Text: Eugene Benson, “The American Critic,” The Season (New York, NY), August 1871, p. ?, col. ?

The American Critic.

As a critic, Poe was liberal and perverse, burning incense before second rate writers, and stinging the author he professed to admire. His article on Hawthorne, like Antony's oration, with its blasting phrase, “Yet Brutus was an honorable man,” leaves an impression contrary and fatal to the frequent professions of high appreciation which make the refrain of his article. As a critic, Poe spent himself upon questions of detail, and, in all cases, belittled his subject. He did not exercise the most engaging faculties of his mind. He is brilliant caustic, stinging, personal without geniality, expressing an irritated mind. Reading his criticisms, we think his literary being might be said to resemble a bush that blossoms into a few perfect flowers, but always has its thorns in thickest profusion. Poe was what may be called a technical critic. He delighted to involve his reader in the mechanism of poetry, and convict his victim of ignorance, while he used his knowledge as a means to be exquisitely insolent. He was like an art critic stuffed with the jargon of studios, talking an unknown language; carless [[careless]] about the elements of the subject which, properly, are the chief and only concern of the public. That Poe was acute, that he was exact, that he was original, no one can question; but he was not stimulating, and comprehensive, and generous, like the more sympathetic critics, as, for example, Diderot or Carlyle. It was his misfortune to have been called to pronounce upon the ephemera of literature, conscious that he was expected to think them fixed stars. His critical notices of American men of letters show the incessant struggle of a supreme scorn muffled and quieted from time to time in the acknowledgement of mitigating circumstances to excuse the literary criminals that he had assembled. When he wishes to be indulgent and generous, it is the indulgence and generosity of a cat stroking a mouse — the claw is felt by the breathless victim. He probably tore his subject moe than any critic that ever lived. In his criticisms, the sentences are sharp, stinging, pointed, and sparkling; they are like so many surgical knives — they lay open the living subject, quivering and fainting, to the bone. Poe had no indulgence for literary offenders. He had the instincts of a mole slaking its thirst over its prey. Poe scratched almost every one of his literary contemporaries, and, in nine cases out of ten, he was right in his destructive work. But he was virulent, mocking, incensing, seeming to be animated with a personal animosity for his subject, he was like a literary pirate, sparing neither friend nor foe, always accusing other people of stealing, while his own hands were not pure. There is no question but that Poe had a monomania upon the subject of plagiarism. He was so skillful in hiding his own literary thefts that he seems to have been impelled to accuse others, and talk incessantly of a view known best to himself — it was an example of his perverseness of nature. Although the arrogant and incensing elements of Poe's nature had full play in his remarks on American writers, they were only the accidental expressions of his literary genius, and should not determine our critical conclusions. Poe had what I may call, pre-eminently, a beautiful mind — all its highest and characteristic manifestations were harmonious and enchaining. His combination of the strange or the unusual with the lovely or symmetrical, is his claim to be considered original. No writer ever reached a more personal expression of the beautiful than Poe. He was modern in all his traits, romantic as no other American writer, the lighting in the horrible as the natural antithesis of his radiant and mournful ideal beauty. The women that live in his stories, the ideal women of a modern epoch, pail, sick, luminous, white-eyed, preyed upon by “incurable melancholy,” versed in the most recondite knowledge, vibrative, and “sneaking with a voice that resembles music,” and as from profound depths, have no existence outside of Poe's beautiful and strange imagination. He created them; as Eugene Delacroix created his women, who are remarkable, impassioned, profound, and make you think. Poe's “Lenore,” “Legeia [[Ligeia]],” and “Morella,” are the creations of a poet — ideal and natural as the “Venus of Milo” is ideal and natural, but in no sense realistic, and having no relation to the photographic and literal portraits of women such as we find in modern novels. It is for them that Poe has drawn up his poetical nature; they are the issue of his sense of beauty, which in him was more imperative in its needs, and more creative in his energy, than the same sense in Hawthorne Among Americans, I repeat, Poe and Hawthorne are the only two literary men who have had the sense of beauty and the artist's conscience in a supreme degree; and in Poe it was more isolated, or unalloyed, than in Hawthorne.

EUGENE BENSON.