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[page 686, column 2, continued:]
— EDGAR A. POE has, from the first, been a favorite in France. The demoniac character of his imagination, and the exaggerated, intense structure of his style, seem particularly to suit the taste of the French readers, though French critics have not been blind to his faults. One of the latter, M. TH. BERNARD, has an article on his poetry in a recent number of the Atheneum Français, which contains a characteristic estimate of his character and genius. Our readers may like to see a few sentences:
“To see the portrait of Poe is enough to understand the life of the unhappy poet, and, consequently, to excuse it. The forehead is ill proportioned, fantastic, sickly, like that of Hoffmann; the lower part of the face is weak and undecided. Byron says somewhere of Sheridan, ‘He had the brow of a god and the mouth of a satyr.’ Poe had the brow of a god and the mouth of Silenus. We see from the configuration of his lips, that he was born to drink; but the intelligence which beams from the brain, reveals that in his thoughts, intoxication was only a means to an end, to repose.” * * * “Poe is to be classed among the fantastic poets, of the third rank who, not being able to rise to power, content themselves with being eccentric. Preoccupied with one constant idea, that of the miseries of life, he expresses it under the form of broken-hearted love. The soul is haunted by a sad memory, and that manly strength is lost, which overcomes the fatal world of tears, and leaves the brain free to exercise its faculties. Fantastic images which recall one only recollection, one only emotion, play in the sighs of the breeze, in the murmur of the complaining waters; while beneath the mists and clouds, there yawn abysses where the eye of the poet incessantly discovers the same phantasm; and if the mind, overwhelmed, returns to the earth, it is but to behold the hungry worm crawling toward the already excavated grave. Such is Poe and such his genius. We cannot, then, conceive how his editor should accuse him of Jacking the religious sentiment. He is truly a religious man who lives in fear and sadness (!) thinking of the miserable condition of human life. Besides, Poe does not avoid the usage of [page 687:] forms, which to the modern mind seem surely symbolic. Seraphim with golden lyres pass incessantly in his dreams, and a beautiful invocation to the Virgin, which fell from his pen in some hour of sadness, has, doubtless, sufficed to obtain grace for him before God, and to render his expiation less painful.”
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PM, 1853] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Poe in France (T. Bernard, February 1853)