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Page 29
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,' and the lay of the 'Jumblies.'
On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned
Molie're. 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.
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