A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate,—the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity.... I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual in man the mass.—I have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a mere word.... You speak of “an estimate of my life,”—and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for solitude—a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.

An estimate of his own plays and poems can be fairly made only in the light of this thing that he set out to do, a fairness of treatment, by the way, which he often withheld from the objects of his criticism. Not to paraphrase Poe’s minute analysis of “The Raven,” we may select the “Ulalume” of a year or two later as a production which satisfies the formula of “The Philosophy of Composition” and which is richer in meaning and in self-revelation than any other. In length and tone and subject and treatment it is according to rule. In ninety-four lines of increasing tension the ballad of the bereaved lover is told. The effect toward which it moves is the shocked moment of discovery that grief for the lost love is not yet “pleasurable,” but on this anniversary night is still a source of poignant bitterness. It is built around a series of unheeded warnings—as “The Cask of Amontillado” is—which fall with accumulated weight when the lover’s cry explains at last the mistrusts and agonies and scruples of the pacified Psyche. The effect is intensified by use of the whole ominous first stanza in a complex of refrains throughout the rest of the ballad. The employment of onomatopœia, or “sound-sense” words, is more subtle and more effective than in “The Bells” or “The Raven”; and the event occurs in the usual circumscribed space—the cypress-lined alley which is blocked by the door of the tomb.

These, however, are the mere externals of the poem; the amount of discussion to which it has been subjected shows that, as a poem of any depth should, it contains more than meets the eye. It is a bit of life history, for it refers to Poe’s own bereavement, but it is, furthermore, a piece of analysis with a general as well as a personal application. The “I” of the ballad is one half of a divided personality, what, for want of a better term, may be called the masculine element. He is self-confident, blundering, slow to perceive, perfectly brave, in his blindness to any cause for fear. Psyche, the soul, is the complementary, or feminine, element in human nature—intuitive, timid, eager for the reassurance that loquacious male stupidity can afford her. They are the elements incarnate in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the early half of the play, and the story in “Ulalume” is parallel to the story of Macbeth up to the time of the murder. Yet, and here is the defect in Poe, true as the analysis may be, in Poe’s hands it becomes nothing more than that. It is like a stage setting by Gordon Craig or Leon Bakst—very somber, very suggestive, very artistic, but so complete an artifice that it could never be mistaken for anything but an analogy to life. It is, in a word, the product of one whose “life has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for solitude—a scorn of all things present.”

Poe’s briefer lyrics are written to a simpler formula, modified from that for the narratives. The resemblance is mainly to be found in the scrupulous care and nicety of measure, in the adjustment of diction to content, and in the heightened dream tone prevailing in them. As they are not attached to any scenic background, the appeals to the mind’s eye are unencumbered by any obligations to continuity. Poe’s technique in some of the best is quite in the manner of the twentieth-century imagists, and no less effective than in the best of these poets at their best. The earlier of the two poems entitled “To Helen” is quite matchless in its beauty of sound and of suggestion, but it is utterly vulnerable before the kind of searching analysis to which he subjected the verse of the luckless contemporary who stirred his critical disapproval. One has not the slightest objective conception of what “those Nicéan barks” may have been nor why the beauty which attracts a wanderer homeward should be likened to a ship which bears him to his native shore. The two fine lines from Byron in the second stanza reverberate splendidly in their new setting, but again they seem to have small likeness to the beauty of Helen. And the last pair of lovely lines are altogether beyond understanding. Read in the dream mood, however, which is utterly unreasonable but utterly unexacting, “To Helen” is as captivating as the sound of a distant melody.

Poe’s tales are of two very different sorts: those that are in the likeness of his poetry and those that were done in the analytical spirit of his criticism. “Ligeia” is an example of the poet’s work, and, indeed, includes, as some others do, one of his own lyrics, “The Conqueror Worm.” This is cast in the misty mid-region between life and death, with none of the pleasures of the one except as foils to the reduplicated horrors of the other. In all the laws of construction it is one with “The Raven” and “Ulalume,” as it is also in general effect. Like the poems, too, these narratives contain no human interest, unless this is derived from the consciousness that the “I” narrator is made in the image of Poe and hence is partly his spokesman,—a claim on the attention to which the stories, if considered as works of art, have no title. Once again these tales and poems are of the same family in the degree to which they subordinate any kind of event to the dominant mood and in the painstaking use of every accessory that will contribute to a sense of shivery horror.

Perhaps, to indulge in the type of classification that is after the manner of Poe, a connecting group should be mentioned between the two extreme types. This includes the kind of story that substitutes the horrors of crime and its consequences for the horrors of death, giving over any elevation of soul for the thrill derived from the malignance of fear or hatred. They deal with crime as quite distinct from sin, and when they involve conscience at all, introduce the conscience that doth make cowards of us, rather than the voice of guidance or correction. Of this sort are “The Imp of the Perverse”—less a tale than an essaylet with an illustrative anecdote—and “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” In some ways this story of cold-blooded vengeance comes nearer than any other of Poe’s tales to completely representing its author’s artistic designs. In the matter of its contrivance it is cut on the pattern of “The Raven.” One can apply “The Philosophy of Composition” by replacing each allusion to the poem with a parallel from the story. Montresor, the avenger, is an incarnate devil; Fortunato, the victim, is a piece of walking vanity not worth bothering to destroy. The slow murder is conceived during “the supreme madness of the carnival season,” is pursued in a tone of grim mockery, and concluded with ironic laughter and the jingling of the fool’s-cap bells. And finally, to free the tale from any least relation to life, the assassination does “trammel up the consequence, and catch with his surcease, success.”

The stories that show the mind of the critic—and the greatest of them come in his later career—are in different fashions riddle-solutions, the most famous being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Purloined Letter,” pioneers in the field of the detective story. In the elaboration of these Poe combined his gift as a narrator with the powers which appeared equally in deciphering codes, discrediting Maelzel’s chess player, dealing with the complications of “Three Sundays in a Week,” or foreseeing the outcome of “Barnaby Rudge” from the opening chapter. Still, as in the earlier types, they are composed of the things that life is made of, but themselves are uninformed with the breath of life. It has been well said by a recent critic that the detective story is in a way a concession to the moral sense of the reading public, following the paths of the older romance of roguery, but pursuing the wrongdoer to the prison or the gallows instead of sharing in his defiance of the social order. But this concession is one in which Poe had no hand. For him detection is an end in itself; he is like the sportsman who is stirred by the zest of the hunt and shoots to kill, but at the day’s end, with fine disregard, hands over his bag to the gamekeeper. It should be said as a last word in the classification of Poe’s stories that the best work in the threescore and ten can be found in one fourth of that number, that the remainder are in varying degrees overburdened by exposition, and that the least successful, unredeemed by technical excellence and unanimated by any vital meaning, trail off into “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

As a contemporary figure, to summarize, Poe was a vigorous agent in the upbuilding of the American magazine, a stimulator of honest critical judgment, a writer of a few poems and a few tales of the finest but the most attenuated art. At his lowest he is a purveyor of thrills to readers of literary inexperience, people with just a shade more maturity than the habitual matinée-goer; and at the other end of the scale he serves as a stimulant to the decadents who are weary of actual life and real romance, whose minds are furnished like the apartment in “The Assignation,” in the embellishment of which “the evident design had been to dazzle and astound.” At his highest, however, he has exerted an extraordinary influence not only on those who have fallen completely into his ways but on several prose writers of distinction who have bettered their instructions. Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Chesterton, are only the beginning of a list, and in only one language, who have taken up the detective story where Poe laid it down. Wells and Jules Verne have developed the scientific wonder-tales. Bierce, Stevenson, Kipling, Hardy, have written stories of horror and fantasy; and the touch of his art is suggested by many who have absorbed something from it without becoming disciples or imitators of it or refiners upon it.

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