Text: Curtis Hidden Page, “Poe in France,” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. 88, whole no. 2272, January 14, 1909, pp. 32-34

[page 32, column 2:]

POE IN FRANCE.

Poe appeals to the French even more than to Americans, because the essence of his work is logic — logic entirely divorced from reality, and seeming to rise superior to reality. The French of

the Parnassian epoch especially, found in him 2 kindred spirit because of his devotion to art for art's sake. The lesser, or lower, Parnassians and the Decadents loved him for his perversity and his grotesque horrors. The Symbolists found in him their ideal, because his work so often seems to have much greater significance than it really possesses.

I.

Poe's name first became known in France through a lawsuit between two newspapers. One of them had received a story called “Les Crimes de la Rue Morgue,” and had published it without knowing that it was not an original work. The second published a similar story, called “L’Orang-Outang,” and, in the suit which followed, it was brought out that both stories were independent versions of an English tale by a certain Edgar Poe. This roused interest in him; a translation of several of his tales, by Madame Meunier, was published in 1846; and in 1853 appeared two tales, translated by Borghers.

The accepted literary tradition, that Baudelaire was the first to make Poe known in France, dates back to Gautier's “Rapport sur le progrés de la poésie francaise depuis 1830,” published in 1867, in which he says, speaking of Baudelaire: “Sa familiarité de traducteur avec Edgar Poé, ce bizarre génie d’outre-mer, qu’il a le premier fait connaitre en France, a beaucoup influé sur son esprit.” In spite of the early translations just mentioned, Gautier is on the whole right. It is entirely due to Baudelaire that Poe has become practically a French author (his works being almost as familiar to all generations of Frenchmen since 1856 as those of any native writer), and that he has come to be counted among the exceedingly rare foreigners who are naturalized citizens of the French republic of letters. Baudelaire devoted the best part of his life to his translation of Poe. He consciously prepared himself for this particular work. From the time when he first became acquainted with some fragments of Poe's work, in 1846, he haunted the English cafés, spent his time by preference with any one who could speak English, from men of letters to coachmen and jockeys, besieged every American whom he could come at, for information about Poe, and, after four years of such preparation, began the translations to which he devoted the following fifteen years. He seems to have believed in a sort of mysterious connection between his own spirit and Poe's. “I could tell you,” he wrote to Armand Fraisse, “of something still more strange and almost [column 3:] incredible. In 1846, or ‘47, I became acquainted with some fragments of Poe's; they moved me in singular fashion. I found among them, believe me or not, as you please, poems and stories which I had conceived myself, though in a vague and confused way, ill thought out; and which Poe had wrought into perfect works.” Baudelaire's first translation, of a single story by Poe, was published in 1848. In 1855, a series of tales appeared in the newspaper Le Pays, and these were collected in 1856, in a volume, under the title “Histoires extraordinaires.” The “Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires” appeared in 1857, “Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym” in 1858, “Eureka” in 1864, and “Les Histoires grotesques et sérieuses” in 1865, only two years before Baudelaire's death. These translations have become so identified with Baudelaire that they are regularly republished with the editions of his original work, and they have also appeared in many separate editions.

Many other writers of distinction have attempted to render Poe into French. Besides the translations by Baudelaire, there are as many as twenty-three other versions, each including more or less of Poe's work; and among their authors are such men as the critic Hennequin, the poets Mallarmé and Rabbe, and the novelist J. H. Rosny. As compared with this devotion of the French to Poe, I know of only four different translations in Spanish, three in Italian, and one in modern Greek (mentioned by Lauvriére in his thesis on Poe). Among all these, Baudelaire's version has remained the standard. He has followed Poe with absolute literalness, line by line, and almost word by word (so far as his knowledge of English, which was here and there a little at fault, allowed him), and yet has made of his translation a living work. That it possesses all the qualities of an original is perhaps sufficiently proved by the influence it has exerted. As some one has said, it made Poe a figure in the world's literature.

II.

Not only as translator, but as critic, Baudelaire forced Poe upon the attention of his countrymen, willing or unwilling. The essay, “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages,” later used as an introduction in the “Histoires extraordinaires,” appeared first in the Revue de Paris early in 1852. In this introduction Baudelaire makes American materialism alone responsible for all the misfortunes of Poe. This “great gas-lighted barbarity” (that is, America) crushed, stifled, murdered him. The United States was simply a vast prison to him, in which he rushed back and forth with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe more aromatic air. “All his inner and spiritual life, [page 33:] whether drunkard's or poet's, was one constant effort to escape from this antipathetic atmosphere,” in which, according to Baudelaire, “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny, the tyranny of the beasts, a zoécracy. Poe, in the midst of “this seething mass of mediocrity and commonplace,” cared only for the exceptional, and painted it with faultless and terrifying artistry:

Poe est Vécrivain des nerfs. The last phrase, be it noted, is meant for praise. One thing more is supremely praiseworthy in Poe, according to Baudelaire: Poe not only has no lesson to teach, but he has no purpose or aim in his art except that art itself.

Many of the later appreciations of Poe in France were modelled directly upon Baudelaire's, and no French writer has departed very much from the conception of Poe as thus first revealed to France. The recognized authorities of French criticism have not dealt with him at all. Saint-Beuve, whom Baudelaire repeatedly besought to devote one of his Monday articles to Poe, promised to do so; but the article was never written. Taine wrote to Baudelaire: “I greatly admire Poe; he is the type of the Germanic-Englishman with deep intuitions and an amazingly overwrought nervous system. He reminds one of Heine.” But Taine, like Sainte-Beuve, failed to write the “weighty article” in Poe's favor which Baudelaire had demanded of him. All the critics of a little lower order — especially, of course, the impressionists — have, however, found their account in Poe. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote four essays on him, and in all of them treated him as “the most beautiful thing which that off-scouring of humanity [meaning, of course, America] has produced.” Poe, stranded on this “desert waste,” was “trampled to death by the elephantine feet of American materialism.” Villiers de lI’Isle-Adam took up the same refrain, and Péladan, in his introduction to Mourey's translation of the poems, once more attacked this land “without civilization, without art, without nationality, without a language,” as the “murderer of the greatest genius of the nineteenth century.”

More worthy treatment was accorded Poe's genius by Emile Hennequin, himself perhaps the greatest intellectual genius among recent critics, whose first literary work was a translation of some of Poe's tales, and whose last essay, [column 2:] written just before his premature death, was devoted to Poe. More than the others, he appreciates Poe's intellectuality, and he is less often than the others a dupe of Poe's pretended hallucinations, realizing that Poe was even greater as a fakir than as a conjurer, and that, compared with Baudelaire, Poe was (in the cruel but true phrase of Henry James), “much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.” Other serious critics have treated Poe less analytically and more generously: Teodor de Wyzéwa, in the Revue des Deux Mondes and in his volume, “Ecrivains étrangers,” calls Poe's verse the most magnificent which the English language possesses, and his poems masterpieces of emotion and music. Jules Lemaitre, in a curious passage of his “Dialogue des morts,” which seems to have been taken with all seriousness by his countrymen, but in which one may suspect at least a touch of malice, makes Poe say:

Of the critics who belong to the Symbolistic school, Camille Mauclair and Charles Morice are the most important. They are naturally both of them devoted to Poe. Morice, in his “Littérature de tout a l’heure,” the chief critical manifesto of the school, includes Poe with Chateaubriand, Goethe, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Wagner, in the parallelogram of forces that have produced modern literature in France. For him the true greatness of Poe consists in this:

Such is the esteem felt for Poe by various schools in France.

IV.

Poe's direct influence upon creative writing in France was perhaps less than might be expected from the esteem in which he was held. It is, of course, difficult to measure, especially since it is mingled at first with that of Hoffmann, Heine, and De Quincey; and even of Anne Radcliffe and Maturin, whom Gautier mentions in the same breath with him; and later, with that of Wagner [column 3:] and the Pre-Raphaelites, who, with Poe, were the foreign masters of the Symbolists. To join the names of Poe and Wagner seems a little odd to us, but it is constantly done by critics and poets of the Symbolistic school in France. Both, at least, are artists in sound, and to the French mind both seemed vaguely to suggest meanings that might possibly be of infinite significance (which was the ambition of the Symbolists). Baudelaire himself published his “Fleurs du mal” between the “Histoires extraordinaires” and the “Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym.” I find in them very little of Poe's influence, and according to the latest verdict of scholarship (see Louis Betz's “Studien zur vergleichenden Litteratur-Geschichte”) this is natural, since most of them were probably written by the middle of the decade of the forties, or at any rate before Baudelaire became completely absorbed in Poe. Many of the poems were published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1855, before the first volume of the “Histoires extraordinaires.” Only in one of his later poems have I found any direct borrowing from Poe, and that is probably unconscious. There is a rather close resemblance (suggested by Betz) between the ideas of Baudelaire's sonnet “Le Flambeau vivant,” in which we find the lines:

and Poe's second “To Helen”:

The complete contrast between Baudelaire's verse and that of Poe may be sufficiently indicated in Baudelaire's own words: “Il n’y a pas dans toute son ceuvre un seul passage qui ait trait a la lubricité, ou méme aux jouissances sensuelles.”’

Leconte de Lisle was too great a poet and too strong a personality to be influenced by Poe. But the lesser men of the Parnassian school found in him a brother, and the Decadents, partiy on account of his association with Baudelaire, took him for their adopted father. Barbey d’Aurevilly called him rather oddly the Byron of Bohemia. Morice, more than oddly, found a close analogy between Poe and Pascal. Most of the Decadents, and some of the Symbolists, failed to see that Poe was not a victim of delusions, but a creator of illusions. Poe was one of the chief patron saints of the minor hangers-on of the Decadent and Symbolistic schools — of those who gathered at the Chat Noir, undoubtedly named from Poe's story, and of those [page 34:] still lesser Bohemians who delighted in the cheaply gruesome Cabarets de la Mort, so popular in Paris during the early nineties.

Mallarmé, for a time the chief of the Symbolistic school, saw the greater sides of Poe. Better than any one else in France, he appreciated Poe's one sure claim to immortality, the sheer beauty of his very few great poems. Better than any one else, Mallarmé has rendered these into French. Baudelaire had translated only one of the poems, “The Raven.” Mallarmé's first published work was a new translation of “The Raven,” superior to Baudelaire's in almost every point. Baudelaire, for instance, renders “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven,” by “Bien que ta téte soit sans huppe et sans cimier”’; Mallarmé gives us “Quoique ta créte soit chue et rase.” Only once does he distinctly fall below Poe in his choice of words, where (like Baudelaire) he renders “bosom's core” by “au fond de mon sein.” Only once does he let his own love of the unusual in expression triumph over his faithfulness to Poe, when he changes “By the heaven that bends above us’”’ into “Par les cieux sur nous &cents;pars.”’ Mallarmé also has the intelligence to know that “Ulalume,” “For Annie,” and many others of Poe's poems are superior to “The Raven.” Unfortunately, his translations are in prose, and so much the larger part of Poe's effect is lost, in spite of the care and even genius which he shows in his choice of words. It was in 1888 that he published, in a beautiful volume illustrated by Manet, twenty of Poe's poems. The only complete translation of the poems into French, so far as I know, is that published in the following year by Mourey, who has also translated Swinburne.

V.

The influence of Poe is somewhat more evident in Baudelaire's prose than in his verse. Yet here, too, the resemblance is slight. Baudelaire even seems to me to owe much more to De Quincey than to Poe. Less intellectual than Poe, and far more sensuous, he could reproduce Poe's creations admirably, but could not imitate them. On the other hand, he could, and did, imitate De Quincey. Only in “Mon Ceur mis a nu” do I find direct echoes of Poe — both in its autobiographic method (more sincere, however, and less creative, than Poe's); and in phrases like this: “Au moral comme au physique, j’ai toujours eu la sensation du gouffre”’; or this: “Tout enfant, j’ai senti dans mon ceur deux sentiments contradictoires: |l’horreur de la vie et l’extase de la vie.” This is true Poe, but rather by detail of technical method than by intellectual creation of substance.

Others have imitated Poe better than Baudelaire, in almost every class of short story, from the pseudo-scientific tale of adventure to the wildest exaggerations [column 2:] of the grotesque and horrible; from Jules Verne's last work, “Le Sphinx des glaces,” which is a sequel to Poe's “Arthur Gordon Pym,” to the “Contes pour les assassins” of Maurice Beaubourg. And between these extremes are to be found such masters as Richepin (especially, for instance, in his “Morts bizarres”’); as Marcel Schwob, in many a collection; and as Maupassant himself, whose briefer tales, like “Une Apparition,” descend directly from Poe, and whose story of the dead Schopenhauer's false teeth might well have been written by Poe himself. Instances abound. Chief among them are the “Contes cruels,” “Nouveaux Contes cruels,” and “Histoires insolites” of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Maeterlinck, by the way, was once so unguarded as to say: “I owe all I have done to Villiers.” One might mention also, as in the lineage of Poe, the “Contes fantastiques” of such gentle and harmless authors as Erckmann-Chatrian; but these belong rather to a collateral branch, with Hoffmann for their direct ancestor.

The names of Hoffmann and Poe are often linked together as forerunners of the modern tale. But certainly in France, and perhaps everywhere, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Poe's influence has been far greater than Hoffmann's. To my mind, the most remarkable thing about Poe as a mere prose-writer (for I believe his poetry alone can be of great permanent value) is his anticipation of the modern desire culminating in such tales as Kipling's “Wireless,” for a pseudo-scientific supernaturalism to replace the mystic, symbolic, or merely romantic supernaturalism which Hoffmann and all his contemporaries give us. Poe even took some of his plots from Hoffmann; but where Hoffmann had made a subject mystical and vague, Poe made it mysterious and intelligible. This does not mean that Poe is superior; but it does mean that he is both more modern and more French. To sum up, he is an inventive, not an imaginative, genius. And he is vastly superior to Hoffmann, and likewise to all his American rivals for fame, as an artist pure and simple, whether in the short story, or in verse. Therefore he is the one American writer who has been accepted and acclaimed by the majority of intelligent Frenchmen.

CURTIS HIDDEN PAGE.

New York.