Poe, Edgar Allen - The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe Read online

  England-in fact, the latter nation has often uttered the reproach

  that Poe's own country has been slow to appreciate him. But that

  reproach, if it ever was warranted, certainly is untrue.

  W. H. R.

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  EDGAR ALLAN POE{*1}

  BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

  THE situation of American literature is anomalous. It has no centre,

  or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is,

  divided into many systems, each revolving round its several suns, and

  often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a

  milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris, is not

  a great central heart from which life and vigor radiate to the

  extremities, but resembles more an isolated umbilicus stuck down as

  near a's may be to the centre of the land, and seeming rather to tell

  a legend of former usefulness than to serve any present need. Boston,

  New York, Philadelphia, each has its literature almost more distinct

  than those of the different dialects of Germany; and the Young Queen

  of the West has also one of her own, of which some articulate rumor

  barely has reached us dwellers by the Atlantic.

  Perhaps there is no task more difficult than the just criticism of

  contemporary literature. It is even more grateful to give praise

  where it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often

  seduces the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she

  writes what seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if

  praise be given as an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into

  any man's hat. The critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an

  infusion of nutgalls or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous

  than to be just, and we might readily put faith in that fabulous

  direction to the hiding place of truth, did we judge from the amount

  of water which we usually find mixed with it.

  Remarkable experiences are usually confined to the inner life of

  imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and

  peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of

  a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was

  adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed

  seemed the warranty of a large estate to the young poet.

  Having received a classical education in England, he returned home

  and entered the University of Virginia, where, after an extravagant

  course, followed by reformation at the last extremity, he was

  graduated with the highest honors of his class. Then came a boyish

  attempt to join the fortunes of the insurgent Greeks, which ended at

  St. Petersburg, where he got into difficulties through want of a

  passport, from which he was rescued by the American consul and sent

  home. He now entered the military academy at West Point, from which

  he obtained a dismissal on hearing of the birth of a son to his

  adopted father, by a second marriage, an event which cut off his

  expectations as an heir. The death of Mr. Allan, in whose will his

  name was not mentioned, soon after relieved him of all doubt in this

  regard, and he committed himself at once to authorship for a support.

  Previously to this, however, he had published (in 1827) a small

  volume of poems, which soon ran through three editions, and excited

  high expectations of its author's future distinction in the minds of

  many competent judges.

  That no certain augury can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings

  there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems,

  though brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a

  very faint promise of the directness, condensation and overflowing

  moral of his maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a

  case in point, his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we

  believe, in his twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show

  tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and a delicate appreciation of

  classic models, .but give no hint of the author of a new style in

  poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly

  unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his

  later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign

  of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We

  have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy,"

  Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated

  dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is called), the interest of

  ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke White's promises were

  indorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey, but surely with no

  authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a traditional piety,

  which to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less objectionable in

  the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment of prose.

  They do not clutch hold of the memory with

  the drowning pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of

  his occasional simple, lucky beauty. Burns having fortunately been

  rescued by his humble station from the contaminating society of the

  "Best models," wrote well and naturally from the first. Had he been

  unfortunate enough to have had an educated taste, we should have had

  a series of poems from which, as from his letters, we could sift here

  and there a kernel from the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful

  efforts give no promise whatever of that poetical genius which

  produced at once the wildest, tenderest, most original and most

  purely imaginative poems of modem times. Byron's "Hours of Idleness"

  would never find a reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable

  curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is but a dim

  foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early poems, a

  safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient

  investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied

  explorer of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances

  of a man who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the

  rarer and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The

  earliest specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give

  tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar

  above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be

  entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is

  generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early

  insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical

  arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity

  wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy

  memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort

  of _reason, _and the rudest verses in which we can trace some

  conception of the ends of poetry, are worth all the miracles of

  smooth juvenile versification. A school-boy, one would say, might

  acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an association with the

  motion of the play-ground tilt.

  Mr. Poe's early productions sh
ow that he could see through the verse

  to the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the

  life and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will

  of the other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we

  have ever read. We know of none that can compare with them for

  maturity of purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of

  language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display

  what we can only express by the contradictory phrase of _innate

  experience. _We copy one of the shorter poems, written when the

  author was only fourteen. There is a little dimness in the filling

  up, but the grace and symmetry of the outline are such as few poets

  ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia about it.

  TO HELEN

  Helen, thy beauty is to me

  Like those Nicean barks of yore,

  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

  The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

  To his own native shore.

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,

  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

  To the glory that was Greece

  And the grandeur that was Rome.

  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

  How statue-like I see thee stand!

  The agate lamp within thy hand,

  Ah ! Psyche, from the regions which

  Are Holy Land !

  It is the tendency of_ _the young poet that impresses us. Here is no

  "withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its

  teens, none of the drawing-room sansculottism which Byron had brought

  into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the

  Greek Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It

  is not of that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the

  tips of the fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear

  alone _can _estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because

  of its perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he

  intended to personify the music of nature,, our boy-poet gives us the

  following exquisite picture:

  Ligeia ! Ligeia !

  My beautiful one,

  Whose harshest idea

  Will to melody run,

  Say, is it thy will,

  On the breezes to toss,

  Or, capriciously still,

  Like the lone albatross,

  Incumbent on night,

  As she on the air,

  To keep watch with delight

  On the harmony there?

  John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too

  long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and

  similar passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.

  Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to

  call _genius. _No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and

  yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its

  power. Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such

  magnetism. Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are

  wanting. Talent sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have

  still one- foot of clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings

  of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from

  Dante, and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea

  itself, his verses shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of

  ocean. Talent may make friends for itself, but only genius can give

  to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration.

  Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he

  ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a

  disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are

  possessed and carried away by their demon, While talent keeps him, as

  Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of his sword. To the

  eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder

  that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng

  continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his inkstand

  at the devil.

  When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he

  has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it

  at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence

  for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and

  the greenest laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses; and

  Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the

  loftiest order to render a place among them at all desirable, whether

  for its hardness of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of

  our Parnassus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most

  thickly settled portion of the country, a circumstance which must

  make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical

  temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts,

  a necessary part of their idiosyncrasy.

  Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of

  vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of

  imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist

  in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in

  stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper

  relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second

  groups, fills up and colors. Both of these Mr. Poe has displayed with

  singular distinctness in his prose works, the last predominating in

  his earlier tales, and the first in his later ones. In judging of the

  merit of an author, and assigning him his niche among our household

  gods, we have a right to regard him from our own point of view, and

  to measure him by our own standard. But, in estimating the amount of

  power displayed in his works, we must be governed by his own design,

  and placing them by the side of his own ideal, find how much is

  wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions of the objects of

  art. He esteems that object to be the creation of Beauty, and perhaps

  it is only in the definition of that word that we disagree with him.

  But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall take his own

  standard as our guide. The temple of the god of song is equally.

  accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for all

  who bring offerings, or seek in oracle.

  In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that

  dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the

  probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He

  combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom

  found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the

  impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does

  not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the

  natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we

  have before alluded, analysis. It is this which distinguishes the

  artist. His mind at once reaches forward to the effect to be

  produced. Having resolved to bring about certain emotions in the />
  reader, he makes all subordinate parts tend strictly to the common

  centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to his own mind. To him X is

  a known quantity all along. In any picture that he paints he

  understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague

  some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him

  the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical

  diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with Mysticism. The

  Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his

  thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest

  things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a

  spectator _ab extra. _He analyzes, he dissects, he watches

  "with an eye serene,

  The very pulse of the machine,"

  for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and

  piston-rods, all working to produce a certain end.

  This analyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and by

  giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a

  wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints

  with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the

  mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In

  raising images of horror, also, he has strange success, conveying to

  us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible _doubt _which is the

  secret of all horror. He leaves to imagination the task of finishing

  the picture, a task to which only she is competent.

  "For much imaginary work was there;

  Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,

  That for Achilles' image stood his spear

  Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind

  Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind."

  Besides the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of

  form.

  His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It would

  be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers.