Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations (mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in. And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not these _revenants,_ in the French sense? There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any chance, falls into the abyss. Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all are not _nés marques pour le mal?_ Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "_I know,_" he says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that wore the semblance of a reason."