Text: George D. Morris, “French Criticism of Poe,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham, NC), vol. XXV, no. 4, October 1915, pp. 324-329

[page 324:]

For nearly twenty-five years after his death, Poe was not a very important figure in the eyes of his countrymen. Since 1875, however, American criticism of him has steadily grown more favorable. At the time of his election to a place in the Hall of Fame, in 1910, so general was the disposition to regard him as one of the world's great writers that there was only one prominent man of letters in America, so far as the writer is aware, that lifted up his voice in protest. Mr. W. C. Brownell, the veteran critic, vigorously decried what he called the “growing cult of Poe,” maintaining that it was a betrayal of literature. The only visible effect was that its author was sorrowfully declared to be a “calamity in contemporary criticism.”

This steady growth of Poe's fame in America is unquestionably due, in part, to his fame in France. His popularity with the French reading public and the high praise bestowed upon him by a few well known French men of letters, notably Baudelaine and Jules Lemaitre, have been so well exploited that Americans have come to believe that in France admiration of his works has been almost universal. A survey of the French criticism of his tales shows, however, that this conclusion is not justified, that ever since 1846, when he was introduced to the French public through the columns of the Revue des Deux Mondes, there has been in France almost as wide a difference of opinion concerning his merits and his place in literature as there has been in the land of his birth. It is the purpose of this paper to show something of the seriousness and the scope of the adverse criticism to which he has been subjected in that country. The task is undertaken, not in a spirit of unfriendliness toward Poe, whom the writer is proud to honor as one of the most famous among American authors, but rather in the belief, expressed by Edmund Clarence Stedman as long ago as 1885, that indiscriminate praise of him is really an ill omen for his fame. [page 325:]

Among the many French writers who have made a study of Poe there are seven whose criticisms, considered from this point of view, are particularly noteworthy, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Louis Etienne, Arthur Arnould, Rene Tasselin, Madam Vincens (Arvede Barine), and Emile Lauvriere. I shall confine myself to a few of the more important criticisms made by each of these, as they fairly well represent the entire body of unfavorable French comment.

In the first of his articles on Poe, written in 1853, Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the well known novelists and critics of his day, takes up the stories of the Gold Bug and the Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall. What first attracted his attention was their strange and disconcerting originality, an originality so peculiar that it suggested an abnormal, perhaps diseased, condition of the brain. “Poe is like one,” he says, “whose talent, singular, abnormal, has its roots in some somber mania. It is like a flower which has acquired strange new colorings and spottings because its roots have been dipped in poison.” He condemns the author of the Gold Bug for sacrificing his genius for the fantastic to the positivism and the materialism of his American environment. The mystery surrounding the discovery of the treasure in the Gold Bug should have been left unsolved, he says. He contends that in giving a perfectly rational explanation of it, “the poet allows him- self to be strangled by the American.” In the story of Hans Pfaall and his journey to the moon he sees little but the Yankee with his deep-rooted love of discovery and applied science. In his second article, which deals with twelve of Poe's best tales, he makes further complaints. He reproaches him for his silence on moral questions, for his pessimism, and for his pantheism. In tales like the Gold Bug and the Purloined Letter, he sees merely the “dexterity of a magician,” artifice rather than art. He claims that Poe never rises above the world of sensations, that he never mounts to the higher regions of the feelings where the real substance of man is to be found. He finds fault with him for taking up with what he calls the chimeras of the century, mesmerism, somnambulism, metempsychosis, etc. He thinks that Poe's tales show effort and determination rather than strength and inspiration and that his originality [page 326:] lacks “just that sincerity that would make of it a thing divine.” In his third article, he reproaches him for his extravagant devotion to the doctrine of art for art's sake, which leads, he maintains, to the “deliberate contempt for everything that savors of the didactic, to the pursuit of violent emotions at any price and to the almost bestial adoration of form alone.” He expresses his final judgment in these words: “Edgar Poe could have been something great, but he will be merely some- thing curious.”

Louis Etienne, who was at one time a professor in the University of Besancon, published in 1857, in the Revue Contemporaine, an appreciation of Poe which, taken as a whole, was perhaps the most valuable contribution to the Poe literature that France had as yet made. Like d’Aurevilly he reproaches Poe for his lack of the higher feelings and at the same time for his unceasing exploitation of the horrible. “In these stories,” he says, “the heart and soul have no place.” “Oh for a breath of human feeling,” he exclaims, “that is what is lacking in these horrors which make you shudder. It is not because they are horrors that they fall under the ban of criticism but because they reach nothing but the nerves. They un- questionably betray rare power, they make your flesh creep, they make your heart throb, they throw you into a fever of excitement, but they do not reach the soul. The horrible may be beautiful, original, admirable, — but only on one condition, and that condition is everywhere sovereign — it is that in it the soul shall have its share. The human soul is not in these stories; it is not in Edgar Poe, either, in spite of all his talents.”

Like d’Aurevilly again, he finds in the group of tales represented by the Gold Bug and the Purloined Letter ingenuity rather than art. “Ingenuity carried to this excess,” he says, “is literature only for those who confuse amazement with admiration.” Poe's philosophy he characterizes as puerile. He considers as especially deserving of condemnation Poe's theory of evil, which is, he says, that “It comes, not from man's weak- ness, but from a primordial element of perversity in his nature.”

M. Arnould, whose article on Poe was published in the Revue Moderne, in 1868, was a young journalist of democratic [page 327:] tendencies who devoted himself almost exclusively, during his later years, to the writing of fiction. He notes first that the tales of Poe are extremely monotonous, a peculiarity due, he claims to the fact that they all deal either with physical suffer- ing or with mental anguish. “This,” he asserts, “is the bond of unity and the indelible mark of his works.” The monotony of his stories is aggravated, according to M. Arnould, by the uni- formity of the pictures and the personages. “In the pictures there are no contrasts. If he describes a tempest and darkness, it is the wildest tempest and the thickest darkness, not a mo- ment of calm, not a gleam of light, a flash to make the horror visible and that is all.” The personages, dominated by a single idea, all end with crime, a kind of crime, moreover, whose char- acteristic is that it is “never the result of passion or rage but the necessary consequence of a deformation of the brain, of a depravity of the moral sense.” He observes that even Poe's heroines bring no light into the darkness: “A young woman enters, you think that a ray of sunlight is about to shoot athwart these heavy clouds and beautify them with a fringe of silver; be undeceived. When Edgar Poe brings into our presence a beautiful young woman, it is because she is in the clutches of some strange disease, of some nervous disorder akin to epilepsy, it is because, reduced to the state of a suffering, agonizing phantom, she can no longer inspire us with any feeling except a mixture of repulsion and horror from which even pity is absent.”

Like many other critics of Poe, M. Arnould attaches slight value to his tales of logic, such as the Murders of the Rue Morgue and his tales of mystification such as the Balloon Hoax. “You discover in them,” he says, “merely the American playing with difficulties, or the mathematician amusing himself solving problems that have purposely been made complicated in order to show off his cleverness to greater advantage.”

He declares, too, that Poe has not a creative imagination. Apropos of the story of Hans Pfaal, he writes: “Here the story ends. Do not expect adventures in the moon, or a description of this dead luminary. If Poe were a man of exuberant, or even inventive imagination, this would be a fine theme. But Poe's imagination stops short at the point where his acquaintance [page 328:] with science ends, and never passes certain well defined limits. He disfigures, he magnifies, he exaggerates, he conjectures, he does not create.”

He affirms, furthermore, that “Poe knows nothing of wide horizons,” “that he has no general ideas,” that “he does not comprehend life, viewing it as he does, from only one side,” that he is “unacquainted with absolutely everything that is not himself and his malady.” He declares that he is not, properly speaking, a great figure, that “he has not genius, for genius is the supreme equilibrium of the higher faculties.”

Rene Tasselin, a contributor to the Revue Suisse, believes that the exclusive treatment of the exceptional, which, according to him, is the special characteristic mark of Poe's writings, is a sign of inferiority. “Does not art consist,” he asks, “in manifesting simple, primitive, natural beauty, so to speak, and is it not degrading it, and in some sort doubting its power, to seek it in clever combinations of the horrible and the grandiose, in subtile penetrating perfumes, in strange discordant tones? You obtain in this way extraordinary effects, you may succed [[succeed]] in pleasing the over-refined, the blasé, but assuredly you have left the higher levels of art.”

Madame Vincens, well and favorably known as Arvede Barine, agrees with Arnould in thinking that Poe did not have a creative imagination. “His imagination was strong,” she says, “it was never fertile, and its fecundity dried up as the attacks due to the excessive use of alcohol became more violent.” She contends also that his outlook on life is very limited, that of all writers that count he is the one whose domain is the most restricted, and as to his position she thinks that he de- serves only a “secondary place in the ranks of creative minds.”

Finally M. Emile Lauvriere, whose treatise on Poe, the result of six years of labor, was crowned by the French Academy, summarizes his opinion of the story writer in the follow- ing words: “In short everywhere in this monstrous temple of madness we witness, enthralled by the irresistible charm of a dangerous art, the fascinating but exhausting spectacle of the human faculties, sensibility, energy, intelligence, imagination, reason and taste outrageously overtaxed in paroxysms of pain. [page 329:] If the frightful superiority of this extraordinary being comes from genius, then genius is nothing but frenzied excess.”

It is evident that some of the foregoing criticisms are inspired by prejudice. The unfriendly attitude of the aristocratic d’Aurevilly, for instance, is undoubtedly due in large measure, to his detestation of democratic America. But after all, he was a Frenchman, and a Frenchman of such prominence in his day that he can not be ignored in this investigation. Furthermore it is by no means claimed that the views set forth above represent the total French conception of Poe. I have confined myself to unfavorable criticism because the emphasis hitherto placed upon French praise of him has engendered among us an erroneous idea as to what the French estimate of him really is. If we add, as we should, to the list of names already given, that of Remy de Gourmont, editor of the Mercure de France, and, if we then compare it with the list of well known French men of letters who have eulogized Poe, a list which contains, even when compiled with the utmost generosity only the names of Baudelaire, Gautier, Lemaitre, Joseph Péladan, Charles Morice, and Camille Mauclair, we shall see that more than half of the French critics of Poe whose opinions really count have not given him a higher place than that given him by the more conservative among our own critics, such as Richard Henry Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Professor Woodberry, Hamilton W. Mabie, Brander Matthews and others.