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writers that followed him. It is a cool pleasure to watch Stevenson put Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through their changes, and it is with clear intellectual delight that one reads "Markheim" and sees Death present himself as the last guest at the house of "Will o' the Mill"; whereas a story by Maupassant or Dostoievski, or even Dickens's highly inartistic and very great "Christmas Carol," leaves one aching. Mr. Poe and Mr. Stevenson do not overwhelm, nor does that other exquisite master of the eerie tale, Hawthorne. Poe plays with psychological moods abstracted from experience and so wholly and deliberately of one tone that incredulity does not forget itself and unbar the gates to the inner passages of a reader's nature. Granting this limitation, nay, insisting on it as necessary to the full appreciation of Poe's tales, one can then praise them unreservedly. "William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher" are quite perfect things. In his admirable criticism of Hawthorne, Poe defines the limits of the tale, and that means, of course, the limits which Poe intended or recognized in his own tales:

"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step." After that, if we read the first sentence of "The Fall of the House of Usher," we find Poe

has let us into his secret - but none except Poe can make a Poesque tale.

Poe has puzzled some readers who, taking too literally the addresses of other poets to the heavenly muses, have come to believe that a great artist is one who sits with a halo round his head, an amanuensis of some capricious deity who has chosen to fill him with inspiration. They think that because Poe talks of his methods with such jaunty assurance, with such an air of the prestidigitator who kindly shows the audience how the last little trick was done, he is not truly inspired, but is confessedly and peculiarly artificial. He is precisely as artificial as art always is. He has singular ability and willingness to turn one part of his mind upon the other and examine his own creative processes. This is the action of his critical faculty, which all great artists have, but which not all choose to put into essays on literary technique. Poe is a great critic of himself and of others. Writing apropos of himself he becomes our first philosophic student of literary technique and æsthetics. Writing apropos of books which the day's work brings him to review, he becomes our first judicial and dogmatic critic.

Whether Poe is "right" or "wrong" in his critical judgments is not important. He has something to say while he is sitting on the bench, and he expresses himself admirably. Never once does he write as if he had not considered what a particular book and the entire literature of the universe meant to him. Even in the course of the most trivial review he manages to suggest something valuable about literature. His judgments, except when he overpraises some perishable

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poetry whose author happens to stand in his good graces, are not so much wrong as vigorously different from those of other people. He was unlike any one that the American press had ever seen before; he was assertive, competent, and had a slashing disrespect and toplofty independence which seemed like a new sort of literary honesty. In one sense Poe is thoroughly independent and honest. He never expresses other people's opinions except when he agrees with them, and then he repeats them as his own; like many other intensely original men he is a shameless plagiarist, and he turns off ideas gathered from Coleridge and Macaulay with a divine assumption of discovery, which later critics (some of them incapable of any original idea) easily trace back to the

source.

Poe was a devoted servant of literature. He loved what is good. Some of his diamonds were paste, and one suspects that he knew it, that he was sometimes a trifle disingenuous in "writing up" for the public, on whose suffrages his bread depended, the paste whose glitter the public likes. But on the whole he struck blows for what he liked. His critical papers which are of permanent value are his essays on the technique of poetry and his appreciations of Dickens, Hawthorne, Mrs. Browning, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Lowell. His retort to Lowell is a bit of unguicular sparring, which it is stimulating to read now in a day of dull truce, when every well-bred critic is too polite or too timid to say anything pugnacious. Lowell had shown his claws in his "Fable for Critics," and Poe in revenge caustically applies his acute sense of metre to Lowell's rattling impromptu. He had so much intellectual acumen that, although the gods had not made him a humourist, he could by sheer force of intellect write wittily - and write well, always well. His feeblest paper about the deepest buried celebrity among the "literati" is written by a man who understands the literary craft through and through. Criticism is valuable not in so far as it tells the truth and nothing but the truth about a book (for it can never do that), but in so far as it expresses an unusual, an individual mind; it reveals the critic rather than the thing criticised. When Mr. Henry James speaks of Poe's "very valueless verses," he tells nothing about the poet, because for half a century other people, including the unanimous company of poets, the highest authorities, have found the verses very valuable. But he does tell us something about Mr. James's interesting mind; he confesses that his auditory system is defective. Similarly, the following passage from Mr. James's " Life of Hawthorne" explains Mr. James in some measure, but it does not explain Poe.

"There was," says Mr. James, "but little literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps y held the scales the highest. He, at any rate, rattled them loudest, and pretended more than any one else to conduct the weighing process on scientific principles. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe's and very extraordinary were his principles; but he had the advantage of being a man of genius and his intelligence was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his milieu and moment is very

curious and interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever being completely forgotten. It is probably the most exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of man. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry."

Note how this latter-day critic tries to make Poe conform with the critic's prejudices and obsessions. In the first place, Poe is seldom pretentious, because he does not have to pretend; he is in full possession of a rare literary proficiency and has no occasion to be pretentious. In the second place, he is not vulgar, because he is a unique and original person, having little in common with current, that is, vulgar, ideas and ways; the extraordinary can be objectionable, offensive, but it cannot be vulgar. Finally, consider Poe's collection of critical sketches as "the most exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of man." Poe's collection is an accident of journalism; after his death the trivialities of his day's work were assembled from the petty magazines. Let us compare the list of persons criticised by Mr. Poe, an American poet enforced by circumstance to be a hack reviewer, with the list of persons criticised in "Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, whom the booksellers hired to write introductions to poets whom they, not he, had chosen to reprint. Poe's list contains fifty-five names that mean nothing, and thirteen names still regarded as important. Johnson's list contains twenty-eight names no one of which

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