[page 1245, continued:]

THE SPHINX

This slight story is based mainly on the old idea that things are not always what they seem, and a realization that our senses may sometimes mislead us even when they function normally. It is not surprising that an imaginative author should reflect on relative size. Giants and dwarfs are the themes of countless folk stories — and of Gulliver's Travels. Poe presents us with a monster horrendous indeed.

Poe's chief source was the book he had helped compile, Thomas Wyatt's Synopsis of Natural History (1839), which he quoted directly in the story below.* There is a remote connection between the sphinx and the beetle in “The Gold-Bug,” but the latter is partly made up, and the sphinx exists in nature.

The story is of some biographical interest, as it is the only article Poe is known to have sold to his friend Timothy Shay Arthur, who published it in his magazine about December 15, 1845 and reprinted it in his Home Magazine for November 1855.† The story was also reproduced in The American Keepsake for [page 1246:] 1851, an annual that included two stories by Arthur, author of Ten Nights in a Barroom; this circumstance suggests that Anna Wilmot, who edited the gift book, may have obtained Poe's tale from Arthur.

THE SPHINX.   [C]

DURING the dread reign of the Cholera in New-York,(1) I had accepted the invitation of a relative to spend a fortnight with him in the retirement of his cottage orné{a} on the banks of the Hudson. We had here around us all the ordinary means of summer amusement; and what with rambling in the woods, sketching, boating, fishing, bathing, music and books, we should have passed the time pleasantly enough, but for the fearful intelligence which reached us every morning from the populous city. Not a day elapsed which did not bring us news of the decease of some acquaintance. Then, as the fatality increased, we learned to expect daily the loss of some friend. At length we trembled at the approach of every messenger. The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death.(2) That palsying thought, indeed, took entire possession of my soul. I could neither speak, think, nor dream of anything else. My host was of a less excitable temperament, and, although greatly depressed in spirits, exerted himself to sustain my own. His richly philosophical intellect was not at any time affected by unrealities. To the substances of terror he was sufficiently alive, but of its shadows he had no apprehension.

His endeavors to arouse me from the condition of abnormal gloom into which I had fallen, were frustrated in{b} great measure, by certain volumes which I had found in his library. These were [page 1247:] of a character to force into germination whatever seeds of hereditary superstition lay latent in my bosom. I had been reading these books without his knowledge, and thus he was often at a loss to account for the forcible impressions which had been made upon my fancy.

A favorite topic with me was the popular belief in omens — a belief which, at this one epoch of my life, I was almost seriously disposed to defend. On this subject we had long and animated discussions — he maintaining the utter groundlessness of faith in such matters — I contending that a popular sentiment arising with absolute spontaneity — that is to say, without apparent traces of suggestion — had in itself the unmistakeable elements of truth, and was entitled to {cc}much respect.{cc} (3)

The fact is, that soon after my arrival at the cottage, there had occurred to myself an incident so entirely inexplicable, and which had in it so much of the portentous character, that I might well have been excused for regarding it as an omen. It appalled, and at the same time so confounded and bewildered me, that many days elapsed before I could make up my mind to communicate the circumstance to my friend.

Near the close of an exceedingly warm day, I was sitting, book in hand, at an open window, commanding, through a long vista of the river banks, a view of a distant hill, the face of which nearest my position, had been denuded, by what is termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of its trees. My thoughts had been long wandering from the volume before me to the gloom and desolation of the neighboring city. Uplifting my eyes from the page, they fell upon the naked face of the hill, and upon an object — upon some living monster of hideous conformation, which very rapidly made its way from the summit to the bottom, disappearing finally in the dense forest below. As this creature first came in sight, I doubted my own sanity — or at least the evidence of my own eyes; and many minutes passed before I succeeded in convincing myself that I was neither mad nor in a dream. Yet when I describe the monster, (which I distinctly saw, and calmly surveyed through [page 1248:] the whole period of its progress,) my readers, I fear, will feel more difficulty in being convinced of these points than even I did myself.

Estimating the size of the creature by comparison with the diameter of the large trees near which it passed — the few giants of the forest which had escaped the fury of the land-slide — I concluded it to be far larger than any ship of the line in existence. I say ship of the line, because the shape of the monster suggested the idea — the hull of one of our seventy-fours(4) might convey a very tolerable conception of the general outline. The mouth of the animal was situated at the extremity of a proboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length, and about as thick as the body of an ordinary elephant. Near the root of this trunk was an immense quantity of black shaggy hair — more than could have been supplied by the coats of a score of buffaloes; and projecting from this hair downwardly and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlike those of the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimension. Extending forward, parallel with the proboscis, and on each side of it, was a gigantic staff, thirty or forty feet in length, formed seemingly of pure crystal, and in shape a perfect prism: — it reflected in the most gorgeous manner the rays of the declining sun. The trunk was fashioned like a wedge with the apex to the earth. From it there were outspread two pairs of wings — each wing nearly one hundred yards in length — one pair being placed above the other, and all thickly covered with metal scales; each scale apparently some ten or twelve feet in diameter. I observed that the upper and lower tiers of wings were connected by a strong chain. But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing, was the representation of a Death's Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast, and which was as accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground of the body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist. While I regarded this terrific animal, and more especially the appearance on its breast, with a feeling of horror and awe — with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found it impossible to quell by any effort of the reason, I perceived the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscis, suddenly expand themselves, and from them there proceeded a sound so loud and so expressive of wo, that it struck upon my nerves [page 1249:] like a knell, and as the monster disappeared at the foot of the hill, I fell at once, fainting, to the floor.

Upon recovering, my first impulse of course was, to inform my friend of what I had seen and heard — and I can scarcely explain what feeling of repugnance it was, which, in the end, operated to prevent me.

At length, one evening, some three or four days after the occurrence, we were sitting together in the room in{d} which I had seen the apparition — I occupying the same seat at the same window, and he lounging on a sofa near at hand. The association of the place and time impelled me to give him an account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end — at first laughed heartily — and then lapsed into an excessively grave demeanor, as if my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At this instant I again had a distinct view of the monster — to which, with a shout of absolute terror, I now directed his attention. He looked eagerly — but maintained that he saw nothing — although I designated minutely the course of the creature, as it made its way down the naked face of the hill.

I was now immeasurably alarmed, for I considered the vision either as an omen of my death, or, worse, as the forerunner of an attack of mania. I threw myself passionately back in my chair, and for some moments buried my face in my hands. When I uncovered my eyes, the apparition was no longer visible.{e}

My host, however, had in some degree resumed the calmness of his demeanor, and questioned me very rigorously{f} in respect to the conformation of the visionary creature. When I had fully satisfied him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerable burden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, of various points of speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formed subject of discussion between us. I remember his insisting very especially (among other things) upon the idea that the{g} principal source of error in all human investigations, lay in the liability of the understanding to under-rate or to over-value [page 1250:] the importance of an object, through mere misadmeasurement of its propinquity. “To estimate properly, for example,” he said, “the influence to be exercised on mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distance of the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished, should not fail to form an item in the estimate.(5) Yet can you tell me one writer on the subject of government, who has ever thought this particular branch of the subject worthy of discussion at all?”

He here paused for a moment, stepped to a book-case, and brought forth one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History. Requesting me then to exchange seats with him, that he might the better distinguish the fine print of the volume, he took my arm-chair at the window, and, opening the book, resumed his discourse very much in the same tone as before.

“But for your exceeding minuteness,” he said, “in describing the monster, I might never have had it in my power to demonstrate to you what it was. In the first place, let me read to you a school-boy account of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia, of the order Lepidoptera, of the class of Insecta — or insects. The account runs thus:

“ ‘Four membranous wings covered with little colored scales of a metallic appearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles{h} and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennæ{i} in the form of an elongated club; prismatic; abdomen pointed. The Death's-headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears upon its corslet.’ ”(6)

He here closed the book and leaned forward in the chair, placing himself accurately in the position which I had occupied at the moment of beholding “the monster.”

“Ah, here it is!” he presently exclaimed — “it is reascending the face of the hill, and a very remarkable looking creature, I admit it to be. Still, it is by no means so large or so distant as you imagined [page 1251:] it; for the fact is that, as it wriggles its way up this thread,{j} which some spider has wrought along the window-sash, I find it to be about the sixteenth of an inch in its extreme length, and also about the sixteenth of an inch distant from the pupil of my eye.”

VARIANTS

[The following variants appear at the bottom of page 1246:]

a  ornée (A, B, C)

b  in a (B)

[The following variant appears at the bottom of page 1247:]

cc ... cc  as much respect, as that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius. (A, B)

[The following variants appear at the bottom of page 1249:]

d  Omitted (A)

e  apparent. (A, B)

f  vigorously (A, B)

g  a (A, B)

[The following variants appear at the bottom of page 1250:]

h  manibles (C) misprint, corrected from A, B

i  anteunœ (A); autennoe (C) misprint, corrected from B

[The following variant appears at the bottom of page 1251:]

j  hair, (A, B)

[page 1251, continued:]

NOTES

1.  When Poe wrote, the most recent epidemic of cholera in New York was that of 1832.

2.  Compare Poe's “Serenade,” lines 14-15, “And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky / Are redolent of sleep.”

3.  Compare this passage and its variant with Dupin's dictum in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” at the reference to n. 81: “Now, the popular opinion, under certain conditions, is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself — when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner — we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius.”

4.  A seventy-four is a fighting ship with seventy-four guns.

5.  If this is the sentiment of the author, as it well may be, it represents a considerable relaxation of the uncompromising statement in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” five years before (p. 610 above): “Alas! we had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days ... Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground, and in the face of analogy and of God — in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven — wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made.” Nor is there here any of that satire of “suffrage ad libitum” we find in “Some Words with a Mummy” preceding n. 38. I take a view contrary to that of A. H. Quinn, who suggested (Poe, p. 499) that the author's purpose in the story was to criticize the dangers of democracy. The statement here is rather a gentle and philosophical admonition not to judge the democratic experiment too hastily, through a “misadmeasurement of its propinquity.”

6.  Poe abridges somewhat but otherwise quotes almost verbatim from the discussion of Insects in Thomas Wyatt's Synopsis of Natural History, pp. 188-139:

Compare the imaginary insect in “The Gold-Bug,” and see Carroll Laverty in American Literature, March 1940.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 1245:]

*  For Wyatt's book, see “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” n. 35

†  See Warren G. French, “T. S. Arthur ... Champion of Poe,” in Tennessee Studies in Literature, 5:35-41 (1960).