Text: Anonymous, “A Dreamer of Things Impossible, Academy (London, UK), vol. LXI, no. 1534, September 28, 1901, pp. 263-264

IT is a singular and not very creditable fact that (as we have recently experienced) the tales of Edgar Allan Poe should be difficult to procure in their entirety — apart from complete editions of his works. It is the more regrettable and singular because these creations of genius touch on two sides two of the most popular modern schools of British fiction. Perhaps, indeed, this is the explanation of it: that the derivative has ousted the original. On the one side they have relation to the “detective” fiction of Dr. Conan Doyle, on the other they are in contact with the fantastic fiction of Mr. Wells. And between these two extremes is enthroned the very Poe — single, singular, with no predecessor and no authentic successor — unless it be the Stevenson of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That central and — artistically — supreme class of his tales is difficult to describe, for, indeed, to describe it is to describe Poe himself. It has been the tendency of the modern romantic school, and of modern poets in general, to make themselves the heroes of their own work. Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, are instances that come at once to one's mind, and Byron had strong influence on the early Poe. But not Byron, not even the author of Epipsychidion and Alastor, hardly the author of Atala, had such a — gift for arabesquing their own lives, for transcendentalising themselves, their happenings, and environment. In nearly all these tales of idealistic terror or beauty, of which the House of Usher is an example, the hero is Poe himself ; while they constantly revolve round situations suggested by his own history. To consider Poe : to consider these tales, to consider the tales is to consider Poe.

It is significant that his family was alleged to be descended from the Irish family of Le Poer — one of the English Pale, it is true, but thoroughly Irished by long residence and intermixture. The spirit of his work is Celtic, if the form of his poetry be not, indeed, of direct Celtic origin. It is at least possible that he should have seen some of Mangan's poems, and that unfortunate Irish poet anticipates Poe's peculiar form so strikingly that it is difficult to believe the resemblance can be accident alone. Yet, hardly less singular than such a coincidence would be, is the coincidence between the lives of the two men — identical in drudgery, misery, poverty, bondage to stimulants, and not far from identical in their deaths. It is the visionary and ethereal spirit of Celtic romance which informs the central group of tales no less than the poems. The Celtic temperament would go far to explain Poe's weakness and strength; his brilliant caprice, his pride and passion, his literary quarrels, his lack of robust moral stamina, his ready enslavement to alcohol. The Celtic visionariness, with its lack of hold on earth, is further accentuated in him by the love of strange ways in reading which he shared with Shelley. The trait is constantly appearing — implicit or explicit — in his heroes. The hero of the scarcely-sane Ligeia relates:

His quotations testify to the same thing. Glanville, Raymond Lully, Platonists like Henry King; by his citation of them he indicates the shadowy and mysterious authors whom he found congenial to his mind. But not to penetrate them, so far as we can see, with the zeal of the thinker. He loved, as he says himself, “ those who feel rather than those who think.” They give him dreams, suggest the stuff of tales or poetry; they are, indeed, to him, in no disparaging sense, “such stuff as dreams are made of.” When a mind thus exalted, and of such natural development in one supermundane direction, applies itself to fiction, the result must needs be strange, almost monstrous. The pear! is an abnormality, the result of external irritation which provokes the precious excretion. These tales are no less precious and abnormal. One feels the reading of them as it were an unlawful pleasure, wrung from pain, disease, calamity, and the fruitage of delirium. The cost is too great, and the pleasure itself scarcely human. We said of Ligeia that it was hardly sane; we might have said thus of all the group to which we refer. Poe was conscious of this, and absolutely suggested — before Lombroso — a relation between madness and genius. For the hero of Eleonora surely speaks in the name of Poe:

This perilous doctrine is at least not far from descriptive of Poe's own genius. There was something uncanny about the man which forbade intimacy, almost approach. Of the hero (there is virtually but one) who paces through these tales in Poe's image you feel that no woman could live with him without going mad — or dying. And death, accordingly, is Poe's gift to all his women. The tales are vital with a wrongful vitality. They are told by heroes whose sensitive nerves have the preternatural acuteness of initial insanity; colour, sound, scent — every detail of description in their rendering becomes morbidly distinct to us, like the ticking of a clock in the dark. In the House of Usher this feature becomes conscious of itself; the hero hears the beating of a woman's heart while she stands without the closed door. Beauty and terror are alike portentous, “larger than human,” like figures in a mist. The landscapes are preterhuman, painted as with fire, and blinded with a light such as only streams from the fountains of the dreaming brain. The heroes live by choice in chambers out of nightmare, where curtains like molten silver fall in cataracts on carpets of burning gold, lighted by coloured flames which writhe from antique lamps, and perfumed from carven censers ; on golden tapestries phantasmal figures waver in the rushing of a continuous wind. Amid such surroundings women of unearthly beauty, or the shadow of Poe's own child-wife, pass and die, and dying, give rise to tragedies of impermissible terror ; the Red Death incarnates itself among the fated revellers; or a man flies through life pursued by the visible presence of himself. Beauty which cannot separate itself from terror, terror haunted by beauty, are the powers which rule this world of an opium-dream.

It is the deliberate turning away of a man from the normal ; it is the obsession by the desire for better bread [page 264:] than is made from wheat. When Poe theorises on landscapegardening, he avows his preference for the artificial style; but must have a “spiritualised” artificiality, an artifice which suggests the more than mortal. Yet this world at which the human heart aches becomes real while we read — there is the genius, The art is admirable in its sureness and delicacy. The imagination has seized these things of beauty and terror with more than the closeness of a poet — with the closeness of a dream; and there is no closeness, either to terror or beauty, so appalling as that of a dream. The scope is strange and narrow, but the mastership is absolute.

Yet the same man who can thus handle ideal horror and loveliness with the touch and arts of a poet is also, on another side, and within the limits of romance, one of the most convincing of realists. The man who wrote The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death wrote also The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and The Descent into the Maelström. For the dreamer was also a keen analyst and an amateur of science; and had his active days in youth. Mr. Wells himself has not combined romance and realism more startlingly than that feat is achieved in Arthur Gordon Pym, The seizure of the ship, and, above all, the whole episode of the storm and subsequent starvation, are done with amazing wealth and verisimilitude of imaginative detail. In reading the description of the escape from the Maelström, in the other tale we have mentioned, it is hard to realise that Poe, in all probability, never was in the neighbourhood of the Scandinavian seas. The little vivid touches seem the result of experience, For instance:

Or again:

The hackneyed comparison is doubly intrusive in the mouth of a Scandinavian fisherman; but otherwise the passage has an admirable air of eye-witness. The effect of the story, however, is not in single passages, in any cataract of “description,” such as an inferior artist would have attempted, but is gradually built up from the accumulation of small matter-of-fact details, It is the very opposite pole of style and art from that in the first-mentioned group of tales; yet both are handled with equal power and effect. Perhaps in this group of tales the MS. Found in a Bottle most directly anticipates the wonder-tales of Jules Verne and Mr. Wells. The material is not, like theirs, scientific ; but the method strikes the note which all have since followed, according to their ability.

Finally, this wonderfully original artist has struck out and set the method for yet another class of tale — the “detective story” now represented by Dr. Conan Doyle. For, with Mr, Blatchford, we refuse to concede that the deductive method is undeveloped in Poe's tales of this class.

Certain applications of the deductive method Dr. Doyle has developed from his medical experience which are not to be found in Edgar Poe. But the deductive method itself is used by Poe with consummate skill. Dr. Doyle may also pride himself that in many cases he has trusted his mystery [column 2:] entirely to the ingenuity of the problem ; whereas Poe holds back the essential clues the better to effect his surprise. But the merit of the tales lies deeper than their display of analysis. It is the finished art of construction and narrative, bringing out the ghastly element or the thrill of excitement with exact cresendo of effect; the beauty of the exposition; and, over all, the style of a master, which can endow with immortality a thing in its essence so ephemeral as this species has shown itself in other hands. Let it be, if you will, that the great Dupin was the bungling pretender which the great Holmes, we know, once declared him to be. Yet Poe makes us believe in his greatness — and that is ‘he thing which matters in art. Perhaps the truth is that Dr. Doyle, too, is an artist, and knows the artistic value of “ bounce” in the right place. From the artistic standpoint, however, these latter tales — The Murder in the Rue Morgue and their kind — though they were the first to make Poe's fame as a tale-writer, will be the last to keep it. It is on the two former classes that his fame must chiefly rest — and rest securely.