Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/228

208 treat. Are his poems consistent exemplars of the beauty which, as a critic, Poe held to be the only true goal of the poet? Woodberry, speaking of our greater writers, says: "They were concerned not with the apparent, but the real; not with the transitory, but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the beautiful." This is a grave and strange indictment. If it is true, Poe preached one thing and practised another. The consensus of world opinion, moreover, has been unaccountably at fault if through all the years it has thought that it saw beauty and heard beauty and felt beauty where there was no beauty but only a sham pretense. If Poe was not an artist of the beautiful, what was he an artist of? The prompt and superficial answer is, He was an artist of death. Does he not say, "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world"? And are not his poems uniform illustrations of this thesis? Yes; but whatever his topic, Poe's theme is none the less beauty. Death, decay, separation are not his themes. They are only the occasions when beauty, in flight or about to take its flight, is felt to be most beautiful; when love, looking upon us for the last time, turns our love into adoration. "Nevermore" is not only the refrain of The Raven, it was not only a word that loomed terrible and menacing in Poe'sthought, it was a doom under the shadow of which beauty and love seemed suddenly not of this world but visitants recalled.

If Poe's central theme needs any defence, it maybe found in Browning: