The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (82 page)

But we feel angry with ourselves for the jesting tone of our observations upon this topic. The prevalence of the spirit of puffery is a subject far less for merriment than for disgust. Its truckling, yet dogmatical character—its bold, unsustained, yet self-sufficient and wholesale laudation—is becoming, more and more, an insult to the common sense of the community. Trivial as it essentially is, it has yet been made the instrument of the grossest abuse in the elevation of imbecility, to the manifest injury, to the utter ruin, of true merit. Is there any man of good feeling and of ordinary understanding—is there one single individual among all our readers—who does not feel a thrill of bitter indignation, apart from any sentiment of mirth, as he calls to mind instance after instance of the purest, of the most unadulterated quackery in letters, which has risen to a high post in the apparent popular estimation, and which still maintains it, by the sole means of a blustering arrogance, or of a busy wriggling conceit, or of the most barefaced plagiarism, or even through the simple immensity of its assumptions—assumptions not only unopposed by the press at large, but absolutely supported in proportion to the vociferous clamor with which they are made—in exact accordance with their utter baselessness and untenability? We should have no trouble in pointing out, today, some twenty or thirty so-called literary personages, who, if not idiots, as we half think them, or if not hardened to all sense of shame by a long course of disingenuousness, will now blush, in the perusal of these words, through consciousness of the shadowy nature of that purchased pedestal upon which they stand—will now tremble in thinking of the feebleness of the breath which will be adequate to the blowing it from beneath their feet. With the help of a hearty good will, even
we
may yet tumble them down.

So firm, through a long endurance, has been the hold taken upon the popular mind (at least so far as we may consider the popular mind reflected in ephemeral letters) by the laudatory system which we have deprecated, that what is, in its own essence, a vice, has become endowed with the appearance, and met with the reception of a virtue. Antiquity, as usual, has lent a certain degree of speciousness even to the absurd. So continuously have we puffed, that we have at length come to think puffing the duty, and plain speaking the dereliction. What we began in gross error, we persist in through habit. Having adopted, in the earlier days of our literature, the untenable idea that this literature, as a whole, could be advanced by an indiscriminate approbation bestowed on its every effort—having adopted this idea, we say, without attention to the obvious fact that praise of all was bitter although negative censure to the few alone deserving, and that the only result of the system, in the fostering way, would be the fostering of folly—we now continue our vile practices through the supineness of custom, even while, in our national self-conceit, we repudiate that necessity for patronage and protection in which originated our conduct. In a word, the press throughout the country has not been ashamed to make head against the very few bold attempts at independence which have, from time to time, been made in the face of the reigning order of things. And if, in one, or perhaps two, insulated cases, the spirit of severe truth, sustained by an unconquerable will, was not to be so put down, then, forthwith, were private chicaneries set in motion; then was had resort, on the part of those who considered themselves injured by the severity of criticism, (and who were so, if the just contempt of every ingenuous man is injury,) resort to arts of the most virulent indignity, to untraceable slanders, to ruthless assassinations in the dark. We say these things were done, while the press in general looked on, and, with a full understanding of the wrong perpetrated, spoke not against the wrong. The idea had absolutely gone abroad—had grown up little by little into toleration—that attacks however just, upon a literary reputation however obtained, however untenable, were well retaliated by the basest and most unfounded traduction of personal fame. But is this an age—is this a day—in which it can be necessary even to advert to such considerations as that the book of the author is the property of the public, and that the issue of the book is the throwing down of the gauntlet to the reviewer—to the reviewer whose duty is the plainest; the duty not even of approbation, or of censure, or of silence, at his own will, but at the sway of those sentiments and of those opinions which are derived from the author himself, through the medium of his written and published words? True criticism is the reflection of the thing criticised upon the spirit of the critic.

—
Graham’s Magazine
, August 1841

OBSERVATIONS

As a magazinist Poe composed notes, squibs, short essays, and editorial comments on a wide range of topics. These pieces served several purposes, one of which (admittedly) was to fill empty column space. But these “brevities” also enabled Poe to flaunt his learning, to deliver pungent insights, to convey literary gossip, to indulge in philosophical speculation, and to play the cultural pundit. From the beginning of his tenure at the
Southern Literary Messenger
, he contributed scraps of filler, culled mainly from the classics, and in one issue supplied nine pages of scholarly tidbits that he called “Pinakidia.” Poe’s best known series of general observations, “Marginalia,” made its 1844 debut in the
Democratic Review
, and over the next five years, installments also appeared in
Godey’s
,
Graham’s
, and the
Southern Literary Messenger
. As editor of the weekly
Broadway Journal
in 1845, Poe likewise composed brief miscellaneous comments, mostly concerned with contemporary literary culture.

From these stray writings, one gains both a better appreciation of Poe’s intellectual range and a clearer sense of his concerns as an American man of letters. The selections included in the section cohere around several organizing ideas—art, imagination, reason, genius, insight, spiritual revelation—and reflect his preoccupations mostly during the 1840s, a period of profound uncertainty when he was increasingly drawn toward a compensatory vision of cosmic unity. Inevitably, his comments also betray the inconsistency of his thinking. Poe defines art as “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul,” and he emphasizes the role of that “veil,” which restricts conventional sight that always sees “too much” by focusing on material surfaces. Yet elsewhere he hails the “clear-sightedness” of the poet, which enables him to see injustice “where the unpoetical see no injustice whatsoever.” Poe insists in these jottings that the “natural” state of humankind is not “the savage” but rather the rational; implicitly countering Rousseau, he affirms a notion of “improvement” and cultural progress that he elsewhere rejected.

Much like Emerson, Poe describes the crucial process by which the soul, in moments of heightened awareness, transcends its human particularity to apprehend its relationship to the universe. The imagination likewise offers occasional glimpses of “things supernal and eternal.” The first installment of “Marginalia” includes a meditation on the “
mutuality
of adaptation” inherent in the created universe and reflective of divine perfection. In a revealing commentary from 1846 he describes his own “psychal impressions” between waking and sleep, visions of “the spirit’s outer world” that he means yet to communicate with through “the power of words.” Though not a fragment of “Marginalia,” the last selection (from the conclusion of
Eureka
), represents the transcendental culmination of this line of speculation, the counterpart, in effect, of his dread.

The subject of genius fascinated Poe, and in one of his “Fifty Suggestions” he distinguishes between genius in the popular sense, which arises from the abnormal development of one “predominant faculty,” and that highest, most irresistible form of genius, which derives from a huge intelligence whose faculties are all in “absolute proportion.” In his “Marginalia” Poe argues that genius may be “far more abundant than is supposed,” but most people lack the moral and analytical powers to
create
works of genius, which depend crucially upon patience, concentration, and energy. Reversing his assumption about the prevalence of genius, though, he muses elsewhere about the strange fate of an individual “accursed” with an intellect far superior to the rest of the human race, whose unconventional opinions would be taken for signs of madness. The greatest test of radical originality would be, he later conjectures, to reveal truthfully the inmost secrets of one’s heart; the generality of humankind would not dare make the attempt for “the paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”

Alongside Poe’s meditations on mind, soul, and imagination, his comments on the situation of the American writer and the project to create a national literature offer a revealing contrast, illuminating the obstacles to authorship and the cultural politics that circumscribed his literary career. One of his most basic convictions, expressed repeatedly in letters, informs his “Marginalia” comment on magazine literature in America: the “
rush
of the [modern] age” was creating a reading public that demanded “the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused.” Poe believed that the “whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward” and anticipated a “geometrical” increase in the cultural importance of monthly journals. Yet in “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” one of his most trenchant critiques, Poe reveals the dark side of this publishing trend. Drawn into magazine work by the absence of an international copyright law, American writers found themselves victimized on two fronts by the pressures of literary capitalism. While book publishers spurned their work, preferring to profit from pirated works by British authors, magazine publishers likewise exploited them by delaying payment for original articles, virtually starving to death “poor devil” contributors.

Poe toiled in the magazine world at a time when, as he wrote in an 1842 “Exordium to Critical Notices,” the “watchword” in American popular culture was “a national literature.” The imperative to infuse literature with nationalism struck Poe as a formula for provincialism, and he mocked the tendency to praise “a stupid book” because its “stupidity” was home-grown. Again in 1845 in an editorial comment Poe questioned the value of “American themes,” yet he also resented American “subserviency” to British critical opinion and closed with a ringing call for a literary “Declaration of Independence” from England, or better still, he added, a “Declaration of War.” About the same time, in a “Marginalia” column for
Godey’s
, he underscored his support for international copyright by pointing out the consequences of the heavy reliance on imported literature: The same system that represses the true literary genius encourages “gentlemen of elegant leisure” to produce insipid colonial imitations of British models, just as the dissemination of foreign books has promoted a “monarchical or aristocratic sentiment” ultimately “fatal to democracy.”

Because Poe worried about the future of the nation and (as we see in his satires) about the fate of democracy itself, his modest proposal of 1846, inspired by Irving, to name the United States “Appalachia”—and thereby resist appropriating the general name of the Western hemisphere—shows an underappreciated aspect of his thinking about the nation. He argued that Appalachia would associate the country with its unique topography and honor those who named it—the original Native inhabitants who had been “at all points unmercifully despoiled, assassinated, and dishonored.” If Poe sometimes conjured in fiction and poetry a fantastic place “out of space—out of time,” he was nevertheless attuned to cultural politics and concerned that rabid nationalism was distorting American literature and criticism.

 

 

 

That the public attention, in America, has, of late days, been more than usually directed to the matter of literary criticism, is plainly apparent. Our periodicals are beginning to acknowledge the importance of the science (shall we so term it?) and to disdain the flippant
opinion
which so long has been made its substitute.

Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the mother country. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency to the
dicta
of Great Britain. At last a revulsion of feeling, with self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into the opposite extreme. In throwing
totally
off that “authority,” whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, “a national literature!”—as if any true literature
could be
“national”—as if the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary
histrio
. We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest
partizans
in letters. Our papers spoke of “tariffs” and “protection.” Our Magazines had habitual passages about that “truly native novelist, Mr. Cooper,” or that “staunch American genius, Mr. Paulding.” Unmindful of the spirit of the axioms that “a prophet has no honor in his own land” and that “a hero is never a hero to his
valet-de-chambre
”—axioms founded in reason and in truth—our reviews urged the propriety—our booksellers the necessity, of strictly “American” themes. A foreign subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning nativity in the States; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of our own growth, and discussed our own affairs.

It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it
is
subsiding. Our views of literature in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use—to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism—to regard it more as an art based immoveably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-dictation of the bookseller
-coteries
. If our editors are not as yet
all
independent of the will of a publisher, a majority of them scruple, at least,
to confess
a subservience, and enter into no positive combinations against the minority who despise and discard it. And this is a
very
great improvement of exceedingly late date.