Text: James Ashcroft Noble, “Edgar Allan Poe,” New Quarterly Magazine (London, UK), vol. VIII, no. 7, July 1877, pp. 410-427

[page 410:]

DURING the last two or three years there has been a considerable revival of interest both in the life and in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. From the year 1849, in which his short and chequered career was brought to a sad and untimely end, until a comparatively recent period, the man was only regarded as a peculiarly terrible example of profligate genius who could be used effectively by moral lecturers; and his writings, with the exception of one or two striking poems, were either ignored altogether or summarily disposed of in hastily-written criticisms of the knowing kind — criticisms in which such ill-sounding words as morbid, unhealthy, insane, and disgusting, were made to act as substitutes for more definite and discriminating epithets. Poe has in fact been badly used by the world at large, and the man who set the example of ill-usage was one who, both by the laws of friendship and honour, was bound to defend him. There can be no doubt that the estimate of Poe which was current both in America and in England during the quarter of a century which followed his death — and is, indeed, widely current still — owed its existence to the shamefully libellous biography of his literary executor, Rufus Griswold, who, not content with suppressions and misrepresentations, brought even his inventive faculties into play for the purpose of defaming the friend who had entrusted to him the care of his reputation. Of course, protests were frequently and vehemently made by those who really knew the truth; by Mr. N. P. Willis, and Mr. Graham of Graham's Magazine, for both of whom Poe had worked, and by many other less known writers; but these were for the most part published in some ephemeral form, and Griswold had practically the whole field to himself. So far as the general reading public was concerned, things remained in this state until 1875. In that year [page 411:] the Messrs. Black of Edinburgh published in four volumes the first complete English edition of Poe's works, the first volume containing a biography by Mr. John H. Ingram, in which at last the true story was fully told, and Poe was vindicated as thoroughly as he had been calumniated. With the particulars of that vindication it is not my intention to deal, for I wish to speak not so much of the man as of his work. As, however, in Poe's case as in many others, false biography has been made the basis of false criticism, it may be well even here to state that it has been proved once for all, that the popular conception of Poe as one-third demon, one-third madman, and one-third genius, is actually as false as it is inherently improbable.

The new presentation of the unfortunate poet has undoubtedly gained a great deal in veracity, but I am afraid I must declare that it has lost almost as much in vividness. The Poe of Mr. Ingram strikes the imagination more pleasantly but less distinctly than the Poe of Griswold, and I rise from the perusal of this latest biography with only a hazy notion of what manner of man the subject of it really was. He is no longer a monster, but he is still a mystery. The portraits drawn by his friends have common outlines and a common expression, but there is a want of the shading without which the outlines are characterless and the expression undefined. There is intense pride, with a certain fascinating sweetness and even tenderness lurking behind it; there is a keen sense of honour, an indomitable perseverance, a singular sensitiveness of nature; and there are great unregulated emotional forces, but not, I think, what are usually known as strong passions. These things I see clearly, but all else is indistinct, and yet much more must have gone to the moral making of the man. His character leaves an impression which is sharp and yet indistinct, because so many of the lines are wanting.

With his works it is very different. The idea of his merely intellectual nature which we derive from them is so clear, so vivid, so strongly marked-in a word, so obvious that at first sight is seems impossible to say anything about Poe as a writer, which has not been said long ago and is now the merest commonplace. His marvellous analytic faculty, his De Foe-like power of giving to the wildest fiction the appearance of sober fact, the strange grotesquerie of his imagination, his fine feeling for ideal beauty, and his apparent taste for the [page 412:] ghastliest horrors — these things are patent enough, and every one of Poe's critics has seen them, and in his own fashion has said his say concerning them. It looks as if there were no room for a new critique, and yet there may be room after all, for few of his commentators have been in a position to interpret the books by the best of all keys, the key provided by an acquaintance with the real life of their author. With new materials fresh results may not unfairly be expected.

If I were suddenly asked to name Poe's dominant intellectual characteristic, I should unhesitatingly answer a passion for perfection; and if I were then asked to name the merely literary qualities by which this is indicated, I should say his accuracy and his thoroughness. I know how strange and even absurd this must sound to those who think of Poe as a specimen of the most impulsive and irregular type of genius, but I cannot help its strangeness, and hope soon to prove its truth and to show the special kind of perfection which it was his constant endeavour to attain. Perhaps to those whose acquaintance with his works is not limited to “The Raven” and half-a-dozen of his short tales, it may hardly seem so very strange after all. It may indeed be said that when this quality of Poe's intellectual temperament has once been seized by the critical perception, it seems so obvious, that the wonder is how it could ever have been missed. It is like some new truth, which the moment after its discovery appears so familiar that we feel as if we had known it all our life, — which harmonizes so entirely with our other mental acquisitions that it is difficult to believe it had not some obscure place among our original mental furniture. Poe's passion for perfection manifests itself more or less visibly in everything which he wrote; its workings are clearly enough to be seen in the compositions just mentioned, and its existence might be inferred if not proved from them alone. Most of his short tales belong to the class of artistic productions, which painters call by the name of “pot boilers”; that is, they were produced to supply immediate pecuniary necessities, which were too pressing to wait for the completion of more elaborate work. And yet they have about them nothing of the hasty, careless, slapdash, pot-boiler character. They are planned as carefully, and finished as minutely as if their author had been a rich literary amateur with nothing to do but to take care of his reputation. In the merest externals the same spirit was manifested. He did not, like Buffon, array himself in full [page 413:] dress when he sat down to write, but the outside garments of his thoughts, the characters in which they were traced upon the paper, were distinguished by such singular beauty that a manuscript of Poe's is a veritable artistic treat. His handwriting is indeed so characteristic that it is a real help to us in forming an opinion of the man. The compliment paid to its mere legibility in one of Griswold's fictitious anecdotes is a fine specimen of the art of damning with faint praise. Every letter is perfectly formed, every word reveals its significance at a glance, every point is placed as carefully as if Poe had been a Hebrew scribe copying the sacred law, everywhere there is an exquisite symmetry, and yet no handwriting was ever less mechanical and formal, or more full of individuality and significance. Thackeray's caligraphy somewhat resembles it, but in the manuscript of the English novelist the mere prettiness of the penmanship is in excess of the expressiveness, while in that of Poe we seem to get a glimpse of the real man.

This, however, may appear somewhat fanciful, and I am willing enough to return to more familiar and solid ground. Almost any one of the best known of Poe's short stories will serve as an example of the thoroughness of his work, and as a proof of the existence of that instinct which would never allow him even to deviate in the direction of slovenliness. The tale of “The Gold Bug,” or “The Gold Beetle,” as it has always been called in English editions, is convenient to refer to because it is so well known, and none other is really more characteristic. On a first perusal, however hasty, no reader can fail to be struck by the author's singular gift of narration, and, even if he be not consciously awake to the existence of this faculty, he bears witness to it by the unflagging interest with which he takes in every line; never skipping a paragraph because it looks immaterial, or running his eye lazily over a conversation which seems a drag on the movement of the story. Now the mere power to tell a tale in such a manner as to produce an effect of this kind is neither ordinary nor insignificant. That it is uncommon is obvious enough, and it is frequently supposed to be of small importance only because the great masters of narrative have the art to conceal their art, and their stories come so trippingly from the pen that no one could imagine them being told save as they tell them. That part of a story-teller's business which is transacted behind the scenes — the inventive, constructive [page 414:] part of it — always receives due honour; but that other part which is performed before the eyes of the public is, I think, regarded by most people as, comparatively speaking, mere journeyman's work, which a very short apprenticeship might enable any one to accomplish. The error, I might say the absurdity, of this view is very patent to those who have ever either accomplished or attempted anything in narrative art, and it is by no means difficult to make it equally patent even to unpractised outsiders. The tale-teller has not simply to keep clear of one Scylla and one Charybdis: there are a score of each. His finest faculties may be his worst enemies. The possession of graphic power may tempt him into long descriptions which weary the reader, and ruin the symmetry of his work; a superabundance of wit may only make his story sparklingly unnatural; and imagination running riot in the fulness of its strength may only result in grotesque extravagance. Then the story may be developed in a hundred ways, only one of which is truly artistic, and if the natural sequence of incident — so hard to find — be once broken by things being told in their wrong order, there is nothing but confusion. Nor must proportion, and what is called literary perspective, be for a moment forgotten. If that is elaborated which should only be hinted at, or that merely suggested which should be fully set forth; if the character or incident which makes the story is less distinct than the one which is merely accessory to its development, perfection, and that satisfaction which it alone can give, are rendered impossible. Fifty similar difficulties might be mentioned, but the list is long enough. And it must be remembered that the danger of some kind of failure increases with the contraction of the area of the work; that a flaw, which no one would notice in a novel which runs through three volumes, is quite fatal to the success of a tale which covers only twenty pages. Instead, therefore, of Poe's shorter stories being insufficient examples of that instinct of perfection by which they were fashioned, they are really the best examples that could be found. “The Gold Bug,” for instance, as I have already said, strikes even the most careless reader as being a singularly well-told tale, but its thorough artistic finish can only be fully appreciated by those who have examined it somewhat closely. The story was evidently thought out down to the minutest detail before pen was put to paper; every point had its place assigned to it; every situation [page 415:] was so arranged that it should be in itself as effective as possible, and yet still more effective as a portion of the entire work — one of a series of steps leading up to an always visible goal. The tale was probably written to illustrate Poe's method of cipher-reading; but there is none of that artificiality of construction which is almost always found in narratives produced for a special purpose, either moral or intellectual. From the very first sentence Poe is working up to the pirate's cryptograph relating to the hiding-place of the buried treasure; but, when we survey the tale as a whole, the central conception seems only like the keystone of an arch which, though it is the main support of the structure, strikes us only as one of a series, each member of which is equally essential to the stability of the whole. The part played by the gold beetle itself is finely conceived. The plot might have been constructed without it, and yet the glittering insect, which the old negro so persistently affirms to be made of the precious metal, is the genius — the controlling demon — of the story. The mystery encircling the scarabæus, and the ill fate which it somehow seems to have brought to Legrand, supply the semi-poetical element which adds so great a charm. Then, how admirably everything is marshalled and arranged. Everywhere we see the master's hand, and, from the first word to the end, not a touch is missed and not a touch is wasted. The dog, for instance, may seem, at first sight, wholly needless; but in the two scenes where he appears his presence could not be dispensed with, save at a real sacrifice of artistic effect. We fail to find a line that has not a definite relation to the evolution of the story. Even the description of the chilly evening, and of Legrand's warm fire, which would have been admissible enough as a simple background, is, like everything else, wrought into the design, and is seen at the conclusion of the story to have been absolutely necessary to its development. Mr. Wilkie Collins is the only writer I can at present remember who exhibits the same absolute command over his materials; but he is either deficient in the ars celare artem, or does not care to practise it; for most of his works are like those time-pieces in which not only the dial-plate but the springs and wheels are visible to the observer. We seem to see Mr. Collins’ books in the making. In Poe's compositions results only are visible; and though a little exercise of analysis enables us to guess at the mechanical [page 416:] processes by which they have been produced, we never get a real peep into the workshop.

To this last statement perhaps one exception must be made. In an article entitled “The Philosophy of Composition,” which is to the literary student one of the most interesting of his works, Poe professes to give the history of the genesis of his poem “The Raven.” Some of his readers have taken this paper to be a simple statement of facts; but most of his more thoughtful critics have tossed it aside a little too impetuously and scornfully, as merely one specimen of those curious mystifications with which Poe so often amused himself and bamboozled the public. Personally I cannot feel quite satisfied with either way of regarding the matter. In the absence of any evidence on one side or the other, such rough-and-ready judgments as these are oftener wrong than right. It seems to me not only possible, but on à priori grounds extremely probable, that both parties have a certain amount of truth on their side; but I do not think that either view is tenable as a whole. The statements made in the essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” may in detail be fictitious, and yet be sufficiently truthful to give us a very fairly accurate idea of Poe's literary methods. To a certain extent I must admit that I am at one with the sceptical critics. If internal evidence be worth anything at all, “The Raven” is as genuine an inspiration — in the ordinary sense of that word — as any poem that was ever written. In proportion to the sympathetic appreciation of any reader will be the depth and strength of his conviction that the work was produced at a white heat of poetic passion, that it was the result of one great flash of imaginative revelation, and that the development of the theme was contemporaneous and coterminous with the travelling of the eager pen over the unstained paper. The reader who gets out of “The Raven” all that there is to be got out of it, will resent almost as a wrong the suggestion that a work which has affected him as only the product of a genuine poetic afflatus can affect anybody, was after all only a mere mechanical contrivance, built up like a house or a steam-engine from carefully constructed plans, which make up in accuracy for what they lack in inspiration. Still, though a man would be very foolish who believed that if he only mastered the principles of the paper in question he could write another “Raven,” I think that it would be equally foolish to deny to it any autobiographical and [page 417:] critical value, or to assert that it throws no light upon Poe's general literary habits, and tells us nothing concerning the psychological idiosyncrasies which have their outcome in his published works.

“The Philosophy of Composition” is too well known to stand in need of description or summary here; but for the benefit of readers to whom it is unknown it may be briefly said that the main interest of the article lies in the fact that the writer's principles of composition are illustrated by a series of statements concerning the manner in which he set to work to write his most popular and striking poem. He informs us of the various considerations which guided him in deciding, first upon the length of the proposed poem, then upon its emotional tone, then upon its general theme, then upon its special subject, and finally, upon one or two points of detail such as the nature of the refrain, the manner of its introduction, and the character of the versification. The facts, if they be facts, are narrated with Poe's usual fascinating lucidity; and the fiction, if it be a fiction, is constructed with an ingenuity quite as great as that displayed in his avowed romances. Of course, the leading idea of the essay is that a poem or any other work of art ought to be, as much as a sewing-machine or a chess-problem, the result of a conscious and calculating application of means to ends, — that a poem is, in short, a manufactured article, and that the poet who knows and employs the best processes will produce the finest and the most perfect work.

I cannot now discuss Poe's opinions on this matter. Put briefly and baldly, as I have put them here, they seem obviously absurd; put with the ingenuity and subtlety which Poe always had at his command, they seem almost as obviously true and reasonable. As a matter of fact I believe them to be, like many other attractively paradoxical utterances, half-truths and half-falsehoods. But whether true or false, it seems to me abundantly clear that they were the principles by which Poe himself was largely guided, and that they really help us to gain an insight into the secret of his power. Nature had given him a perception of certain artistic ends, and he seems to have been one of the first to see that genuine artistic triumphs could be achieved in the narrowest as in the widest field; that there was ample room and verge enough for the man of original genius in a region which had previously been regarded as the play-garden and practising ground of frivolous amateurs and [page 418:] mechanical literary hacks. In both Poe's poetry and his prose we see plainly enough the nature of his literary ideals and also of the processes by which he attained them. His first aim seemed to be the stamping of an impression on the minds of his readers which should be pleasant and exciting if only on account of its mere vividness, quite apart from any other emotional or æsthetic quality. When the special end to be attained was beauty, the beauty must be transcendent; when it was grotesqueness, extravagance was piled upon extravagance and bizarrerie upon bizarrerie; when awe and wonder, no device was missed to stimulate the one or to sustain the other; and, most notably and strikingly of all, when he aimed at the production of the horrible or the loathsome, his materials were collected so carefully and distributed so deftly as to produce effects unparalleled in literature — effects to the morbid power of which the most insensitive reader bears witness when something almost approaching a purely physical feeling of nausea follows the perusal of a passage containing some terrible curiosity of moral malignity or material gruesomeness.

Of course Poe has not wanted critics who have reminded us again and again that the object of art is pleasure, and that he often enough chose themes which no treatment could render pleasurable to a healthy mind; and this is true enough, but a little too obvious to be of much value as a criticism. One may feel that such stories as “The Black Cat,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and some portions of “Arthur Gordon Pym,” really lie outside the pale of legitimate artistic work, and yet acknowledge — as one is compelled to acknowledge — that the intellectual qualities, which in these stories only produce in us a shudder or a recoil, are the very same qualities which, when employed on more happily chosen themes, give to some of Poe's most popular works their special power and peculiar charm.

In his poetry Poe has often been accused of resorting to mere literary tricks, and his verse is undoubtedly full of peculiar and not very attractive mannerisms. These, however, were not mere whims, but literary expedients adopted in accordance with a principle and for a purpose. The principle is that originality is not a thing which comes of itself,” as people say, but is a product of thought and labour; — that if a writer would be original he must take pains, just as he would if he wished to be learned or accurate. He says deliberately [page 419:] in his essay on “Magazine Writing” that “after all, the true invention is elaborate. There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.” The purpose was the production of a strong and vivid effect upon the mind of the reader, the special kind of effect being immaterial so long as these essential characteristics of strength and vividness were preserved unimpaired. Sometimes he seems to aim simply at novelty in the mode of expression, as in those poems where repetition is so frequently used instead of rhyme, not to mention other literary expedients which owe whatever effectiveness they may possess to their unfamiliarity, not either to their beauty, their expressiveness, or any other inherently valuable literary quality. For critical ends, particularly when the criticism is depreciatory, it is generally unfair to select from any poetic composition a verse here and a verse there, and found some wide generalization upon them, but as I cannot quote a whole poem as an example of my meaning, I must, while giving only a simple stanza, protect myself by saying that I quote it not as a proof, but simply as an illustration of the assertion I have made. It is a stanza from the poem entitled “For Annie,” the central idea or motif of which, — the passionate soliloquy of a dead lover, who, while lying in the grave exults in the love and beauty of his mistress, — is really artistic and original. The execution is, however, so wilfully fantastic that it is impossible to free one's self from the impression that the poet consciously set himself the task of exciting attention by pure eccentricity, and cared not if the eccentric developed into the simply nonsensical. What can be said in praise of such a verse as this, except that it gives a certain impression of originality by its outrageous violation of all the traditions of poetic art?

Various similar specimens, some of them in various ways quite as absurd as this, could be gathered from the not very large [page 420:] collection of poems which Poe has left behind him; but it would be unjust to take such extravagances of mere expression as fair samples of the means used by him to attain his supreme end — effectiveness. These oddities of form were merely his recreations, and even if he attached any value to them he knew that he must use mightier incantations if he would bring his readers truly and permanently under his spells. In his finest poems, and in all his really noteworthy works in prose, there are none of these catchpenny literary tricks. There may be, nay there is, plenty of artifice, but it is artifice of a rarer, subtler, more intellectual order than this. His style has a uniform simplicity, and there is always an appearance of spontaneity and unstudied directness; but it is easy to see that the writer never suffers himself to drift, but, always having a certain goal in view, keeps steadily to the path which he has chosen as the best by which to reach it. To illustrate this at length might be tedious, and would certainly occupy more space than could well be spared here; but any reader of such tales as “William Wilson,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Spectacles,” will be able to recognize more or less clearly the intellectual juggleries by which Poe manages to give so curiously vivid a suggestion of the terrible, the beautiful, the weird, the outré, or the grotesque. To sum up a too lengthy criticism in one short sentence, Poe wrote always for effect, and did so consciously and intentionally, believing that strong effect was the legitimate aim of all art. Of course there is a sense in which he was right. Art which is not impressive is valueless; but Poe's mistake lay in attaching an artistic value to mere intensity of impression, and the natural consequence was that he was often driven to adopt subjects which were horrible and loathsome, because the merely beautiful or the merely curious seemed to offer less scope for the keen, incisive, emotional appeal which it was his constant object to make.

If these considerations have any basis in truth, many of the popular estimates of Poe's intellectual character have been, to say the least, partial and hasty. It has been assumed, on insufficient grounds, that his imagination was naturally unhealthy and morbid; that he loved to breathe the atmosphere of the material or moral charnel-house; and that he chose gruesome and disgusting themes because his mind [page 421:] always gravitated towards them. Critics, usually sober and moderate, have spoken of him as of a madman possessed by demons of the deep, who used him as a medium through whom to utter their loathsome imaginings. In Griswold's veracious memoir we are told that

To declare that this piece of high-flown nonsense-worthy only of a writer for the Minerva press-is utterly worthless as a portrait of Poe, or, indeed, of anyone else, would surely be an insult to the intelligence of the most thoughtless reader. Even in the United States, that home of eccentricity, a person who conducted himself in the manner described would speedily be put under proper restraint either by his friends or the public authorities. Still, statements such as this often impress where they do not convince; and nothing is more natural than that when the impression has once been made, it should be deepened and intensified by the apparently corroborative evidence which some of Poe's writings afford. I think, however, that the critic who comes to an examination of his works with a mind uninfluenced by such silly and sensational romances as this of Griswold's, will arrive at the conclusion that Poe's supposed taste for the horrible was little else than a love for strong effects; that the most repulsive things to be found in his writings were the outcome not of emotional mania, but of a perfectly sane, though, in some respects, perverted æsthetic estimate.

Nevertheless, I would not be so unfair, either to Poe himself or to the majority of his critics, as to assert that the [page 422:] popular view which traces back his choice of themes and peculiar methods of treatment to personal idiosyncrasy and overmastering impulse, is altogether erroneous. In speaking of the machinery by which so many of his works were produced, it would be indeed foolish to ignore the motive-power — the living spirit within the wheels. The steam which set the mechanism in action was supplied by a very remarkable and powerful imagination. It is not to be supposed, because Poe produced work of a given kind and quality by adhering to certain rules and methods, that mere familiarity with rules and methods was all that was necessary for the production of the work. The great master of sleight-of-hand may explain to us the manner in which his feats are performed, or we may find the secret out for ourselves; but our knowledge does not necessarily enable us to astonish the world after his fashion, by making the visible invisible, or by extracting a live pigeon from the body of a champagne bottle. Poe's imagination is an ultimate fact of nature, needing no more explanation than the colours of a tulip or the flavour of a peach; but its manifestations doubtless owe much of their special character to the influence exercised by singularly unfavourable conditions of life upon a temperament of unusual sensitiveness to the touch of beauty. When a man with Poe's keen appreciation of the beautiful is, by the force of circumstances, compelled to live a life from which things of beauty are either altogether or in great part excluded, he must either dream or go mad; and Poe did the former. In the world of fancy, where at times he sojourned, he found a relief from the world of fact in which he dwelt; and it is not at all wonderful that, in order to make that relief most complete, he chose to summon visions which had as little as possible in common with the dreary, stale, inartistic surroundings of his every-day existence — visions which, not merely by their beauty or their grace, but even by their loathsomeness or terror, had the power for some precious moments to confer the blissful gift of forgetfulness, and to hide from his mind's eye the coarse, repellent realities which to him were infinitely more loathsome and terrible.

This is the grain of truth which lies hidden amongst the nonsensical verbiage of such a description as that of Griswold, and which has helped to give currency and credence to its absurd exaggeration. Poe did not curse, and swear, and pray, and turn up his eyes as he walked along the streets, [page 423:] partly because he really was not a raving lunatic, but principally because he knew better how to extract the greatest amount of pleasure from the exercise of his imaginative powers. Like De Quincey, he took care to have his peculiar form of opium at a time when he could extract from it the most exquisite gratification. Imagination, like money, goes furthest when it is used systematically, and a proper account is, as it were, kept of it. No one knew this better than Poe. He was, indeed, a perfect master of imaginative economy, but it would be very unfair if the critic who mentioned this indisputable fact were to be accused of denying that Poe had any imagination to economize. The fact is, the impulsive and demoniac side of his nature has been so exclusively dwelt upon that an honest writer is tempted to speak in an equally exaggerated and one-sided manner by the apparent hopelessness of making people see in Edgar Poe anything but a very full-blown specimen of the vagrant and irregular genius.

In his search after themes which would allow him to do full justice to his peculiar methods of effective treatment, Poe travelled over the whole domain of literature. He boxed the intellectual compass; and if it cannot be said of him, as of Goldsmith, that he touched nothing which he did not adorn, it may be said that Le attempted hardly anything in which he did not succeed. One has to use the qualifying phrase because there are one or two departments of literary art in which he achieved a failure as complete as any of his numerous successes. His intellectual machinery was so admirable, and he had it so perfectly under control, that he not unnaturally conceived the idea that if the levers and cranks could be properly adjusted, it would produce any literary fabric in the desired quantity and of the highest quality. His experience seemed to favour the idea. He had produced poems, stories, scientific speculations, and analytical studies, many of them bearing unmistakable marks of the loom; he had shown that, by setting himself “carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine,” he could manufacture the beautiful, the wonderful, the horrible, or the grotesque, and he imagined that he could also produce the humorous. He made the attempt several times, and in no single instance was he successful. His failure was hardly to be wondered at. There is, I think, a sense in which it is more apparently true of the humourist than of the poet that he is born, not made. It does indeed require a poetical [page 424:] nature for the production of genuine poetry, just as truly as it requires a humorous nature for the production of genuine humour; but it is much more easy to manufacture a passable imitation of the one than of the other. A literary work may not be true poetry, and yet be so very like poetry as to deceive nine out of ten readers; but the difference between writing which quite succeeds in being humorous and that which only very nearly succeeds, is so immense that it is at once perceived even by people whose critical faculties are by no means highly educated. Now, Poe never gets any further than this unsatisfactory approach to success. He was not in any sense a born humourist, and if there are solitary gleams of humour to be found in his writings, which I am not prepared to deny, they are obviously of the accidental order. Some of his compositions have a clearly humorous intent, but they are strained and unspontaneous, and some of them have even a flavour of vulgarity, which is found nowhere else in his finished writings, and was entirely alien to his nature. Nor had he the gift of pathos. He is one of the very few men of undoubted genius who never, by any chance, move us either to tears or to laughter. His books present strong evidence in favour of the theory, often vaguely hinted at and propounded very clearly in “The Gay Science” of Mr. E. S. Dallas, that wit and humour stand in certain fixed complementary relations to terror and pathos; that a master of the terrible will probably be a master of wit, and that a command of the springs of pathos implies an equal command of the springs of humour. Mr. Dallas bases his theory on semi-metaphysical à priori grounds; but he might easily have constructed an even more conclusive inductive argument, and have shown, from a survey of the literary history of the world, that his view was supported by a very remarkable array of harmonious facts. So far as any general statement can be confirmed by a particular instance, to that extent is the statement of Mr. Dallas confirmed by the case of Edgar Allan Poe.

As a critic, Poe's failure seems to have been even more complete, and also more deplorable, because, while his attempts at humour are simply depressing, his attempts at criticism might be definitely harmful. His defects were the result not of a lack of critical insight — which in him would be hardly a credible deficiency — but of a radically false theory of the duties of the critic. One of his favourite notions was that [page 425:] a critic's true mission is the discovery of defects. He tells us in one of his essays that “while the critic is permitted to play, at times, the part of the mere commentator — while he is allowed, by way of merely interesting his readers, to put in the fairest light the merits of the author — his legitimate task is still, in pointing out and analyzing defects, and showing how the work might have been improved, to aid the general cause of letters, without undue heed of the individual literary men. Beauty, to be brief, should be considered in the light of an axiom, which, to become at once evident, needs only to be distinctly put. It is not Beauty if it require to be demonstrated as such: — and thus to point out too particularly the merits of a work is to admit that they are not merits altogether.” The italics are Poe's own, and as he does not usually make use of these typographical aids to expression, we may infer that he considered this passage full of point. It is certainly full of misapprehension and fallacy. One does not need to enlarge upon the degradation of the critic's office which must inevitably result from his becoming a mere literary scavenger, and it is hardly necessary to point out that if Poe's view be correct, criticism, instead of maturing as a country's literature reaches perfection, must inevitably decay; but it may be worth while to suggest that though Beauty does not need to be demonstrated as such, there may be ample room for an exposition of the means by which the end which we call Beauty has been attained. If I do not see that a certain work of art is beautiful, no one can prove to me that it is so; but I may recognize the Beauty without knowing why it exists or by what powers it has been called into being; and the man who can tell me these things will always be a more valuable teacher than the self-sufficient person who merely points out a flaw here and there, or shows me how, in his opinion, “the work might have been improved.”

This was the defect in Poe's theory, and out of it arose very naturally a defect in his practice — a miserable habit of ignoring general aspects and broad effects, and fixing his attention on trivial details of execution altogether unworthy of more than a passing notice. He was just the man who in criticising Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar would have devoted a sentence to an analysis of the character of Mark Antony and a page to a denunciation of the shockingly ungrammatical line in which he speaks of the wound inflicted by Brutus as “the most [page 426:] unkindest cut of all.” It is rather a curious fact that, notwithstanding the great critical canon just quoted, Poe's best criticisms are those which he devoted to writers such as Tennyson, Dickens, Mrs. Browning, and N. P. Willis, whom he really admired, and whose merits he does his best to place “in the fairest light.” Even here, however, he cannot quite forget his theory, or break away from his habitual practice, and “the trail of the serpent is over them all.” His article on Mrs. Browning, for whom he had a genuine and enthusiastic admiration, is disfigured by wretched critical quibbles which irritate rather than instruct, not because they are unsound — for as a rule they are sound enough — but because they are so miserably small, and seem to indicate such a narrow range of vision. In his essay on “Critics and Criticism” he laboriously picks to pieces a paragraph from Lord Macaulay's review of Southey's “Colloquies of Society,” objects to a word here and a phrase there, to the awkwardness of one sentence and the tautology of another, and finally, after writing an octavo page of nibbling criticism, shows us in extenso how Macaulay ought to have written the passage, and doubtless would have written it, had he been possessed of the fine literary taste of Edgar Allan Poe. This article is already too long, but I really cannot refrain from giving the English writer's original crude attempt, and the American critic's finished production.

Here is Macaulay: —

And here is Poe:

Poor Macaulay! or, should we not rather say, poor Poe! The critical game at which he plays here is surely not worth the candle. It is curious to notice how a deficiency in the sense of [page 427:] humour is frequently accompanied by an equal deficiency in the sense of proportion; yet not so curious either, for may we not speak of one as being in a manner identical with the other? It is your non-humorous man who most frequently employs himself in the unprofitable task of breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, and though in this case the wheel is constructed with unusual elaboration, the butterfly seems to flit away uninjured. I am not sure that I have a sufficiently fine feeling for style to justify me in criticising one of Lord Macaulay's happiest passages; but I may venture to say that I cannot see that Poe has perceptibly improved it, and I think that most of my readers will feel with me. I find in Poe's version a certain something, which I suppose I must call correctness — though the first clause of his last sentence is surely more German than English — but I am compelled to say that I miss the ease, the picturesqueness, the rhetorical effectiveness, which our own writer has managed to infuse into his uncultured sentences. I am sufficiently a barbarian to prefer Macaulay unimproved, and to think that if Poe had done nothing but write criticism such as this he would hardly have been remembered for even a quarter of a century.

Nothing more, however, shall now be said of Poe's literary failures. We can afford to forget them, and to remember only his numerous and genuine successes. I have spoken of his poems, his tales, his criticisms, but have said nothing of his other works, some of which are of real value. I have refrained even from speaking of the marvellous treatise entitled “Eureka,” in which he built up an elaborate theory of the genesis and ultimate destiny of the physical universe — a work which displayed to the full his extraordinary powers of imagination, ratiocination, and analysis, and proved him to possess talents of a kind which, while separately rare, are in combination almost unique. Still, little needs to be added to what has been already written. Without pretending to have exhaustively summarized Poe's intellectual and literary characteristics, I have endeavoured broadly to indicate their nature and range. It is his special glory that while he was undoubtedly a man of genius, with the wayward instincts by which men of genius are so often distinguished, he was also, according to his lights, one of those genuine artists who seem most free and unrestrained when working within boundaries and according to methods suggested by a true and delicate artistic instinct.