The Critical Game

by John Albert Macy

But Professor Smith does not quite escape American moralism in his effort to accentuate Poe's virtues. He makes too much of Poe's interest in religion, which was surely nothing but a purely intellectual and critical interest, and his recurrent emphasis on Poe's Americanism is too tiresomely patriotic even for a professor in the United States Naval Academy. Poe was keen for the best interests of American literature, zealous in searching out any note of promise in a new poet and in pointing to the weak spots in men of acknowledged talent. He sometimes exhibits a kind of local Southern patriotism which does not much interest us now. But on the whole, he was detached from the issues of politics, an unlocalized, almost disembodied genius whose apparition in the United States of America is still an endless wonder to European critics.

One possible influence of Poe's environment on his art Professor Smith is, so far as I know, the first to point out; and it is a very valuable suggestion, even if it can not be thoroughly proved. In Virginia, more than in any other American State, the English and Scots ballads survive by oral tradition. It is possible that as a child Poe heard these ballads recited or sung, and from them derived his sense of refrain and repetition. To the influence of the ballad Professor Smith adds the possible influence of plantation melodies as "subsidiary sources of Poe's lyrical technique." He is certainly right in thinking that Poe's originality consists not in the contribution of a new form to poetry but in his individual development of forms already established. His charm resides in the color of his words rather than in the shape of his stanzas. But of course the two things are inseparable and whoever tries to analyse them is hopelessly baffled. Poe's own attempt to explain how the trick is done is far from explaining it, and if he could not expound in prose the secret of poetry, nobody can.

For Poe was first and always a critic, inquisitive of methods, and making his effects with cool calculation. Even if his tales of horror no longer give us the creeps, they will always give to any one who cares about writing, that shiver of pleasure which comes when we watch a dexterous craftsman at work. Professor Smith calls Poe the "father of the short story," but he came too late to be credited with such paternity. After all, Boccaccio and whoever made "The Arabian Nights" lived long before Poe and in Poe's stories are evident traces of old tales of magic and mystery. What Poe did was to rationalize the short story so highly, in some cases, as to sacrifice the illusion of spontaneity which is one of the merits of a tale that seems to tell itself.

With the purpose of suggesting the range of Poe's intellectual interest and of classifying some of his miscellaneous work that does not fall into certain obvious groups, Professor Smith has adopted the term "frontiersman." The image evoked by that word somehow does not fit Poe. He was, in a sense, an explorer of ideas, and he had a genuine gift for philosophy which he did not live to develop. We could spare many of his short stories rather than lose "Eureka." If it is not profound philosophy and if it does not solve the riddle of the universe, it is profound in its beauty, a prose poem. Poe's science is obsolete, no doubt, and even in the science of his day he was little more than an amateur. But the mark of a great intellect is on every page. An amazing mind! He succeeded in all forms of literary art which he tried. If the poet or the critic or the short-story writer should be obliterated, there would still remain a man of genius.

Critics and biographers of Poe, like Poe himself, cannot let his drink alone. They deny or blame or pity without understanding. The question of Poe and alcohol seems to have been finally answered by a California physician, John W. Robertson, in a book which I have not seen but which I know only through reviewers' accounts of it. This physician finds from the evidence that Poe was a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania is not drunkenness nor riotous dissipation; it is a disease. Poe, like other victims of the disease, had to have periodic bouts with the demon, got fearfully sick, and when he recovered stayed cold sober until his next attack. This accounts for Poe's written anathemas against alcohol, which puzzled Remy de Gourmont. De Gourmont says: "Il ne pouvait plus travailler que dans l'hallucination de l'ivresse." Quite the contrary is the case. Poe could not do a stroke of work under the inspiration of whiskey; he was not one of those mad geniuses who conceive masterpieces in a tavern or with a bottle beside the ink-pot. That is proved, or indicated, by his critical clarity, the almost passionless rationality of his tales and poems, and even by the physical perfection of his manuscripts. He worked between his joyless debauches, and he worked hard. His melancholy and love of terror, his preoccupation with defects of will and remorse, whatever "morbidity" there is in his writings, may have some relation to his disease. But as an artist he achieved his dark effects by sheer force of intellect in hours of clear-eyed sobriety. Only in a literary sense is he the author of "MS. Found in a Bottle."

BIOGRAPHIES OF WHITMAN

The one fault that can be found with Traubel's "With Walt Whitman in Camden" is that there is too much of it. But that is a fault easily remedied without blotting a line of the record. Books that contain too little may cheat us of desired knowledge, whereas books that contain too much can do no harm; every reader has the privilege of not reading at all or of dipping into a book here and there. Traubel's method is admirable; it is that of a documentary historian. He set down Whitman's talk and such impressions and facts as the biographer recorded at the moment, and he reproduced the letters in the order in which Whitman gave them to him. He did not presume to select from Whitman's conversation what now seems most interesting or most to Whitman's credit, but he gave you all that he had for you to enjoy or ignore and for other biographers and historians to make use of as they will.

Traubel made no concessions to the fact that readers have to catch trains and read other books, and he ignored, perhaps to his personal disadvantage, certain exigencies of publication, such as the publisher's obvious need to interest as many people as possible with the least possible expenditure. Traubel's method is simple from an artistic point of view, requiring nothing but accuracy, courage and industry. Yet the method is a great strain on all concerned. Traubel could stand it. Evidently the publishers thought they could stand it. The reader can stand it, because, as I have said, he can take as much or as little as suits him. The real question is whether Whitman can stand it. And the amazing man can stand it. Consider that in the years when Traubel knew him Whitman was an invalid, broken by his services as nurse and brother of soldiers during the war. He was a garrulous old man talking to men who loved him and who, though no servile worshippers of him or anyone else, encouraged him to reminiscence and the utterance of offhand opinion. Now that is a severe test. Not many old men, even men of great achievement in action or art, could last for more than a small volume. Whitman is worth these hundreds and hundreds of pages. For he was a great talker, full of experience and endowed with the gift of speech. Almost every day, according to Traubel's record, he hit off an interesting idea and turned it in a Whitmanese way. He repeats himself. He makes remarks that do not amount to much. But he is never a bore. Line by line he and Traubel, egotists both, but honest, thoughtful, artfully inartistic, have drawn a portrait, the like of which is not to be found. For once a literary man is as big as his literary work. Traubel was a very happy biographer, for he had a sort of monopoly of a great subject, and he had not the slightest temptation to omit or defend.

An admirer has called Traubel's work "the most truthful biography in the language." To use the informal mode of Walt Whitman and of his biographer, that ain't exactly so. It ain't the most truthful biography; it's simply a true biography.