Edgar Poe and His Critics — Sarah Helen Whitman, 1860 — reading text

profound, incommunicable sorrow. When the nights were very dreary and cold, when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest and came away most regretfully. It was the image of this lady, long and tenderly, and sorrowfully cherished, that suggested the stanzas " to Helen," published among the poems written in his youth, which Russell Lowell says have in them a grace and symmetry of outline such as few poets ever attain, and which are valuable as displaying " what can only be expressed by the contradictory phrase of innate experienced As the lines do not appear in the latest editions of his poems we give them here. " Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. Edgar Poe and his Critics. 51 On desperate seas long wont to roam, . Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, To the grandeur that was Rome. Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche, How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand I Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Laud! " In a letter now before us, written within a twelve- montli of his death, Edgar Poe speaks of the love which inspired these verses as " the one, idolatrous, and purely ideal love " of his passionate boyhood. In one of the numbers of Russell's Magazine there is a transcript of the first published version of the exquisite poem entitled "Lenore," commencing " Ah broken is the golden bowl 1 the spirit flown forever, Let the bell toll! a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river." 52 Edgar Poe and his Critics. It is remarkable that, in this earlier version, instead of Lenore we have the name of Helen. The lines were afterwards greatly altered and improved in structure and expression, and the name of Lenore was introduced, apparently for its adaptation to rhythmical effect. What- ever may be the meaning that underlies this strange funeral anthem it will always be admired for the trium- phant music of its sorrow and for its sombre pomp of words. We may trust that the " Sabbath Song " did indeed " Go up to God so solemnly the dead could feel no wrong." The ideas which haunted the brain of the ydung poet during his watch in the lonely church-yard — the shape- less fears and phantasms, " Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible "Woel" were the same which overwhelmed De Quincey at the burial of his sweet sister and playmate, as described by him in the "Suspiria De Profundis" — ideas of terror Edgar Poe and his Critics. 53 and indescribable awe at the thouglit of that mysterious waking sleep, that powerless and dim vitality, in which "the dead" are presumed, according to our popular theology, to await " the general resurrection at the last day." What wonder that the phantoms of " Shadow" and "Silence," once evoked there, could never be exor- cised! What wonder that "the fable which the Demon told in the shadow of the tomb" haunted him for ever! "Now there are strange tales in the volumes of the Magi — in the iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi — glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the mighty Sea — and of the Genii that overruled the sea and the earth and the lofty heaven ; there was much lore, too, in the sayings of the Sybils, and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona — but, as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told rue as he sat hi/ my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all ! And as the Demon made an end of his stony, he fell back within the cavity of the tomb and 54 Edgar Poe and his Critics. laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out and sat at the feet of the Demon and looked him steadily in the face." These solitary church-yard vigils, with all their asso- ciated memories, present a key to much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet's after life. Questions which no human tongue could answer, no human know- ledge satisfy or silence, then found an utterance m the vast and desolate chambers of his imagination, and their mournful echoes are heard again and again in the magic cadences of his verse. In the "Colloquy of Monos and Una" he has imagined all the phases of sentient life in the grave, and in the "Bridal Ballad'' are stanzas which, as read by the author, were full of a wild, sad pathos not easily forgotten, "We will instance only two of the stanzas although their rhythmical effect is injured by their separation from those which precede and accompany them. Edgar Poe and Ins Critics. ^^ "And my lord he loves me well ; But when first he breathed his vow The words rang as a knell, And the voice seemed his who fell In the battle down the dell, And who is happy now. ***** "Would God I could awaken 1 For I dream I know not how, And my soul is sorely shaken Lest an evil step be taken — Lest iJie dead, wlio is forsaken, May not be happy now^ The thought which informs so many of his tales and poems betrays its sad sincerity even in his critical writ- ings, as, for instance, in a notice of "Undine" in the "Marginalia." Yet it has been said of him that "he bad no touch of human feeling or of human pity," that "he loved no one but himself" — that "he was an abnormal and monstrous creation," — "possessed by legions of devils." The most injurious epithets have 56 Edgar Poe and his Critics. been heaped upon liis name and the most improbable and calumnious stories recorded as veritable histories. Ten years have passed since his death, and while the popular interest in his writings and the popular estimate of his genius increases from year to year, these acknow- ledged calumnies are still going the round of the foreign periodicals and are still being republished at home. We believe that with the exception of Mr. Willis's generous tributes to his memory, some candid and friendly articles by the Editor of the Literary Messen- ger, and an eloquent and vigorous article in Russell's Magazine by Mr. J. AVood Davidson, of Columbia, S.C. ( who has appreciated his genius and his sorrow more justly perhaps, than any of his American critics) this great and acknowledged wrong to the dead has been permitted to pass without public rebuke or protest. In the memoir prefixed to the Illustrated Poems, it is said of him that " his religion was a worship of the beautiful," which is emphatically true, and that "he knew no beauty but that which is purely sensuous," Edgar Poe and his Critics. 57 which is, as emphatically, untrue. We appeal from this last assertion to Mr. Poe's own exposition of his poetic theory. He recognises the elements of poetic emotion — the emotion of the beautiful — "m all nohle thoughts^ in all holy impulses^ in all chivalrous^ generous, and self-sacrificing deeds." His "aesthetic religion," which has been so strangely misapprehended was simply a recognition of the divine and inseparable harmonies of the supremely Beautiful and the supremely Good. The author of the very able and systematic critique in the !N'orth American Review (which is, nevertheless, essentially false in all its estimates of intellectual and moral character) tells us that he " repudiated moral uses in his prose fictions as in his poetry, and that if moral or spiritual truths are found in them they must have got there accidentally, without the author's permission or knowledge." This is very unjust. To prove its injustice we have only once more to quote the author's own words. " Taste," the sense of the beautiful, ^^ holds intimate relations with the intellect and the moral sense; 58 Edgar Poe and his Critics. from the moral sense it is separated by so faint a diiference that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves." Again, "The poetic sense is strictly and simply the human aspiration for supernal beauty. It is no mere apprecia- tion of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above — a prescience of that loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to Eternity alone." The current strictures on Poe's sinful worship of Beauty remind us of the satirist, Shoppe, in Jean Paul's "Titan," who says, "In one respect we Germans are far in advance of the Greeks and Italians. We never seek the Beautiful without looking for collateral advantages ; our caryatides must uphold pulpits, and our angels bear baptismal fonts." We are ready to admit, with the severe critic of the North American, that a very large proportion of Poe's stories are filled with monstrous and appalling images — that many of them oppress the reader like frightful incubi, from whose influence he vainly tries to escape. Edgar Poe and his Critics. 59 Ruskin tells us, in his treatise on the Grotesque, that it is the trembling of the human soul in the presence of Death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual mirror, investing them with the grotesque ghastliness of fitful dreams. "If the mind be not healthful and serene the wider the scope of its glance and the grander the truths of which it obtains an insight the more fantastic and fearful are these distorted images." Yet, as out of mighty and terrific discords noblest harmonies are sometimes evolved, so through the pur- gatorial ministries of awe and terror, and through the haunting Nemesis of doubt, Poc's restless and unap- peased soul was urged on to the fulfilment of its appointed work — groping out blindly towards the light, and marking the approach of great spiritual truths by the very depth of the shadow it projected against them. It would seem that the true point of view from which his genius should be regarded has yet to be sought. 6o Edgar Poe and his Critics. We are not of those who believe that any order of genius is revealed to us in vain ; nor do we believe that the age would have gained anything if the author of the Raven had proved another Wordsworth, or another Longfellow. These far-wandering comets, not less than "the regular,