But before he could determine the question, though not the faintest motion of the air in this infinite waste of wasteless light was manifest, the door that he had left ajar behind him had, unperceived by Mr Asprey, already begun to stir upon its hinges. There sounded a tiny click in the supreme silence. He turned his head. Too late, again! – the door was shut. And since between heaven and earth there followed not the remotest hint of an approaching kloop-kloop of hoof or muffled clatter of wheel, it looked as if he must be intended to walk. So he set out.
* As printed in BS (1942). First published in Observer, 25 December 1932.
A Revenant*
It was an evening in November; too early in the year, that is, for winter coughs to have set in. And coughs to the lecturer are like reefs to the mariner. They may wreck his frail craft. So extreme indeed was the quietude in the Wigston Memorial Hall in which Professor Monk was speaking that if he had remained mute for but a moment, even the voice of the gentle rain that was steadily descending out of the night beyond upon its corrugated roof would have become audible. Indeed his only interruption, and it had occurred but once every quarter of an hour, had been a sudden, peculiar, brief, strident roar. On his way to the hall he had noticed – incarnadining the louring heavens – what appeared to be the reflected light from the furnaces of a foundry. Possibly it was discharging its draff, its slag, its cinders. In any case, a punctual interruption of this kind is a little dramatic; a pregnant pause, and it is over. Nor did it affect him personally.
The professor had read somewhere that on occasion a certain eminent mathematician will sink in the midst of one of his lectures into a profound reverie, which may continue for ten minutes together. Meanwhile his students can pursue at leisure their day-dreams. But students are students, not the general public. He himself, while avoiding dramatic pauses, could at once read out loud and inwardly cogitate, and he much preferred a sober and academic delivery. He never allowed his voice to sink to a mutter or rise into a shout; he neither stormed nor cajoled, nor indulged even in the most modest of gestures. A nod, a raised finger, a lifted eyebrow – how effective at their apt moments these may be! He flatly rejected, that is, the theatrical arts of the alien – to let his body speak, to be stagy, oratorical.
He even regarded the bottle of water that stood on his reading-desk as a symbol rather than as a beverage. A symbol not, of course, hinting at any connection with sacred Helicon, but of the fact that his lectures were neither intoxicating nor were intended to be intoxicating. How many times, he wondered, had he repeated his present experience? Scores, at least. He had become at last a confirmed lecturer.
And yet, to judge by his feelings at this moment, he might almost have been a novice – a chrisom child. This was odd. The particular lecture he was engaged on – its subject the writings of Edgar Allan Poe – was one of his own favourites. He had delivered it at least half a dozen times, and always with a modest satisfaction. No more than just that. It owed, of course, a great deal to its theme; one that possessed an almost repulsive attraction for the queerest of readers. Anything about Edgar Allan Poe was edged with the romantic, tinged with the macabre – that strange career, its peculiar fruits.
Nevertheless, and not for the first time, as the professor stood alone up there on the platform, full in the glare of an arc-lamp suspended almost immediately over his head, he had become sharply aware not only that he was, with one single exception, the only human being present who was not sitting down, but also that he was the only human being present who was making a noise. The realization, in this intensity at any rate, was new to him; and it made him a little uneasy. Not that he had much patience with members of his own calling who pretend they dislike lecturing. That must be affectation. He enjoyed it. But he would enjoy it even more, he sometimes mused, if he could carry off with him a clear and definite notion as to the effect of what he had been saying.
Any impression of this kind might, of course, prove sadly disillusioning, but it would at least be positive. As a professional man, that is, Professor Monk lived in a faint mist. It was not that he pined for encouragement. Certainly not. His appeal was to the intelligence rather than to the emotions. He aimed at nothing in the nature of what in his subject’s native land is known as the ‘heart-to-hearter’. He had views, and tried to express them; it would therefore be helpful to discover if they were shared or rejected. Such evidence was very scanty. Again and again when, his lecture safely over, the customary rattle of applause had followed its last word, he had sat speculating precisely how much of it was due to good manners and how much to a natural sense of relief. A sigh is so much less audible than the clapping of hands. Any physical reaction after one has been sitting cramped and mute for a solid hour is of course as instinctive as sneezing is after snuff. But English audiences are oddly inscrutable.
For this reason he had more than once been tempted to insert in his paper a sentence or two that he himself felt confident was shocking, or even to leave out all the negatives on any particular page, all the nots – just to see the effect. But even English audiences are less easy to shock than once they were. Besides … well – not tonight. His only desire at the moment was to get finished, to have done. An unfamiliar longing had swept over him to go away, and never come back. Oh, for the wings of a dove, he was sighing with the Psalmist. And he knew why.
It was not the hall itself that was to blame. Lecture halls are much alike. Sunday-schoolish in atmosphere, they usually resemble railway waiting-rooms in their general effect. The fierce light beating into his spectacled eyes and on to his high conical brow was a slight embarrassment – it dazzled if it did not daze. He was accustomed to that too, however. After all, lecturers must be seen, even if they are not heard. He wished again what he had often wished before – that so-called house-decorators, when engaged on places of public assembly, would choose for their paint other tints than a dingy duck-green edged with a chocolate brown. Why, again, should the chairs selected suggest an orphanage? Were they assumed to be the only certain means of keeping listeners awake?
Still, this was all in the usual way of things. There was no walk in life without its vexations. As for his chairman, all that he could see of him at the moment was a puckered ecclesiastical boot. Simply, however, because he was motionless, he was not necessarily either inattentive or asleep. And what if he was? He himself had a genuine sympathy for chairmen. They were usually far too busy men, and tired. He had shared their trials and temptations. Nor had he the faintest hint of a complaint to make against his audience. He would have preferred, naturally, the farthest few rows of chairs to look a little less vacant; but this was a compliment to the occupants of the rest. All those who had come had stayed, and – though owing to his glasses he was unable to see them very distinctly – those who had stayed had been markedly attentive. He remembered a facetious friend once gravely asserting that it is impossible to thin a lecture down too much, and that, if it is to be appreciated to the full, at least one attempt at the jocular is essential every quarter of an hour. Make them laugh; it clears the air. That, however, was not his own method. He had neither thinned nor temporized, nor tried to amuse. Moreover, everybody was listening; no one had laughed; the theory was absurd. Then what was wrong?
Immediately in front of him and at the end of the room a circular white-faced clock hung midway above the two low, rounded arches which led out of the hall. Its hands now pointed to fourteen minutes to nine. The end then was in sight. And so, lowering his head a little, and pausing an instant, he ventured to take a second long, steady look at what he was now perfectly well aware had been the cause of his disquietude – a solitary figure who was standing (almost like a statue in its niche) within the left of these two doorways.
This person had been the only late-comer. At one moment the alcove was vacant, at the next there its occupant was. He must have sallied in out of the night as furtively as a shadow. The lecturer much preferred late-comers to early-goers. The former merely suggested the impractica
ble – that he should begin again; the latter that it was high time to stop. There was no doubt, however, that this particular listener had been a little on his nerves. Once having vaguely descried him, he had been unable to forget his presence there. Why stand? And why stand alone? He should himself have had the audacity to beckon him in. A warm word of welcome would have been by far the most politic method of – well, he might almost say, of accepting his challenge.
Unfortunately, any such word was now too late. Motionless in the dim light – his dark voluminous cloak around him, and hat in hand – there the stranger stood, leaning indolently the while one foot crossed over the other, against the hollow of the arch. The attitude suggested a pose, but, pose or not, he had not altered it. The glare of the arc-lamp in the professor’s eyes, his very uneasiness indeed, prevented him from clearly distinguishing the distant features. But the turn and inclination of the head, the perfect composure, the attitude, vaguely arrogant, of a profound attentiveness – everything suggested that this particular individual was either wholly engrossed in his own thoughts, or in what he was listening to. The latter should have been a consoling reflection. But, alas! one may be engrossed in destruction – as was Nero when Rome was burning, as is always the Father of Lies, and the angel of Candour. Well what of that? Like the professor himself, he had come, he would go; and that would be the end of the matter.
It was nonetheless a little odd that of all those present none seemed to have become aware of this conspicuous interloper. Yet he was obviously a stranger in these parts. What chance could have summoned him in? Not necessarily the woeful November weather. For as the professor all alone had come walking along on his way to his lecture through the drizzling lamplit streets, he had passed by not only a flaming picture palace, radiant with seductive posters, but the vestibule of a dingy dejected little theatre – which appeared a good deal more inviting, nonetheless, than the spear-headed railings and dank brick wall of the cobbled alley which led into the Memorial Hall.
There were, then, rival attractions in the town. If so, why had this theatrical-looking personage not taken advantage of them? Or was he himself one of a company of touring play-actors idling his time away until the call boy claimed him for the second act? Had he ventured out of his green room for a breath of air, or for a draught even more exhilarating? Why again is it that extremely actual things in appearance may at times so closely resemble the imagery of sleep? But what folly were all such speculations. Nevertheless, Professor Monk had continued to indulge in them, and with an amazing rapidity, while he continued to read his paper. To satisfy them was quite another matter.
His voice – and he enjoyed this scrupulous resonant use of it – his voice rang on and on, sounding even louder than usual in his own ear by reason perhaps of this attack of what might be called psychic indigestion. Nor was he aware of any suddenly revealed reason to be distrustful, let alone ashamed, of his paper. When looking it over he had taken the opportunity of re-reading some of the stories, most of the poems, and an essay or two. He had consulted here and there one of the more recent lives. Its actual composition had taken him a good deal more than a week; and it was at least systematically arranged. In four parts, that is: (a) the Environment; (b) the Man; (c) the Tales and Poems; (d) the Aftermath. Even if he had been able to extemporize he would have preferred to keep to the written word. It was a safeguard against exaggeration and mere sentiment.
As, tall, dark, steel-spectacled, and a little stiff, he stood up there decanting his views and judgments, it ensured that he said only what he meant to say, and that he meant only what he said. He disliked lectures that meander. He preferred facts to atmosphere, statements to hints, assumptions, ‘I venture’s’, and dubious implications. He detested theorizing, fireworks, and high spirits. The temperamental critic is a snare. And though poetry may, and perhaps unfortunately, must appeal to the emotions and the heart, the expounding of it is the business of the head. Besides, a paper simply and clearly arranged is far easier to report. He hoped that his audience would go away with something definite in their minds to remember, though he was not so sanguine as to suppose that they would remember much. ‘Hammer, hammer, hammer,’ he would laugh to himself, ‘on the hard high road!’
Until this hour indeed it was highly probable that many of them had never read, even if they had ever heard of, much more of Poe’s writings than The Pit and the Pendulum, and possibly The Bells. Others may have accepted him merely as the melodramatist of The Maelstrom, or The Cask of Amontillado, the sentimentalist of Annabel Lee, the cynic of The Masque of the Red Death, and the fantast of The Fall of the House of Usher. A few of the more knowledgeable might have stigmatized him not only as a gross sensationalist, of little character and no morals – and an American at that – but something of a poseur and a charlatan. This was a view, he confessed, that had been shared by no less distinguished a compatriot of Poe’s than the great novelist, Henry James, who had dismissed his work as a poet in three contemptuous words – ‘very superficial verse’. Yes, and thrillers are thrillers and shockers shockers, whether they are old or new. He himself could not agree with so sweeping a verdict, but he would not disguise the facts.
It would be only too easy indeed, he had declared, to treat the subject of Poe in what might be called a pleasing, persuasive, and popular fashion. He had tried to avoid that, to be frank and just without becoming censorious. He had admitted that to look for lessons, instruction, spiritual insight, and what in his own country is called uplift, in the career and writings of the author of The Premature Burial, The Black Cat, or such poems as The Conqueror Worm and Ulalume, was like looking for primroses and violets fresh with dew in a funereal wreath of artificially dyed immortelles. And though he would agree – and here he had cast a deprecatory glance at his chairman – that it was a lecturer’s office to expound rather than to indict, he could not avoid a dutiful word or two on the ethics of his subject. He had expressed his agreement with Longfellow that life is both real and earnest, that books are more than merely a drug, an anodyne, a solace, a way of escape. Poets, too, have their specific value, and, unlike Plato, he would certainly not dismiss them from his Ideal Republic. ‘Not bag and baggage!’ Nonetheless poetry is in the nature of honey. It is not a diet. He himself was of opinion that a delight in beauty cannot be considered a substitute for the desire for knowledge, an excuse for any laxity of moral fibre, or for the absence of any serious convictions. And he had no wish to be partisan. However that might be, poets themselves, though they secrete this enticing honey, have not always proved themselves the best of bees. Their characters and their conduct, alas! are seldom as impeccable as their syntax.
A man’s style, whether in prose or verse, in some degree, of course, reveals that man himself. And Poe on the whole wrote well. But we must be careful. A style that may be good from a merely literary point of view is not necessarily the work of a good man, nor is a bad style necessarily the work of a rascal. Otherwise, how few men of science – philosophers even – would escape damnation! Though again, what a man writes may reflect himself, as in a sort of looking-glass, it does not necessasily reflect the complete self. By no means, surely, is the whole of Burns in his love lyrics. Was even Paradise Lost all Milton? If so, the less Milton he. Byron, Baudelaire, Horace, Herrick, had they nothing of heart, mind, and soul but what was imaged in their writings? What then of Poe?
The professor had confessed impatience with the iridescent veil theory of poetry. Did the worn-out slogan Art for Art’s Sake, if examined closely, mean anything more profound than pudding for pudding’s sake, or plumbing for plumbing’s sake? Nor is a poem as a poem the better or worse for having been written at an age when most young people prefer the excitements of cricket or basket-ball; are, in fact, in Matthew Arnold’s words, young barbarians at play. Genius may sometimes manifest itself in precocity; nonetheless, such a poem as Poe’s To Helen, which he professed to have written at fourteen, must take its place with the rest of his work. It must stand or fall
on its poetic merit.
Nor again, the lecturer had insisted, is any piece of literature the richer or more valuable for having been composed in an attic, in wretched circumstances. Not for a moment had he conceded that between poetry and poverty there is only the difference of the letter V – ‘The viol, the violet, and the vine’ – that sort of thing. Men of imagination may be naturally sensitive, delicately poised, easily dejected – it is the price they pay for so precious an inheritance. But is it too extreme a price? Even Robert Louis Stevenson – an artist to his finger-tips – had not excused the man of genius the obligation of meeting his butcher’s bill. Indeed he had said harsher things than that. Chaucer proved himself a man of affairs; Shakespeare made a handsome fortune and retired in his later forties to his birthplace; Robert Browning in the prime of life was occasionally mistaken for a prosperous banker; Westminster Abbey was at this moment positively surfeited with poetic remains. And that is hardly the Valhalla of the disreputable.
But even as a child Poe had been perverse and self-willed. And certainly in the brief months he spent at Jefferson’s beautiful and serene University of Virginia, and in his even briefer career as a cadet in the lovely natural surroundings of West Point – though every allowance of course should be made for the young and the gifted – he had without question shown himself arrogant, fitful, quarrelsome, unstable. Had he been the reverse of all this, which of its better qualities would be missing from his work?
There was, of course, the other side of the account to consider – Mangan, De Quincey, Coleridge. One could hardly, alas! think of their writings dissociated from certain weaknesses not merely of constitution but of moral fibre. Mangan had died in poverty in deplorable circumstances in the same year as Poe himself, 1849; and this too was the death-year of Beddoes, while Emily Brontë had died only the year before – a strange eventuality, since there was much in common between them all – ill health, adverse fortune, extremes of mood and imagination. But Branwell’s habits rather than her own were Emily Brontë’s scourge, and the tragic and morbid end to Beddoes’s career seemed to be proof of ‘a sadly unstable mind’.
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