Text: Anonymous, “Poe's Raven Illustrated,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (London, UK), vol. LVI, whole no. 1,462, November 3, 1883, pp. 578-579

[page 578, column 1, continued:]

POE'S RAVEN ILLUSTRATED.*

NEARLY forty years have elapsed since Edgar Poe's rhetorical masterpiece saw the light, and its popularity, instead of declining, seems to be still on the advance. In spite of its manifest faults, in spite of the glacial disapproval of successive generations of Boston critics, The Raven remains not merely an interesting and vital work, but the most original and striking piece of poetry yet produced in America. The Thanatopsis of Bryant, the best sonnets of Longfellow, nay even certain of Poe's own lyrics, may be finer in their touch, more scholarly, more delicate; but none has the same peculiar quality of newness, the same command over the attention of all classes of readers. It is a poem which has been successful, like a much higher effort, Gray's Elegy, from the moment of its appearance. It was first printed in Colton's American Review for February 1845, over the signature “Quarles”; but Poe had already acknowledged a variety of poems in his peculiar style, and was detected at once under the thin disguise. The Raven formed, in fact, the corner-stone of that poetical edifice which Poe had for a long time past been silently raising, and it was the latest in point of date, though the earliest in position, of the pieces which he then immediately published under the title of The Raven, and other Poems; and after this time he produced little, except “Ulalume,” which bore the stamp of his peculiar style. In a very interesting and graceful essay, by which Mr. Mr. Stedman introduces the volume which stands first on our list, he sums up what has been said concerning the genesis of this poem; but he hardly seems to us to take note of the maturity of Poe's mind at the date of its composition. At all times a careful and even too conscious artist, Poe, in 1845, was in possession of all the technical secrets of success in literature, and it was scarcely possible that his ear should be led unintentionally captive. Mr. Stedman quotes some verses by a writer of the name of Pike, whom he calls “the half-Greek, half-frontiersman poet of Arkansas,” and he thinks that Poe may have unintentionally caught the rhythm of his Raven from these. The hopeless absence of anything like bibliography from Mr. Ingram's pretentious edition of Poe's works makes it difficult for us to say whether or not the “Chapter on Autography” was written before 1845; but, at all events, in the few lines which Poe dedicates there to Pike, he not only does not mention “Isidore,” which appeared, according to Mr. Stedman, in 1843, but he distinctly says that he believes Pike to have written nothing since 1834. We cannot ourselves see any resemblance between the two pieces; the rhythm is totally distinct, and the style of the earlier writer is as flat and commonplace as that of Poe is sharp and [column 2:] striking. On the other hand, Mr. Stedman is certainly correct in pointing out that Poe deliberately imitated the movement of Mrs. Browning's (then Miss Barrett's) “Conclusion” of Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

It is strange that this poem of The Raven, with its vivid rhetorical and metrical effects, its appeal to spiritual terror and pain, should be selected as a favourite subject for illustration. It might be supposed that it would be universally avoided as singularly unfitted for pictorial representation. There is a bust of Pallas in it, and a bird; a distressed poet and a silken curtain, and it is perhaps not unnatural that one picture of these objects in combination should be attempted by an artist in love with the melodramatic. But that a whole series of designs in illustration of a tempest of the soul should appear to any draughtsman as being within the range of what is possible, this is very strange. Although the imagery in Poe's poems is particularly bold and vivacious, they do not seem to us to lend themselves in any great degree to artistic expression. It would be easy to draw a Haunted Palace, but impossible to interpret more fully or to do otherwise than disguise the strange human phantasy that underlies the poem of that name. The shadowy dream-forms of “Ulalume” enchant us in the verse; but how silly would be a substantial group of a young man walking in an alley with Psyche, his Soul, and “conquering her scruples and gloom” by asking her an architectural conundrum? In the same way, no conceivable art, the most imaginative that has ever existed, could translate into black and white the evanescent and phantasmal charm of “Eldorado,” or of “The Sleeper,” or of the “City in the Sea.”

It is plain, however, that this view is not shared by the artists; for there is perhaps no poem of recent times, except Mr. Tennyson's Princess, which has attracted so many pencils to its service as The Raven of Poe. It appears that it was the last work in literature on which Gustave Doré expended his rich fancy; and, as we receive the handsome folio which contains his designs, a more modest edition of the poem, with drawings from another hand, is placed ced on our table. We have united with these two volumes, as the subject of our examination, the very striking edition of Le Corbeau, published some years ago by the late Edouard Manet, the high-priest of the Impressionistes — a book which, from the expensive and limited form in which it was produced, is too little known in England. When this book was first published, it was received with shouts of ridicule. The quieting hand of death, which takes the sting out of all intellectual contentions, has stilled the controversy which raged so long over the pretensions of Edouard Manet. For good or for evil, he was a power in art which we must take into consideration; and now that both he and Doré, the much-ridiculed and the much-lauded artist, stand alike before the bar of posterity, we find ourselves able to weigh their claims to consideration more calmly than when they were both alive. Manet, then, be it said at once, had certain intuitions which Doré, with all his talent, lacked. In the first place, Manet saw that Poe's poem, dealing as it does entirely with rhetorical and spiritual ideas, would not bear more than four illustrations; and he confined himself to that number. Doré, on the other hand, with his impulsive and careless fecundity, was ready to illustrate each phrase of the poem, and has actually left us no less than twenty-six full-page plates. Manet, again, perceived that it would be a mistake to attempt to render in bodily form the shapeless visions which throng upon the brain of the bereaved man. He gives us but four scenes. In the first, the student is seated at a table, and the light of his lamp makes an island of brilliant whiteness in a sea of gloom. In the next, the haggard man stands at the window gazing out, and the raven rushes in. In the third we see his head only, as he gazes upwards at the bust; and here Manet's inspiration broke down. The fourth picture is a mere piece of gratuitous impressionist impudence; we have nothing given us but an empty arm-chair and the shadow of the bust. There are, moreover, two clever designs — one of a raven's head, the other of a raven poised on outspread wings. The style of all these is rough in the extreme. They are very little more than the shorthand notes of an artist, rapidly jotted down. They represent exactly enough what it was in Manet's work which drove, not only the Philistines, but real students and fellow-artists, to a denial of anything like talent in him. But this was a mistake; these designs brim over with talent. The way in which the lamplight floods the table and the poet's head in the first plate, not with timid lines or dots, but with a veritable deluge of illumination; or the way in which the foreshortened head in the third plate is connected, by sheer force of expression, with the bust and the bird far above it — these are examples of genuine talent.

We do not think that Doré was, on the whole, at his best in this his latest work of illustration. Doré was happiest. in purely grotesque and grimly fantastic design, and he had two sides to his talent, one of which is typically represented. by his illustrations to the Contes Drolatiques, and the other by those to Milton and the Bible. Curiously enough, the first great shock which his reputation received in England was the attack of Mr. Ruskin on the side where Doré really was an important artist. The great critic in the letters which he wrote to Mr. Dixon indubitably did a great deal to shake the faith of the English philistine in his favourite illustrator. But Mr. Ruskin's attack was made not, where it might most legitimately have been made, on the Doré of the Milton, but on the Doré of those droll and pantagruelistic designs in which there can be no doubt that he was a master. The edition of The Raven now [page 579:] before us is very interesting in this respect. It gives us an opportunity of comparing all the varieties of Doré's talent in draughtsmanship, and the fact that the plates happen to be engraved by the best engravers of the new American school, whose aim is to let the draughtsman speak for himself as plainly as possibly, gives us an unrivalled opportunity of examining Doré's method. Indeed, we cannot think that the French artist would have thanked his American interpreters for their conscientiousness in all cases. The old tradition that the engraver corrected little mistakes is quite exploded here. “What should we do without Mr. Bartolozzi, who sets all our drawing right for us?” said Sir Joshua Reynolds; but Mr. W. Zimmermann, who has engraved the plate called “Sorrow for the Lost Lenore,” has not understood his duty in that way; he has not merely given Doré's lines with most scrupulous exactitude, but he has reproduced some erroneous perspective which Doré did not take the trouble completely to erase. The reverence for the design tells both ways, as in the plate called “In the distant Aidenn,” where, if Mr. King, the engraver, has been unkind to Doré in leaving his figures merely scribbled in with a rapid stroke of the crayon, he has given the delicate misty effect of the trees against the sky exactly as Doré rubbed it in.

If these plates were preserved to a future age which had entirely lost the text of Poe's poem, it is impossible that they could aid in its reconstruction. Much that is vague, ghostly, and spiritual in the poem becomes bodily and concrete in Dore's designs. In The Raven the solitude of the speaker is the primary impression we receive. His very wildness of utterance, his careless display of hysterical emotion, are due to the sense of his loneliness. Nobody is near him, nobody will ever approach him again, and he may rave and weep without shame. Doré has absolutely neglected this impression. In the opening scene, “While I pondered, weak and weary,” a female head, as solid as his own, nestles by the student's shoulder. We should take it to be that of a happy wife, watching by her husband while he sleeps. In the next, “It was in the bleak December,” where the horror-stricken figure of the man is powerfully given, the design is completely spoiled by the introduction of a full-sized female, with wings, sleeping on a settee in the foreground. In “Eagerly I wished the morrow,” not only is a life-sized skeleton reclining by the poet's arm-chair, but no less than eight ladies, of redundant physical development, gambol behind him. In “Then I opened wide the door,” a very effective design in itself, we cannot resist the impression that some persons who are seen hiding behind the door as the man throws it open have been playing him a trick. Of course Doré meant them to represent the phantoms of his hopes; but they do not look like phantoms; nor is the substantial lady who appears to be tickling the lobe of his ear in “She shall press, ah! nevermore,” the least in the world like the vision which the bereaved man scarcely dares to recall to memory. In short, in many of his attempts to render the phantasmal allusions of the poem the artist has erred in attempting to give outline and bodily presence to that which it is impossible to realize. As was usual with him, Doré has succeeded best where he was dealing with ideas entirely removed from human traditions and the laws of physical nature. The best design in The Raven is “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” where he represents a great luminous sphere rolling through the starry void of night, and carrying poised upon its upper pole the grim skeleton of Death, robed in ample garments, with a vast scythe in its hand, driving the Raven forth from its presence. Very good also in the same manner is the drawing of “The Night's Plutonian Shore,” a melancholy sea, beating with phosphorescent waves under a murky sky, a great house with red-lighted windows looming high up in the distance. Very effective, too, is the plate which gives us the outside of the castle in which the bereaved man lives, with the Raven beating its wings against the closed lattice.

Mr. W. L. Taylor's illustrations are said to be “drawn and engraved under the supervision of George T. Andrew,” whatever that means. Both names are unfamiliar to us, and one fancies that Mr. Andrew might draw his own illustrations. They are less ambitious than Manet's or Doré's, but careful and tasteful. Mr. Taylor's drawing, be it confessed, is often a great deal more correct than Doré's, among whose virtues precision found no place. But he makes the same vain endeavour to represent the spiritual and the invisible. His designs are full of ghostly floating company, and the poor Raven seems to have suffered severely from sheer alarm. This, at least, is the only reason we can find to account for the phenomenon that his tail grows longer and longer as the story progresses.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 578, column 1:]

* The Raven. By Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrated by Gustave Doré. With a Comment upon the poem by Edmund Clarence Stedman. London: Sampson Low & Co. 1883.

The Raven. By Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrated by W. L. Taylor. London: Griffith & Farran. 1883.

Le Corbeau. Poëme par Edgar Poe. Traduction française de Stéphane Mullarmé. Avec illustrations par Edouard Manet. Paris: Richard Leschide. 1875.