‘It has escaped your memory, it seems. Read your own handbills then. “The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe”.’
‘That is a quibble.’
‘It is essential. Your better nature gave you the title of your paper. Your worse followed the easier, the more appetizing, the more popular, the charnel-house treatment of your theme.’
A pallor almost as extreme as that of his visitor had spread over Professor Monk’s features. A hatred of this stranger, a hatred not the less bitter for being now innocent of contempt, was stirring in his mind. His glance fell from the fixed eyes to the thin satirical lips and thence to the delicate hands, but he realized that this petty effort to appear indifferent had woefully failed him. ‘I consider,’ he managed to say, in a low, hardly articulate voice, ‘I consider this is an outrage and an insult.’
‘That may well be so,’ responded his visitor, with a hardly perceptible shrug of his cloaked shoulder. ‘And I believe if your poet were here – I mean, professor, in the flesh – that he too would not hesitate to agree with you. But let us be honest for a moment. Apart from other writers – Thomas Lovell Beddoes and a Miss Brontë – you mentioned James Clarence Mangan, hinting that possibly Poe himself definitely stole, cheated him of his technique. Did you produce one single syllable in proof of this? And if you had, when, may I ask you, were poets forbidden to gild the silver they borrow? You said that Poe shared with these writers something of their dreams, their visions, their frail hopes and aspirations. How far did you inform us regarding the meaning, the source, the value and reality, quite apart from the fascination of those dreams? Poe’s complete mortal existence was a conflict with his woe of spirit, his absorption in death and the grave, his horror of the solitude of the soul, of the nightmares that ascended on him like vultures from out of the pit of hell when he lay on his hospital death bed. What do you know of these? What will your listeners find of comfort, of reassurance in your academic mouthings and nothings when they come to face their terrors of the mind, that unshatterable solitude?
‘My only speculation is not concerning which of the authors you mentioned you know least about, but what conceivable satisfaction you found in reading their books. And believe me, my dear professor, your groping remarks on poetic technique were nothing short of fatuous. Not only can you never have written a line of verse yourself, unless perhaps as an inky schoolboy you thumped out a molossus or a spondee or two on your desk, but you can never even have read with any insight the poet’s essay on the subject. Indeed, what is your definition of poetry? Did you refer to his? It is deplorable enough that you have confused the imagination, that sovereign power, that divine energy, with a mere faculty. Reason, yes. But is not man’s feeblest taper, like the sun itself in heaven, a dual splendour – of heat and light? Are you aware that you made no use of the word intellect, or divination, or afflatus, ay, and worse, even music? Did not Poe himself maintain that “in enforcing a truth, we must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical”? That, you may claim, was a mood you endeavoured to share. But did he never share it? Was opium or Hippocrene his aid in that? How then can you justify your commendation of that vain piping wiseacre Emerson, who in his own practice suggested that poetry is skim-milk philosophy and flowery optimism cut up into metre, and dismissed all else as jingle? Or your halfhearted rejection of Mr Henry James’s shallow gibe, “very superficial verse”. Is beauty the less admirable because it is skin deep? I know little of Mr James, but assume from what you yourself said of him that one might as justly dismiss his fiction as sillily super-subtle psychology. Was he a devotee of the Muses – of Music? Music, let me quote again, “music when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.”’
‘Who said that?’
‘Ah! Is it sense or nonsense?’
‘I had an hour,’ muttered the professor tartly, ‘not all night.’
‘And what virtual service,’ continued his visitor more genially, ‘is there in comparing poems different in aim, in kind, and in quality? Has not even the ass its own niche in the universe? Is not every work of art – yes, even your own lecture – something single, unique; and are these precious comparisons anything better than mere mental exercises? Heaven forbid, and heaven forbids much, that I should legislate in such matters. My mere question is, how can you? Believe me, while what you told us of creative insight – invention as you called it – might set any sensitive human heart aching with despair, your remarks on the art of writing were nothing short of a treason to the mind. They were based on inadequate knowledge, and all but innocent of common-sense. Have you ever read that Poe never laughed? Perhaps not. And you had no reason to notice that one at least of your listeners refrained even from smiling, though on my soul I can imagine no moment in which he would be more bitterly tempted to indulge in the cachinnation of fools than in this.
‘“Questions” – questions! I awaited in vain the faintest intimation that our poet was perhaps the first of his kind to foresee the triumphs and the tyranny of modern science; that he was no mere groping novice in astronomy, physics, and the science of the mind. Creature of darkness his imagination may have been: but was there no light in his mind? If you could meet him face to face, professor, at this moment, here, now – I ask you, I entreat you to confide in me, would you deny him the light of his Reason? Would you? You might even try to forgive his extravagances, his miseries; you might even agree that even four-score years of purgation could hardly serve to annul the habits of a lifetime; and that yet in spite of his discordant nature, his self-isolation, he was happier in the solitary company of his own miserable soul than … But I must refrain from being wearisome. I will burden you with but one more quotation:
‘“We have still a thirst unquenchable … It belongs to the immortality of man … It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above … to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone …”
‘Those tears, then, that respond to poetry and music are not from “excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.” These words, professor, though you are evidently unaware of it, were Edgar Allan Poe’s. And I – I myself have as yet found no reason to retract the conviction of their truth.’
Professor Monk’s apprehension that his visitor, if not positively insane, was far from ‘normal’, had become a certainty. Their eyes, or rather the sentinels that look out of them, had met again. Who goes there? they had cried one on the other. And again it was the professor’s that had returned no countersign. But dislike – a transitory hatred even – of his censor had fallen away into a sort of incredulity. That he should have consented to such a catechism. That a mere lecture should have led to this! He had been hardly troubling indeed to follow the meaning of the last remarks he had heard. His sole resource was to mutter that though he was grateful for his visitor’s suggestions, it was clear that they would never see eye to eye in these matters, that the hour was growing late, and that he must be gone. He even managed to grimace a slant but not unkindly smile. ‘We live in two worlds,’ he said, ‘you and I, and I fear we shall never agree. Nonetheless, and though you prefer to doubt it, I share your interest and delight in poetry, and, within strict limits, your admiration of Poe.’ He cast a forlorn glance towards his hat perched in solitude upon a chair. ‘We shall at least, I hope,’ he added, ‘part friends.’
‘So be it,’ replied his visitor, drawing his cloak more closely around him, raising slowly his heavy head.
‘The cock he hadna crawed but once,
And clapped his wings at a’,
Brother we must awa’…
‘I also must be gone. We have met by chance. Let us not make it a fatality. By just such a chance indeed as that in your dreams tonight you may find yourself in regions such as our poet described, and may not, I fear, find much comfort in them. So, too, this evening, I found myself – well, here: in a region, that is, which it is your own excellent fortune to occupy and which is yet of little comfort to me. Is there not a shade of the Satanic in these streets? But what are waking and dreaming, my dear sir? Mere states of consciousness; as too in a sense is this, your world of what you call the actual, and the one that may await you. Opinions, views, passing tastes, passing prejudices – they are like funguses, a growth of the night. But the moon of the imagination, however fickle in her phases, is still constant in her borrowed light, and sheds her beams on them one and all, the just and the unjust. We may meet again.’
The dark, saturnine head had trembled a little, the weak yet stubborn mouth had stirred into a faint smile as the stranger thrust out an ungloved hand from beneath his cloak over the varnished wood of the table. Professor Monk hesitated, but only for a moment. Critic though he might be, and so not by impulse a man of action, he was neither timid nor unforgiving. His fingers met an instant the outstretched hand, and instantly withdrew, not because he had regretted the friendly action, but because of the piercing cold that had run through his veins at this brief contact. A sigh shook him from head to foot. A slight vertigo overcame him. He raised his hand to his eyes. For an instant it seemed as though even his sense of reality had cheated him – had foundered.
And when he looked out into the world again his visitor had left him. At last he was indeed alone. He stayed a moment, still dazed, and staring at nothing. Then he glanced at his mute typescript on the table, and then furtively into the grate. He paused, musing. His fingers fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, but encountered only a penknife. It was in part with a penknife, and when seated in his winter house before a burning fire, that King Jehoiakim had destroyed the Prophet Jeremiah’s manuscript. But though, unlike the angel’s little book in Revelations, the professor’s paper was no longer sweet on his tongue, and there were a few dead coals at hand, he had no matches. His evening had wearied him, but this vile altercation seemed to have sapped his very life. Had he changed his views concerning the genius of Poe as a writer? – not by one iota. As a man? He had always, he realized, disliked and distrusted him; now he hated him. But this was immaterial. An absurd conviction of his own futility had shaken and shocked him. Life itself is a thing of moments, the last being its momentary apex. And now he felt as dead and empty as some sad carcass suspended eviscerated from a butcher’s hook. By a piece of mere legerdemain in this cold and hideous room his view of himself and even of his future had completely changed. The pattern in the kaleidoscope – was that then nothing but a trick? A few dull fallen fragments of glass now, and no pattern at all? Being a man of habit and purpose and precision, Professor Monk was well aware that a drug, however potent, and whatever its origin, wears out at length its own effects. So with this evening’s enterprise; he might, he would, soon be his own man again. But meanwhile … well, he would await the morrow, when perhaps his second thoughts would be less impetuous – and he himself less hideously cold.
He stooped awkwardly for his hat, and as he did so caught a glimpse of the little wizened, warty, bent-up old caretaker peering in at the doorway. ‘Ah, there you are, sir,’ he was assuring him, with the utmost friendliness. ‘I was beginning to think you had passed out without my seeing you. They do sometimes. No hurry, sir.’ Professor Monk hesitated; then paused; while yet again the adjacent foundry discarded its slag.
‘Which way did that – er – gentleman go?’ he inquired.
‘Gentleman, sir? I’ve set eyes on no gentleman. Except for one of them saucy young schoolgirls from St Ann’s half an hour ago, I see them all come along out together like rain out of a gutter-pipe. And the Reverend Mortimer hard at heel after them. It’s fine now, sir, and starry, but the wind’s rising. I have been talking with a friend.’
‘Ah, yes. Thank you!’ replied the professor. But it was well under his breath that he repeated, ‘Ah, yes.’
* As printed in SEP (1938).
‘A Nest of Singing-Birds’*
Hilbert had cooled down at last. And now so sweetly chimed his heart, so transporting a sense of peace had stolen over his mind, that he had all but repented of his hasty vow – never, never to run for a train again. And particularly for a train not his own. After the din and fever of the arterial road, this tiny station – Bovey Fausset – of which he was the sole occupant, with its Noah’s Ark trees, its nursery bridge, and tall toy signal-post, was like a scene out of some Hans Andersen fairy-story. How very odd that those dreadful Victorians, those slaves of the squat god, Pocket, should have indulged in anything so ridiculous and charming! The whole thing looked as if it were made of cardboard, and just for fun. If, now and then, between trains, he could sit on here, on this hard, hot, narrow bench in this westering September sunshine – mellow as a vintage hock – how simple it would become to stuff lines of verse with sad melodious thoughts; to rhyme pass with alas! – anguish with languish. This morning, unfortunately, he had hastened out of the house minus his fountain-pen.
So narrow was the single track of glinting steel that he could have jumped it with ease – a hop, a skip, and clean over. If he had been sure he was not alone he would have made the attempt. But ‘deeds of reckless daring demand an audience of the fair’! All along the twin platforms – snapdragons, cottage roses, dahlias – yellow sunflowers of every tint and magnitude, from Van Gogh tea-trays downwards, stood opulently exposing their charms to a host of bees and flies and butterflies in the gentle breeze – a breeze so gentle indeed that it had taken exactly twenty minutes to cool Hilbert’s fevered brow.
If he had refused to believe that a ramshackle train going the wrong way could possibly be his own, if he had merely mocked at the silly fallacy of ‘saving’ time, he would long ago have detected how heavenly, how earthly-sweet this faint wind was, as if it were laden with the spices of the Hesperides. The little old leather handbag now squatting on the seat beside him and packed almost exclusively with pretty little bibelots – how could it have come to weigh so heavy. His own Works, too!
They simply irradiated the air – the sunflowers; and continued to be the bliss of Hilbert’s outward eye until suddenly he remembered that their very splendour proclaimed that autumn had come. Autumn! Bedizened creatures, how odd that they should wait so long to bloom. But then poor Hilbert seemed now unlikelier than ever to bloom at all. Never. And this in spite of the fact that his present little expedition, which for the moment had come to so hapless yet serene a pause, just hinted that in a more favourable sphere and loaded up with some other kind of merchandise, he might have proved himself to be a really rabid go-getter.
The little expedition had been solely his own idea, too. Hilbert, in fact, had long had leanings towards literature. He was already the author of the quite recently published little volume of fancies, pensées, conceits, now in his bag. And so precisely mid-way were its contents between a respectable prose and a defensible verse that the harsh critics of an earlier era might have avowed that they had issued from a vacuum with the merits of neither. Hilbert’s very few reviewers – still following a passing fashion to ‘say it with flowers’ – had been far more indulgent.
One of them, after a jocular sally (in July) at ‘spring poets’, had referred to ‘these, as doubtless we may assume, dainty first-fruits’; and another, after (possibly with the help of the printer) citing the title of the book as Parlourings instead of Parleyings with Pegasus, had pleasantly remarked that Mr Hilbert Winslow ‘wielded a dainty and pensive quill’. This had been a no less welcome tribute for being purely metaphorical, since the pen Hilbert had that morning left at home on his dressing-table, between a rather decayed ivory-backed hair
brush and an empty bottle of brilliantine, was an exceedingly bloated ‘Swan’.
How odd that critiques as affable as these should have failed to sell a single copy of Parleyings. Even poems by Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell had wooed three into the fold; and editors, of course, must know what is good for their readers! But then – though economy rather than foresight had counselled it – how fortunate that Hilbert had ordered only a hundred copies in all. ‘I suppose it’s the gilt,’ his mother had remarked on seeing the binders’ account, ‘I suppose it’s the gilt, darling, that makes it so expensive, but I am sure it deserves every penny.’ Thirty of these Hilbert had squandered on the press. Three had gone to relatives, and twenty-two to friends and well-wishers – a phrase, alas! that for the literary novice is by no means equivalent to go-getter. And the family bookseller had taken twenty. Not on approval, of course, but, as he carefully explained, for ‘sale or return’.
Within ten days, Hilbert was astounded to hear, this enterprising tradesman had disposed of the complete batch. And Hilbert had naturally asked for some description of his local patrons. At this the bookseller had looked a trifle confused. He had retrieved at last – but very vaguely – a tall, dark gentleman in spectacles; and then – ‘a lady, yes, a lady, sir.’
It was at mention of the lady that Hilbert’s heart had sunk. Telepathy, perhaps. But although next morning he had peeped into his mother’s bedroom and afterwards covertly surveyed the bookcase in her little sitting-room, he had actually detected only one copy of his little masterpiece. This was lying with her Prayer Book on the barley-sugar-legged walnut prie-dieu at her bedside, and its fly-leaf was adorned with his signature. ‘I always told my beloved one, darling, that some day you would be famous; although I must say books never entered my head. I fancied perhaps something useful. Your Uncle Charles, you know, once went down in a diving-bell.’
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 47