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CHAPTER IV
POE, THE STORY-TELLER
As a writer of stories Poe was undeniably the most original and marvellous narrator that has ever enriched English literature with his creations. Who has not acknowledged his power — who has not been thrilled by his delineations of the horrible and the fantastic? “Them's very fine books of yours, them Waverly Novels,” said one of his Abbotsford neighbors to Sir Walter Scott. “I am glad you think so,” replied the novelist. “Why yes, you see sometimes I comes home very tired and restless-like, and I takes down one of them and don't have to read more than ten minutes before it puts me to sleep.” Widely different as are Poe's stories from the Waverly Novels and far inferior to them as portraitures of life and manners, they certainly cannot be recommended to any reader as an opiate. He must be a very unexcitable or very unimaginative reader who could fall asleep in their perusal, or read them before going to bed without danger of the nightmare, though it was only the other day that a most charming and intelligent lady informed me that she had lately been reading them just before retiring to rest, which I receive as an undeniable proof of a well disciplined mind.
The supernatural in fictitious composition found in him an interpreter such as it never had before, so far as we have any means of knowing. What volumes may have been contained in the Alexandrian library from [page 18:] Magi and cabalistic scholars of the East, we cannot tell: there may possibly be hidden away in the rolls of Chinese or Persian or Hindoo mythology revelations of the mystic world that might be placed in comparison with his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” — but among the moderns he stands as the chief oracle of the vague and incomprehensible — the Cagliostro of romance.
It is painful to think that he arrived at this eminence by strange and subtle processes of suffering, and that the favorite study of his life was a sort of Frankenstein which held him in the direst subjection. Like the wit which ruled, rather than obeyed, Theodore Hook; like the melody that enslaved rather than served Mozart; like the lizards and reptiles which Palissy the Potter was forced to bake into porcelain, the supernatural possessed him, and the wild and horrible imaginings to which he gave the rein, hurried him forever beyond the sunshine, which still gilds now and then our earthly abiding place, into a region of darkness and dread, where he was kept in one continual Walpurgis-night of revelry with phantoms and “Chimeras dire.” The poor geese, whose sad destiny it is to supply the livers for the pate de foie gras and which are condemned to undergo the ordeal of fire that the epicure may enjoy the highest triumph of the gastronomic art, endure no more ineffable torment than did this sensitive and gifted writer, as he wandered in fancy through the realm of shadows he himself had created, now plunging into the Maelstrom, now condemned to experience the most exquisite refinements of torture in [page 19:] premature burial — led into gloomy vaults by spectral companions who raise coffin lids before his affrighted gaze, and anon struck as by the knell of doom with the tolling of the midnight bells; for to him, indeed,
every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people — ah, the people —
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone —
They are neither man nor woman —
They are neither brute nor human —
They are Ghouls! (1)
It may be said that the stories of Poe are not healthful reading, that they enforce no moral and that they tamper with subjects into which we ought not to look in idle curiosity. But for all that, they seize upon the imagination with wondrous power. The very boldness with which he dares to lift the awful veil between our earthly senses and the realm of the Infinite fascinates the mind, while there is something so repulsive and shocking in the unhumanity of the stories that the reader is as little influenced by them, after their perusal, as by the hallucinations of “De Quincey.” To a certain extent they furnish suggestive hints towards the proper study of mental philosophy, and as processes of reasoning may well be carefully considered. [page 20:]
Perhaps the secret of the great success of Poe's fantastical stories may be recognized in the circumstantiality with which they are narrated. He starts off on an impossible voyage, which we know beforehand never could have been made, which is in conflict with the well-understood laws of the physical universe, and yet before he has accomplished a tenth part of the distance we are cheated into a belief in the whole narrative by the naturalness and congruity of the incidents connected with it — the state of the thermometer, the appearance of the stars, the botany on the wayside, the behavior of the vehicle or animal that supports him, whether ship or balloon or horse or griffin, and other such matters which seem to have nothing to do with the main fact, the impossibility of the story, but which really give it chief support. Neither “De Foe” in his many imaginary voyages, nor “Swift” telling us of giants, pigmies and Yahoos, has surpassed Poe in the probability imparted to his fantasies by the trifles embodied in them. And there is this curious fact which perplexes us in seeking to understand the spell these fantasies exercise upon the reader, that over them all is poured the electric light of Poe's highly excited imagination, a light wholly unlike the radiance of noonday, warm and genial and revealing the objects around us in their true proportions, but a cold and ghastly yet singularly vivid illumination, throwing portentous shadows, and making tree and shrub and stately palace and shimmering lake and purple mountain as unreal as the spectres that move across them.
Recognizing the extraordinary power of Poe in inspiring [page 21:] the reader with faith in his weird conceptions, some of his admirers were tempted to suppose that had he entered the field of everyday romance, which lies before us everywhere, he might have achieved a fame second to that of no novelist who has moved us to laughter and to tears. The late Philip Pendleton Cooke, the author of “Florence Vane,” a name never to be mentioned without a grateful word of acknowledgment of his genius and a lament for his early death, said during Poe's lifetime,
For my individual part, having the seventy or more tales, analytic, mystic, grotesque, arabesque, always wonderful, often great, which his industry and fertility have already given us, I would like to read one cheerful book made by his invention, with little or no aid from its twin brother imagination — a book in his admirable style of full, minute, never tedious narrative — a book full of homely doings, of successful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of ruddy firesides — a book healthy and happy throughout, and with no poetry in it at all anywhere, except a good old English “poetic justice’” in the end. Such a book, such as Mr. Poe could make it, would be a book for the million, and if it did nothing to exalt him with the few, would yet certainly endear him to them.
Such a book, we may say, was an obvious impossibility. “A book healthy and happy throughout” Poe never could have written, for his intellect was not healthy and the man himself was not happy. He never moved us to laughter. It was not his to draw forth our tears. The fountains of sensibility and the sources of mirth, which lie near each other in the human heart, were both sealed to his touch and would not gush at his bidding. The same lack of sympathy with his fellow men, to which we have referred as observable in his criticisms, would have [page 22:] proved fatal to any effort of his to portray the life of ordinary mortals in whose joys and sorrows, feelings and aspirations, he never participated. Poe stands out in literature preeminently as the ideologist, and metaphysician of fictitious composition. As such he has no equal, no rival.
The machinery and the dramatis persona of his stories are alike ideas. His landscapes are wholly different from any scenery to be found in the tropics, in the frigid, or in the temperate zone. His mansions and castles are more unsubstantial than the pasteboard mansions and castles of the stage. His trees are spectral, his rocks are impalpable, his waterfalls are not even damp, his men and women are mere ideas on legs, fitted only to inhabit that shadowy realm to which he was instantly hurried off the moment he gave himself to that wild courser, his imagination. With Lucy in Tickell's ballad, he could exclaim
I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay —
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away,
A writer in Chamber's Journal, only a few months ago, sustains the estimate I have formed of Poe as a romancer. He says:
If the term “genius” be not altogether meaningless and affected, it certainly seems to be applicable to Edgar Allan Poe, the first person whom the New World has produced, perhaps, altogether deserving of that dubious designation. Neither Franklin nor Washington was at all what is usually understood by the title “man of genius;” they had both their prototypes, and under less stirring circumstances, [page 23:] might have been respectable shopkeepers all their days. Washington Irving, who is so superior to Poe in most respects as port to purl, was himself only a monitor or head pupil of a most popular and well established commercial academy, Mr, Emerson is but the second boy in that limited class of which Mr. Thomas Carlyle is the acknowledged dux. Mr, Longfellow is of the same bin as Mr. Tennyson, only a much lighter and thinner liquid, adapted for families and schools. But Edgar Poe had neither father nor mother in literature, and according to the usual system of compensation in such cases, has left a gigantic literary posterity of his own behind him. For almost all our modern “horrors,” our tales of mystery, crime, and detection, so different from the clumsy stage-devices of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, and which form such a striking feature in our periodical literature, we are indebted — and some will say, “And small thanks to him” — to this transatlantic young scamp.
As an illustration at once of the dominion which the supernatural had over Poe, and of the tremendous mental agony he underwent at times referable only remotely to drink, I may be indulged in endeavoring to relate one of his confessions made to me orally, which, as it fell from his lips, in language wholly unstudied and unambitious, was something never to be forgotten. It was his intention, he told me, to write it out, and had he done so, it would probably have excited as much notice as any of his strange compositions of the same character. If my own version of it, written from memory, should fall far below your conception of what it would have been, committed to paper by Poe, as it must do, it will at least afford you some idea of the distress of mind to which he was often brought.
“I was once in Philadelphia,” he said, “during the prevalence [page 24:] of the cholera there.(1) Hundreds were dying every day, and the gloomy aspect of things out of doors, the hurrying to and fro of physicians and nurses, and the constant passing of funeral processions, was in mournful contrast with the intense blue of the sky and the garish sunlight that rested upon the city. When darkness came down, the long vistas of the gas lamps in the streets twinkling away into little points of light in the distance, and the bright, steady, peaceful, planetary gleam of the stars overhead seemed to mock the desolation of the heart that reigned around. The apartment I occupied was in the highest story of a lofty building, and my window looked out upon the housetops towards the Schuykill. I had climbed up the long flights of stairs one mild, serene midsummer evening, weary with walking and oppressed in spirits, and, having lit my single burner, threw myself upon the bed for immediate rest, not slumber.
“I had not lain but a few moments when the door opened and there glided into the room a vision of seraphic beauty, a woman tall and robed in white, who noiselessly approached the bedside and, taking my hand gently in her own, said, ‘Follow me.’ That it was a spiritual visitant I had no doubt, and I looked for the wings that must have borne her from another sphere. The whiteness of her garments and of her countenance was supernatural — the snowdrift, the early thorn-blossom, the white dove flying skyward with no stain of earth upon its pinion, were not so pure and glistening. I had no volition — obedience to her command was compulsory. I remember with the utmost distinctness to have noticed, in rising from the bed, that the form of this visitor cast no shadow in the room, but rather that an effluence of light seemed to belong to her as a personal attribute. Instinctively I followed her into the passage, and through an open window of this passage instantly we both swept out into the night. [page 25:]
“I was carried aloft with an incredible swiftness over the city, and a pale object which I saw looming below me, and recognized as Girard College, was soon left far behind. On and on we went through interminable depths of darkness, and, as it appeared to me, for weeks and months of time, with the same rapidity of motion. At length we stopped, poised in mid air. Looking down, I saw by the dots of light sprinkled over the wide space beneath that we were hovering above another great city, a mighty capital or vast emporium of commerce. Now, for the first time, I became conscious that my earlier vision of seraphic beauty had vanished and that I was borne by a bird as dark as the surrounding midnight. And as this bird remained suspended and stationary, its wings began to extend themselves in every direction until they formed an immense canopy overshadowing the entire city, a canopy extremely attenuated and admitting of the transmission of light from the myriads of lamps under my feet. Presently there began to distil and fall from all parts of this extended surface big inky drops in a pestilential rain, and it seemed to me that I was myself the black liquid and that in every drop I underwent the horror of falling from a fearful height — the suffering multiplied a thousandfold. Then the bird turned its beak towards me and cried, I am the Cholera.’
“Thence mingling with the terrors of a thousand fallings, there came to my mind the overpowering consciousness of having been made the agent and messenger of death to whole communities of human beings, and the remorse of multitudinous murders seemed reserved for me, an everlasting despair. And when at last I found myself with open eyes (I had never closed them) looking around my little apartment from the bed on which I had thrown myself but five minutes before, I could not shake off the conviction that I was the minister of the pestilence that then raged in Philadelphia, and that the death of every one of its victims would be fastened upon my soul.”
Such was the outline of this singular waking vision, [page 26:] and one could not hear it without feeling that an outraged nervous system and an imagination always at riot combined to create for their possessor a Nemesis more fearful than was ever invoked in the wailing measures of the Greek chorus.(1)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 19:]
1 From fourth stanza of Poe's poem The Bells.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 24:]
1 The Richmond Whig and other newspapers of July, 1849, carried news items of the deaths caused by the epidemic of cholera then prevailing in Philadelphia, which was during Poe's stay there.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 26:]
1 John Sartain, in Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, New York, 1899, tells of Poe's visit to him at Philadelphia about July, 1849, claiming that Poe then imagined that he had been imprisoned there. Sartain's recollection of this affair is about as rambling as Poe's, but among other things he recalled Poe's reference to “a young female, brightly radiant, like silver dipped in light, either in herself or her environment.” Sartain has varied in telling this story. His definite statement that to appease Poe he himself had cut off Poe's mustache is a canard. Poe wore his mustache shortly afterwards, and it is to be seen in his last picture taken at Richmond in the frontispiece to this book. Sartain's book makes no mention of Poe's “begging for laudanum,” as is stated in Professor Woodberry's Life of E. A. Poe, Boston, 1909 [[2:430]]; on the contrary tea seems the strongest beverage of which they both partook. Poe, writing Mrs. Clemm of this episode said: “I have been so ill — have had the cholera or spasms quite as bad, and cannot hold the pen.” In a later letter to her he mentioned the affair as an hallucination. A letter from Poe to E. H. N. Patterson of this same period stated that “he had been arrested in Philadelphia by the cholera.”
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - JRT29, 1929] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe (Thompson)