BOOKS.
EDGAR POE.*
IT is pleasant to have Edgar Poe rescued from the reputation of something like infamy to which his first biographer had con- signed him, even though it seems simply impossible to accept the vindication which Mr. Ingram has so successfully put forth for him without throwing upon his previous biographer, Mr. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the responsibility not merely of mis- representations which were very unpardonable in a biographer who should have taken, what certainly he did not take, the greatest pains to sift the truth of reports injuriously affecting the sub- ject of his memoir, but the much more serious responsibility, if we may trust Mr. Ingram, of deliberate falsification of Mr. Poe's writings. Mr. Ingram (p. lxi. of the Memoir) criticises Mr. Griswold's account of one of Poe's literary quarrels, which he found untrue in almost every important respect, and espe- cially in this, that the very editor who, according to Mr. Griswold, had refused to support Poe, on the ground that he was obviously in the wrong, had written in defence and praise of Poe's "honourable and blameless conduct :" but he does more, he states that though he was not at all surprised to find Mr. Griswold's whole account of the affair upset by his in- vestigation of the facts, he was startled "to discover that the whole of the personalities of the supposed critique included in the collec- tions of Poe's works, edited by Griswold, were absent from the real critique published in the 'Lady's Book.'" Of course, if Mr. Griswold, or his friends, cannot explain this strange appear- ance of direct fabrication, all belief in Mr. Griswold's veracity collapses at once. There would be no longer any reason to suppose that there was even a foundation in fact for a statement unfavourable to Poe, simply on the score that Mr. Griswold made it. And in point of fact, Mr. Ingram does seem to have refuted all the reasons for believing that there was anything whatever malign in Edgar Poe. That he led a restless and somewhat ungoverned life in his youth, and that in the unhappy days after he lost his wife he was occasionally intemperate,— though his was a physique overpowered by incredibly little wine,—seems to be true. But for the worse charges against him, for the insinuations repeated by Mr. Griswold that he was once guilty of an offence which it was not even possible to mention, for the charge that he was an ungrateful man towards those who had been good to him, for the stories of his inattention to business and neglect of his employers' interests, and for the assertion as to the reason why the engagement for his second marriage was broken off, there seems to be no foundation whatever,—nay, the best possible proof that the very reverse was true. Mr. Ingram has quoted the most convincing evidence of his fidelity to the interests of his literary employers, of the exactitude of his business accounts with them, of the regret with which they parted with him, and of the permanence of their esteem. In short, he has proved that Edgar Poe was not only most faithful to his engagements, and a devoted husband and son-in- law, but that with the exception of one period of great misery, he led a most regular, industrious, and abstemious life, and was as earnestly loved as he was earnest in his own love.
All this will be a surprise to most of Edgar Poe's English readers, who have not unnaturally taken Mr. Griswold's state- ments without any distrust, and have discerned perhaps something in the rather revolting character of many of his tales, of a nature to support the assumption that there was a sinister strain in his character. But, in fact, though Edgar Poe is one of the
* The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Sohn B. Ingram. VoL L Memoir and Tales. Edinburgh : Adam and Charles Black. greatest masters of the gruesome who ever lived, there seems to be no reason in that at all for making any kind of assumption as to his character. Curiously enough, one of the principal features of the most original among the American novelists has been a fascination for the gruesome. The Hawthomes, father and son, are both great masters in it ; Dr. 011iver Wendell Holmes made a study in this school the subject of the fiction by which he is best known, "Elsie Venner ; " and Edgar Poe was but leading or following in the vein of some of his greater countlymen, when he chose to devote himself to the working- up of weird and gruesome effects. The contemplation of death, and of the earthly accompaniments of death, seems always to have had an overpowering fascination for him. Indeed, his passion for producing that curdle of the blood with which the mind is apt to greet the close association of repulsive bodily conditions with intense ideal feelings,—either of love or scientific desire,— was almost the key-note of his imaginative genius. No writer was ever freer from a sensual taint. None was ever more constantly haunted by the corruptibility of the body, by what we may call the physical caprices of the soul in relation to that corrupti- bility, and by the vision of that spiritual clamminess which sometimes seems to spring out of tampering with questions too obscure for the intellect and at any rate depressing to the vitality of the whole constitution, or out of that morbid condition which insists on connecting with the mortal body what should be given only to the immortal spirit. These are the sort of themes on which Edgar Poe rings the changes till his stories seem to reek of the grave, and of the human affections which oppress "the portals of the grave" with their unhallowed pertinacity. We know nothing more gruesome in all fiction than such tales as " Ligeia " and " Morella," or that ghastly bit of fictitious science in which Edgar Poe gives the account of the mesmerising of a man in articulo mortis, and of its effect in preserving the body from decay for many months after death had occurred, without, however, depriving the separated soul of the power of occasionally using the tongue of the corpse. The atmosphere of thorough horror hanging round the realism of this little bit of morbid imagination is hardly to be conceived without reading it. And yet still more ghastly are such stories as " Ligeia,"—the devoted wife who holds that Will ought to be able to conquer death, and who nevertheless dies of consumption, but apparently haunts her successor, the second wife, till she dies of the mere oppression on her spirits, and who then by a vast spiritual effort, the physical effects of the tentatives at which are described with hideous minuteness, enters the dead body of her rival, and brings back the exhausted organism to life in her own person. And yet perhaps even this morbid story is exceeded in the uncanniness of its effects by the brief story of " Morella,"—a wife who had pored over, or, shall we say, pried deeply into, all the forbidden lore of the mystical writers on personality and personal identity, till the subject seemed to have a kind of unholy fascina- tion for both her husband and herself, and who in dying bears a daughter, into whom it soon becomes evident that the very personal soul of the mother had entered. It is not, however, the ghastliness of this fancy which chiefly gives its force to the tale. Possibly even more force is spent on the description of the woman herself,—which has nothing impossible or even improbable about it,—though the husband's impression of her is evidently a diseased one. Can what we have ventured to call spiritual " clam- miness " be more powerfully conceived than in the following account of Morella ?— " 'With a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known ; but tho fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met ; and fate bound us together at the altar ; and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone, rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream. Morello's erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no common order—her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters, because [? became] her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg educa- tion, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the more dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine, were her favourite and con- stant study—and that in process of time they became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit and example. In all this, if I err not my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, wore in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I road to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicity to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies. And then—then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me—would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory. And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the
most hideous, as Hinnon Hinnom] became de-Henna. But indeed, the time had now arrayed when the mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid; she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it fate. She seemed also conscious of a cause, to me unknown, for the gradual alienation of my regard ; but she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent ; and one instant my nature melted Into pity, but in the next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul sickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss." .
It is very difficult to say where the genius of this kind of thing ends and the merely nervous horror of it begins. A good many of Edgar Poe's tales read as if they might have been suggested by a constant brooding over the conquests of the grave, in a state of health disordered by doses of opium. But that there is real literary power in the gruesome mixture of sweetness and moral clamminess in such a character as is here described, it is hardly possible to deny.
Perhaps abetter measure of Edgar Poe's true literary power may he gained from stories in which he evidently intends to draw mono- mania, and draws it with a force that one would regard as implying a real experience of the confessions of a monomaniac. In these cases "there is none of the gruesomeness on which we have been dwelling. The whole power is spent on delineating the almost diabolical posses- sion of the mind by a single idea, and the rush with which this at last precipitates its victim into the fatal spring. "The Tell-tale Heart" and "The Imp of the Perverse" are two very fine illustra- tions of this power which Edgar Poe had of realising for us what we may call moral "rapids," down which the will, if there be a will in such cases, is carried like a shallop down Niagara. Whatever may be said of his stories of corruption and sepulchral horrors, which no doubt owe a good deal of their appearance of power to their un- naturalness of conception, no one can doubt that such a descrip- tion of monomaniac remorse as the following, implies very striking vigour. The hero of the story commits a murder by means which it is nearly impossible for any one to discover,-the manufacture of a poisoned candle, by which the victim reads at night in an ill-ventilated apartment, and of course is found dead In the morning ; and the greatest delight he has is not the wealth he inherits, but the satisfaction he feels in his absolute security. This afforded him "more real delight than all the mere worldly advantages of his sin." But at last he caught himself repeating to himself "I am safe," just as the words of a song, which have somehow caught the fancy, go round continually like a mill-wheel in the head :-
" One day whilst sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring half-aloud these customary syllables. In a fit of petulance I re-modelled them thus I am safe—I am safe—yes, if I be not fool enough to make open confession No sooner had I spoken these words than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart. I had had some experience in these fits of perversity (whose nature I have been at some trouble to explain), and I retnbered well that in no instance I had successfully re- sisted their attacks ; and now my own casual self-suggestion that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered—and beckoned me on to death. At first I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously, faster, still faster, at length I ran. I felt. a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror, for' alas I well, too well, understood that to think in my situation was to be lost. I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length the populace took the alarm and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. !Could I have torn out my tongue I would have done it—but a rough voice resounded in my ears—a rougher grasp seized me by the shoul- der. I turned—I gasped for breath. For a moment I experienced all the pangs of suffocation ; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy ; and then some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul. They say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell."
"The Tell-tale Heart" shows power of the same kind, but in a still higher degree.
But we have not yet mentioned one of the most distinctive features of Poe's literary power, his delight in the exercise of that sort of skill which consists in the nice and delicate appraising of circumstantial evidence. Poe was very fond of decyphering
cyphers, and proved, it is said, to many who brought him pu771es of this kind that there was no cypher which human art could invent, that human art could not also unriddle. He has explained in the story of "The Gold Beetle" (or "Gold Bug," as they call it in America) the principles on which one simple specimen of a cypher can be decyphered, but he himself surmounted the diffi- culties of far more complicated problems. This, however, was only one department of the field of circumstantial evidence of which he was so fond. In the case of a New York murder, he- seems to have really detected the secret which had baffled the- police, and all his discussions of the value to be assigned to. circumstantial indications of human motives are very keen. In- deed, in his tales of this kind, he shows that minute practical. ingenuity which seems to be one of the chief marks of American life, as strongly as he elsewhere shows that curiosity to explore the in- fluence of the body on the mind which is another of those marks. Circumstantial evidence seems to have-been the concrete region in which Edgar Poe sought relief from the lurid and gruesome dreams of his imagination. Nor is it the first time that the piecing together- of an almost mechanical puzzle has been a vast relief to a mind oppressed by dreary phantoms.
Of Edgar Poe's poems,-except "The Raven," which will always owe a certain popularity to the skill with which rhyme and metre reflect the dreary hopelessness and shudderiness, if we may coin a word, of the mood depicted-it is impossible to speak very highly. His imagination was not high enough for the sphere of poetry, and when he entered it he grew mystical and not a little bombastic. Yet his criticisms of poetry were very acute and almost always worthy of an imaginative man. Indeed, he had imagination enough for criticism, but hardly enough for successful poetic creation. On the whole, while we should place him on a. level far below Hawthorne,-on the level of great but, in almost all creative regions, essentially sickly power,-we do not doubt that Edgar Poe will have a permanent and a typical name in the history of American literature; and we rejoice heartily that ME. Ingram has vindicated his memory from aspersions so terrible, and apparently so unscrupulous and unjust, as those deliberately cast upon him by his previous editor and biographer. We should add that the printing of this edition is very careless. Errors of the press are abundant.
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