If it be asked, "What shall one read of Poe's fiction?" the answer must depend largely upon individual taste. "The Gold Bug" is a good story, having the adventurous interest of finding a pirate's hidden gold; at least, that is how most readers regard it, though Poe meant us to be interested not in the gold but in his ingenious cryptogram or secret writing. The allegory of "William Wilson" is perhaps the most original of Poe's works; and for a thriller "The House of Usher" may be recommended as the least repulsive of the tales of horror. To the historian the chief interest of all these tales lies in the influence which they have exerted on a host of short-story writers at home and abroad.
[Illustration: SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER BUILDING]
AN ESTIMATE OF POE. Any summary of such a difficult subject is unsatisfactory and subject to challenge. We shall try here simply to outline Poe's aim and method, leaving the student to supply from his own reading most of the details and all the exceptions.
Poe's chief purpose was not to tell a tale for its own sake or to portray a human character; he aimed to produce an effect or impression in the reader's mind, an impression of unearthly beauty in his poems and of unearthly horror in his prose. Some writers (Hawthorne, for example) go through life as in a dream; but if one were to judge Poe by his work, one might think that he had suffered a long nightmare. Of this familiar experience, his youth, his army training, his meeting with other men, his impressions of nature or humanity, there is hardly a trace in his work; of despair, terror and hallucinations there is a plethora.
[Sidenote: HIS METHOD]
His method was at once haphazard and carefully elaborated,—a paradox, it seems, till we examine his work or read his records thereof. In his poetry words appealed to him, as they appeal to some children, not so much for their meaning as for their sound. Thus the word "nevermore," a gloomy, terrible word, comes into his mind, and he proceeds to brood over it. The shadow of a great loss is in the word, and loss meant to Poe the loss of beauty in the form of a woman; therefore he invents "the lost Lenore" to rime with his "nevermore." Some outward figure of despair is now needed, something that will appeal to the imagination; and for that Poe selects the sable bird that poets have used since Anglo-Saxon times as a symbol of gloom or mystery. Then carefully, line by line, he hammers out "The Raven," a poem which from beginning to end is built around the word "nevermore" with its suggestion of pitiless memories.
Or again, Poe is sitting at the bedside of his dead wife when another word suddenly appeals to him. It is Shakespeare's
Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
And from that word is born "For Annie," with an ending to the first stanza which is an epitome of the poem, and which Longfellow suggested as a fitting epitaph for Poe's tomb:
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last.