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Following the order of thought rather than chronology, this is, perhaps, the proper time to introduce the name of the great American romancer, as well as poet, EDGAR ALLAN POE. One of the most morbid men of genius the modern world has seen; in the regions of the strangely terrible, remotely fantastic, and ghastly, he reigns supreme. With his lyrics we have not here to do. His best prose is no less distinctive and admirable for richness, force, clearness, and the correct choice of phrase, only definable as the literary touch. He, in this field, distances all his competitors, except Balsac, in the mental dissecting-room his only master. But, while the Frenchman deals with anomalous realities, the power of the American consists in making unrealities appear natural. Many of his works, like Hawthorne's, are either pages torn, as it were, from the second or third volumes of a complete romance, or suggestions of what might have been developed into one. This fragmentary manner has its disadvantages ; but the writer of real imagination, who confines it within limited bounds, never allows the interest of his readers to flag. Edgar Poe is consequently, save in his acrid criticisms and mistaken attempts at humour, never dull. This applies, in a remarkable degree, to that section of his tales [page 164:] by which, although by no means the highest, he is most widely known — I mean those devoted to the discovery of puzzles or the tracking out of crimes. These are mainly the Gold Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Purloined Letter; where the author, standing on the border-land between romance and reality, seems to prove himself the potential prince of all detectives. They are the first and best of the long series of police stories with which we have been inundated. A similar, though slightly different class, are the quaint pseudo-scientific fantasies (of which Jules Verne has of late years somewhat unscrupulously availed himself), such as The Adventure of Hans Pfaall, Von Kemplen's Discovery, Mesmeric Revelation, [[Some]] Words with a Mummy, etc., where as yet ingenuity preponderates over imagination. Then come the tales of which children and nervous persons should beware, as Thou art the Man, The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-tale Heart, The Oblong Box. Most if not all of these are redeemed from pure horror by their literary merits, and their reference, under grotesque circumstances, to dominant fears and passions of mankind. Among them The Red Death and The Oval Portrait inevitably suggest comparison with Lady Eleanor's Mantle and The Prophetic Pictures. The Cask of Amontillado bridges the way to the fourth and highest, though less generally appreciated class, where imagination preponderates over ingenuity, and where the likeness to Hawthorne is heightened. These are the subtle psychological analyses of strange conditions of the individual and of society, in which the influence of the metaphysical era becomes most apparent in our author's works; plumb-lines thrown into the deeps of existence, lurid or glittering lights swung in the unfathomed well of truth. The emotions they excite are subtler than the others, as the thrill of mystery surpasses the mere spasm of fear: they demand study, and repay it; [page 165:] they require some poetic sympathy, and remain in poetic memories. The difference between the two styles is best illustrated by contrasting two modes of treating the same terror. In the Premature Burial Poe conceives of an ordinary man, whose mind has been stuffed with “bugaboo” stories, so afraid of being buried alive that he has planned for himself a special receptacle with a chain and bell, so arranged that he can at any moment give the alarm. This man finds, to appearance, all his cautions in vain: he is immured beyond hope: the appliances have been neglected: during absence from home he has fallen into a trance: strangers have buried him as a dog, and thrust him deep for ever into some nameless grave. He at last contrives to shriek, so that the yell of agony resounds through the “realms of the subterranean night,” and is thereupon seized by a group of sailors who, in rude nautical language, ask him what he means by making such a disturbance. He has fallen asleep in a sloop, and, in a fit of nightmare, mistaken the narrow cabin for a coffin. This is grotesque, with a touch of the hideous. In the fall of the House of Usher, on the other hand, terror and pity are mingled in an atmosphere which is a fit setting for the finest, after Annabel Lee, of the author's lyrics, In the greenest of our Valleys, and the close is the climax of imaginative horror. The last lord of the falling house has buried his beloved sister, and placed her in a vault beneath his study. A friend comes to visit him, who, in the intervals of a terrific storm, hears low moaning sounds which keep him [page 166:] from sleep; but, setting these down to fancy, he composes himself to wear away the night by reading to his host a strange passage from the Tryst of Sir Launcelot. Again, in the pauses of the wind, the strange sounds are repeated; and as both become conscious, of what the brother had been before aware, that the sister is still alive within the tomb, the ebony panels of the chamber roll asunder. “It was the work of the rushing gust; but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline.” “For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold; then fell heavily upon the person of her brother, and, in her now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse and a victim to the terrors he anticipated.” The visitor rushes out aghast, and turning back for a moment sees a wild light issuing from the house.
“The radiance was that of the full-setting and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through a fissure extending from the roof of the building to its base. While I gazed this rapidly widened; there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind; the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight; my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder; there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and silent tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.”
In Berenice, again, we have a similar idea so embodied in a jumble of diablerie and grotesque as to cross the dangerous line. In Eleonora there is a pleasing contrast of gentler emotions, and “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” is wrapped in the gorgeous glories of some opiate dream, as of De Quincey's Suspiria or of Kubla Khan. Poe's genius, the most intense, though, from want of breadth, by no means the greatest of his nation, has distinct affinities to that of Coleridge; but, in his manner of probing the secrets of existence, an imaginative scepticism takes the place of predetermined orthodoxy. His pure speculations, as Eureka, are marred by excess of idealism; but the same element adds to the impressiveness of such pieces as William Wilson, probably the finest allegory of Conscience that anywhere exists; The Man of the Crowd, with equal force symbolising the weakness of a character that has lost itself in love of sympathy; and the brilliant dreamy love-story of the The Assignation. To my mind, however, the most powerful of all the minor pieces of this wonderful writer is Ligeia, the dénoûment of which comes [page 167:] upon us with a thrill only surpassed by some of the tours de force of Victor Hugo. It is introduced by a quotation from the old mystic, Joseph Glanvill, which is the refrain of the whole, and in itself memorable —
“And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”
The narrator, who assumes the comparatively passive rôle common to most of Poe's media between the public and the mystery, had met, “in some old decaying city near the Rhine,” and married the lady who gives her name to the tale. Her beauty is described with the usual rhapsodies, emphasis being laid on her majesty of stature, softness of motion, raven tresses, and eyes “fuller than the fullest of the valley of Nourjahad, which expanded under passion in a miraculous manner.” The qualities of Ligeia's mind are represented as no less extraordinary; but her immense attainments were surpassed by her strength of will, which, after halcyon days of love, wrestles with the grim shadow soon seen to be overshrouding her. “At high noon of the night on which she departed, beckoning me peremptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before.” Then follow the well-known lines beginning —
“Lo! ‘tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!”
and ending —
“And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling affirm
That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
“‘O God!’ half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet, and extending her arms aloft, with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines, ‘Shall this conqueror be not once conquered.’ ‘Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who — who knoweth the mysteries of the will, [page 168:] with its vigour? Man doth not yield him to the angels nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. “
The last low murmur from her lips, the faint echo of a voice ever low and sweet, she repeats those words, and dies with a love determining to triumph over death. The widower, in whose character there is no trait not commonplace, goes to England, eats opium; and, in an evil hour, leads “from the altar as his bride-as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia -the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena.” This unfortunate victim of her parents’ avarice soon becomes the object of her husband's hate, and in the excitement of his dreams he is constantly calling aloud on Ligeia. Meanwhile rustlings and other strange sounds begin to be heard about the tapestry of the bride-chamber; shadows from no ascertainable source are thrown on the floor, and during Rowena's illness ruby-coloured drops fall into her wine. She dies, and the twice-bereaved man watches by her inanimate frame. Then comes the close —
“It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later — for I had taken no note of time — when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my reverie. I felt that it came from the bed of ebony — the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious terror, but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse, but there was not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. . . . At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of colour had flushed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in our preparations — that Rowena still lived. . . . In a short period it was certain, however, that a relapse had taken place; the colour disappeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble . . . all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Ligeia. . . . The sound came again; it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse I saw — distinctly saw — a tremor upon [page 169:] the lips. In a minute afterwards they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. . . . The lady lived; and with redoubled ardour I betook myself to the task of restoration. . . . But in vain. Suddenly the colour fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterwards, the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been for many days a tenant of the tomb.
“And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia — and again (what marvel that I shudder while I write?) — again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse . . . . stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance — the limbs relaxed — and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off utterly the fetters of death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment.
“I trembled not — I stirred not — for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanour of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralysed — had chilled me into stone. I stirred not — but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts — a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it, indeed, be Rowena at all — the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine ? Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth — but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the cheeks — there were the roses as in her noon of life — yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples as in health, might it not be hers? — but had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought! One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. ‘Here then, at least,’ I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never — can I never be mistaken; these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love — of the Lady — of the LADY LIGEIA.’” [page 170:]
Poe's idealising and descriptive powers perhaps reach their climax in The Domain of Arnheim; but, on the whole, his masterpiece is his longest prose work, Arthur Gordon Pym. Criticism would hardly strike a line from a page of this narrative, beginning with a Crusoe-like representation of the spirit of adventure, passing to the almost unspeakable horrors of the ship of the dead, and ending in the weird mystery of the figures “of the perfect whiteness of the snow” around the engulfing cataracts of the Antarctic Pole.
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A few words in conclusion must suffice for the familiar favourite whom Lowell, in the Fable for Critics, thus wittily introduces: —
“Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”
This is true, but we must not omit to add that Poe's genius, at its culminating point, threatens to transcend that of any of his compeers. This wonderful writer is a phenomenon per se; he seems to have belonged to a sphere in which certain elements of ordinary human nature are omitted, and others are developed to an unparalled intensity. His excellences as a poet are narrow, his virtues as a man still more so. He has no humour, no general sympathies, no dramatic power (for his Politian is the stupidest fragment of a play that survives), and hardly any self-control. The amiable and ingenious defence of his admirable editor, Mr. Ingram, shows that Poe was ill used and maligned by Mr. Griswold, that he could love and enlist affection, that he had reason to complain of being ousted by his inferiors, and that he often set before himself noble ideals; but we must confess that he was often “sad, and mad, and bad,” and gloried in his madness and his badness. Let us find, in the half insanity of a diseased organism, the source and palliation of his errors of life and frequent fractious jealousy. Setting these aside, we are left to admire the flashes of the fancy and imagination with which his best work is radiant. His precocity was almost as [page 218:] remarkable as Chatterton's, of whose career he often reminds us. A fine critic — the late Mr. James Hannay — has said of a short poem to a lady, written, we are told, at the age of fifteen, that it is, like Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, “merum nectar.” If the date is correct, the classic finish of these lines can only be called miraculous.
“Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicæan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
“On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
To the grandeur that was Rome.
“Lo! in yon brilliant window niche,
How, statue-like, I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!”
The familiar Raven is, at the worst — i.e. by his own account — a marvellous piece of mechanism; The Bells a triumph of jingle. In the author's best lyrics, the fervour of his sympathy for himself makes artistic recompense for his general lack of sympathy for others. The lines to the Colosseum, The City in the Sea, Eulalie, Lenore, To Annie, have a fascination which we can neither explain nor resist; and even the semi-delirious horrors of The Conqueror Worm and Ulalume, with its nonsensical “Astarte's bediamonded crescent, distinct with its duplicate horn,” are bewitched by the music of the spheres. In Annabel Lee(1) his pathos is [page 219:] most profound, and his passion at the whitest heat; but the love he immortalises might be shared by “the winged seraphs of heaven.” Nothing is more remarkable than the purity which pervades all this author's verses: they are set in serene skies, where no breath of his disordered life dares to ascend. They are like nuns in the convent of a riotous city. Poe lived in two worlds: the one was made desolate and miserable by his early orphanhood, his reckless youth, poverty, drudgery, and the demons worse than those which beset and blasted his career; the other is the world of his inner mind, the world of memories coming from afar.
“In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace,
Radiant palace, reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion
It stood there.
“Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow.
This, all this, was in the olden
Time, long ago.”
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 218:]
1 It were unjust to the author to omit this masterpiece of music and tenderness from any collection of American verse; but we must leave room for extracts less familiar.
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Notes:
These two portion presented here is all that concerns Poe himself, beyoond a very minor comment about Poe's criticism of Hawthorne, which Nichols describes as “lively but somewhat shallow.”
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[S:0 - ALAHS, 1882] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Edgar Allan Poe (John Nichol, 1882)