Text: Danske Dandridge, “Poe on Happiness,” Poet Lore (Boston, MA), vol. XV, Winter, 1904, pp. 108-110

[page 108, continued:]

ALTHOUGH Edgar Allan Poe was a genius, he was one of the most ill-starred, ill-contrived of mortals that ever wrote divinely and acted madly.

A great poet is a great seer, and, although Edgar Allan Poe's Dæmon would not allow him to practice his own theories, yet there is some truth and wisdom in these theories; and we know of none more interesting than those on the subject of happiness. ‘From the violation of a few simple laws of humanity,’ says Poe, ‘arises the wretchedness of mankind. As a species we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of content; and even now, in the [page 109:] present darkness and madness of all thought on the great questions of the social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may be happy.’

He goes on to tell us of a certain highly-favored individual named Ellison, who ‘admitted but four elementary principles, or, more strictly, conditions of bliss. ‘That which he considered chief was the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air. The health, he asserted, attainable by any other means was scarcely worth the name. He instanced the ecstasies of the fox-hunter, and pointed to the toilers of the earth as the only people who, as a class, can be fairly considered happier than others.

‘His second condition was the love of woman. His third was the contempt of ambition. His fourth was an object of constant pursuit, and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in proportion to the spirituality of this object.’

Ellison, presumably a healthy man, with a beautiful wife whom he loved devotedly, created for himself a bit of fairyland in which to live out a happy existence. In a word, he became an enthusiastic landscape gardener.

If we are to put any faith in Poe's philosophy we may perhaps concede that, given good health, an absorbing love, absence of gnawing ambition, and an engrossing pursuit that carries one into the open air, as gardening does, we mortals might, for a time, live very contented lives.

It is not selfish to be happy; on the contrary, we do not know how one can do better than to set an example of happiness obtained by simple means, which would preach, as all good examples do, louder than the loudest sermon.

‘If I can possibly help it,’ said Sydney Smith, ‘I will never be unhappy.’

To be sure, Ellison's pursuit is a kind of sublimated and semi-miraculous landscape gardening, the result of which Poe describes, giving his fantastic imagination full swing. Ellison spends several years in the search for an ideal locality for his earthly paradise, which must seem, when completed, as if it were the creation and abode of celestial beings. The visitor to Arnheim intrusts himself to a magic boat which, after many windings and turnings along lovely shores, ‘commences a rapid descent and enters a vast amphitheater entirely begirt with purple mountains, whose bases are laved by a gleaming river throughout the whole extent of their circuit. [page 110:] Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view. There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange, sweet odor; there is a dreamlike intermingling to the eye of tall, slender eastern trees, bosky shrubberies, flocks of golden and crimson birds, lily-fringed lakes, meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses, long, intertangled lines of silver streamlets, and, uprising confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself, as if by miracle, in mid-air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles, and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the sylphs, of the fairies, of the genii, and of the gnomes.’

Poe, unhappy as he was, had one source of enjoyment that he does not mention among his requisites for the attainment of bliss, and that was his marvelous imagination, which enabled him

What cannot fail to strike the thoughtful reader of ‘Arnheim’ is the absence of altruism in this ingenious scheme for individual happiness. It affords little scope for the cultivation of the spiritual nature. Perhaps Poe argued about men and women as some parents do in the case of their children, that as long as they were happy they would be good. Yet so boundless are the wants of the soul that it is doubtful whether any scheme ever devised by the fancy that had for its object the gratification of the senses alone could long satisfy the higher nature. Add to Poe's plan some pursuit which should have as its aim the sharing of one's own happiness with others less fortunate, and it is possible that we may learn from it some lessons of wisdom. And yet the most admirable men and women are those who can keep brave and bright and sweet-tempered in spite of the troubles that must come to all, and without following any elaborate plan for esthetic enjoyment. ‘These strong, elastic, loving, sunny-natured souls are rare, indeed, but most of us have been privileged to know one or two of them, and to thank God for that knowledge.