Text: Dan Wilson, “[Review of Tales of Mystery, and Poems],” Canadian Journal of Industry, Science, and Art, ns. Vol. II, no. 8, March 1857, pp. 103-109

[page 103:]

R E V I E W.

Tales of Mystery, and Poems. By Edgar Allan Poe. London: Vizetelly, 1857.

The writings of Edgar Allan Poe have already been appreciated in various forms, and they possess such an individuality of character, and a power of fascination even in their least attractive aspects, that we may be assured they will again and yet again be subjected to re-issue, criticism, censure, and laudation: as intellectual products, ephemeral in their aspect, and yet such as this age at least will not willingly let die. We have purposely selected for our present notice, the volume named at the head of this article, though it is merely a popular selection of a few of Poe’s prose writings, issued in a cheap form along with his poems. At another time we may have larger space at our command, and shall then pass under review the more comprehensive literary memorial of this eccentric and wayward child of genius, recently issued from the American press. The publication we refer to is entitled: “The Works of the late Edgar Allan Poe, with a memoir by Rufus Wilmot Griswold; and notices of his genius, by N. P. Willis, and J. R. Lowell.” In this latter work four substantial volumes are devoted to the Essays, Poems, and fugitive pieces, and to notices of the biography and genius of Poe, — a writer of whom, if America may not be proud, it is only because the strange moral obliquity of the man, has steeled the hearts of his countrymen against that pride, akin to love, with which they would otherwise have learned to regard the author and the poet. In some striking respects we feel tempted to designate Edgar Allan Poe the Charles Lamb of America — so marked is that strange whimsical individuality of his, that quaint gravity and affectation of seriousness in dealing with a jest, and that sober and deliberate purpose of laughing in his sleeve at the literary lies he successfully palmed upon the most credulous of publics. And yet, assuredly, no two men were every more dissimilar. When, some eleven years after Charles Lamb had been laid beneath the green turf of Edmonton Churchyard, a few survivors of his old circle of friends, — and among the rest his loving biographer, Sir T. N. Talfourd, — met to lay the remains of Mary Lamb along side those of her brother, his biographer thus records the revived memories which the scene awakened; “so dry is the soil of the quiet Churchyard that the excavated earth left perfect walls of stiff clay, and permitted us just to catch a glimpse of the still untarnished edges of the coffin in which all the mortal part of one of the most delightful [page 104:] persons who ever lived was contained, and on which the remains of her he had loved with love passing the love of woman, were henceforth to rest.” How strange the contrast of one whom even we who know him only by his writings cannot help loving, with this author who, like him, expresses such unmistakeable individuality and self-originating characteristics on every page, but only to make us admire with shuddering; as one might gaze on the cold glittering pinnacles of polar ice-cliffs. The poet Lowell has been called in to aid in setting forth the true attributes of his genius, but he had already stamped his just estimate of him in the pungent terseness of a stanza of his “Fable of Critics:”

Genius Poe unquestionably had; with eccentricities too, enough to furnish any ordinary half dozen of the irritable race of poets, critics, and editors. But the selfishness of morbid sneering cynicism never took a colder and more repellant aspect; and we look back upon him with a strange sadness as on one of the gifted contributors to the permanent stock of our sources of literary pleasure, whom yet it is all impossible to love. In the prose of Poe, with its odd matter-of-fact anatomising of mystery, there is a singular artificiality of art that seems too much to betray the wires and pulleys of the puppet-master; but few as are his poems, it is difficult to believe the heart so well simulated, if no genial pulsation of human affection and sympathy actually throbbed beneath that cynic heart of his. To these, therefore, the rare and brief out-gushings, as it might seem, of the genuine feeling of “man of woman born,” we shall devote such brief space as the demands on our pages admit, in this notice of Edgar Allan Poe; remembering that for him, instead of the hero-worship, which fondly exaggerates the virtues of a favorite author, while “to his faults a little blind,” it has been till now his fate to be coarsely anatomised by those who have proved only too willing to expose his frailties, if not to deepen the shadows of his dark life-picture. For this there can be no excuse, for whatever his frailties as a man, no charge can be brought against him of having pandered his genius, or wielded his pen in the cause of vice.

The following brief but touching lyric, is dedicated — we may presume, — to the memory of the same “rare and radiant maiden whom [page 105:] the angels name Lenore,” who constitutes the heroine of his more famous “Raven” lyric. But sweet and gracefully touching as are some of the ideas, and musical as are the lines, the “Raven” of Poe’s morbid genius flutters ever towards the close, and he winds up this, as well as nearly every other pæan, with thoughts born of his own brooding misanthrophy which could well be spared.

LENORE.

The same strangely morbid bent of thought which mars the beauty of the stanzas here is perhaps even more apparent in his piece called “The Bells,” suggested we can scarcely doubt by Moore’s “Evening Bells,” ringing, unconsciously perhaps, in memory’s ear. But the American Poet’s theme is, in its starting point at least, a thoroughly native one: the mirthful, heart-enlivening music of the sleigh-bells, which give a music to our long winter that repays in part the coyness of the spring’s forest-songsters, and cheeringly contrasts with the melancholy pathos of our summer nightingale, the Whip-poor-will. We say nothing of certain [page 106:] ranal choristers, not unknown as Canadian nightingales! The Sleigh Bell; the Wedding Bell; the Fire Bell; and the Funeral Knell; each in succession has a stanza devoted to it. It is not uncharacteristic, nor without its significance, that the “Sabbath Bell” finds no place in the otherwise comprehensive series. The second and the last of these lyrical peals will suffice to exhibit the poet once more in his real aspect of strange antithesis:

Reiteration is carried here to the utmost length short of wearisome satiety ; yet the curious collocation of words must be felt to embody the full ideal of the pealing bells ; and this would be much more apparent could we spare room for the whole piece. The varied power of expression is shown by ringing all the changes of words which each successive bell requires. The merry tinkle of the sleigh-bells ; the mellow voluminous chime of the wedding bells; the brazen clang of the alarum bells; and the muffled, throbbing knell of the funeral bells; each and all of these seem reproduced in imaginary peal, which echoes through the fancy as the eye silently passes over the curious patch-work of rhyme and rythm strung together in artistic semblance of the music they describe.

One example more we must find room for, of a quaint conceit, more than once successfully accomplished by this singular poet, and perhaps most curious as illustrating the same odd fancy for grappling with self-imposed difficulties, which furnishes the strange plots of so many of his tales of mystery. The subject and occasion of the poem is common, — if not common-place — enough; being one of the thousand-and-one verse missives of the Festival of Saint [page 108:] Valentine. Some of the rhymes, here as elsewhere, read strangely to unfamiliar ears, e. g. Lœda and reader. But such are not with out precedent on the American Parnassus. Whittier constantly rhymes such words as law and ware, as in the following couplet:

No one, however, can have read Poe’s “Raven” without recognising his complete mastery of the varied cadences of alliteration, resonance, and the ample musical compass of English rhymes; though in the following bagatelle he had other accomplishments in view:

This the reader perchance pronounces no great poetic feat; but he has not yet solved the poet’s riddle. In the days of old George Wither, poets were wont to invent for themselves new shackles, and to write rhomboidal dirges, triangular odes, and lozenge-shaped lyrics or canzonets. The acrostic is an old fashion not yet altogether obsolete; and the ordinary restraints of the sonnet, Spenserian stanza, or the ottava rima, still furnish pleasant “poetic pains,” as in elder centuries. But the hardest of such poetic labours are trifles compared with that which Poe has here achieved; as will be seen it the reader undertakes its solution according to the following directions. Read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third of the third line, and so on to the end, and the name of the [page 109:] fair object of the poet’s pains will be revealed; a name which though far from common is not unfamiliar to Canadian ears, nor without its memorial amongst ourselves. After all, however, it is on his “Raven” that Poe’s fame as a poet will rest, and its strange odd mingling of morbid and beautiful fancies with the luscious surfeitings of rhyme, will long attract and repel the reluctantly admiring reader with its curiously fascinating charms.

D. W.