Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/70

50 'one who, in every feeling of his nature, and in every feature of his deportment was every inch a prince'—is matter for grave reflection and sorrowful debate. The American, at least, who shall peruse the concluding pages of the book now under review, and not turn in disgust from the base sycophancy which infects them, is unworthy of his country and his name."

Poe's Americanism was not the robust, genial, confident Americanism of Lowell. But it was less conventional; it was also more searching, more interrogative, more constructive. Its base was not so broad, but its summit was higher. Poe was essentially a frontiersman, Lowell a dweller in the more settled interior.

A quality inseparable from personality and almost inseparable from Americanism is humor. Did Poe have a sense of humor? Did he ever smile or make others smile? There is little evidence of it in his poems and better known stories. Hence we find James Hannay saying and others saying with him, "Poe has no humor." But Poe's best work did not call for humor; it excluded it. "Humor," he says, "with an exception to be made hereafter, is directly antagonistical to that which is the soul of the Muse proper; and the omni-prevalent belief, that melancholy is inseparable from the higher manifestations of the beautiful, is not without a firm basis in nature and in reason. But it so happens that humor and that quality which we have termed the soul of the Muse (imagination) are both essentially aided in their