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by William P. Trent, 1903
What, now, did this man who was so unfortunate in his life accomplish in his art? Are those foreign critics right who maintain that he has made a more important and original contribution to the world's literature than any other American? Or are those of his countrymen who say with Lowell
There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge
nearer to the truth?
Perhaps before attempting to answer these questions it will be well to give some reasons for the discrepancy of opinion that is so perplexing. It seems plain that the enmities Poe provoked and his irregular, squalid life have prejudiced many Americans against him, not merely as a man but also as an artist. This prejudice has been strengthened by the fact that the New England school of writers, which has been dominant in America for two generations and has in the main set the standards for American criticism, has not only never been able to divorce art from morals, but has laid preponderant emphasis upon morals. This has meant that the artistic principles for which Poe stood and stands--principles which may be roughly indicated by the phrases "worship of beauty" and "art for art's sake"--have never been accepted by an important part of the American public. It is, of course, possible to enjoy a writer's work and ignore his principles, but it has been difficult for Americans to do this because Puritanism and utilitarianism are more or less ingrained in them and in their literature. We have had constant occasion to remark that American authors write for the greatest good of the greatest number. Poe, on the other hand, did not write for the good of anybody. His writings are as nearly free from positive moral teaching as they are from impure suggestion. The American who reads to improve himself morally and mentally finds little to his purpose in Poe and much in Hawthorne and Longfellow. It is no wonder that he at once assumes that Poe is "queer" and more or less negligible. Nor should it be forgotten in this connection that Poe was not only committed to theories of art entirely antithetical to those held by the New England writers, but that he spent a large part of his time assailing both the theories and the persons of those exemplary authors. It is not surprising, then, that he has suffered for his temerity at the hands of readers and critics trained to venerate his rivals. Nor, finally, is it in the least strange that the remoteness of his themes from common life should have limited his appeal to a people who, while possessed of imagination, have as yet done little to cultivate and refine it.
It is needless to say that foreign readers have been influenced by none of these considerations. They are not in the least surprised or aggrieved to learn that a great literary artist should have led a life not in accord with the canons of conventionality, and they have nothing to do with his personal quarrels. They are not puritanical and do not inevitably ask when they pick up a book what good they will derive from its perusal. They are fairly contented to be charmed or thrilled, and Poe, with the haunting melody of his verse and with his weird, ethereal, and terrible tales, has both charmed and thrilled them. In short, they have welcomed in their sophistication an original literary force. As Poe's native country becomes more sophisticated, it is likely that his originality and power will be more and more welcomed there.
Poe's work, then, has stood better than that of any other American writer the test of cosmopolitan approval. It has not stood so well the test of home approval, although, as we have seen, he did not lack warm admirers among his countrymen during his life, and although his fame has been so steadily rising in America that it is becoming possible for critics of standing to hold that Hawthorne's superiority to him is not a settled point. He therefore comes nearer than any other American to satisfying the demands made upon the author who claims admission to the limited ranks of the world-writers.
But what is the basis of his appeal to his devotees at home and to the world at large? This question can be best answered by distributing his writings into the three categories of poetry, prose romance, and criticism, and endeavouring to determine how well he has succeeded in each division. If it can be shown that he has succeeded eminently in the first two, it will follow that, owing to the greater permanence of poetry, he has a better chance of appealing to remote generations than his fellow-romancers, and that his imaginative prose will give him an advantage over writers, like Emerson and Lowell, who share with him the rewards of poetry, but are scarcely likely through their ethical and critical writings even to maintain, much less to increase, their hold upon the world.
With regard, first, to Poe's work in verse, it is obvious that its small volume excludes him from the ranks of the greater poets. He is no more to be put on an equality with Tennyson than is Gray. Yet just as Gray is a true classic through the quality of his scanty productions, so is Poe. It is possible to maintain with Arnold and with Gray himself that the latter's odes contain reaches of pure poetry not to be found in the "Elegy"; it is possible to contend that "The Raven" is too factitious to be regarded as a poem of the highest merit; but it is not possible to deny that the two poems have enjoyed an unbounded popularity that has made them genuine classics. And just as Gray is for English-speaking peoples an unapproachable elegist, so is Poe an unapproachable writer of haunting, melodious lyrics of regret for lost loves and for luring, ever-escaping beauty. However narrow Poe's genius as a poet may be, it is plain that withing his own sphere he is a more perfect artist than any other American has been in any sphere. Probably no other poet writing in English has equalled him as a master of the refrain and of the device of parallelism. Nor has any one precisely reproduced his harmonies or surpassed them in their kind. His themes are few, but they appeal deeply to the hearts of many readers, and Poe has developed them with insight, with sure tact, and with a strange, haunting imagination that has profoundly moved the imaginations of others. His influence upon latter-day poetry, with regard both to melody and to colour, has been very strong. He has also influenced, less beneficially, perhaps, the substance of modern poetry and the artistic theories of its votaries.
In other words, what Poe did he did almost perfectly and with the maximum of effect. He was not absolutely original, of course--the influence of Shelley, Coleridge, and Mrs. Browning, to name no others, can be traced in his work--but he was markedly original in comparison with any other contemporary save Emerson. A few years later Whitman displayed an originality broader and more specifically national, but he was not an artist as Poe was, nor has his influence upon other writers been thus far nearly so marked, at least in matters of technic. Whatever we may say, then, with regard to the narrowness of Poe's lyric vein and to the remoteness of his themes from the highest and broadest interests of life, we cannot deny to him as poet the power and influence that accompany perfect mastery of an art, or rather of one of its phases. The dramatic interest and weird intensity of "The Raven," the undefinable emotional appeal of "Ulalume," the varied melody of "The Bells," the romantic charm of "Annabel Lee," the subtle harmonies of "Israfel," "To Helen," and "To One in Paradise," and finally the melodious pathos of "The Haunted Palace" appear to be Poe's title-deeds to unending fame.
Turning now to Poe's work in fiction, let us endeavour to determine how much of it seems to have permanent value. His only attempt at a sustained story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is not without merit, but has never impressed many readers and plainly does not rank high in its class. His numerous extravaganzas must be set aside also, for Poe was seldom successful when he aimed at humorous or grotesque effects. It is on the body of sombre, haunting, ethereal, tragic, and morbid tales represented by "Shadow," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Eleonora," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Black Cat" as well as of the pseudo- scientific and ratiocinative stories represented by "Hans Pfall" and "The Gold Bug" that Poe's fame as a writer of prose fiction must rest. In other words, just as he is not a poet of sustained power, so he is not a romancer of sustained power. He is as little to be ranked with Scott or Cooper or Hawthorne in prose as with Byron or Shelley or Tennyson in verse. He is to be ranked with the great masters of the short story, with Baccaccio and Maupassant, and it is plain that in literary influence and effectiveness his tales, taken in their entirety, entitle him to a high and unique position among romancers. Few or no other writers grip their readers as Poe does. In this particular, this seizing and holding quality of his work, his art is little, if at all, short of wonderful. He has no elaborate sustained romance or novel to his credit, he has created no great characters, he does not know the human heart as Scott and Hawthorne do, nor does he make such an appeal to it, he has comparatively little humour, he has not even, except in his very best romantic tales, a remarkably good prose style; but he has originality, range, and intensity of controlling power to such a degree that one almost forgets his limitations. Few or no other writers of fiction have clearly surpassed him in presenting a tragic situation-- witness "The Cask of Amontillado"; or in analyzing a warped character-- witness "William Wilson"; or in making the impossible seem true--witness the "Descent into the Maelstrom"; or in unravelling a mystery--witness "The Purloined Letter"; or in casting a weird or a lovely glamour--witness "Ligeia" and "Eleonora." In view of such a range as this it seems idle to speak of Poe's genius as narrow; few will deny his originality, or at least his mastery in what he tried to do; and probably no one will dispute his influence upon modern fiction, although many doubt whether it has been beneficial.
That modern decadents have been influenced by Poe's work, but more especially, perhaps, by his theories of art, may be admitted. He does not deal with the highest things. He does not give us a consistent criticism of life or aim at making us better or wiser. But he does make us see and feel the beautiful, the mysterious, the terrible in a way that profoundly affects our emotions. There is room for art such as his in any age and among any people. It is a genuine, not a meretricious product of human genius, it is extremely rare, and to belittle it is, to say the least, uncatholic on the part of any critic.
The miscellaneous prose works of Poe, including his Eureka, his letters, his lectures, essays, and other critical writings of whatsoever form, are important to the student of his art and of his mind as well as to the student of American literature during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Their intrinsic value, however, is comparatively slight. Eureka appears to have no scientific or philosophic merits, but is plainly the product of a daring and brilliantly analytic mind. The lecture on "The Poetic Principle" has been seriously praised, but its merits are more than neutralized by its author's narrowness and arrogance. The reviews and other critical estimates of his contemporaries are as a rule either too severe or too eulogistic. Yet it is clear that Poe, in the thirties at least, had higher critical standards than any other American who was doing journeyman work in the magazines, and that he did good service to his countrymen by scourging the mediocre and bad authors who were being ludicrously overpraised merely because they happened to be Americans presumably engaged in ushering in the much desiderated national literature. Yet although Poe was, perhaps, the most useful critic of his time, and although his mind was so acute that he might have made himself a noteworthy critic, metaphysician, or scholar, it seems idle to imitate his more extreme admirers in discovering in his lucubrations matter for wonder and hyperbolic praise. On the other hand, it is unfair to infer from his blunders and from his familiar references to things of which he probably knew little that he was a mere charlatan. His range of knowledge was wider than is sometimes supposed; and he had enough sheer vigour of mind to excuse many more solecisms than he can be shown to have committed.
But now having briefly reviewed his work in its various categories, how are we to rank Poe as a writer? He is an important and original and truly classic poet, yet we have seen that we cannot well pronounce him to be a great one. He is a potent writer of romance, although he has no sustained masterpiece to his credit. He is an acute but unbalanced critic, a strong intelligence but not an important force in the world of thought. If these statements contained the whole truth, he would plainly not be an author of supreme or even exalted station. But it is equally plain that no other American author occupies, in the eyes of either foreign or some native critics, such an eminent position, and that Poe is the only American whose influence upon literature at large has been fairly considerable. By reason of this influence, of his originality and range, of his intense power and his mastery of the forms of art he attempts, and of his double appeal as poet and romancer, his position is one of secure though not superlative eminence, and his admirers are not "perverse" when they assert his primacy among American writers. Yet it should not be forgotten that the genius of Cooper is more robust than his, that Whitman's is more autochthonous, Emerson's more ideally stimulating, and Hawthorne's more sympathetic and humane. The American who prefers any or all of these writers to Poe is not so destitute of the critical faculty as some foreigners suppose, while the foreigners that assert Poe's superiority have more reason on their side than is admitted by most Americans. The task of assigning relative ranks to authors is a very delicate one--so delicate that many persons are inclined, erroneously but not without provocation, to regard it as a waste of time, if not as a piece of impertinence. Perhaps the safest conclusion in this vexed matter of Poet's standing in American literature is to admit that in view of his primacy on the Continent of Europe, his influence upon modern literature, his perfection as an artist in his two roles, and his steadily increasing fame, he is the American writer that means most to the civilized world of today, and that probably has the best chance of maintaining, if not of increasing, his hold upon posterity. If this means that he is the greatest of American authors, it does not mean that he need ever be the favourite author of the American people. There is a devotion that proceeds from the heart and an admiration that springs from the mind. The one may belong to Hawthorne or Emerson, the other to Poe.