Text: Alexander Hay Japp, “Genius of Poe,” Home Journal (New York, NY), thirteenth year, no. 38, whole no. 1,546, September 22, 1875, p. 4, cols. 1-3

[page 4, column 1, continued:]

GENIUS OF POE.

OF Poe's genius much has been written, yet there remains room for a brief analysis of his characteristic qualities. The first thing that strikes a careful reader is the supernatural or rather extra-natural atmosphere in which he revels. His eye is ever turned away from earth. The most beautiful of actual landscapes has no charm for him. He is preoccupied with some picture of the mind, which owes all its color to weird and fatal enchantments. Men and women pass him by, brush clothes with him, but he seldom feels the thrill of brotherhood. In a special sense, he walks apart in a world of his own — a world rich, beautiful, even gorgeous; but with glooms and terrors hovering over it, and ever ready to burst upon the creatures of his fancy with whom he has peopled it. The natural passions have no scope in his writings, He celebrates no real and healthy love; his muse's wing droops and flags when it nears earth, It is among phantoms, ghosts, ghouls, echoes of dead joys, that she dwells, seeking to veil the past even as she unfolds it. It has been remarked that Poe has ever dealt with love with absolute purity of feeling. This, however, was easy, for the love he celebrates is love for the disembodied — a yearning for an individual reunion, denied and hopeless. He is, par excellence, the poet of remorse, and dream, and morbid phantasy.

And yet it would be wrong to say of Poe that he does not write from experiences that originally had their root in natural affections and passions. It is as though a nature — solicitous of affection, keenly sensitive, seeking a natural ground to repose on, had been disappointed, and, all the genial current turned backward, had exhausted itself in the vain effort to draw satisfaction from im ages, shadows, phantoms. He conjures up before himself constantly a spiritual world, but one in which the individual affections are nipped and die, and can be recovered only by physical re-embodiment. Therefore he escapes from it, as if by sudden rebound, into a gross materialism that regards death as simple separation, with no hope of reunion; while the imagination retreats into mere dream, and establishes for itself there a pseudo-spiritual world, which it forces upon the intellect. Such tales as “Ligeia” and “Morella” are thus definite embodiments of his creed — a creed which found most logical but most mournful exhibition in “Eureka” — a piece of the most painful pantheism ever proclaimed. According to it, the individual life exists merely for the world-soul, and reabsorption into it, with him, as with the Brahmins, is the only rest possible to human creatures — a dull nirwana.* It has been well said that “Ligeia” and ‘’Morella” commemorate a psychical attraction which transcends the disolution [[dissolution]] of the mortal body and over-sweeps the grave; the passionate soul of the departed transfusing itself through the organ of an other, to manifest its deathless love; but it should have been added that this is regarded by Poe as tho only form in which it could thus manifest affection or even consciousness. Out of this conviction springs that haunting remembrance and that remorseful pity for the dead which form such distinguishing features of Poe's writings; a vein inseparable from his most individual moods, It is the dominating tone which imparts even to the sweetest of his lyrics a haunting horror hardly in keeping, one often feels, with the clear and graceful music of the form. The penchant for the horrible which is thus generated does not exist in him for itself merely, but in default of the natural affections and passions, the instinct of which has escaped from him as if by reaction. ‘When the young student still in his teens haunted the graveyard where Mrs. Helen Stannard was buried, and crept as near as he could to the corner where she lay, assuring himself of some kind of communion with her by the mere fact of physical proximity, and lingering the longest when the winds roared and the rain fell, we have the first indications of a tendency which remained to the end, and grew until it became excessive by being artificially stimulated and ‘wrought upon for purposes of art, which, we must admit, it occasionally did some thing to degrade. Let our readers turn to that “Ligeia” to which we have just referred — where the soul of the dead love takes possession of the body of the dying wife, transforming it to the former bodily likeness of the other — and we are certain that, in the influence it produces, they will have to confess themselves the victims of a kind of literary legerdemain, which at length will come to use freely for its purposes the most repellent and unallowed secrets of life. The natural result of such a process long persisted in is that the very facts of life that are thus travestied in a pseudo-spiritual atmosphere — the creation of the phantasy — come to be disbelieved in; and, sooner or later, the cynical element asserts itself, sucking down the last relics of natural reverence — as is all too plainly seen, for instance, in the tale of “King Pest” — a story of the London Plague, in which all the ghastly horrors of that time are made to masquerade in oddest guise before us. The cynicism, which, by consciously shutting off the over-stimulated fancy from real life and its concerns, as it had before unconsciously been shut out by the environment of a pseudo-spiritual atmosphere, cannot but empty life at last of its common hopes and softening mysteries, to set in their place skepticism — which, unfortunately, with Poe issued in an identification of the body with the soul, and a refusal to view them apart, even in view of artistic effect.

This is the source of that weird painfulness and fascination which characterize Poe's greatest poems, as well as the more imaginative of his prose tales. Even in that wonderfully musical, richly-dight lyric of “Annabel Lee,” where regret and despair seem to soften themselves in the uprising conviction of a perpetuated relationship, we find that this materialism obtains to destroy the effect of one of the most graceful fancies in all literature: —

Here we see it is the soul that is merely poetical and figurative; the body that is real and individual. For be it noted that when, in another stanza, he does make use of the term “soul,”it ia strangely, to confase our common ideas of the ministry of angels in relation to the dead and the after-world. Angels and demons are with him alike only messengers of separation and evil. Listen:

Heaven and future were, after all, to Poe, nothing but figure or fancy, a world of dreams, “the limbo of lunary souls,” ot the best. He speaks of Aidenn, but lays a light grasp upon it. It is something to be caught hold of by the fancy, used for the sake of symbol, and the drawing forth into sustained sweetness of chosen metaphors, and poetic turns of phrase. It is hardly more than this, and his persistent use of it in this way is one of the most characteristic things about his genius and its development. For here we may see how the strange, unearthly sweetness of his poems — a rare something, indefinable, and only to be named as a troubled glamor of moonlight — traces itself after all to the same root as the ghastly and horrible in his prose tales, This idea once clearly seized leads in our view to the very centre of Poe's secret both in life and work. He himself significantly confessed that the visions which visited him impressed him with the profounder awe than any reality. “I regard these visions,” he says, “even as they arise, with an awe which in some measure moderates or tranquillizes the ecstacy — I so regard them through a conviction that this ecstacy, in itself, is of a character supernal to human nature — is a glimpse of the spirit's outer world.” We have then to regard him as a dreamer, as one who derives what practical rules he recognizes, and seeks to live by, from a world that lies apart. Hence that element of solitariness, combined with on idea of unrest, which has struck the most differently constituted critics on a study of his writings. The cup of bliss — of earthly bliss — may be at his lips, but he dashes it aside in remorseful haste at thought of the dead, who may be wronged by his acquiescence.

The North American Review — with which fo the end Poe remained in angry feud, heaping sarcasm and contempt so liberally upon all Bostonians, that his array of ene?mies is not to be wondered at — declared of his poems that they were “rich and elabo?rate pieces of art, wanting in the vis vitæ which alone can make of words living things.” A short-sighted criticism truly; for, considering the remote and abstract forms of feeling with which he chiefly concerns himself, he has certainly communi?cated a burning vitality, so that the reader is thrilled precisely as the writer was thrilled when under the first heat of his conception. Mr, Peter Bayne surely shows more of insight when, in his essay on Tennyson, he classes Poe with those who have scattered imaginative spells rather than furnished elaborate imaginative pictures.

“Imaginative spells” — that is the proper word; and not otherwise is it with the more strictly imaginative of his prose tales, where the initiative is distinctly ideal or psychological, Grant his assumption, he is consist?ent in his development — his mood sustains itself; the spell is adequate and commands you. If you start with him, you must go on to the end, tacitly acknowledging a unity and pervading self-consistency, and relinquishing yourself for the nonce to his guidance, Granted that, in some instances, his conception is morbid and objectionable, yet his mode of treatment is artistic, and fault is to be found, not with his treatment, but with his theme. Of course we must confess that Poe often overdid the morbid and horrible. The life of literature depends on the return upon common interests — just as amusements and excitements are impossible without common bread; and he is the greatest writer who supplies all, But that is no reason why an author is to be condemned merely because he supplies only one element, and does not concern himself with others.

Some critics, as we have seen, have spoken of Poe as though he had no affinity for the people among whom he dwelt; yet it may be said that, in one respect, he was a representative American. No people on earth view matters more practically, more acutely, than the Americans — dealing with those around them as so many counters merely — and yet no people are more prone to find relief and escape from excess of materialistic devotion, and of overweening calculation in spiritualistic rapture and ideal indulgence. Poe's ingenious, if perverted, practicality, which enables him, by dint of symbol, to solve, in his own way, the most difficult problems, while yet he retreats suddenly from them into dream and phantasy, has something more than an individual significance, more especially when taken in connection with his peculiar pantheistic skepticism, and his feverish curiosity and ambition, The dependence of mind on special bodily conditions was never more aptly illustrated. He excels in the power of associating the most exceptional physical conditions with the most exalted and ideal feelings, so as to produce that “eeriness” which can be accepted as a pleasurable relief only by s people of exceptionally high-wrought organization, (in which climate may play its own part.) In all this — in the cold calculation, in the “exalé” feeling alternating with it, and yet in the solitariness and sudden escape from common interests, on a sphere of dream, rather than of spirit proper, Poe is distinctly American; and the form of his work could hardly have been what it is, if he had not been so. He believed more in the realm of fact from which he retreated, than in that of dream into which he made his escape; and the root of his unrest, and self-condemnation, and fevered remorse, lay here, precisely as the unrest and dissatisfaction of American life may be said to lie, in a materialism which intrudes itself under all its religious, or rather spiritualistic, reactions, and too often makes them seem hollow.

It needs to be said, too, that the fact that Poe so fails at any point sympathetically to touch real life himself, and so to qualify his dominant moods, suggests a defect in him fatal to his taking the highest rank. He is destitute of humor. He sometimes essays wit, but it is only verbal. He ia a dreamer, and a dreamer so absorbed in his dream that real life remains shadowy and distant, and no contact with it can shake him out of his own fancies, or tickle him for a moment into o hearty laugh. “They smile, but laugh no more;” and the smile is a smile of individual self-assertion, of the sort that is not hateful only because it is transcendently indifferent. He is an egotist of a kind that would be most unattractive in real life, unless, as in his case, the egotism ia associated with peculiar gifts. His lack of interest in ordinary human affairs is physiognomic; he dwells shrouded in a world of fancy and symbol, What concerns [column 3:] him first, even in criticizing poetry, is the symbol which stands between him and the essential truth sought to be expressed. The more real and human the truth, the more persistently it would seem does the symbol assert is claim to his attention, him and the steady report of the real world. Even when he does receive his initiative from actual occurrences, he must withdraw the facts into the “mid region”of symbol or cipher, and so work out his abstract theory.

As it is essential for Poe to isolate, and to the facts of life he is content to receive and to deal with, it is inevitable that the more complete and satisfactory his performance, the more should it shut out mystery and the sense of it from the mind of the producer, and to some extent also from the mind of the reader. Thus it comes about that Poe's analytic art may be said to empty the real world of mystery, and make it half mechanical, as “Eureka” — in which the universe is treated very much as in one of his sketches he treats the automaton chess-player — in contestably proves. The assumption of the majesty of the individual intellect supervenes. It has been well said, therefore, that ‘this proud assumption of the superiority of the individual soul was but an expression of its recoil from the haunting phantoms of death and annihilation.” The only religion possible to Poe was worship of intellect, or self-worship, to which all beauty perceived in nature or in art is tributary. Both as thinker and as artist, he was thus materialistic and pantheistic, and stands as the representative of a tendency of the time. Especially is he representative of that assumption of knowledge, that unwillingness to admit mystery, and that individual self assertion, which are more and more becoming characteristic of American life and thought, sucking away the reverence which is so essential to real greatness, national or individual.

That fatal withdrawal from the healthy interest which sympathetic human association affords, was not, with Poe, the result of circumstances, We have seen it pointed out (and apparently Baudelaire had the same idea in his mind when he wrote that passage about the United States being a prison to Poe) that Poe's inherited aristocratic tastes were offended by the lack of grace and beauty in the social circumstances surrounding him. Not so. Place such a nature where you will, for it to live freely is to dream. Circumstances as correctives are repellant to it. Its fatality is to be in opposition; for the ‘powers that be” are doom ed to be contemptuously ignored by it, until they come forward with their demands. Therefore we think ourselves justified in saying that the “common-sense order of the world” would have made any place a prison to Poe as well as the United States, And we may note that here Poe radically differs from Hawthorne. Hawthorne, along with his wistful, dreamy far-sightedness, had the sagacious patience with fact, the discerning shrewdness and quiet observation that enabled him constantly to seek and to enjoy the verification and correction of his own impressions from new stand-points, and to make canny, humorous note of the dis parities of the world and humanity. Hawthorne is no dreamer in the sense we mean when we say that Poe is so. He delighted to recover his normal relations, if we may speak so, after his art-work. Those wonderfully realistic sketches, especially that prefixed to “The Scarlet Letter,” no less than his “Note-books,” abundantly attest this, The necessity was never so much as felt by Poe. It is in this sense that he is void of conscience, as a man, so far, and not as an artist.

Then, again, the totally different ways in which the two men view the spiritual world, would of itself be conclusive when once pointed out. Who that has ever read that passage in Hawthorne's “Note-book,”where he relieves a besetting doubt by the conviction that in the next world we shall be able freely to communicate ourselves — where the “Babel of words” will not stand between soul and soul — can forget it? And where in the range of all Poe's writings can you find trace of the expression of such a healthy human religious faith? Poe seems to draw no satisfaction from the thought — if he ever entertains it — of the freedom that shall come to the enfranchised spirit, or from the compensations of Providence and of spiritual relation; he falls back for fleeting satisfaction, rather, on his individual dreams, or if he escapes from them at all, it is only to seek a momentary suggestion from elements of sensuous beauty. Hawthorne, in a word, had faith — faith in men, faith in a future — Poe had not; and the re morse and hopelessness of his prose as well as of his poetry — qualities radical and essential to them — at once and decidedly differentiate his art from that of Hawthorne, in spite of some superficial points of external resemblance.

Another very noticable [[noticeable]] point is that, whereas Poe suffered almost chronically from “low spirits” — “blue devils” as his friend, Mr. White, graphically called them — and was hurried by reaction from joy to sorrow, from despondency to ecstacy, Hawthorne, on his own confession, lived a life of equable content, seldom visited by low spirits, And, in spite of the problems with which he occupied himself, this is not so surprising when we reflect how he kept him self en rapport with life, eschewed solitude, and regarded nothing as more healthful for a literary man than to have much to do with those who could not sympathize with his peculiar views and employments.

We had intended to follow out this comparison into much fuller instance and detail. Space forbids; but it is easy to verify the suggestion here given, which we trust many of our readers may be tempted to do for themselves — at the same time gaining more intimate acquaintance with the style and thought of two of the greatest masters of the English language in recent times.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 2, column 1:]

* The following is a characteristic note to “Eureka,” found pencilled in the poet's copy: — “The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity ceases at once when we 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 intelligence (that is of the universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.”