Text: Alice Chandler, “The Visionary Race,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 73-81

[page 73:]

“ ‘To dream has been the business of my life.’ ” This sentence, taken from one of Poe's early stories, I could easily serve as the motif for more than a hundred years of Poe criticism. Whether applied as praise or blame, the notion that Poe's kingdom is not of this world” has been the underlying assumption of almost everything written about him. Among the major nineteenth-century critics, Griswold portrayed him as a “dreamer — dwelling in ideal realms — in heaven or hell;” Baudelaire honored him as one who “took flight in dreams” from “a dreamy world, hungry for material things;” and Whitman wondered if his “abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes” did not warrant ‘pathological study.(1) As if in answer to Whitman's question, many twentieth-century critics have either explained Poe's writing as the projection of his deeply neurotic fantasies or continued to criticize him for failure to deal with the “concretes’” of human existence. As T. S. Eliot has put it, Poe lacked a “consistent view of life,” and his dreams were with out “moral significance.”(2)

Even the most devoted of recent critics, Edward Davidson and Richard Wilbur, have seen Poe as a dream-artist. Davidson describes him as the ultimate exemplar of the Romantic tradition, the artist as god-player, creating his own solipsistic world out of the fragments of reality. He sums up his viewpoint by saying that Poe “held a mirror, a lamp, and a pulverizer to nature.”(3) Wilbur, too, sees Poe as a god-player, the inventor of a cosmic myth, in which the poet undoes the fall of man by imaginatively creating a transcendental ideal. According to Wilbur, all Poe's stories are basically tales of the quest for a dream world, an aesthetic intention which he at one point terms “insane.”(4)

I do not intend to argue that Poe was not a dreamer or that his main purpose as an artist was not to construct an ideal world beyond the reach of time. What I should like to suggest, however, is that Poe was by no means as simplistically involved in the creation of dreams as most of his critics have taken him to be. Long before such writers as Mann, Joyce, and Gide were to explore the ambiguity of the artist, Poe questioned the nature of the whole “visionary race” and raised profoundly disturbing questions about those great faux monnayeurs, imagination and illusion. I also believe that it is a mistake to treat Poe's attitude toward the [page 74:] world monolithically, as though his artistry had no development. The poems and stories written before the 1840's increasingly criticize the destructiveness of a dualistic universe in which the ideal can only be achieved through the destruction of the real. But Poe's later works suggest something quite different: a monistic world, in which art is both creative and redemptive. His new fictional form, the detective story, illustrates this changed viewpoint clearly, as do the later gothic tales and “The Domain of Arnheim.” Although it is possible to trace this shift in attitude in Poe's criticism and poetry, I shall restrict myself to discussing Poe's short stories; for we can best understand what Poe is saying by looking closely and objectively at his tales.

I

Poe's early story, “Ms. Found in a Bottle” (1833), is clearly dualistic in conception, opposing the material to the immaterial and the empirical to the intuitive. The narrator of the story, as Poe makes plain, is a rationalist and a skeptic, whose “relish for physical philosophy,” (II, 1), leads him to oppose the madness of German Idealism. The vessel on which he sets sail at the start of the story is almost as sensible and four-square as he is, a well-built and practical ship, with a clearly defined itinerary and destination. However, since ships and houses in Poe usually serve as emblems for the mind, it is interesting that the cargo is somewhat clumsily stowed and that, among the normal items of freight, are also a few cases of opium — the possibility, as it were, of dreams.

As his poems and other writing clearly show, Poe's attitude in the 1830's was predominantly anti-materialist and anti-rationalist; he felt threatened by and hostile toward, the “peering eyes” of “science.” Thus it is not surprising that most of the story concerns a symbolic movement from reality to imagination. After a strange and stormy voyage, similar to the Ancient Mariner's punitive journey, the narrator is catapulted from his own commonplace ship to an ancient and mysterious vessel, so huge that it appears to have grown and swollen in the sea. As the narrator says in describing his sensations aboard the magic boat, “A new sense — a new entity is added to my soul” (II, 9).

The main reason for his sense of newness lies in the crewmen of the ship, who appear to belong to a wondrous and far-voyaging race of dreamers. Very old, knees tottering with age, eyes glistening, grey hairs streaming in the wind, they mutter to themselves in a strange tongue, and will not, cannot, see the flesh-and-blood narrator moving among them. The most wondrous dreamer of them all is the captain himself. His singular expression — ‘the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme’ (II, 12) — excites in the narrator an ineffable sense of a past so ancient as to transcend time. No wonder that the narrator's idle daubings on a crumpled sail turn out, when unfolded, to spell “DISCOVERY” (II, 10). And no wonder, either, that at the end of the story, the ship and all its crew seem bound on a final voyage of exploration that will take them plunging through a whirlpool at the South Pole “amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest” (II, 14-15) to the very center of the earth. Metaphorically, the rationalist seems to have plunged to the very heart of the imaginative experience. As Richard Wilbur says, the narrator ‘has rejoined, by way of dream, that visionary faculty which presided over his soul during its earthly infancy and previous unearthly existence.”(5)

Indeed, it is quite easy to see the story as a Wordsworthian restoration of the fractured soul to wholeness, a reilluminating, as it were, of inner light. Poe makes it clear that the narrator is encountering another fragment of himself: the two boats are multiples of one another in weight and, as Wilbur points out, the narrator and the captain are exactly the same height — five foot eight — which is Poe's height, too.(6) And yet, if the narrator is finally discovering his imaginative self, the journey is a dark one, reminiscent of the darker moments of Poe's early poetry. The landscape is in many ways frightening: a blood-red moon, hardly propitious, illuminates the opening scene, and the succeeding passages describe such obviously ill-omened images as utter calm, strange winds, transparent seas, death-dealing waves, and unnatural illumination. In a world beyond chronology, no natural day or night mark the passage of the hours, and all charts and instruments are broken and abandoned. Time-swollen, hovering over the darkened waters, the ship resembles nothing so much as the City in the Sea and the decaying tarn-side structure of the House of Usher, both of which are apocalyptically destroyed.

Other factors are disquieting, too. As in much Romantic poetry, the bearers [page 75:] of the dream are simultaneously godlike and childlike. But the way in which Poe expresses the paradox is unnerving; for his crewmen display “a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood and the solemn dignity of a God” (II, 9). It is suspicious, too, that the sailors are doomed to wander forever, like Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the Ancient Mariner. For what sin are they doing penance? What knowledge has driven them to madness? Is it some wish for penance or for self-destruction that makes them look so hopeful as the current rushes them uncontrollably toward the Pole? They seem a crew of doomed poets, anxious to cast off their burdens, seeking the comfort of annihilation. Even the initially rationalistic narrator seems willing to die at the end in order to pursue his dream. Although, like all Poe characters, he is presumably afraid of death, he has become intoxicated with his new discoveries. In spite of his horror, he says, “a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction (II, 14).

Thus, although Poe is clearly unsympathetic with the narrator's shallow intellectualism at the start of the story, he is also critical of his passive abandomment to dream at the end. The visionary crewmen are antithesis, not synthesis, to the narrator's original position. Poe seems to insist here, as elsewhere, that if materialism shuts one out from the deeper levels of experience, the exclusive life of the imagination can destroy one utterly; there is no resting place between the two extremes. As Melville would phrase the same problem in Moby-Dick, “So when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now on the other wise, hoist in Kant's, and you come back again; but in very poor plight.”(7)

Another of Poe's early stories, “The Assignation,” is almost certainly, as Richard P. Benton has pointed out, a travesty of Byronism, in which the narrator, representing the poet Thomas Moore, retells and parodies the relationship between Byron, his beloved Countess Guiccioli (the Marchesa Aphrodite of the story), and her jealous old husband (Mentoni).(8) In a larger sense it is also a critique of Poe's own temperament and an analysis of the alliance between dream and death. Once again the obvious conflict in the story — originally called “The Visionary” — is between the rationalist and the dreamer in this tale, between the wicked Mentoni, the Italian Machiavel so dear to Gothic romances, and the visionary poet, who seems modeled on Lord Byron. In the conflict between Byron and Mentoni, the poet seems to have the edge: he restores to Mentoni his lost heir and then takes from him his beautiful wife. In the total context, however, the dreamer's victory is more ambivalent, since he achieves his conquest only at the price of death.

Significantly, the story takes place in the same dream kingdom that forms the scene of many of Poe's poems and stories: Venice, that “star-beloved Elysium of the sea” (II, 109), the City in the Sea, at once beautiful and decadent. Byron is the dreamer who lives in the city: his hyacinthine hair, pale forehead, wild eyes, and strange and memorable expression mark him as a member of the visionary race; and he has the kind of wealth that for Poe always symbolizes the wish-fulfilling powers of the dreamer. The Marchesa Aphrodite is the art object or the concretion of his dreams. “Statue-like” and “classical,” she symbolizes beauty and love by her very name. Her child, the lost babe of so much nineteenth-century poetry, is the visionary faculty, the soul. In having Byron plunge into the dark waters to return her child to her, Poe achieves a perfect metaphor for his view of artistic creation: a dizzying journey into the unknown, resulting in the union of soul and form.

For a good reason, however, the narrator of the tale views the rescue of the child with horror: for each such act is a threat to the existence of the self. Although Byron, at the start of the tale, manages to return from the abyss, the rest of the story shows him plunging deeper and deeper into the vortex of dreams. Addicted to the imagination, he so constructs his life — symbolized by the furnishing of his palace — that he is isolated from reality and surrounded only with the timeless, dream-inducing decor of the ages. It is he who says, “... to dream has been the business of my life ...” (II, 123). As he realizes, the committed dreamer can only go deeper and deeper into dream-land, just as the dream-crew can only sail on and on. ‘The delirium of this scene ...” he continues, “... is fashioning for me the wilder visions of that land of real dreams whither I am now rapidly departing” (II, 124). Drinking wine which he himself has poisoned, he dies. As Poe realized only too well, the artistic quest for ideality and the near-hysterical intoxication [page 76:] of inspiration consumed the self, and, if carried too far, could annihilate it utterly.

Poe's increasing distrust of the visionary or artistic temperament manifests itself in several other stories of the middle and late 'thirties. “Berenice,” for example, although usually seen as a study of abnormal psychology, is also a study of the self-destructiveness of the dreamer. Egaeus, the narrator, tells us that he is the descendant of a ‘race of visionaries” (IL, 16), whose ancient halls are crowded with painting and sculptures. He was born in the library, of all rooms — a “palace of imagination” (II, 17), filled with the monuments of thought and learning. With such a family and such an environment, it is not surprising that Egaeus begins to find his dreams more vivid than reality: “The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, — not the material of my every-day existence — but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself” (II, 17).

If Egaeus is the artist's dreaming self, his cousin, Berenice, is the other aspect of his soul — his objective, physical, cheerful, out-of-doors persona. As she grows older, however, her vital powers are continually sapped, and her increasing subjection to cataleptic trances is directly proportionate to the narrator's increasing absorption in his own solipsistic, dream experiences. Quite explicitly, then, Poe is saying that the exclusive pursuit of the dream results in the destruction of the self — a theme that we find repeated in several stories, including the very obvious “Oval Portrait’ of 1842.

“Ligeia,” too, can be fitted into this pattern, though it contains other ideas as well. Ligeia herself is clearly a dreamer-figure: her family is ancient, she comes from an “old, decaying city near the Rhine” (II, 248), and her high forehead, hyachinthine tresses, and large expressive eyes all mark her with the stigmata of the dreamer. Like all Poe's dreamer figures she is strangely capable of growing; both her eyes and her stature increase during moments of excitation and power. “Ligeia,” however, is not wholly a dreamer tale, for the Lady Ligeia, though bear ing many characteristics of the imagination, actually personifies all of mental life. This personification is borne out by many of the narrator's seemingly casual remarks. It is as intelligence and knowledge, of course, that she is the partner of his youthful studies; and, as he grows older and wiser; she becomes, as philosophy is said to be, “the wife of [his] bosom” (II, 249). Her being a symbol of human intellect explains the vastness of her acquisitions: she is all man's learning personified. That she has “traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science,” that she is deeply versed in the classical languages, that she is never at fault in the “most abstruse ... eruditions of the Academy” (II, 253-254), is not hyperbole but allegory. Whatever man has already learned, she knows; whatever man wishes to know, she strives with all her mind and will to conquer. What is that final “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden” (II, 254), for which she strains if not the knowledge of immortality itself?

Ligeia's final failure — that is, her inability to conquer death — thus becomes a symbol of the fragility of mental life. In a dualistic universe, neither matter nor spirit can survive. For while the body must perish to free the mind; the mind, loosed from the body, must perish too. In “Ligeia,” which Poe intended to end with the heroine's relapse into death,(9) he is saying that there is no escape from death whatsoever, that body and soul, though seemingly separate, are inextricably bound and inevitably mortal. Eventually, Poe would find away out of this metaphysical and aesthetic paradox; but “Ligeia’ shows the extent of his difficulties.

II

“The Fall of the House of Usher,’” perhaps Poe's most famous story, considerably deepens his analysis of the imagination. The setting is the familiar dream scape of the time-eaten building tottering over still waters and the familiar interior scene of secluded, antique rooms strewn with pictures and books. His hero, Roderick Usher, is the dreamer in his most exaggerated form: his pallor almost cadaverous, his hair floating wildly about him, his eye luminous, and his expression impossible to connect with “any idea of simple humanity” (III, 279), In his guttural mutterings and recurrent hysteria, Usher symbolizes the artist possessed by forces beyond rational control. It is significant that in the course of the story he runs the gamut of artistic creation: music, painting, sculpture, and poetry. Thus, it is possible to see this tale not only as a study of the dreamer [page 77:] but as a tragic portrait of the artist.

The most obvious characteristic of Roderick Usher is his hypersensitivity and the way it is destroying him. Like that other poet, Israfel, his very heartstrings are a lute. He seems the embodiment of Pope's line, “Die of a rose in aromatic pain,” for his is the exacerbated sensitivity of the aesthete, intense beyond all bearing and yet deliberately pursued for all its cost. Like an addict, Usher seeks the sensations that he knows will destroy him and persists in the kind of manic activity that can only lead to his demise. Quite as much as Mann's Adrian Leverkubn, although perhaps not so knowingly, he exhausts both sensibilities and vital forces in a passion of creation. Paradoxically, the very frenzy of artistic activity into which he plunges to forget his fear of death, wastes him away to the point of death itself.

Not only Usher, but his art, show the debilitating effects of this kind of aestheticism. If Usher is consuming himself in his art, the art he is creating is also flawed by an excessive subjectivity. In what seems to be a brilliant extrapolation of the direction in which artistic expressionism could lead, Poe describes Usher's painting. It is a powerful art, but it is also an art purged of all con tent — a mere projection of an interior state of mind, in which “an excited and highly distempered ideality [throws] a sulphureous lustre over all’ (III, 282). His pictures are terrifyingly vague: “ ... from these paintings (vivid as their images mow are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least ... there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe. ...” (III, 283). Similarly, Usher's music is distorted, too, or, as the narrator characterizes it, “perverse and wild.” It partakes of the same lawlessness which Thomas Mann, for one, has seen implicit in Romantic music. His poetry, the product of “intense mental collectedness and concentration. ..observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement’” (III, 284) is rhapsodic and, once again, “wild.”

Although the chief power of the dreamer or the artist is his capacity to create a world of his own, Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher” actually casts doubt upon the value of this gift, suggesting that its exercise can lead to madness and death. Usher's secluded mansion, with its remote rooms accessible only by labyrinthine paths, obviously symbolizes the world of the mind, which has become all of reality for Usher himself, and his poem, “The Haunted Palace,” reinforces this analogy. The story of the poem is, of course, the story of Usher ‘himself as he moves from the Eden of his early dreams to the inevitable hell of his later visions. But while the poem assigns no blame for the change, the story itself makes clear that it is Usher's obsession with the godlike powers of creation that has brought with it his own punishment. (In this way the story very much resembles Tennyson's “Palace of Art” [1833], which Poe was to praise in his essays on Tennyson published in 1842 and 1845.)

The chief action of the story is the punishment of Usher. The death of Madeleine repeats the death of Berenice and other figures who symbolize the external, physical self; but in this story the artist is tortured, almost from the start, by his own guilt for the life he has prematurely buried and which claims its retribution at the end. The very heavens seem to cooperate in punishing Usher for his presumptions and delusions. The vast whirlwind at the end of the story reenacts the suggested doom of the City in the Sea and of the mysterious ship in the “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” since here, too, the tottering structure collapses into the waters of death. Rushing away over the causeway, by the light of a blood-red moon, the narrator sees and recognizes this destruction; sees and recognizes the destructiveness of the interior, dreaming self — the boyhood companion whom he has been re visiting. As the mighty walls rush asunder to the tumultuous noise of a thousand waters, Poe ushers in the apocalypse for those who, forgetting that body and soul are twins (like Roderick and Madeleine), devote their lives exclusively to dream.

Poe's rejection of the dreamer probably reaches its peak in the story of William Wilson, who, if not Roderick Usher's brother, is at least his cousin, Al though the tale is conventionally taken as relating the struggle of a soul with its conscience, it is actually, like Gide's Counterfeiters, concerned with the artist as immoralist. In it Poe casts doubt on the whole imaginative process by [page 78:] showing that dreams are not necessarily innocent and that the untrammeled dream can easily lead to the destructive act. Only too well aware of the perverse passions of men, he seems to be saying here that art and criminality are allied, just as in other stories he has shown the alliance between art, madness, and death.

Like Poe's other visionaries, Wilson is “the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable (III, 300); and his childhood at Dr. Bransby's school is spent in a locale reminiscent of all Poe's dream buildings from “Byron's” palazzo to the House of Usher. As Wilson says, “But the house! — how quaint an old building was this! — to me how veritably a palace of enchantment!” (III, 303). Of the young William Wilson, Poe states two things: first, that he possesses an extraordinarily “vivid force of the imagination” (III, 313) and, second, that he is “self -willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions” (III, 300). Neither the external censor, Dr. Bransby, nor the internal censor, the shadowy other self, can stop Wilson from living out his dream, for in his fertile invention and in his unflinching will to create the world he desires lies the secret of Wilson's existence. Looking back on his past, he sees his whole life as a phantasmagoric procession. He has been the victim of his own wicked dreams. “Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?” (III, 300).

Although the narrative of “William Wilson” in some ways resembles some of Poe's early poems, where the dream landscape becomes nightmarish before the eyes of the beholder, there is nonetheless a difference. The poems provide no explanations for the change, but in this later work Poe places the responsibility for bad dreams in the nature of the dreamer himself. Is not William Wilson an artist of the sinful? What a dandy he is! The “white kerseymere morning frock,” cut in an unusual fashion, the luxurious cloak of rare furs, “how rare, how extravagantly costly I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention” (III, 320). All these statements proclaim the artist and the aesthete, for whom, as for the here in “The Assignation,’ wealth is a symbol of imaginative power. But, in contrast to the earlier stories, there is no ambivalence here on Poe's part. His earlier artists were suspect and self-destructive, but they were also creators of beauty. William Wilson, however, is totally rejected. The dreamer whose fantasies lead him over the boundary between good and evil can only find death. “ ‘You have conquered,’ ” says the spectral William Wilson, “ ‘and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead — dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope!’ ” III, 325).

III

“The Fall of the House of Usher! and “William Wilson” in many ways mark a turning point in Poe's conception of the artist or the man of dreams. Roderick Usher, as we have seen, is actually the culmination of a series of dreamer characters (Byron, Egaeus, Ligeia) who try to possess and to destroy reality. William Wilson, too, though in some ways out of the main stream of visionaries, also destroys a part of himself — namely, his moral being — in his attempt to translate his Lo imaginings and desires into realities. But even though we can trace the Usher and Le Wilson types a little further in Poe's works — Usher reappears as the artist in “The Oval Portrait” (1842), and Wilson as the Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), — the destructive dreamer does not figure importantly in Poe's works published after 1840. Instead, two new types of characters assume dominance: the perverse or maddened criminal of such stories as “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the creative or resolvent dreamer, epitomized by Dupin. The shift is difficult to account for completely, but it seems related to the changes in Poe's metaphysical ideas which find their earliest explicit expression in his letters of 1844 and his tale, “Mesmeric Revelation,” of the same year.(10) Briefly, what Poe's new metaphysics suggests is a Leibnitzian healing of the Cartesian breach.(11) The universe is no longer conceived as divided between spirit and matter, but rather as composed of agglomerations or constellations of matter so finely attentuated as to be identical with spirit. By making matter and spirit continuous, Poe enables his dreamers to move from reality to dream without radical divisions or destructive denials of the self. The result is a new form of dreamer, not only in control of the world, but able to restore it to order and beauty.

The control and rationality of Poe's new kind of visionary are seen earliest in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a story in which the dreamer finally escapes from the clutches of a nightmare. From the narrator's early description of himself, it is [page 79:] clear that he is yet another member of the visionary company. He is one who “finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in the coals that glow ... who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view ... whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention” (V, 69). What makes “The Pit and the Pendulum” different from the other poems and stories is the way in which the narrator struggles to attain con- trol of the situation, and to escape the agony and nausea of his fears. Whereas all of Poe's previous dreamers seem to have succumbed passively to their terrors, the whole plot of this story centers upon the highly conscious way in which the narrator seeks to outwit his captors in their attempt to plunge him into the abyss.

“A Descent into the Maelstrom” is an even more positive portrait of man's powers, since its hero is saved from death by intelligence, not luck.(12) on the very brink of annihilation, the narrator uses his observations of moving objects to deduce an escape from the wild vortex of the whirlpool (Poe's symbol here, as in “The Ms. Found in a Bottle! and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, for the uncontrollable forces of the mind and the universe). By coming to grips with reality and conceptualizing it in this way, the narrator frees himself from the irrational, and, unlike any previous Poe character, returns to normal life. There is double meaning in the narrator's seemingly random statement that the crewmen who picked him up knew him “no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit- land” (II, 247); for it is exactly from the abysses of the spirit that the hero has come back, white-haired but alive.

The chief evidence that Poe by the 1840's had transcended his early conceptions of the passive dreamer is to be found in the character of Dupin. The detective-hero offers the synthesis between materialism and idealism that Poe had previously been unable to find and marks the way toward the positive aesthetics of Poe's last works. It is clear from Dupin's antipathy and contempt for the Prefect of Police that Poe still distrusts the shallow empiricism of the supposed scientific method, whose results are brought about by mere diligence. What he substitutes instead is the truly analytic mind, capable of making an intuitive leap from the subtle observation of detail to a broad comprehension of pattern. One of the ways in which Poe symbolizes this ability is by showing how an analytic mind can find in the gestures and actions of his opponent at whist the clue to the whole distribution of cards in the game. What he is implying, however, is the capacity of such a mind to move from the realities of the world to a comprehension of the universe.

To exert these analytic powers Dupin must still be partly a dreamer. He is the “Bi-Part soul,” both creative and resolvent (IV, 152). If he secludes himself by day, occupying his soul in dreams and existing within himself alone, he can nonetheless leave his ‘time-eaten and grotesque mansion” (IV, 151) at night and wander through the real world, solving his mysteries. Thus, while Dupin can remove himself from reality, he can also return to master it. As the detective-god, he can see beyond the chaos brought by evil forces and either explain their havoc or restore the original order. The bestial and inexplicable crimes in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue! and “The Mystery of Marie Roget’ symbolize the motiveless malignity of life itself. Dupin is Poe's new type of visionary, not life's victim, but its avenger.

The difference between Poe's earlier and later dreamers is particularly clear in “The Purloined Letter,” where the villain, the Minister D., is a continuation of the William Wilson character, the destructive dreamer whose visions lead him on to lawlessness, while the hero, Dupin, is the new resolvent dreamer, who returns the world to law. That D. is a dreamer is evident from the emphasis that Poe puts during the story on his being a poet as well as a mathematician. Less obvious, perhaps, but equally important is the fact that D. and Dupin are brothers — alter egos, like William Wilson and his shadow — and that the wickedness of one underscores the goodness of the other. This brotherhood is suggested by the common initial D. that both men share and by the closing quotation about those classical brothers, Atreus and Thyestes. But it is more meaningfully implied in the way that the characters and actions of both men parallel and reciprocate one another. D.'s being a mathematician and poet is analogous to Dupin's analytic and creative powers, and D.'s ability to control his victims’ acts is matched by Dupin's uncanny knowledge of his antagonists’ thoughts. With beautiful symmetry, Poe balances D.'s bad deed at the beginning of the story with Dupin's good deed at the end; for after D. steals a letter and substitutes another to destroy his victim, Dupin steals that letter [page 80:] and substitutes yet another one to save her. D., then, is that “monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius” (VI, 52), who uses his gifts to manipulate and deceive. Dupin is the godlike-dreamer and analyst, who ventures forth from a very whirlwind of tobacco smoke to restore the world to law. How far Poe eventually came from his early conceptions of the artist can be seen in his story “The Landscape Garden” and its expanded version, “The Domain of Arnheim.” In these stories the artist is unequivocally the hero, but the art that he practices manifests none of the qualities which Poe has been indirectly criticizing in his earlier works. It is neither subjective nor expressionistic and is based on reality rather than on a visionary world. His aim is not to create a new, wild, bizarre world in accordance with his dreams but to restore a pre-existing harmony. He is the artist as saint.

In many ways Ellison, the hero of “The Landscape Garden! and “The Domain of Arnheim,” is the opposite of Poe's earlier protagonists. The hero of “The Assignation,” for example, is addressed as “Ill-fated and mysterious man! — bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth” (II, 109). Egaeus begins his tale by saying, Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of the earth is multiform” (II, 16). “The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with the memorable gloomy lines about the “dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year! (III, 273). Ellison, on the contrary, is seen as the embodiment of human happiness and perfection: “From his cradle to his grave a gale of prosperity bore my friend Ellison along. ... In the brief existence of Ellison I fancy that I have seen refuted the dogma, that in man's very nature lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of bliss! (VI, 176).

The reasons for Ellison's happiness lie in himself. Whereas Poe's earlier dreamers usually claim to be victims of an invisible fatality, Ellison is wholly in control of his actions. No victim of the “imp of the perverse,” he orders his felicitious life according to some chosen rules. Without his “instinctive philosophy,” Poe states, ‘Mr. Ellison would have found himself precipitated, by the very extraordinary success of his life, into the common vortex [italics mine] of unhappiness which yawns for those of pre-eminent endowments” (VI, 177). One of his rules, significantly enough, is plenty of fresh air and exercise — a sure sign of his divergence from Poe's earlier cloistered and passive artists.

Most important, in distinguishing Ellison from Poe's earlier portraits of the artist, is his conception of art itself. ‘Byron’” stated that “to dream has been the business of my life” (II, 123); Ligeia tried to transcend the limits of mortality itself; Usher created an art so expressionistic that it had no objective con tent at all — and all of them were punished with madness and death. Like all these figures, Ellison is also committed to the quest for beauty and the ideal, but what saves him is that he finds his beauty in reality rather than in dreams. Like Poe he makes no distinction between matter and spirit and claims that ‘the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness” (VI, 180-181).

Given this new materialism on Poe's part, the philosophy of art expressed in “The Landscape Artist! and “The Domain of Arnheim’ is freed from the dualism that had previously destroyed Poe's visionary characters by subordinating the objective to the subjective world. The very fact that Ellison is a landscape artist rather than a musician, poet, painter, or sculptor means that he must create his effects through the objects themselves, rather than through imitations or visions. With out the ambiguity that such a concept involved in Poe's earlier works, Ellison's art mediates between the ideal and the real; it does so by working with reality rather than by escaping into dreams. Turning the story of the Fall to his own purpose, Poe makes Ellison declare that the imperfections and ugliness of the earth are prognostic of death — death which the artist transcends, though he may not escape it, by restoring the original heavenly design. “ ‘There may be,’ ” he claims, “ ‘a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our own disorder may seem order — our unpicturesqueness, picturesque; in a word, the earth angels, for whose scrutiny ... may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres’ ” (VI, 184-185). The artist's role thus is to suggest this higher order and, by repairing nature, to convey to his viewers, “the sentiment of spiritual interference! (VI, 187) — the sense that the universe is divinely planned. Like Dupin, then, to whom he is spiritually related, Ellison must undo the error of the Fall. However, he cannot merely explain the evil of the world; he must make it good again. [page 81:]

The earthly paradise that Ellison creates to fulfill this ideal is particularly interesting because of the way in which it uses familiar elements from Poe's other visions but so handled that the dream is always good rather than ambivalent. The magically moving boat, the transparent waters, the labyrinthine passages, and the circular lake, all reappear, but purged of their nightmarish connotations. There is not a dead leaf anywhere, ‘mot a stray pebble — not a patch of the brown earth” (VI, 191). The final apocalytic entry of the last vessel, a “light canoe of ivory stained with Arabesque devices in vivid scarlet! (VI, 193), is both similar to and different from the conclusion of the “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” with its onrushing abyss, or the fatal appearance of Madeleine through the folding doors. “The canoe ... approaches the gate. Its ponderous wings are slowly and musically expanded. The boat glides between them, and commences a rapid descent into a vast amphitheatre. ... Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view. There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odor; — there is a dream-like intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees — bosky shrubberies — flocks of golden and crimson birds — lily-fringed lakes — meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses — long intertangled lines of silver streamlets — and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture sustaining itself as if by miracle in midair ....” (VI, 195-196)

After he long wanderings Poe's artist has finally found himself back in the paradise he always sought. But though the elements are familiar, there is no sense that this dream is tainted or that the Edenic landscape will soon turn to the land scape of the nightmare. For all that Ellison and his paradise resemble other characters and other scenes that have occurred in Poe all along, they seem to have escaped the fatality of the dreamer. In control of his own actions and guiltless of the desire to escape through dreams, Ellison avoids the madness and death that punished other visionaries. There is a clarity, a sanity, and a repose in the that landscape tormented he creates the Gothic that is far different from the restless and thwarted energy chambers of his predecessors. In a world in which mat- ter and spirit are reconciled rather than separated, Poe can at last conceive of an artist and an art purged of imperfection and destruction. Ellison's gardens — objective, material and real — embody this ideal.

City College of the City University of New York

[page 81, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, reproduced from the Virginia Edition, (N.Y., AMS Press, 1965), II, 123. All subsequent references to Poe's tales are to this edition.

2 These quotations may be conveniently found in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c. 1966), pp. 100, 32, 45, 76, 213.

3 Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, p. 258.

4 The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 277.

5 Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller World), et al., (N.Y., Harcourt, Brace and I, 402n.

6 Ibid., 402.

7 Memmi Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr., (Indianapolis: Bobbs, c. 1964), p. 524.

8 “Is Poe's ‘The Assignation’ a Hoax?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XVIII, (1963), 193-197.

9 Edgar Allan Poe, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), I, 118.

10 Ibid., I, 257-260.

11 The shift to materialism, culminating in Eureka, deserves further study. “The is knowable of the Crowd” (1840), for instance, praises Leibnitz, who asserted that truth is knowable because matter and spirit are one, as against Gorgias, who contended that matter and spirit are discontinuous and that man is the prisoner of his senses.

12 I follow A. H. Quinn and W. T. Bandy in thinking this is not a Folio Club tale.