false — Poe keeps his distance from life too skilfully and consistently for this — but because of their all-pervading lack of deeply human imagination and interest, because of that shallowness in Poe's hold upon life that has already been noted. The stories and the characters seem the work of pure intellect, of intellect divorced from heart; and for that very reason they do not wholly satisfy, when judged by the most exacting artistic standards. They seem the product of some ingenious mechanism for the manufacture of fiction, of [page 125:] some surpassing rival of Maelzel's chess-playing automaton. This faultily faultless accuracy and precision of movement may very likely be a penalty Poe has to submit to because of his devotion to art for art's sake. He is too much engrossed in treatment and manipulation; his dexterity of execution perhaps presupposes, at any rate goes along with, an almost exclusive interest in technical problems and in “effects,” to the neglect of what is vital and human in the material he uses.

Closely akin to this dryness of treatment is a certain insincerity of tone or flourish of manner, that often interferes with our enjoyment of Poe. We become suddenly aware of the gleaming eye and complacent smile of the concealed manipulator in the writing-automaton. The author is too plainly lying in wait for us; or he is too ostentatiously exhibiting his cleverness and resource, his command of the tricks of the game. One of the worst things that can be said of Poe from this point of view is that he contains the promise and potency of Mr. Robert Hichens, and of other cheap English decadents. Poe himself is never quite a mere acrobat; but he suggests the possible coming of the acrobat, the clever tumbler with the ingenious grimace and the palm itching for coppers.

The same perfect mastery of technique that is characteristic of Poe's treatment of material is noticeable in his literary style. When one stops to consider it, Poe's style, particularly in his romances, [page 126:] is highly artificial, an exquisitely fabricated medium. Poe is fond of inversions and involutions in his sentence-structure, and of calculated rhythms that either throw into relief certain picturesque words, or symbolize in some reverberant fashion the mood of the moment. He seems to have felt very keenly the beauty of De Quincey's intricate and sophisticated cadences, and more than once he actually echoes some of the most noteworthy of them in his own distribution of accents. Special instances of this might be pointed out in Eleonora and in The Premature Burial. Poe's fondness for artificial musical effects is also seen in his emphatic reiteration of specially picturesque phrases, a trick of manner that every one associates with his poetry, and that is more than once found in his prose writings. “And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall — and the rock was gray.” Echolalia, Herr Nordau would probably call this trick in Poe's verse and prose, and he would regard it as an incontestable proof of Poe's degeneracy. Nevertheless, the beauty of the effects to which this mannerism leads in Poe's more artificial narratives is very marked.

In Poe's critical essays his style takes on an altogether different tone and movement, and becomes [page 127:] analytical, rapid, incisive, almost acrid in its severity and intellectuality. The ornateness and the beauty of cadence and colour that are characteristic of his decorative prose disappear entirely. Significantly enough, Macaulay was his favourite literary critic. “The style and general conduct of Macaulay's critical papers,” Poe assures his readers, “could scarcely be improved.” A strange article of faith to find in the literary creed of a dreamer, an amateur of moods, an artistic epicure. Yet that Poe was sincere in this opinion is proved by the characteristics of his own literary essays. He emulates Macaulay in his briskness, in the downrightness of his assertions, in his challengingly demonstrative tone, and in his unsensitiveness to the artistic shade. Of course, he is far inferior to Macaulay in knowledge and in thoroughness of literary training, while he surpasses him in acuteness of analysis and in insight into technical problems.

Poe's admiration for Macaulay and his emulation of him in his critical writings are merely further illustrations of the peculiar intellectual aridity that has already been noted as characteristic of him. Demonic intellectual ingenuity is almost the last word for Poe's genius as far as regards his real personality, the quintessential vital energy of the man. His intellect was real; everything else about him was exquisite feigning. His passion, his human sympathy, his love of nature, all the emotions [page 128:] that go into his fiction, have a counterfeit unreality about them. Not that they are actually hypocritical, but that they seem unsubstantial, mimetic, not the expression of a genuine nature. There was something of the cherub in Poe, and he had to extract his feelings from his head. Much of the time a reader of Poe is cajoled into a delighted forgetfulness of all this unreality, Poe is so adroit a manipulator, such a master of technique. He adapts with unerring tact his manner to his matter and puts upon us the perfect spell of art. Moreover, even when a reader forces himself to take notice of Poe's artificiality, he may, if he be in the right temper, gain only an added delight, the sort of delight that comes from watching the exquisitely sure play of a painter's firm hand, adapting its action consciously to all the difficulties of its subject. Poe's precocious artistic sophistication is one of his rarest charms for the appreciative amateur. But if a reader be exorbitant and relentless and ask from Poe something more than intellectual resource and technical dexterity, he is pretty sure to be disappointed; Poe has little else to offer him. Doubtless it is Philistinish to ask for this something more; but people have always asked for it in the past, and seem likely to go on asking for it, even despite the fact that Herr Max Nordau has almost succeeded in reducing the request to an absurdity.