One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," "numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. "These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is disgraceful—a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of a dropped comma!
The Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe of 1857 are infinitely finer than those of 1856. He begins with: Littérature de décadence! and with a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. Genus irritabile vatum! a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.
Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations (mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in.
And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not these revenants, in the French sense?
There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any chance, falls into the abyss.
Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all are not nés marques pour le mal?
Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "I know," he says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that wore the semblance of a reason."
His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous wrath of Rossetti.
In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his Marginalia that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in "the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate.
There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: "A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written his first line?" This certainly was part of his métier, made of combinations and of calculations.