VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE
IN the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly
affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction
as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great
European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to
be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our
most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's
fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst
the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist
and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective
critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency
of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook
may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities
and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent
writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must
comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the
art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide,
were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations,
Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him
we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely
in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the
horror appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to certain empty
literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in
general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and
values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the
story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas.
Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real
artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express
and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they
tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating
or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler
rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly
that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter
for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom,
decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings
which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror
rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or
indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind,
and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed
by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism
in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover,
was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe
studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked
with an analytical knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the
force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent
in merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having been set, later
authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all;
so that in this way a definite change begin to affect the main stream of
macabre writing. Poe, too, set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and
although today some of his own work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated,
we can constantly trace his influence in such things as the maintenance
of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and
the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing
on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax. Truly may it be
said that Poe invented the short story in its present form. His elevation
of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible
themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized,
sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre
Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal æsthetic movements
in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the
Symbolists.
Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician
and philosopher by taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from
defects and affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship,
his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often
vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven.
Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's
vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that
writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every
festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in
the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had
power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations;
till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and forties such
a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether
slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen
of cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls
that toll iron bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in
the black October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the
"wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space -- out of Time" --
all these things and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething
nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the very
jaws of the pit -- inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible
half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked
tension of the speaker's hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications;
dæmoniac patterns and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for
one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden
madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath
of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed before us -- a sight the
more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular
is marshaled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness
of material life.
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some
of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales
of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story,
are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others,
probably influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which
relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group
deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express
terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the
literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their author
a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountainhead of all modern
diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the
billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle -- the dark intimations
of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing
greybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the
ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current
toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction?
Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept
together by hypnotism for seven months after his death, and uttering frantic
sounds but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him "a nearly
liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence." In the Narrative
of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land
of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines
have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana
of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything
is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic
cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into
a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints
of a monstrous metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable
of his hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the
blazing building after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit
of ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the victim's ancestor
in the Crusades; the madman's wild and constant riding on the great horse,
and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood
obscurely over the warring houses; and finally, the burning of the madman's
palace and the death therein of the owner, borne helpless into the flames
and up the vast staircase astride the beast he had ridden so strangely.
Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins take the form of a gigantic horse.
The
Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle
with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but
implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror
and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a
tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil
of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time
and space.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection
of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province
of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly
poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled
phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully
used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases
where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic
in essence -- an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with
every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of
corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a
Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every sense
of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural
cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic
tales, Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher -- especially
the latter -- that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe
takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward
in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development
which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident.
Ligeia
tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns
through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of
a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated
corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity
and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless
power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very
marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays
an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated
family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient
house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the
same moment.
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands,
become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights;
and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and
physiology of fear and strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise,
the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants
to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in
advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous
dénouement
to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy
in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous
effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and
landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood
and vitalising the desired illusion -- principles of this kind, and dozens
of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended
by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be
-- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe
except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but
all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn
sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth
from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre
work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are
alive
in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad
narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist
is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly
sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly
mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply
learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden
secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character
obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly
neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician
romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connection;
since his gloomy, ambitious and anti-social qualities savour strongly of
the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring,of the
Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More particular qualities appear
to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed
much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and
extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary
victims of Fate.
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