Text: Charles Du Bos, “Poe and the French Mind (part I),” Athenaeum (London, UK), whole no. 4732, January 7, 1920, pp. 26-27

[page 26:]

THE readers of THE ATHENÆUM will forgive me if I return again to the subject of my last two Letters,* because my aim in so doing, as in these Letters generally, is to throw as many little bridges as possible — even if they should prove but fragile — between the French and the English point of view.

“Le poéte moderne essaie de produire en nous un éfat, et de porter cet état exceptionnel au point d'une jouissance parfaite.” Such was M. Valéry's definition. If one wanted to trace this conception back to its origin, one would have to revert to Novalis, than whom, on this point as on sundry others, there never was a man of genius more completely ahead of his age. “In eigentlichen Poemen ist keine als die Einheit des Gemüths,” says one of the Fragments, and in his own country Novalis had to wait until the early nineties — until the first poems of Stefan Georg and the “Unterhaltung über Gedichte” of Hofmannsthal — for his meaning to be wholly assimilated and acted upon. Even then the group of the “Blatter für die Kunst” reached it rather through the circuit of the Symbolist Movement that at the fountain head. From the Paralipomena to “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais” I cull these two lines:

Can one avoid calling to mind the attention devoted by the circle of Mallarmé to the figure and myth of Narcissus? — Valéry's poem on Narcisse, the young André Gide's “Traité du Narcisse,” and the opening chapter of Camille Mauclair's first book: “Eleusis.” But — to borrow the two words which make up the title of Wilhelm Dilthey's profound work — Novalis valued the “Dichtung” essentially on account of the indwelling “Erlebnis,” whereas the French poets reverse the accent and set rather the chief importance of the “Erlebnis” in the fact that it provides the only fit material for the “Dichtung.” So that the case of Novalis belongs to a quite different spiritual universe, and would necessitate the introduction of another species of values; besides, we are happy enough to possess a curious example of the reaction towards Novalis of a mind of a very definitely French cast, with the additional peculiarity that it is the mind of a complete foreigner.

The reader may have noticed that among the forerunners of the movement towards “la poésie pure” the first name mentioned by M. Valéry — and the only foreign one — is the name of Edgar Poe. M. Valéry has here but faithfully acquitted himself of the duties of the historian: the name of Edgar Poe stands in that place by a right of its own, for both his work and his personality have operated as a germinating influence of the first order in the movement we are here studying. But precisely that they should have so operated is the fact that most of all invites consideration.

Now it so happens that one of the most characteristic among Poe's Marginalia — the one on Art — begins with a quotation from Novalis: “The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.” In a gesture very typical of the temper of his spirit — such as it is described by a schoolfellow, Colonel J. T. C. Preston, “self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious” — Poe has torn the sentence from its illuminating context, which enables him to decree that the idea appears to him “that of an essentially prosaic intellect” — an epithet which, applied to the author of “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” is almost inexhaustibly funny. In the original the sentence crowns a paragraph of far-reaching significance, not unlike those deep and lucid pools of reflection which adorn the narrative in Goethe's “Wahlverwandschaften”: the extracts from Ottilien's “Tagebuch.” But — and here already appears a first trait, albeit still only an accessory one, of what I mean by Poe's French cast of mind — although, owing to incomplete data and rash jumping at conclusions, he misses the whole purport of the fragment of Novalis, the misconception itself — like the “mesure pour [column 2:] rien” of a secure Kapellmeister or the preliminary canter of a crack — seems but to call into finer play all his mental resources, and the personal thought issues with an added relief:

And, not to retaliate upon Poe his own treatment of Novalis, let us quote to the end:

I have chosen on purpose a text that does not belong to one of the professedly theoretical writings so as to get nearer to the normal functioning of Poe's mind; not that I refuse to consider the theoretical writings as in the main sincere, but it is a sincerity with a flourish: the horse prances to such a degree that it prevents one from judging his true action. Yet even in this text how the individuality stands out, with its sharply defined outline, in its rigid attitude! The text is replete with instruction, both in what it states, and in what it unconsciously betrays.

I should not enter at all into the subject of Poe's poetry, and would never presume to trespass on ground not safely to be trodden by any but purely English or American critics, were it not that the question is so closely interlocked with what Poe's case may have to teach us as to certain differences between the French and the English point of view that it does not admit of complete disentanglement. “Very transparent and excessively brittle’’: the mind can hardly forbear to visualize the antagonistic uses which a determined opponent and the most thoroughgoing admirer could make of the words if affixed to the poems of Poe himself, the first arguing from the substance and the second arguing from the sound, and each, from his standpoint, would no doubt be right. The two extreme views, as held by “color che sanno,” are well represented by Emerson's reference to Poe (in conversation with Mr. Howells) as “the jingle man,” — and the remark which Tennyson once dropped in talk, “not unworthy to stand beside Catullus, the most melodious of the Latins, and Heine, the most tuneful of the Germans.” In between those two verdicts, yet, in a sense, including them also, all the shades of the truth have been elucidated — from the piercing analysis of Mr. W. C. Brownell in his “American Prose Masters,” through the admirable introduction of E. C. Stedman to the Poems in the tenth volume of the definitive edition which he and Mr. Woodberry gave of the Works, down to the article that Mr. Edmund Gosse wrote in 1909, for the centenary of Poe's birth, on his poetry, partly to counterbalance the possibility of too great a stress being laid upon the tales, of which he esteems the importance “very slight by the side of that of the best poems.” The article is reprinted in “Some Diversions of a Man of Letters,” It is by far the best plea that I know in favour of Poe's poetry, because, very completely and subtly appreciative, it is yet redolent all through with the discriminating temperateness customary to its author. I, for my part, have only arrived quite recently at a genuine appreciation of Poe's poetry, and if I put such a personal fact on record, it is because I believe that the reasons which in my case deferred appreciation are the very same that have operated to establish the hold of Poe's work on most of my compatriots. When a Frenchman who has English blood [page 27:] first comes into contact with English poetry, the impression is so Overwhelming that he may remain absorbed, perhaps for years, in an exclusive pondering over the great, the central masters; he is like a visitor at Windsor Park who could never decide to forsake the Long Walk for any exploration of the bypaths, conscious though he remains all the time of what they too may hold in reserve.

My appreciation was deferred by the very degree of my allegiance to far greater masters in Poe's own line of sound — and by greater I simply mean here conveying the sense both of a richer and of a more inevitable music — by my allegiance to Keats, to Shelley and to Coleridge — to Rossetti and to Swinburne. “Exquisite mellifluousness of versification,” to use one of Mr. Gosse's expressions, where was it to be found more supreme than in “the wandering airs” that “faint” of Shelley's “Indian Serenade”? They, for the time, barred the way to Poe's stanzas “To One in Paradise,” in which Mr. Stedman rightly points out the capture of the authentic Shelleyan spell. Who knows but that a too intent gazing on the Psyche of Keats's Ode would have prevented me from opening my eyes to the Psyche of “Ulalume” and of the almost perfect “Lines to Helen” — those perhaps in all Poe's work that inscribe themselves the nearest to the central walk of English poetry? I should in all probability have felt a much greater consideration for the hackneyed four de force of “The Raven” had I then known what Rossetti confided to Mr. Hall Caine, that it was his admiration for the “Raven” that wrought up the young man of nineteen to the writing of “The Blessed Damozel”; but at that time “The Blessed Damozel” herself and the “Willow Wood” — and the still greater magic of the “Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” — were, in the very realms of strangeness, mystery and symbolic allusion, in which Poe aspired to rule, far too intoxicating to allow of any diversion.

Richness and inevitability — richness in what a French critic might call “l'étoffe premiére” of the poet, and richness in the springs of inspiration, which always seem rather to rush to him than he to resort to them, and which lie withal so deep below that one never, as too often with Poe, comes to disagreeably close quarters with them; — inevitability in the flow of the inspiration, so ample, yet all the while so serenely unconcerned (an appearance of course, but the impression is conveyed, and the whole question turns upon that), and inevitability in the indestructible stamp of the result: such are — crowned by a general sense of sovereign ease in all the movements of the poet, that always seem effected as by one who has all space at his disposal — the two characters which immediately strike a Frenchman who has English blood when he turns from French to English poetry. He is like a man who on a June afternoon would be looking at a beautiful landscape behind the glass of a window: he has not noticed that the window is shut: the landscape is beautiful indeed, yet there is something missing in his personal well-being. Somebody opens the window: the sunshine and the breeze come in and intermingle liberally, and of a sudden it is to him as if he had never known before what it was to breathe quite freely.

Now these sensations are precisely those which the pure Frenchman is least likely to undergo. The inevitability of a poem is not to be felt if the process of reading, the mere understanding of the sense of the words (without alluding to their subtler implications in the language of each great poet) retains in it too much of laboriousness: either the inevitability is missed altogether, or, if the reader be a very scrupulous one, he may after many readings come to reconstruct it; but what he then reconstructs is an artificial inevitability stripped from the very fluency that graces the original, and that needs to be apprehended at once; and unless he is very careful, not only to draw distinctions, but, once they are drawn, to bear them well in mind, he may run the risk of putting to the account of the inevitability of the poem were it but so little of that character of an achievement which his own reconstruction presents. On the other hand, severed from that stamp of inevitability which is the one justification and certain test of the greatness of a poem, the richness, both in “l’étoffe premiére” and in the springs of inspiration, appears to him — and quite rightly — from a very different angle. One can imagine a great poet of the best French tradition in presence of these innumerable and various elements, which to his eye will appear as lying on the ground, [column 2:] neglected and almost squandered, and picturing to himself vividly all the while to what deft use his thinner, more tenuous inspiration would put each of them: he is like a dexterous jeweller before a lump of sparkling stones, every one of which appears for the first time on the market; yet nobody seems to have noticed how new, how original, how unexploited they are, since nobody has taken the trouble to devise for each of them a special, carefully isolated setting. Put such a Frenchman in contact with Poe's poems and theoretical writings, and he will declare: “Here at last is a man who is clear as to what he is about, and who minds his business: he has the new themes, and he knows what to make of them; from him even a French poet may have something to learn.” When he reads in the “Philosophy of Composition” such sentences as: “My first object (as usual) was originality” and “The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation,” the French poet is bound to react, and the necessity of his reaction carries us straight to the centre of our subject.

CHARLES DU BOS.

(To be continued.)

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 26:]

* Letters IV. and V. appeared in THE ATHENÆUM of July 23 and 30, 1920.