Text: Anonymous, [Review of Ingram's edition of The Raven],” Critic (New York, NY), vol. 7, ns. vol. IV, whole no. 104, December 26, 1885, p. 302

[page 302:]

OF the many ‘dainty devices bred in books’ one of the most wonderful was that ‘wonderful house of dreams’ — Poe's ‘Raven.’ The medieval bestiaries were filled with marvellous symbolism; the ‘Phenix’ of Lactantius and Cynewulf, the ‘Panther’ and the ‘Whale’ of the old Germnanic and French animal-books, ‘Reynard the Fox’ and his elaborate satire, all, in various and sundry degrees, had attempted to convey mystic meaning through the instrumentality of animal life. The most exquisite of Anglo-Saxon poems drew a charming picture of an ideal land filled with harmony and felicity, and drew it under the guise of the Phœnix. The elaborate cunning, sensuality, and trickiness of the Dark Ages swam in the mocking lines of Reineke Fuchs and flashed their foulness on us from the fables and fabliaux, the geste-verse and the rhymes of the monks and the jongleurs. A whole literature of animal mysticism inter-penetrated with darting irony grew up and flourished in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in the north of France, to the delight of the irreligious and the discomfiture of the ecclesiastics. Earlier than this all Hellas had been stung by the ‘Wasps’ of Aristophanes, while the stagnant pools of Greek thought had bred not only ‘Clouds, but a plague of avenging ‘Frogs,’ whose guttural croak has come down to our times as the incarnation of concentrated ridicule. Not until the present age, however, did an artist arise, supreme in gifts and deft of touch, who took up the principle latent in these ancient bestiaries and caused it to flower anew in a form well-nigh matchless.

‘The Raven’ from the start had instantaneous success. Whether from a metrical or a psychological point of view, it chained the attention of the world, solved insoluble difficulties of rhythm, and expressed new and inexpressible thoughts that had haunted the brain like dream-music, teasing and tuneful as the sweep of æolian wings across the window. In its chorded and complex music there lay concealed a welt-schmerz, a heart-break which all had felt, a pathos full of melodious anguish, a whispering of sweet sorrow — angels’ feet treading out the wine-vats of woe. The immediate popularity of the poem, which was flung off into the vast coils of the newspaper press and went flying round the world in every language and latitude, showed that there was something in it which, despite its intense artificiality, touched the popular heart and therefore ensured immortality. Almost at once, and before the poet was even cold in [column 2:] his grave, men and women began to write and wrangle about it, an entire literature, home-bred and foreign, grew up in the effort to interpret, to translate, to parody it, stimulated by the irony, plausibility or deceitfulness of ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ in which Poe himself came forward, as in a sort of parabasis, and pretended to play showman to his own puppets. In France, under the leadership of Baudelaire, de Banville, and Mallarmé, a school of admirers, imitators, and translators came into existence whose efforts to popularize Poe were completely successful. In Germany ‘The Raven’ drew forth many beautiful translations, chief among which are those of Fräulein Jacobson, Herr Eben, Niclas Müller, Spielhagen, and Adolf Strodtmann. In Hungary and Russia ‘la rare et rayonnante jeune fille que les anges nomment Lénore’ has found naturalization in striking renderings. There is even an excellent Latin version published in 1866 by Gidley and Thornton. Along with this apotheosis of the favorite marched the skeleton-at-the-banquet in the shape of innumerable accusations, fabrications, and mendacities on the part of wiseacres and would- be critics and claimants. Poe had translated his poem literally from the Persian; he had composed it while intoxicated, etc. And then the multitudinous jingle of the parodies, followed by the cackle of innumerable geese, filled the air and served to show still further the profound impression made by the metre and music of the poem on the contemporary and post-contemporary public. Finally the era of careful editing was ushered in: all that could be said apparently had been said, per et contra: the fulness of time arrived, and the poem was handed over to the Gentiles for complete sepulture in the heart of notes, commentaries, variorum readings, translations, leanings of this or that critic and gleanings from this and that source.

The gravedigger in this instance is the untiring Mr. J. H. Ingram, who has attached himself as lovingly and tenaciously to Poe as an orchid does to its parent pith. How often in such cases the attaché blooms out in a radiance and beauty unknown to the original growth from which it draws its sustenance! How many dull tropic trees are covered with these brilliant excrescences whose delightful beauty has nothing in common with their ancestor! How convincingly Mr. Ingram proves that though Poe's marvellous blossom was fructified by golden pollen blown from over seas — from ‘Lady Geraldine's Courtship,’ possibly from Tennyson's forgotten ‘No More’ (published in 1831), probably from Albert Pike's ‘Isadore,’ — it took on its strange brightness and intensity from no traceable source, but sprang, wonder-blossom that it was, straight from the best growths of his own imagination. In his exhaustive presentation of all that has been said or done with regard to ‘The Raven’ Mr. Ingram has shown himself a learned and skilful editor as well as advocate. The editor of one book, like the man of one idea, is to some extent a parasite. He climbs and crawls all over his author: he lives and feeds on him. But in the evening of his labors he gets his reward: from a parasite, usually invisible, he becomes an illuminating glow-worm, and sheds fire-fly-light as from a pharos on all his surroundings.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 302, column 1:]

* The Raven. By E. A. Poe. With Literary and Historical Commentary, by J. H. Ingram. $2.25. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Co.