∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
William Coyle
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
An Attack on Poe in 1864
ONE MORE vilification of Poe added to those by Thomas Dunn English, Charles F. Briggs, Rufus W. Griswold, and others would be of no particular interest. The lines below are mildly significant, however — not for the ghoulish fact that they were printed fifteen years after Poe's death but for the statement that Poe had published criticism of the author's paintings.
Come! be by searching truth's tribunal tried!
Come forth! if you’ve got sober since you died,
You, drunken mad-dog, EDGAR ALLAN POE —
Is it my fault that I must call you so?
Your works, like you, are born of alcohol;
Horrid monstrosities, distortions all;
It needs no doctor's gallipot or jar,
Filled with that stuff, to keep them as they are;
Soaked with its strange and strong, insidious power,
Your tales the many eagerly devour;
The Barnum of the Western Museum, FRANKS,(1)
Here for apt illustration shall have thanks;
He fitted up a noted murderers’ room,
Of victims, too, which they sent to the tomb,
Wax figures with authentic, gaping gashes,
The weapons that made all these hideous slashes;
An hundred dollars covered the expense —
Three thousand dollars was his recompense! [page 162:]
You, Poe, through all your nature most debased,
You pandered to this craving tiger-taste;
King Alcohol through you once ruled our realm
Of literature, you staggered at its helm;
By English critics, too, were recognized,
A fact which was by us most highly prized.
You, with an impudence sublimely brazen,
In Art your frantic fumes must largely blazon;
Here I've a crow to pick with you, my friend —
Your poor, poor raven that rhymes without an end?
No, mad dog, no! but do you recollect
How at my pictures once you picked and pecked?
They were done soberly, with anxious care,
No time, no labor on them did I spare,
All that nigh any fool could have seen there;
Nor was the labor lost, they were well painted;
Then you, with every fiber liquor-tainted —
You, YOU, who all your life could not walk straight,
With swaggering ignorance my work berate?
When in the gutter the last time you lay,
When death, disgusted, almost turned away,
When you with rot-gut whisky dying stunk,
And thus into God's presence reeled DEAD-DRUNK —
I tell you, mad dog, when I heard all this,
I helped outraged humanity to hiss!
You need not say now nothing should be said,
That I am living and that you are dead —
You drink yourself to death; must I forego,
Be balked of justice and revenge? Not so;
In prose to prick me you chose your own time,
And I choose mine to pay you back in rhyme;
Avaunt! and nevermore to me come nigh —
I do believe you stink of whiskey yet — good bye!
This passage appears in American Art: Its Awful Altitude (1864), a long satirical poem by John Frankenstein, a painter-sculptor of Cincinnati. An irascible eccentric, he had struggled for thirty years to support himself by his artistic talents; and when this became impossible in wartime, he composed and published at his own expense a frenetic and clumsy diatribe denouncing persons and institutions he considered unfriendly to American artists, particularly to himself.
Frankenstein lived in Philadelphia from 1839 to 1844, a period roughly corresponding with Poe's residence in that city. He probably [page 163:] was induced to settle there by his friend Willis Gaylord Clark, who procured him some commissions. Clark had attacked Poe in the Philadelphia Gazette (8 April and 10 May 1836); and although Poe's feud with his twin brother, Lewis Gaylord Clark, had not yet fully ignited, it is probable that Frankenstein often heard Poe discussed unfavorably among his circle of acquaintance in Philadelphia.
If Poe ever commented on Frankenstein's work, the most likely occasion would be one of the annual exhibitions sponsored by the Artists’ Fund Society. Frankenstein was elected a member in 1839, served on the Board of Control from 1840 to 1844, and exhibited one painting in 1841, six in 1842, and six in 1843. National publications like Godey's or Graham's did not, of course, review Philadelphia art shows. Most local periodicals(2) reported the opening of the exhibition and urged the public to attend. In these brief notices Frankenstein was singled out surprisingly often for special praise.
Only three unfavorable comments on Frankenstein have been discovered, two of them in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. In 1842 this newspaper praised his “Portrait of Professor Frost” at considerable length; but the next year two of his paintings were ridiculed:
“Portrait of a Lady and Child”
The effect of this painting has been entirely sacrificed by the artist, in attempting some peculiar and unnatural style of coloring. The faces appear to have been scalded and the whole work is boiling hot. The face and dress of the child are sadly in want of washing. Mr. Frankenstein has painted better pictures, and can obtain a high rank in his profession, by bending his energies to nature, instead of making nature bend to his notions of style and effect. (24 April)
“Portrait of a Gentleman”
Here is another portrait sacrificed by the artist in endeavoring to realize some strange and unnatural style of coloring. The modeling of the face is good, and the exhibition of the muscles correct, saving a harshness and intensity of expression produced by the peculiar tone of the color. A few years ago, Mr. Frankenstein was justly distinguished among our young artists for the richness and accuracy of his coloring; and it is to be hoped that he will abandon the style just adverted to, and return once more to nature. (28 April)
The other unfavorable notice appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, which covered the exhibitions more fully than any other periodical, commenting on individual paintings in running reviews that appeared in several consecutive issues. In 1841 the reviews, signed [page 164:] “Claude,” were so harsh that the newspaper printed a two-column defense of its critic; but Frankenstein's “Portrait of a Boy” was highly praised in a paragraph that closed “Frankenstein has the true Promethean spark.” Notices in 1842 were favorable. On 22 April 1843, however, the following criticism of “Portrait of a Lady and Child” appeared:
There is great strength of character in the mother's face, but the child is very much distorted. Hogarth somewhere speaks of the line of beauty; it should be applied to children as well as to their parents. Mr. F. should remember that beauty in a work of art is, although not of the first of some importance; he sacrifices too much to tone.
In style and in substance this sounds even less like Poe at his most casually journalistic than the two Public Ledger notices; but the review in the next issue (29 April) is followed by a capital P, which Frankenstein may have taken for a signature. Furthermore, the Saturday Courier published Poe's prospectus for Penn Magazine, “The Gold Bug,” and “Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.” Of all Philadelphia newspapers, it is the one that Frankenstein would be most likely to associate with Poe.
It seems altogether probable that Frankenstein blamed Poe for a criticism written by someone else and, like his fictional namesake, created a synthetic monster. His resentment required only the slightest provocation. The Poe segment is preceded by a long attack on Horace Greeley for a slighting notice in the New York Tribune and is followed by a condemnation of Emerson because he quoted Newton's description of sculpture as “stone dolls.” Nevertheless, even the fact that Frankenstein mistakenly attributed to Poe a criticism of his paintings is interesting. Preeminence in painting and sculpture had passed to New York by the early 1840's, but Philadelphia was still a comparatively lively center of the arts. Poe is known to have been a friend of John Sartain and of Felix O. C. Darley; Frankenstein's attack suggests that he may have been more concerned with the fine arts than has generally been supposed.
1 Frederick Franks, a Swedish artist, arrived in Cincinnati in 1825 and opened a museum with a “Chamber of Horrors” as its main attraction. In 1835 he took over the Western Museum, which featured an “Infernal Regions” with spectacles and wax figures devised by Hiram Powers.
2 The periodicals examined (all in the Pennsylvania Historical Society) include Daily Chronicle, National Gazette, North American, Pennsylvania Inquirer, Pennsylvanian, Saturday Evening Post, and U. S. Gazette.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
None.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[S:0 - POP72, 1972] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Papers on Poe (William Coyle)