EDGAR ALLEN POE
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material goods, the very world of Philadelphia and New York,
the slight, yet piercing moral overtone is felt; and like the shrill
cry of a bat, it is all too clear once it has been discerned. Poe's
list of mock virtues for the scarcely human creatures who practice
diddling in
Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences
include Interest, Perseverance, Ingenuity, Audacity, Nonchalance,
Impertinence and Grin; and these virtues are so defined as to
clothe some few of the literary figures of Poe's day as well as "the
banker
in petto"
or the small merchant. The essay itself is far
too highly pitched, too nervous, -too grotesque to be entirely con–
vincing, and in reading it one suffers the same chill of rejection
that one experiences in viewing the habits of Dean Swift's Yahoos.
Yet the mock virtues as Poe stated them reveal an important aspect
of his critical intelligence;. one begins to share the sight of evil
which Baudelaire perceived at the very center of Poe's active
imagination, and we quickly recognise that the same intelligence
which Poe employed in his burlesques of The Business Man's
morality appears in all his comments relating his adventures among
the New York literati to his own standards of literary excellence.
In
The Mystery of Marie Roget
his experiences in journalism
found their reflection in the following passage, which even today
requires no further elaboration:
We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our news·
papers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the
cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident
with the former.
And in
The Purloined Letter
it is certainly plain that one
object of Poe's satire within the story was and still is human stu–
pidity in the person of the Prefect of Police; one sees the satire
rise to a small climax as the Prefect betrays his own mental inac–
tivity by ridiculing poetic insight and intelligence, and if one
were to translate the Prefect's indolence into moral terms one
would find him the very image of sloth and groundless pride.
One need not labor the point that Poe's critical position was
heretical, or that in writing his prose narratives and verse he never
failed to follow his own advice. His failures may be obvious
enough, failures of taste, proportion and adult responsibility, but
with the possible exception of his essay on
The Rationale of Verse,
he is never dull-and it would be a rare phenomenon indeed to
