Here follows, translated for the first time, a critical essay by Émile Hennequin, originally published as an article in the Revue Contemporaine, January 1885.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
To analyse the work of Edgar Poe, to discern the subtle, learned and perfect aesthetic through which he summons, with calculated certainty, the extremity of certain emotions; to trace back from these means to their effects, from the artifices of style, psychology and composition to their intimate and essential properties; to grasp, finally, the ultimate cause, the very soul of Poe—complex, tenebrous, twisted and robust, possessing the cold, the blue, the fine and the hard of a steel mechanism—this would be, in a certain sense, to apply to this artist the law of retaliation, to dissect him with the very instruments by which he exerts over most minds of this century an imperious and unquestioned dominion.
I
The works of Poe fascinate: their domination is immediate. From the very first lines of his tales and poems, through the employment of a particular and variable style, a certain category of words and a precise syntax, through the specific tone of the opening, Poe seizes the attention, disposes it to follow in a certain humour, compels it—just as a smile begets a smile, and a wink leads one to assume a knowing air—to feel the state of mind, the nervous comedy and the painful oppression with which the work will be saturated. Something foreign and prestigious has insinuated itself, in those first paragraphs, into the reader’s soul: clasped and entwined, bent into the assigned intellectual posture, he undergoes in advance the shock of the emotion that the poet has premeditated.
This preparation is made with scrupulous care. In the detective stories, prefaces of several pages in a defined and lucid style, of correct elocution, setting cold paradoxes in clear silver, prepare us, all sentimentality repressed, to unfold whatever the mind contains of speculative dispositions, of superior and dry curiosity. Other introductions are at once clear and fantastical, mysterious and febrile. In the tales where error dominates, all the nuances of the tragic tint the opening phrases. The opulent solemnity of the beginning of “The Masque of the Red Death,” the piteous and failing tone in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” harmonise with the broken enfeeblement that shakes the commencement of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with the morbid and melancholy opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher” where these words—”dull, dark, and soundless day”—toll like a death knell; others still, the unforgettable prelude to “Ligeia,” the slow and sombre initial periods in “Shadow,” the tenebrous beginnings of “The Raven” and “The City in the Sea,” affect us like omens. Without gradations and without pause, through a sinister word, through a sudden inversion, the poet touches the cerebral region, designates the emotion he will overstimulate. As fear seizes an entire silent audience when the footlights dim, as the magnetic sleep of convulsionaries comes with the long tearing of a cymbal, these prefaces subjugate, predispose and seize, drawing us into the violet mist where Augustus Bedloe’s vision rises, to the slope of the soft hills skirted by the fairy’s frail barque, to the dark vaults beneath which Roderick Usher pales and withers.
Not a single dissonance of style breaks the tonality of these opening themes in what follows. The analytical diction of the detective stories remains precise and glacial to the end. The atmosphere of ambiguous banter distilled around the secret of “The Oblong Box” dissipates only at the catastrophe. Through the slow unfurling of the narrative, the acute terror designated by the exordium of “Berenice” does not slacken for an instant. In certain poems, idiotic repetitions, marking the debility of a prostrate soul, pursue their bell-like beating to the very end. This relentless persistence in using but one style at a time, in summoning and redoubling but one emotion, conquers the reader, carries him away and disturbs him; losing his footing in the unreal, slowly stripped of the sense of his own personality, he is subjected and bound, mute with horror, transfixed with pain, maniacal with analysis, dismayed by the death of a lover he has never known, attached by a coldly taut enthusiasm to the demonstration of a metaphysical principle enormous enough to integrate the universe.
This consonance of the reader’s soul, obtained from the beginning of each work and maintained to the final phrase, Poe invests with his imagination. He causes to well up within it visions as precise and clear in their parts as perceived spectacles, soliciting belief through the very properties that external objects realise: in Poe, every ensemble is minutely detailed, evident and intuitive, through the repeated demonstration of its elements.
The description of places in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is classical: with dull inventory-like phrases, with repetitions and insistences, Poe recounts the layout of the apartment, the mechanism of the windows, the aspect of the corpses, the disorder of the furniture, reconstructs the act of the crime, summoning from this throat-slitting a vision more concrete than a dramatised indictment. His descriptions of tempests, rendered in nautical rather than picturesque words, are terrifying in their minute truthfulness, full of real horrors, of sailors’ livid faces, of breaking masts, of colossal waterspouts sweeping the deck, of the brutal jolts of planks struck and stove in by the obstinate shock of waves. The graphic detailing of scenes, absolute counterfeit of vision, stupefies in “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Through a prodigy of identification with the character of this tale, Poe realises, in the strict order in which the fictitious narrator could have glimpsed them, scenes that cease to be imaginary. The burial in the ship’s hold of the adventurous sailor, the battle against the mutineers, the island of Tsalal, the landslide, the explosion of the vessel, the flight of the whites, occur in visible places, become encrusted in the memory like acts committed or endured. Poe knows how to summon thus, in his readers’ brains, sumptuous furnishings, the magnificent and clear landscapes of “The Domain of Arnheim.” He fixes unforgettable physiognomies—that of Dupin, of the victim in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” of Morella, of the exsanguine morphine addict of the “Reminiscences.” He leads us through the nocturnal and populous streets traversed by the man of the crowd, and unfolds the luminous hallucination of Augustus Bedloe. The interior of the morose House of Usher “with windows like eyes without thought” unveils itself in a twilight. The scenes of horror, of torture, of putrefaction, the hippocratic facies of a dying consumptive, the hideous apparition of the Conqueror Worm, are implacably detailed. These pictures of amphitheatre and charnel house, slowly described and painful to the nerves, culminate in that of the successive resurrections and mortifications of Lady Rowena’s corpse, in that story which Poe has rightly named “Ligeia,” the acute. Life returning to the flesh beneath the flaccid epidermis, the blood that flows back and reddens the arterioles, the lips relaxing, arching, the eyelids that flutter, and the frail breast that palpitates, then this trembling body cadaverised, the shrivelling of the features, the lividity of the flesh and the viscosity of the skin, are followed and retraced without a start, in a succession of images so memorable that they haunt.
This minute descriptive detailing of things and persons, applied to the representation of a state of mind, becomes the most subtle analysis. When setting out to show the activity of a spirit, Poe decomposes it into successive rudimentary movements, followed in their entanglement, linked through their interstices, distinct and reunited as under the microscope, the cells of a tissue. Whether he proposes to convey the monomania of a pure analytical intelligence, the fatuity of a stupid investigator, the vacillation of a sick soul incited to consummate its ruin and caught between concern for its flesh and an irresistible morbid impulse, the enfeeblement of a frenetic terror, those twilight states of the spirit where the anaemic brain has only slow stirrings and moribund thoughts, Poe’s psychological penetration operates through the same method of detailed demonstration. Step by step he follows in William Legrand the thread of reasoning that leads from a piece of soiled parchment to the discovery of a miraculous treasure. He decomposes the dreamy humour of M. Bedloe into a procession of brilliant images. The neurosis of Roderick Usher, his terror of being terrified, which degenerates and annihilates him, is dissected fibre by fibre. In a more arduous department, Poe excels at delimiting the rudimentary states of damaged or sleeping brains, the extreme vertigo, the spiritual nausea of a man dying of hunger, the larvae of thought in a man who has fainted from horror, the reptilian movements of a brain emerging from catalepsy, the invincible torpor of incipient dementia. And his virtuosity is such that he delights, in the “Colloquy of Monos and Una,” in the tour de force of degrading, through infinite attenuations, the cerebral life of one recently dead, from its plenitude to nothingness.
“I breathed no longer. The pulse was still. The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless… The rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of flowers—fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of the old Earth… Touch had undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted always in the highest physical pleasure. Your earnest love and sorrow, with their tremulous kisses upon my eyelids, at length, filled my whole being with a sensual delight immeasurable… Your wild sobs floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences… They were soft musical sounds and no more… while the large and constant tears which fell upon my face… simply penetrated with ecstasy every fibre of my frame… You alone, habited in a white robe, in whatever direction you moved, ever moved musically about me… And when now, dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched, you sat gently by my side, breathing odour from your sweet lips, and pressing them upon my brow, there arose tremulously within my bosom, and mingling with the merely physical sensations which circumstances had called forth, a something akin to sentiment itself—a feeling that, half appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and sorrow… This vanished rapidly into extreme quiescence, and thence into a purely sensual pleasure… A year passed… The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead—instead of all things—dominant and perpetual—the autocrats Place and Time. For that which was not—for that which had no form—for that which had no thought—for that which had no sentience—for that which was soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion—for all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates.”
This example of analysis is a clue. One may be permitted to suspect that a psychologist so skilled at minutely dissecting unknowable states of mind has perhaps not used observations and documents either to divine the characters elsewhere less hypothetical. Their unity further confirms this supposition. To show and characterise the beings who act in his Tales, Poe confines himself to deducing before the reader one of their states of mind, a chain of thoughts, an intuition, an inclination, a reverie. He does not employ conversations, the minute recital of antecedents, the adventures brought about to cause a characteristic decision, expedients which serve psychological novelists to hint at the complexity of their creatures. With a more elementary art, Poe prunes from his characters what is human, common and subordinate; he designates the excessive or defective faculty in which they individualise themselves, shows them unbalanced in action and pushing to its extreme consequences the conduct commanded by their mental state.
This summary method is justified by the salient aspect of Poe’s characters, who almost all fall within the domain of mental pathology. Apart from Pym and a few supporting players, in this gallery of haggard faces that runs from Dupin and Legrand to Lady Ligeia and Helen’s lover, all are affected by some mania, pursued by hallucinations, shaken by some spinal neurosis, maddened with hatred, terror, pain and spleen. Perpetual reasoners ceaselessly pursue their deductive operations, fatally seduced by the attraction of enigmas. Others accomplish atrocious vengeances, combining tortures with a lucid and fixed hatred. There are those rendered opiate-sodden and hysterical, whose personality has been finally effaced through the abuse of mesmeric passes. Pale victims emerge annihilated, nerves tensed or atonic, from some terrible adventure beyond human strength. The man of the crowd is afflicted with a moral malady that alienists can classify. The murderers of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” Roderick Usher are incipient maniacs, afflicted with auditory or visual hallucinations, agitated by morbid impulses. The mutilator of “Berenice” is in the grip of one of the forms of vampirism. The heroes of the poems are frenetic with exultation, or drivel and rave with pain, just as the strange women of the tales, mystical, tall and frail, have the bewildered fervour of fragilely nervous beings. This entire troupe with sharp eyes, pale and convulsed faces, trembling hands, these compromised and vacillating souls, situated at the confines of madness, dissected in their vice, exhibited in their monstrosity, are defined and homogeneous. None bears the mark of beings observed and taken from life: diverse and incomplete.
It is certain that none of the women Poe knew for long periods or for a few days is reproduced or exalted in his tales or in most of his poetry. “Ligeia” seems to transpose some of the incidents of his wife’s death only prophetically; for he wrote it before the successive relapses and recoveries of Virginia Poe could furnish him with the model of the alterations through which Lady Rowena’s corpse passes. Of Poe’s masculine characters, no prototype has been designated by Mr Ingram’s minute biography. Neither Dupin, nor Pym, nor Bedloe, nor Rod. Usher have not had, so far as is known, any real existence, even approximate. Beings taken partially from reality would moreover be more complex and less intense, would have a more mixed and troubled soul than the rigid and clear spirits that pass through Poe’s tales. To figure them, he must have consulted only the needs of his narrative, and drawn from the intuition of his own soul—distraught, torn, maddened and fallen—whose convulsions his lucidly cold intelligence observed. Driven from the age of eighteen into a hazardous life, he had the thirst for adventures and horror of Pym, nostalgic visions of shipwrecks, of famine, of dreary despair, “of an existence of tears dragged out upon some grey rock in an unknown Ocean.” Weakened and humiliated by the struggle vainly pursued against his alcoholism, feeling in his periods of sobriety the tragic ruin of his intelligence, driven at the end of his life even to suicide and the delirium of persecutions, he could study upon his miserable soul the mechanism of fatal impulses, the menacing hallucinations, the staggerings and prostrations of the diseased reason. He suffered in his last years that terror of isolation which the man of the crowd concentrates. Having lost in his childhood a woman who showed him some affection, he spent long nights lying upon that tomb, and had time, during those lamentable vigils, to meditate upon the hideousness of putrefaction, and to conceive the idea, frequent in his tales, of the persistence of sentiment after death. He possessed, to a degree as elevated as the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the sovereign reasoning power, demonstrated the principle of Maelzel’s automaton, discovered the real judicial mystery of Marie Roget’s assassination, deciphered all the cryptograms which, following an article, were sent to him by strangers. Amplified and overstrained, it is the very faculties and wounds of his own soul that Poe extracts and summarises in each of the characters of his work.
This self-analysis into painful fragments never degenerates into confession or display.
The tales remain rigid, cold and remote, devoid—though written in the first person—of exclamations, apostrophes and cries. The glacial calm of detective and adventure novels is apparent. One cannot divine, in reading “The Black Cat”, that the author saw himself lost to alcohol, and the emotion of “The Raven”, which is factitious, differs not at all from that of “Ulalume”, composed on the same subject in memory of Virginia Poe. Under the poet’s hands, all these souls, born of his own, become metallic and mechanical. The constant intensity of their single passion, the rectilinear thrust of their will, their acute and overwrought senses, the subtlety of their thoughts, their actions never instinctive but deduced and reasoned even in the most terrifying circumstances—all these make of them perfect mechanisms driven in their workings by regulated electric currents. These automata know neither love nor debauchery, neither animal passion, the jolts of anger, the clutch of rage, nor the contraction of fear and pain; from their apparatus, the cry, the panting, the contortion—all that in man proceeds from the general nervous system rather than the encephalon—is suppressed. Sinister as masks, with bloodless cheeks and thin lips, Poe’s characters gravitate like stars, bearing in their eyes the cold flash of reasoning reason, or the trembling gleam of vacillating reason, wearing the imperious and definite aspect of perfect machines.
To this meticulous imagination, which conceives with equal detail directly perceived states of mind and imaginary scenes, places, trains of thought—which is constituted, consequently, more by the clear vision of probable and logical relationships than by any special acuity of observation—Poe joins the deduction of incidents, the notion of probable or necessary consequences that any given premise can or must have. In constructing his tales or poems, he does not regard each act and word as a chance occurrence that nothing necessitates and which conditions no result. He arranges them in a coherent and final series, which possesses two properties of calculation: the dependence and gradation of terms.
The facts of the Tales, the poems, of Eureka are in mutual relation, like the masses of a system or the organs of an animal. From the knotted piece of cord found at the scene of the crime, the analyst Dupin concludes that one of the perpetrators is a Maltese sailor. The ensemble of circumstances by which Poe prepares the deduction that Marie Roget’s body was thrown into the water after the murder is coherent. The manner in which Pym and his companion were dressed and secured in the boat, on their first voyage to sea, saves them. It appears moreover evident to the least expert reader that Poe’s designs have been prepared with premeditation towards a final effect to which all parts converge. The detective novels and “The Gold-Bug” are thus deductive in reverse, issuing from the cryptogram or mystery deciphered at the end and determining the beginning. In other tales of less logical appearance, one recognises from certain fugitive indications this character of subordination to the dénouement, keystone beneath the work. At the end of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, one recalls how equivocally Bedloe, having recounted that in an opium vision he had seen himself fall dead, refused to answer when it was pointed out that he had just proved the inanity of his hallucination. In “Hop-Frog”, it escapes notice at first that from the beginning the ministers’ “adiposity” is noted, they being destined to be burnt alive at the apotheosis. All the details of the description of the House of Usher serve the catastrophe. In “William Wilson”, as Mr Ingram has remarked, no trait of the singular narrative belies the allegorical revelation of the ending. And there is no more perfect example of logic in madness than those thunderous final pages of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, that horrible dénouement, algebraically necessary once the fantastic premises are admitted, where a consumptive mesmerised in his agony, left thus after his death for seven months, then subjected to the contrary passes, “within the space of a minute and even less, shrank—crumbled—rotted absolutely beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before all the witnesses, there lay a mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence!”
This deductive power, of which we have just marked an extreme case, appears marvellously in the cosmogonic poem of Eureka. No longer bound to the semblances of reality required in the tales, and free to manipulate purely general ideas at will, the poet there passes from the physical to the metaphysical by marvellous trajectories. In this philosophical essay where Poe deploys speculative faculties analogous to those of the German dialecticians and touches in passing upon certain propositions that form part of the most recent evolutionist hypotheses, the origin, that is to say the cause of the law of gravitation, is investigated.
Poe conceives this force as the tendency of all particles of matter to return to an original unity. This reaction implies a prior contrary action, an irradiation from unity into plurality which must, by virtue of Laplace’s nebular hypothesis, have filled space with equally diffused matter. This force of repulsion between molecules and that other by which masses attract each other constitute the two primordial properties of matter—indeed, matter itself. The particles irradiated by virtue of the first force tend, by the second, to return to their primitive state of unity. The universe is therefore in a condition of progressive convergence, which will cause it to condense and engulf itself in one prodigious central globe:
“The equilibrium between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of each system being necessarily destroyed when it comes to approach within a certain distance of the nucleus of the group to which it belongs, there must one day result a chaotic precipitation—or such in appearance—of planets upon suns and of suns upon nuclei. Then amidst immeasurable abysses will blaze unimaginable suns. But all this will be only a magnificent climacteric presaging the great end… Through this work of agglomeration, the groups themselves, with a prodigiously increasing velocity, have precipitated themselves towards their centres—and soon, with a velocity a thousand times greater still, an electrical velocity proportioned to their material magnitude and to the spiritual vehemence of their appetite for unity, the majestic survivors of the race of stars at last rush together in one common conflagration.”
Here Edgar Poe, having posited as a principle that matter exists only as a function of repulsion and attraction, conceives, by a magnificent stroke of deduction, that these two forces, once satisfied or annihilated, ceasing to be, carry with them in their disappearance the matter they constitute. This resolves itself into an undivided metaphysical entity, equal to that which irradiated into space at the beginning of all things, equal to God. For in Poe’s original pantheism, God, following a grandiose rhythm, now dissociates and immerses himself in the universe, ceasing to exist through this dilated incarnation, now concentrates and recovers himself in a mystic unity:
“There was an epoch in the night of time when there existed an eternal being—composed of an absolutely infinite number of similar beings who peopled the infinite domain of infinite space… Even as it is in thy power to expand or concentrate thy pleasures (the absolute sum of happiness remaining always the same), so an analogous faculty has belonged and belongs to this divine being, who thus passes his eternity in a perpetual alternation from the concentrated Self to an almost infinite diffusion of Self. What thou callest the Universe is but the present expansion of his existence. He now feels his own life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intermingled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous beings whom thou designest his creatures, but who are really but innumerable individualisations of himself… The general sum of their sensations is precisely the total of happiness which belongs by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within himself.”
It is in this extraordinary apotheosis that the poem of Eureka culminates. Here all Poe’s deductive art has exhausted itself; he takes as his base a solid scientific foundation, posits axioms, interlaces causes, draws from each anterior proposition consequences as disconcerting, unforeseen and swift as a coup de théâtre, rises from ascension to ascension to a mystical summit where the poet suddenly reappears. One forgets, before this magisterial artifice, that Eureka possesses a certain scientific value, that the nebular hypothesis is defended there at a time when it seemed compromised, that on page 143 Darwinism is anticipated, elsewhere the law of rhythm and Spencer’s principle of heterogeneity are expounded, that the original pantheism of this poem proceeds neither from Hegel, nor from Spinoza, nor from the Alexandrians. Before the perfect art of the craftsmanship, these merits are neglected by the reader who admires the precise dependence of the parts and their progression deduced from the initial premises to the terminal hymn.
This system of direct composition where incidents juxtapose in a straight line leading from the first sentence to the last, constant and ostensible in Poe’s designs, often disguises itself in application beneath a skilfully sinuous intrigue. The storyteller knows how to lead one down a false path parallel to the true one, and abandon it with a leap only a few lines from the end. He excels at making one fear that the solution to an intriguing enigma will be impossible, then extracting it with a sleight of hand from the very antinomies he has chosen to accumulate. Like Japanese painters, he sometimes seems to cast unconnected touches at random which the rapid final stroke suddenly unites into a whole. Finally, this mathematician of the fantastic, this imperturbably logical mind on the confines of the rational, knows, when it suits him, to stop short at the edge of a final development, and, with some half-revealed fact left in shadow, to play with suggestion, insinuation, reticence and symbols. These are shadows of thoughts, sinister fears that the mysterious finale of “The Gold-Bug” suggests. No one could tell the horror, increased thereby, of the inquisitorial torture reserved for the victim of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, nor what is the centre of the immense spiral described by the phantom ship on an ebony sea beneath an Erebus sky. The catastrophe of A. Gordon Pym’s adventures conceals itself behind a curtain of ashen clouds, where above flights of snowy birds spreads the gesture of a pale phantom dominating a milky sea. In the poems, mysterious double meanings half-open beneath the vagueness of words infinitely hollow depths, an abstract current of mysticism that wells opulently in the final stanza of “The Raven”:
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!"
In these artifices, the most apparent, Poe shows himself the man of all literary stratagems, skilled at composing and distilling with a sure hand the delicate emotion that transports the reader outside himself, and charms him into a foreign life more intense and more beautiful. Through interest, he knows how to seize, abandon, recapture, deceive, stupefy and overwhelm, to kindle cupidity, the cruel joy of the manhunt, the thirst for vengeance and the thirst for adventure, the terrors of horror and the distant sweetness of dream. He is doubtless among those who play upon man and make him resonate “from his lowest note to the top of his compass”.
Beyond the particular aspect that the three primordial parts of any writer’s aesthetic take in Poe—style, invention of places and characters, composition—it is useful to consider the general characteristics of these elements, the properties by which they accord and cooperate. Among these common qualities, the most apparent is originality, the fact that in objects, in ensembles, are found associated attributes which experience presents separately. Originality penetrates all of Poe’s work. It determines things, scenes, souls, designs, theories and ideas.
The entire configuration of the island of Tsalal in the Adventures is invented—the opaque, veined, iridescent and tinted water that flows in its streams, the absence of white in everything the natives touch and the horror this colour inspires in them, the stratification of rocks and the plan of valleys. The tortures in “The Pit and the Pendulum” are of absolute novelty. The catastrophe to which humanity succumbs in “Eiros and Charmion” is marvellously simple and original. The idea of having the sinister refrain croaked by the Raven, that of having the crime of the Rue Morgue committed by an anthropoid, have a character of unprecedented invention that astonishes when one reflects how much direct or modified imitation is in all things the rule.
Poe’s originality, concentrated in these examples, is diffused throughout the work. It has created this rigid style, rich and sombre as a heavy silk drapery, without example in English prose. It is through this that he undertakes to describe spectacles no human eye has seen—the whirling suction of the Maelstrom, the black striated waters over which the phantom ship flees, the vermillion extravasations of the Red Death, the delicious and free charm of the bright gardens where Landor’s cottage stands. The unprecedented intrigue of “The Gold-Bug”, the singular vengeance in “The Cask of Amontillado”, the stupefying idea of attempting to describe the consequences of magnetisation in extremis, the allegory of William Wilson, that grandiose catastrophe where the House of Usher, on a stormy night, cracks and engulfs itself in the stagnant pond at its foot, slowly unmasking the red disc of the full moon—never has such wealth of unparalleled inventions been expended in a series of works. Let one review again the storyteller’s gallery of characters, these bizarre souls constituted of unknown manias, of ill-classified mental diseases joined to a disparate lucidity, passionate and cold, sick and rigid; let one add to these marks of artistic originality an incontestable scientific originality, certain propositions of Eureka, views on metrics since confirmed by German studies, lateral vision of the eye established recently, knowledge of oxygen’s deleterious action; it will seem that in no human brain have sprung forth more visions, more groups of images and ideas integrally factitious.
The astonishment caused by this originality of parts is increased by the brevity of the compositions in which they are combined. In a literature where the multi-volume novel and voluminous poem are the rule, it is worthy of note that Poe wrote only a single work forming a book, that the average length of his tales is fourteen pages, and the extreme length of his pieces one hundred lines. This general fact, considered alongside the precepts of “The Philosophy of Composition” and the essay on Hawthorne, appears both fundamental and deliberate. Poe’s compositions, established with the artful aesthetic we have analysed, tending to evoke the rare emotions we shall study, could be neither elaborated nor absorbed in masses. His skill at creating interest through stylistic devices, factitious souls, series of cautiously juxtaposed events, suggestions and surprises, would quickly lose all ascendancy if the storyteller had not instinctively taken account of a law of psychology that the German school has formulated almost mathematically, and whose effect one can grasp in the diminishing pleasure of an encored piece repeated, in the increasingly fruitless reading of a novel perused straight through. Poe’s works, by contrast, have an extent suited to ensure upon the sensibility a complete action without excess or defect. They are distilled with the perfect measure of modern pharmaceutical preparations, where powerful alkaloids, infinitesimally dosed, carry medicinal effects to the deleterious limit.
Note further the discreet and almost imperceptible use Poe makes of the fantastic. This element, which in his work consists of a little of the impossible united with much of the improbable, is inserted into the work with infinite care, at the moment when the reader has most lost his composure and finds himself ready to no longer distinguish the real from the unreal. A vision in the polar Ocean after strange adventures on an unknown island, a house that singularly collapses during a storm, the resurrection of a cataleptic, bizarre resemblances, a shadow on a door, a raven that answers marvellously aptly—in these slight breaches of verisimilitude consists all of Poe’s measured fantastic, further attenuated by an exact science of transitions, of the propitious milieu and moment.
That this discreet invention, the precise brevity and originality noted above, derive from a still higher and ultimate general property of Poe’s aesthetic—artificiality—numerous indices demonstrate. It seems that Poe never resigns himself to producing the effects he premeditates through copying reality, nor consents not to distance himself from it. Ceaselessly he disarranges and recombines its elements. The incidents necessary to verisimilitude are compressed into a purely logical intrigue, altered, chosen and refined to the point of seeming to agitate a chimerical planet, with paler sun and clearer nights than ours. The souls that gleam in the sharp eyes of the characters are concise, extracted, sublimated into pure spiritual essences. The descriptions show fictitious things and scenes; the style unfolds in multiple forms, deliberately adapted to the emotions the storyteller wishes to suggest. The entire work, conceived by an infallible and learned art, calculated in its parts, its movement, its direction and its mass, assumes the glacial aspect of a geometrically perfect object. Brilliant corollas of spectral hues, hollowing into cones and cutting into angled volutes, inflect by pure curves on their initially vertical stems. The precise harmony of their bearing flatters the eye that their rigid beauty and inanimate charm disconcert.
II
By means of that complex aesthetic whose subtlety we have had to analyse, Edgar Poe attempted to evoke two allied emotions in varying proportions: curiosity and horror.
Certain tales appear driven solely by the feverish pursuit of some singular problem. They unfold like the calculation of an equation, advancing with gradual and certain steps, leading from term to term—after several false arrivals from which one sets off again more breathless than before—to an unforeseen certainty irrefutably deduced. From the progression of the tale, from its intrigue (an unsuitable word for works as glacial and devoid of all amorous tenderness as Eureka, the detective and cryptographic novels), all interest proceeds. They are untouched by passion and free from horror. Then the tales, to which the poems are added, grow darker. The problem, taking less time to solve, holds one less in suspense. The account of a fabulous voyage, an opiate hallucination magnificent and bloody, a vendetta of bizarre atrocity—these divide the reader between a shudder and the allure of unheard-of incidents. The still thinner plot reduces itself to the description of a scene or an act; the curiosity stirred by the originality of the invention is immediately repressed by a spasm of terror and disgust. All manner of horrors surge forth. Spiritual torments torture a pale apostate. Upon human putrefaction, lugubrious and formidable variations are performed. Souls become deranged, deformed and warped by rare strokes of madness; then comes the very spectacle of dread, the cruel analysis of the most anguishing fears, which makes one pale and tremble—until this ascending terror, at last sublimated and spiritualised, enclosed within crystalline verses, tinged with a strange reflection of beauty, becomes the tragic and celestial charm of “The Raven,” of “Ulalume,” of “Lenore.”
In the detective novels, “The Gold-Bug” and Eureka, Poe succeeds in arousing an interest devoid of all emotional element. He clothes in literary form that cold pleasure, intense amongst speculative minds, which the solution of a problem as such causes in geometers, metaphysicians and strategists. Endowing his characters with perspicacity, reasoning power, deductive rectitude, stripping from their souls all passion and disorder, he assigns them an investigation, has them undertake it, pursue it, fail at it, until the solution is shot into their brain by some thunderbolt of logic. In this cerebral drama, the object of investigation has no more importance than the stake in a game of chess, charged with reinforcing an interest that already exists. It is evident that the discovery of the murderer in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the exhumation of Captain Kidd’s treasure, are mere lures that make one follow, with more complete forgetfulness of all else, the marvellous reasoning, the intense cerebral activity of Legrand and Dupin. In this contemplation of purely intellectual acts, interest transforms itself, becomes overwrought and freezes. The reader is moved in his faculties as calculator and analyst, which correspond in his experience to nothing passionate or tender. He admires the strange dominion of these inhuman tales, subjugating his intact intelligence. And the secret of their empire appears to him to reside in the maintained impassivity of the poet, who knew not to tarnish with any cordial phrase the rationality of his longest works.
This element of pure curiosity that constitutes the detective novels and “The Gold-Bug” attenuates but persists in the series of narratives running from “Hans Pfaall” to the prose poems and verses. It renders the vengeances of “Hop-Frog” and “The Cask of Amontillado” as artful as they are horrible. In descriptive tales such as “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the tortures and situations are as singular as they are atrocious. The pursuit of curiosity adorns the psychological tales with dubious mental illnesses and arranges in bizarre sequences the misfortunes that lead to the dénouement of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.” Finally, in the mystical tales and poems, reduced and refined, it still encloses the solemn terror they exhale within strangely chiselled vessels. Everywhere, to varying degrees, calculation, analysis, artifice appeal to reason, to reflective faculties, to detached and cold curiosity, recommend calm, invite one to think rather than feel, envelop Poe’s works in a clear radiance of intellectuality. Become, through these extra-literary properties, disquieting and difficult to read, exactly balanced in their proportions, they take on the perfect geometric contour of a linear drawing.
To this regularity and rigidity is mingled, in varying proportions but in constant presence, one of the human emotions most violent, most tumultuous and disordered: horror.
Here Poe is master. Gather together the darkest pages of world literature—certain cantos of the Inferno, the brutal scenes of Shakespeare’s dramatists, Swift’s fantasies, the more puerile terrors of Godwin and Anne Radcliffe; blend certain pages from the northern epics, from Russian and Spanish chronicles, from the Malleus Maleficarum, from missionaries’ travels in China; join to passages from Suetonius certain chapters from our treatises on pathology—all these images of blood and suffering will pale beside the freezing horror, the disgust, the nervous exhaustion, the oppressive anguish caused by some very short and very calm tales of Poe. Through profound instinct sharpened by calculation, he has struck at those places where modern man, freed from so many terrors and frights, remains subject to fear and prone to trembling. He evokes only efficacious images, capable of frightening the most incredulous; he knows how to provoke vague apprehensions, the instinctive disgust at repugnant spectacles, the dread of sinister hazards, of agonies, of cerebral catastrophes; his art ranges from the trances induced by horrifying adventures to that solemn and lofty terror emanating from stanzas arranged in the slow funeral march of his poems.
Certain analytical tales already inspire a sort of vague dread through the glacial calm, the livid clarity with which Poe recounts some monstrous murder and indicates the wounds. In other works, in the adventure narratives, he evokes the communicative fear caused by the spectacle of one of our fellow beings running some horrifying danger. He describes and suggests the anguish of the fisherman whirling in the vertiginous spiral of the Maelstrom and makes one feel in the “Manuscript” the crushing despair of a castaway thrown upon the deck of a mysterious and decrepit vessel fleeing through full night upon a howling sea. In the invention of moral tortures, he displays the most diabolical fantasy. The prisoner of the Inquisition, besieged in “The Pit and the Pendulum” by the threat of the most frightful torments, left intact upon the smoking plates of his dungeon, passes through superhuman agonies; the cataleptic of “The Premature Burial,” who awakens haggard between four planks, his mouth bound and eyes obscured, undergoes a mortal mental agony.
The horrors of cemetery and charnel house seem to attract Poe, whose implacable genius draws from the spectacle of carnal putrefaction brutal effects of terror. In the final pages of “The Black Cat,” there stands the rotting corpse of the murdered woman, devoured, with red maw, by the famished animal, sinister hero of this tale. In Arthur Gordon Pym, scenes of physical horror accumulate and intensify. The episode of the mutineers’ massacre, where Pym, to terrify his adversaries, paints himself with pustules, bloats himself and disguises himself in imitation of a dead sailor whose carcass rolls amongst the bales; the ignoble scenes where the survivors kill, dismember and salt one of their own, taking care to throw away the head and feet—these culminate in the horrible encounter by these starving men of a dismasted and depopulated brig, rolling at random upon the waves, a pestilent cargo of corpses in corruption torn by gorged birds.
Upon his back where part of the shirt had been torn away, leaving the flesh exposed, sat an enormous gull, actively gorging itself on the horrible meat, its beak and talons deeply buried in the body, and its white plumage all splattered with blood. As the brig continued to turn, as if to see us more closely, the bird laboriously withdrew its bloody head from the hole and, after considering us for a moment stupefied, lazily detached itself from the body upon which it was feasting, then took straight flight above our deck and hovered for some time in the air with a piece of the coagulated and quasi-living substance in its beak. At last the horrible morsel fell, with a sinister splashing, right at Parker’s feet.
Just as these putrid spectacles provoke extreme disgust through the assault they make upon our love of the human form, the psychological tales terrify by ruining belief in reason. Poe makes one doubt cerebral health by constantly displaying the derangements, neuroses and hallucinations of his maniacs. He shows the mysterious and inexplicable haunting of “The Man of the Crowd,” the will succumbing to morbid impulses, the degrading ravages of alcohol; then the half-madnesses, the acoustic illusions and bloody cravings of the murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart”; finally the frenzied vampirism of Berenice’s lover, whose disgusting act vies in horror with a frightful madness. And beyond these tales where anguish appears exalted beyond measure, from neurosis to neurosis, come beings more mysteriously disorganised, powerful in intelligence, afflicted with profound diseases of the will, monstrous and cracked by the enormous development of some cerebral group normally minute. Against the tenebrous background of a sumptuous and silent dwelling, there stand out the pale features of the incestuous widower of Morella, believing he recognises in his daughter the transfused soul of her he had not known how to love whilst living; Ligeia’s mad struggle against death, the somnolent grief of her lover and his fantastic reverie through the long night when he believed he saw the immaterial form of the deceased slip into the warm body of Lady Rowena; Roderick Usher, fearful of being afraid, bare-handed, voice trembling, darting his too-acute gaze in all directions, bewildered by the delicacy of his senses, his spirit starting, vacillating and failing, to the point of succumbing in a spasm of terror on that mysterious night whose description remains unforgettable.
Here we are at the confines of the possible and at the summit of the scale of terrifying emotions that Poe articulates throughout his work. In leaving reality entirely behind, he strips horror of all that is painful and harsh. In these supreme works it is purified and sweetened, tinged with tenderness, shadowed by a sort of mysticism that both exalts and soothes it. We enter the astral ether where the sweet words of Monos and Una, of Oinos and Agathos are exchanged, whence descend the demon of “Silence,” the fairy of “The Island,” whence came the formless and indefinite phantom who, in a time of pestilence, saddened the seven drinkers of Ptolemais. Subtle rhythms, musical alliterations, the magic of words lead us to the poems. The sombre allegories of “The Haunted Palace,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “The City in the Sea” veil the images of Madness, Death, the Last Judgement beneath the black lace of their style. In “Lenore,” in “Ulalume,” rises the lament for a lost beloved, the sudden anguish of an inconsolable mourner who comes to pass, on a scintillating autumn night, before the threshold of the vault closed for a year upon precious remains. The noble poem of “The Raven” still embalms, beneath heavy cerements, the love of a dead woman whose memory illuminates the nocturnal chamber with its rustling silken curtains, gives to the fatidic and monotonous response of the bird all its successive gradations of despair, up to that outpoured finale where terror, passion, mystery and supreme beauty unite:
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!
The absence in Poe’s work of certain characteristics is as significant as the presence of the preceding ones. Neither in his tales nor in most of his poems does he use, to produce emotion, the spectacle of normal love, which is nevertheless the principal content of all novels, all dramas and almost all verse. The greatest number of tales have men for characters, and nothing in the background of the plot shows that these have ever been stirred by the rustle of a skirt. Other works present men and women in love, but with a passion so denatured, mystical or demented, that it is novel and superhuman. Poe veils the attraction of the sexes, whose roles he reverses, alters it with disease, madness or crime, shows it morbid and frenzied in “Ligeia,” childlike and fantastical in “Eleonora”; and even his poems, a few fugitive pieces apart, describe only the spectre of love. “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Lenore” are requiems for a beautiful dead woman. In “To Helen,” which Poe addressed to Mrs Whitman on the point of becoming his wife, the fervour of an ecstatic adoration is altered by the account of a hallucination as strange and cruel as that in “Berenice,” written thirteen years earlier. If healthy, sweet and happy love is missing from Poe’s writings, neither does one find there, despite their diabolism and cruelty, their monsters and grotesques, the element that accompanies the caricatures of all epochs: obscenity. Although there is talk of orgies in “William Wilson,” though on the island of Tsalal the sailors of the Jane Guy find women “obliging in all things,” though in “Marie Roget” one must delve into the underworld of a kept woman, and in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” glimpse the corpse of a young girl brutally lacerated, not one equivocal word, not one allusion to the realities of the flesh, a hoarse cry or a rush of blood comes to alter the glacial calm of these works and all the others. It seems they have been cold-rolled, tempered in polar water, aerated with ether, nimbed with a boreal halo. They unfold their mechanism without arousing other passions than those that make the brain anaemic and the cheeks pale. Wan, they bear the traces of a terrified and contained soul that we endeavour to see.
III
We have analysed the work of Edgar Poe. Having separated the elements of his aesthetic and the components of the emotions it serves to provoke, we have discerned a style varied and adapted to the tone of each tale and poem, descriptions of places and states of mind equally detailed, a psychology at once minute, autobiographical and imperturbable, plans marvellously combined, the skilful brevity of every piece, the novelty of the visions presented, the general artificiality of the means employed. These are used to excite in the reader’s soul a double current of emotions associated like two interwoven and alternating threads: one the pure curiosity of the analyst, the other the terror of the visionary, which, becoming less and less material, proceeds from the spectacle of death to that of the most subtle cerebral disorganisations, rising finally to the ideal and grave passions of the poems. In this succession of elements, some are simple and some complex. The originality and horror in Poe’s imagination, his love of artifice in style, the plans, the brevity, the analysis—these are irreducible. His employment of curiosity, his psychology, certain strange omissions in his work, his aesthetic doctrines proceed from composite causes. It is these causes we shall now determine, sought in the cerebral configuration of him who produced these manifestations. In other words, given the characteristics summarised above, we shall attempt to construct a hypothetical intellectual mechanism whose principal activities correspond to these salient properties, to perceive in its great workings the soul that Poe must have possessed to write as we have shown.
Edgar Poe limited his effort to producing perfectly the emotions of curiosity and horror. In a literary stylist, poet, and scholar, this choice of two unwonted sentiments, without common logical link, may surprise. Psychology here explains that desire is the conscious manifestation of an aptitude of the organism. Just as hunger is the cerebral indication of the capacity to digest, as love of a career marks the faculty to excel in it, so Poe applied himself to arousing the two emotions special to his work because he felt he could terrify and astonish.
Of these two effects the first is easy to produce. To provoke horror it suffices to show objects, scenes, characters that appal, and, to show them, to imagine them oneself distinctly.
This must have been Poe’s primordial inclination. Just as each artist perceives more vividly and retains more obstinately in memory certain forms, certain beings, certain ensembles, and from these spectacles a specific and abstract character—as Michelangelo had his soul filled with twisting muscles, Rembrandt with gradations of light, Beethoven with heroic rhythms—so Poe must have accumulated within himself all the objects of human terror. His soul was filled with corpses, with pale victims of torture, with subtle and sudden madnesses, with tears of fright, remorse, abandonments. This is the primary phenomenon of his cerebral organisation, for which any explanation is impossible, save the vague reasons for the individual of racial heredity, education, milieu.
To this original inclination, others are joined. We have shown how originality characterises all Poe’s work, from certain bizarrely composed objects to the invention of situations, characters, plans, emotions, and even certain scientific truths. Analysed in its elements, the idea of originality resolves itself into the coupling of two or more images that do not ordinarily present themselves consecutively, that do not associate in experience or memory. It is therefore in an anomaly of that cerebral mechanism called associationism that we must seek the profound cause of the literary phenomenon apparent in Poe. Evidently in this man’s mind, images neither followed nor coordinated themselves in imitation of reality; by a slight derangement which, magnified and constant, would be that of mania, they sometimes succeeded one another without order, automatically; or else Poe, voluntarily discarding the intermediate links, took pleasure in joining the extreme terms of a series of consequent images.
This second supposition is more probable; for all Poe’s art bears the mark of a clarity, a will, a full consciousness that constitutes its third primitive element. We have shown with what superior calm Poe analyses his characters, deduces his plans, combines the colouring of his style, the proportions of his work, the reticence of his dénouements, doses with a learned hand the two passional forces with which he plays, horror and curiosity. The common character of all these qualities of measure, order, foresight, just calculation is that of adaptation to an end. Poe perceives the definite relation of cause and effect between the literary means to be employed and the fictional emotional effect to be produced, between the internal constitution of characters and their acts, between a fact and its possible consequences, between all parts of the work, between his own faculties and their leisurely employment, finally, in “Eureka”, between certain hypotheses and certain actual laws. This aptitude for knowing clearly and habitually observing certain relations that ordinary artists confine themselves to feeling by instinct, resolves itself into a particularity of cerebral constitution that may be expressed thus: in Poe emotions constantly transform themselves into thoughts.
It is common knowledge that any violent movement of the soul, if he who experiences it strives to examine and handle it, ceases to affect consciousness as emotion and becomes that toneless, clear and useful thing, a knowledge. This is what Poe constantly practises, and it is by virtue of this essential inclination that his works have assumed a crystalline and geometric form, sharp and defined, that they are perfect, glacial and precise. It seems that the artist, for his briefest or most extended piece, having felt, then envisaged an emotional effect to produce, having calmed himself even from that sort of purely intellectual excitement caused by the invention of means, set to work with a head as free as a mathematician noting a beautiful demonstration, or a biologist about to write a conclusive paper. In the plenitude of his high faculties of analysis, Poe meditates his final effect, combines his peripeteias, determines his characters and their milieu, decides upon the required sort of style—precise, pensive, mystical, plaintive or pompous—adopts certain proven artifices, fixes the nature of the dénouement, brutal or elusive, verifies in reverse the contexture of his web, composes and finishes, as certain of striking particular cerebral chords as a chemist of the effect of a reagent or a ballistician, about to project a cannonball, of its terminal impact. Without fever of inspiration, without that identification with the work practised by most authors, a marvel of literary mechanics has been produced, an admirable apparatus for moving the emotions, of infallible, intense and perpetual action.
These three primordial faculties—the vision of horror, the originality of association, the transformation of emotions into thoughts—separated by analysis, are in reality confused, cooperate and react upon one another.
The rational aptitudes, regulating the others, prevent them from becoming in their author himself sources of emotion. Had the faculty of seeing and retaining horrible images not been contained by intelligence, Poe would have felt the terror and perceived the hallucinations that prevented Hoffmann from writing alone at night. Had his originality not been constrained to operate along a logical and productive line, it would have degenerated into incoherence, into bizarreries of manner and habit. On these two points Poe’s biography is negative, whilst his psychology, where he calmly analyses himself in his vices and miseries, shows what was the empire of his intelligence over his sensibility. On the other hand, the latter, affected only by tragic spectacles, his originality to which hackneyed subjects were repugnant, united with his rationalism refractory to all emotion, meant that he could show of love, source of life and joy, only its macabre, tragic and mad aspects, the Venus of vertigos and the sepulchral Venus. Finally, his aptitude for reasoning, joined to his originality, accounts for his aesthetic doctrines.
“It is the curse of certain minds,” says Poe in his Marginalia, “not to be able to be satisfied when they feel themselves capable of accomplishing a work. They are not even happy when they have executed it. They must know and they must show how they went about it.” Yielding to this weakness, Poe has revealed to us, in several of his Essays, the principles of his rationalist aesthetic, by which he avows excluding from art all emotion and all enthusiasm. In an article on Bryant, he congratulates this poet for having banished all passion from his verses. He writes in a study on Hawthorne: “In all composition, there should not be a word written that does not tend directly or indirectly to the pre-established design.” He begins his Essay on American poetry by declaring: “The highest order of the imaginative intelligence is always principally mathematical.” The passages abound where he proclaims the identity of the calculating and the artistic faculty. But he is nowhere more explicit than in his analysis of the poem “The Raven”, giving if not the exact history of the composition of this piece, at least the ideal of his aesthetic.
“I prefer,” he says, “to commence with the perception of an effect to be produced… I say to myself first of all: of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intelligence, or, in general, the soul is susceptible, which shall I choose on the present occasion? Having chosen an effect, firstly novel, secondly vivid, I consider whether it can best be produced by ordinary incidents and a particular tone, or by particular incidents and a particular tone, looking then around me or rather within me to find that combination of tone and events which will best aid me in producing the effect.”
And he continues thus, developing the entire possible genesis of “The Raven”, from its fundamental idea to its smallest details.
Let one compare these precepts according to which composition proceeds “step by step towards its completion with the precision and rigorous logic of a mathematical problem,” to the recommendations of ancient poetics enjoining the artist first to feel the emotion he wishes to provoke. One will note a fundamental difference and a progress.
The appeal to instinct, to the incorrect exuberances of temperament, the counsel to deliver secret emotions as amusement to strangers, the invitation to confidences and familiarities, are replaced by a learned and prouder doctrine. Aesthetic calculation and knowledge of man governing the elaboration of the work, each detail added involuntarily, the vital forces of the artist contained, concentrated and directed upon the premeditated goal, the trouble and errors of passion set aside, the dispensation from confessions and displays—to these innovations tend the doctrines of Poe, which mark as clearly as his work the intellectuality of his soul. Adopted and practised, they would make of art a discipline as impersonal, scientific and effective as medicine.
We are at the end of our task. In a body of works, the strangest of our century, we have noted a collection of characteristics, first external, then interior. These characteristics, associated according to their similarity, analysed according to their significance, have permitted us to conclude in him whose writings they marked, certain mental properties whose existence and reciprocal modifications explain why Poe’s work is such as we have seen it. It seems that in envisaging these faculties as the forces of a cerebral mechanism, one forgets their character as vital and transitory manifestations. One must therefore imagine that these inclinations great and small, the visions of horror, the incoherent associations, reason taming all emotion, were situated between 1809 and 1849 in the matter of a particular brain, since rotted and reabsorbed by the soil of the cemetery of Baltimore in America; that this brain filled the skull of a man with black, lustrous and curled hair, with grey eyes, a broad forehead, thin lips, straight, cut at the corners by two diagonal incisions, a man with a massive and almost cubic head set upon round, strong, sloping shoulders, having medium height and muscular hands, the air imperious, self-assured, sarcastic and gracious. This being, issued from the marriage of an actress and a petty nobleman whom his family disowned, having for elder brother a half-madman and for younger sister an idiot, left orphan at three years, adopted by a rich family and passing his youth in those proud Southern states where the slaveholders were recruited, raised without affection in expectation of a great fortune, dissolute, indebted, disavowed by an adoptive father, having led on two occasions for two years a life of unknown adventures and wanderings, was picked up dying of hunger in Baltimore by an old journalist whom his first attempts had astonished. Here comes a clearing of some years. Poe marries; and circumstances having thus permitted him to increase the radius of his sufferings, here are the disasters that return and follow one another, as driven from city to city and from editorial office to editorial office, remaining needy, slow to work, quarrelsome, embittered, maddened by the spectacle of the illness that was undermining his wife, seemed to abandon her and seized her again, he threw himself into the vice that consummated his ruin, began to drink the formidable liquors that are sold in America, those ruinous mixtures of alcohol, aromatics and ice; and always struggling against his temptation and always succumbing, transferring the childlike love that purified his poor soul from his dead wife to his mother-in-law, begging a little sympathy from all the women he found on his path and receiving only a sort of timid pity, having attempted suicide over a disappointment of this kind, seized finally by the fear of the hunted beast, by the delirium of persecutions, multiplying his last drunkennesses that led him from fall to fall to death—he came, the man in whom were summed up beauty, thought, masculine strength, to have that face of an old haggard and white woman that a last portrait shows us, that face hollowed, swollen, striated with all the wrinkles of pain and tottering reason, where above sunken, bruised, sad and distant eyes, thrones, sole undeformed trait, the magnificent forehead, high and hard, behind which his soul was extinguishing itself.
This man who was weak, nervous, small, irascible, rancorous, loving, childlike, inconstant and maddened, whom life tossed about, struck, overthrew and prostrated ceaselessly, who seems to drag himself through it staggering, uncertain and enraged, as a drunkard beneath a squall, possessed by a contrast, height of irony, the lucid, logical, rectilinear intelligence that we have admired, the aptitude for bizarre combinations of thought, the vision of all that is horrible, with the faculty of dominating these emanations, of making cold, perfect, and neutral works bloom from them. It seems that the very power of detaching himself from himself in the exercise of his high faculties cut them off from his entire life. He was certainly not the man of his writings, he who was picked up drunk and moribund in a street of Baltimore, the 7th of October 1849. The continual ill-fortune that pursued and overwhelmed him, that constrained him, man of dream nobly unsuited to all mercantile task, to the petty rogueries of the needy life, forbidding him to expend his ardour in beautiful debauches and his inconstancy in sumptuous caprices, made him fill only the ideal part of his career, incompletely and at the price of what sufferings! He was broken and shattered for having been of a non-ductile metal. At all points where the inclement society that carried him along could reach him, he was bruised and mortified. But just as his high faculties did not govern his life, they were not affected by it. Poe preserved intact more or less, if not entirely, the interior, precious and useless part of his being, the delicate and magnificent cerebral mechanism that permitted him to flower his stunted trunk with resplendent corollas. The fact, stupidly fortuitous, that employment in the federal administration was refused him, has doubtless deprived us of some poems and his intemperance of some tales. Between Poe the writer and the unfortunate man, the fissure was not complete. But thanks to the primordial faculty of his soul, to that rationalism that made him feel emotions only in his inferior existence and saved the artist by better losing the man, he preserved and deployed his genius, more than any other writer less constitutionally impassive. This man, vacillating and weak, was imperturbable. From his passions, his alcoholism, his inconstancy, his pettiness, his misfortunes, his poverty, his isolation, his rage, and his despair, the intellectuality that was in him supreme and not central, remained separate, intact, triumphant.
I've chosen to accompany this substantial piece of literary criticism by Émile Hennequin with the letter Stéphane Mallarmé sent him upon receiving it. Mallarmé's response reveals both his gratitude and his keen appreciation of Hennequin's essay on Edgar Allan Poe.
TO ÉMILE HENNEQUIN*
Paris [, Monday] 2nd February 1885
My dear Monsieur Hennequin,
This article is your masterstroke: I should have thanked you straightaway, had I not wished, after studying it in detail, to reread the entire essay yesterday. Your intellectual operation strikes me there as indisputable; and the brevity of method you achieve by striking precisely where needed, repeatedly, swiftly and cleanly, is thoroughly modern. Truly, yes, with this lucid decisiveness in selecting typical facts, all drawn from the work itself (which reveals the man better than anything), one need not burden oneself with the ordinary means of historical criticism—milieux, precedents, etc., etc. And this lends itself no less to all that one desires in a literary piece: for you have several pages of intense and concise eloquence, mathematically musical! Poe is there, authentically, in a collection of strict ebony with precious handles.
Thank you for sending this to me, and thank you for taking, in speaking of The Raven, several lines from my translation: I could in no way be foreign to your work.
I clasp your hand; until soon.
Stéphane Mallarmé
*Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance (1854-1898), ed. Bertrand Marchal, dir. Jean-Yves Tadié, nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Gallimard, 2019).
*
This also provides an apt occasion to quote from Octave Mirbeau’s memorial article for Émile Hennequin, who died tragically before his thirtieth birthday in a swimming accident. Mirbeau wrote particularly about Hennequin’s relationship with Edgar Allan Poe:
He was charming, with a curiously refined appearance, supremely elegant yet veiled in mystery, with eyes deep and gentle, intoxicated yet cold, piercing yet innocent—a visionary’s eyes, perfectly emblematic of his particular genius and noble emotional qualities. Stéphane Mallarmé told me he bore a striking resemblance, in facial expression and bearing, to Edgar Poe—not the Edgar Poe those lying engravings show us, but as Mallarmé knew him: a man of strange beauty and infinite allure. Émile Hennequin, moreover, through his intellectual kinship with the celebrated American writer, was irresistibly drawn to that great metaphysical poet—perhaps the greatest amongst the great.
He devoted to Poe a magnificent study, more detailed, more harmonious in its judgements, more compelling and expressive even than Baudelaire’s, and produced excellent translations of some of his most obscure tales that delighted the literati. His death isn’t merely a ghastly blow to his family, a cruel loss to his friends; it’s an irreparable loss to the intellectual world, for it carries away, along with Émile Hennequin, the marvellous work we expected from him—the work yet to be done that isn’t done and that he would surely have done.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 