Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions — John H. Ingram, 1880, volume I — reading text

of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. . . . I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract — let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation. “Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chessplayer will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by ‘the book,’ are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honour by honour, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin, From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation — all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own. “The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater indeed than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (as also the two narratives in a similar strain which shortly followed), are desired by their author to be read somewhat in the light of commentaries upon the propositions advanced in the preceding remarks. Accepted as fiction merely, their merit is pre-eminently conspicuous, but as demonstrations of the mental problems to which they refer, they deserve the earnest attention of the psychologist and moral philosopher, and entitle Poe’s works to study in quarters where the productions of the mere romancist are rarely or never known. Poe’s name was first introduced to the French public by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the tale, shortly after its appearance in Graham’s, being copied with complimentary comment into the Paris Charivari, the translator objecting, however, that no such street as the Rue Morgue existed (“so far as he knew,” says Poe) in Paris. This circumstance was also cited in after years by Baudelaire as one of a series of proofs that the poet had never visited the French metropolis! Some years later the tale reappeared in Le Commerce, as an original feuilleton, under the title of ” L‘Orang-Otang,” and shortly afterwards La Quotidienne, aware, apparently, of the source whence the work had been obtained, transferred it bodily to its own columns. This being noticed by a third journal as a case of gross plagiarism, a lawsuit was instituted, during the hearing of which Le Commerce proved that Edgar Poe was the real and sole author of the story in question. The interest created by this legal inquiry induced Madame Isabella Meunier to translate several of Poe’s tales for the Democratic Pacifique and other French journals. In the May number of Graham’s appeared another of Poe’s prose chefs d’œuvre, the weird narrative entitled “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” Scientific truth and artistically blended than idiosyncratic tale natural secret that vortex, offers more poetic invention have never been more in this most marvellous and its author having learned the a cylindrical body, revolving in a resistance to its suction, and is consequently drawn into it with greater difficulty than bodies of any other form of equal bulk, instead of inditing a chapter on mechanics, charms all readers with a story of weird and fascinating power. On the first of the same month he contributed to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post — a paper belonging to Mr. Graham, and for which Poe wrote critiques — another startling manifestation of his analytic capabilities, in a prospective review of Dickens’s story of “Barnaby Rudge.” In this review the poet explained with mathematical exactitude what should be the plot of the as-yet-unwritten story, and the correctness of his solution drew from Dickens a letter of flattering acknowledgment, in which he inquired whether Mr. Poe had dealings with the devil. Alluding to the poet’s wonderful analysis of his plot, Dickens says, “By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his ‘Caleb Williams’ backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.” Some years later, Poe, commenting upon this remark, after noting that this was not the precise mode of procedure on Godwin’s part, says, “But the author of ‘Caleb Williams’ was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process,” a process, indeed, not altogether divergent from Poe’s own acknowledged method of retaining the dénouement of his work always before him, and subordinating all incident, tone, even verbal combination, to the development of this idea. But for deficiency in construction of plot he criticised the author of “Pickwick,” deeming that he had no positive genius for adaptation, and still less, in Poe’s judgment, “for that metaphysical art in which the souls of all mysteries lie,” yet apart from this drawback, he expressed an intense reverence for Dickens, deeming him England’s greatest living novelist. In the July number of Graham’s Poe reverted to his favourite theme of cryptography, in an article styled “A few Words on Secret Writing.” It was a subject to which he had already devoted some time, both at home and in the papers of New York and Philadelphia, and this magazine article was the result of, and in connection with, his challenges to the public to produce a cryptographic riddle he should not be able to resolve. “The facility with which he would unravel the most dark and perplexing ciphers,” writes a clerical friend, “was really supernatural. Out of a most confused medley of letters, figures, and cabalistic characters, in any of the seven different languages, the English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek, his wonderful power of analysis would, almost at once, evolve sense, order, and beauty; and of the hundreds of cryptographs which lie received while editor of one of our popular periodicals, he never failed to solve one unless it was illegitimate, that is, unless its author put it together not intending to have it made sense. During a visit which he paid to Lowell, designing to test his cryptographical skill, I wrote a short paragraph somewhat in the following fashion.* . . . The sentence was this: — “ ‘The patient was severely attacked with spasms and acute pain in the hypogastric region; remedial agents were employed; but without effect, and death soon ensued.’ This rendered into cipher in the manner shown* above would be: — ‘Gurengvragjuffrireryl nggnpxrgjigufonfzfnagnghgrenvavagurulcbtnfgevpertvb aerzrgrnyntragfjrerrzcybirgohgjigubbgrssrpgnagqrngufb bararafirq.’ “Mr. Poe solved this cipher in one-fifth of the time it took. me to write it. This, however, is one of the most simple forms of cryptography.” In his magazine article, Poe deemed it scarcely possible to “imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another in such manner as to elude general