268
PARTISAN REVIEW
find a reader who had fallen asleep in the progress of following
the plot of one of Poe's tales.
It may be said that many of Poe's objects of satire were un·
worthy of his skill-but so were Alexander Pope's (and we may
quote
The Dunciad
to prove it) -yet how cleverly and with what
sound judgment he discriminated in separating literary sheep from
goats, herding the first, his "magnanimous cabal" of
The
North
American
Review
into one field, and the latter, those who were
subtilely influenced by the mock virtues of diddling into the other:
The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us (for a
brief period, at least) are ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons
of mere address, perseverance, effrontery-in a word, busy-bodies, toadies,
quacks. These people easily succeed in
boring
editors (whose attention
is too often entirely engrossed by politics or other 'business' matter) into
the admission of favorable notices written or caused to be written by
i.Dterested parties-or, at least, into the admission of
some
notice where,
under ordinary circumstances, no notice would be given at all. In this
way ephemeral 'reputations' are manufactured which, for the most part,
serve all the purposes designated-that is to say, the putting of money
into the purse of the quack and the quack's publisher; for there never
was a quack who could be brought to comprehend the value of mere fame.
Now, men of genius will not resort to these manoeuvers....
The paradox of Poe's morality as he applied it to the writers
of his time may be reread today with little loss of pertinency or
freshness; and it is only until we hear him bringing charges of
plagiarism against Longfellow that we reencounter the darkened
atmosphere in which the figure of Poe is the injured and yet
petted child of an indulgent foster mother.
As we return to the prospect of a world that Poe saw in his
childhood, and here Mr. Hervey Allen's exhaustive and almost
exhausting biography,
lsrafel,
has been of greater and more pene–
trating service than the observations of Poe's latter-day American
critics, we rediscover the vividness of his attraction for the com·
moo reader. Poe's appeal is to the private world that exists in
all of us, the world that
E.
M. Forster aptly described as the true
"Ivory Tower," which has always been the necessary and com–
mon refuge of the social human being whenever he seeks self·
knowledge and wishes to be alone. Poe intensified the realisation
of that necessary refuge by the detailed descriptions of "being
cast adrift" in
The
Narrative of A. Gordon
Pym,
which Mr.
