III
THE PROSE WRITER
Poe’s genius was essentially journalistic. In his prose writing he aimed at an immediate effect, and he knew exactly how to produce it. The journalist does not in general write with a view to the influence his paragraph will produce week after next. The paper will have disappeared week after next, if not day after to-morrow. Though his theme be the eternal verities, the journalist must write as if he had but the one chance to speak on that subject. He will therefore be direct, positive, clear, seeking to persuade, convince, irritate, amuse.
The most obvious characteristics of Poe’s style are found in his clarity, his vividness, his precision, in the dense shadows and the high lights, in the hundred unnamed but distinctly felt marks of the journalistic style. Whatever he proposes to do, that he does. There is no fumbling. Even his mysteries are as certain as the stage effects in a spectacular drama; they seem to come at the turning of an electric switch or the inserting of a blue glass before the lime light. In reality the process is much more complicated. Other magicians have essayed to produce like effects by turning the same switch, with disastrous result.
Poe was a diligent seeker after literary finish. He was painstaking, and would polish and retouch a paragraph when to the eye of a good judge there was nothing left to do by way of improvement. ‘He seemed never to regard a story as finished.’[26]
He was over emphatic at times, and like De Quincey, many of whose irritating mannerisms he had caught, made a childish use of italics. But he had no need of these adventitious supports. It was enough for him to state a thing in his inimitable manner. While his vocabulary was for the most part simple, he was not without his verbal affectations. He loved words surcharged with poetic suggestion. A lamp never hangs from the ceiling, it ‘depends.’ One of his favorite words is ‘domain.’ The black ‘tarn’ which mirrors the house of Usher he could have called by no other term. ‘Lake,’ or ‘pond,’ or ‘pool’ would not have done. The word must be remote, suggestive, mysterious.
His style often glows with prismatic colors, but the colors seem to be refracted from ice. There is no warmth, no sweetness, no lovable and human quality. All the pronounced characteristics of Poe’s style are intensely and coldly intellectual. It is easier to admire his use of language than to like it.
IV
TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE
By virtue of his journalistic gift, Poe resembled the author of Robinson Crusoe. He could not, like Defoe, have become general literary purveyor to the people, but he was quite ready to profit by what was uppermost in the public mind. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is an illustration, as it is also a good example of Poe’s art in its most mundane form. It recounts the adventures of a runaway lad at sea. Mutiny, drunkenness, brawling, murder, shipwreck, cannibalism, madness, are the chief ingredients of the book. It is minute, circumstantial, prolix, matter of fact. The air of verisimilitude is increased by an alternation of episodes of thrilling interest with tedious accounts of how a cargo should be stowed, and the object and method of bringing a ship to. Only at rare intervals does Poe’s peculiar genius flash out.
As the longest of his writings the Narrative has a peculiar value. By it we are able to get some notion of his power for ‘sustained effort,’ to use a phrase that always irritated him. That power was certainly not great; perhaps it was never fairly tested. The Journal of Julius Rodman is a second attempt at the same kind of fiction. Poe was less happy in descriptions of the prairie than of the sea; the interest of the Journal is feeble.
In these fictions the author holds fast to tangible things. Pym and Rodman might have had the adventures they recount. In another group of stories Poe leavens fact with imagination. Such are ‘The Balloon Hoax,’ ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,’ ‘A Descent into the Maelström,’ and the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Real or alleged science is compounded with the elements of wonder and mystery. And with these elements comes an increase of power.