Poe, who was never backward in giving himself the credit he thought his due, often failed to understand where his own most marvellous achievements lay. In ‘Hans Pfaall’ he claimed originality in the use of scientific data. Had his stories only this to recommend them, they would long since have been forgotten. Nothing so quickly becomes old-fashioned as popular science. The display of knowledge about aerial navigation in ‘Hans Pfaall’ perhaps made a brave show in 1836, but it is childish now. A Hans Pfaall of the Twentieth Century would descend on Rotterdam in a dirigible balloon, and if questioned would be found to entertain enlightened views on storage batteries. Poe talked glibly about sines and cosines and brought noisy charges of astronomical ignorance against his brother writers, but it was not in these things that his genius displayed itself, it was rather in the way this wonder-worker makes one aware of the illimitable stretches of space, the appalling vastness, the silence, the mystery, terror, and majesty of Nature. He is the clever craftsman in his account of how the Dutch bellows-mender started on his aerial travels. But when in two or three paragraphs Poe conveys a sense of height so terrific that the plain fireside reader, indisposed to balloon ascensions, grasps the arms of his chair and clings to the floor with the toes of his slippers lest he fall—then does he display a power with which popular science has nothing to do.
This is true of ‘A Descent into the Maelström.’ What scientific fact went into the composition of the piece appears to have been taken from the Encyclopædia Britannica, but the valuable part, the sense of life and movement, the crash of the storm, the roar of the waves, the shriek of the vortex, like the cry of lost souls, all this is not to be found in encyclopædias. The story can be read any number of times and its magical power felt afresh each time. But the first reading cannot be described by so tame a phrase as a literary pleasure, it is an experience.
Another masterpiece is the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The din of the storm is not easily got out of one’s ears. With the unnamed hero of the tale we ‘stand aghast at the warring of wind and ocean’ and are chilled by the ‘stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away, into the desolate sky.’
In another group of stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ the gruesome ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter,’ the author fabricates mysteries for the express purpose of unravelling them afterwards. Poe, who seldom attempts the creation of a character, actually created one in the person of his famous detective. Dupin is a living being in a world peopled for the most part with shadows.
Poe professed not to think much of his detective stories. The ‘ratiocinative’ tale is not a high order of literary achievement. Poe shares the honors accruing from the invention of such puzzles with Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau, and the ‘great ‘Boisgobey,’ and they in turn with the most sensational of sensation mongers.
‘The Gold-Bug’ afforded the author a vehicle for giving expression to his delight in cryptography, at the same time he availed himself of the perennial human interest in the prospect of unearthing buried treasure. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was based on a contemporary murder case. It contains a minimum of that in which Poe often revelled, namely physical horror, and a maximum of the ratiocinative element. ‘The Purloined Letter’ is in lighter vein, and illustrates the comedy side of Dupin’s adventures. Chevalier and minister cross swords with admirable grace, but no blood is drawn.
The masterpiece of the group is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ Genuinely original, blood-curdling, the story depends for its real force not on the ingenious unravelling of a frightful mystery, but on the sense of nameless horror which creeps over us as little by little the outré character of the tragedy is disclosed. We realize that in the dread event of being murdered one might have a choice as to how it was done. The predestined victim might even pray to die by the hands of a plain God-fearing assassin and not after the manner of Madame L’Espanaye.
Of the stories classified as tales of conscience, ‘William Wilson,’ ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ‘The Imp of the Perverse,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and ‘The Black Cat,’ the first is not only the best, but is also one of the best of all stories in that genre. The image of bodily corruption is not present and the interest is held by perfectly legitimate means. ‘The Black Cat’ is a fearful and repulsive piece, and at the same time characteristic. Poe hesitated at nothing when it came to working out his theme. He who had such absolute control of the materials of his art too seldom practised reticence in exhibiting the gruesome details of a scene of cruelty.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a representative story, if not absolutely the best illustration of Poe’s genius. The motive of premature burial haunts him here as often elsewhere. But the emphasis of this tragedy of a race is laid where it belongs, in the terror of the thought of approaching madness. Poe wrote many stories which can be described each as the fifth act of a tragedy. It may be doubted whether he surpassed ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’
‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘Morella’ are highly successful experiments in the realm of the morbidly imaginative, and might be grouped under Browning’s discarded title of ‘Madhouse Cells.’ The themes are monstrous, and are only saved from being absurd by the author’s consummate ability to carry the reader with him. Poe could scale a fearful and slippery height, maintaining himself with the slenderest excuse for a foot-hold. A dozen times you would say he must fall, and a dozen times he passes the perilous point with masterly ease. In the hands of a lesser artist than he, how utterly absurd would be a scene like that in ‘Ligeia’ where the opium-eater watches by the bedside of his dead wife.