BOOKS.
EDGAR ALLAN POE.*
TH.Z other day we had occasion to notice an admirable new edition of Emerson, a fitting tribute to a writer whom America has long held in special honour. To-day it is the turn of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Tames A. Harrison, Professor in the University of Virginia. "The Virginia Edition," 17 vols. Hew York; Thomas Y. Crowell and Co. [$12.50 per set.]
that strange genius whom till late his countrymen regarded with a rather shamefaced pride. This complete and scholarly edition of his works is somewhat in the nature of a building of the prophet's tomb which has long lain waste and unre- garded. There could be no harsher contrast than between the careers of the two men. One came early to recognition, and lived his simple, blameless, prosperous life amid the plaudits of the world. The other died young after a career of bitter drudgery, and left little behind him but a legacy of hate. In him genius burned with no "hard, gem-like flame," but with a murky intensity which scan- dalised his contemporaries. In the orderly bourgeois world of young America he moved like a panther among polar. bears. No nation—least of all a young, self-satisfied nation— likes to be told that it is "one vast perambulating humbug," and he spoke his opinions equally plainly of his colleagues in literature. The natural result followed. Every species of literary vulture battened on his reputation, the scandals of his life were magnified, and his genius was hidden by a cloud of vulgar abuse. No man was less fortunate in his epoch and his country. He found an America, middle-class, prosaic, still half Puritan and indomitably respectable, and he ran his head against the stone walls which hemmed him in. He wrote his great stories for starvation wages, since the taste which could value them had largely to be created. Had he lived to-day, we can well imagine that a more cosmopolitan America would have made him a hero almost beyond his deserts. Had he fared less hardly at the world's hands, there might have been no gall in his pen and no dark places in his life. His posthumous reward has been great, for to no other American writer has it been given to exercise so profound an influence at once on English and French literature. For ourselves, we should rank him, in the hierarchy of American prose, below Hawthorne, who seems to us to have combined a profounder insight with an equal sense of form and an equal imaginative force ; but certainly, save for Hawthorne, he has no rival.
The first volume of the new edition is devoted to a biography of the poet by Professor Harrison. In a style of Oriental luxuriance, but with commendable industry and fairness, he in- vestigates every detail of Poe's career. It is part of the irony of his fate that Boston, the city which he hated like the plague, should have had the honour of giving him birth. He came of good stock, originally from Ulster; but his parents were on the stage, and lived a roving, unhappy, impecunious life, both dying shortly after he was born. He was adopted by an elderly Scotsman called Allan, a tradesman in Richmond, Virginia ; and till his adopted father's second marriage regarded himself, and was regarded by others, as his heir. He spent some years at school in England, where he imbibed the romance of an older country, and then went at an early age to the University of Virginia. He did not greatly distin- guish himself there in scholarship, but became noted as a bon, vivant and an athlete. He next went to the famous West Point Academy, and afterwards, Allan having died without leaving him anything, turned to journalism as a profession. For the rest of his days he was tied to the drudgery of the pen, and wrote for his bread tales, poems, reviews, essays, any kind of work, much of it strangely bad, but some of an excellence which no contemporary could claim. He made many enemies, and his wild neurotic nature kept him always in a state of white-heat, a fury either of affection or dislike. He took to drink and drugs, though he was never an ordinary drunkard, seeking a stimulant or a narcotic to relieve the misery of his daily life. His end was as tragic and strange as his life. Passing through Baltimore, he seems to have been drinking in a tavern, where he was drugged by some electioneering roughs and carried round in their custody to the different voting-booths. He never recovered from the treatment, and a few days later died in hospital.
To most people he is best known as a poet, and the poems which have the widest vogue are unfortunately his worst pro- ductions. "The Raven" was, in his own words, to be composed of "equal proportions of Beauty and Quaintness intermingled with Melancholy." The result was a parody of his peculiar qualities, and the parody, as in the similar case of "The Bells," has been accepted for the original. That sinister fowl has stood between him and the highest kind. of poetic fame. "The vagueness of exaltation," he wrote, "aroused by a sweet air (which should be strictly indefinite and- never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at in poetry." It is a narrow definition, but in hissmall body of verse he repeatedly reaches the ideal. "To
Helen," "The City in the Sea," "The Haunted Palace," "To One in Paradise," "For Annie," "Annabel Lee," and even beautiful nonsense like " lTlalume," have all the strange haunting sweetness of music. On his own definition Poe is a
master-singer, and on any definition he is a true lyric poet. But his real medium was prose, for, apart from gifts of style and
melody, he had in the highest degree the constructive imagination which can reproduce a realm of fancy with the minute realism of everyday life. He shows all around us the shadowy domain of the back-world, and behind our smug complacency the shrieking horror of the unknown. There is no humour in him, none of that wise detachment which makes Wandering Willie's Tale immortal, for every nerve, as he writes, quivers at the terrors he is conjuring. To this imaginative intensity he
added a style of singular flexibility and grace. He has, to beoure, appalling lapses into the banal, but at his best he has a store of apt and jewelled words in which to clothe his reoondite thoughts. It is this combination which endeared him to Thecphile Gautier and his school, and gave him Baudelaire and Mallarme as his translators. But style and imagination, if left alone, might have landed him in an un- profitable mysticism. What gives him his unique power is the mathemathical accuracy of his mind. All his life he had a passion for cryptographs, and maintained that human ingenuity could create no cypher which human ingenuity could not un- ravel. His mind worked on data with the most logical precision, and he once startled Dickens by predicting the whole plot of Barnaby Itudge from the material furnished in the earlier chapters. Hence in all his tales there is a clear sequence of cause and effect which gives them an imaginative coherence and verisimilitude. Without this gift his fancy would have lost itself in vague flights and barren splendours. The conjunction of such very different talents gives him a right to a high place among the masters of the short story, in his own genre perhaps to the highest place, for we know no French irnitator who can produce the haunting sense of fate which we get from "The Fall of the House of Usher," or the devilish herror of "The Cask of Amontillado." How admirable, too, are his mystifi.cations, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" or "The Gold Bug." Sometimes, as in "Berenice," his "mortuary turn of mind" carries him too far for serious art; but he makes amends in tales like "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," where his imagination works soberly and convincingly among realities.
In an excellent essay prefixed to one of the volumes of this edition Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie discusses Poe's place in American literature, and finds in his complete aloofness from vulgar ideals, his exquisite craftsmanship, and his devotion to an austere art for its own sake the example which was especially needed by his generation. He sought above all things distinction, and to a nation which was apt to content itself with the gods of the market-place he preached in his strange way a wholesome lesson. "The final justification of a democracy lies in its ability to clear the way for superiority." The democracy which suffered under his lash is at last beginning to realise the superiority of its critic. So far he is the one great surprise of American letters. A shrewd observer might, after the Revolution, have predicted Long- fellow and Emerson and Holmes and Hawthorne, but it would have passed the wit of man to foretell Poe.
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