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Donald Barlow Stauffer
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT ALBANY
Poe as Phrenologist:
The Example of Monsieur Dupin
WHEN EDGAR Poe revised “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” for inclusion in Wiley and Putnam's 1845 Tales, he made a number of changes, the most important of which was his omission of the original first paragraph with its explicit references to phrenology. Poe had begun the first version, as it appeared in Graham's Magazine in April 1841, with a discussion of man's reasoning powers which was even longer than the one that is now always reprinted. For the 1843 Prose Romances pamphlet he made some relatively minor revisions, but in 1845 he altered the tale more drastically by choosing to omit the first paragraph entirely and plunging somewhat abruptly into what appears to be a distracting and unnecessarily long essay. This revision reveals Poe's apparent unwillingness to retain the phrenological references he had made in the earlier version. Why did he drop these? If this question cannot be satisfactorily answered by assuming, as did Arthur Hobson Quinn, that he had simply lost interest in phrenology,(1) at least we can look again at the original opening paragraph and see what it tells us about the character of Dupin.
Modern readers of the standard text are bothered by the four opening paragraphs, which go on for what seems an inordinately long time about the powers of analysis and their relation to the imagination. Robert Daniel, for example, says they are “intrusive and unaccountable,” but in 1841 were “of paramount importance to the success of [page 114:] the idea that a debilitated amateur would triumph where the police had failed.”(2) What would such readers think, then, about the opening paragraph of the original version, which begins with a reference to phrenology and proceeds to get lost in a welter of jargon, such as “primitive faculty,” “ideality,” “causality,” and “comparison”? That paragraph will certainly make little sense to the reader unless he is aware of the meanings of these terms. We can go farther. M. Dupin himself can be fully understood only when we see him in the light of these terms and in the light of Poe's other writing about phrenology, especially in his reviews and criticism.
Today we tend to put phrenology, or the science of mind, as it was called, in the same class with astrology or divination, telling one's character by the bumps on his head. But it actually has its origins in ancient empirical philosophy, even though the modern version was originated by Dr. F. J. Gall in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century. Gall, measuring and studying the brains and skulls of living and dead men, compared these measurements to the individual's mental powers. His investigations led to the development of a system of mental philosophy, but also to the popular science of determining certain characteristics about a person through the study of the size and shape of his head. Gall's writings and lectures were disseminated widely by his disciple, J. G. Spurzheim, who travelled and taught throughout Europe and America. Phrenology took strong root in Great Britain, especially in Edinburgh among the Scottish empirical philosophers. There, in 1832, George Combe, one of Spurzheim's most enterprising pupils, began the Phrenological Journal and published the first edition of his A System of Phrenology.(3)
In 1838-1840 Combe made two highly successful visits to the United States, where he met many scientists, physicians, philosophers, and men of letters, including William Hickling Prescott, George Bancroft, Horace Mann, and Poe's friend, the novelist John Pendleton Kennedy. Combe gave his first series of sixteen lectures in New York in October 1838; from there he travelled to Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Hartford, New Haven, and other cities. These proved so successful that he gave another series, concluding his second New York appearance in March 1840. It is quite possible Poe attended some of these lectures, perhaps the series that ended in Philadelphia on February 8, 1839.(4)
Poe's interest in phrenology can be traced back at least to 1836, when he reviewed Mrs. L. Miles's Phrenology, and the Moral Influence [page 115:] of Phrenology for the Southern Literary Messenger, “Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at,” he wrote. “It has assumed the majesty of a science.”(5) This recognition of phrenology as a respectable science should not be taken as the apologia of an eccentric or a faddist, since the thirties and forties in America was a time when phrenology attracted wide attention and a considerable following. Books on phrenology sold well, especially Combe's A System of Phrenology. After going through six American editions in about as many years, this popular treatise, one of several on the same subject by Combe, was reissued in a revised and enlarged edition in 1841, after which it was republished at least eleven times. In 1886, more than fifty years after it was first published, it was still going strong.
When Poe, in the opening paragraph of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” writes about the powers of “causality and comparison,” what is he talking about? And what does he mean by a “faculty”? The answers can be found in A System of Phrenology, where Combe defines a faculty as “a particular power of feeling or thinking, connected with a particular part of the brain.” These Faculties were divided into two broad types, the affective (having to do with feelings) and the intellectual. The affective faculties had to do with such “propensities” and “sentiments” as Amativeness, Self-Esteem, Benevolence, Hope, Conscientiousness, and Ideality. The Intellectual Faculties were divided into four genera which had to do mainly with perceptions, such as the five senses, and perceptions of size, weight, color, and time; but the fourth “genus” comprised the “Reflecting Faculties,” Comparison and Causality.(6) These last two are what Poe refers to as the “discriminating powers,” and they have to do with one's ability to compare things, and to perceive cause-effect relationships through the exercise of method and logic.
Some of these terms had made enough of an impression on Poe to lead him into using them in the literary criticism he wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger. Soon after his review of Mrs. Miles's book, Poe put phrenology to work in one of his best-known early critical essays. When he attacked Joseph Rodman Drake's The Culprit Fay, and Other Poems and Fitz-Greene Halleck's Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems as poems of mere fancy, he was drawing first of all upon Coleridge's definitions of the higher and lower powers of imagination and fancy to distinguish between the poetry of genius and the poetry of mere invention or ingenuity. But Poe also drew upon phrenology to define what he calls the sentiment of Poesy, and to show how this [page 116:] sentiment is related to the highest powers of the imagination.
Describing first of all the disposition of all men to look with reverence upon superiority — that “primitive sentiment” which phrenologists call Veneration — Poe points out the relationship between this faculty and the faculty of Ideality, which, he says, is the sentiment of Poesy: “the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical.” Poe then refers to the distinction between the powers of Causality (one of Combe's two Reflecting Faculties) and Ideality to explain why a poet of genius still needs powers of Causality to write a great poem:
We do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with the powers of Causality — that is to say, a man of metaphysical acumen — will, even with a very deficient share of Ideality, compose a finer poem (if we test it, as we should, by its measure of exciting the Poetic Sentiment) than one who, without such metaphysical acumen, shall be gifted, in the most extraordinary degree, with the faculty of Ideality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind.(7)
What Poe is saying is that a poet, such as Coleridge, “highly endowed with the powers of Causality,” that is, those powers associated with method and cause-effect relationships, could compose a finer poem than one who had Ideality without Causality. This would seem to be a contradiction of Poe's own high regard for the powers of the imagination, but as Robert D. Jacobs has pointed out, we must read these remarks in the context of his strong desires for professionalism and methodical craftsmanship in letters which will result in literature quite different from the romantic vaporizing he found so objectionable in the poems of many of his own countrymen. Poe then makes a statement about the role of the imagination in the poetic process which, Jacobs says, “may seem to be one of the most outrageous ever made by a supposedly responsible critic,” since Poe is claiming “that an unimaginative poet with great ability in practical psychology would produce a finer poem than an imaginative poet without such ability.”(8) But what Poe is really trying to suggest is that pure inspiration is not enough to produce a great poem; one must have enough command of his craft to be able to stimulate these pure poetic sentiments in his audience:(9)
It is more than possible that the man, who, of all writers, living or dead, has been most successful in writing the purest of all poems — that is to say, poems which excite most purely, most exclusively, and most powerfully the imaginative faculties in men — owed his extraordinary [page 117:] ordinary and almost magical pre-eminence rather to metaphysical than poetic powers. We allude to the author of Christabel, of the Rime of the Auncient [sic] Mariner, and of Love — to Coleridge — whose head, if we mistake not its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of Ideality, while the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed.(10)
But what exactly does Poe have in mind when he refers to “the faculty of Ideality”? A look at Combe's description of Ideality will perhaps supply the answer. “The knowing and reflecting faculties perceive qualities as they exist in nature,” Combe writes; “but this faculty desires, for its gratification, something more exquisitely perfect than the scenes of reality.” This faculty, he explains, was discovered by measuring and examining the busts and portraits of many poets, including Ovid, Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Ariosto, and Milton, all of whose foreheads rose perpendicularly immediately above the nose, “then retreated, and extended [themselves] a good deal laterally, as if a part had been added on each side.” Combe also points out the connection of Ideality with beauty; “the function of this faculty is to produce a peculiarly grand and intense emotion of a delightful nature; on surveying certain qualities in external objects; and it surpasses so vastly in strength and sublimity, the feelings of beauty communicated by the other faculties, that it may itself be regarded as the fountain of this delightful emotion, and be styled in the Faculty of the emotion of Beauty.”(11)
Combe makes clear that those endowed with Ideality look at things differently than do those endowed with Causality, an idea Poe obviously followed in his Drake-Halleck review. Even though Ideality was basically a passive sentiment, however, Poe saw enough resemblance between it and Coleridge's imagination for him to use the two terms synonymously. He therefore was applying the distinction Coleridge made in the Biographia Literaria between the imagination and the fancy, but confusing the distinction somewhat by using phrenological jargon as well.(12)
Now let us look at all of the original opening paragraph of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as it was first printed in Graham's Magazine for April 1841. With the meaning of certain phrenological terms in mind, we can easily see how Poe was using them to explore the possibility of still another faculty of the mind, Analysis.
It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not to the actual discovery and [page 118:] location of an organ of analysis. If this power (which may be described, although not defined, as the capacity for resolving thought into its elements) be not, in fact, an essential portion of what late philosophers term ideality, then there are indeed many good reasons for supposing it a primitive faculty. That it may be a constituent of ideality is here suggested in opposition to the vulgar dictum (founded, however, upon the assumptions of grave authority,) that the calculating and discriminating powers (causality and comparison) are at variance with the imaginative — that the three, in short, can hardly coexist. But, although thus opposed to received opinion, the idea will not appear ill-founded when we observe that the processes of invention or creation are strictly akin with the processes of resolution — the former being nearly, if not absolutely, the latter conversed.
In the creation of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, Poe is attempting to attribute equal value to the analytical and the poetical powers. That is, he is trying to account for the two warring sides of his own nature — the analytical or logical side and the poetic side. He therefore proposes, very cautiously, the idea of the existence of an organ of analysis, offering two possibilities concerning such an organ: 1] that it would be “an essential portion of what late philosophers [i.e., Spurzheim and Combe] term ideality”; or 2] if not, then it would be a “primitive” faculty, that is a separate or primary one. Leaning first toward one possibility, then toward the other, he ends in a cloud of uncertainty. Although denying the “vulgar dictum” that causality and comparison cannot coexist with the imaginative powers, he nevertheless observes that the processes of resolution are the converse of the processes of invention or creation. What Poe is trying to suggest, although he cannot settle on the kind of machinery he thinks will achieve it, is that the problem-solving ability of a Dupin is not merely a function of his reflecting faculties, but is the creative process in reverse, in which a solution is arrived at not by deduction or by a series of steps, but by a flash of intuitive insight.
Intuition, in fact, is exactly what Poe has in mind, since in the second paragraph (customarily printed as the first one) he describes the habits of mind of the “analyst,” who glories “in that moral activity which disentangles.” The analyst, he says, “is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.” Poe is therefore [page 119:] making a distinction between the “soul and essence of method” and method itself. The higher power of analysis, since it is on the same plane as ideality, goes beyond the mere mechanics of method to arrive at a directly intuitive solution of the problem.
After two long paragraphs in which he tries rather unconvincingly to demonstrate that one needs superior analytical powers to win at checkers and whist, while in the “elaborate frivolity” of chess one needs only concentration and attention, Poe sums up his argument by introducing still another term, ingenuity. Ingenuity becomes the counterpart of causality and fancy, in what is now a set of three terms in opposition to analysis, ideality, and the imagination. Poe, in fact, opposes the terms in this way, by defining analysis by analogy with Imagination:
The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis [I have spoken of this latter faculty as that of resolving thought into its elements, and it is only necessary to glance upon this idea to perceive the necessity of the distinction just mentioned]. The constructive or combining power by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals.(13) Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
In this crucial paragraph Poe uses Coleridge's distinction between fancy and the imagination, to provide us with a second set of terms by which to define analysis. We have seen him in the Drake-Halleck review combine Combe and Coleridge to distinguish between ideality and imagination on the one hand and causality and fancy on the other; here again, he uses Coleridge's terms as a complement to the phrenological terms he used in the opening paragraph of the tale, this time to distinguish between analysis and ingenuity. That this distinction is one to which Poe, in the early version, at least, attached great importance is demonstrated by his careful — even laborious — efforts to clarify it, such as the passage in brackets in the above quotation, which appeared in both the Drexel Institute MS. of the tale and the [page 120:] Graham's version, and, like the original opening paragraph, was also later omitted.(14) In his equation of imagination-ideality with analysis, Poe therefore achieves what he set out to do — to show that “the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.” He achieves it in the methodical character of C. Auguste Dupin, the extraordinary raisonneur, whose powers of re-solution are so great as to make him a poet of the analytical, or an analytical poet.
As he launches into the story itself, Poe writes, “The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced.” Some of Dupin's peculiar qualities are therefore worth looking at rather closely. He is a gentleman of reduced circumstances with bookish tastes who lives in Paris and frequents out-of-the-way libraries. The narrator first meets him in such a library in the Rue Montmartre, and, upon further acquaintance, is struck by several of his qualities, but “above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination.” After taking up residence together in a “time-eaten and grotesque mansion” in a ‘retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain,” the narrator and Dupin lead a life of seclusion, closing all the shutters of their mansion by day and venturing forth only at night.
The vivid imagination of Dupin is matched by his powers of analysis. “I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin,” the narrator writes. What interests us in this remark, of course, is the way Poe links the analytic with the ideal, as he already has elsewhere. Dupin's behavior when he directs his analytical powers to a scrutiny of his friend resembles that of a poet deep in the process of creation — a fact which does not escape the narrator's notice: “His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulant but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the enunciation. Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin — the creative and the resolvent.” This last phrase, together with Poe's earlier equation of the imaginative and the analytic, makes it clear that he views Dupin as the embodiment of these two apparently contradictory qualities. And, as the rest of the story shows, Dupin's [page 121:] problem-solving genius is derived from intuition rather than ingenuity. Both the demonstration of his powers in following and then retracing the narrator's chain of reasoning as they stroll near the Palais Royal and the solution of the mystifying murder case itself are actually flashes of intuition. Although they have to be explained step-by-step to the wondering and barely comprehending narrator, Dupin's own reasoning seems to have been instantaneous. In fact, much of the circumstantial detail which Poe carefully gives us, as Robert Daniel has pointed out,(15) is not really essential to a solution of the crime. Dupin himself suggests this when he makes fun of the Parisian police for making “a vast parade of measures” and of the French Minister of Police, Vidocq, for having “erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations,” and having “impaired his vision by holding the object too close.” The police, that is, use too much method and lose sight of the matter as a whole. Dupin, on the other hand, arrives at his solution with a flash of insight, putting all the details together and seeing the order, unity, and pattern into which they must fit. The key is his observation that the hair discovered in the rigidly clutched fingers of Madame L’Espanaye is not human hair but the hair of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands.
Dupin's success confirms his earlier opinion of the Prefect of Police; as he says at the conclusion of the tale, the Prefect “is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna — or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier ce quiest, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’” Once again, Dupin, or rather Poe, has made a distinction between analysis, as he had defined it, and ingenuity.
The contrast between the cunning Prefect of Police and the profound Dupin is placed in another interesting light when we look at a review of Macaulay's essays Poe published in Graham's Magazine two months after “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which he compared Macaulay to the phrenologist Combe:
It is scarcely too much to say that the style of the profound thinker is never closely logical. Here we might instance George Combe — than whom a more candid reasoner never, perhaps, wrote or spoke — than whom a more complete antipode to Babington Macaulay there certainly never existed. The former reasons to discover the true. The [page 122:] latter argues to convince the world. ... The man who looks at an argument in its details alone, will not fail to be misled by the one; while he who keeps steadily in view the generality of a thesis will always at least approximate the truth under guidance of the other.(16)
And it is also worth noting the revision Poe made for the version of the tale printed in the 1843 Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (which published in pamphlet form both “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Man That Was Used Up”). In the last paragraph he wrote, “Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of the mystery, is by no means, that matter for wonder which he supposes it. Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio, [nothing in wisdom is more hateful than too much acumen] is, perhaps, the only line in the puerile and feeble Seneca not absolutely unmeaning; and, in truth, our friend the Prefect had been too cunning to be profound.” In Graham's the Prefect had been “too cunning to be acute.” The quotation from Seneca was omitted in the 1845 version.(17)
Poe's hero is a poet-artist, who, like all artists, has done his work as part of a pursuit of pleasure and finds the results aesthetically satisfying. “An inquiry will afford us amusement,” he had said before embarking upon his investigation, a remark which the narrator had thought odd, although he said nothing. But Dupin is, in his act of resolution, the converse of the artist in the act of creation, applying his analytic powers to restore the order and pattern that his creative counterpart, richly endowed with ideality, would call the work of art.
By this means — the creation of a character who is both a poet (in “The Purloined Letter” Dupin admits that he has been “guilty of certain doggerel myself”) and a man of superior analytical powers — Poe establishes an equation between imagination and intuition on one hand and analysis or ratiocination on the other. Thus, when he says that “the truly imaginative” is “never otherwise than analytic,” he does more than merely sum up the conflict that existed in his own mind throughout his life between the poetical and the logical or mathematical; for the moment at least he resolves it. In this resolution he is moving toward that vision of the ultimate unity of all things which he was to set down in its final form in Eureka.
Edward Davidson has already given us some suggestions as to how it is possible to link Poe's detective with his unifying theories in Eureka. Poe's use of phrenology makes even more clear that his detective is the converse of the artist: the great unifier who brings to bear his analytical powers in the act of “re-solution” of the primal unity. [page 123:]
In his discussion of “The Tale as Allegory,” Davidson notes that the mind of Dupin began acting upon the murder case with the assumption that the real world is actually one of total disorder:
A crime is ... a sudden and startling thrust of what lies behind the bland surface of existence into the presumed reality; that reality instantaneously breaks down and, while in its fragments, sustains or reveals the “ideal.” ... A “true philosophy,” Poe elsewhere stated, “will show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” At such a moment the detective-philosopher sees the total relevancy not only of being but of non-being; he can begin to relate the irrelevant and seemingly meaningless action in the brute world to the total, primal calculus of relationship which can be apprehended only by the creative imagination. The man who solves a crime is a poet: he is a re-creator of things as they truly are, not as they seem “in reality” to the common gaze.(18)
Although Davidson speaks here of the “creative imagination,” it would seem more accurate in light of the foregoing discussion to use the term analysis, but the process he describes is certainly analogous to the creation of a poem. “A tale of ratiocination,” Davidson continues, “is very like the poem: each in its special way proceeds from multiplicity and confusion to the primal ‘simplicity’. ... The ratiocinative exercise of the detective is simply an allegory of how the mind may impose its interior logic on exterior circumstance. Dupin is the supreme artistic ego: everything external to himself can be made to fit the theoretical, the ideal logic.”(19) How these ideas relate to those ideas of the restoration of unity out of multiplicity which Poe develops in Eureka may be seen if we recall briefly the basic process of expansion and contraction that lies at the heart of Poe's cosmogony: from its original unity, he says, particles of matter were radiated outward, dispersing themselves into a steadily increasing complexity and heterogeneity. At some point in time this process will be reversed, the forces of attraction will be stronger than those of repulsion (or gravity), and all will return to their primal spirit-matter unity. As Davidson has diagrammed the first part of the process:(20)
| Unity ——————— | Irradiation —————— | Diffusion |
| (The aboriginal state) | (The creative process) [of the material world] |
(The present condition or multiplicity) |
If we diagram the second phase, in which the forces of attraction prevail, we can see them as part of the “re-solution” into unity — the process [page 124:] which Dupin duplicates in his own analytical solution of the crime:
| Diffusion | ——————— Recolution ———————— | Unity |
| (Attraction) |
But perhaps it would be better to let Poe himself make the connection between the assimilative powers of Dupin and the general principle in Eureka that by the removal of a “seeming” impossibility one can arrive at the solution of a problem. In Eureka he wrote, “Now, I have elsewhere observed that it is by just such difficulties as the one now in question — such roughnesses — such peculiarities — such protuberances above the plane of the ordinary — that Reason feels her ways, if at all, in her search for the True.” In a note to the word elsewhere Poe wrote, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and, indeed the last phrase of the above quotation, following the dash, is quoted exactly from the tale.(21)
1 Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 466.
2 Poe's Detective God,” Furioso, VI (1951), 48. Daniel's essay is interesting, particularly for its provocative title, although I believe it is possible to go farther with Dupin's divine possibilities than he has (see below).
3 Some of this material may be found in Edward Hungerford's informative survey, “Poe and Phrenology,” AL, II (1930), 209-31, which lists and discusses several other tales, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia,” which use phrenological ideas. Of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Hungerford writes, “The discussion of phrenology serves merely to launch the tale,” later adding, “Modern knowledge of phrenology has faded, but thoroughly to understand Poe we must relearn the connotation of his allusions.” Hungerford seems not to have been aware of the original first paragraph.
4 Nahum Capen, Reminiscences of Dr. Spurzheim and George Combe: and a Review of the Science of Phrenology, from the Period of its Discovery by Dr. Gall, to the Time of the Visit of George Combe to the United States, 1838, 1840 (New York, 1881), pp. 131-37.
5 Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Works, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), VIII, 252-53.
6 George Combe, A System of Phrenology (Boston, 1839), 6th American from the 3rd Edinburgh edition, p. 105.
7 “Review of Poems by Drake and Halleck,” Southern Literary Messenger, II (April 1836), 328.
8 Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge, 1969), p. 145.
9 It was this recognition of the function of the craftsman that led Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition” to painstakingly explain the steps in writing “The Raven’: to take the reader behind the scenes to peep at “The wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — [page 125:] the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.”
10 Drake-Halleck review, p. 328.
11 A System of Phrenology, pp. 303-319.
12 Jacobs, Poe, p. 148. Poe himself was confused on this point, as Jacobs makes clear. On one page of his review he quotes Coleridge to the effect that imagination is the soul of Poesy and that it is “creative” (Works, VIII, 283). “On the very next page,” says Jacobs, ‘using the term ‘Ideality’ as synonymous with imagination, he asserted that Ideality alone cannot create, unless aided by Causality. This last would be sound according to Combe — a sentiment does not create unless aided by certain faculties or powers “” (Jacobs, Poe, p. 148n).
13 This was apparently a widely-held belief among writers on phrenology. In 1880 Nahum Capen wrote, “Moral idiocy is to be found, and it should be understood. Fox, of Lebanon, N.H., who killed his sister and her husband because they married against his consent, was an idiot. ... Comparatively, his organ of Constructiveness was large, and it was said that he could make the best ox-yoke in Lebanon “ (Reminiscences, p. 170).
14 Works, III, 289 and 297.
15 Poe's Detective God,” p. 50.
16 Works, X, 158.
17 Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 399n.
18 Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 217-18.
19 Ibid., pp. 220-21.
20 Ibid., p. 228.
21 Works, XVI, 228.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - POP72, 1972] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Papers on Poe (Donald Barlow Stauffer)