Text: Anonymous, “J. S. Redfield's Books,” White Man's Newspaper (New York, NY), vol. 1, no. 1, May 1851, p. 7, cols. 1-3

[page 7, column 1:]

J. S. REDFIELD'S BOOKS.

The works of the late Edgar Allan Poe, in three volumes. Published by J. S. Redfield, Clinton Hall, New York.

MR. REDFIELD has rendered considerable service to the literary world, by bringing out this neat and well arranged edition of the principal writings of Mr. POE. They appear under the editorship of Dr. Griswold, who was appointed Mr. Poe's literary executor. The work has been published several months, and gone into general circulation. Opinions have been divided on the subject of Mr. Poe's character and merits as an author, but there seems to have been very little dispute on the subject of his being entitled to a prominent place among the literary men of the present age.

Gifted with original genius, and inheriting a delicate physical organization, the roughnesses of life subjected him continually to irritations and mortifying disappointments and collisions; indulging as he did, too, from time to time, in habits of intoxication, venting his spleen without stint on friend and foe, who crossed his track; one hour transported with demoniac rage toward a man who had done him no injury, at another, inflamed with even a self sacrificing love for a man who had proved one of his worst enemies; living in a Utopia and of his own creation, peopling it with beings of his own wild fancy; eluding as he did, while living, as his works do now that he is dead, almost the possibility of clear and analytical criticism — it is not strange that he has proved an enigma to his cotemporaries, nor that he will to posterity, for he was from the beginning an enigma to himself.

A few things, however, may be said in regard to this author, which are likely to meet the concurrence of those who read his works with care. Mr. Poe was gifted with undoubted original poetic genius. There was nothing commonplace about him; his idiosyncrasies of mind were as great, and striking, as his peculiarities of character. He neither thought nor acted like other men. He was not satisfied with filling the common measure of imagination or reality. He was in all things, except perhaps his warm devoted love for his mother, a madman; and he loved her with a wildness of passion which was substituted for that calmer, more abiding and glowing sentiment of filial affection, that might better have taken its place.

Mr. Poe's writings have been subjected to a great deal of criticism, and from the most competent hands there has been accorded to him probably more originality of creation, for some of his productions, than to any one of our American Poets. With his great genius, and a better regulated life, he would doubtless have contributed in the end to advance the domain of poetry, beyond any other man of his time. But a fatal gleam of madness, — shot across his soul by some ill starred influence — presided over his life. Enough, was never enough for him — enthusiasm was not enthusiastic enough for him; wildness of passion became the frenzy of mad raving, and all the degrees of comparison by which the laws of light and shade and feeling are measured by calmer intellects, were made to give place to a fire-world admeasurement, which whelmed in one chaotic mass, all the thoughts and passions which belong to the soul.

It was so in his tales and stories. Perhaps in some of these pieces he displays greater poetic power and dramatic genius than in his poetry. His Mesmeric Revelation and Facts in the case of Mr. Valdemar, no sane person would like to read after dark. He delighted in the horrible; and when he gave (as he almost always did) free scope to his wild fancy, he converted the universe itself into a witched cauldron, over which his own wayward fancy presided, like Shakspeare's wild night ghosts. Charged, as he doubtless was, to the highest possible degree, with electricity, magnetism, or whatever we please to call that terrific power which gives some men such fearful controll over others; he creates passions that do not exist in any well regulated mind, and portrays scenes through which no sane being ever went, and over them all he breathes the demoniac spell of his own spiritual and unearthly imagination. Poor Poe was from first to last conscious of impending madness: he expected to die crazy, and he looked upon the world, and even the universe, as his madhouse. He was so mad that he knew he was insane, as the most experienced drunkards tell us is the case with them in the wildest ravings of delirium. They know that they are raving; whereas, a man does not know that he is intoxicated when he is dead drunk. But this dead drunk process, if carried far enough, brings a man through on the other side, where he sees the gleam which gives him consciousness, and he finds out his position by the law of repulsion and contraction, and not by the principle of analogy or affinities.

There are some genial, calm and sweet passages in the history of Poe's erratic mind, and in the whole range of English literature we have never found anything of the kind more touching, calm and beautiful, than “Annabel Lee.”

ANNABEL LEE.

But those of his works which probably are destined to be the most short lived of all are, as in so many other cases where the same rule holds true, the very ones which gave him his greatest notoriety during his life, and which have been read most since his death — “The Literati, Some Opinions about Autorial Merits and Demerits, with Occasional Words of Personality.” We could quote many passages from these seventy seven pieces which another man could hardly have written. Surpassing almost everybody, as Mr. Poe did, when he either chose to be or was able to be an honest critic, when he set himself about it, or happen ed to be in the vein to speak properly, he could analyze the mind or the works of an author as the chemist analyzes material substances. He could detect with almost infallible scrutiny the strength and the [column 2:] weakness of his writer; he could shoot by an electric flash of perceptive gleam through the very heart of an author. A single drop of ink from his pen fell upon the uncertain substance of autorial mind like a decomposing drop of acid from the vial of the alchemist. Every thing exterior, foreign and extrinsic crumbled to ashes or evaporated in smoke which cleared away in an instant, and there remained the naked residuum which by such a process revealed to the author he laid in the crucible precisely his intrinsic proportions.

To change the image; he could take a warm human body lying on his dissecting table, and with his keen scalpel mercilessly strip the skin and flesh, leaving a skeleton, not like those from which every thing has been scraped to the bone or decomposed by chloride of lime, but his skeleton lay complete with every muscle or the shadow of it, tendon, cord, nerve and scarlet vein. The being seemed still to be alive; and every nerve was dancing with exquisite thrills of neuralgic pain; every tendon was stretched to its utmost, as though it were on the rack; for there was little humanity about POE. He hated mankind because he was miserable; he loved to divide carotid arteries, and when he took them up it was not so much to save the life of the owner as to display the skill of the surgeon.

We never read POE'S criticisms without remembering a story which a friend of SIR ASTLEY COOPER once told us. When SIR ASTLEY went over to Paris on a professional trip to look into the French hospitals and see what progress the French surgeons had made in operative surgery, the following conversation took place between him and a very celebrated French man of the same profession. After many things had passed between these two illustrious men, “monsieur” inquired of SIR ASTLEY how many times he had performed a certain operation. What that ope ration was we have now forgotten, but of course it was one of the most difficult belonging to the art. He remarked that he had performed the opera thirteen times.

“But, SIR ASTLEY,” replied the Frenchman, “I make him perform one hundred fifty time.”

“How many times were you successful?” asked SIR ASTLEY.

“Oh,” replied M., “I was always triumphant.”

“You are very fortunate then,” answered the Englishman, “for in spite of all my care, out of thirteen cases I lost five!”

“Oh,” said the Frenchman, “ I lose him all; they all die; but I make one grand operation every time! And,” continued the Frenchman, “ it was one greater, monsieur, des operations are very brillant [[brilliant]].”

“So I perceive,” quietly rejoined Sir Astley with a smile, which of course was lost upon the French man, and they proceeded to the discussion of other matters.

It was very much the same with Poe : his operations were very brillant [[brilliant]], but his subjects generally died in the process. We might give many illustrations of this, but it is not necessary, since they have been circulated so generally through the papers and in this complete edition of Mr. Redfield. Dr. Channing defined genius to be a calm self-regulating power. In this sense Poe was not a man of genius; perhaps in this sense Byron, Shelley and Dean Swift would be stripped of all their claims to this exalted endow ment. But after all it is doubtless true that genius, in the highest sense it has ever appeared in the world, can accept the qualification of Dr. Channing ; he was himself one of the most eminent illustrations of its truth of which we have any knowledge. Probably at no period of Dr. Channing's mature life was there an hour in which he did not hold supreme controll over his own intellect and all its operations.

It was so to a very great extent with Lord Bacon, who even in the midst of political tergiversations and corruptions on the bench was calmly and steadily maturing his great philosophical system. It was so with SHAKSPEARE, who never loses his self controll. He walks as steadily and with as much composure along the beetling Dover Cliff, where crazy Lear hangs in agony and raving, as he does in the bed chamber of Henry inditing those matchless words to Sleep. There are ten thousand gilded eminences in the moral and intellectual world, as there are in the physical and there is a kind of genius which SHAKSPEARE illustrates more strikingly than any other man that has ever lived, which can tread firmly and composedly along them where it even makes us start to see a wild bird light, for fear the tottering mass will fall. And there is Dante, who even in the wildest wanderings of his wayward life, never loses the thread of that vast composition which the Italians call “ The Divine Comedy.” And Milton, too, in the terrors of a bloody revolution, elaborated from hour to hour and moment to moment through twenty years the grandest composition of the English language. And there, too, is Homer, who, in misery, destitution, vagrancy and exile, blind and cold and hungry, without possessions, without friends, almost driven to madness, works steadily on with that divine epic which to the present time is regarded by most men as the mightiest structure human genius has ever yet reared.

There is a class of men that lie one stratum below in the intellectual creation: one of the most distinguished of whom is BYRON, for although in the midst of the volcanic workings of his own intellect, he holds the helm with gigantic and firmly fixed grasp, yet he was wayward; he knew it, he felt it, he confessed it. The vagaries of passion, whether in Don Juan or Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chilion or the Giaour, only revealed the secret workings of the writer's heart. Another stratum below come another class, and here we reach Poe, who had less controll of him self still, but who has produced in fitful intervals creations which would have made Lord Byron start, and such prose as Poe wrote Lord Byron never could have written. It would have been less difficult for Poe under other circumstances to have written Lord Byron's poetry.

Poe's writings are likely to live for a long period. Dr. GRISWOLD has deserved well of the literary world for his share of the task, and it was not small, although it has turned out to be a thankless one. To act as the literary executor of a mad scholar is no joke. It was no common place occupation for GRISWOLD to perform his task so well, and common place happened to have been the poison of POE'S mind; he died at last under the surfeit of it. It was the bane and incubus of his life. Some fierce attacks have been made on Dr. GRISWOLD for the manner in which he discharged his duty; but for the most part we discovered little justice in them at the time, and shafts of this kind generally fall harmlessly against the object at which they are aimed. The editorship of Poe's works is not the assailable point of Dr. GRISWOLD'S literary career; he has heavier sins than these to answer for, upon which in due time we may arraign him. But they are not the sins of which he has generally been accused, nor are they of so serious a nature, taking his entire literary performances into consideration, as some of our readers might suppose from this remark we have just made. In a review of Dr. GRISWOLD'S principal work found in another column there are some clearer specifications given, but we are inclined to think that no other man could have per formed the task so well of collecting and editing the writings of Poe.

Take, then, these three volumes, all in all, and they [column 3:] are but a chaotic mass of half poisoned pears — almost harmless now, since, by the death of their unhappy creator, they have lost all power of chemical combination with the active elements of the age. Whatever is malignant in his writings has already grown distasteful; whatever was inhuman will die, for, heave be praised, we have reached a better time than that of DEAN SWIFT, when satire was in the as cendant and truth retreated from its presence. Those men now living who wish to write what a future generation will read, must remember that humanity has become a sacred thing and that literary judgments, to be affirmed by the jury of mankind, must be impartial. And yet there are ten thousand bright and beautiful things in these three volumes which will make them worth preserving, and they will be preserved and read for a long period to come.