How Ironic is Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling?

References in parentheses are to chapters of the novel.



     Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling is the most popular and typical of the sentimental novels in vogue during the gestation of Romanticism, but it has long been recognized that Harley, its hero, is as much a criticism of sentimentalism as an exemplification of it. Since Mackenzie’s book, like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, is largely comic rather than dramatic, the hero’s effusions are as often ridiculous as affecting.
     In his 1824 essay “Henry Mackenzie,” Scott confidently declares that “the universal and permanent popularity of his writings entitles us to rank him among the most distinguished of his class.” While praising Mackenzie’s “tone of exquisite moral delicacy” which reveals “those finer feelings to which ordinary hearts are callous,” Scott worries that Harley might be taken for an absurd and effeminate “Quixote of sentiment.” He proffers “Harley's spirited conduct towards an impertinent passenger in the stagecoach, and his start of animated indignation on listening to Edwards's story as evidence of masculine vigor and assures the reader that he is confident Harley would dare “on suitable occasions, to do all that might become a man.”
     The problem is unavoidable. The virtuous Harley often manifests his warm human sympathy through charitable contributions of the sort recommended by both Christian and secular values. When he gives the fortune-teller a shilling, he is more doubtful than the reader about the morality of the action – he is supporting one who defined his profession as lying. The man’s indigence, however, is the result of misfortune (a fire and subsequent unemployment), and he declares that he had used to be a “plain-dealer” until he found the world too tight-fisted to give alms without something in return.
     Likewise Harley’s beneficence to the prostitute, the inmates of Bedlam, to Edwards and his family, and the similar generosity of Mountford in the story Edwards tells are all appropriate acts of kindness likely to meet the reader’s approbation. Yet Harley’s sensibility, his “delicacy,” leads him as often into foolish error. He fancies himself skilled at physiognomy and able to discern character at a glance, yet he errs repeatedly because he always thinks well of everyone.
     A man he takes for a gentleman is in fact a pimp (XIX), his guide in the psychiatric hospital turns out to be a madman (XX), and his companions are card sharpers who fleece him. (XXVII) While he is certainly kindly, many would describe him as unusually gullible as well. An impoverished aristocrat, he cannot conceive of working for a living. His only recourse is to attempt to advance his standing as a modest country gentleman by acquiring a land lease through political loyalty. He feels “no great relish for the attempt,” but lacks the energy to resist the urgings of friends. (XII)
     His feckless incompetence extends equally to affairs of the heart. Though in love with Miss Walton whose “natural tenderness” might seem to make her an apt mate, his “extreme sensibility” causes him to be silent when she is present. His partiality manifests as “paroxysms of fancy.” (XIII) Paralyzed by modesty, he is unable to express his feelings until he manages a belated declaration of on his deathbed.
     Harley is consistently governed by emotion. His contributions to the needy are determined by his flurried reaction to chance encounters rather than by conscious moral principles. His ethical decisions are especially open to error because they are subjective and impulsive, based on “delicacy” and “refinement” rather than analysis or insight. The fact is that Mackenzie’s man of feeling has an aesthetic system of morality. Suffering strikes him as horrifying because it is ugly. The coins he hands out are aimed at the amelioration of his distaste.
     The subjectivity of the vision of “the man of feeling” is emphasized by the fragmentary character of the manuscript and the accident of its supposed survival. At the outset the narrator calls his own story “of no importance,” and “without art” (deploying the ancient trope of claiming sincerity by asserting artlessness), noting that “had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson been on the title-page – ‘tis odds that I should have wept” (Introduction), thus acknowledging the greater power of fiction over fact to generate such a fashionable learned emotion. For Mackenzie there is little that separates morality in real life from the sympathy experienced by the reader of fiction since in both instances the focus is on the sensibility of the man of feeling himself.
     This is comedy indeed, but not wholly untethered to real morality. Mackenzie’s essays provide evidence of his views less ambiguous than the fiction. His essay “On Novel-writing” assumes that fiction should have a moral foundation though he concedes that some stories suffer a “perversion” from that base. Narratives operate by, “like all works of genius and feeling” by “promoting a certain refinement of mind,” yet he rejects the extreme, what he calls a “sickly sort of refinement.” He calls for a unambiguously moral literature and opposes characters of “mingled virtue and vice,” though of course such a phrase would describe everyone. He rejects the sentimental delectation of one’s own reactions in readers whose engagement with improving fiction has no influence on their lives, those whose consciences are separated from their feelings.
     His ambivalence about literary endeavors is foregrounded in another essay, “Defence of Literary Studies and Amusements in Men of Business.” Here the conflict is presented as a social tension produced by the rise of capitalism. The disinterested study, not of letters alone, but of science as well, is, he says, a “danger” to men of affairs, because “the fineness of mind, which is created or increased by the study of letters, or the admiration of the arts is supposed to incapacitate a man for the drudgery by which professional eminence is gained.” The newly rich are indifferent to art, or even contemptuous of it, since “learning and genius are proscribed, as leading their votaries to barren indigence, and merited neglect.” He claims that the old aristocracy was motivated by virtue, while the parvenus have no scruples and laments that men’s measure has come to be self-interest and money alone. He regrets the loss of a certain “independence and delicacy of mind” that accompany a “love of letters.” Aficionados of literature experience “a real superiority of enjoyment” of which mere “wealth-blown insects” are incapable.
     Yet Mackenzie makes a surprisingly feeble defense of the liberal arts and sciences. Like some academic pedagogues today justifying the universally required literature courses that require many teaching assistants, he notes that the student of literature will develop general analytical skills. He notes that, whatever its limitations, art at least provides entertainment superior to “mere sensual enjoyments,” and touts the value of reading for idle hours, for retirement, and for old age as if it were the equivalent of crossword puzzles or golf. His final argument limits art’s value to the private sphere. “In the closer intercourse of friend, of husband, and of father, that superior delicacy and refinement of feeling which the cultivation of the mind bestows, heighten affection into sentiment, and mingle with such connections a dignity and tenderness, which gives its dearest value to our existence.”
     As for the public world, though, Mackenzie is nostalgic for a social harmony that in fact never existed. He critique is thorough, beginning with the fortune-teller’s statement in the novel’s opening in which says there is no honesty in the world, obliging him to lie. (XIV) Toward the end Mountford with heavy irony refers to Respino as a “man of honour,” suggesting that worldly respect is no guarantee of morality. In a surprising passage perhaps in part motivated by his Scottish identity in spite of his Tory loyalties, Mackenzie’s man of feeling denounces imperialism. Though the whole passage is problematized by this fragment’s title: “The Man of Feeling Talks of What He Does Not Understand.” He sees clearly the economic motives that belie a civilizing “white man’s burden”: “when shall I see a commander return from India in the pride of honourable poverty?” Even this indignation is softened by sentiment. In the book’s conclusion is no denunciation of profiteers and exploitation, nothing but a soft-focus “pity” for the world.
     He certainly betrayed no Romantic radicalism in the other aspects of his life; rather he was a solid member of the Scottish ruling class. Apart from his literary activities (three novels, a play, the editorship of two periodicals, and biographical and political writings), he was a prominent lawyer, for many years attorney for the Crown, Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland, and an active controversialist, arguing for Conservative principles. I find nothing in his writings that would suggest that his views were anything but ordinary. He was simply a clever journalist and storyteller who aimed to embellish his career with ornamental literary accomplishments. The emotional extravagance that characterizes Harley, the narrator, and Mountford does not seem to have extended to their creator.
     Critics have wondered whether Mackenzie admired or satirized his main character, but these alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Is it not most efficient to imagine that Mackenzie wrote a piece inspired by the current vogue for the man of sensibility with the conscious aim of becoming a best-selling author? He was doubtless making fun of an extreme (like those who theatrically swooned as we know from diaries) while not condemning emotion in itself. Though he had initial difficulty in finding a publisher, once the work had appeared, it proved popular and he was referred to as the “man of feeling” for the rest of his busy life. While creating a hero of sensitivity, he remained a wholly conformist professional man who laughed at the excesses of his own character and exhibited in his own demeanor nothing of Harley’s extravagance. Some modern critics have suggested that out of this contradiction he crafted a subtly ironic figure; to me it seems the book’s themes arise more from his opportunistic use of a theme that was very much à la mode.

Fictional Destinations

     With the exception of a single trip, as a child in Iowa and Illinois, my family did not travel further than to a nearby lake or campground. In spite of my father and mother’s middle class professions, I never slept in a motel until I was a teenager. Too expensive. Yet it happened that I had uncles in Los Angeles with whom we could stay and my frugal parents saw their way to taking us to Southern California on the Sante Fe’s El Capitan in the days when the great trains had names and linen and heavy silverware in the dining car. It was the last year that my older brother could still pay the child’s fare. I recall not only the thrills of visiting the Farmer’s Market, La Brea tar pits, Knott’s Berry Farm, and seeing a game of the minor league team, the Hollywood Stars, but also swimming on the Will Rogers Beach. The name of this park I found as exciting as the surf due to the fact that, knowing nothing of Will Rogers, I convinced myself that it was, in fact, named after Roy Rogers, a pop culture figure I did appreciate.
     I recall, too, driving in a neighborhood of Beverley Hills homes so large many were not visible from the car and being told that we were passing Pickfair, which was explained as the home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, names which meant nothing to a child of the fifties. The adults found such sights fascinating. In those days many shops, even street vendors, sold maps to locate the homes of the stars, and making a circuit of such places was a regular activity of organized tours as well as people on private cars. Yet what could be seen? Some mansions, certainly, but those of the stars were surely no less opulent than those of financial tycoons, yet tourists ignored the merely wealthy while they were drawn irresistibly to actors’ homes.
     For me the high point of the trip was doubtless visiting Disneyland which had just opened the year before, the same year that the Mickey Mouse Club began on ABC television. I had been to amusement parks such as Riverview in Chicago, to county fairs and carnivals, but this place was sanctioned by Walt Disney himself, and the difference was palpable. The expected pleasures of the rides and the Cokes were immeasurably enhanced by the associations. One hears of adults today with no children who remain susceptible still to the lure of Mickey Mouse when making travel plans. Disneyland had behind it the Klieg lights of Hollywood, but the later Walt Disney World rose in the swamps near Orlando with only the warm climate as a recommendation.
     Taste, of course, varies. When I visited Casablanca, a city which I found the least charming place in Morocco, I encountered Americans whose chief destination there was a theme restaurant called Rick’s Cafe, a place with virtually no connection to the country. Though housed in a grand pre-WWII mansion, its “developer,” as they say, was an American of my own age to whom the movie’s appeal was largely nostalgic. Her American designer saw to it that every detail was reminiscent of the film, landing the diner for the space of a meal in a mockup of old Hollywood rather than the fascinating, elegant, and gritty land just outside the door. The unthreatening menu includes steaks, John Dory crusted with black pepper, white wine and thyme, and “Rick’s brownies,” though I suspect Bogart’s Rick was not a big brownie eater. Doubtless for some travelers this restaurant is the high point of their journey.
     In an odd conjunction of pop culture and high culture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art surely attracts more visitors by the nearby Rocky Balboa statue than its own sculptures and paintings. The city tourism office declares unreservedly, “Visiting the statue, running up the steps and taking a picture at the top is a must on any first visit to Philly.” (Odder yet is the Rocky statue in Žitište, Romania, but that is primarily a hometown attraction outside the scope of the present inquiry in spite of its selection by Lonely Planet as one of the "top 10 most bizarre monuments on Earth.”)
     Those of somewhat more bookish tastes might prefer to view the well-maintained Sherlock Holmes Museum at the address of the detective’s flat at 221B Baker Street in London. As a matter of fact, at the time that Doyle was writing his stories, numbers on Baker Street barely reached 100. Though later renumbering did make the address possible, 221 was occupied by a bank which long fielded mail meant for the fictional character. A few doors away the Holmes museum began to grow at 239 Baker and in time was granted permission from the Royal Mail to use the 221B number. A place that never existed at a false address! If a trip to London is inconvenient, the tourist may nonetheless view other versions of the Baker Street flat apartment at Lucens, Switzerland where the author’s son used to spend time, or, of all places, in the University of Minnesota’s library.
     The city of Verona recommends visitors find their way first to “Juliet’s house,” complete with a balcony for calling out “wherefore art thou, Romeo?” The association of the medieval building with Shakespeare is, as it happens, a twentieth-century phenomenon, and the balcony, fashioned from a 17th century sarcophagus, was added to evoke the play’s most well-known line only when people complained about its absence.
     I am presently in Romania, and a few days ago I survived the unpleasant crush at Bran Castle, marketed as Dracula Castle on the basis of the conflation of Bram Stoker’s vampire with Vlad III, Vlad the Impaler, otherwise known as Vlad Dracula, son of Vlad Dracul, which is to say Vlad the Dragon who was a member of an order of the dragon. The fact is that, violent though he may have been, this historical Wallachian prince, was never accused of anything like drinking blood — impaling thousands seems more gruesome yet — and he in fact never lived in Bran Castle, though he may have visited there a time or two. Yet the fantasy of an Irish author who had himself never set foot in Romania has made this place the most popular tourist attraction in the entire country.
     Such interest may become a burden to local residents. Prince Edward Island may be glad for Anne of Green Gables, but Dubrovnik chose to limit visitors because of the influx of Game of Thrones fans, as did the Swiss town of Hallstatt, taken by visitors as the source of the setting of the Frozen movies (though the producers named a place in Norway).
     If my attitude sounds sniffy and snobbish, it is also honest. Through a quantum of hard traveling over the years, I flatter myself that I have earned the right to feel distaste for large guided groups identifiable by hats or ids worn about the neck. May we all have a good time, though! I suppose there is in the end little distinction between the pleasure of people in Pisa making a photo of someone pretending to push over (or support) the celebrated tower, and that of the overeducated observer, enjoying his harrumph from the side. If I know more art history, that does not indicate that I live a better life. My nose does not indicate nobility, yet both nose and art history are elements of my identity.
     In a sense, every traveler arrives at fictional destinations. I am quite sure that, despite the head-clearing cool thin air, I saw a Machu Picchu fictional to some extent, fabricated from all that I read in Hiram Bingham and heard from friends. Who could gaze at Apollo’s temple on Delphi with fresh eyes? Some actual sights have nonetheless purely symbolic value. The Eiffel Tower lacks practical use, but has become ever so rich in associations in spite of its denunciation at birth by France’s leading artists. What one sees in the Taj Mahal or a Normandy graveyard or tastes in Tokay (ordered in Tokaj) or hears in fado in Coimbra may seem primarily a matter of perception, but, while the traveler’s reactions may feel candid and spontaneous, they are largely the product of earlier learned impressions. The world is a great fiction and the borderline between history and legend beclouded with mists.
     The fact is that we are all chasing the phantoms of the mind. The tourist does this intentionally and in play. Mental manipulation of symbolic values is the surpassing skill of our species and a principal way in which we define ourselves. If I smile at someone who will travel across the country to attend a Star Wars convention, never leaving the airport hotel, that enthusiast might be amused at my seeking out the site of the Buddha’s first sermon. Both trips may prove rewarding. During travel more vividly than at other times, each feels the power of being the director of a unique narrative, able to ignore practical considerations and act on purely aesthetic grounds, each decision a matter of taste alone. The variety of trips is quite glorious really, reflecting the diversity of sensibilities.

Poetry and Magic Spells

αἱ γὰρ ἔνθεοι διὰ λόγων ἐπῳδαὶ ἐπαγωγοὶ ἡδονῆς, ἀπαγωγοὶ λύπης γίνονται· συγγινομένη γὰρ τῇ δόξῃ τῆς ψυχῆς ἡ δύναμις τῆς ἐπῳδῆς ἔθελξε καὶ ἔπεισε καὶ μετέστησεν αὐτὴν γοητείᾷ.

Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft.

Gorgias, Helen



     In his ingenious defense of Helen of Troy, Gorgias argues that she cannot be blamed if she was misled by the power of words. Conflating rhetoric and poetry with magic formulae, he declares speech a “great power,” capable of accomplishing “divine works,” manipulating emotion, and in fact inducing pleasure and pain through a sort of “wizardry.” [1] Helen cannot be guilty if her acts were the result of a quasi-holy compulsion. According to the testimonia of antiquity Gorgias himself was the outstanding practitioner of just such powerful hypnotic language with the power of altering the reality of listeners through the use of words alone.
     The intimate connection between magic and poetry has long been evident from the work of anthropologists. Shamans and priests describe their visionary experiences and work their wonders in large part through words, though other arts, including dance, drama, and visual art (in the form of fetish objects and the like) also play a role. This relationship has hardly diminished in the contemporary age. The words of the Roman Catholic priest ego te absolve are meant to work in the real world just like any charm, while poetry enthusiasts often use figures of speech referring to magic to characterize their reactions and poets like W. B. Yeats, Jack Spicer, James Merrill and others tout their work as supernaturally inspired.
     Perhaps the deepest affinity between magic and poetry lies in desire. The magic worker seeks a prosperous harvest, healing from disease, victory in war, ends that are always in doubt but which the individual passionately desires. In this way the practitioner’s words, whether functionally efficacious or not, constitute a poignant statement of longing, of human uncertainty, frustration, and anxiety not so different from a poem. Though Tylor and most early analysts saw magic as a pseudo-science, an ineffective way of obtaining one’s way in the world which served for people until they developed more practical scientific and technical solutions, the survival of magical practices in current times indicates that such a view is insufficient.
     In archaic societies poetry and magic were often subspecialties of the same individual, a person who excelled others in manipulation of the symbolic values of language. Shamans visited the spirit realm and returned with stories and verses to counsel their fellows. In later institutional practice those who mastered the verbal rituals of sacrifice were priests whose aid was considered essential to human well-being. Still later their expertise may lose much of its magical potency and become more scholarly or more pastoral.
     Both spells and poems seek symbolic means to ameliorate the helplessness of our species. People have traditionally found solace in the claims of religion, ordinarily convincing themselves of providence or, when all seems to have gone wrong, in an afterlife in which everything is set straight. In the meantime one may try to alter one’s circumstances for the better through the use of charms and incantations. The language in which these claims are stated and by which they are invoked is regularly poetic. While many writers distinguish magic with its attempt to control events from prayer and other religious manifestations thought to be more lofty, they are identical in seeking to influence circumstances through verbal formulations. All are variations on the old principle do ut des, in which the believer’s actions are thought to elicit a positive response. While moderns may scoff at the idea that reciting a charm will, for instance, heal a sick calf, every traditional society valorizes such efforts and every modern one has its substitutes, be they priests, therapists, alternative healers, or “life counselors.” The fact is that all reality is subjective and people have always recognized that words can alter, reprogram as it were, an individual consciousness.
     From the beginning, but more conspicuously in modern times as faith in revelation has faded for many thoughtful people, art has supplanted religion in its fundamental role of making life livable. This general development is so well-recognized that it does not require documentation. Artists such as Wagner, Mallarmé, Wilde, and Wallace Stevens come to mind.
     Yet significant differences exist as well between incantations and poetry. Since magic is thought to compel its ends (unless, of course, it is opposed by a more potent magic), its words need be little more than a simple statement of desire, a human version of the divine fiat. In some cases nonsense syllables such as abracadabra, a Sanskrit mantra, or the vocables of much Plains Indian song suffice.
     In others a simple statement of the desired result serves. “I bind down Aristaichmos the smith before those below,” says an ancient Greek curse tablet, then going on to list three other enemies of the writer without the slightest further detail. [2] A Hebrew benediction of the same simple sort says the same thing six ways: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” [3] The Vedda may set out on the hunt with confidence after he sings to his arrow, “Go and drop behind the body of the monitor-lizard/ Pierce it, dear cousin.” [4]
     Poetry, on the other hand, must generate its own power on the strength of its language without the aid of dogmatic belief or social consensus. The consumer of poetry will begin to read in an ordinary state of mind, unaffected by the words on the page. The experience of reading, however, may generate the strongest feelings, altogether undeniable when experienced.
     This is not at all always the case. Some of the Old English charms involve thick, sometimes obscure imagery and elaborate rhetorical structures not always clearly linked to the goal of the spell. The "Wið færstice," called “Against a Stitch,” runs twenty-seven lines, construing a sudden pain as the result of an assault by supernatural beings, either Aesir, elves, or witches (hægtessan) and briefly achieving a tone similar to that of heroic epics. Furthermore the poem itself is a component in a dramatic ritual, a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, prescribed in a preceding prose passage that recommends the preparation of a potion of medico-magical herbs boiled with butter.
     Poetry and magic have much in common. Both are verbal technologies that aim at making life more livable through symbolic manipulation. Both embody human desire and both construct world-views in which human values supplant the indifferent chaos of the data of reality. Both use hypnotic and little understood verbal rhythms and melodies to transcend and illuminate lived experience. Both also require accepting a set of learned conventions to function. In the case of magic this involves a belief that recitation of the appropriate words will bend nature and even gods to one’s will. Once such credulity in the old forms diminished, art for many filled its place.
     Yet art boasts no divine author. People compose poems without claiming (explicitly at least) to speak for the universe. It requires perhaps as much faith to take advantage of the redemptive power of a great poet as to utter a spell, but such aesthetic power arises more from the reader’s shared humanity with the author than from the poet’s unique ability to access truth. We moderns are surely as much in need of magic as our ancestors yet, lacking their socially approved avenues to gain some purchase on the unwieldy world, we face the challenge of manufacturing conviction out of whole cloth. For some this arrives through the supreme fiction, to use Stevens’ phrase, of poetry.



1. Gorgias’ phrases are λόγος δυνάστης μέγας ἐστίν, θειότατα ἔργα,and γοητείᾷ.

2. See Werner Reiss, Performing Interpersonal Violence: Court, Curse, and Comedy in 4th Century BCE Athens.

3. Numbers 6:24-26 KJV.

4. Quoted in C. M. Bowra, Primitive Song, p. 118.

Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name

Comic Strips and the Absurd

I speak here only of newspaper comic strips, not of comic books or animated cartoons, each of which has distinct generic characteristics. I am afraid that the copies here of The Squirrel Cage and Count Screwloose are too small to be legible and I don’t know how to make them larger. The reader might copy and enlarge these images or locate them on the web which is what I did at http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2013/08/tis-art-milt-gross-count-screwloose.html and http://screwballcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/nov-shmoz-ka-pop-gene-aherns-mysterious.html both on Paul C. Tumey’s excellent screwball comics blog. See also Art Spiegelman’s “Foolish Questions,” a review of Tumey’s Screwball!: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny in the New York Review of Books, or at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/screwball-rube-goldberg-foolish-questions/. The two of them are experts; I am simply a reader. My observations, I hope, would have meaning even without the strips.

     The status of comic strips, considered by most (until the recent vogue for graphic novels) to be beneath the consideration of critics long meant that, while comic artists were bound by the commercial necessity to turn a profit, they were free to do most anything if they maintained a sufficient readership. Comic strips, meant to be rapidly and casually consumed, typically are built of stereotyped images and received opinions, but they have proved to be quite capable to ironic interrogation of their own conventions. Self-reflective themes, like that in this Nancy strip by Ernie Bushmiller, though often associated with sophisticated and avant-garde art, are featured in many of the very earliest newspaper strips.
     Like other genres of art, comic strips offer a variety of rewards to readers. Some strips such as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant have strong narratives while others such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo rely on verbal play. Winsor McCay created lush and dazzling visual fields in Little Nemo, while George McManus’ Bringing Up Father satisfied readers with the same reliable stereotype-based gags day after day.
     In spite of this range of possibilities it is surely true in general that comic strips have a natural affinity for the absurd. McCay’s motive in using dreams in Nemo and Rarebit Fiend and Kelly’s in making animals talk in a remote swamp is in part the same as Foster’s or McManus’ in using clichés so tired they invite play. Even more than in films anything can happen in the comics. The genre therefore offers an arena for questioning quotidian experience with imaginative leaps and fanciful non sequiturs. Such maneuvers belong to the medium as montage does to film or cadence to poetry.
     Within the category of the absurd artists have developed a broad inventory of possibilities. In the last sixty years the underground comics provided rich veins of nonsense, some of which were published like earlier newspaper comics strips, though they found a more congenial home in comic books. R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman and others have paid homage to the cartoonists of the past from whom they took inspiration, at times amounting to imitation. Much of what looked like sixties revolutionary weirdness in Zap was in large part hommage to past masters, an acknowledgement of tradition. Here I wish only to point out a couple of these early practitioners of the comic strip absurd who, though well-known to other cartoon artists and to specialists have faded from the public view: Gene Ahearn and Milt Gross.
     Though I relished the character Major Hoople in Gene Ahearn’s in Our Boarding House, I only recently came to read his The Squirrel Cage. An acorn in the title panel explains the strip’s name. The squirrel cage is where one would find nuts. Hence everything that happens in Foozland is crazy. Here is the April 22, 1945 strip.

     The first two panels contain a more or less conventional gag despite the nutty landscape and garb. The great wizard in his first appearance uses his supernatural gifts as a child might, to create an ice cream soda, numinous and suspended, for his enjoyment while strolling. Juvenile appetite has free rein here, inviting the reader to regress. The magic man then descends into the underworld through a trapdoor only to resurface in the guise of a refrigerator, still something of a novelty to many when the strip appeared. (It is called in fact an icebox.) Topping this absurdity, a small figure clad in warm furs then emerges. Next, Hearn’s Little Hitchhiker, widely regarded as the inspiration for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, with appears like an apparition, his thumb out inviting the unknown and, on his lips, the enigmatic mantra “Nov shmoz ka pop!” He stands next to a butcher block topped with ham and cleaver (itself utterly out of context) which, with the toss of the wizard’s spell, becomes a small-eared elephant with a brush tail. The license of magic and madness allows Hearn to slide from ice cream soda to a subterranean land and then, in quick succession, refrigerator, Eskimo-like figure, butcher’s block with ham and elephant of a sort never before seen. The reader can only gaze on astonished. Surely here are moves comparable to Lautréamont’s formulation "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." The Little Hitchhiker and the anonymous character with the smaller beard and hat signify their amazement at the spectacle that passes before them with question marks and radiating lines of amazement.
     Madness also enables Milt Gross to untether the story from observed reality. His strip Count Screwloose of Tooloose always begins and ends in a mental hospital, but the premise is that the Count regularly finds the outside world madder than the institution.

     In this February 22, 1931 strip the count is propelled over the walls of his institution by a fellow patient who believes himself to be the cow that jumped over the moon. The diminutive aristocrat notices a hobo who attempts to collect tips by reciting “Abou ben Adhem” in a rough pool hall only to be knocked in the head by a pool table hurled by those intolerant of poetry. He dashes from the hospital to which he has been taken wearing a sheet with his head bandaged as though he were wearing a turban. With the count observing from the rear, he follows a crowd of wealthy sophisticates where he repeats his recitation, this time to great applause. This is enough for the count who returns to the relative sanity of the Nuttycrest Asylum and the dependable company of his dog Iggy.
     The lower-class pool players are violent, demolishing culture in their refusal to hear the poem, practically the only work of Leigh Hunt to find readers from the time of its composition to the present. (It was included in the 1887 book meant for parlor reading out loud, Popular Poetic Pearls and is featured in a current internet list of “poems every child should know.”) Great though its middle-brow prestige may be, it would find little sympathy from real littérateurs. Yet the presumably superior judgement of the cultivated crew that applauds the bum in a hospital sheet is swayed purely by the attraction of the exotic, in essence by their own vanity.
     Gross suggests that both rich and poor have equally blind responses to the poem. Since Hunt’s all-too-simple theme, which no one ever hears, is the common humanity of all, the hostility of the ruffians and the rapture of the upper crust equally miss the point. The madman is the only one to see clearly, and he is driven back to the security of his pet’s affection beneath a painted moon. It is surely accidental that the strip appeared less than a year before the popularity of E. Y. (Yip) Harburg and Billy Rose’s song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” which says 'It's a Barnum and Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be.”
     Ahearn’s The Squirrel Cage takes place in a realm freed from ordinary reductive systems of logic and cause-and-effect. The phenomena in its world always elicit a puzzled fascination from the observer who need not even attempt to make sense of the scene. In fact the refusal to rationalize, the suspension of analysis with its attempt to seize control, has surely a liberating effect on the reader’s mind not wholly unlike the suspension of judgement (or ἐποχή) described by the ancient skeptics.
     Gross’s Count Screwloose of Tooloose portrays a world in which the sanest resident is a mental patient and the safest place to situate oneself is next to a loyal friend behind a high wall. The count might adopt Dalí’s oft-quoted bon mot, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
     Absurdity has countless other forms. I have always enjoyed the metaphysical desolation of George Herriman’s renderings of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County, the flabbergasted expressions in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, the elaborate inventions of Rube Goldberg, and the mute eloquence of Carl Thomas Anderson’s Henry.
     Mary Worth (created by writer Allen Saunders and artist Dale Connor) managed to survive for generations with soap opera and William Donahey’s single panel Teenie Weenies was visually ingenious while Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates made its appeal with action and adventure stories. Still, were my mood to build a comics pantheon, I would place at its height the artists of inspired absurdity who brought the imaginations of their readers to soar like their own in the moments it takes to scan a newspaper comic strip.

Tone in Middle English Double Entendre Songs

Double entendre lyrics appear worldwide and throughout history. In the late Middle Ages, as some performers came to rely on written texts, a number of such songs were recorded in manuscript. While most of the scant body of earlier secular lyrics on the theme of love were written casually and almost accidentally preserved, sometimes in margins by clerics primarily occupied with religious writings, [1] these poems provide a direct glimpse into the popular music of the day. Among the songs recorded from the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the double entendre genre was not confined to stimulating a “wink wink nudge nudge” Eric Idle-type response. One such work is an ingenious and elegant riddle, while another is coarse and transgressive, with hints of aggression and nastiness, and a third sounds like a good-natured joke. Each expresses an element of human eroticism.



1

I haue a gentil cook,
Crowyt me day.
He doth me rysyn erly,
My matyins for to say.

I haue a gentil cook,
Comyn he is of gret.
His comb is of reed corel,
His tayil is of get.

I haue a gentyl cook,
Comyn he is of kynde.
His comb is of red scorel,
His tayl is of Inde.

His legges ben of asor,
So geintil and so smale.
His spores arn of syluer qwyt,
In to the worte wale.

His eynyn arn of cristal,
Lokyn al in aumbyr,
And euery nyght he perchit hym
In myn ladyis chaumbyr.


This poem, perhaps the best-known of the late medieval English double entendre songs, is included in a 15th century manuscript on the same page as the beautiful haunting religious lyrics “Adam lay ibounden” and “I syng of a mayden.” [2] The rooster – cook is a variant form of cock -- has a history as an emblem of Christ from the earliest times, a tradition toward which this poet nods with the reference to the bird’s awakening him “my matyins for to say,” yet this association is playfully misleading. In fact, the expression “to say matins” was a euphemism meaning to copulate. [3]

With its extended description the poem resembles Old English riddles, and, as in some of those, the answer is erotic. According to the OED the earliest denotative use of cock in the sense of male genitals is not until 1618, but verbal play with the association existed long before then. It will strike the young as extraordinary that, until a half century ago, scholars read, analyzed, and anthologized this poem with the assumption that it is simply an elegant and affectionate account of a pet bird. [3]

“I haue a gentil cook” is indeed an affectionate lapidary tribute to its subject. Though some have had difficulty in applying certain particulars of the rooster’s appearance to the genitalia, other critics have found every detail apt. The male organs have found few such worshipful tributes between this and Auden’s “A Day for a Lay.” [4] Emphasizing the cock’s “gentility” (mentioned six times in the piece’s twenty lines) and his beauty, described as though it were Cellini’s enameled gold salt cellar, the poet seeks to remove any trepidation or reluctance on the lady’s part. This unthreatening seduction technique is similar to that of Mississippi John Hurt in “Candyman” which includes lines like “His stick candy don't melt away/ It just gets better, so the ladies say,” delivered in a disarmingly sweet and gentle tone.

The listener’s solution of the riddle will dawn with a sense of discovery analogous to that of sexual exploration. Here is no suffering in love, no courtly self-subjugation, simply a celebration of the gift of sexuality. The speaker is secure in the knowledge that the cock has a nightly perch “in myn ladyis chaumbyr.” The verses are pretty and warmly charged with the potential for pleasure. Though male boasting about one’s sexual member or experiences is universal and often coarse, the tone here might even be called decorous.


2

Other late Middle English double entendre poems are not so refined. “May no man slepe in youre halle,” also from a songbook, [5] is far more explicit, The tone is raucous and dirty.




May no man slepe in youre halle
For dogges,
Madame,
For dogges,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv ynche
With twey clogges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such Clogges
That gyuef such bogges
By twyne my lady legges
To dryue awey the dogges,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For rattys,
Madame,
For rattys,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt letheryn knappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.
Iblessyd be suche knappes
That gyveth such swappes
Vnder my lady lappes
To dryve awey the rattys,
Madame.

May no man slepe in youre halle
For flyes,
Madame,
For flyes,
Madame,
But gyf he haue a tent of xv enche
Wyt such byes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.
Iblessyd be such byes
That maketh such suyes
By tuynne my lady thyes
To dryve awey the flyes,
Madame.


Since vermin such as rats and flies, not to mention the notoriously unwanted attention of dogs, flock to the lady’s “hall,” the man’s role is, in the first instance, to drive off all the competition for what is variously called “between her legs,” her “lap,” and her “thighs.” [6] Hints of bestiality, corruption, and illness are here associated with sex.

The scene is essentially comic, low-mimetic. The sexual parts are not compared to precious and beautiful objects but to functional tools of wood and leather. Emphasizing its distance from a love lyric, the persona does not even seek to join the woman himself, rather with ironic mocking graciousness, he expresses the hope that whoever dares take her on will be up to the challenge. Outsize penises are virtually always comic, and, at any rate, the fifteen inch threshold would surely mean that few, if any, could qualify.

Though “I haue a gentil cook” derived its appeal from its polish and tasteful obliqueness and “May no man slepe in youre halle” is coarse, almost rude, glorying in its dubious propriety, both may well have been performed on the same occasion, perhaps along with pious Christian songs. The crudely bawdy and the sublimely erotic are never far apart in Classical literature or the work of the Troubadours. The testimony of literature suggests the same paradoxical mélange in the human mind.


3

The tone is quite different in “I have a newe gardin.” [7] Here the sexuality is high-spirited, wholesome and fresh. Rather than sounding transgressive, this verse is light and sweet, melodious, contrasting with the percussive effects in “May no man slepe in youre halle.”


I have a newe gardin,
And newe is begunne;
Swich another gardin,
Knowe I not under sunne.

In the middis of my gardin
Is a peryr set,
And it wele non per bem
But a per Jenet.

The fairest maide of this towne
Preyed me
For to griffen her a grif
Of min pery tree.

Whan I hadde hem griffed
Alle at her wille,
The win and the ale
She dede in fille.

And I griffed her
Right up in her home;
And be that day twenty wowkes,
It was quik in her womb.

That day twelve month,
That maide I mette;
She said it was a per Robert,
But non per Jonet.



The riddling opening phrase “I have a . . .” introduces the central image of the pear tree in the garden. A playful slipperiness surrounds the associated significations. While the garden makes one think of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, it is also a lovers’ bower, a locus amoenus. The pear tree, clearly phallic, is at the same time identified with the woman. The image of conception as grafting derives straight from medical description, including a passage in Hippocrates. [8] The punning on Jenet/Jonet is perhaps the main gag, and I use the term because this poem seems to me a joke in verse. Jenet, today Janet, is an early fruit as well as a personal name which may be either female or male. The phonological identity of pear and père supports this jeu de mots.

The ambiguity of the conclusion is the punch line. Is the speaker named Robert or John? If Robert, the final two lines mean that, rather than an early pear, the speaker has made him a father. It could be read, however, as revealing that he, John, is not the father, the father is another lover previously unmentioned, named Robert. While the explanation may be ponderous, the actual telling unfolds with a light and natural conversational ease, leaving the listener suspended between the possibilities.

The levity with which the subject is treated is in part derived from the speaker’s apparent youth (a “new” garden, just begun). The woman approaches him “alle at her wille” asking for the “graft.” So pleased was she that they partied with wine and ale. The relationship, whoever may be the father of the baby, seems entirely consensual.


4
Conclusion

Each of these songs entertains the audience with the riddle-like game implicit in every metaphor. The territory shared by the sexual meaning and the non-sexual varies widely to represent different aspects of the erotic, yet in each case the ludic character of the double entendre form emphasizes the positive. In “I haue a gentil cook” sexual vaunting is given an artful form in which what amounts to praise of one’s own body is done so playfully that it verges on self-satire. “May no man slepe in youre halle” is a rowdy, insulting verse of a sort that might have found favor at a modern fraternity stag. In the end high spirits and good humor mask the potential nastiness of the underlying misogyny. Finally, “I have a newe gardin” is a pleasant telling of an old story which at any rate acknowledges the possibility of a child. In this merry version no one seems to suffer. If the poet’s “gardin” is not Eden, it yet may feel for some moments as though it is.






1. The borderline between the pious and the improper was often ill-defined. Apart from the church’s toleration of parody ceremonies such as the Drinkers Mass (Missa Potatorum), the Gamblers Mass (Officium Lusorum) and the Feast of Fools (Festum Fatuorum), one may think of much of Rabelais and, among critics, of Huizinga and Bakhtin.

2. Sloane 2593, ff.10v-11. See Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. The same essay provides overwhelming evidence from parallel passages in English and other languages to support the identification of cock and penis.

3. For the suggestive use of matins, see Ziolkowski p. 123.

4. Auden’s poem includes lines admiring his young friend’s “delicate wrinkles and the neat/ Sutures of the capacious bag.” Written in 1948, Auden’s poem was unpublished until 1965, when Edward Sanders printed it in Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts (Vol 5 No 8) in March 1965, with a cover by Andy Warhol. It is sometimes titled "The Platonic Blow" or “The Gobble Poem.” Its publication history can be found in Bloomfield and Mendelson’s W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969.

5. Cambridge University Add. 5943.

6. Bugs in the crotch are, of course, most likely pubic lice.

7. Again, from British Museum Sloane 2593.

8. On the Nature of the Child.

Poe’s Plate Articles

     An often impecunious writer who depended on publication for his income, Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote with a quick payment in mind. Amid the great poems and stories in the Collected Works the reader will see four “plate articles.” These were short essays describing engraved plates the publisher had already obtained. Apart from being expected to come up with something with broad popular appeal, the writer had a free hand. Thus these pieces, written to order like poems produced on a prompt at a workshop and tied essentially to the image they accompanied, could sometimes create the opportunity for an almost improvisatory composition, a sort of laboratory for creativity.
     They do not always fulfill this potential, though. The earliest of Poe’s plate articles, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” provides nothing but a factual description of the monument, including quotations from other writers both ancient and modern. His scheme allows very little space for the expression of Poe’s own sensibility. The flatness of the essay is evident in its banal concluding sentence: “The whole number of stones now visible, amounts to one hundred and nine.” The author was palpably anxious to finish up, turn it in, and get paid.
     By the time Poe was assigned another engraving, the result of the exercise was altogether different. The precious archaism of the word “fay” suggests the more self-indulgent style of Poe’s second such article, “The Island of the Fay.” Poe allowed himself a dramatic rush of words expressing a far more passionate and specific vision. His torrent of rhetoric however, is preceded by a sort of overture that might be considered its theoretical justification -- Poe’s sonnet beginning “Science, true daughter of old Time . . .” which indicts science for killing myth.
     He begins by quoting Marmontel to the effect that music is unique in that it may be best enjoyed alone, and proceeds to the quite simple next step of suggesting that to him the pleasures of admiring nature are likewise best pursued by a lone individual. Yet on the way to that point he tosses off a series of provocative propositions unrelated to what follows. In the very first sentence, in the middle in fact of Marmontel’s words, he throws into question the notion he has not even completed stating, saying that Marmontel speaks “with the same odd confusion of thought and language which leads him to give his decidedly equivocal narratives the title of ‘Contes Moraux.’” It may be called an “odd confusion,” but surely thought and language are always entangled. If they are entirely apart, would that not result in gibberish? If the French author is so “equivocal,” why cite him as an authority? But Poe’s American reader, concentrating perhaps on the French, is likely to slide forward past these diversions toward what seems likely to be the chief theme of the essay: the delectation of natural beauty.
     By the end of the article’s first paragraph the love of nature has gone far beyond a conventional picturesque sketch. It becomes a vision of the ancient rocks and mountains, the world itself, and the cosmos beyond as a vast organism upon which humans dwell as “animalculae” do upon our own bodies, and we are as ignorant of these great beings as the microbe – not on our skin in Poe’s imagining – but “those which infest the brain ” -- is of our own reality.
     He is only just warming up. Like a Hindu cosmographer, he goes on to conceive of “cycle within cycle without end – yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead.” There is very little here of the scenic and pretty, no reference whatever to the engraving accompanying the piece, yet the reader does find the most effective demonstration possible of the heights to which an inspired solitary observer might rise. The true center of the essay seems to be the thrill of extravagant speculation.
     The remainder of the piece is devoted to natural description, albeit heavily colored with subjectivity, of a ramble among “melancholy tarns” of the area. There he says he felt like falling into a “doze” beneath an almost narcotic “unknown odorous shrub,” thinking that only by dreaming might he actually look upon the scene before him, “such was the character if the phantasm which it wore.” This comment, of course, leads the reader to question even the concrete details of passages like “The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed.”
     Whether the writer is awake or asleep, as night falls he glimpses the apparition of a fairy in a boat. Poe had notoriously maintained in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Thus the poor “fays” must not only be seen in the process of dying, but dying repeatedly: “rendering unto God their existence little by little” until the apparition is gone, or night has fallen or the dreamer has awakened.
     The castigation of science, then, with which the essay opens becomes profoundly ambiguous since, in an aestheticized analogue of Christ’s crucifixion, the decease of the divine is the moment of its greatest beauty. Just as with the beloved woman, it is the lover’s longing that is loveliest, not the object of his affection at all, and to bring that pathos to the greatest height, the fay must die.
     “The Island of the Fay” is an island in the mind. Far from the mundane appreciation of the natural beauty of trees, mountains, and lakes, Poe is looking for a meditation that will accommodate him to life on earth by fancifully transmuting what he sees. The first third of the article consists of ambitious mental exercises specifically designed to free the consciousness from mere observed reality and the remainder provides a vision of the divine at the moment of its vanishing, simultaneously indulging and denying the writer’s desire.
     In his third plate article “Morning on the Wisshiccon” Poe constructs a light burlesque of a similar theme of ambivalence and the veil of illusion. Beginning quite soberly, Poe suggests that foreign visitors to America miss the most beautiful sights because “the real Edens of the land lie far away from the track of our own most deliberate tourists,” in the wild back-country. He relates a journey of his own to such a remote region during which he “sank into a half slumber” dreaming of “ancient days.” In this condition he sees the noble elk featured in the plate posing atop a cliff. Yet the animal alone is not as beautiful as the animal with a sense of inevitable loss. “I fancied the elk repined . . .at the manifest alteration for the worse, wrought upon the brook and its vicinage, even within the last few years, by then stern hand of the utilitarian.” Imminent extinction lends the elk a patina of loveliness similar to the grace that descends on the dying woman.
     From this meditation, not so very different from the vision of the fay, he is suddenly roused by the appearance of a servant who feeds the animal which, it seems, though suggestive of an emblem of the aboriginal untouched wilderness, was a pet, a domestic animal. After the opening which declared that English tourists never see the real wild America, it seems this vestige of aboriginal fauna is kept by “an English family.” Thus the knot of contradiction is tightly tied. The joke is on the writer until the reader reflects that Poe had been in on it all along and the reader is the one he successfully strung along.
     For the last of his plate articles Poe was presented with an illustration of “Byron and Miss Chaworth.” The relationship of these two makes for him a model of noble true love. He opens with a quotation from George Sand (the name he uses is Mme. Dudevant) who, rather like Marmontel, he finds to mix “many an admirable sentiment” with “a chaos of the most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction.” She speaks of the purity of young love, and, according to Poe, Byron, who was, of course, notoriously promiscuous with men and women of all sorts, maintained the beauty of this relationship specifically because he and Miss Chatworth were never intimate after their youngest days. “It is better,” he says, “for the mere romance of the love-passages between the two [emphasis added], that their intercourse was broken up in early life.”
     Poe’s notion of love from afar as the highest love differs from its form in Jaufre Rudel, since for Poe the experience is deeply solipsistic. “It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love . . .It had no particular regard to the person, or the character, or the reciprocating affection of Mary Chatworth.” In fact, Poe enjoys thinking that to her Byron was “a somewhat portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man,” while to him she was “the Egeria of his dreams – the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts.” Their love derives its power from the fact that it cannot be realized.
     While the piece on Stonehenge illustrates how, even for a writer as idiosyncratic as Poe, a restrictive journalistic assignment might produce routine hackwork, the other three articles prove that professional restrictions might also allow the writer the opportunity for rich rhetoric and soaring concepts. These essays elaborate in pathetic and comic strains Poe’s central themes: the superiority of imagination over reality, and in particular the supreme value of a sublime love as a wholly mental phenomenon for which an unreal object serves better than a real, and for which the impossibility of satisfaction is a paradoxically essential factor. In the end, as in his stories in general, his true focus is the nervous subjectivity of the restless creative mind, enjoying itself in the cosmic flights of the “island of the Fay,” deceiving itself in the cause of the Romantic in “Morning on the Wisshiccon,” and glorifying ethereal unrealized love in “Byron and Miss Chaworth.”