92 PROCEEDINGS MANCHESTER INSTITUTE 



dissipated, sordid, vain, unprincipled and affected. It is not 

 unjust to say that truth never seemed to him a necessary element 

 of character. From early life he treated truth lightly, and 

 sometimes took extraordinary pains to avoid it. Whether in 

 the last years this trait was not intensified by the use of opium 

 is open to question, but throughout he was a poseur^ assuming 

 attitudes and convictions and virtues, with the ease and freedom 

 of an actor. Perhaps he was hardly conscious how radically 

 hollow and insincere it all was and how much it was the play- 

 ing of a part. He became a total wreck at last. 



"We have no right to pass a moral judgment on these matters 

 in a literary discussion. But they were not without influence 

 upon his writing, and his work is not intelligible without refer- 

 ence to the kind of man he was. From such a character the 

 greatest literature is impossible. In three of the requisites 

 which such a literature requires he was wanting : 



(a) His themes, the subjects he chooses are morbid and un- 

 wholesome. Of course this does not mean that they are im- 

 moral. On the contrar}^, both in choice and in treatment Poe 

 is, so far as I have read, entirely free from any slightest taint of 

 impurity. But his interest is pathological; it is attracted to what 

 verges on disease, spiritual and mental disease in human na- 

 ture. His subjects are fascinating to him because the}" border 

 on the horrible; because they are extreme, rare and unusual ; 

 and this penchayit grew upon him. Now the monstrous and 

 the morbid are not illegitimate as subjects in literature. In 

 fact there is a distinct fascination in them. But as we all real- 

 ize it is a dangerous fascination. It is dangerous both for the 

 author and the reader. It is an exercise of the imagination that 

 grows by what it feeds on ; which is like a narcotic, inducing 

 the artificial necessity of larger and ever larger doses. It grad- 

 ually and insidiously distorts the spiritual point of view. The 

 healthy human being cannot, ought not to live in such an at- 

 mosphere, nor would it promote any rational end if he did. In 

 medicine, pathology has a distinct and helpful place. The phy- 

 sician studies disease that he may understand it and effect a 

 cure. In literature it can have no such end and ofl&ce. Here 



