Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 02,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 19-38 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 19:]

2

Romantic Irony

 

THE QUESTION of Poe's Germanism is a curious one. Critics have connected Poe with German Romanticism from the very first. As early as 1833, one of the first editors of the Southern Literary Messenger thought it wise to follow Poe's “Berenice” with a mild apology: “Whilst we confess that we think there is too much German horror in his subject, there can be but one opinion as to the force and elegance of his style.”(1) Poe, on the other hand, sought to minimize his debt to the Germans in his preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, claiming that he could not be so easily categorized: “... Germanism is ‘the vein’ for the time being. Tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else” (H 1:150) [[(M 2:473)]]. Poe made this remark in response to the charge by his “critics” that his serious tales are pervaded by “Germanism and gloom.” But, Poe says, the grounds of the charge have not been “sufficiently considered,” for his particular kind of “terror” is not some kind of horripilation for horripilation's sake, but is instead concerned with the spirit and mind of man, with the inner man, and not with something merely ghostly or grisly:

Scholars have taken this remark both too seriously, and not seriously enough. For it has been used by some critics as evidence which denies German influence on Poe. But as Palmer Cobb observes, the preface, on the contrary, actually suggests Poe's familiarity with German literature. Moreover, Poe's reviews, Marginalia notes, critical essays, and, of course, his tales, are saturated with references to German writers, German philosophy, and German critical terms and ideas. Poe's preface does not, as Cobb points out, contain a denial of the “motives and technique of the German romanticists” but in fact an admission of a general German influence; and Cobb also suggests that Poe indirectly acknowledges a kinship between his tales and those of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Phantasiestücke (1814-15) when he refers to his stories as “phantasy pieces” in quotation marks — to which we might also add Ludwig Tieck's Phantasus (1812-16).(2)

What is rarely observed about German Romanticism, and about such writers as Hoffmann and Tieck, is that one of its distinctive features was the development of a comic perspective, eventually reflected in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Hazlitt, whom Poe read, along with the latest translations of German works as they became available in America. This apprehension of the comic, the ironic, and the absurd in an otherwise melancholy and even sinister world has come to be called, rather loosely, Romantic Irony. And what is striking about German Romanticism in relation to Poe, I submit, is not Gothic gloom and horror, but the theories of the Romantic Ironists about the subconscious mind, about “objective subjectivity,” about the ultimate “annihilation” of contradictions through an ironic art, and about the idealistic “transcendence” of earthly limitations through the Godlike immanence and detachment of the artistic mind. These ideas can be found in two of Poe's favorite German writers, the dramatist and novelist Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845). These figures are those most clearly associated (outside of Germany) with the theories and practices of Romantic Irony, and we shall have special reference to them in the discussion of the theory of Romantic Irony that follows.

 

I

The concept of Romantic Irony is initially confusing. As a leading authority on the subject, Raymond Immerwahr, points out, the term [page 21:] Romantic Irony is rather different from the ordinary meanings attached separately to the two words that make up the phrase.(3) As in ordinary usage of the term irony by itself, the Romantic Ironist “means something different from what he appears to be saying: His argument, creation, or representation is not to be taken solely at its face value or in dead earnest.” But this is only a part of his stance. The Romantic Iron-ist “does not mean simply the opposite of what he says”; instead, “he is likely to mean at the same time both what he seems to be saying and its opposite” (p. 665). Moreover, Immerwahr adds, it is this kind of “interaction” of opposites, especially of “creative enthusiasm and restraining self-criticism” that characterizes Schlegel's conception of Romantic itself ...” (p. 666).

The simplest meaning of Romantic Irony is found in the technique of mocking or destroying dramatic illusion in the fiction and drama of certain German writers at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The technique is allied to satire and parody, and Ludwig Tieck's youthful plays, in which the main interest is satire aimed at eighteenth-century rationalism and sentiment, contain some of the clearest examples of this technique. In Tieck's hands, it reveals a development toward an “objective” philosophy of irony through an increasingly “subjective” treatment of reality. This can be illustrated by reference to three of Tieck's early plays discussed by Carlyle in his German Romance (1827), a book that probably introduced Poe to Tieck, Hoffmann, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, De La Motte Fouqué, and Musaeus, as well as to German literature in general.(4) In Puss in Boots (1767 [[1797]]) , for example, Tieck begins the deliberate breaking of the illusion immediately with a prologue in which members of a make-believe “audience” express fears that the play they have come to see may lack “good taste.” The “author” then appears on stage to reassure them. When Puss begins to speak, the “audience” objects that a talking cat destroys dramatic illusion; and throughout the play the “audience” thus interrupts the action, so destroying illusion. The same effect is achieved as the characters in the play as well as the audience break into the action to discuss the merits of the piece. The audience expresses views the opposite of Tieck's (which the real audience must infer); the “good taste” they want in the play is for Tieck bad taste: the moralizing sentimentalities of popular dramatists like A. F. von Kotzebue (1761-1819). A similar ironic structure is seen again when the cat talks with a burlesque grandiloquence that causes his master to call him “sublime friend” just before the cat climbs up to the roof to stalk pigeons: “As in a series of mirrors, there is endless romantic-ironic reflection and re-reflection.”(5) The work achieves its meaning as a flickering structure of formal as well as situational ironies. [page 22:]

Like Puss, Tieck's Prince Zerbino (1798) is an allegorical satire of and on popular literature, and in it we find a further development of a philosophy of the ironic and absurd. An old king abdicates in order to play with lead soldiers, observing that the game we play in life is “really a child's game, and what indeed do we do seriously?” Free from the tribulations of actual rule, he finds true happiness with his lead soldiers. But the central action of the play forms a sequel to Puss. Zerbino, seriously ill from reading best sellers, sets out on a journey to find good taste, but fails. At one point, however, by sheer force of will, the hero tries to reverse the play: the scenes already presented are staged once more in reverse order, but the author steps in and forces the play to go on. Indeed, it is hard not to wish that Poe might have reviewed each of the translations of Tieck as they appeared in America. The World Turned Topsy-Turvy (1799), for example, is an allegorical burlesque, structured around a number of form-breaking ironies, that Poe would have found attractive. The play is indeed topsy-turvy: an epilogue opens it; a prologue closes it; a spectator becomes an actor and yet remains a spectator; and the stage represents a stage. Moreover, in all this, we find a development toward the psychological, or what the Romanticists called the nightside of nature, eerie because of its nonrational aspects — aspects which suggest gloomy subconscious delusion.(6) In Topsy-Turvy, which is still principally satire, we find the speculation: “... we sit here as spectators and see a play; in that play spectators are also sitting and seeing a play, and in that third play another play is going to be played by those third actors. ... People often dream that sort of thing and it is terrible ... many thoughts spin like that into the inwardness.”(7) This interest in the human mind, both conscious and subconscious, and the problem of subjectivity and reality soon led to a concept of “objectivity” as ironic detachment.

The mode of such ironic works as Tieck's early plays, however, was actually the logical development of eighteenth-century German admiration for Cervantes, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne, in whom the Germans found “sportiveness” and an overall sense of harmonious synthesis of contrasts and contradictions. Don Quixote was the special favorite of Tieck and his followers, who in their fiction continued the German emulation of Cervantes's techniques of addressing the reader, of making mocking references to one's own work, and of generally fashioning a constant interplay of contradictions and ironies.(8) In the mid-eighteenth century, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) had in his romance Don Sylvia of Rosalva (1764) imitated Cervantes in laughing at his own ideals and in organizing his work around contrasts; and in his novel Agathon (1767) and in Peregrinus Proteus, a work which Poe [page 23:] quotes from twice,(9) Wieland had used the structural principle of contrast in presenting true contentment as lying between two extremes — for Wieland between pious asceticism and worldly sensualism. Goethe in The Sorrows of Werther (1773) and more clearly at the end of the century in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796) exemplifies the German Quixotic tradition. Like Cervantes, Goethe often referred directly to his reader, even mocking him openly. Goethe frequently gibed at his own novel, mentioning or suggesting the novel in the novel itself; and, like Cervantes, he often mocked the earnestness of his hero, calling attention to his self-conceit, pretended knowledge, selfishness, and confused thinking. Yet Wilhelm Meister to a large extent remains a sympathetic figure. Indeed, in Poetry and Truth (1811-1814), Goethe described the objective presentation of the clash of reason and habit as an “irony” within ourselves and with ourselves whereby we treat our faults in a playful spirit.(10)

In German Romantic fiction, multiplicity of points of view, such as in the double effect of creating a sympathetic but absurd hero, merged with philosophical theories of detachment and objectivity wherein, as mentioned, the superior mind transcends its human flaws. We have already seen that Poe sometimes creates a strong illusion, especially of horror, and then breaks it with a shock, absurdly though only half comically, as in “The Premature Burial.” It is this more philosophical development of Romantic Irony, emerging from the openly mocking irony we have just examined, that is Poe's “tradition” in his Gothic tales. It found its initial literary form in the subtle duplicity of the distinctively German genre of the “grotesque”: a genre which slyly insinuated double and triple perspectives in a vision closely associated with Gothic horror. When we note how the mocking ironic literary tradition represented by Tieck gradually merged with the subjective idealism of Kant and his followers, we understand how Romantic Irony turned from simple mocking and took on those qualities of brilliant suggestion and confusing chaos that Poe saw in German critical theory (H 16:115-17) [[(P 2:305-306)]]. It was in this merger that Romantic Irony became intricately involved with metaphysical speculation on the objective and the subjective, on imagination, delusion, and reality, and on a transcendental mastery of the world and oneself through simultaneous detachment and involvement.

Although the work of Leibnitz (1646-1716) laid down the metaphysical groundwork (as Tieck and his colleagues laid down the formal, literary groundwork), it is Immanuel Kant's “Critiques” of Pure Reason (1781), Practical Reason (1788), and Judgment (1790) that are of immediate concern here. These works increased the general [page 24:] interest in the perplexities of human perception and in the workings of the subconscious mind that characterized the German Romantic Ironists who directly influenced Poe. According to Kant, all human knowledge is subjective, and objects are known only by qualities not inherent in the things themselves but given us by our sensory “intuition.” The function of human imagination and intellect is to organize sense impressions into meaningful patterns; thus man's mind, to an extent, imposes order on the universe. But Kant postulated another human faculty, the will, which perceives spiritual and moral truths, unrelated to sense experience and unknowable by the intellect. The will, reaching out toward an external reality of universal moral law, operates within an individual as the categorical imperative in a realm of free moral choice which yet determines rightness and directs action without reference to reason — sometimes even directing action in opposition to reason. Aesthetic values in Kant's theory, as in Poe's, are mediational; in the presence of the beautiful we feel a “unification, a harmonious interplay of sense and mind, a perfect freedom from scientific and utilitarian necessity.” This harmony is not merely psychological but philosophical and even moral, for the beautiful is the “symbol of the morally good.” This beauty may be combined with natural forms or with purposive human creations, though neither is “pure” beauty. As Wimsatt and Brooks note in words that could have meaningful reference to much in Poe: “Kant's idea of beauty was severe; it related (so far as human making was concerned) almost exclusively to the formal, decorative, and abstract: to Greek designs, foliation on wallpaper, arabesques (things which ‘mean nothing in themselves’), music without words.”(11) Kant also developed ideas of biological and unconscious artistic creation. His analysis of the organic constitution of a tree (with its own moving and formative power and natural purpose) as opposed to the mechanical functioning of a watch seemed to the German “aesthetic organologists,” as Meyer Abrams calls them, to prove that there is a “purely internal teleology” as a “constitutive element in living nature.”(12)

Now the Romantic Ironists who were to influence Poe proceeded to take Kant's philosophy much further than he had ever intended. Kant's concepts of human subjectivity, necessity, and biological purpose were reworked by the Schlegels, Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, Novalis, Solger, Tieck, and Jean Paul, so as to emphasize the idea of an absolute idealism wherein all reality is arbitrated, if not indeed created, solely by the individual, who is almost a God-in-himself. The importance of this idea in Poe's thought may be seen in a passage in Eureka, where Poe says that it is impossible for one to believe, really, that “anything exists [[anything exists]] [page 25:] greater than his own soul. ... each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator... . Man ... ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length ... recognize his existence as that of Jehovah” (H 16:312-15). This passage has its ironic perspective too, but, in any event, among these German writers it is the more literary Schlegels who, along with Tieck, are the most direct link between Poe and Romantic Irony. That influence is even clearer when we see how the theory of transcendental irony developed from Kant through Fichte, Schiller, and Schelling. For while Poe was most familiar with Tieck and the Schlegels, these lesser figures were also writers whom Poe seems to have read, or read about, for he mentions them frequently, quotes them, criticizes them, and burlesques them.

The first important reinterpretation of Kant was that of J. G. Fichte (1762-1814) in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Fichte developed a dialectical idealism to unify the theoretical and practical aspects of cognition set apart by Kant. He postulated an active individual ego as the source of the structure of experience, though this ego ultimately derives from an absolute ego or universal moral principle (God). Although each man creates his own world and rules it, he is yet restricted by it; but the more “objective,” that is, the more detached, he can be toward the world he projects out of himself, the greater freedom of spirit he attains. (Fichte's concept is clearly similar to the modern critical idea of “aesthetic distance.”) Moreover, Fichte linked this unfettered freedom resulting from objective detachment in the face of one's own subjectivity with psychological mastery over the irrational: to be able freely to govern the irrational part in man “according to its own laws is the ultimate purpose of humanity.” This, said Fichte, is not a completely attainable goal since man is not divine; but man must at least strive to attain such power.(13)

About the same time as Fichte was writing, Schiller and Schelling began to consider the “inevitable” harmony of art, a harmony that eventually reflects either universal morality or spiritual good in Nature.(14) Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) wrote in his Letters of Aesthetic Education (1795) that art arises out of two impulses — a finite material impulse and the “Idea.” The reconciliation in art of the material impulse and Idea is the “free play” of the whole person. And in his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795-96), Schiller elevated satire as a genre that ironically seeks after or affirms the ideal since it looks down on reality from the height of the idea1.(15) Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), in several works published or circulated from about 1800 to 1803, dwelt on the harmony between man and nature and the probable conscious intelligence manifest and evolving in nature (Naturphilosophie). [page 26:] History, he wrote, was a series of stages tending toward harmony with God after man's mythic fall, and he postulated a series of correspondences between nature and art, involving an antithesis between “subject” and “object,” alternatively called “intelligence” and “nature,” the “conscious” and the “unconscious,” “freedom” (of human will) and “necessity” (imposed by Nature). The aesthetic act unites all ideas; it is the highest act of reason. Poetry penetrates the essence of the universe. By the aesthetic act of the imagination, the artist is able to free himself, to “think,” and to “reconcile contradictions” in a liberating transcendence of his limiting self-identity.(16) That Poe was perfectly aware of such ideas will become increasingly clear, but we may note here his hanged narrator's comic remark in an early tale: the effect of the gallows rope upon the neck was such that “Schelling himself would have been pleased with my entire loss of self-identity” (H 2:360) [[(M 2:79)]].

 

II

But while very real connections between Poe and the writers we have just surveyed may be pointed to, the most direct link between Poe and philosophical Romantic Irony is to be found in the theoretical writings of Friedrich Schlegel and in the practical criticism of A. W. Schlegel. Although the evidence that Poe read Friedrich Schlegel very closely is scanty, the evidence that he read August Wilhelm is conclusive. Poe was clearly aware of Friedrich's independent works, however, as well as with (so he would have us believe) German criticism in general. As noted elsewhere, Poe in “Exordium to Critical Notices” (Graham's, January 1842) wrote in praise of German criticism, remarking that the “magnificent critiques raisonnees” of “Winckelmann, of Novalis, of Schelling, of Goethe, or Augustus William, and of Frederick Schlegel” are in principle one with the criticism of Kames, Johnson, and Blair; but he added that the Germans differ “in their more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis and application of the principles themselves.”(17) From A. W. Schlegel alone, however, Poe could have gotten a sense of Friedrich Schlegers more extreme concepts of “higher” irony, “self-parody,” and “transcendental buffoonery,” tempered by August Wilhelm's wistful melancholy and more practical turn of mind.

As we have seen, Fichte, Schelling, and others concerned themselves with the double problem of an “objective” detachment of the writer both from his art products and from the world even while being subjectively involved in art and the world. Maintaining objectivity, while [page 27:] yet subjectively creating a work from the depths of one's own spirit or mind, seemed to them to imply a suprahuman capacity in the artist and suggested ideas of “liberation” and “freedom” from the rather depressing limitations imposed upon the human spirit by the physical world of the senses and of mere appearances. Around 1800, Friedrich Schlegel had conjoined the terms irony and transcendentalism. Irony was the process of transcending both the illusions of the world and the delusions of one's own limited mind. Such transcendence of the visible world and of the self was, for Schlegel, achieved through a sense of the comic and the absurd in the serious. By comparing successive phases of our own stupidity and shrewdness, Schlegel suggested, we evolve increasingly superior versions of the self, a true sense of irony. Such a true sense of irony is the perception or creation of a succession of contrasts between the ideal and the real, the serious and the comic, the sinister and the absurd, through which the “transcendental ego” can mock its own convictions and productions from the height of the “ideal.” As Poe remarked in “The. Philosophy of Composition” (1845), one wants in dark and fantastic composition to approach “as nearly to the ludicrous as [is] admissible” (H 14:205). This kind of higher and more objective skepticism can be seen, according to Friedrich Schlegel, in the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare, which are “full of artfully arranged confusion, charming symmetry of contrasts, marvelous alternation of enthusiasm and irony.” To this ironic interplay of contradictions in Don Quixote, Schlegel gave the name arabesque. Schlegel's use of arabesque to mean, in this instance, symmetrical interplay of contrasts and confusions, of earnestness alternating with irony, is crucial.(18)

Poe's 1840 title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, takes on new meaning when seen in this context. Poe's idea of the arabesque was the same as that of the Schlegels, if not directly derived from them; and the formal structures and the metaphysical vision implied are fundamental to an understanding of Poe's tales. Therefore we should come to that suspiciously “flawed” effect characteristic of Poe's Gothic tales with a sense of purpose, not of censure. For what we find in Poe, coming out of this distinctively European context, is a habit of mind basically skeptical, despite its immersion in the Gothic and the nightside.

Thus we will be able to see that Schlegel tells us something about Poe when he equates the term irony with an aesthetic act of reason that penetrates the essence of the universe, and when he develops further the ideas of Goethe, Herder, and Schiller (though apparently independent of Fichte and Schelling) that the creative powers of the artist are miniature powers paralleling those exercised in divine creation. Just as God's “objective” universe is an “ironical” reminder of [page 28:] the “subjective” Creator pervading all things, so also is the artist's objective literary creation an ironical reminder of his subjective Self pervading and enlivening his whole work. God's creatures appear to live and move independently of any other force than themselves, and yet God is somehow obviously manifest in their existence. Accordingly, even the most objective artist resides subjectively within his work. To combine extreme objectivity and immanence in a state of self-division and self-consciousness is to resemble God. In order to begin informing such a sense of purpose regarding Poe's “flawed” Gothic, we may note echoes of the German ideas we have discussed which are found in some of Poe's reviews, in his tales “The Island of the Fay” (1841), “Monos and Una” (1841), “The Landscape Garden” (1842) and its expanded version “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), “The Power of Words” (1845), and in Eureka (1848).

In his “Drake and Halleck” review (1836), Poe noted that “Imagination is, possibly in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God,” adding that God creates what was not before, whereas man's artistic imitation of God's creative power is the reorganization of what has already been materially created. In his review of N. P. Willis (1845), Poe defined imagination as the artistic combining of elements in such a way as to create something truly original; and therein man's creative power resembles God's.(19) In “Monos and Una” disembodied Platonic spirits discourse on the “poetic intellect” and the transcendental truths reached by artistic analogy. In “The Power of Words” Poe dramatized (with some satiric innuendo about drunkenness) the Romantic imagination weeping over a flowered, green, volcano-studded “star” it has “spoken” into actual material existence (H 6:143-44) [[(M 3:1215)]]. In Eureka, Poe's analysis of conventional, uninspired thought-processes is integral to his concluding remarks that in order to understand the universe (the purpose of Eureka), “we should have to be God ourselves,” that “each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator,” that man, through the division, diffusion, and self-consciousness of the God-principle ordering the universe, will eventually evolve into God (H 1:205, 313-15) [[(H 16:205, 313-15)]]. These apparent affirmations, it may be observed again, have a melancholy irony to them, as we shall see later. In “Island of the Fay” and “Arnheim,” which are ostensibly about beauty, especially the pleasures of contemplating God's beautiful natural garden (the world), Poe is actually concerned with the transitoriness of beauty and with the ironic reminders of deep melancholy import to be found in this beautiful “garden”: shadows, rocky outcroppings, geological upheavals, and the like, which are “prognostic of death” (H 6:184) [[(M 3:1274)]].

Given Schlegel's (and Poe's) insistence that the world is, to the [page 29:] human mind, a dark, even chaotic paradox, it is understandable that Schlegel should have applied the term irony to both the form and spirit of a literary work of genius and to the Godlike state of being of the creator of the work. Only an ambivalent attitude can come close to comprehending the world's dark, contradictory totality; ambivalence is the human being's clear-sighted, conscious reaction to his vision of horrible chaos and to his simultaneous detachment from it. As Wimsatt and Brooks have occasion to note in Literary Criticism: A Short History, the “transcendental ego” of the Dark Romantics remains “aloof from fixation or satisfaction at any level of insight,” and their examples of “dark irony” are perhaps more accurate than they may have realized: “... this irony might be very dark, sardonic, misanthropic; the hero stood with cloak pulled round his shoulder thrust out into [[to]] the cold blast — a Byronic and Poesque figure” (p. 380).

In the Athenäum (1800), Schlegel conceived of the ironic attitude not only as one involving “transcendence” of the opaque facts of the world but also as one having the quality of “Socratic irony,” the “free play” of the mind upon everything presented to it.

Such then is Friedrich Schlegel's “transcendental irony,” which makes fun even of itself — a complex skepticism that yet involves a mystical faith in the ideal, a deceptive personal aloofness from any final commitment, and a “superior” pleasure in the hoaxlike limitation of one's compeers to a select coterie of the perceptive.(21)

 

III

But for Poe the principal German critic was not Friedrich Schlegel; it was his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel. A. W. Schlegel was in fact the most influential of the German critics outside Germany. The principal influence Schlegel is supposed to have had on Poe, however, was the doctrine of “unity” or “totality” of effect.(22) Indeed, Poe gives Schlegel credit for this influence several times in his reviews.(23) What is [page 30:] less obvious and far more important is Schlegel's conception of irony — derived from the work of his brother Friedrich — but articulated at length in the famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which was first translated into English in 1815.

The evidence that Poe read A. W. Schlegel's Lectures carefully is conclusive. In September 1835 (at the age of twenty-four), Poe reviewed the Classical Family Library translation of Euripides for the Southern Literary Messenger, and nearly everything he has to say about Greek drama is a clear echo of A. W. Schlegel, often closely parallel in phrasing to John Black's 1815 translation. Moreover, Poe seems to have tried very hard to conceal his indebtedness, for he carefully avoids mentioning Schlegel directly until the end of the review, so that the reference seems to be brought in casually for the sake of another critic's reinforcing view rather than to acknowledge the derived ideas of the whole essay.(24) But elsewhere Poe admits his indebtedness, usually with extravagant praise, though sometimes with criticisms similar to his fluctuating comments on Coleridge.

Even had Poe read nothing else of German criticism, A. W. Schlegel's Lectures would have introduced him to the concept of transcendental irony. As Soren Kierkegaard pointed out in 1841, A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature would be the place “where one would certainly expect to find an adequate exposition” of the concept of Romantic Irony.(25) But, curiously, the Romanticists kept complaining that one or the other of them did not truly understand the concept of irony. Thus Hegel complained that neither Tieck nor Solger set forth the philosophic significance of “the great unknown — irony” with any clarity. And Kierkegaard complained:

How curiously, or malevolently, the European ironists read one another, however, will be apparent in our examination of Schlegel's Lectures, this work that deals with irony only once in a “brief passage.” A general survey of the contents of the Lectures, for example, reveals [page 31:] discussion in Lecture m of the essence of the comic; in Xx, of satirical drama; in XI, of mixed comedy and parody, the ideality of the comic, mirthful caprice, and the perception of the absurd in the serious, in xin, of the varieties of comedy, self-consciousness and arbitrariness in comedy, and the morality of comedy; in XXIII, of far-fetched metaphor, puns, word-play, objective irony, and mixtures of the tragic and the comic, and in XXVIII, a discussion of English comic writers, as well as briefer commentary throughout.(27)

Perhaps the most striking quality of Schlegel's Lectures with regard to Poe is Romantic melancholy yoked together with admiration for ironic and comic objectivity. Writing of the intimate (even metaphysical) connection between the tragic and the comic, Schlegel suggested that man's “reason” and “consciousness” are the bases of both the tragic and the comic sense of life. Whereas animals have no self-consciousness, man's reason forces him to try to account for things, especially his own actions. But a “longing for the infinite which is inherent in our being is baffled by the limits of finite existence.” In a remark that is highly suggestive of Poe, Schlegel added, “All that we do, all that we effect, is vain and perishable; death stands everywhere in the back ground ...” (in, 45). When we think of our dependence on a “chain of causes and effects, stretching beyond our ken,” of our helplessness against the power of nature, of our conflicting appetites, we see that “we are cast on the shores of an unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth ... we are subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may be our ruin.” Although “poetry cannot remove these internal dissonances, she must at least endeavour to effect an ideal reconciliation of them” (iii, 46).

The “comic” tone of mind, on the other hand, said Schlegel, is merely a “disposition” to forget “all gloomy considerations in the pleasant feeling of present happiness.” The “imperfections and the irregularities of men ... serve, by their strange inconsistencies, to entertain the understanding. ...”

But the mind that truly transcends the contradictions of life is one like that of the old ironist, Socrates. To illustrate the quality of mind that understands the “inmost essence of things,” Schlegel used an incident from the Symposium (one of Poe's favorite works). Having drunk all but Aristophanes and Agathon under the table, Socrates claimed that (in Schlegel's words) “it is the business of one and the same man to be equally master of tragic and comic composition, and that the tragic poet is, in virtue of his art, comic poet also” (xi, 146). Since, according to Schlegel, no Greek tragic poet had ever attempted to “shine in comedy,” Socrates’ ”remark, therefore, can only have meant [page 32:] to apply to the inmost essence of ... things. Thus at another time, the Platonic Socrates says, on the subject of comic imitation: ‘All opposites can be fully understood only by and through each other; consequently we can only know what is serious by knowing also what is laughable and ludicrous’ ” (xi, 146). Schlegel then suggested that the comic poet forms “an ideal of human nature the direct opposite of that of the tragedians” but that this “converse ideality” is not an aggregation of “moral enormities” but instead is a representation of “the animal part of human nature ... that want of freedom and independence, that want of coherence, those inconsistencies of the inward man, in which all folly and infatuation originate” (xi, 148).

Schlegel next, in a passage that should give us some insight into Poe's “flawed” Gothic (one need only recall the “Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning” in “Usher”), took up the matter of interruptions and “intermixtures” in comic and tragic writing. In tragedy they destroy the effect; but “to the comic tone these intentional interruptions or intermezzos are welcome, even though they be in themselves serious” (xi, 151). The mixture of the two genres as in classical “New Comedy” results in a merging of “earnestness and mirth” in which “the ridiculous must no longer come forward as the pure creation of his [the poet's] fancy, but must be verisimilar, that is, seem to be real” (176-77). New Comedy was a “mixed species, formed out of comic and tragic, poetic and prosaic elements” that aimed at the illusion of reality and therefore sought sources of comic amusement not in arbitrary exaggeration but in the “province of earnestness”; and these sources “it found in a more accurate and thorough delineation of character” (xrn, 183). Comparing the ancient writers and the modern, Schlegel concluded that the modern Romantic mind “delights in indissoluable mixtures; all contrarieties.” He added that “nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it [romantic [page 33:] art] blended together in the most intimate combination” (xxu, 342). This combination of contrasts, this continual crossing of opposites, is modern man's attempt to regain the immediacy of perception that ancient man once possessed. Thus metaphor can never be too fantastic; wordplay, puns, contradictions in the works of a poet show a sensitivity to distant relationships that may mirror the whole universe. The “feeling of moderns is, upon the whole, more inward ... incorporeal, and ... contemplative.” Instead of the Greek ideal of “natural” harmony, “the moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided ... (I, 27).

In the natural genius of the modern age, then, we find a union of apparently antagonistical elements held together by a cool indifference best characterized as irony. Shakespeare, for example, “unites in his soul the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most opposite and even apparently irreconcilable properties subsist in him peaceably together” (xxiu, 368).

This technique of multiple perspectives or points of view Schlegel called a “secret irony of characterization” commanding high admiration; it is “the profound abyss of acuteness and sagacity; but it is the grave of enthusiasm.” We arrive at this ironic detachment

Most writers take a point of view and “exact from their readers a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support [page 34:] or oppose.” The irony of Shakespeare's writing, however, “has not merely a reference to the separate characters, but frequently to the whole of the action.” Shakespeare makes

Thus the ironist, in Schlegel's terms, is much like the great artist in Poe's review of Elizabeth Barrett in 1845; he follows extremes, comes back upon himself, and holds within himself a “fortuitous ... combination of antagonisms” (H 12:34) [[(P 3:15)]].

In this one book then — by a critic from whom Poe borrowed theoretical principles of beauty, melancholy ideality, “mystical” indirection, and unity or totality of interest or effect, and from whom Poe stole practical criticism — is a rationale of the comic and ironic blended with Romantic idealism that quite clearly fits Poe into that “vortex” of “German” ideas at which he good-humoredly gibed in the Marginalia (H 16:3-4) [[(P 2:108)]]. In A. W. Schiegel's Lectures alone, Poe found Romantic-Ironic principles of melancholy idealism and a yearning for sublime beauty even in discord and deformity; a fascination with death as the ultimate fact of existence; a belief in the illusiveness of truth, in human alienation from actuality, and in the “one-sidedness” of all “serious” statements. He found a doctrine of unrestrained fancy in the genre of pure comedy and of verisimilitude in the mixed genre of the seriocomic. He found an emphasis on a literary technique of indirection involving a deceptive and even “secret” irony clear only to the reader of superior perceptions; concern for character portrayal within a meaningful plot and with emphasis on “internal discord,” “self-deception,” and multiple reflections and perspectives. He found a belief in the explorations of novelty through contrasts of incident, through fanciful and even fantastic metaphor, symbol, punning, and general wordplay. And he found, finally, a concept of a superior mind transcending the gloomy chaos of the world through artistic ironic detachment.

 

IV

We have seen that Poe knew of the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel; yet one would like some [page 35:] evidence that Poe not only knew but approved of the techniques of the German transcendental ironists. In part, such evidence is to be found in Poe's remarks about Ludwig Tieck, whom he read with clear approval. For one thing, Poe seems to have thought Tieck a writer better even than Hawthorne. In his second, cooler, but still commendatory review of Hawthorne in 1847, Poe argued that Hawthorn's “originality” is more apparent than actual since he does what has already been done by “the German Tieck.”

Poe's italics here reflect his belief in variety of effect; he considers Tieck not only the more original of the two even in Hawthorne's own special province, but also the more capable of greater variety.

That Poe had not discovered Tieck between 1842 and 1847 is clear from the tale “Von Jung, the Mystic,” written ten years earlier (1837). “Von Jung” begins more or less seriously and ends comically; in it Poe had made the hero a cousin of Tieck's, commenting (in the person of the narrator) that Tieck has given us “vivid exemplifications” in the genre of “grotesquerie” (H 4:102) [[(M 2:295)]]. In a Marginalia reference in which he does not give Tieck's name, thereby presuming a familiarity on his readers’ part and implying familiarity on his part, Poe refers to Tieck's Old Man of the Mountain for a satiric comparison to John Wilson (“Christopher North”), the notorious editor of Blackwood's who had the “power to make or to mar any American reputation.” Lashing out against American subservience to British opinion, Poe calls Wilson a “rhapsodist” unworthy the name of “critic,” an “ignorant” and “egotistical” “schoolboy” blunderer, who has “ridden us to death like The Old Man of the Mountain...”(28)

But one of the most interesting of Poe's references to Tieck is the Marginalia note wherein he reveals an admiration for a comic and ironic stylistic technique of Tieck's, that, taken seriously in his own style, has seemed to critics one of Poe's worst flaws. Harry Levin, for example, particularly dislikes Poe's “excess of capitals, italics, dashes ... exclamation points ... superlatives ... intensitives and ineffables ... gallicisms ... sham erudition, scientific pretensions, quotations from occult authorities, and misquotations from foreign languages.”(29) “The misapplication of quotations,” Poe writes in Marginalia, can be “clever, and has a capital effect when well done. ...” [page 36:] One of the best hits in this way is made by Tieck, and I have lately seen it appropriated, with interesting complacency, in an English magazine [[English Magazine]]. The author of the “Journey into the Blue Distance,” is giving an account of some young ladies, not very beautiful, whom he caught in mediis rebus, at their toilet. [[“]]They were curling their monstrous heads,” says he, “as Shakespeare says of the waves in a storm.” (H 16:42) [[P 2:180)]]

That Poe's own style — whenever quotations, foreign phrases, footnotes, mottoes, typographical devices, and the like are exaggerated or rendered slightly askew — is ironic and satiric is borne out to some extent by his reviews of the novels of John P. Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms, and by his burlesque article-tale “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” In his review of Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Robinson (Southern Literary Messenger, May 1835), Poe noted that:

Poe went on to say that everything a writer does, even with his punctuation, must have “an object or an end”; and he then reduced seven dashes from one of Kennedy's paragraphs to one subtly climactic dash.(30) In a review of Simms's The Partisan (Southern Literary Messenger, January 1836), Poe remarked that Simms had been “wiser” than other writers in the matter of the “initial motto”:

This is a rather remarkable comment in view of the fact that almost all Poe's tales are beset with mottoes, some of which (like that to “Ligeia”) have never been identified despite diligent efforts of scholars — remarkable, that is, unless Poe had some satiric, deceptive, ironic object or end.

In “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838), Poe has Mr. Blackwood [page 37:] advise Miss Psyche Zenobia on some details of style for a “sensation-paper.” She must consider her tone and her manner of narration, Blackwood says:

After these two references to works by Kant, it is only natural that Blackwood should also discuss “the tone transcendental and the tone heterogeneous.” He goes on to give Miss Zenobia some advice regarding the very important “air of erudition” or of “extensive general reading” required for a saleable article. Pulling down three or four volumes and opening them at random, Blackwood says:

Blackwood then gives her facts such as these: “there were originally but three Muses” (which if introduced with a “downright improviso air” looks “recherche”); “the river Alpheus passed beneath the sea [[,]] and emerged without injury to the purity of its waters”; “the Persian Iris appears to some persons to possess a sweet and very powerful perfume, while to others it is perfectly scentless” (H 2:277-78) [[(M 2:343)]]. Then Blackwood gives her, in the original languages, several “piquant expressions” from Voltaire (“aussi tendre que Zaire”), Cervantes, Ariosto, Schiller, [page 38:] Lucan, and Demosthenes, for in a Blackwood's article “there is no passing muster. ... without Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek.” The quotation from the Greek must be typographically pretty.

Blackwood urges Miss Zenobia to apply these quotations to her sensations while being choked to death by a chicken-bone; the chicken she had been eating, could, for example, have been “not altogether aussi tendre que Zaire.” Psyche, accordingly (in the companion tale “A Predicament”), proceeds to misquote and misapply the “piquant facts” and “piquant expressions” to her sensations while her head is caught in a large steeple clock.

Poe's “Blackwood Article” and Psyche's “Predicament” are obviously comic and satiric. But a slightly less exaggerated version of the Blackwood's styles, surrounded by a Gothic atmosphere at least partially effective, could be used for ironic purposes. What makes Poe's reference to Tieck's ironic technique of misapplying quotations in The Journey into the Blue Distance particularly important is that in the melancholy library of the House of Usher, the two protagonists of the tale open a copy of this very volume.(31) The half-comic and absurd Schlegelian intermezzo of the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning is, when seen in the literary context suggested here, integral to the seriocomic tone of grotesquerie permeating not only “Usher,” but also Poe's other Gothic tales.