AMERICAN CRITICISM CHAPTER I POE §1 WITH his usual critical acumen, Poe saw that a people's literature may be provincial in either of two opposite ways. At the beginning of his essay on Drake's overrated poem "The Culprit Fay,' he wrote an analysis of the state of American criticism which to this day may be read with profit. First, there is the older type of provincialism: a servile respect for European opinion. "That an American book could, by any possibility, be worthy perusal, was an idea by no means extensively prevalent in the land; and if we were induced to read at all the productions of our native writers, it was only after repeated assurances from England that such productions were not altogether contemptible.' This cringing form of provincialism, however, as Poe is careful to point out, is related with an important virtue - a due respect for what is really superior. It would be folly, he says, to place ourselves on a level with the mature nations of Europe, 'the earliest steps of whose children are among the groves of magnificently endowed Academies, and whose innumerable men of leisure, and of consequent learning, drink daily from those august fountains of inspiration which burst around them everywhere from out the tombs of their immortal dead, and from out their hoary and trophied monuments of chivalry and song.' Of this sustaining power of the past, it must be admitted, Poe himself had but a dim understanding.1 The second and opposite form of provincialism, prominent in Poe's day and still too common, is a blindly patriotic sense of our own importance. We may look down, as well as up; may be 'snobbishly arrogant' as well as 'snobbishly mean,' as Thackeray said in 'Punch.' Declaring that 'We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom,' Poe bids his readers not to 'forget, in the puerile inflation of vanity, that the world is the true theatre of the biblical histrio. ... So far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.' Making it his task to wage incessant warfare against these two forms of provincialism, especially the superficially patriotic form, Poe wrote more criticism than any other kind of composition, and became known in his own time chiefly as a literary critic. In place of the idols that he cast down, he set up the ideal of adherence to principles, 'the purest rules of Art,' discovered by philosophical analysis. He did not hesitate to assume the existence of absolute, universal principles, fixed in the nature of literature and in the mind of a rightly thinking man, though he recognized the extreme difficulty of stating them. Words cannot hem in the spiritual nature of poetry, he says, for the intangible necessarily eludes defini 1 'He read books of contemporary fame, especially such English books as were reprinted in Philadelphia, and magazines and newspapers, for which he always showed avidity; he had little familiarity at any time with literature earlier than Byron, and never showed love or devotion to great masters of the past. He had, in the narrowest sense, a contemporaneous mind, the instincts of the journalist, the magazine writer.' (Woodberry, Life, 1, 132.) tion; yet definitions are requisite in human discussion — and Poe never hesitates to define. In 1831, when he had scarce attained manhood, he set forth his poetical creed in the 'Letter to B' prefacing his own poems, and again and again, in the years that followed, he repeated it with remarkable consistency. Seeking to avoid the conventional rules, whether classic or romantic, and at the same time merely personal preferences and antipathies, he aimed at a criticism that should be both impersonal and deductive and therefore valid. Whether an art or a science (he used both terms) he never doubted that criticism is or ought to be 'based immovably in nature,' on 'the laws of man's mind and heart,' upon which the arts themselves are based. Authority thus resides in principles not in persons, in reason not in precedent, in rationale not in rule. The rational critic will give praise to what has been well done; but he will look less at merit than at demerit, less at 'beauties' than at 'defects,' because it is the business of the critic to hold up as the model of excellence, not the good, nor even the best that has been done, but the best that can be - he must 'see the sun, even although its orb be far below the ordinary horizon.' 1 To this rational method and this high standard Poe adhered with a faithfulness amazing in the America of the thirties and forties. While the great majority of our criticasters never 1 Perhaps the best statement of his ideal in criticism is the following passage from his prospectus for The Penn Magazine: 'It shall be a leading object to assert in precept, and to maintain in practice, the rights, while in effect it demonstrates the advantages, of an absolutely independent criticism; criticism self-sustained; guiding itself only by the purest rules of Art; analyzing and urging these rules as it applies them; holding itself aloof from all personal bias; acknowledging no fear save that of outraging the right; yielding no point either to the vanity of the author, or to the assumptions of antique prejudice, or to the involute and anonymous cant of the Quarterlies, or to the arrogance of those organized cliques which, hanging like nightmares upon American literature, manufacture, at the nod of our principal booksellers, a pseudo-publicopinion by wholesale.... It will endeavor to support the general interests of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions regarding the world at large as the true audience of the author.' (Quoted, Woodberry, op. cit., 1, 274.) t. |