Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/32

12 as Cooper and Hawthorne combined and more than twice the number of pages filled by Longfellow.

The first Spanish edition of Poe's tales appeared in Madrid in 1858. The introduction is by Doctor Nicasio Landa who, amid much that is bizarre in biography and comment, declares rightly enough that Poe "was the first to exploit the marvelous in the field of science." There is as much difference, Doctor Landa holds, between Poe's tales and ordinary tales of witchcraft as there is between chemistry and alchemy—not a bad comparison. He also contests Baudelaire's statement that Poe's wretchedness was due to the crudeness of American democracy. No, says Doctor Landa, there "never was a country in which freedom of thought was permitted to carry itself to such extremes as in America," and he cites in triumphant illustration the unimpeded preachments of "Mistress Bloummer" and the popular vagaries of "the saints of last day."

Of Poe's command of English a later Spanish critic, D. A. H. Catà, writes as follows: "Never since Shakespeare has the English language been handled with such art. Poe had the secret of euphony and fine phrase; between his thoughts and his sentences there is always an indissoluble connection. He knew the inevitable word, the mitigating word, the consoling word. He knew what things make us laugh or weep and, master of inspiration and of language, he could always dominate our will, making our spirit run the whole gamut of emotion from grotesque merriment and vaguely sad placidity up to the brutal and agonizing horror of intolerable fear. He has made us yearn with his heroes, weep with their misfortunes,