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

delivered a lecture at the “William Wirt” Institution, on the “Poets and Poetry of America,” and, in the course of the evening, took occasion to deliver some very severe remarks upon Mr. Griswold’s compilation, recently published under a title similar to that given by Poe to his discourse. This trenchant attack upon the new and much belauded volume created no little excitement at the time in the literary coteries of Philadelphia, and by the book’s compiler was never forgiven, and was terribly avenged. Mr. Griswold, it should be mentioned, for a short time occupied the editorial chair in Mr. Graham’s publishing office which Poe had vacated. To the March number of Graham’s Magazine Poe contributed a lengthy and appreciative review of Horne’s magnificent epic, “Onion.” Criticism was scarcely the poet’s forte; and although the instincts of his own genius invariably prompted him to recognise and acknowledge the productions of kindred spirits, his critiques more closely resemble the unravelling an intricate riddle, than the sympathetic or antipathetic discussion of a propounded subject. And yet when we peruse Poe’s definition of the rules of Art — as furnished by Nature — we cannot refuse to acknowledge their truth. Some of his more remarkable utterances in this review of “Orion,” as embodying the theories he believed, and strove to follow out in poesy, may be reproduced here: — “Although we agree, for example, with Coleridge, that poetry and passion are discordant, yet we are willing to permit Tennyson to bring to the intense passion which prompted his ‘Locksley Hall,’ the aid of that terseness and pungency which are derivable from rhythm and from rhyme. The effect he produces, however, is a purely passionate, and not, unless in detached passages of this magnificent philippic, a properly poetic effect. His ‘Œnone,’ on the other hand, exalts the soul not into passion, but into a conception of pure beauty, which in its elevation — its calm and intense rapture — has in it a foreshadowing of the future and spiritual life, and as far transcends earthly passion as the holy radiance of the sun does the glimmering and feeble phosphorescence of the glow worm. His ’ Morte d’Arthur’ is in the same majestic vein. The ’Sensitive Plant’ of Shelley is in the same sublime spirit. Nor, if the passionate poems of Byron excite more intensely a greater number of readers than either the ‘Œnone,’ or the ’Sensitive Plant,’ does this indisputable fact prove anything more than that the majority of mankind are more susceptible of the impulses of passion than of the impressions of beauty? Readers do exist, however, and always will exist, who, to hearts of maddening fervour, unite in perfection the sentiment of the beautiful — that divine sixth sense which is yet so faintly understood — that sense which phrenology has attempted to embody in its organ of ideality — that sense which is the basis of all Cousin’s dreams — that sense which speaks of GOD through His purest, if not His sole attribute — which proves, and which alone proves His existence. “To readers such as these — and only to such as these — must be left the decision of what the true Poesy is. And these — with no hesitation — will decide that the origin of Poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than Earth supplies — that Poetry itself is the imperfect effort to quench this immortal thirst by novel combinations of beautiful forms (collocations of forms, physical or spiritual, and that this thirst when even partially allayed — this sentiment when even feebly meeting response — produces emotion to which all other human emotions are vapid and insignificant. “We shall now be fully understood. If, with Coleridge, and, however erring at times, his was precisely the mind fitted to decide a question such as this — if, with him, we reject passion from the true — from the pure poetry — if we reject even passion — if we discard as feeble, as unworthy the high spirituality of the theme (which has its origin in a sense of the Godhead), if we dismiss even the nearly divine emotion of human love — that emotion which, merely to name, causes the pen to tremble — with how much greater reason shall we dismiss all else? And yet there are men who would mingle with the august theme the merest questions of expediency — the cant topics of the day — the doggerel æsthetics of the time — who would trammel the soul in its flight to an ideal Helusion, by the quirks and quibbles of chopped logic. There are men who do this — lately there are a set of men who make a practice of doing this — and who defend it on the score of the advancement of what they suppose to be truth. Truth is, in its own essence, sublime; but her loftiest sublimity, as derived from man’s clouded and erratic reason, is valuelessis pulseless — is utterly ineffective when brought into comparison with the unerring sense of which we speak; yet grant this truth to be all which its seekers and worshippers pretend — they forget that it is not truth, per se, which is made their thesis, but an argumentation, often maudlin and pedantic, always shallow and unsatisfactory (as from the mere inadaptation of the vehicle it must be) by which this truth, in casual Mid indeterminate glimpses, is, or is not, rendered manifest.” After pointing out the matters in which he deemed Horne had departed from the proper standard — the standard which he, Poe, assumed to be the true one — he concluded by acknowledging that “Orion” “will be admitted by every man of genius to be one of the noblest, if not the very noblest, poetical works of the age. Its defects are trivial and conventional; its beauties intrinsic and supreme.” Consequent, apparently, upon this critique, some correspondence took place between the two poets. “During a certain period of Poe’s* troubled circumstances,” writes Horne, “he wrote to me, I being then in London, and inclosed a manuscript, saying that he had singled me out, though personally a stranger, to ask the friendly service of handing a certain story to the editor of one of the magazines, with a view, of course, to some remittance. Without waiting to read the story I replied at once that I considered his application to me a great compliment, and that I would certainly do the best I could in the business. But when I read the story, my heart of hope sank within me: it was ‘The Spectacles.’ I tried several magazines, not an editor would touch it. In vain I represented the remarkable tact with which the old lady, under the very trying task she had set herself, did, nevertheless, maintain her female delicacy and dignity. I met with nothing beyond a deaf ear, an uplifted eyebrow, or the ejaculations of a gentleman pretending to feel quite shocked. It may be that false modesty, and social, as well as religious, hypocrisy, are the concomitant and counterpart of our present equivocal state of civilisation; but if I were not an Englishman, it is more than probable I should say that those qualities were more glaringly conspicuous in England than in any other country.” No comment is needed here upon the fact that any imagination could be discovered so ultraprurient, and utterly ridiculous, as to perceive anything contrary to the most rigid and puritanic delicacy in the playful, but not very powerful, badinage of “The Spectacles.” One day in April of this year, 1844, the good folks of New York were startled by a jeu d‘esprit, or hoax, on the subject of Ballooning, and Poe was the author. The Sun, in which this amusing sally appeared, had already a reputation for information not elsewhere obtainable, in consequence of its publication of the notorious “Moon Hoax” article,* when one morning its readers — and their number increased that day with much celerity — were astounded by reading the following wonderful communication: — “ASTOUNDING NEWS BY EXPRESS, via NORFOLK! “THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! “SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON’S FLYING MACHINE!!! “Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, S.C., of Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and four others, in the Steering Balloon, Victoria,’ after a passage of seventy-five hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!” This wonderful record of unparalleled adventure Is originally published, as its concocter, indeed, confessed “with the preceding heading in magnificent capitals, well interspersed with notes of admiration, a matter of fact, in the New York Sun, a daily newspaper, and therein fully subserved the purpose of creating indigestible aliment for the quidnuncs during the few hours intervening between a couple of the Charleston mails. The rush for the ’sole paper which had the news’ was something beyond even the prodigious; and, in fact, if (as some assert) the ‘Victoria’ did not absolutely accomplish the voyage recorded, it will be difficult to assign a reason why she should not have accomplished it.” As a jeu d‘esprit, this trick on public credulity was a splendid success, but such jests are scarcely the class of productions one would desire to obtain from a poetic genius. Doubtless, for the immediate needs of the hour, these clever impositions paid their author much better than did the best of his poems, whilst they also furnished more ample food for his cravings for reputation, and his insatiable love of hoaxing. Poe’s readers and admirers must, in point of fact, always be upon their guard against his inveterate habit of attempting to gauge their gullibility; his passion for this propensity frequently led him into indulging in the practice when least expected-into giving way to the desire of befooling his readers when apparently most in earnest. In the same month as “The Balloon Hoax,” Godey published in his Lady’s Book, a literary magazine of Philadelphia, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” It was one of its author’s favourite stories, and the scene of it is laid in the vicinity where his college days were spent, that is to say, in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville. Taken in connection with mesmeric theories — and at this period Poe appears to have been investigating such theories with the most steadfast interest — this tale is a singular manifestation, but, beyond some Poësque traits of thought and diction, contains nothing very remarkable. The Death Fetch, Doppelgänger, and similar dual creations of superstition have always been numerous enough in literature, and this revivification, although treated in a suggestively original manner, calls for no lengthy comment. Perhaps, when Poe’s own habits are considered, and his love of mystification fully allowed for, the most interesting passages in the tale will be found in these allusions to its hero’s use of drugs: — “His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast each morning or rather, immediately after a cup of strong coffee, for he ate nothing in the forenoon — and then set forth alone, or attended only by a dog, upon a long ramble. . . . In the meantime,” that is to say, after some hours walking, “the morphine had its customary effect — that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf — in the hue of a blade of grass — in the shape of a trefoil — in the humming of a bee — in the gleaming of a dewdrop — in the breathing of the wind — in the faint odours that came from the forest — there came a whole universe of suggestion — a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.” Scarcely any original composition is again discernible until the end of the year. A review, already alluded to, in The Pioneer, and the quaintly beautiful verses, “Dreamland,” published in the June number of Graham’s, are all we can trace before the