OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 95 



byish conception of woman ; tie had an eye for beauty, but it 

 was beauty of form, not of spirit and character. 



(c)Still more striking, the more deeply Poe's work is examined, 

 is his artificiality. Perhaps he was as self-conscious a great 

 writer as ever lived. And that is saying a good deal, for most 

 of them are abnormally self-conscious and subjective. He is 

 the very opposite of hearty, sociable old Sir Walter Scott. This 

 is not apparent at once. The first impression made by Poe's 

 writings is one of power, and the power of genius is always ob- 

 jective ; the man sinks himself in the seriousness and reality of 

 his work. That seems true at first sight in regard to Edgar 

 Poe. But as the original impression passes, you grow more 

 aware of the artifice which lies behind. He studies with won- 

 derful patience the art of producing effects, a histrionic effect. 

 It seems to be spontaneous, to be real. There is an air of seri- 

 ousness, a freedom from exaggeration, a calmness, a superb 

 balance about his narrative which creates that illusion. But it 

 is an illusion. Admitted behind the scenes, you discover how 

 the wires were pulled and the plots arranged. His description, 

 for example, of the method by which " The Raven " was delib- 

 erately manufactured — manufactured is precisely the word — 

 is one of the most curious and disillusionizing passages in liter- 

 ature. It may be found in I^ittell's I/iving Age, Vol. cxevi, 

 p. 696. Whether this passage was written partly in jest or 

 wholly in earnest, it throws a good deal of light upon Poe's 

 qualities as a writer. He had extreme cleverness and great 

 natural gifts of expression. He was a good, even an extraordi- 

 nary workman. But the parts are put together by a kind of 

 contrivance, not by an original act of creative thought. The 

 end and result are first conceived and then all sorts of artifices 

 are invented to attain that result. Whereas great literature 

 rather springs from the initial impulse of an idea that demands 

 utterance, and the form that utterance will take cannot be fore- 

 seen. It bears about the same relation to a genuine literary 

 inspiration that the watch discovered on a Patagonian desert, 

 in Paley's unfortunate illustration of Natural Theology, bears 

 to the livincr world of divine creation. The method Poe pur- 



