Text: Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr., “Poe and Emerson,” Texas Review, vol. VII, October 1921, pp. 54-69

[page 54:]

Two books in the “How to Know Authors” series(1) came out simultaneously during the past spring: Poe, How to Know Him, by C. Alphonso Smith; and Emerson, How to Know Him, by Samuel McChord Crothers. The appearance of the two volumes suggests a comparison of the two authors and the treatment of them by their two eminent critics. Though Poe and Emerson were almost entirely contemporaneous in their fame and in their best productions, little attention has been paid to their interrelations further than to note their personal antipathy and their utterly different literary aims and qualities. As a convenient approach, then, to a brief comparison of the two authors, we may examine at some length the two volumes before us.

Professor Smith's book on Poe is characteristic of its author — brilliant, convincing, enthusiastic, admirably organized, charmingly written; but selective, omissive, smacking of the advocate and the apologist, and at times extravagant and somewhat sensational, over-confident and injudicious in its appraisements, and one-sided in its altogether favorable presentation of the erratic character and the peculiar genius of Poe. In his preface Professor Smith says that Poe “is popularly regarded as a manufacturer of cold creeps and a maker of shivers, a wizened, self-centered exotic, un-American and semi-insane, who, between sprees or in them, wrote his autobiography in ‘The Raven’ and a few haunting detective stories”; and that this new book on Poe is “an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity.” [page 55:]

As a skilful lawyer would introduce his witnesses and marshal his evidence to convince a jury, Professor Smith proceeds to introduce foreign opinions to prove that Poe is not merely a writer of cheap thrillers, but a world-author of profound influence in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Latin- America, France, England, and the islands of the seas. He denies the assertion made by a writer in The Edinburgh Review of January, 1910, that Poe is the only American writer to whom the title of “world-author” may with any propriety be applied, and including Franklin, Cooper, Emerson, Longfellow, and Mark Twain along with Poe as authors to whom the title may be given, suggests that Walt Whitman, Joel Chandler Harris, William James in a narrower sense, and O. Henry are fast becoming world-authors. After this generous concession the skilful critic concludes with a general summary of Poe's work, which not only gives Poe the preeminence among the so-called American world-authors, but at the same times gives the gist of all that Professor Smith has to say of his favored author: “But is it none the less true that the title belongs preeminently to Poe. His appeal as poet and story-teller, the universality of his themes, the purity of his style, his studied avoidance of slang and localism, his wealth of sheer intellect and his equal dowry of constructive imagination, together with his almost uncanny feeling for form and color, for the fitting melody and the enhancing background, these put him in a class alone, and these have give him a recognition in foreign lands not equalled by any other American writer.”

The proof of the point in the number of translations, imitations, critical comments, allusions and quotations, acknowledged and unconscious influence in the various European literatures is overwhelming; but the result of the critic's method is to give an exaggerated conception of the universality of Poe's fame. The unwary reader is led to believe that Poe is beyond all comparison the greatest of American writers simply because he has had a world-wide vogue. [page 56:] Professor Smith realizes that his array of evidence on the international influence of Poe may lead to a false appraisement of the author's real worth, and so he hedges by declaring that he does not wish to anticipate or coerce the reader's opinion, but rather to free it. We do not see how the argument will free the reader's judgment. The array of evidence is entirely too strongly cumulative in effect to render freedom of personal judgment at all likely. To the average mind the implication of Professor Smith's argument is plainly this: Since Poe is by all odds the most widely known American author in the foreign world, he is surely the greatest of all American writers, and every reader should unhesitatingly accept Poe's works as the chief American contribution to world classics.

The second chapter, on “Poe the Man,” is equally well written and on the surface equally convincing, but here again we feel that the critic has overstated his case and led the unsuspecting reader to an erroneous conclusion. He argues that Poe had not only temperament, genius, individuality, but a rich personality capable of fitting itself to the daily interests of the common affairs of the world around him. To prove his point he appeals to the testimony of the nine volumes of Poe's letters, lectures, and critical and journalistic papers in the Virginia edition of his works. A careful advocate can go through this material and collect evidence enough to seem convincing on either side of the questions of Poe's sanity or semi-insanity, his critical poise and detached judicial fairness, or his uncritical vagaries and sectional bias; his impersonal devotion to art for art's sake, or his personal vanity and egotistic spleen. The objection is not to the exaltation of Poe's power of minute and accurate observation, his sane Americanism, his keen insight into the men and measures of his time, but to the one-sided picture of a personality which was made up of a strange combination of apparent contradictions. Few of the peculiar, the erratic, the unconventional acts of Poe's life are mentioned. His [page 57:] utterances are not weighed and judged as a whole; attention is directed mainly, almost entirely, to the favorable inci- dents of his life and the saner products of his pen. This is the method of the advocate, not of the judicious critic. Professor Smith admits Poe's intemperance, but apologizes for and condones it. He even refuses to admit that Poe is preeminently the poet of darkness and death. Poe rather hated death than loved it, says the critic; he “fathomed darkness but climbed to the light; he became the world's spokesman for those dwelling within the shadow, but his feet were already upon the upward slope. Out of it all he emerged victor, not victim. When I remember that Poe resented the charge of pantheism, when I recall that he ended his career as thinker and prophet with the chant, ‘All is Life-Life-Life within Life-the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine,’ the sunlight seems to fall upon ‘the misty mid region of Weir,’ even ‘the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir;’ and Edgar Allan Poe seems no longer our great autumnal genius, heralding an early winter, but the genius of winter itself, a late winter, with spring already at its heart.” The glowing eloquence of this passage well illustrates the style in which Professor Smith has treated his idol.

The other chapters are entitled, “The Critic,” “The Poet,” “The Writer of Short Stories,” and “The Frontiersman.” Examples of Poe's work under the various rubrics are selected with fine discrimination and satisfying inclusiveness in so far as types are concerned, and in the introductory portions of these chapters there is much illuminating comment on the essentials of Poe's methods and aims and accomplishments in the literary art forms which he practised; but the method of the eulogist and the apologist continues here also. The emphasis on Poe's interest in technique or architechtonics in criticism; the classification of his stories as the A-type, or those which rise to a climax at the end, as in “Ligeia” and “The Cask of Amontillado”; and [page 58:] the B-type, or those which double on themselves at the middle point, as in “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter”; the recapitulation of what Professor Smith long since called attention to as the chief contribution of Poe to the technique of poetry, namely, the employment and extension of repetition and the incremental refrain and the recurrence of initial lines in the terminal stanza; the refreshing exposition of Poe as a prose poet in the fantasias-all these points are well made and amply illustrated. The use of the term “frontiersman” in the last chapter challenges interest as a new word in Poe criticism. What Professor Smith means by the term is Poe's attempt to enter and take possession of an entirely new literary realm in these prose poems or pastels, little masterpieces in which he crosses the border line between life and death and illuminates, if he does not really expound, the condition of beatified intelligences in the undiscovered country. Professor Smith joins hands with certain recent critics of Poe who are willing to assert that the prose poems, such as “Shadow: a Parable,” “Silence: a Fable,” “The Power of Words,” “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eros and Charmion,” all of which deal in one way or another with contemplations on life and death by disembodied and beatified spirits, are after all worth more as examples of artistic prose than all of Poe's famous stories. “His mastery of English is more evident, I think,” says Professor Smith, “in his prose than in his poetry, and more evident in the selections that follow than in his stories. His tales of ratiocination, for example, his masterpieces of the B-type, show chiefly the logical side of the man and illustrate a zest and acumen in intellectual processes that have rarely formed any part of the dowry of poetic genius. The style, moreover, is sculptural. In his stories of the A-type, the style is richer, being more plastic and more pictorial. But in these frontier sketches there is a blend of the sculptural and plastic and pictorial not equalled because not called for in the more purely narrative prose. [page 59:] There is the residuum of intellectual activity, but the activity itself is kept in the background. We are distantly encompassed rather than immediately neighbored by it. Imagination takes the lead, and the language assumes a gravity, a somber beauty, a hymnic cadense, and utter identification with mood and thought that one finds heralded only in the purple patches of a Bacon, a Milton, a Jeremy Taylor, or a Sir Thomas Browne. If style be, as Lowell defines it, ‘the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding between the worker and his material,’ Poe found it at last in these soaring meditations that compass not only life and death, not only the natural and the supernatural, but also the dizzy arches that span the spaces between.”

The treatment of Emerson by Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers is as different from Professor Smith's treatment of Poe as is Emerson, in the popular conception, from Poe him- self. Professor Smith is a teacher and lecturer, and so he presents his material in six definitely delimited and yet comprehensive and well organized lectures. Dr. Crothers is a preacher, and so he chooses twenty-two little texts from Emerson's scriptures and preaches as many clear-cut incisive, stimulating sermons on the various facets of Emerson's mind. Professor Smith makes his points with all the emphasis, embellishment, illustration, and rhetorical force of the skilled lecturer. Dr. Crothers calmly expounds his texts in cogent, sprightly, perspicuous sentences, and thus produces the pleasing effect that a stimulating intellectual sermon would make upon a thoughtful listener. When you finish Professor Smith's book you feel that the last and most favorable word has been said on Poe, and you secretly conclude that if you are ever called on to lecture on Poe or read a paper on him at a literary club, you could reproduce Professor Smith's orderly analyses and striking conclusions with the assurance of winning the spontaneous applause of your auditors. When you finish Dr. Crothers's book, you feel that you can approach Emerson's writings with an increased [page 60:] He interest in and a closer intellectual intimacy with the personality of the sage of Concord, and with a reassured confidence in your own ability to grasp his message to the world.

“The mind of Emerson,” says Dr. Crothers, “was a searchlight revealing not itself but the various objects on which it successively turned. . . . . He had no pretensions and no reserves. In clear sentences he told us what from time to time he thought. He made no attempt to connect these thoughts into a coherent system. For any one else to attempt to do this would be to misrepresent him.” We have here the author's explanation of and excuse for his method of presenting Emerson in the twenty-two cameo-like sermonettes on the various facets of Emerson's mind. “Emerson was a man thinking. There is no Emersonian philosophy, only an Emersonian way of looking at things. . . . . He is not uttering oracles, though the form might sometimes seem oracular. He aimed to challenge us rather than to secure docile acceptance of his ideas. He did not attempt at any one time to state the whole truth. He preferred to state a half truth in such a manner that we should be ready to supply the other half. . . . . Emerson would never assume the cool judicial attitude in regard to any vital question. He would speak as an advocate of the side which for the moment seemed to him most important. But he would always reserve the right to state the other side just as strongly. . . . . One who would know Emerson must not read his word with the docility of a mere disciple. He must rather take it as a game and match his wits against a quick antag onist.” This last is exactly what Dr. Crothers himself does in his book on Emerson. He refuses to collate and digest all that Emerson has said on any one topic. He merely puts down a text from his author and then goes on meditating on it himself, deducing his own conclusions, illustrating and interpreting the modernity of Emerson's thought, and in general following Emerson's advice by being self-reliant [page 61:] and independent in his thinking, merely using the master's thought as a stimulant for his own mind.

The sentences quoted in the preceding paragraph are from Dr. Crothers's first chapter, “The Approach to Emerson.” They afford not only a sample of the style and texture of the book, but also a key to Emerson's greatest value to the modern reader, namely, that of a powerful mental stimulant and spiritual tonic. To my mind the two most stimulating and fecundating influences in all American literature are Emerson and Whitman — Emerson for pure intellectual reactions and Whitman for vital social reactions. Mind sharpeneth mind as iron sharpeneth iron, and Emerson's keen, original, steel-hardened intellect serves as a whet-stone to every young mind that comes into quick contact with it. Preeminently Emerson the thinker makes thinkers of his readers. He probes deeply for the truth, and he inspires others to probe similarly. It is well known that he loved beauty also and that he yearned to be a poet, though by his own confession he was never able to speak naturally in the noble dialect of poetry. He exalted moral and spiritual beauty, but he approached it ever with the drawn sword of the intellect. Truth was his divinity, and he sought not merely the truth of the grosser logical faculty, or understanding, as he called it, but the truth also of the nobler reason, the truth of intuition and spiritual revelation. This is the key to his philosophy. He never argued for or merely expounded logically any truth. He simply stated it as an intuitive revelation of his own mind and left the reader to accept or reject as his own experience and intuition might dictate.

A keenly discriminating chapter on “Emerson as a Discriminating Optimist” opens with the statement that Emerson was not an incorrigible or smug optimist, not a worshiper of respectability content with the cant of liberalism, for Emerson was not a Victorian under the spell of the good queen, but an American. He recognized evil as a force in [page 62:] the world and asserted that Nature as we know her is no saint. But Emerson was the sort of optimist who believes in the progress of the race ever upward toward the ideal. The constant effort of man to rise out of the chaos and night of the beginning he found to be most glorious. “The mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive on casualties.” His optimism was not the mere shallow, lazy, thoughtless optimism of looking always on the bright side of things. He looked on the dark side also and found that inspiring. His optimism was one with that of Tennyson's Ulysses, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield;” or with Browning's Ben Ezra,

“Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

“Except the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events,” says Emerson. “Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” The optimist accepts circumstances as he finds them, ever resolved to make the best of them. The joy comes through the struggle. It is a grim con- test of man's will, man's spiritual power, against adverse fate. And when man puts all his strength into the struggle, he finds to his surprise that the worst has turned into the best, defeat into victory, and the result is even better than he had planned. This is the sort of optimism that one needs [page 63:] in these modern times to refute the decadent pessimism of some of our recent writers. The essay on Fate, says Dr. Crothers, presents “the most complete expression of Emerson's discriminating optimism.”

In chapter three, “An Opener of Doors,” the head-piece text is taken from Emerson's Journal (1841), “Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the Universe a blind alley.” This is a starting point for the continuation of the exposition of Emerson's optimistic phil- osophy in his doctrines of the joys of the continual quest of man's spirit, the fundamental freedom of man's mind and will, self-trust, the identity of all things in nature as ex- pressed in such poems as “The Forerunners,” the well known address called “The American Scholar,” and the still better known essay “Self-Reliance.” On the familiar Emersonian paradox concerning the fetich of consistency, Dr. Crothers, by throwing particular emphasis on the adjective in the well known quotation from “Self-Reliance,” brings out the idea that Emerson did not condemn true consistency of thought: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It is interesting to note that Emerson's Journals afford Dr. Crothers quite a number of texts as head-pieces for his chapters. “Spent the Day at Essex Junction,” from the Journal of 1868, opens the chapter on Emerson's enjoyment of what are usually considered unpleasant places, such as railroad junctions where one always has to wait interminably for his so-called close connections; “Friendship without Intimacy” is based on a passage from the Journal of the early date of 1820; “The Lure of the West,” on a bit of a quotation taken from a letter to Margaret Fuller; “The Quiet Revolutionist,” on “The Past has baked my loaf, and in the strength of its bread I break up the old oven,” from Journal, undated; “Among His Books,” on “I put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault [page 64:] is it?” Journal, 1854. Other chapters are built on texts from the poems and the essays.

Dr. Crothers does not quote complete essays, and he rarely gives complete poems, but he makes numerous excerpts and some longer quotations from both the poetry and the prose of Emerson. One objection to the popular, as opposed to the more accurately scholarly, method of the series of How to Know books is illustrated in the frequent failure of Dr. Crothers to locate his quotations. Because of Emerson's habit of building up his paragraphs by taking sentences more or less at random, or, as Lowell suggests, trying the desperate experiment of shuffling his thoughts, and because also of his habit of frequent repetition of the same thought in slightly different words in different essays, quotations from Emerson are difficult to place definitely or accurately. A reader who is fairly familiar with his Emerson will often be dubious of the exact source of a detached quotation, even though it is perfectly well known to him. It would have been an easy matter for the author of the present volume to have inserted references to the sources of his many quotations and excerpts from Emerson's works and thus saved the reader from much needless and often fruitless effort to locate the passage quoted.

Emerson (1803) was six years older than Poe (1809), and yet Poe came into literary notice some years before Emerson gained anything like a general public hearing. Poe's first volume of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, came out at Boston in 1827, a second volume with the addition of Al Aaraaf in 1830, and a third edition in 1831. His prose tales had began to appear in periodicals in 1832, and in 1836 he had become editor of The Southern Literary Messenger and was known not only as a creative writer of poems and tales but as a keenly discriminating though somewhat caustic critic. During the next few years he was associated with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, The Saturday Museum, and the New York Evening Mirror, through which periodicals he broadened his fame as critic and particularly [page 65:] as story writer and poet, “The Gold Bug” (1843) and “The Raven” (1844) having given him a notably wide vogue. Emerson during these years was quietly developing as a preacher and lecturer. In 1836 his first volume, Nature, came out almost still-born; his two famous addresses, “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address,” delivered in 1837 and 1838, added to his prestige as an original thinker; and his two series of Essays appeared in 1841 and 1844 to increase his fame with the thoughtful public. It may be said that while Poe preceded and out-stript Emerson in popular appeal, the two authors arrived at the height of their general popularity almost exactly simultaneously, about 1844. Neither of them seemed to pay any attention to the other, though William Dean Howells in My Literary Acquaintance reported that Emerson referred contemptuously to Poe as “the jingle man,” and Poe, according to Professor Smith, spoke slightingly of Emerson as “a mystic for mysticism's sake.” It is not at all strange that the two authors, so different in temperament and aims, should have maintained for the most part a discreet silence the one on the other. Poe attacked transcendentalism directly and Emerson indirectly, but he apparently did not put into print any serious strictures either upon Emerson's personality or upon his literary and philosophic productions.

The exaltation of art for art's sake, the exposition of pure or supernal beauty, the emphasis on tone and style, the ultra- literary sense of Poe and his insistence on logical and scientific deductions were all in direct antithesis to Emerson's carelessness of form, his devotion to abstract and intuitive truth, his seriousness and moral solidarity, and his transcendental philosophy. Poe's sense for the music of words was greatly superior to Emerson's, as everybody knows, and yet Emerson was as certainly a poet sui generis as was Poe. Both authors loved beauty supremely, Poe being the more adept in securing beauty of form and Emerson the more profound in his apprehension of the essential unity and beauty of the [page 66:] universe. Poe dwelt largely in the sober and melancholy realm of the decadent romanticsm of his time, while Emer- son based his romantic philosophy on the ethical precepts of his inherited though rejuvenated and optimistic Puritanism. Poe created dreamy and unmoral poetic melodies, and Emer- son struck off unforgettable and impeccable ethical epigrams. The one appeals primarily to our esthetic sense, the other to our ethical sense. Poe soothes the soul into pleasing moods of reverie and wonder; Emerson fires the spirit to high moral and ethical endeavor. Poe excites the imagination to wander in strange realms; Emerson inspires the soul to practical realizations in the realm of spiritual action. Poe incites one to search for absolute beauty in the strange and mysterious events of life; Emerson stimulates one to live a purer and nobler life. Each is supreme in his own demesne, but there is no measuring rod by which the two entirely diverse realms in which they moved may be mutually evaluated. One reader will prefer Poe, another Emerson; the same reader in different moods will exalt the one author or the other. Comparison may serve to bring out the differences, but it is utterly futile in determining the relative merits of the two writers. Forced to a choice between the works of Poe and Emerson on the proverbial desert island, the majority of serious-minded Americans would doubtless give suffrage to Emerson; but American literature as a whole would be equally bereft if we were forced to dispense with the works of either of the two.

In that peculiarly original type of prose pastels by Poe in which he advances into the shadowy realm of disembodied souls, it seems to me that Poe more nearly approaches the fundamental doctrines of Emersonian transcendentalism than anywhere else in his works. Here he is setting forth in concrete artistic form exactly the same ideas which Emerson set forth in his intuitive or transcendental philosophy. Emerson's oversoul becomes Poe's disembodied spirits. Poe uses human passion as the binding element of his spirit lovers, [page 67:] while Emerson insists on the identity, the essential unity of all spiritual essences. Poe extends physical laws to their infinite powers in the spirit realm, but Emerson drops out all physical laws as mere phenomena, mere symbols of the ultimate truths of spirit. Take Poe's “The Power of Words,” representing the conversation of Oinos and Agathos, for example. Agathos is explaining to Oinos the method by which disembodied spirits gradually acquire universal knowledge or wisdom in their immortal state. Oinos, the feminine spirit, is learning from Agathos, the masculine spirit, who has preceded Oinos by three centuries into the empyrean realms, the laws of the spiritual universe as the two spirits “swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.” Agathos explains that Nature under certain conditions will “give rise to that which has all the appearance of creation.” (The italics are Poe's.) The first word of the Creator spoke into existence the first law. Since that time secondary creation has been going on continuously, thus extending creation infinitely. The movement of the hand, for example, will inevitably set infinite vibrations into being, and this simple impulse, transmitted through earth's atmosphere, will continue for ever throughout the universe, eventually creating new worlds. On this basis the physical power of words, spoken words of course, will set infinite vibrations into being, and from these vibrations will come marvellous physical creations. For example, the passionate words of Agathos to Oinos while they were yet on earth had created a “fair star — which is the greenest and yet most terrible of all we have encountered in our flight. . . . . This wild star — it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved — I spoke it — with a few passionate sentences into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and [page 68:] unhallowed of hearts.” If this is not a concrete artistic application of transcendental ideas, though, as was Poe's wont, based on the extension of a natural law, I know not what else to call it.

Though Professor Smith insists on Poe's worldly wisdom and practical sanity regarding the political and social problems of his time, and though Dr. Crothers almost entirely neglects Emerson's business acumen and common touch with the practical affairs of life, it seems to me that the most striking difference between Poe and Emerson is to be found in their respective attitudes towards the common, workaday experiences of life. Poe is the dreamy, ineffectual, impractical cavalier; Emerson is the sane, complacent, practical-minded Puritan. Poe, with his chivalric and poetic temperament, is constantly making confusion of his business relations; Emerson with his practical New England turn of mind, is always restraining his idealism to fit the workaday experiences of life. Poe is always impecunious and in desperate financial straits; Emerson is constantly converting his talents into hard cash and even turning a hand to help his more impractical friends, as in his relations with Thoreau and Carlyle. Poe is always giving way to his craving for drink and drugs; Emerson is uniformly adverse to all physical stimulants, depending entirely on the natural sources of physical energy in good food and sound sleep.

The comparison might be extended indefinitely, but enough has been presented to suggest the richness of the contrast. Poe and Emerson are undoubtedly the most original creative minds produced by America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their best work was done in the same decades, those between 1830 and 1850. Hawthorne, whose greatest success came after 1850, and Whitman, whose work lies wholly after that date, are the only other American writers who may be classed with Poe and Emerson in creative power. Emerson is undoubtedly the greatest American thinker, and according to Paul Elmer More, he is, [page 69:] “judged by an international or even by a broad national standard, the outstanding figure in American literature.” Poe is our first eminent critic, the first exponent of the short story as a unique artistic form, and the supreme technician, atmospheric artist, and melodist in American poetry. If we admit that Emerson is, from the point of view of thought and philosophic wisdom, “the outstanding figure in American literature,” we must also admit that Poe from the point of view of technique and artistic expression is the outstanding all-round literary man of America.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 54:]

1 Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis