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13 January, 2012
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Letters To Dead Authors
LETTER--To Edgar Allan Poe
by Lang, Andrew
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Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and
romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the
indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory. You, who knew the
men, will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors
of your own generation, still harass your name with their
malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and
unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New York. But their
persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike
with which many American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps
the greatest literary genius, of their country. With a commendable
patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low; and you,
I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost without
honour in his own country.
The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects
admirable study of your career ("Edgar Allan Poe," by George
Woodberry: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English
readers who have forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it,
that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer. How unhappy were the
necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a
man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary
criticism! About the writers of his own generation a leader of that
generation should hold his peace. He should neither praise nor
blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at the
buzzing ephemerae of letters. The breath of their life is in the
columns of "Literary Gossip;" and they should be allowed to perish
with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of
course, there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise
the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-
finding.
Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor;
you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What
"irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense
of wrong," drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his
pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow
forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great. It was
the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not
how to forget. "The New Yorkers never forgave him," says your
latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of
their malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole
literary class that you assailed. "As a literary people," you
wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and
writing still. He who knows them need not linger over the attacks
and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on
calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust
which takes so long in settling above your tomb.
For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
pen, and that in an age when the author of "To Helen" and "The Cask
of Amontillado" was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When
such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep
than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were
inevitable and assured. No man was less fortunate than you in the
moment of his birth--infelix opportunitate vitae. Had you lived a
generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at
home, would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a
change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it
is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to
Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of
"Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in
the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a
respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as
"objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what
is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to
his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself," and so forth.
Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer
of short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and
elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own
brief definition of poetry, "the rhythmic creation of the
beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory
illustrated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of
what you call the "didactic" element in verse. Even if morality be
not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present
estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be
the largest public.
"Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry," so you
wrote; "the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which
should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely
what we should aim at in poetry." You aimed at that mark, and
struck it again and again, notably in "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"
in "The Haunted Palace," "The Valley of Unrest," and "The City in
the Sea." But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been
foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem--"The Raven:"
a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the
"exaltation" (what there is of it) by no means particularly "vague."
So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the "Skylark,"
and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each
of them a poet's name, vivu' per ora virum. Your theory of poetry,
if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the
foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come
Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote "Golden Wings," "The Blue
Closet," and "The Sailing of the Sword;" and, close up, Mr. Lear,
the author of "The Yongi Bongi Bo," an the lay of the "Jumblies."
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you
consigned Moliere. If we may judge a theory by its results, when
compared with the deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic
does not seem to hold water. The "Odyssey" is not really inferior
to "Ulalume," as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were
correct, nor "Le Festin de Pierre" to "Undine." Yet you deserve the
praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your
poetic principles--principles commonly deserted by poets who, like
Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system. Your pieces are
few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like Fielding, "a barren
rascal." But how can a writer's verses be numerous if with him, as
with you, "poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . . which cannot
at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations or the
more paltry commendations of mankind!" Of you it may be said, more
truly than Shelley said it of himself, that "to ask you for anything
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton."
Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a
single string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the
grave. You chose, or you were destined
To vary from the kindly race of men;
and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your
reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success--the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation.
By this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your
translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your
views about Mr. Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so
energetically resisted all those ideas of "progress" which "came
from Hell or Boston." On this point, however, the world continues
to differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the
choice between our optimism and universal suicide or universal
opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps a
profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described
them as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens." I am not aware that
extreme orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress
towards a predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of
delirium. If they be, then there is a deal of truth in the
criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your style. But
your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of
fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which
Mr. Hawthorne had at his command. He was a great writer--the
greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced. But you
and he have not much in common, except a certain mortuary turn of
mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the workings of
conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of
American fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you
laid down about brevity and the steady working to one single effect.
Probably you would not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your
leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen's favourite
novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently uninspired.
In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a
Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the
subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute of humour
as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the
charm of "Daisy Miller." You would admit the unity of effect
secured in "Washington Square," though that effect is as remote as
possible from the terror of "The House of Usher" or the vindictive
triumph of "The Cask of Amontillado."
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius
tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille,
a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a
scholar's training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all
unsupported by his consolations.
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