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.'