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

calm stars," obey a law and follow a pathway that has been marked out for them by infinite Wisdom and essential Love. That the genius of Poe had its peculiar mission and significance in relation to the age we cannot doubt. Every man of electric tem- perament and prophetic genius represents, or rather anticipates, with more or less of consciousness and direct volition, those latent ideas which are about to unfold themselves in humanity. It is thus that Mtiller accounts for the origin of the Greek Mythus, the simple invention of which he pronounces to be impossible, if by invention is meant a free and deliberate treatment of something known to be untrue. He regards the originators of the Greek Mythus merely as the more passive recipients and skilful exponents who first gave form and expression to Edgar Poe and his Critics. 61 those spiritual ideas which were tending to organic development at that particular stage of the world's progress — "the foci in which the scattered rays of spiritual consciousness were concentrating themselves to be radiated forth with new intensity." When Poe's genius began to unfold itself the age was moving feverously and restlessly through processes of transition and development which seemed about to unsettle all things, yet, gave no clear indication of whither they were leading us. In our own country,- Mr. Emerson's assertion of the transcendental side of the ever-recurring question between idealism and materialism marked the reaction of intellectual and spiritual tendencies against the materialism and literalism of the churches. Through him the fine idealism of the German Mystics penetrated our literature and spiritualized our philosophies. His novel statements of truth had in them a strange force and directness, startling the sleepers like the naive cadences of a child's voice heard amid the falsetto tones 62 Edgar Poe and his Critics. of the conventicle or the theatre. What a sovran grace of sincerity in his chapter on Experience. What noble ethics in his statement of spiritual laws. Yet, if we turn to the pages of Emerson and look for the evidences of his belief in the soul's individual immor- tality, we shall find that the words he has uttered on the subject express, for the most part, either a purely Oriental indifference or an aimless and anxious ques- tioning. In his lecture to the Divinity Students of Cambridge, protesting against the formalism and famine of the churches, he told them that the faith of the Puritans was dying out and none arising in its stead — that the eye of youth was not lighted by the hope of other worlds — that literature had become frivolous and science cold. In his lecture on " The Times " he says, " We drift like white sail across the wide ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea ; — but from what port did we sail ? Who knows ? Or to what port are we bound ? Who knows ? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed Edgar Poe and his Critics. 63 mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal from afar, or floated to us some letter in a bottle. But what know they more than we ? " In another of his essays he says, " I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which now house together in this mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, but this one thing I know, that the law which clothes us with humanity remains new. We are immortal with the immortality of this law." These expressions indicate the pervading scepticism of the time. Coming, as they do, from a man who had been educated as a clergyman — a man for whose large culture and liberal faith in humanity the pulpits of the existing church seemed to offer no sufficient platform — they have an emphasis which no added word could heighten. The negation of Carlyle, and the boundless affirma- tion of Emerson, served but to stimulate without satisfy- ing the intellect. The liberal ethics of Fourier, with his 6^ Edgar Poe and his Critics. elaborate social economies and systems of petrified harmony, were leading his disciples through forlorn enterprises to hopeless failures. A "divine dissatis- faction" was everywhere apparent. De Quincey saw something fearful and portentous in the vast accessions to man's physical resources that marked the time, unaccompanied by any improvement in psychal and spiritual knowledge. Goethe had made his great dra- matic poem an expression of the soul's craving for a knowledge of spiritual existences — • " 0 giebt ea geister in der luft Die zwischen Erd' und Himmel weben, So steiget nieder aus den golden duft, Und furht mich weg zu neuem bunten leben." Wordsworth, in his finest imaginative poem, "Laoda- mia," represents and half reproves this longing. Byron iterates it with a proud and passionate vehemence in "Manfred." Shelley's sad heart of unbelief, finding refuge in a despair too deep for aspiration, stands Edgar Poe and his Critics. 65 apart, as Elizabeth Browning has so finely sculptured him. In his white ideal All statue-blind," while Keats lies sleeping, like his own "Endymion," lost in dreams of the " dead Past." Then, sadder, and lone- lier, and more unbelieving than any of these, Edgar Poe came to sound the very depths of the abyss. The unrest and faithlessness of the age culminated in him. Nothing so solitary, nothing so hopeless, nothing so desolate as his spirit in its darker moods has been instanced in the literary history of the nineteenth cen- tury. It has been said that his theory, as expressed in ."Eureka," of the universal diffusion of Deity in and through all things, is identical with the Brahminical faith as expressed in the Bagvat Gita. But those who will patiently follow the vast reaches of his thought in this sublime poem of the "Universe" will find that he 6* 66 Edgar Poe and his Critics. arrives at a form of unbelief far more appalling than that expressed in the gloomy Pantheism of India, since it assumes that the central, creative Soul is, alternately, not diffused only, but merged and lost in the universe, and the universe in it: "A new universe swelling into existence or subsiding into nothingness at every throb of the Heart Divine." The creative Energy, therefore, "?zow> exists solely in the diffused matter and spirit, of the existing universe." The author assumes, moreover, that each individual soul retains in its youth a dim consciousness of vast dooms and destinies far distant in the bygone time, and infinitely awful; from which inherent consciousness the conventional "World-Rea- son" at last awakens it as from a dream. "It says you live, and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own, and it is only through this Intelligence that you live at all." "These things," he says, "we struggle to comprehend and cannot: cannot, because being untrue, they are of necessity incomprehensible. Edgar Poe and his Critics. 67 "No thinking man lives who, at some luminous point of his life, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing that any- thing exists greater than his own soul. The intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought, together with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity. The material and spiritual God now exists solely in the diffused matter and Spirit of the Universe, and the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the reconstitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God." In a copy of the original edition of Eureka, pur- chased at the recent sale of Dr Griswold's library, the following note was found inscribed in the handwriting of the author on the half blank page at the end of the volume. It is singularly ingenious and characteristic. ^^Note. — The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our 68 Edgar Poe and his Critics. individual identity, ceases at once when wo further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than that of the absorption by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God." This proud self-assertion betrays a mysterious isolation from the "Heart Divine" which fills us with sadness and awe. We confess to a half faith in the old superstition of the significance of anagrams when wo find, in the trans- posed letters of Edgar Poe's name, the words a God- peer ; words which, taken in connexion with his daring speculations, seem to have in them a mocking and malign import " which is not man's nor angel's." Yet, while the author of Eureka, like Lucretius, " dropped his plummet down the broad, Deep Universe and found no God," his works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an over- whelming sense of the power and majesty of Deity ; Edgar Poe and his Critics. 69 they are even dark with reverential awe. His proud intellectual assumption of the supremacy of the indivi- dual soul was hut an expression of its imperious longings for immortality and its recoil from the haunting 2')hantasms of death and annihilation ; while the theme of all his more imaginative writings is, as we have said, a love that survives the dissolution of the mortal body and oversweeps the grave. His mental and tempera- mental idiosyncrasies fitted him to come readily into rapport with psychal and spiritual influences. Many of his strange narratives had a degree of truth in them which he was unwilling to avow. In one of this class he makes the narrator say, " I cannot even now regard these experiences as a dream, yet it is difficult to say how otherwise they should be termed. Let us suppose only that the soul of man, to-day, is on the brink of stupendous psychal discoveries." Dante tells us that •"minds dreaming near the dawn Are of the truth presageful." 70 Edgar Poe and his Critics. Edgar Poe's dreams were assuredly often presageful and significant, and while he but dimly apprehended through the higher reason the truths which they foreshadowed, he riveted public attention upon them by the strange fascination