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INTRODUCTION
“Goethe spoke much about the French, especially Cousin, Villemain, and Guizot. ‘The insight, circumspection, and perspicuity of these men,’ said he, ‘is great; they combine complete knowledge of the past with the spirit of the nineteenth century, which, to be sure, works wonders.’
From this we passed to the newest French writers and to the significance of classic and romantic.
‘A new expression has occurred to me,’ said Goethe, ‘which does not characterize the relationship badly. The classic I call the healthy, and the romantic the diseased. And in this sense the Nibelungen is classic, as well as Homer, for both are healthy and vigorous. The most of the new is not romantic because it is new, but because it is weak, sickly and diseased, and the old is not classic because it is old, but because it is strong, fresh, happy and healthy.’”(1)
This is Goethe's word relative to a certain phase of romanticism whose productions seemed to him to be unsound and unwholesome, because they did not emanate from minds which were “strong, fresh, happy and healthy.”
It is with the productions of two such minds which Goethe characterizes as “diseased” that the present work has to do. The American Edgar Allan Poe, and the German Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann are both disciples of that phase of romanticism which had terror of the uncanny as its dominant note, and which Goethe calls “weak, sickly, and diseased” in in [[sic]] distinction from that which is “strong, fresh, happy and healthy.” Both these men were powerfully fascinated by the mystery of the supernatural. They were tantalized by the hope of solving or guessing the secrets of another world which stretches away beyond the range of human intelligence. One may agree with Goethe that the theories they evolved and the [page 2:] tales they told are not food for the mind that is fresh, sound, and cheerful. But if their fancy and their speculation enticed them too far afield their genius accompanied them, and it will create for their work a lasting value.
It has been said that they were both exponents of one phase of romanticism, that their interests were frequently identical. To what extent was the one acquainted with the work of the other? In what measure did the one mind influence the other?
In the recently completed German edition of Poe's works,(2) the editor, in his prefatory account of the poet's life and work's remarks:
Sein Leben war das eines Träumers aus dem alten Mutterlande Europa, und wenn man seine halb normannische Abkunft bedenkt, kann man schon ruhig sagen, eines germanischen Träumers — war ein Leben, ein Träumleben, geführt in dem brutal-realen, fast ausschliesslich merkantilen Milieu Nord Amerikas ... Die Kreuzung von Leben und Mensch, die sich da ergab, die Mischung von bedingungsloser Kultur und unbedingtem Neuland, die dann so einzig ist, ist Poe, der Romantiker, verpflanzt auf den realitätenschwersten Boden, den man sich in damaliger Zeit nur überhaupt denken konnte.
This in general is the standpoint of the present work. It is Poe the “Germanic dreamer,” the romanticist, that is here to be the subject of discussion, and always from the standpoint of his indebtedness to German literature, as to material and technique, Poe the romanticist and dreamer is probably nowhere more happily, and at the same time more briefly characterized than by his contemporary James Russell Lowell:(3)
In his tales he has chosen to exhibit his powers chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very [page 3:] utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. ...
He loves to dissect those cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a hint some terrible doubt which is the secret of all horror. He leaves to the imagination the task of finishing the picture, a task to which she only is competent.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 1:]
1. Biedermann. Goethes Gespräche, Leipzig, 1889-96. Vol. 7, p. 40.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 2:]
2. Moeller-Bruck, E. A. Poe's Sämtliche Werke. Minden i. W., 1904. Vol. 1, p. 126.
3. Graham's Magazine. February, 1845. Our Contributors.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PCETA, 1908] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (Jacobs)