Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Béranger in the Works of Poe,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 54-74 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 54:]

4

BÉRANGER IN THE WORKS OF POE

IN 1909 KILLIS Campbell advanced the theory that two lines from “Le Refus” by Pierre-Jean de Béranger were the basic inspiration for Poe's “Israfel,” first published in April, 1831. He repeated this view in his authoritative edition of Poe's Poems in 1917.(1) Since that time many commentators appear to accept the hypothesis.(2) Yet it seems difficult to maintain that by April, 1831, Poe could have read the lines in “Le Refus”:

In fact, I believe Poe never read a volume of Béranger's verses although he used these two lines later as a motto for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” reviewed a translation of a few of Béranger's poems with authoritative allusions to the French originals, and referred to the name and style of Béranger in six more pieces of criticism and one extended comment in the “Marginalia.” In all, there are nine separate published references to the poet or his poems in Poe's writings and one in a manuscript note. Two of his major critical works — the review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales and “The Poetic Principle” — have important passages discussing Béranger as a poet. Obviously it is necessary to consider Poe's methods of citation as well as his knowledge of the French contemporary figure.

It was quite normal for Poe to be aware of the songs of Béranger, who was then feted throughout the western world for the lyrical quality of his verse and his very apt commentaries on personalities and events in France. Perhaps few reputations [page 55:] have more sharply fallen than that of Béranger, whose chansons were being published in one, two, or three volumes almost every year throughout Poe's maturity.(4) It was not only the French who were infatuated with these lyrics, composed by Béranger for popular melodies of his own and earlier days; we find also an 1837 London volume of translations; another published in Philadelphia in 1844 by Poe's successor as editor, the indefatigable anthologist Rufus W. Griswold; and an 1850 New York translation of two hundred of the lyrics.(5) Continuing evidence of his popularity is shown in another translation of Béranger's Songs, dedicated to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1856), and still another (New York, 1888).(6) In short, Poe had to be aware of a body of poetry of which Griswold said: “This is the first collection that has been made in this country of the writings of the greatest of the living poets of Europe. ... The edition has selected such songs as in their English dress give the most true impression of the author's genius”; similarly the preface of Young's 1850 English edition declares: “Béranger, the darling poet of his countrymen and the admiration of the lettered world, is a master of song, not the founder of a creed.”(7)

Since the many collections of Chansons inedites and Oeuvres began coming out in 1828, there was sufficient opportunity for Poe to become acquainted with Béranger's work. On this assumption, Killis Campbell postulated that “Le Refus” was somehow known to Poe in time for the publication of “Israfel” in Poems “by Edgar A. Poe, Second Edition.” The date of this book, as noted by Quinn,(8) was probably April, 1831. Campbell requires us to be fastidious about the month because he specifies that “Le Refus” came out in January or February, 1831, early enough to enable Poe to gain inspiration for “Israfel.” Poe, I believe, actually first saw the two lines in the article on Béranger in Robert M. Walsh's translation of Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, which Poe reviewed in the April, 1841 issue of Graham's Magazine. Not long afterwards, in October, 1841, in the same magazine, Poe reprinted “Israfel,” with a subtle but significant change in the poem and [page 56:] in the motto, ascribed to the Koran. In 1831 the motto read: “And the angel Israfel, who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures.” In 1841 it read: “And the angel Israfel, or Israfeli, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who is the most musical of all God's creatures” (19.183). In the poem itself the second line of the 1831 version is now furnished with quotation marks: “Whose heart-strings are a lute”; these imply that it is a quotation from Sale's version of the Koran. (In actual fact, the 1831 version leaves out the Koran as source, while that of 1841 leaves out Sale, inserted only in the 1845 printing.) I suspect that Poe would not be displeased with Harrison's suggestion, elaborated by Campbell, that Béranger's “lute” lines were connected with the genesis of “Israfel.”(9) Both of these critics may be following the curious 1841 “lead,” which I believe derived from Poe's reading in Walsh.

Briefly this is Campbell's argument for an early inspiration. Béranger had refused the offer of a pension from General Francois Sebastiani, minister of the successful new monarch, Louis Phillipe, whom Béranger had supported despite his protestations of republicanism. “Le Refus” speaks bravely of his desire to be independent and maintain a heart responsive to his own thoughts and desires and those of the people:

This is rendered thus by William Young:

In reality, he declared in 1840, his refusal sprang chiefly from sheer laziness; in his posthumous autobiography, he ascribed it to his having an income from his books of verse without need for aid from the public treasury.(11) Whatever the motives of Béranger, the main idea of the poem is very different from “Israfel,” with its aesthetic and mystical creed, and also from the hypochondriac dilettantism of Roderick Usher. Campbell ingeniously supposes that a Paris newspaper, probably Le Figaro, in January, 1831, published the first instance of “Le Refus,” chiefly because another Béranger poem, “A mes amis devenus Ministres,” appeared in the paper in that month. Campbell admits that Poe would have had to see the Paris newspaper in West Point — which he left on February 19, 1831 — or in New York City, in order to include his “resultant” poem in the volume published in April; surely this was unlikely in the days when passengers took more than a month to cross the Atlantic.

Le Figaro, as a leading anti-royalist organ, took great interest in the work and popularity of Béranger. In its January 14, 1831 issue (Vol. 6, no. 14) it announced its first-page publication of his poem, “A mes amis devenus Ministres”: “A new song by Béranger ... it is the awakening [reveil] of that voice ... too long mute with joy. ... If this spirit of the muse who had anticipated, counseled, celebrated in advance our political regeneration is revived, the opposition in France is neither dead nor splintered” (author's translation). This poem was reprinted on January 15 in Le Voleur, of similar political persuasion, under the title “Le Reveil de Béranger.” Obviously, if “Le Refus” had come out soon afterwards, Le Figaro and Le Voleur would have printed or at least spoken about it as a major literary event. Only in September is there another Wronger poem (see below) and a short, disappointed article on Béranger on December 14, 1831. Moreover, Béranger published his recent political poems late in 1831, in a twenty-four page pamphlet “au profit du Comite polonais,” of which he was a member; the only poems included were “Poniatowski,” [page 58:] “Hatons-Nous,” “Chansons dediees au General Lafayette,” “Le 14 Juillet, 1829,” and “A mes amis devenus Ministres.” This last item contained the significant notation: “This poem was printed in the Figaro a few months ago” (p. 23). Clearly during the intervening months “Le Refus” had not been published anywhere.

In the absence of any positive proof from Béranger or his editors, it is difficult to establish the exact date of “Le Refus.” It first appeared-according to our knowledge, not Campbell's inferences-in Chansons Nouvelles et Dernieres de Béranger in 1833. I have looked for it in a Brussels edition of Oeuvres Completes which is dated 1830 but which includes poems from 1831, among them “A mes amis devenus Ministres” (pp. 559-561) as well as “A M. de Chateaubriand,” which is dated, “Paris, 14 septembre 1831” (pp. 570-571); Le Figaro, I found, printed the latter in its September 6, 1831 issue, with this proleptic date. The absence of “Le Refus” from this volume argues clearly that “Le Refus” belongs to a later date than September, 1831, and therefore could not have been seen by Poe before he published “Israfel” in April, 1831. On the other hand, it does appear in a Brussels edition of 1833 (pp. 117-118). The only edition that attempts to date “Le Refus” at all, among the many that I have examined, is the Oeuvres de Pierre-Jean de BOranger (Paris, 1872), which lists it without a definite date in the text (2.308), but which ascribes it to 1831 in the “Table” (2.389). The subject matter certainly places it in 1831, as Campbell says, but it is fantastic to think that Poe could have seen it then.(12)

Far more plausible is Quinn's claim that a major source of “Israfel” is Thomas Moore's “The Light of the Haram,” with its lute and “Angel Israfil.”(13) Incidentally, Poe shows a confusion about the nature of the lyre and lute throughout the poem, in which Israfel seems to be singing to a lute in stanza 1, to a lyre in 3, to a lute in 6, and, by implication, to a lyre in 8. He makes the same error in the first paragraph of “The Island of the Fay” in speaking of “those who love the lyre for its own sake, and for its spiritual uses,” since players on the [page 59:] lute in 1841 were conceivable but not players on the ancient instrument called the “lyre.” The lute would have been appropriate for a Moslem angel, since it had come to Europe via the Arabs.(14) The lyre is more reminiscent here of Shelley's “lyre” of the “forest” in the “West Wind Ode” and has overtones of “The Skylark.”(15) To Béranger the lute in “Le Refus” and in several other poems was a symbol of the carefree songster, the troubadour strolling about and delighting a succession of auditors, as in the paintings of Watteau.(16)

There is no need to belabor the point, since in 1831 Poe had probably no more than heard Béranger's name. In 1836, he presented a bona fide discussion of one of Béranger's poems, however ignorant of the text itself he may have continued to be. As editor and major reviewer of the Southern Literary Messenger, in January, 1836, Poe published a long review of three volumes of poetry by three women: Zinzendorff, and Other Poems by Mrs. L. H. Sigourney; Poems by Miss H. F. Gould (3rd ed., 1835); and Poems; Translated and Original by Mrs. E. F. Ellet (Philadelphia, 1835). It is the third volume which is of interest because of Poe's dicta on Mrs. Ellet's translations of Béranger and Lamartine.(17) Poe first gives the facts of her book-that in two years most of its fifty-seven poems had appeared in periodicals and that eighteen were “creditable” translations from French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Yet he ironically observes: “A too scrupulous adherence to the text is certainly not one of her faults-nor can we yet justly call her, in regard to the spirit of her authors, a latitudinarian.” She neglects the “poetical characters” of the original. In proof of this, he says, “Let us refer to the lady's translation of the Swallows. We have no hesitation in saying that not the slightest conception of Pierre Jean de Béranger, can be obtained by the perusal of the lines at page 112, of the volume now before me.” Given below are the lines in question (stanza 2) from “Les Hirondelles,” followed by William Young's translation of 1850 and then Mrs. Ellet's version. Hers appears to me to be as faithful in content as Young's, for example, and perhaps [page 60:] more felicitous in style, despite Poe's carping and despite her being ignored by anthologists of Béranger translations.

There is little reason for Poe's conclusion: “We have no fault to find with these verses in themselves — as specimens of the manner of the French chansonnier, we have no patience with them.” This stricture, which he levels also at her translation of the “Sepulchres” of Foscolo, he applies to Lamartine's “Loss of the Anio,” “in the original of which, by the way, we cannot perceive the lines answering to Mrs. E's verses:

Mrs. Ellet devoted five pages of her book (pp. 42-46) to her translation of this entire poem. Since she does not identify the exact source, aside from the subtitle, I doubt that Poe either knew enough or cared to consult the original in Lamartine when he made this contumelious statement, which matches the irrelevancy or cruelty of his stricture on her Béranger translation. In fact, her entire poem is a fine, faithful translation of “La Perte de l’Anio” in the Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses.”(19) For the original of the above chapter, Lamartine wrote:

Clearly Poe had not looked at the text before making this harsh charge against Mrs. Ellet.

The rest of his discussion of her volume is less apposite to our investigation, but it illustrates further Poe's critical approach. He praises her translation of a Quevedo sonnet, “Rome in Ruins,” which gives him a chance to decry Quevedo's “plagiarism” from Girolamo Preti. He is equivocal about the merits of her original poems, and attacks an epigram on Echo as a “silly joke upon a threadbare theme.” He hints at plagiarism in her Teresa Contarini, a tragedy included in this volume which was lauded upon its performance in March, 1835, but is really “better suited to the closet.” Finally, he prints the six stanzas of a poem “rich in vigorous expression and full of solemn thought,” containing “condensation and energy.” It begins:

Could not these lines have lingered in the retentive memory of Poe for many years as a suggestion for

Poe himself thought that his criticism, including this kind of “cutting and slashing,” was “just.” Indeed, he scarcely saw it as unkind, and affirmed that in regard to the poems of Mrs. Ellet “praise slightly prevails.”(20)

In 1839 Poe had another occasion to mention the French poet's works. He was reviewing George P. Morris's works, for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (December, 1839). Morris was author of the extremely popular “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and a frequent contributor to the magazines of the day. His many song lyrics were often published in books. Now he forms the subject of a Poe article, “George P. Morris,” featured simply as “our best writer of songs” (Harrison, 10.41-45). This inevitably suggested comparison with the best French “song-writer,” here termed by Poe “De Béranger.” Poe first claims that the popularity of a song is a test of its merit. He then associates the “indefiniteness” of the composer's creation with that of the “lyricist.” Poe here seems to identify “definiteness” or “determinateness” with imitative or program music, such as kotzwara's “Battle of Prague.” He manages to equate indefiniteness with “abandonnement,” which, he says, is exemplified in old English ballads and carols. This is the “essence of all antique song,” and he enumerates Homer, Anacreon, and Aeschylus. “It is the vital principle in De Béranger.” Without “this quality no song-writer was ever truly popular.” Next, Poe defends the use of “hyperbole” and the poetic “conceit” — as used by Morris. Béranger is brought in again, rather strangely: “To all reasonable persons it will be sufficient to say that the fervid, hearty, free-spoken songs of Cowley and of Donne — more especially of Cunningham, of Harrington, and of Carew — abound in precisely similar things; and that they are to be met with, plentifully, in the polished pages of [page 63:] Moore and of Béranger, who introduce them with thought and retain them after mature deliberation” (10.44). His last commendation of Morris speaks of his “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and “By the Lake Where Droops the Willow” as “immortal.” Now one may ask whether this rigmarole of names and ill-matched qualities, intended to set off Poe's erudition and refinement, gives the slightest hint of the real merits of Béranger. Can one find any evidence here that Poe had read the French poet, who is neither indefinite nor metaphysical nor above imitative effects in his poems?(21) It is clear, I think, that to this date, 1839, Poe had read no Béranger in French.

His ignorance was alleviated early in 1841 when he received, for review in Graham's Magazine, Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France, translated by R. M. Walsh (Graham's, 18.202-203). The original author, although unknown to Poe and Walsh, was Louis Leonard de Lomenie. Poe accepts the “impartiality” of these sketches of contemporary figures and asserts: “We are most pleased with those of Thiers, Hugo, Sand, Arago and Béranger [sic]” (p. 202); although he devotes his entire review to the accounts of Hugo, Arago, Berryer, Chateaubriand, and George Sand, his awareness of details in Lomenie's eulogy of Béranger can easily be proved. Elsewhere I have analyzed the pastiche of unjust remarks about Hugo that Poe concocted from Lomenie's chapter.(22) Conversely, Poe would have received the impression of a man of extraordinary genius from the account of Béranger. Since the substance and the cited examples of his chapter entered largely into future references made by Poe, I shall briefly summarize it (Sketches, pp. 231-247). The famous eulogy by Chateaubriand, prefacing his “Historical Studies” as the epigraph terms the work, is cited: “Under the simple title of song writer, a man has become one of the greatest poets that France has produced”; also cited is Béranger's statement in the preface to his works: “The people is my muse” (p. 231). A long account of his life is first given, with three brief poetic excerpts, in French, that help to underscore important dates. He is said [page 64:] to be “careful to conceal his profound knowledge” (p. 241) and to have the “stuff of an historian, a philosopher, or a statesman” (p. 242).

A discussion of “the general character of his poems” is introduced with “Mon coeur est un luth suspendu; / Sitôt qu’on le touche it resonne” from “Le Refus.” “The genius of Beran-ger is like his heart; it echoes every sound, from whatever quarter it may come” (p. 242). Lomenie deplores his “loose songs” and praises his satirical poetry which has been “a powerful influence upon the great events of recent years.” Eight lines are here cited. His “elegiac poetry” is next praised for its pervading tone of “sadness” and “The Swallows” is one of those mentioned. Eight lines from the sentimental “Jacques” are quoted to illustrate his sympathy with the wretched of the earth; Lomenie notes “that refrain which is heard at intervals, like the tolling of a funeral bell; leve-toi, Jacques, Leve-toi; / Voici venir l’huissier du roi.’ “ The harmonious combination of his lyric poems is highly praised, and an example is given in “this admirable strophe of the piece entitled Fools (‘Les Fous’).” The last four lines of the eight which conclude this poem we shall find Poe citing in toto in 1849. The author ends with mock reproof of Béranger for deprecating his “glory” and his “genius” which have been lavished on the song, “that imperishable species of manifestation. When you have chosen, you have inspired the people with the instinct of noble things, you have impressed upon their soul ... the grand ideas of glory, honour, patriotism, and humanity. ... The remotest generations will repeat your strains and your name will never perish from the earth” (p. 247).

Before indicating the more far-reaching effect upon Poe's view of Béranger given by this translated chapter, I should like to offer an amusing sign of his careful reading of its pages. Eight years later, Poe prepared for the Southern Literary Messenger of June, 1849, a set of “Marginalia.” One paragraph, which has not been traced to my knowledge, comes directly from Lomenie-Walsh's chapter on the poet, with minor changes: [page 65:]

This can be found printed verbatim in Walsh (p. 243), with the erroneous spelling “debauchee,” (referring to Anacreon), but Poe, in correcting this error, should also have corrected “Batyllis” into “Bathyllus.” Poe also adds the emphasis of italics. It would appear that he retained his notes on this chapter from 1841 or the book itself — a fact which becomes more significant in his 1849 quotation of Béranger, from the same chapter, as well as his 1842 addition of the motto for “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

It is not a mere paragraph, however, nor even a set of quotations that Poe chiefly derived from this source, but a wholehearted respect for the French poet. This was much more intense than any feeling that firsthand acquaintance with Béranger's middle-level strains could have given to Poe. Yet Lomenie was not unusual at this time in his adulation. For example, William Young, in his translation, asserts: “Béranger's songs are the wonder of the critic, no less than the delight of the artisan, who cannot read them, but yet knows them by heart.”(23) Béranger himself knew the truth about his mediocrity; in his preface to the Chansons Nouvelles et Dernieres of 1833 he wrote: “In short, a great number of my songs are no more than the inspiration of intimate sentiments or of the whims of a vagabond spirit. ... Despite all that friendship has been able to do, despite the noteworthy tolerance and indulgence of the interpreters of public opinion, I have always thought that my name would not survive me, and that my reputation would decline faster for having, of necessity, been greatly exaggerated by the interest of the party which has adopted it.”(24) This sentiment accords with his reply to a letter of glowing tribute to Béranger, “chansonnier,” sent by Chateaubriand on September 24, 1831 (alluding also to his high praise in the Etudes). [page 66:]

It appears to follow Béranger's poem of tribute to Chateau-briand of September 14. Béranger's reply, of October 4, 1831, concerns his inflated reputation: “I am a good little poet, a clever artisan, a conscientious worker to whom the old airs and the corner where I am confined have brought happiness, and that is that. ... I shall have a line in history.”(25) Béranger correctly assayed his merits, although his reputation lingered a little longer than he had anticipated.

In 1879 Walter Bagehot, in a long chapter on Béranger in his Literary Studies, thought him influential in political affairs, quick, gay, precise, and epicurean — therefore, “superficial.”(26) In 1896 Alcee Fortier regarded him as “vulgar, bombastic, and grandiloquent” but not without genius.(27) Gustave Lanson left him out of his Histoire de la Litterature Francaise but elsewhere granted him a skill in ear-catching, dramatic rhythms; he compared him to Scribe in his song structure.(28) Even more contemptuous is Pierre Moreau, who says: “He waved a panache of popular patriotism which made him for a time a great man.” A brief but penetrating evaluation is offered by L. Cazamian, who thinks his “unrivalled popularity” to be owed to “neatness, light and deft phrasing, easy, short, well-marked rhythm ... humour and a touch of sentiment” — qualities appealing to “the taste of the middle classes” rather than “artists and intellectuals.”(29)

Mindful of these few critical dicta about Béranger, we return to his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, who has just read the sketch by Walsh-Lomenie. In September, 1841, Poe was reviewing for Graham's the novel Joseph Rushbrook, or the Poacher by Captain Marryat (19.142-143; Harrison, 10.197-202). Poe had little respect for Marryat: “He has always been a very popular writer in the most rigorous sense of the word. His books are essentially ‘mediocre.’ His ideas are the common property of the mob, and have been their common property time out of mind. We look ... in vain for the slightest indication of originality ... sentiments rather than ideas; and properly to estimate them, even in this view, we must bring ourselves [page 67:] into a sort of identification with the sentiment of the mass. Works composed in this spirit are sometimes purposely so composed by men of superior intelligence, and here we call to mind the Chansons of Béranger.” This spirit is called by critics “nationalty” (in this sense, a Poe nonceword) and Poe doubts that it is “a fit object for high-minded ambition” (10. 197-198).(30) One wonders whether “nationalty” is indeed what critics do call the mixture of popularity and simplicity about which Poe may be writing (for there is certainly little straightforward meaning in any of it). It would appear, however, that Béranger's writing for the people, whom he calls “ma muse,” has been driven home by Lomenie, but the comparison with Marryat is utterly discordant and shows no real understanding or knowledge of Béranger.

It was during 1841 that Poe recorded a few lines from Béranger which are not in Lomenie's article, the only such instance, but he did not make any published use of the citation. The matter is, perhaps, too petty to concern us for long, and may be followed in the illuminating account of “What Poe Knew about Cryptography” by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.(31) Sometime during 1841, while he was continuing his articles on “Secret-Writing” or cryptography, begun in Alexander's Weekly Messenger over a year earlier,(32) Poe jotted down three lines from Béranger's “Petit Homme Gris” on an envelope which he was using for notes on cryptography: “Et dit, moi je m’en / Et dit, moi je m’en / Ma foi; moi je men [sic] ris.” This is the refrain of the poem, save for the last line: “Oh! qu’il est gai [bis] / le petit homme gris!” (1840 ed., pp. 27-29). The envelope can be identified as one sent by F. W. Thomas to Poe, July 19, 1841. Various aspects of Poe's magazine exhibition of decoding cryptograms made it appropriate for him to record this mocking kind of refrain. He could easily have picked it up from hearing the song, “Le Petit Homme Gris.”(33) It was not necessary for him to derive a refrain from reading a collection of Béranger's works, and in the light of his further uninformed references, I believe that the sketch in Walsh's book remained [page 68:] his sole contact with Béranger's work in the original French. The connection between “A Few Words on Secret Writing” in the July, 1841 issue of Graham's and the April review of Walsh's book is noted by Poe (19.35); Poe refers to the phrase “le gouvernement provisoire” which had been discovered by Berryer, subject of one of the Walsh chapters, to be the key to a cipher involving the Duchesse de Berri (18.203). In a further notice on “Secret Writing” Poe alluded to the Berryer discovery of the cipher solution (August, 1841, 19.96). A brief note on “Secret Writing” was again included in Graham's for October, 1841 (19.192). Clearly, elements from the Sketches were lingering with Poe during the rest of the year and afterwards, to provide him with ideas and allusions adequate for his purposes.

Accordingly, in May, 1842, in his second review of Haw-thorne's Twice-Told Tales in Graham's he invokes Béranger's name, in the often-cited passage on the superiority over long compositions of the “tale proper” and of the “rhymed poem” which can be read in an hour. In discussing the epic as “offspring of an imperfect sense of Art,” he evaluates a “poem too brief” to produce “an intense or enduring impression” (Harrison, 11.107). I shall give the conclusion with its misinterpretation of Béranger:

This is replete with errors, the most objectively demonstrable of which is the length of Béranger's poems. In the 1840 edition, which is virtually complete, there are 320 “chansons,” of which [page 69:] only three percent or exactly eleven are as brief as eight lines in length. Since these “couplets” as Béranger terms them are usually written in tribute to real persons the danger of mere “epigrammatism” is slight.(34) Almost all of the remaining 309 are forty lines long, much greater, one might add, than the average length of Poe's poems. How could Poe have made such a surprising mistake? one asks. The answer is simple and inescapable — by looking solely at the excerpts published in the Béranger chapter of Walsh's book. From the same source derives the notion that he wrought “brilliant things — pungent and soul-stirring.” Merely read the ending of that chapter given above, to observe this. Even the wording derives from it. Apparently, with regard to French literature, Poe felt secure from any accusation of error.

Poe next drew upon the chapter in Walsh's Sketches for the important motto to “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In his Tales “by Edgar A. Poe” (New York, 1845), he reprints the tale of 1839, this time with the motto. It had appeared twice in 1840 without the motto.(35) I emphasize that 1840 was the year before his review of Walsh's Sketches; hence, Poe had no previous knowledge of the lines from “Le Refus.” Without suspecting this situation Quinn controverts by implication Campbell's suggestion about “Israfel” by stating that if both works were based on the excerpt, “It would be a remarkable example of Poe's retention of an idea for fourteen years!” (Quinn, pp. 466-467). In fact, Poe would have been capable of such a retention, if he had actually read Béranger's poem in 1831, but this was impossible. There is no question that, taken out of context, the lines are very well suited to Roderick Usher, who responds to so many suprasensual phenomena with fear, evasion, and eventually disintegration. To point up the application Poe did not hesitate to change Béranger's “mon coeur” to “son coeur” in the motto. This is one of the many instances in which Poe shows a kind of genius in borrowing and adapting short-story mottoes well after the original genesis and printing of the work.(36) In his article in The Dial Campbell [page 70:] carelessly overlooks the lack of motto in the first three printings of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and confidently declares that the tale uses it ten years after it enters into “Israfel.”

After 1845 there is a lapse in Poe's references to Béranger until the last two years of his life, when we find three. The first to be printed (see below for his lecture of 1848) is the comparison of George P. Morris with Béranger, because of their both being “song-writers.” This is identical with Poe's article in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine of December, 1839, and it is now included as one of the long items in the “Marginalia” of the Southern Literary Messenger of April, 1849 (Harrison, 16.136-140). Harrison is in error in his headnote and footnote which maintain that it was given the title “National Melodies of America” and reprinted “revised” and “with slight alterations” (10.41). Its appearance indicates Poe's continuing misconceptions about Béranger's works — for example, their being written for music of “indefiniteness.”(37) In the stresses of the year of Virginia's final decline and afterwards while courting the literary ladies of New York, Lowell, Providence, and Richmond, Poe probably had little time or inclination to look into Béranger's poems.

At least once he glanced into his notebook jottings from Walsh's Sketches or into the book itself, for in the June, 1849 “Marginalia” of the Messenger we find him using four of the eight lines from “Les Fous,” which Lomenie had quoted. The brief item illustrates Poe's method of embellishing his “Marginalia” quotations and also provides insight into Poe's prevailing attitude on important issues:

For lack of a faithful translation by Mrs. Ellet of these lines from Béranger's satire on followers of St. Simon, Fourier, and Enfantin, I shall give that of William Young. He translates the poem as “Madmen” and concludes it with:

Béranger's full satire on social reformers would certainly be pleasing to Edgar Allan Poe. Many are the instances of Poe's strictures against Fourier and Condorcet and those that he sweepingly called the “human-perfectibility men.” More ambivalent was his attitude toward the progress of the sciences, quite apart from their application to the betterment of the life of the average man. He shows this equivocal appreciation of the new science in the heavily footnoted “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” with its references to rapid trains, Babbage's early computer, electrotype, the “Voltaic pile,” the “Electro Telegraph,” the daguerreotype, etc. (February, 1845); less directly, in the “anti-democratic” and “anti-progressivist” story “Some Words with a Mummy” (April, 1845); and, especially, in his “looking-backward” fantasy, “Mellonta Tauta” (February, 1849). These are only a few of the loci for references by Poe to scientific development.(38)

It may appear strange to the reader of today that Poe should reach out to Béranger in order to make such an observation. One might note, in passing, that Poe knew about Sir Humphry Davy's experiments of 1801 with the electric arc (exhibited by him in 1808) as well as about the many developments of the 1840's intended to improve electric arc lamps.(39) Poe's interest here may also have coincided with his work on “The Light-House” during his last year of life.(40) Lighthouses were often [page 72:] discussed as a primary goal of efficient electric illumination.(41) Whatever the source of his interest, Poe certainly forces Béranger into an odd application, since the French poet is not talking about science at all, and says nothing so very extravagant at the end; the image is as old as the idea of Prometheus's enlightening mankind with fire. But it certainly leads to an insight into Poe, for he implies his feelings about the majority of mankind — “les fous” — despite the wry humor of his placing himself on the same level. There is also the implication of pleasure in a universal holocaust — easily substantiated from Poe's self-destructiveness, especially after the death of Virginia.

The last instance of Poe's use of Béranger's poetry was in “The Poetic Principle,” prepared as a lecture late in 1848 and published posthumously in 1850.(42) The Béranger section of this celebrated statement of Poe's aesthetic credo, with its definition of the function of poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” was adapted from his earlier passage in the May, 1842 Graham's Magazine review of Twice-Told Tales. We can date with accuracy its entrance into his lecture and consequent essay through a letter to Sarah Whitman of November 26, 1848:

Poe lectured in Providence on “The Poetic Principle” on December 20, 1848, with great success according to his letter of the 28th (Ostrom, 2.413). Henceforth the lecture-article, with its prominent reference to Béranger, became a major source of income for Poe during the last year of his life.(43) In view of the importance that Poe and literary critics have attached to this work, Poe's use of Béranger's “chansons” to illustrate a leading point deserves attention. [page 73:]

The passage in the Hawthorne review, with its capitalized “Poetic Sentiment,” may have suggested the lecture and essay title, “Poetic Principle,” as well as various themes. It is interesting to observe the way in which he has altered the original — by no means for the better. I do not wish to suggest causes for the loss of his customary skill or judgment in this matter. Some changes, of course, derive from the need, in 1848, to consider poetry alone, whereas “tale-writing” was his primary theme in 1842. The Béranger portion of the original, long paragraph now is given paragraph emphasis by itself:

The former image of “the dropping of the water upon the rock” has been supplanted by two references to “the stamp upon the wax,” probably suggested by his original use of “impression” and “impress.” The phrase, “extreme brevity degenerates,” of the first essay has become “undue brevity” and has been shifted to the beginning from its penultimate position, while the pretentious last sentence, in Latin, has been dropped. The paragraph is another proof that up to the very end of his career Poe persisted in believing that Béranger's poems were chiefly short, a misconception that a mere glance into a collection would have banished. In this new passage he has committed another blunder, for in the original, Béranger's poems were too “immassive” to “satisfy the Poetic Sentiment,” whereas now, being still “imponderous,” they fail to receive significant “public attention.” This is, as we have seen from [page 74:] the large number of editions and the extravagant praise and popularity of his works, a wrong estimate by Poe, willing to derive one error from another in justification of his original thesis about the short poem. In the new version he adds to the notion by a comparison with feathers ‘blown aloft,” despite the marked staying power, at least up to 1849, of Béranger's poems. Moreover, rhetorically the development is peculiarly inept for poems which start out as “brilliant or vivid,” turn into “stamps upon the wax,” then become “pungent,” and finally dance lightly in the breeze. Poe's conspicuous use of synesthesia can scarcely justify this mixture. Quinn judges his style in the essay to be “almost beyond criticism” — apparently in other passages than this one.

In conclusion, then, Béranger appears not to have contributed very much to Poe's concepts or practices in creative work. He probably played a very minor role in the revision of “Israfel” and furnished only a reminder of the theme — a mere addendum — in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In his criticism we find Poe willing to adapt views about Béranger gleaned from secondary sources, such as Lomenie, and to neglect elementary precautions in making generalizations about a presumably well-known author. His two definite citations of verses appear intended primarily to display his knowledge, although in touching upon important strands in Poe's total fabric of thought the citations provide us with insight into his mental processes. Several of Poe's references to Béranger also show a lack of appreciation of contemporary movements in French literature, entirely understandable in the harried American, who was desperately eager to establish a reputation for sophistication and omniscience. In surveying the ten instances we learn something about Poe and about his contemporary reading public and audience.