Text: Mary Newton Stanard, “Was Poe Never Ethical?,” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. 92, whole no. 2395, May 25, 1911, p. 527

[page 527, column 1, continued:]

WAS POE NEVER ETHICAL?

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:

SIR: In a valuable article on “Poe's Cosmopolitan Fame,” in the Century Magazine of December, 1910, Prof. Brander Matthews says:

Thus, in effect, have said many of the many Poe critics. Thus said the critics of Poe's own day, so persistently that under pretence of satisfying them, but real! to have a quiet laugh at their expense, he wrote, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Story with a Moral.” And therein recorded the history of Mr. Toby Dammit, who, like naughty little boys in old-fashioned Sunday School books. gave indication even in the cradle of the inherent viciousness which would bring him to a bad end

All critics agree that Poe's pen rambled. He never wrote one sentence or one word without design — without meaning something very definite by it. Even in his detective stories and in the tales of pseudo-science the links in the chain of evidence or of reasoning follow each other in nice and perfectly natural order Are we, then te conclude that in the higher field of the imagination his stories had no meaning — no object save to make the flesh creep? It is hard to believe.

To begin at the top, take “The Fall of the House of Usher.” If in telling this tale, Poe had been seeking simply to produce an effect, to make an impressionistic word-picture, he would have been as careful as ever in the selection of just the right word and phrase to produce this effect, for his art was his master and would not suffer him to slouch. But could this picture have been drawn with as certain a hand if there had been behind that hand definite thought, no deliberate meaning, no sage? Would the effect of the word — picture be so vivid? Would it be so long remembered, so strongly felt at each re- reading?

I think not. And I offer the following interpretation of the parable of “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

The life cloaked in egoism, turned in upon itself, feeding upon itself, existing for itself, having no touch with other lives, must come first to desolation, then to despair, finally to destruction. To my mind the House of Usher and its master, Roderick Usher, were the symbol of such a life. The peculiar atmosphere that surrounded them was the egotism in which an isolated and self-centred life is sunk. No detail of the story should be taken as meaningless, any more than the ballad of “The Haunted Palace,” which Poe puts into the mouth of the master of the house himself, and which is plainly the symbol of a wrecked intellect, should be taken as meaningless. This ballad so effectively interpolated [column 2:] into the story is simply an allegory within an allegory-that is all.

Who then, was the Lady Madeline, the twin sister whose illness and evidently approaching death filled Roderick Usher with deep gloom? In the ballad of “The Haunted Palace,” Usher prophesied the loss of his own mind, but in such a life as his the decay of reason would be inevitably preceded by another decay — that of the soul. As the master of the House of Usher was conscious of the approach of death of the mind, may he not have been conscious also of the more imminent death of the soul, personified by the Lady Madeline? Let us see how far this idea is borne out by what Poe (who never wastes words, be it remembered) is at pains to tell us of the lady.

In the first place, she is the “sister,” the “twin sister.” In the highly symbolic poem, “Ulalume,” Psyche (the soul) is addressed as “sister.” There is “a striking similitude between brother and sister — sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” — such as exist between one's self and one's soul. We the are reminded of the resemblances Poe describes in another story between “William Wilson” and his double who plainly personifies Conscience. A fleeting glimpse of the lady, as she passed through the shadows of a remote part of the room, was afforded to Roderick Usher's guest — “as Usher talked of her.” The allegory here is plain. After the lady's death Usher “roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step — the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out.” The allegory again seems plain — the soul had gone out of him. Even in the change in his tones this is indicated. The “occasional huskiness” (characteristic of the voice of one whose emotions are deeply stirred), gave place to “a tremulous quaver”-the whimpering of one capable of no deeper feeling than self-love or self-pity.

The soul dies hard, and so it seems the Lady Madeline — though apparently dead — was only in an unusually deep, cataleptic slumber. Her brother, tortured by conscience, confesses having heard her struggles to free herself from the coffin and the vault in which he had entombed her. the very moment of his confession (note the allegory again) she succeeds in bursting her bonds and for a moment stands be- fore him, “lofty and enshrouded,” but to totter and fall, sweeping him down with her in a terrible embrace to actual death and more — complete destruction and extinction of him and his house.

Is there no spiritual meaning in this dark allegory?

Poe sometimes deliberately takes a text and preaches a sermon, but with such art does he cover his didacticism, with such grim and splendid, such weird and barbaric colors does he decorate his pages, that the result seems merely the fantastic dream of an abnormal brain. Take, for instance, the story “Ligeia” — Poe's own favorite of all his “tales” — which has for its text this quotation from Joseph Glanvill:

All students of Poe are familiar with the sermon he preaches from this quaint text — [column 3:] a sermon upon the exercise of will in the shape of a wonder-tale, in which he makes the Lady Ligeia, whom he has presented to us as a woman of unusual intellectual vigor, and into whose mouth he has placed one of his most striking poems (“The Conqueror Worm”), actually rise from the dead through the mere force of will.

Take “The Black Cat,” in which he uses for his text the transformation by alcoholism of the character of a man naturally kind and affectionate to one irritable and brutal, until he who before the changes in his nature took place would not have laid his finger on a dumb animal save to caress it, destroys, and in the most atrocious manner, first his pet cat and then his own wife. Were the consequences of intemperance ever more fearfully, more warningly, set forth?

This brings us to another favorite theme of Poe's-the mastery of conscience — strikingly illustrated in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the murderer hears above all other sounds the beating of the heart of the old man he has ruthlessly slain. Even after he has securely concealed the body under planks of the floor, he hears it, until he can endure it no longer, and, terrified by the awfulness of that fancied sound, confesses his guilt.

The same theme is presented in the story of “The Man of the Crowd,” who, with the secret of sin committed lying heavy on his breast, spends his days and his nights in futile effort to lose himself in street crowds. Could there be found a more vivid and forceful picture of a man convicted of wrongdoing by his own heart?

The most complete and carefully worked out of Poe's conscience stories is “William Wilson,” in which Wilson's conscience appears as his double, like him in all things save in rigorous conformity to morals and duty, and in the voice — a mere whisper — with which he checks, or seeks to check, Wilson whenever he is tempted to depart from the path of virtue. The whisper is hateful to Wilson, and becomes more and more so as he deafens his ears to its warnings. Many times he seeks to hide himself from the double-many times to get beyond the sound of the hated whisper — but in vain, and finally he decides to meet the double in hand-to-hand combat and slay him outright. He succeeds, as all must who wage a sufficiently persistent warfare against conscience, but with dying breath the double death addresses him thus:

You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead — dead to In me Is there no spiritual meaning in this dark the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! didst thou exist — and in my death, see by allegory? this image which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.

Is there nothing of the preacher, no moral purpose, no lesson drawn from human experience in this arraignment?

MARY NEWTON STANARD.

Richmond, Va., May 17.