But it is not true that this is always the case. Who is to decide, for example, between the "Ode to a Nightingale" and the "Ode on Immortality"? Poe's theory, however, and its elaborate working out, involve the inference that "The Raven" is a finer poem than either, since Wordsworth's ode is actually joyous and the idea of "The Raven" on the other hand sadder than anything in Keats's. He proves it by a plus b. Of all melancholy topics, he says, death is the most melancholy; it is most poetical when it allies itself with beauty; "the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

Any force his theory might abstractly be supposed to have, assuredly evaporates in his illustrative exposition of it, and "The Raven" is certainly superior to either. But two things are made perfectly clear by such theorizing: one, that the theorist is primarily not a poet but an artist-concerned, not with expression but effect, that is to say; and, the other, that he is not a natural but an eccentric artist, since sadness voluntary and predetermined is artificial and morbid. The poem itself-undoubtedly Poe's star performance confirms these inductions. It is not a moving poem. It has, as Mrs. Browning herself admitted, a certain power, but it is such power as may be possessed by the incurable dilettante coldly caressing a morbid mood. To be moving melancholy must be temperamental. Even a mood will not suffice. Whatever injustice is done its real genesis by Poe's farrago about it, "The Raven" is in conception and execution exceptionally cold-blooded poetry. But, distinctly on the plane of artifice, it is admirable art. Less remarkable as a pure tour de force in linguistic luxuriance than the extraordinary "Bells," which in its way is quite unparalleled, it is nevertheless a noteworthy technical achievement. Its rhythms and rhymes are more than clever, and, together with the recurrent accent of the refrain, combine in the production of a sustained tone and effect of totality, which may almost be said to epitomize Poe's genius.

Both "The Raven" and "The Bells" have enjoyed an enormous popularity among readers impressionable by effects and insensitive to distinctions, and their poetic strain has not saved them from being

the natural prey of the professional elocutionist-also an elaborate technician in his more or less humble fashion. Poe's more personal verse has less interest. Some of it deserves Stoddard's verdict of "doggerel," for where his own work, verse or prose was concerned he had no standard. The lines "For Helen," written when he was a boy, are not only astonishingly precocious but charming, far better than those "For Annie," written when he had matured and for the most part overlaid his inspiration with artistry and encrusted it with technic. "Ulalume" is the genuinely poetic poem of his maturity, and in it one feels the sincerity which is latent in the most artificial and abnormal natures-a sincerity indeed that throws into exceptional relief the element of artifice in Poe's art and seems itself in the shadow that perhaps befits remorse, behind the apparatus of repetend and empty assonance that tries the reader's nerves. Even here one feels the aptness of Emerson's bland reference to him as "the jingle man," and notes the artist rather than the poet and the technician rather than the artist. In any case the volume of his verse is so slight as to confine his claim to its quality, and its quality is hardly such as to place him very high up on the fairly populous slopes of Parnassus where there is more competition than he met with in his lifetime. Competition is fatal to Poe. His cue was distinctly to function outside of it, and he was wise to cultivate originality at any price.

III

As a technician his most noteworthy success is the completeness of his effect. He understood to perfection the value of tone in a composition, and tone is an element that is almost invaluable. In this respect he has no American and few foreign rivals. All of his writings attest his supreme comprehension of it-prose as well as poetry, the ablest and the most abject. Such rubbish as "The Duc de l'Omelette," with its galvanic rictus of false but sustained gaiety; such elaborate and hollow solemnity as the parable "Shadow," which ends, however, on a note of real pith and dignity; such a crazy-quilt of tinsel as "The Assignation," all have this unifying quality which makes

art of them. His very deficiency in the qualities usually present in the romancewriter and absolutely vital in romance of a high order, enabled him to cultivate his own special excellences the more exclusively. Many of the tales are tone and nothing else -not even tone of any particular character, but a reticulation of relations merely in admirable unison. The false note is the one falsity he eschewed. Tinkling feet on a tufted carpet is nonsense, but it is not a false note in the verbal harmony of the artificial "Raven." In "The Cask of Amontillado" the tone is like the click of malignant castanets. And in "The Fall of the House of Usher" it reaches Poe's climax of power-a diapason of gloom, wholly voluntary, and ending none too soon perhaps, but maintained to the end with the success of a veritable tour de force. What on the other hand he did not understand was modulation. He has no variety. Probably he realized this limitation and confined himself almost wholly in prose to the short story, grotesquely prescribing, too, one hundred lines as the limit of a poem. A novel by Poe is inconceivable, and would be even if he had had the feeling for character and the human interest that the novel demands. This is partly because he lacked sustained power and the larger art of organization and dynamic development, but it is also due to the monotony which results probably from the predominance and prolongation of the mood, which makes it so easy for him to secure tone.

Thus he achieves atmosphere, but an atmosphere which is less the envelope than the content of his work, and which so enwraps the detail as to blend its accents and minimize the force of such variety as it has. Nothing takes place in "The Fall of the House of Usher" that is not trivial and inconclusive compared with its successful monotone, its atmosphere of lurid murk and disintegrating gloom. And as a consequence of this inversion of the normal artistic relations of content and envelope, I must say I think that here, where we have Poe at his best, he refuses us all satisfaction that lies beyond the scope of purely scenic art. In this one respect "The Cask of Amontillado" is better. It too is most remarkable artistically for its tone, the cascade of brilliant chatter that sustains its suspense. But it contains some psy

chology, devilish rather than human to be sure, and therefore as usual ringing false, but imaginatively thrilling in its malignity, though its monstrousness is rendered somewhat insipid by the perversity and characteristic inadequacy of its motive. And it has a situation both moral and material, and a rapidly conducted, however meagre, action. But even these two tales as they stand do not take their author out of the rank of the purely scenic artist, comparatively high as they may place him within it. The truth is that no writer of anything approaching Poe's ability has been content to remain in this rank.

There is unquestionable power in his best tales, but it is a repellent power. In fact, his most characteristic limitation as an artist is the limited character of the pleasure he gives. He has a perverse instinct for restricting it to that produced by pain. Pain and pleasure have no doubt an equivalent æsthetic sanction. Metaphysically they are sometimes indeed difficult to distinguish, desire, for example, which superficially classes itself as pleasure, being probably pain in reality. The discussion of such a question would have delighted Poe, but it is unnecessary to quarrel with the legitimacy of painful effects in art-in which as in life no doubt, as Mrs. Browning declared, "pain is not the fruit of pain"

in order to appreciate the perversity of Poe's practice in this regard. The production of pain is with him an end, not a means to the production of pleasure. His design is, crassly, to wring the withers of our sensoriums.

In the most characteristic of his writings this motive is exactly that of the fat boy in "Pickwick" who announced to his easily thrilled auditors that he was going to make their flesh creep. To accomplish this result, however, is more difficult than to announce it, unless one deals with an altogether higher order of material than Poe's and is possessed of an altogether different order of powers. The element of awe is not, of course, in question, for Poe had no awe, and there is no need to cite more august examples than that of Victor Hugo, for instance, to remind ourselves by contrast of the difference between the fleshcreeping effects produced by a master and those obtained by a charlatan who addresses not in the least the mind but ex

clusively the nerves. His success in accomplishing his desired effect at all events is fatally compromised, usually, in two ways: his motive is too plain and his means too primitive. He makes his motive so plain not only by its constant undisguised and obvious recurrence, but by actual profession (see "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" for example), as to defeat its own end. It is impossible to meet half-way an artist whose efforts to surprise, shock, startle you are all the while in full sight. He must perforce forego the unconscious reciprocity of concern that is the essence of appreciation. A writer who declares at every turn, as the inveteracy of Poe's practice, his constant harping on the string of "horror," declares, that he is "going to make your flesh creep," fails in his attempt. In the face of such an announcement any flesh at all jaded by the extravagances of romanticism remains stationary. In the case of some of Poe's stories, in fact, positive paralysis ensues in the face of almost hysterical efforts on his part at galvanism; "The Pest," for instance. For this carnomaniac purpose, too, his means are as primitive as his motive is plain. He can certainly produce his effect when the material he treats is of a nature to produce it in any one's hands. The subject itself of "The Premature Burial" is full of horror and can be trusted to come home to the imagination of the reader under any treatment of it. So with the idea of being walled up alive, as presented in "The Cask of Amontillado." So also with the situation in "The Pit and the Pendulum." But in most instances it may certainly be said that one does not get enough pain out of Poe to receive any great amount of pleasure from him.

He carries his "unscrupulousness" very far indeed-much farther than even in Arnold's estimation Kinglake could be said to! In fact, if throughout his work you feel the artist, you also feel the artistic liar. He is the avatar of the type-a type tolerably well-known in a multitude of examples from Mandeville to Münchausen, and establishing perhaps through its mere existence (if anything could) the absence of any necessary connection between art and truth. Truth stood between him and originality. It irked him equally in pursuing the egregious, in which he delighted, and in eluding

the commonplace, which he abhorred. The esoteric attracted and the ecumenical repelled him. He was fascinated by the false as Hawthorne was by the fanciful. He was, as Henri Martin said of the Celt, "always in revolt against the despotism of fact." He was an artist in whom the great purpose of art, making the unreal appear real, became the end of making the false appear true. At this flagitious game he evinced the superior cleverness of the children of this world. Nowhere is his skill more noteworthy than in securing verisimilitude for the improbable, the incredible, one of the most obvious of his expedients being the auto-biographical form, which he uses almost invariably, and which, when the material is extraordinary, gives the color of plausibility.

But the same fondness for the false appears in his occasional inversion of the process whereby the truth is made to seem incredible-marvellous beyond belief, “too good to be true," in a word, but true all the same. Here of course the falsity of effect merely takes the place of falsity of material. It was all one to Poe, provided he satisfied his passion for mystification. The shortest road to producing the sensational effect that alone he sought is to controvert the established order, and for that road, apart from its being the line of least resistance, he had a native affinity. The effect he aimed at being exclusively a sensational effect, he could best secure it by falsifying his material and thus circumventing the reader's tranquillity of expectation. The fact that such sensation is valueless was of no concern to a philosopher who attached value to sensation as such and to sensation only. Hence he devoted the powers of an extraordinary intellect to producing what is to the intellect of next to no interest. The abnormal, in its various manifestations, the sinister, the diseased, the deflected, even the disgusting, were his natural theme. He could not conceive the normal save as the commonplace for which he had apparently the "horror" he would have liked to inspire in others by the presentation of the eccentric. Dread of the commonplace, as was pointed out centuries ago by a far otherwise penetrating critic than Poe, is fatal to the sublime. And there is assuredly no sublimity in Poe.

Yet the tales of horror and those of the

weird and the fantastic probably stand in the widest popular estimate as especially characteristic. And it is true that it is of these one thinks when one speaks of a Poe story. They have, many of them, the evil eminence that wilful morbidity lends to the production of its votaries of genius, and except for the effect on the nerves which a few of them are able to produce on "suggestible" sensoriums, they hold their place among other writings of a similar sort-there are none precisely like them because of their meagreness-chiefly on account of their scenic quality. More has been claimed for the "tales of ratiocination," as they are called. Writers before Poe have "grovelled in the ghastly and wallowed in the weird" with considerable effect, if with an art inferior to his. But he has been called the inventor of the detective story, and thus decorated with a badge of unique distinction in the hierarchy of literature. It is always difficult to assign with certainty to any individual the invention of a literary or plastic genre. "Doubtless Homer had his Homer," remarks Thoreau. M. Dupin was certainly preceded by Zadig, and Voltaire is said to have invented "Zadig" after reading an Oriental prototype. And even ascribing to Poe the invention of the detective story, the lover of literature may justly exclaim, "la belle affaire!" and feel disposed rather to charge than to credit him with it. However, to start or even accelerate a literary current of magnitude, whatever its merit, is an accomplishment so rare as to be noteworthy on that account alone. Moreover, strictly as regards "ratiocination," Poe excelled if he did not invent. In this respect "The Gold Bug" is probably an unsurpassed masterpiece; a masterpiece, at any ratewhich is no doubt eulogy enough, though M. Lemaitre's characterization of Maupassant as "à peu près irréprochable dans un genre qui ne l'est pas," is certainly applicable to it. So in a less degree is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' "The Purloined Letter" is decidedly inferior and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" quite unworthy the inventor of the detective story. In "The Purloined Letter" the effect of M. Dupin's contemptuousness dominates that of his skill, and in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" the arrogance of the author is destructive of all interest in a tale that is also

otherwise tedious. When Poe's personality comes to the surface the effect is always unpleasant, and it is the absence of temperamental color that gives an agreeable relief to such exhibitions of his purely intellectual activity as "The Gold Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; just as among his weird and fantastic tales the best are those in which there are the most evidences of his art and the fewest of his disposition.

Even in his poorer work, even in his poorest, the workmanship is always the best element. It is poor enough in some of them, but in such tales as "Four Beasts in One,” "Loss of Breath," "The Man that was Used Up," "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," in fact, almost all the "tales of extravaganza and caprice," there is assuredly nothing else. In such inexplicable "extravaganzas" as "The Duc de l'Omelette" and "Lionizing" its stark salience gets on one's nerves. The excessive predominance of this kind of thing in his tales is due obviously to failure in inspiration. But more obscurely it is undoubtedly due to alcohol. "Bon-Bon," for example, is definitely characteristic of inebriety. The effect of alcohol is well known to be the relief of that tension which the maintenance of equilibrium imposes so painfully on such organizations as Poe's, and a consequence of excessive indulgence in it is therefore the loss of that balance of the faculties which secures correct judgments. It is impossible to account for much of Poe's writing except on the theory that both in conception and in execution it was in this way transfigured to his mind and sense. He saw it through the mist of mental congestion and saw in its incoherence the significance that escapes sobriety. Even his egotism would be insufficient otherwise to explain it. The effects of opium in stimulating and coloring the poetic imagination-as in Coleridge's case-are familiar. But those of alcohol are pathologically quite different and quite inferior, and it does not seem to have been sufficiently remarked that in Poe's case they were undoubtedly responsible for the deterioration of his literary productions as well as for the pathetic disintegration of his life. It is a generous instinct that shrinks from dwelling on the latter, but the naiveté that ignores the obvious origin of much of his "extravaganza and caprice" is less gener

IV

THE truth is it is idle to endeavor to make a great writer of Poe, because whatever his merits as a literary artist, his writings lack the elements not only of great, but of real, literature. They lack substance. Literature is more than an art. It is art in the extended, the heightened, sense of the term. Since it is the art that deals with life rather than with appearances, it is the art par excellence that is art plus something else-plus substance. Its interest is immensely narrowed when it can only be considered plastically-narrowed to the point of inanity, of insignificance. Every art, of course, has its conventions. And so far as literature is an art it, too, leans upon them. It has its schools, its phases, its successive points of view, its academic perfections, its solecisms. But the fact that it deals with life itself rather than exclusively with appearances which may be arranged, or ganized, systematized, controlled far more easily owing to their own preliminary simplification—gives it so much more range, so much greater freedom, such an infinitely greater miscellaneity of material, and material of so much more significance and vitality that it is comparatively independent of conventions and finds its supreme justification in giving anyhow, in any way, well or ill one may almost say, the effect of life, the phenomena and import of life, which constitute its substance. Thus it is that in literature substance counts so much more than it counts in any other art, however much any other may also be in its degree "a criticism of life." Mr. Henry James has curiously illustrated the principle in later years. Beginning as pre-eminently or at least conspicuously an artist, he has become so overwhelmed by the prodigious wealth and miscellaneity of his material that is to say the phases of life which his prodigious penetration has revealed to him -that his art has been submerged by it. The trees have obliterated the forest. All the more important is it, one may argue, to cling to conventions of treatment, that your picture of life may be definite, coherent and

In short, however extravagant and capricious, any work of art is necessarily subject to its material, and the hand of every artist must, like the dyer's, be subdued to what it works in. But a literary composition, especially, cannot be conceived and executed in vacuo. The warp must be "given," however wholly the woof may be invented, or the web will be insubstantial and the pattern incoherent. Poe could transact his imaginings in environments of the purest fancy, in no-man's land, in the country of nowhere, and fill these with "tarns" and morasses and "ragged mountains" and shrieking water-lilies, flood them with ghastly moonlight and aerate them with "rank miasmas." Nevertheless, he could only avoid the flatness of pure phantasmagoria by peopling them with humanity. His landscape might embody extravagance and his atmosphere enshroud caprice, his figures demanded to be made human. The overwhelming interest of fiction is its human interest. Since it is peopled with human figures, neglect of its population is a contradiction in terms. Even in the fiction of adventure, in which the personáges are minimized and the incidents the main concern, even in fiction in which plot figures as the protagonist of the drama, plot and incident would be sterile but for the characters that figure in them. However subordinate and undifferentiated these may be, they must make some intrinsic appeal, or we should not care what happened to them. The game even as a game is not one that can be played with counters. Yet that is precisely the way in which Poe played it. And his stories have no human interest, because humanity did not in the least interest him. Neither man nor woman delighted him enough to occupy his genius even incidentally. His tales contain, of course, no "character"—that prime essential, and most exacting raison-d'être of normal fiction.

Indeed so great is the importance of human character to a story that deals with it at all, that I think those of Poe's tales in which the personages are the least shadowy, the least like algebraic symbols, the least