POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE
Self-conscious method.
'It is the curse,' says Poe, 'of a certain order of mind that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.' It is all very well to call it a curse; it is the curse that gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds' Discourses, and Stevenson's few essays on the art of writing; the curse that is among the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds' excellence, Stevenson's excellence, and the excellence of Poe himself. It is the curse that is the secret of all real knowledge of technique. The man who is as interested in the way of doing a thing as in the thing when done, is the man who is likely to put a new tool in the hands of his fellow-craftsmen.
Poe's methods were such a delight to him that his works have an uncanny atmosphere about them, as if he had not written them but had been present, passionately observant and critical, while they were being written by somebody else. More than once he used his pen to make a new thing out of a discussion of an old one, and on these occasions he dissects his own motives in so impersonal a manner that it is difficult for the reader to remember that the author examining is in any way connected with the author undergoing examination. The Raven, for example, a profound piece of technique, is scarcely as profound, and certainly not as surprising, as The Philosophy of Composition, in which its construction is minutely analysed, and Poe callously explains, as a matter of scientific rather than personal interest, that the whole poem was built on the refrain 'Nevermore,' and that this particular refrain was chosen on account of the sonority and ease of o and r sounded together. It was inevitable that such a man busying himself with story-telling should bring something new into the art.
WILLIAM GODWIN
William Godwin and Caleb Williams.
Another story-teller, who, like Poe, was a philosopher and deeply interested in technique, had existed before, and from him Poe had that strengthening of his ideas that is given by outside confirmation. He refers often to William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and of several novels, among them one now most undeservedly half forgotten, called Caleb Williams. It is seldom possible to point to any one book as the sign-post of a literary cross-roads, but there can be no doubt that in Caleb Williams we see the beginnings of self-conscious construction in story-telling. Of that book Hazlitt wrote: 'No one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through: no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.' And the author not only had done this, but had known how it was done. It is usual to say that Poe himself was the first to choose an effect and then plan a story to produce it. But Caleb Williams was published in 1794, and in a preface to one of the later editions Godwin gave his methods away. On him also lay that fruitful curse. He wrote: 'I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first.'
Godwin perhaps did not realise how revolutionary was his attitude, and even Hazlitt, delighted as he was by their results, does not seem to have noticed the novelty of his methods. But Poe, finding Godwin's ideas of the very temper of his own, developed them logically as far as they would go, and in two paragraphs that I am going to quote, expressed in a final manner the principles of self-conscious construction.
The architecture of narrative.
The first is taken from an essay on Hawthorne:
'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 worked out, he then invents such incidents—he then contrives such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of the effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed.' ...
The second is more personal, and from The Philosophy of Composition:
'I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.... Keeping originality always in view, I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought out by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combination of event and tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.'
The Masque of the Red Death.
Here, of course, he is exaggerating actual fact to make his meaning more clear; but I am sure that even the exaggeration is deliberate. If he did not literally work in that way he certainly worked in that spirit. A writer of Poe's fertility of imagination would be at least biassed in choosing his effect by consideration of material already in his head. But, the effect once chosen, he left nothing to chance. He would never, like the older story-tellers, allow himself to be carried away by a wave of his own emotion. He stands beside de Maupassant and the conscious artists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. His emotional material is never emptied carelessly in front of the reader. Chosen scraps of it are laid before him, one by one, in a chosen order, producing a more powerful effect than the unrestrained discharge of the whole. The first sentences of one of his stories prepare its readers for the atmosphere demanded by its conclusion. In The Masque of the Red Death, for example, revolting horror is the emotion on which he built. So, from the terrible opening lines, 'The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal and so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution ...' to the end, 'And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel, and died, each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,' we are led on through consciously created disquietude and terror. How menacing is the sentence that immediately follows the prelude: 'But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.' We feel at once that the shadow of death is at his elbow.
The detective stories.
Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in those of his tales in which the same faculties that planned the construction supplied also the motive. The three great detective stories, The Purloined Letter, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Mystery of Marie Roget, are made of reasoning and built on curiosity, the very mainspring of analysis. It is a profitable delight to take any one of these stories, and, working backwards from the end to the beginning, to follow the mind of the architect. Each of the tales states a difficulty and secretes an explanation that is gradually to be reached by the reader, who identifies the processes of his own mind with those of the analytical Dupin. Starting always with the solution, we can watch Poe refusing the slightest irrelevance, and at the same time artfully piling up detail upon detail in exactly that order best calculated to keep the secret, to heighten the curiosity, to disturb the peace of the reader's mind, and to hold him in conjectural suspense until the end.
Poe's mind.
But it is easy, in considering the technique of Poe's stories, his smiling refusal of 'inspiration,' his confident mastery over his material, to let the brilliance of his analytical powers hide from us his intimacy with the beautiful, the richness and vividness of his imagination, and, particularly, the passionate character of his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man whose works were the result of the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds designed by reason. Not all Leonardo's theories and calculations would have sufficed to make a Mona Lisa. And if Poe had been merely a skilled technician, like so many of his imitators, we should have had from him only unbeautiful toys no less valueless than theirs. All Poe's work depends, like all Leonardo's, on his power of retaining the poetry, the energy of his material, after submitting it to his constructive science, and then, when the moulds have been made, of pouring it into them red-hot and fluid, as if in the primal vitality of its conception. In those very detective stories, that seem built by and of the coldest-blooded reason, what is it that makes them great but Poe's absorbing passion for the manner of mind of their leading character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but analysis. He is the embodiment of the logical spirit in mankind, just as Nicolete, in the old French tale, is the embodiment of the loving spirit in womankind. It is for this reason that some have accused Dupin and Nicolete of a lack of individuality. They are not individual, but universal.
If we would understand the matter as well as the manner of his stories, we must think of him as two men, and remember that the same sensibility that served the man of anagrams, and ciphers, and detective puzzles, served also the worshipper of beauty, and made him tremble like a lover at the faintest whisper of her name. Delicately balanced, alike as analyst and æsthete, he was moved profoundly by the smallest circumstance. Just as a glass of wine was sufficient to overturn his reason, so the least wind of suggestion stirred his brain in a deep and surprising manner. Nothing that happened to him touched him only on the surface. Everything dropped to the depths of him, and sometimes returned enriched and recreated. Ideas that others would have passed over became for him and for his readers powerful, haunting and inevitable. Ideas of mesmerism, of hypnotism, and of madness, that have been for so many lesser artists only the materials for foolishness, were pregnant for him with wonderful effects and stories that, once read, can never be forgotten. In William Wilson he is using less flippantly than Stevenson the idea of dual personality. In The Oval Portrait, where a painter transfers the very soul of his lady to his canvas, and, as the portrait seems to breathe alive, turns round to find her dead, he is using the subtle, half-thought things that an earlier writer would scarcely have felt, or, if he had, would have brushed, like cobwebs, secretly aside.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
His failures.
With a mind so sensitive, a coinage so rare, and a technique so thorough, it is curious that he should so frequently have failed. And yet, when we examine his failures they are not difficult to explain. They are due in every case, saving only his attempts to be funny, which are like hangman's jokes, to sudden rents in the veils of his illusions, made by single impossible phrases whose impossibility he seems to have been unable to recognise. I could give a hundred examples, but perhaps none better than the excruciating line in an otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that
'The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside.'
Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious atmosphere he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had to pay for being a citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never safe from the pitfalls of a language that is older than their nation.
His isolation.
In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string, dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always called by their Christian names, and can talk unreservedly with a thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age; but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement, they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of The Raven,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful, small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.
His work.
The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility, and his intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no value whatever, some melancholy and beautiful verse, critical articles of a kind then new in America, a philosophical poem, some tales of the same flavour as the most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and some other stories that can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to them with the reverence and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of priceless wine. It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a delicacy, not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They leave us richer, not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with their help into novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured goblets or fantastic metal-work, and we find, often with surprise, that we have waited for them. That is their vindication, that the test between the valueless and the invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of twisted extravagance that stir us with no more emotion than is given by an accidental or capricious decoration never felt or formed in the depths of a man. But these stories, like those patterns, however grotesque, that have once meant the world to a mind sensible to beauty, have a more than momentary import. Like old melody, like elaborate and beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of poison or any other concentrated power, they are among the significant experiences that are open to humanity.