conventional and the recondite. It is bedizened with the frippery of learning of ten, but one suspects the truth that most of the goods, in familiar phrase, are in the shop-window. And his etalage of learning is that of the literary charlatan-an arsenal of the occult and the obscure, the abstruse and the exotic, above all the esoteric and the technical, the whole chosen and calculated to impose on the credulous and mesmerize the impressionable.

But it is doubtful if any one of his circle had as much reading. In this respect he belonged rather in the New England that he constantly jeered at as provincial and hated with a genuine and sometimes clairvoyant hatred. The weaknesses of Isaac are apparent enough to Ishmael, and though his railing at them may seem Bedouin to the Brahmin, it is not to be called Boeotian. There was probably no one within the purview of transcendentalism capable of writing the following: "Sculpture, although in its nature rigorously poetical, was too limited in its extent and consequence to have occupied, at any time, much of his attention." Possibly Poe was not and got it from Goethe, as he certainly did the remark on the next page of "The Domain of Arnheim": "No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude"-a landscape by whom he had probably never seen. It is difficult to determine the true inventory of the predatory, but appreciation of Goethe's aestheticism is in itself a distinction for Poe's time. Nor is he to be called bohemian. His habits were irregular enough, but the bohemian has no intellectual curiosity and Poe was made of it. The bohemian is content "merely to bask and ripen." Poe was a worker. His irregularities have obscured for us his exceptional industry. They interfered sadly with his accomplishment, but with its amount far less than with its character. In spite of them he kept at work-or at least returned to work when he could. His indigence and the heavy pressure of it on the two beings he cared for were a constant stimulus to a nature that whatever its faults knew not supineness. With even less urgent need he would have worked as hard-perhaps even, considering the instability of his nervous organization, to better purpose, since he would have been

He

less harried by the cormorant care. had the disposition of the fighter, and his failings did not mine his fortitude nor his failures discourage, however they might transiently deject, him. He was not an idler or a dreamer. His mental activity was constantly informed with purpose, and directed with assiduity. He was always full of energy when he was not hamstrung by exhaustion. No bohemian produces ten volumes. When his ambitious and sometimes arrogant plans met shipwreck, owing in general no doubt to his own evil genius, he made new ones. Never handicapped by modesty or even the prudences of self-distrust, he was undeterred by obstacles and undismayed by misfortune. If he did not have a proud soul, at least his egotism conserved his identity unimpaired even in the disintegration of his faculties, and to the last made the most of what his errors had left him. Next to his art it is his energy that, by demonstrating his capacity, distinguishes him and makes him a marked figure in our literature.

He had an English experience in impressionable school-boy days-which served him to real purpose in "William Wilson," probably the solidest of his tales. But he never travelled, and in this respect he inevitably seems limited, even boyish, in comparison with many of his contemporaries. It is hardly necessary to say that this was a limitation he did not himself feel. But if his egotism amounted even to bumptiousness, as it did, it was naturally associated with great independence. He did his own thinking. He was constantly "sizing up" everything, especially others, and could on this account alone hardly have been popular, even among the lowly spirited to whom arrogance and imperiousness, or even the caricatures of those vices, seem not defects but qualities. They were especially evident along with more amiable ones in his criticism, which forms several volumes of his complete works, which he wrote more incisively not to say more successfully on the whole than any of his few contemporary competitors, and for which he certainly showed the aptitudes of real penetration and a philosophic standpoint. He lacks, to be sure, one of the chief qualifications of the critic, the critical temper. It is in his criticism that his "journalism" appears

most obviously. And his journalism was that of his day, the farthest possible removed from the critical temper. It has instead the polemic temper. And his polemic was extremely personal. Its tone is often extremely contemptuous. The lining, as the French say, of his praise is sometimes abuse of those who differ with him. His praise of Hawthorne is highly spiced with contempt for the neglect of Hawthorne that he charged upon New England. He felt the sectionalism of New England, as of course no writer not himself a New Englander could fail to do. But he treats it with a self-answering excess in his references to "the Emersons and Alcotts and Fullers." His treatment of Longfellow is another instance. Perhaps he had not enough purpose to be called malevolent. He was rather irritable than imperious perhaps in his lack of any feeling of responsibility, in which case he must be acquitted of more malign motive than that of the strutting and consciously clever Ishmael bent on self-assertion. To call Carlyle an and Emerson his imitator was but a way like another of calling attention to himself. So possibly were his equally extravagant eulogies. Such primitive "methods" were certainly more in vogue in his day than in ours. The journalism to which his work formally belonged or with which it had notable affiliations bristled with "personalities," so-called. But Poe has claims inconsistent with the cloaking of his faults by the mantle of his time, and certainly no writer of his time, even, of anything like his powers, wrote criticism of this particular order of simplicity. If it had been as prevalent as it was primitive we may be sure he would have avoided it in his consecration to "originality" and aversion to custom and the common.

ass

His mental activity was indeed extraordinary so much so as apparently to be deemed by him almost an end in itself. To what purpose or upon what substance his mind was engaged was of small moment so long as it functioned. But to the fact that it did function so actively is probably due the specific excellence, as his penetration is the specific quality, of his criticism, namely, that like much of his fiction it is ratiocinative and neither canonical as so much past, nor impressionist, as so much current criticism is. He was dogmatic

enough, and absurdly autocratic, but his dogmas were not conventions. On the other hand, he had ideas about the matter in hand and did not recount the adventures of his soul among masterpieces"though it is to be said that acknowledged masterpieces did not greatly interest his soul, to which they doubtless afforded too little polemic material. His ideas were often mere notions. With his theoretic bent they could hardly be otherwise. But in form at least they were conspicuously rationalized. Reasons with him were as plenty as blackberries. He delighted, in French phrase, to remuer them-fussily, perhaps, rather than profoundly, and largely, no doubt, by way of what he himself calls "kicking up a bobbery," but energetically and unceasingly. And though whistling as one goes even from excess instead of want of thought is still only whistling, nevertheless the phenomena of so much mental activity occupied with something quite other than Transcendentalism, exalting beauty to the point of declaring its incompatibility with truth, must have been interesting in his day. In fact, it still has a certain piquancy. But his reasons were not the fruit of inquiry. They were "immediately beheld" justifications of his preferences, and his mental furniture was not rich enough for the production of any a priori reflections of range and moment. He never speculated as Balzac, in similar case, observing: "There must be a cause for this singularity." He was only too pleased to rest in the singularity, to establish and flaunt it. He was much impressed by the saying he cites more than once from "Lord Verulam": "There is no exquisite beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportion," but he does not press the matter farther and is too content to get authority for "strangeness"-which was precisely his affair-to appreciate that its service as an accent does not involve its value as an element even, to say nothing of his own practice of enforcing its predominance. The portion of his reasoning that-naturally-has most interest is that concerned with linguistic technic. He would have made a stimulating professor of prosody, in spite of his "crotchets," as Mr. Stedman calls them, and his extravagance is in this field altogether more suggestive than in any other.

VII

He had, in short, a fine mind which he neither disciplined, nor stored, nor developed; the unusual activity of which was stimulated and guided by intellectual curiosity; of which invention and logic were more marked traits than imagination and poetic feeling; and of which he made effective but unscrupulous usage to no particular purpose. There is nothing very sinister in Poe, except the desire to produce sinister effects. And since these, as I have said, are apt to fail through the obviousness of their motive and the crudity of their means, they leave a merely disagreeable and not a sinister, a morbid and perverse, not at all a satanic, impression of the genius they express, though it is undeniable that a good many of the tales recall Emerson's description of Mephistopheles: "pure intellect applied-as always there is a tendency to the service of the senses."

His legend has grown curiously since his death. The reasons for it are of course largely romantic, personal rather than literary. He is distinctly so much the most, as to be almost the only, romantic figure of our literature; and his romantic interest has greatly influenced the critical estimate of his work. In the first place it has led to the production of an unusual amount of criticism of this. And this criticism has been increasingly favorable. His contemporaries took a much less extravagant view of it. For them there was less mystery about Poe himself, and they entertained none of the illusions that time, instead of destroying as usual, in Poe's case seems to have engendered. Then, too, the appreciation of literary art has greatly increased with us to an excess, at present, I think, which fairly matches our earlier provincialism. Moreover, the spirit of literary generosity, particularly abounding in America, toward our own authors-our own sommites in all fields-touched by the hard fate and possible injustice which Poe endured and from which his personal reputation suffered in the eyes of his contemporaries and the succeeding generation, has tended to exalt his literary reputation with no doubt the instinct that its exaltation may serve to excuse or at least obscure his infirmities.

His reputation among us has notoriously been greatly increased by foreign recogni

tion of his writings. If, say his admirers, we ourselves esteem him because he is an American writer, this cannot be true of his foreign estimation; quite the contrary. This is certainly plausible. But foreign recognition sets such traps for our naïveté that it is prudent to be a little on our guard in the presence of it. The theory laid down by Matthew Arnold that the foreign estimate previsaged posterity's is open to some question-aside from the fact that posterity itself may make mistakes; Aldrich, for example, acutely argued from Browning's obscurity the probable injustice of posterity, preoccupied with obscurities of its own, to his incontestable merits. But foreign recognition in the nature of the case rewards to a disproportionate extent the merits that especially appeal to foreigners. If as Arnold held, Sainte-Beuve could regard Lamartine as important to the French without implying a positive in this relative importance, it is equally true that an exotic may make an appeal out of all proportion to its intrinsic value and interest. In any event we ought to distinguish between foreign recognition of those of our writers who are classifiable with foreign ones, and this recognition when it rewards with its irresponsible applause the exceptional and extravagant which appeals to its interest in the novel and the foreign per se. As a matter of fact, foreign recognition has been most generous with regard to many of our to us least indispensable writers. To put the matter crudely, the appreciative foreigner has admirable writers of his own, what he most appreciates in our literature is the queer, the odd, the qualities from whose associated defects he feels an entire detachment. Foreign recognition therefore in the case of Poe's extravaganzas and caprices is not necessarily an imprimatur of the same authority as it is in such instances as those of Cooper and Longfellow, for example. It attests not the merit but the extraordinariness of his writings, and a little, no doubt, the extraordinariness of their being produced in America. Gautier's reference to him, besides classing him with Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, is chiefly depreciation of his environment. The selection of the tales was in fact entitled, published and celebrated on the Continent as "Tales Extraordinary." And there their sponsors were not, as in the case of Cooper,

Balzac and Sainte-Beuve, the foremost of Continental authorities at the time, one may say, but the genial and good-natured Gautier who was preaching the gospel of romanticism à outrance, and Baudelaire as to whose authority Mr. Swinburne's praise and the current rediscovery of him by the dilettanti, mainly of Mr. Swinburne's speech, is disconcertingly at variance with his treatment by the austere Scherer, our own catholic Henry James, and the trenchant but impartial Faguet, perhaps the first of living French critics, in whose admirable "Literary History of France," his name does not appear. It is also worth bearing in mind—since prudence in such a matter is, as I say, commendable-that Baudelaire, whom Mr. James cruelly calls Poe's inferior both as a charlatan and as a genius, had nevertheless an even greater purely linguistic genius than Poe's, and that the beauty of his translation, in itself celebrated, has been an appreciable element in Poe's Continental vogue.

The cult of Poe is not in the interests of literature, since as literature his writings are essentially valueless. The interests of literature occasionally call for restraint in the indulgence of Mr. Swinburne's "generous pleasure of praising" not for the purpose quite as frequent with Mr. Swinburne of alternating with it the delights of censure and reprehension, but in order to maintain unobscured and unimpaired the standards of literature itself. Literature has a stronger claim than any of its practitioners, and generously or ungenerously to exalt these at its expense is to belittle and betray it. Hardly any cause is nobler and treason to few so flagrant or since the pleasure of praising is, like most prodigalities perhaps, a generous one-so frequent. But there is a particular irrationality in American over-praise of Poe. It is this: unlike foreign literatures and English literature as a whole, American literature as it is, perhaps fatuously but

nevertheless inevitably, not to say conveniently, called-has no background. Its figures do not form part of a pageant relieved against a rich and varied scenic setting, but stand in silhouette before the black "drop" that isolates rather than supports them and focuses attention on their individualities from the stately lyceum lecturer like Emerson to the genial "songand-dance artist," in all strictness too numerous to mention. Lacking-within our own exclusively American ranks, I repeatancestors and traditions, we are without the restrictive influences of a stream of tendency," an orderly evolution, without that subconscious education which saves conscious intelligence so much unintelligent performance. Our protestant and innovating temperaments have really nothing to protest against, nothing to break away from, no routine to vivify. More than that, we have, comparatively speaking, nothing to maintain, nothing to keep in mind, no standards in a word. Such a romanticist as Gautier, with the whole heritage of the noble seventeenth and the enlightened eighteenth century French literature in his literary blood, could safely practise and preach the literary freedom which with us means license-and consequent insignificance. No romantic artist can do more than "pad round" the skeleton he must have derived from his predecessors— at least in our day, the human imagination on which he leans having been so long at work. Our realists are in better casenature being inexhaustible. Hence our disposition to magnify our extravagant and capricious writers-such as Poe and Whitman-is destructive of our hold on the standards which it is of the last importance for us consciously to keep in mind, since so only can we have them in mind at all. Only an older society than ours can with impunity cherish and coddle "les jeunes," who with us are merely out of the ranks, however bravely we may imagine them at the head of the procession.

ID you ever go automobiling over a mountain road with a box of dynamite for company?" asked Willis. "Well, that's how I used to feel, the first few months Winford was superintendent at the Little Maggie. We'd both started in up there just after Winford and my sister Bess came back to California from their wedding journey to Tahiti, he as manager of the mine and I as a general roustabout-he put me at assaying first, and then switched me over to mine surveying.

"Trouble began to brew the day Winford took command. You know he always was a human dynamo. He'd put his own shoulder to an ore-car if he met it stuck on a grade, and he always expected the next man to take hold and lift, whether it was his job or not. The miners didn't relish the change from the superintendent my father'd had there before-an old-time pal of dad's, an easy-going, old-fashioned 'practical miner.' When a premature blast had gone off one day and he'd got his, he'd left everything slipshod and run down, and at take-it-easy tradition round the camp-but nil nisi bonum-!

"My brother-in-law hit that camp like a wild tornado. He told a man what he wanted done, and then he expected him to do it and make no bones about it. Well, he got results. His improvements were a marvel. He hooked up an extra stamp between every set, and he used the exhaust steam on his slimes, and in four months, without extra cost of operation, he'd increased the output of the mill over twenty per cent. Of course my father was tickled to death. But there was trouble brewing just the same. Every body was knocking, and saying Winford might have been all right down in South Africa, where he'd been bossing Chinamen and niggers, hired under the contract labor system, but that you couldn't expect white men to stand for him, here in God's own country.

VOL. XLV-10

"I could smell discontent wherever I went. Nosing around down under ground, I'd come on a gang of men drilling extra hard but not sweating, and a smell of tobacco smoke in the air, and I'd know they'd been loafing and cussing Winford on company time. You bet the gangs working on contract, at so much a foot, were always hot and sweaty.

"Then the complaining began to crystallize. My great place to get wise to things was old Bong's cabin. Nights I used to go down there in the Chinese camp and play stud-poker with a lot of Chinks and Dagoes. Old Bong himself never said anything. He was a wily old guy. He'd been a miner in our camp thirty years before, but he'd made money on contract work, and set up in business for himself, and now he dealt in Chinese groceries and opium and dried herbs, and loaned money to the Chinks and acted as their banker and shipped their bones back to China for an un-Christian burial. I'll bet Bong was worth several hundred thousand dollars-anyway, he had a lot of money salted down in real estate in San Francisco, and he'd sent back to China and got the peachiest Chinese wife you ever laid eyes on. Old Bong never would talk about mine affairs, and neither would any of the other Chinamen, at least not in English-there's no telling what they were jabbering about in Cantonese-but when the white miners had lost enough money to Bong and taken enough of his Chinese gin aboard, they'd loosen up and tell their troubles.

"For one thing, they wanted the Chinese cleaned out of the camp. For another, they were mad because Winford wouldn't let 'em eat more than three meals a day at the mine boarding-house, on the eighteen-dollar monthly rate. You see, some of the night shift used to get up at noon, just to eat an extra meal, and then go back to the bunk-house for another snooze before their six P.M. breakfast. That figured up more extra expense to the company per annum

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