On the other hand, virtue, the lecturer was bound to confess, is not the prerogative either of the Stock Exchange or even of the Church; and our public-houses, our workhouses, and other abodes of the unfortunate and the unwise are thronged with human beings incapable even of scribbling a limerick or of rhyming dove with grove. In other words, it is by no means only the rarely gifted that are responsible for all the failures in life.
Poe’s two years as private soldier, corporal, and sergeant in the American Army, though it had been an experience forced on him, had proved him capable of endurance, discipline, and responsibility. He had been sober and diligent, and had won the respect of his officers. No man of genius need be the worse off for that! In after years he had remembered the experience with sufficient tolerance at least to make its surroundings the scene of one of the best, one of the most original, and, even better, one of the least bizarre of his short stories: The Gold Bug. The Gold Beetle, as we should say. And though the writing of verse and even of poetry is seldom fated to be much more than its own reward, fiction may well be.
One of Poe’s earliest stories, indeed, had won him a substantial prize; and it was only editorial discretion that had prevented him from carrying off a prize for the best poem also. ‘Your Raven,’ wrote Elizabeth Barrett from her sick couch in Wimpole Street, ‘has produced a sensation … Our great poet, Mr Robert Browning, was struck much by its rhythm.’ There was little indeed to suggest that Poe had any extreme aversion to becoming a popular writer. Again and again success – and ‘I mean,’ the professor had emphasized, with a tap of his finger on the desk, ‘I mean material success’ – had been within his grasp. Yet his feeble fingers had refused to clutch at it.
Nonetheless, the professor had refused to ally himself with those who maintain that to be popular is a proof of mediocrity. There were great books whose appeal is universal. Poe’s triumphs, however, had been brief and very few. It could hardly be otherwise with a writer so egregious and idiosyncratic.
In spite of a personal charm and fascination almost hypnotic in effect, even at times on those of his own sex, Poe utterly refused to tolerate any opinions or convictions contrary to his own. He was obstinate and contumelious, scornful of the workaday graces that so sweeten human inter course, and – to change the metaphor – oil the wheels of life. In his youth he had been treated harshly perhaps, had been denied what no doubt he regarded, but quite erroneously, as his rightful inheritance – his foster-father’s fortune, for example; but he had failed to profit by so drastic a lesson. It could scarcely be said that it was the mere hardships of destiny that had prevented him from rivalling in general esteem even Longfellow himself, who, whatever his failings, seems to have been consistently true to his principles, was accepted as the laureate of his own people, and was a man of as many simple and homely qualities of head and heart as he was nobly leonine in appearance. And he, again, had made a fortune!
To compare, moreover, Poe’s work with Emerson’s was like comparing a neglected graveyard, dense with yew and cypress under the fitful lightings and showings of the moon, with a seemly, proportionate, if unadorned country parsonage, in the serene sunshine of a transatlantic morning in May. Man for man, Poe had not the virtues of Emerson, and Emerson had neither the exotic gifts nor the failings of Poe. Let us acknowledge it then. If in literature there is such a thing as the diseased, and even the sordid, why not attempt to exemplify them, even though it was exceedingly difficult to define them? The professor had, rather tentatively, made the attempt.
On the technical side of Poe’s work, he had himself always realized that his appreciation had been less full and less penetrating than it might have been. Here his lecture had skipped a little. But had it been otherwise how many of his listeners – those rows of silent faces – would have continued to listen? There were children among them. One little girl had a slumbering infant in her arms! Temper then the wind to the shorn lamb. Craftsmanship, artistry, he had announced, however, is vital alike in prose and verse; but you cannot really separate words from what they say. And the highest art is the concealment of art; and, beyond that, the concealment of the concealment. Could this be said of Poe’s technique? Is not rather one of the chief defects of his poems their flawless mastery of method? Poe, it seems, had never lisped in numbers, but (quite apart from his own account of the composition of The Raven), we know how laboriously many of his later numbers came.
Still, if writing is an art, so also in its modest way is the compiling of a lecture. The professor had dealt briefly with what he described as Poe’s mere tricks as a versifier, his verbal repetitions, his childish delight in the jingling of rhymes, and in emphatic metres. He had referred to his theory and practice of lyrical brevity – and there is no such thing as a poem that cannot be read and enjoyed in the course of half an hour. There was, he agreed, a measure of truth in this, but surely it is a question for the reader to decide – the reader, say, of the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the Prelude. For his part, there could not be too much of a good thing. He had agreed also that the primary impulse of poetry is the sharing of pleasure rather than the teaching of lessons. But there are various kinds of pleasure, they are of differing values; and poems whose chief appeal is to the senses – whether they are in the nature of a stimulant or a narcotic – should for that very reason be examined in the light of reason.
He had, however, left that examination to his listeners, and instead had specified where and when and to what end certain of the poems had been written – The Bells, for example, which from being a few lines enshrining an idyllic and rapturous moment in the company of the charming but minor poetess, Mrs Whitman, had gradually been expanded by the poet into the rather heady masterpiece of its kind now only too familiar. It had been not only easier but more practical to do this than to attempt a close analysis.
Apropos of Mrs Whitman, he had broken off to refer to the poet’s rather numerous infatuations and attachments, or one might almost say detachments – those fleeting and even fugitive Egerias – from the lovely and doomed Mrs Stannard, the original of his Helen and the idolatry of his boyhood, to the ladies to whom each in turn in his later years he had proposed
– and indeed almost insisted on – marriage: after the death, that is, of his young wife Virginia. Like many other poets, Poe had loved at times unwisely and by no means always too well. He had sipped deep of the cup of feminine adulation – whatever its sediment might be. Scandal in consequence had not spared him, nor even slander, but for the most part it had left him unscathed.
The professor had referred in this connection to the poet’s childlike, ethereal, camellia-pale Virginia, ‘the tragic bride of but fourteen summers’, whose brief life, with all the recurrent horrors shared by them both and incident to her fatal disease, had been but a protracted journey to an early grave. And that said, how could he but also refer to Poe’s humiliating dependence on his more than motherly mother-in-law, Mrs Clemm? Muddie, as he called her, to whom he wrote letters as naturally affectionate and commonplace as most of his correspondence tended to be high-flown.
There were indeed episodes in Poe’s life which it would be futile to pass over, and impossible to condone – dismal lapses, even apart from those due to physical disability and the ravages of drugs. Truth imposes on us the obligation to record what only sympathy and indeed humility can help us to understand. Nonetheless, he had tactfully, regretfully refrained from bestowing that scrutiny on ‘the dark side of the poet’s career’ which one is apt to fix on a drop of ditch-water seen through a microscope. Not that Poe himself had spared others. As a critic alike of humanity and of literature, his bias was on the side of severity; he despised a fool, ridiculed failure, had no mercy on his enemies, and little patience with aims and ideals contrary to his own. Whatever the value of his writings might be, in Poe’s eyes ‘an inferior poem was little short of a crime’. An arrogant assurance of his own powers was alike his weakness and his strength.
Unlike Poe himself, however, the pr
ofessor had endeavoured to be moderate. As briefly as possible, he had told of the poet’s last few sombre and disastrous days at Baltimore, that final ignominy when he had been found in a high fever, half naked, and scarcely sane, in the clutches of political miscreants who had confined him merely in order that he should serve their purpose at the voting booth. He had spoken of the horror and solitude of his death in the public hospital, that last forlorn cry of: ‘Is there any help? … Lord help my poor soul!’ He had lamented that all this had occurred within a few hours of the first occasion in the poet’s life when, restored to the Elmira whom in his early days he had loved and been cheated of, promise for the future had never seemed for him so fair, so full of hope, and rich with opportunity.
And as he said the words, a sudden overwhelming billow of mistrust had swept over the lecturer’s soul. It was as if a complete flock of geese were disporting themselves on his grave. Why, in heaven’s name, instead of perhaps a glimpse of Goya’s serene yet appalling picture, The Pest House, had Rembrandt’s curiously detached study, An Anatomical Lesson, flickered at this moment across his mind? And this when his paper was on the point of completion – fourteen minutes to nine?
Solely, it seemed, by reason of the presence of this one silent stranger yonder, who, as he himself raised his eyes from his desk to peer at him over his spectacles, had answered him look for look, scrutiny for scrutiny, a moment before. The lecturer had made no statement he was ashamed of; nothing false, nothing even dubious. And yet his words seemed to have lost their savour. But however that might be, he reminded himself that one cannot by mere wish to do so blot out the past. The mind itself must be its own sexton beetle. One cannot unsay the said, even in a lecture. The very attempt would be ludicrous. He was being fanciful. He was falling a victim to what he cordially despised – the artistic temperament! So late in life! He had come to lecture, yet to judge from this sudden disquietude, he was being ‘larned’. Well, he must hasten on. Life, like a lecture, is a succession of moments. Don’t pay too extreme an attention to any one or two; wait for the end of the hour.
‘I think perhaps,’ he was declaring at this moment, ‘the most salient, the most impressive feature of Poe’s writings, as with Dean Swift’s, though the two men had little else in common, is his own personal presence in them. Even in his most exotic fantasies, some of them beautiful in the sense that the phosphorescence of decay, the brambles and briars of the ruinous, the stony calm of the dead may be said to be beautiful; some so sinister and macabre in their half-demented horror that if we ourselves encountered them even in dream we should awake screaming upon our beds – even here the sense of his peculiar personality is so vivid and immediate that, as we read, it is almost as if the poet himself stood in the flesh before us – in his customary suit of solemn black, the wide marmoreal brow, the corrosive tongue, the saturnine moodiness.
‘Flaubert’s ideal of the impersonal in fiction indeed was utterly beyond Poe. His presence pervades such a tale as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, or The Tell-tale Heart no less densely than it pervades his William Wilson, his Masque of the Red Death, his Ligeia, and The Haunted Palace. This may in part be due to the fact that his was a mind at once acutely analytical and richly imaginative. This is a rare but by no means unique combination of what only appear to be contradictory faculties. Incapable of compromise, Poe had remained preposterously self-sufficient, self-immolating, and aloof; and, in spite of occasional gleams of sunshine, a moody, melancholy, and embittered man. He was thus alike the master and the victim of his destiny. If not a positive enemy of society, there is little to suggest that – apart from literature – he was ever much concerned with the social problems, causes, principles, and ideals of his own time and place. With some justification perhaps – as events have proved – he distrusted democracy, detested the mob, and he warned his fellow-countrymen of the sordid dangers incident to an ignorant republic. These views nonetheless were those of an egotist rather than an aristocrat. By birth he was of little account – the son of a mere travelling actor.
‘Nor, though he had, it is true, been brought up in the traditions of a gentleman of the Southern States and abhorred all New Englanders, was he by any means a giant among pygmies. Longfellow, Emerson, Washington Irving, Bryant, Whittier, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes were in varying degrees his contemporaries; and, first cousin to him, in mind if not in blood, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Since, too, The Gold Bug, like The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is one of the earliest tales of its genre in English, and Treasure Island is one of its remoter off-spring, one might add Fenimore Cooper. He had lived, that is, in one of the Golden Ages of English literature – not that of our own day, the Brass.
‘As for J. R. Lowell, an admirable critic of the widest range, in his knowledge alike of books, men, and affairs, though he was responsible for the caustic summary of Poe’s work as three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge, he was one of his closest and loyalest friends.
‘I am not,’ announced at last the professor, wearily, and never before had he been so tired of the sound of his own voice, ‘I am not a mathematician, and cannot check Professor Lowell’s vulgar fractions. But even if allowance be made for the fact that here in England even the parochial are inclined to sneer at the provincialism of all things American, it must be remembered that for years Poe was anathema, a man accursed among his own people. And it is certainly not in this country that since his death his work has been neglected. It had not been a beneficent influence’ – the professor had once more assured his audience; and that not merely because ‘it is easier to imitate fudge than works of genius. What a man does, however, must not mislead us in our judgment of what he is. Poe was a round peg in a square hole. The wise and the prudent in this world make the best they can of these conditions. Not so this ill-fated, saturnine, sinister poet. Whatever our debt to him may be, he flatly refused to follow their example.’
During the pause that completed this sentence – perhaps a tenth part of a second – some imp in the professor’s mind engaged in a violent argument with him as to which kind of peg and in what kind of hole he was himself just now; and then reminded him that pegs and holes may be of many shapes other than merely square or round – ovals, hexagons, oblongs, polygons. But he knew this imp of old, and dismissed him.
And now his lecture, which for the first time in his placid career had been little short of a martyrdom, was all but over. Though his air and manner conveyed no symptom of what was in his mind, hotly debating, ill at ease, dejected, not a little indignant, he had come to his peroration. Yet once again he lowered his head for a final fleeting glimpse of the stranger in the doorway, and ejaculated the few sentences that remained.
The last syllable had been uttered. His task was done. He had shut his mouth. For an instant he stood in silence facing his listeners – an intellectual St Sebastian – no less mute and more defenceless than an innocent in the dock. At the next he had turned stiffly, had gravely inclined his head in the direction of his chairman, and had sat down. He crossed his legs, he closed his eyes, he folded his arms. Though the electric vibrations of the hideous arc-lamp over his head continued to quiver beneath his skull, though a vile disquietude still fretted his soul, he had come back safely into his shell again. A moment before he had been a public spectacle; now he was private again; his own man and all but at liberty. Even better, he had ceased to criticize himself.
He was listening instead to his chairman, a smallish man in a clerical collar, and, in spite of that clerical collar, attired in a suit of a cloth much nearer grey than black. He had a square head, square shoulders, square hands, and a plain, good-natured, eager, and amusing face. Those hands were now in rapid motion in a mutual embrace one of the other; and, with enviable ease and fluency, he was assuring his audience how much they had all been instructed and entertained. He was rapidly confessing, too, that he had himself come to the meeting that evening knowing very little of Mr Edgar Poe’s works. The name was familiar – but some of us
hadn’t much time for fiction. So far as he himself was concerned, life was real and earnest. He had, it is true, taken a hasty glance at a page or two of what appeared to be a very clever and harmless tale entitled The Purloined Letter, and believed he could recite then and there the first few lines of Annabel Lee, not by the way to be confused with an old wholesome favourite of his, Nancy Lee. Their lecturer, however, had not, he fancied, mentioned this particular piece, and had passed over this story, though he had referred to others that were concerned with an even graver crime than that of pilfering, nay – let us give the dog the name he deserves – stealing a letter. He meant, brutal murder. There were far too many murders in the fiction of our own day. On the other hand, an orang-outang, whatever its extremes of conduct may be, has not been given a conscience. He is not morally responsible. Man, whether his descendant or not, is.
Tales of crime were, alas! very prevalent in these days, much too prevalent, he feared. Quite respectable and well-educated people not only read but wrote them. They were yet another symptom of the unrest of the age. The professor had, of course, referred to America – the United States. Was it to be credited that in that great English-speaking country the harmless if slightly colloquial expression, ‘Taking a man for a ride’, actually signified consigning a fellow-soul into eternity? On the other hand Mr Edgar Poe, he gathered, could not be held responsible for the present sad state of Chicago. He understood he was a Virginian, a Southerner, and though one of the tales mentioned by the professor bore what he feared was the only too appropriate title, MS. Found in a Bottle, the poet, it seemed, had lived not only prior to the Civil War, but long before the days of Prohibition. That, however, was only a blessing in disguise. For in view of what the lecturer had said of Mr Poe’s sad and afflicting end, they must remember that those responsible for the Volstead Act had meant well. There were tragedies in every life, skeletons in every cupboard. And the lecturer’s subject was no exception. As for his marriage with a wife then only fourteen years of age, though no doubt it is true that Juliet in the play was also of equally tender years, she was emphatically not Romeo’s first cousin. He himself could not approve of this arrangement. We mustn’t run headlong into wedlock.
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