Text: Harriet R. Holman, “Longfellow in the Rue Morgue,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 58-60

[page 58,continued:]

Almost hidden among the details of the ornate frame-work introductory to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” lies what I can read only as a clever example of the complicated bilingual word-play which Poe enjoyed constructing. In this case, it is also a minor volley in the Poe-Longfellow war. But though it was first published in 1841, it seems to have gone unnoticed; for in Poe's Literary Battles, Sidney P. Moss made no recognition of this little attack from a place so unexpected as to amount to literary ambush.(1) The references appear essentially unchanged in every edition Poe supervised: As the narrator and his friend strolled one evening, M. Dupin shocked his companion by entering into his unspoken thoughts. “He is a very little fellow, that's true, and would do better for the Théâtre des Variétés,” he observed.(2) (Little fellow, I surmise, is a satiric diminutive for Longfellow.) When the narrator halted his half-completed response, to be sure that he had not misunderstood, Dupin completed the sentence for him, “— ‘of Chantilly,’ said he, ‘why do you pause? You were remarking to yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy.’ ”(3) They mentioned a bitter tirade against Chantilly, “a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the rôle of Xerxes, in Crébillion's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains”(4) by a satirist who, “making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler's change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted a Latin line about which we have often conversed.”(5) I mean the line: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.”(6) At the narrator's request to explain “the method — if method there is — by which you have been able to fathom my soul in this matter,” Dupin recapitulated his process of thought: “It was the fruiterer,” replied my friend, “who brought you to the conclusion that the mender of soles was not of sufficient height for Xerxes et id genus omne.”(7) He further spelled out that the process in reverse, from “the recontre with [page 59:] the fruiterer in question [who had a large basket of apples on his head]. The larger links of the chain run thus — Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.”(8) Almost all these seemingly idle comments designed to exhibit the quality of Dupin's mind are indeed also recognizable allusions to Longfellow, extensions of Poe's belittling diminutive for the little fellow of short significance as a literary man.

Evidently Poe had not forgotten Longfellow's own reference to little fellows, once jestingly in Outre-Mer (1826-1829) to “the little great men” of a Spanish village named El Pardillo, which itself means the little brown fellow,(9) and more significantly in Hyperion when Longfellow's autobiographical narrator Paul Flemming, cast in the mold of the prolix and self-willed Jean Paul,(10) considered the meaning of a homily about the Hermetic Philosopher who contemplated making a homunculus — a diminutive human being, a midget — to give significance to his empty life.(11) Recorded in Poe's retentive memory, the references fitted neatly with his satiric purpose. The fruiterer too is from Hyperion, for Longfellow explained the death of Paul Flemming's wife with a flourish of Victorian bowdlerism: “The friend of his youth was dead. The bough had broken ‘under the burden of the unripe fruit.’ ”(12) The reader mindful alike of the apple in Eden and the autobiographical character of Hyperion needs no Golden Bough to establish the identity of Longfellow and the fruiterer's stumbling man with the basket of apples. Dupin's fruiterer-Chantilly list has already been related elsewhere to Longfellow through “Dr. Nichols,” Poe's satiric misspelling of John Pringle Nichol, in Frederick W. Conner's thorough “Poe and John Nichol: Notes on a Source of Eureka.”(13)

The quondam cobbler, mender of soles, offered an easy and obvious pun on Longfellow's habitual didacticism, his soul-mending, both in poetry and conspicuously in Hyperion, which was his effort to express his grief and longing and thus cleanse his soul of them.(14)

The tirade which lampooned Chantilly could well have been a reference to Poe's two attacks on Longfellow in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in reviews of Hyperion, (V, [October, 1839], 227) and Voices of the Night [[Voices of the Night]], (VII, [February, 1840], 100-103).

The name of Chantilly seems to be a bilingual, perhaps even a kind of double, pun, whose sense is dependent upon the meaning of Perditit antiquum litera prima sonum and, perhaps, also allusions to Longfellow's unsuccessful venture into play-writing, The Spanish Student. That drama, to be sure, was not published until September-November, 1842, when it appeared in Graham's Magazine, some year and a half after publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in the same magazine, and Longfellow's letters make clear that he zealously guarded his play from the public while he tried to find a producer for it.(15) As editor and author, however, Poe was in a position to hear literary gossip long before publishers made announcements, and there is good reason to assume that some friend either permitted him to see the manuscript, or, more likely, reported its inadequacies to him. A tragedy of “Xerxes et id genus omne” would of course be heroic, beyond the scope of any little fellow, either author or actor, on whom the buskin could appear no better than ridiculous.

Now, the key Latin sentence is generally translated as “The first letter destroyed the ancient sound,” which implies that with the first letter Longfellow wrote, he had destroyed the sound of true literature, classical literature; but every Latinist I could press into service produced independently a different version: “The first letter has lost its old (or former) sound.” One French initial letter customarily changed in English is e acute, which in English becomes a sibillant, as in état, state. Prefixing Chantilly with e acute — the sibillant in translation would be absorbed into the initial Ch — produces very nearly échantillon, a sample, a little piece, as the name of the quondam cobbler before he assumed the grand stage name of Chantilly. In any case, the new name suggests some form of chanter, to sing — probably chant-t-il? (does he sing?) or chantent-ils?, chantent-elles? (do they sing?), Chantilly. This allusion may stand as reference either to Longfellow's lyrics or, more ironically, to the two German girls in Hyperion whose mama adjured them, “Chantez donc, mes enfants!” Their talent was such that after two years' instruction and prolonged practice of a particular song, they could “sing [it] right off, so that you know in a moment what it is,” though it was a quarter of a note lower than the piano-forte.(16) The allusion is applicable either to Longfellow alone or to both Longfellow and the writers Poe accused Longfellow of plagiarising, the two singing the same tune, though not exactly. [page 60:]

In Poe's judgment, Longfellow merited Dupin's continued talk of “the diminutive figure of Chantilly ... as, in fact, he was a very little fellow — that Chantilly — he would do better at the Théâtre des Variétés.”(17) The only surprise is that Poe could make M. Dupin his ally in his continuing literary battle against Longfellow.

Clemson University

[page 60, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 (Durham, 1963).

2 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, (N.Y., 1902), IV, 153.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Poe labored over this sentence, which in the original is “quoted a very peculiar Latin line upon whose meaning we often conversed” (Graham's Magazine, April, 1841, p. 169) and similarly in the 1843 edition of The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe reads “a very peculiar Latin line upon the meaning of which we have often conversed” (p. 16). Note that in this second version conversed may mean “turned in the opposite direction.”

6 Harrison, IV, 155.

7 Ibid., p. 156.

8 Ibid.

9 (Boston, 1892), p. 180.

10 That is, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, admired by Carlyle. Poe repeatedly made uncomplimentary references to Carlyle.

11 (Boston, 1892), pp. 25-29.

[[12 (Boston, 1892), p. 8.]]

13 In All These to Teach, ed. Robert A. Bryan, (Gainesville, Fla., 1965), pp. 190-208.

14 Sidney P. Moss has summarized critical comment on Hyperion, both attacks like Poe's and fulsome praise like Sam Ward's “lay ... uttered by the scholar with the lips of a minstrel” and Lewis Clark's “feast of calm philosophy, poetry, and romance” in Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu, (Durham, 1963), pp. 133-135.

15 See for example his letter to his father, December 20, 1840, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), II, 274. But two months later he was admitting to George Washington Greene that he expected it to be published during the summer (February 22, 1841, ibid., p. 286).

16 Hyperion, (Boston, 1892), p. 239.

17 Harrison, IV, 153.