Text: Palmer Cobb, “Poe and Hoffman,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. VIII, no. 1, January 1909, pp. 68-81

[page 68:]

The unique position which Poe occupies in the history of American letters challenges perennially the interest of the literary investigator. He is at once the most fascinating and the most enigmatical figure exhibited in the annals of our literature. The imprint of his genius as well as the distinctive quality of his imagination was of such pronounced character as to relegate his work to a position of absolute isolation among the productions of his contemporaries. His life and his literary achievement stand out in bold relief against the background of the life about him. And the two are strangely lacking in points of contact. Poe voiced none of the strivings of the new civilization growing up around him. His work reflects no phase of life which we may call distinctively American, either from a provincial or from a national standpoint. His genius assumes, more than is usual, the character of the phenomenal. Other literary men of the time frame their productions in more or less familiar settings. They gather up certain threads of the life about them and weave them into the fabric of their work. Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Lowell hold up to our view people and conditions which are familiar to us. Poe's verse, and in particular his short story, stand entirely aloof with respect to contemporary contributions of the same genres. He transports us to a fantastic dream world created by his own fancy, and by the skill of his portraiture, forces us to move with him easily in this strange realm, the while we marvel at its wonders.

It is a fact not without significance that Poe has been studied and cultivated with much more zeal by his foreign admirers than by his own countrymen. In France, for example, Poe found in Charles Baudelaire an ardent supporter and apostle. Not content with his own discovery of the American poet, Baudelaire, translating and interpreting unwearily, heralded abroad the fame of this new genius. Poe early enjoyed in France a fame which in enthusiastic devotion far surpassed the recognition [page 69:] which he had gained in America. In Germany the process was similar. He had no German apostle, but a Poe cult was early developed and has steadily gathered strength with the passing decades. A critical German edition of his works has recently been published, which attests alike the painstaking spirit of German scholarship and that widespread acquaintance with Poe among the Germans which called the edition into being. Translations of his works exist also in Spanish, Italian, Russian, and the Scandinavian languages.

As was noted above, it was no whimsical trick of fate which in Europe bore his fame aloft on the crest of a wave of good fortune. His art as developed in his short story is essentially non-American. It is a commonplace of Poe criticism to say that the dominant note of his life rang out of tune with the accords of that new and struggling civilization in which he found his destiny cast. It is more exceptional, for Poe's countrymen at least, to establish a relation of cause and effect between this essentially non-American character of his art and the schooling which he gathered from foreign models. We look at the record of his life and see him battling throughout years with the prosaic facts of his daily existence. We observe him struggling to find his level and to express himself to his countrymen, and we see him finally engulfed in a veritable tidal wave of misunderstanding and misconception. His very memory was for years darkened by the calumnious onslaughts of his first biographer, Griswold, while his genius is just now coming into its own among Americans in the belated recognition of the value of his work. The superficial student of Poe observes that he was what Edmund Clarence Stedman called a “misfitted American.” The corollary to this fact is that it was the soil and atmosphere of Europe that was best adapted to the florescence of his genius and that it was from this source that he drew freely for a part at least of his own spiritual and intellectual nourishment. In the German edition of Poe's works just referred to, the editor in his prefatory account of Poe's life and works remarks: “His life was that of a dreamer from the old motherland Europe, and if one considers his half Norman extraction, one can safely say, a Germanic dreamer. It was a dream life lead in the brutally real and almost exclusively mercantile milieu of North America. This crossing of the life and [page 70:] the man which resulted, and which is so unique, is Poe, the romanticist, transplanted to reality's heaviest soil.”

Disregarding for the moment the Germanic or non-Germanic character of Poe's romanticism and the community of interest exhibited in the material and subject matter of his work and that of the Germans, there can be but one view as to his interest in German letters. His critical and narrative writings are replete with quotations and discussions of German literature. His critique of Longfellow's Ballads, for example, furnishes opportunity for a discussion of the echoes of Longfellow's German studies to be found in the latter's work. A reference in his “Marginalia” to de la Motte Fouqué's “Theodolf the Icelander” brings out an expression of opinion as to the state of German criticism. “Individual Germans have been critical in the best sense, but the masses are unleavened. Literary Germany thus presents the spectacle of the impulsive spirit surrounded by the critical, and of course in some measure influenced thereby.” Poe admits “the German vigour, the German boldness, directness, imagination and some other qualities in the first or impulsive epochs of British and French letters.” But he is ‘not ashamed to say that he prefers Voltaire to Goethe and holds Macaulay to possess more of the truly critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined.” In the “Fall of the House of Usher” Poe cites Tieck's ‘Journey into the Blue Distance” as one of the books which “for years had formed no small part of the mental existence of the invalid.” In his essay on Hawthorne, he says with reference to the latter's originality: “Those who speak of him as original, mean nothing more than that he differs in his manner or tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their acquaintance — their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner, in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne.” In this connection a striking passage occurs in Poe's “Morella:” “Morella's erudition was profound. . . . I soon found, however, that perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of German literature. These, for what reason I cannot imagine, were her favorite and constant study — and that in process of time they became my own should be attributed to the simple but [page 71:] effectual influence of habit and example.” Introductory to his story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” Poe quotes in the original and then translates one of Novalis's fragments. Numerous other quotations in the original German are scattered throughout his works. One is thus forced to the alternative of rating Poe as a literary charlatan or granting him a measure of acquaintance with the German language and literature, specifically with the productions of the German romanticists.

Poe's critics have from the first connected his name with that particular phase of romanticism which was developed in Germany. His first tale, “Berenice,” was published in the Southern Literary Messenger, March, 1835, and the editor found it expedient to introduce it to his readers with the following note: “Whilst we confess we think there is too much German Horror in his subject, there can be but one opinion as to his force and style.” From that time until the present day, the association of Poe's work with that of the German romanticists has been made the subject of more or less vague discussion by his biographers and critics. In the last critical edition of Poe's works, the editor, Professor Harrison, declares that Poe was “saturated with the doctrines of Schelling,” and speaks of “Novalis and Schelling, his masters across the German sea.” Mention is also made of the translations of Tieck, de la Motte Fouqué, Chamisso, the Schlegels, Schiller, Heine, Uhland — ”opening up a wonder-world of picturesque Germanism.” German students of Poe are unanimous in their assumption of the kinship of Poe's tales to the works of his German brother romanticists. And usually they proceed a step further and connect his name with that of that bizarre figure of German romanticism, the narrator, Ernst Theador Amadeus Hoffmann. A German student of Poe voices the characteristic German view as follows:* “Poe's literary relationships with our Amadeus Hoffman are by far his most important ones. Both as to content and technique, the narrator Poe, the author of the “Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque,’ owes undoubtedly much to the richly imaginative and fantastic German poet.” Edmund Clarence Stedman finds that “there is a pseudo-horror to be found in certain of his (Poe's) pieces, and enough of Hoffmann's methods to suggest that the brilliant [page 72:] author of the ‘Phantasiestücke’ (Hoffmann), whether a secondary name or not, was one of Poe'searly teachers.” And in truth a comparison of the lives and works of the two men reveals striking parallels of temperament and interest.

Mr. Oscar Hammerstein's recent production in New York of Offenbach's opera, “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” the text of which is based on several of Hoffmann's stories, has at least sufficed to bring the name of Hoffmann before the American public. To the average English reader his name, his literary achievement, and his position in German literature are still veiled in the obscurity which invests the fame of a secondary literary light of a foreign country. Born in 1776 in Königsberg, his comparatively short life of forty-six years was filled with the most varied experience. He was in turn jurist, musician, musical critic, painter and author. In Warsaw, where he was in the Prussian government service, he entered actively into the somewhat unbridled gaieties of the mixed society of the Polish capital. The battle of Jena deprived Prussia of her new province and changed the government official into a director of an orchestra in the Bamberg theatre. In 1816 he entered again the government service in Berlin, and from then until his death in 1822 he gave to the world the best of his literary output. Hoffmann's life was irregular and spent in Bohemian circles, and while he was not given to intoxication, the steady use of wine was a pre-requisite to the stimulus of his creative faculty.

It has been the fashion among certain of Hoffmann's critics to give him no higher rating than that of a skillful spinner of ghost yarns. He is more than that. It is true that he manipulates the usual machinery and accessories of the ghost story in the accomplishment of many of his effects. But the ghost story as he tells it bears the touch of the artist and assumes a position of worth and dignity in literature which will assure its transmission to successive generations of readers. Hoffmann conjures up before our eyes figures and events which the greatest skill of other virtuosos of the ghost story could not invest with a semblance of probability. We see most fearful transformations. Divided personalities in a double physical embodiment confront us. One student falls in love with a doll with glass eyes, another with a “gentle green serpent.” Cats and dogs philosophize over and [page 73:] satirize the life of their human associates. Diseased states of mind are portrayed with startling distinctness, while uncanny noises, stupefying odors of marvelous flowers, magic organ music, etc., all play their part in Hoffmann's machinery of the narrative. How is it possible that he is able to rescue such material from the realm of the ridiculous and childish, pass it through the mill of his genius, and turn out a product which is food for intelligent minds? What is the secret of the spell that made him among the French the most read of all German authors and impelled such men as Otto Ludwig, Jacques Offenbach, Ernst von Wildenbruch, and the great Wagner himself to wrench his figures out of the obscurity of the supernatural atmosphere in which they move into the white light of the stage? The explanation is to be sought in the fact that Hoffmann's figures are, to him at least, absolutely real. He believed with all his heart in the most improbable figure of his fevered fancy. It was as real and tangible to him as the most prosaic fact or object in his daily existence. For him the trivial, commonplace, work-a-day world about him was filled with the marvelous and supernatural. In his stories he hovers always on the boundary between the real and the supernatural, crossing and recrossing at will. And one realm was as real to him as the other. Given his faith in his productions, add to that his remarkable power of description, and the secret of the peculiar character of his art is revealed.

It is just here that Poe and Hoffmann meet on a common ground. They share a view of the world which eliminates the commonplace and glorifies the marvelous. Throughout Poe's works one finds, variously expressed but ever recurring, an allegiance to the principle that truth is stranger than fiction. Witness, for example, the skit called the “Angel of the Odd,” the whole of which is but an allegorical expression of the same idea. The same belief pervades all of Hoffmann's work. He walks along a crowded Berlin street in broad daylight. Passing a house in a crowded and busy quarter, he notices a woman's hand drawing back a curtain. Immediately the realities recede and his fancy begins to weave a web of wonder about the simple incident. One could hardly find more commonplace material for a story of effect — an ordinary house, set down in the midst of the stream of a great city's traffic. But Hoffmann invests it with the most [page 74:] curious mystery and spins a story around it, the marvel of which is as real to the reader as to the writer. And this is the basic principle from which the stories of Poe and Hoffmann proceed — a belief in the reality of the supernatural and a skill of portrayal which makes their fancies as real to their readers as to themselves. The choice of subject matter for their stories arises from their view of the world, and this in turn gives to their work its peculiar and characteristic tone.

A motive which was common to several of the German romanticists is that of the double existence. The idea that the personality is divided into two parts and that the individual leads then a double existence, mental and physical, is one of Hoffmann's favorite themes. He drew from life. He was frequently haunted by the idea that he was being pursued by his double. The idea is the basic one in the story of “The Double.” It occurs also in the “Cat Murr,” and plays the leading role in the “Elixirs of the Devil.” Parallels between this last story and Poe's “William Wilson” are so striking as to suggest that Poe drew certain ideas from Hoffmann, which, according to his method, he combined and transformed in his narrative.

In Hoffmann's tale a monk relates the story of his life. He begins with his childhood, passes rapidly to his reception in the monastery, and describes with great exactness events and persons which are of importance in the development of his destiny. Early in his career he is sent by his prior on a mission to Rome. Traveling through the mountains the monk comes suddenly upon a man lying asleep over a precipice. Startled out of his sleep by the sudden appearance of the monk, he falls over the precipice and, as the monk supposes, meets his death. This incident marks a turning point in the monk's career. He supposes himself a murderer and from that time on his life is a history of crime. We learn at the end of the story that this stranger is a half brother of the monk, and the latter's exact counterpart as to figure and appearance. The man has not been killed, but has received wounds which resulted in insanity. His insanity takes the remarkable form that he believes himself to be the monk. In this fashion Hoffmann works out the fiction of the double existence on quite natural grounds. Throughout the story the relationship between the monk and his double is kept shrouded in a veil [page 75:] of supernatural mystery. In “William Wilson,” Poe adopts the same device. The idea on which both Poe and Hoffman construct their stories is the simple one of the contention of the two inimical forces in a man's soul, the evil and the good struggling for supremacy and final victory. In carrying out the idea, both authors have availed themselves of the device of the double existence to achieve their purpose. Such a division of the human personality they have romanticized by the fiction of the two selves, physical as well as mental, both of which are well nigh identical as to physical appearance and as to mental characteristics. One self is the type of the good, the other is the embodiment of the evil. The atmosphere of mystery thus created works an effect of terror as, in the successive stages of the development of the story, the hero at some critical point of the narrative is confronted by his double. This is the basic idea of both stories.

The German traces the growth and struggle of evil in his hero's life very minutely. We observe the first foothold which “the dark power” wins in the life of the monk Medardus, and we trace the growth of the germ of evil step by step, until finally, with giant power it plunge sits victim into an abyss of crime. The supposed death of his double, which the monk ascribes to himself, is the initial act in a long chapter of horrors. The apparent death of Medardus's double marks the seeming victory of sin in the monk's life. But his double's death is only apparent, and Medardus in the end gains his victory.

The history of Medardus's struggle against the evil finds its exact counterpoint in the story of William Wilson. We hear at once: ‘From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into the enormities of an Elagabulus.” His career of vice is described minutely up to the final scene of the story, the duel with his double. This is the climax and the decisive event in the contest of the good and the evil. The death of the double is the death of the good principle in Wilson's life. “Dead to the world, to heaven, and to hope.”’ It is the triumph of the evil and the ultimate extinction of the good. Medardus's double in Hoffman's story is the personified incorporated principle of evil. William Wilson's double in Poe's story is the living embodiment of the good principle.

Besides this community of the fundamental ideas on which the [page 76:] two stories are constructed, the two authors make common use also of certain motives in their machinery for the production of the awe-inspiring. Such an one is the exact correspondence of the voices of the two doubles and the fact that one of them always speaks in a mysterious whisper. In Hoffmann's narrative, the monk, when he is confronted by his double, notes that the latter always speaks softly and with a hideous stammering tone. But the tones of his double's voice are so like those of his own that, in his terror, he is unable to tell whether he himself is speaking or whether it is his double.

Poe has made this whisper and correspondence of voice play a much larger and more effective role in his story. Indeed he has made of this minor incident the means whereby he lifts his story entirely out of the realm of the natural. With Hoffmann the exact correspondence of voice and the whispered utterances of the monk's double are of no special significance. They are part and parcel of the general correspondence between Medardus and his double-brother. With Poe there is no explanation of the resemblances between the two doubles. It is his evident purpose to create a setting of the supernatural, to remove his reader wholly out of the reasonable, to transport him to the realm of the inexplicable, and to create an impression of terror by contact with the supernatural. As a means to this end he uses with striking effect the mysterious whisper as well as the identity of voice between the two doubles.

Poe and Hoffmann, both ever alert for the novel and the fantastic, were powerfully attracted by the doctrines of Mesmer and the theories of hypnotism. The absolute novelty of the discovery and the fact that its principles were but half understood, lent to the subject an additional charm of interest. The disciples of the new theories tantalized themselves with promises of the discovery of many of the deep secrets of nature which have always allured and baffled the brain of man. Both authors busied themselves earnestly with the study of the subject, and both turned to good account in their stories the results of their investigations. Among Poe's best known stories are “Mesmeric Revelations” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” both of which represent a flight of fancy into the realm of the unknown, motivated by the fiction of a conversation with a person hypnotized [page 77:] just previous to death. The doctrine of hypnotism plays more or less of a role in all of Hoffmann's tales. In two of his tales he has based plot and incident upon the hypnotic relationship existing between his characters. The general features of these two stories, ‘The Uncanny Guest” and “The Hypnotist,” agree, as Hoffman himself points out.

Aside from the large role which hypnotism plays in Poe's and Hoffmann's stories, they have also a large interest, if not positive belief, in the doctrine of metempsychosis, a form of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, — the idea that an individual after death may be re-incarnated and lead a second existence, and that there may even be a thread of connection between these two periods of existence. Poe and Hoffmann both further accentuate the idea and add to the mysterious by creating between their individuals of the first and second existence a physical and psychic resemblance. This doctrine forms the basic idea of several of Poe's tales, notably “Ligeia, Morella,” and “Eleanora,” while Hoffmann's collection of stories which he calls the “”Brothers of Serapion” takes its title from the story of the hermit monk Serapion, whose insanity consists in the belief that he is the martyred monk Serapion, whose death had occurred four hundred years previous to the time in which the story is told. Hoffmann, with a characteristic mixture of realism and mystery, makes the monk insane, but makes the wisdom of his insanity superior to that of the sanity of his fellows who try to convince Serapion that he is suffering from monomania. In the end the reader is left with the idea that the monk is sane and the rest of the world too ignorant to understand him.

There is nothing singular in the fact that both Poe and Hoffmann should have evinced strong interest in hypnotism and in the doctrine of metempsychosis, nor does the fact that they both used these motives in their stories necessarily imply an influence of the one upon the other. But when we find both these motives united in one story, and worked out with striking similarity of motivation, and when we consider the novelty of the idea, it is safe to assume that the two authors did not accidentally hit upon the same singular combination of singular motives, without one having received a suggestion from the other. In Poe's “Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and Hoffmann's ‘”The Hypnotist,” [page 78:] we find a union of the doctrines of hypnotism and metempsychosis and both interwoven and worked out with striking correspondence in the work of both authors.

The theme of both stories is the mastery of one mind over another by means of hypnotism. In each case the center of interest is a man of commanding will who exerts a mesmeric influence over certain other persons of the tale. The hypnotist proceeds gradually. He wins at first an influence more or less powerful over his subject. This is gradually increased until at last the subject is wholly subservient to the master's will. A glance, or even the mere concentration of the hypnotist's will, is sufficient to put the subject into the hypnotic state which is described by Hoffmann as the “complete emergence out of the self and life into the higher sphere of the master.”

Both stories present also a mysterious personage, in Hoffmann's story the hypnotist himself, in Poe's the subject, whose identity is associated with that of another individual of a previous generation. In each case an atmosphere is thrown about this central figure by the peculiarity of his person. Poe's Bedloe seems young, “and yet there were moments when one might easily have believed him to be a hundred.”’ ‘He was singularly tall and thin . . . . the pupils of his eyes underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement, the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable.” The gigantic stature of Hoffmann's hypnotist “was made more conspicuous by the emaciation of body. His large black eyes cast a burning glance which was hardly tolerable.” Well on in the fifties, “he had the strength and agility of a youth.”

Hoffmann's story runs through two generations and his hypnotist is the “hostile demon” who, in two successive stages of his existence (between which there is a connecting link), interposes a violent hand in the destiny of two generations of the same family. Poe's story has but two characters, the hypnotist and his subject, Bedloe. The latter is the re-incarnation of a man of another generation, one Oldeb. Besides the direct suggestion of the identity of the two, Poe adopts the mechanical device of making the one name spell the other reversed, the e being disregarded. [page 79:]

Again, a traveler, detained on his journey, rests for a period by the way. In the place of his temporary sojourn the traveler's attention is called to a painting, a work of startling genius, singular for its quality of life-likeness. The traveler's interest in both the picture and the artist is keenly aroused, and he succeeds in learning the history of both. The face of the woman that is portrayed on the canvas is that of the artist's wife. The story is of the painter who falls in love with his model, in this case the ideal which inspires him to production. Having won and possessed her, his wife falls a victim to the selfishness of his former mistress — Art, — and dies, her life the price of her husband's success.

These are the motives which form the skeleton of Poe's story, “The Oval Portrait,” and Hoffmann's “The Jesuit Church in G ——.” The incidents thus recounted appear in both stories identically. But Poe relates a short story solely for the telling, and to produce a certain effect. Hoffman tells a long tale with the same central incidents, but embellished with infinitely more details. He satisfies his zest for the narrative for its own sake and in addition provides himself with a vehicle for the expounding of his general theories of art. Poe's tale comprises scarcely a half dozen pages, and the personages of the story are two in number. The action proceeds rapidly and reaches a climax which is quite in keeping with the author's oft-defined standard of excellence for the short story; namely, the producing of a desired effect.

Hoffmann tells the story of an artist who, having possessed the woman who had served as his artistic inspiration, finds the very possession of her to be fatal to his creative impulse. He regains his lost power at the price of his wife's life. Not until after her death is he able to execute his picture of her, which is also his masterpiece. Poe, with a keener eye for the telling possibilities of the story, establishes a relation of cause and effect. between the successful completion of the painting and the death of the woman. The artist paints the very life of his wife into the canvas. It is this quality of life-likeness which makes the picture startling. The theme of both stories is the jealousy of art as a mistress.

The resemblances between Hoffmann's story, “Doge and [page 80:] Dogaressa,” and Poe's “The Assignation,” have been cited in support of Poe's debt to the earlier author by most of the critics who have argued in favor of such a debt. Stedman, in the introduction to the Woodberry-Stedman edition of Poe, remarks relative to the two tales: “‘The Assignation’ derives from Hoffmann's ‘Doge and Dogaressa,’ and the tableau with the Marchesa is a radiantly poetic variation upon the balcony scene in the earlier tale.”

The story of the Venetian Doge, Marino Faliero (1354), forms the historical setting for Hoffmann's tale. We learn of the old Doge, his young wife, and the latter's lover, the whole interwoven with a chapter of Venetian history, and provided with a number of characters more or less sharply and clearly drawn. The tale is carefully constructed, and, so far as technique is concerned, is worked out on a somewhat elaborate scale. Poe, with a masterful stroke and with a half dozen sentences, conjures up the mystery and romance of Venice, and in this setting he paints a picture which is strikingly like that of Hoffmann. We have again the old Doge, his young wife, the latter's lover, and the tragic death of the last two at the climax. But the American's method of execution is quite different. He omits all introductory facts of history, disregards entirely characterization, and reduces the number of characters to three. The story is presented in two pictures and the technique is of the simplest.

In thus associating Poe's work with that of Hoffmann, it is of interest to take account of certain utterances of the former with respect to his theory of the tale. In the ‘Philosophy of Composition,’‘ Poe says: “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily obtainable source of interest — I say to myself in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect (or more generally), the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion select?’ Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone — afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.” This last sentence is significant. In looking about him for combinations [page 81:] of event and tone, Poe found in the work of Hoffmann certain subjects and interests which were very congenial and which were very fruitful of suggestion for him in his own work.

Recognizing the points of contact between Poe's work and that of the German romanticists, specifically that of Hoffman, it is at the same time of importance that the hosts of Poe's admirers who are not readers of Hoffmann should distinguish between literary influence and literary plagiarism. Poe was undoubtedly influenced by Hoffmann and undoubtedly owed him many suggestions for motives and to a less extent for technique. But Poe's story is distinctively his own product. Whatever of suggestion he received from Hoffmann was recast in the moulds of his own imagination, and the finished product which he turned out bears the indubitable stamp of his own genius.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 71:]

* Edgar Poe in der franzœsischer Literatur. L.P. Betz, Frankfurt a.M., 1893.