A BOOK AND ITS Writer.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 December 1904, Page 209

A BOOK AND I TS Writer.

By EDWARD KEMPE

FOE'S TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE.

(&£d'^ -^ a handful of weird tales, AvPp-j a few pages of passionate V'HF*' verse > anf ' t^e tradition °^ a s i n g' u^ ar ly unhappy f( <&) life, the name of Edgar vsS^- Allan Poe has survived t&Jn^ within a few years of the r centenary of his birth. ■'" The evil that men do ■ j " lives after them " in the world's memory. Every one who has read the " Raven and the Bells," the " Pit and the Pendulum/" and the " Murders in the Rue Morgue/ will have heard this much of their author — that he lived an intemperate and unhappy life. and died of drink. What a biography for a man of genius, the popular epitome of a record of passionate effort in pursuit of the ideal, of the extremes of brilliant success and tragic failure, of such hopes and such disappointments as average men are incapable of realising. It is the human instinct to reduce everything to an epigram, and it is impossible to deny a certain rough justice to the world's summing up. Yet, any one who studies the life of Poe will be moved to pity at the hostility which dogged him through his life, ard survived to blacken his memory. To turn to the Tales which are the subject of this article. They are a collection of magazine stories, frankly sensational, written to take the popular taste, noi remarkable for humour, pathos, characterise-

lion, or the mere human side of creative art. Ihe tortures of the inquisition, the horrors of premature burial twhien might be called Poe's ruling dread), of the grave, the enamel house and the sheeted ghost, murder in its ugliest forms, and the material terrors of the guilty conscience, the ocean regarded as the storehouse of supernatural secrets and weird happenings — this is the material of Poe's tales, together with a few grotesque fancies tinned with a humour of a rather ugly cast. Here is sensation enough for the most hardened reader, but the curious critic asks, where are the qualities that have preserved the Tales against the lapse of time ? For though nothing is more nopular than sensationalism, there is no form of literature less likely to endure. A shudder is a passing emotion. The generation which rejoiced in Monk Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe have long laid them by, as a traveller skims the pages of a railway novel and leaves it behind him at his journey's end. Yet Poe's tales not only captivated his magazine readers ! but have survived the lapse of nearly three generations, and still possess the power of thrilling in new editions. Of course, a tale may be sensational pnd something more. Hamlet and Lear, it has been pointed out, are as full of sensations as any police novel, but behind all the

alarums and excursions one feels the great volcanic forces at work in the souls of the men and women. The great artist makes you see through the terror of the incident into the still more appalling depths of human passion of which they are the outward expression. But a purer sensationalist than Poe never wrote. He rarely attempts to lift his subject into tragedy. He is too much occupied with the horror of the incident to trace the shadow of fate in the background. Even the victims themselves concern us less than their experiences. We are disgusted or horrified, not moved to pity. And Poe himself frankly admitted that he aimed at nothing more than to " make your flesh creep." He was well pleased with the form of Victor Hugo's congratulatory criticism, " You have invented a new shudder." That Poe could be something beside a sensation monger, his poems are sufficient evidence, but his prose works are our concern now, and it is undeniable that when the worst is said about them, the Tales in themselves do possess powerful elements of vitality, and are likely to hold their place in the world's literature. What singles out Poe's sensations from the mass, and gives them a lasting hold on the imagination js the extraordinary force and earnestness with which they are presented. In the hands of an ordinary magazine writer his subjects would often be not only incredible, but disagreeable, sometimes even ridiculous. But, like the Ancient Mariner, once Poe has caught your ■attention, his " glittering eye " holds you. The fearful exactness with which he builds up his terrors piece by piece impress you against your will. You may profess to be displeased, but you will never forget. This same intense earnestness is indeed an essential ingredient of what we call genius— the glowing conviction which carries writer and reader throug-h all obstacles. It is

the same quality, to compare smaller things with greater, which gives the note of realism to Dante's " Inferno/ the realism that made the people of Florence point with awe at his sombre figure in the streets, as the man who had been in hell. Like Dante, too, Poe makes no use of the art of suggestion. His descriptions are always precise, his measurements exact. And at his height Poe is capable of a sublimity in description which is worthy of a great poet. Take the following passage from the " Descent into the Maelstrom,'' a sort of Hugoesque sea-vision in a style which Poe attempted too seldom. As a rule he could not resist staining his canvas with mere ugliness. The fisherman who tells the tale has been caught in the great whirlpool. " Never shall 1 forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which 1 gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hano-ing, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far down into the inmost recesses of the abyss. . . ."' " . . . The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf ; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped, and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow- and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity. This mist, or sDray, was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the Great walls of the funnel as they all met together at the bottom, but the yell that

went up to the heavens from out of that mist 1 dare not attempt to describe." Although not in itself an evidence of literary merit, still it is a fair tribute to the earnestness of Poe's style, carrying' conviction in the face of incredibility, that several of his most fanciful tales were commonly believed to be records of fact, and excited controversy on the point both in England and America. " The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym " was one of these. It is the longest of Poe's imaginative works, indeed the only one to appear originally in book form — and is the detailed record of a voyage, beginning in tragedy and ending in a peculiarly suggestive and unsolved mystery — a catalogue raisonee of every kind of sea tragedy, mutiny, shipwreck and starvation. "Arthur Gordon Pym " is hardly so well known as some of Poe's shorter efforts, and it is not surprising considering the repulsive nature of some of its scenes. Yet there are few of Poe's writings which have more power to enchain the lover of adventure, and as an instance of the amazing vividness of conception and minute detail in which Poe's imagination revelled, it is unequalled. But the most curious instance of Poe's convincing realism is the famous tale called " Facts in the case of M. Waldemar/' a masterpiece in the region of nightmare. Tt is a scientific " statement " of the effect of mesmerism on a dying man, which is so far successful that though death takes place the mesmerised spirit still continues to communicate with the living through the agency of the dead body, and by the same unnatural influence the body is preserved from corruption until the necessary passes have been made by the mesmerist, when the catastrophe takes place. The tale yave rise to considerable controversy in the press, and at last a professional mesmerist, named Collyer, wrote to Poe,

asking him to put an end to all doubt by proclaiming the incident as a fact— he, Collyer, having fought all his life on behalf of mesmerism, and come in contact with a similar case. Poe replied with some humour in the columns of his paper, the " Broadway Journal/ that " the truth is there is a very small modicum of truth in the ' Case of M. Waldemar.' ... If the Case was not true,, however, it should have been, and perhaps ])r. Collyer may discover that it is true after all." In naming Poe sensationalist and realist, one should not forget that he was a poet, and a poet of a high order. in his romantic tales — " Berenice," " Ligeia," " William Wilson," " The Domain of Arnheim," etc. — one finds the same glowing imagination and sensuous appreciation of beauty as in the poems, though here the gloomy realism of his prose style often strikes a discordant note (the " instruments of dental surgery " in Berenice are an almost ludicrous example). It was one of Poe's theories of art, expressed in a review of Longfellow's poems, that the sole end of poetry is the pursuit of Beauty, unhindered by any idea of " Truth or Duty." Poe's critical theories, elaborate as they are, often suggest ingenuity more than sincerity on the part of the writer, but here his own work certainly bears out his creed. And it is this very want of moral feeling that is the weakness of his poetry. Tts passion is unchastened and morbid, its sense of beauty unrefined. Tt has no saving hopes or ideals. The 2,' rave yawns in the background. Sheeted ghosts and spectres are its only spiritual visitants. Tts brilliant flowers have a hectic colour and lustre. The same may 'be said of his prose romances. There is the same striving to express a somewhat sensuous type of beauty, which becomes artificial. His women are actresses without soul, his landscapes are exquisite scenepaintings without nature.

A word must be said on the philosophic side of Poe's genius, which forms so strange a contrast to his florid imagination. As a thinker Poe is ingenious and versatile, if not profound. He was fond of speculation on such picturesque problems as the consciousness after death, the possibilities of mesmerism, the transmigration of souls, some of which fcriu the text of his tales and prose poems. But perhaps the most curious side of Poe's scientific faculty is that which rinds expression in the famous trilogy of detective tales, and extraordinary feats of cypher reading. Not only was Poe the inventor of the " detective formula," not only does its great modern exponent, Conan Doyle, admit that he has " covered its limits so completely that I. fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can call their own. On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him." Not only this, but Poe himself proved that as an armchair detective he w<?s the equal of Sherlock Holmes and his own Dupin. Whether his faculty was due -to- an extraordinary acuteness of analysis, or as he himself suggests, to a union of the qualities of poet and mathematician, enabling him to follow the process of reasoning in another man's mind by putting himself in his place, it is hard to say. At any rate there is no reason to doubt that in the second of his three famous tales, " The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe simply recapitulated under assumed names the details of an untrace'd murder,, which was agitating New York at the time, and that the imaginary conclusion to his tale which he evolved from the clues provided by the newspapers, was long afterwards proved by the confession of the murderer to be absolutely correct. '' And over all there hung" a cloak of fear." Strong as was his love of

the beautiful, as strong' almost as that of his contemporary, Keats, keen as was his analytical faculty, they are overshadowed always by that obsession, or waking nightmare, in which his imagination, if not his mii.d, always seems to move. He might be called the chronicler of death. Not the "beautiful death " of the strong soul of Whitman, but that king of terrors, which haunted the superstitious minds of the Dark Ages, in the shape of the grisly skeleton of the dance of death. That a mind of Poe's rank should have submitted to this hateful tyranny is pitiable. It doubtless grew on him with the weakness for drugs, and to a healthy mind poisons much of his written remains. Edgar Poe began his career a high-spirited, handsome, active boy. inheriting the hot blood of an old Southern family, which was dying out in poverty ynd misfortune. His father and mother, wandering 1 actors, died in his infancy, and hewas adopted by 3Tr Allan, a wealthy friend of his family. Thus Poe was unfortunate from the outset. Discipline was the prime need of his character, and he seems to have been alternately treated with lavish indulpence and unjust severity, the worst possible handling for a boy of hii>h spirit and little selfcontrol. He was educated rather irreoularly at schools in England and Virginia, and at the age of seventeen went to the University of Virginia, where he seems to have taken his life into his own hands and began sowing his wild oats. Within a year he had left the University under a cloud of debt, quarrelled with his adoptive father, pnd published his first volume of poems. From this time his stormy independence begins. He went to Europe and disappeared for two years, then returned in the guise of the Prodigal, and submitted to academic discipline once more at the famous West Point Military CoT-

lege. A year's caging' was all that this wild spirit could endure. He was only twenty-two, but he was a poet, a traveller, a man of the world. It, is said he had fought for Greece during lis wanderings ; he had drunk the wine cf youth and ■freedom. He deliberately qualilied for dismissal from West Point by breaking some technical rules, had a last violent altercation with his foster father, which ended all hopes of allowances or legacies, and was again face to face with the world. Henceforth Poe's life is a long and -sordid battle with poverty — a losing battle from the world's point of view, for he never achieved financial success, and finally he sank under the slavery of drink — the fire of his youth was beaten down, until it was only manifest in lurid and fitful outbreaks of genius and misdirected passion. Jt is a dreary record, little as we know of it, not merely because of his failures and misfortunes, but because he could never get a fair start. His mind and spirit were worthy of a large field, even for defeat ; he would have leaped at the opportunity. But it was his fate always to struggle for a mere footing, and his pride often raised obstacles where a meaner ■spirit might have avoided them. After the final quarrel, his friends for the second time lost all trace of him, but his second experience of Bohemia was no better than the first, and he ayain reappears in the . Drodigal's raos, 'but no home or father to carry his repentance to. A literary patron, Mr Kennedy, came to his assistance, and Poe soon made his debut as a Drose writer by winning a hundred dollar prize with a collection of six romantic tales. This started him on his career. He became connected with a Southern paner, the " Literary Messenger," and was appointed editor within a year. Nowadays one would think that a young man who could rise so roridly to the head of an editorial staff would have an assured future. Either

Poe's capacities were extraordinary, and easily recognised, or newspaper proprietors have changed remarkably in three generations. Certainly the first is true. Within two years Poe had ended his connection with the paper, but during that time he had quadrupled its circulation, chiefly fy the popularity of his own contributions. And yet his salary never exceeded a hundred guineas. This speaks more for the astuteness than the generosity of American publishers. And Poo's life is simply a repetition of the same experience. One newspaper proprietor after another jumped at the opportunity of engaging the brilliant hack, who came to them on the verge of destitution and was willing to accept starvation waife. For a time all would go well. Pop's tales never lost their popularity. He was willing to write half the magazine. His articles were fresh, original, provoking. His ideas excited controversy. Circulations went up. Then after a year or two trouble would arise. Then the hack would become restive, claim a higher salary, or a share in the paper, and something more than the orthodox three dollars a page for his creations. Or his criticism became too plain- spoken. He gave oller.ee in quarters where flattery was the policy that paid. He abused popular favourites, and overthrew orthodox literary idols. So Poe would find himself penniless on the world again, hawking his stories round to the newspapers to keep the wolf from the door. Excepting the " Narrative of A. G. Pym," and the famous " Gold Bug," ancestor of innumerable cypher tales, which gained a hundred dollar (£2O) prize, all his stories appeared in the manner described, and brought little or no profit to their author. Perhaps the height of contrast was reached in the year '45, which saw the production of " The Raven," one of those rare poems which delight both the people and

the critic, and the publication of his tales and poems in a volume, which was popular on the Continent, and excited the admiration of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. In this year Poe reached the summit of his fame. " The Raven " was read, recited, parodied everywhere. He was a society lion (whatever that is worth). He was invited to lecture by Historical and Literary Societies. Meanwhile the literary hero was earning scanty bread and butter at a desk in the office of one -N. P. Willis, proprietor of the " Evening Mirror," who evidently had some hesitation in engaging 1 a hack of Poe's unbroken character and doubtful reputation. But N. P. Willis soon found "that the want of bread and butter will induce even a literary lion to pare his claws. " We were led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties, and scenes of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious." He goes on to enlarge on the beauties of his tame genius in the true biographer's vein. " With his pale, beautiful and intellectual face as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible of course not to treat him with deferential courtesy, and to our occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a criticism, or that he would erase a passage coloured too deeply with his resentment against society and mankind, he readily and courteously assented." Incredible blandness ! Through the dreary shifts and changes of Poe's life, two saving influences can be traced, his home life, and his ambition to found a literary magazine. At the age of twenty-seven he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, a marriage of pure romance, for she was a eirl of fourteen, and he, as usual, in financial straits, though at the time he was editing the " Southern Literary Messenger/ and by the popularity of his weird tales and articles had raised its circulation from five to

twenty thousand. For eleven years Poe, his wife, and his mother-in-law lived together in full confidence and affection, facing their poverty with united courage. The poet' himself was passionate, erratic, and extravagant. The wife seems to have been a delicate, clinging girl ; and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, a woman of strong, stern, practical mould (the very antithesis of the two young people she watched over), was the pillar of this strange family. Between Poe and herself there was a mutual affection which reminds one of the relations of Cowper and his nurse, Mary Unwin, for it lasted through all the storms in which Poe's life was ended. But for this steady current of domestic happiness, Poe's wild spirit would have beaten itself to destruction long before. As it was, the last few years of his wife's life were filled with suffering, and the strain on Poe's acutely sensitive nature was so great that there is no doubt his mind was seriously affected, and he gave way to those habits of drinking which have tarnished his good name. Improvident he certainly was, though his means were always narrow, and there were times when the sick girl was in want of sufficient food and covering, and Poe, who was out of employment, strove in vain to wring saleable copy from his tormented imagination. At the end friends had to come to their assistance, and a public collection was made, which even in those circumstances was a wound to Poe's pride. Yet, with all their troubles, it was in his cottage home, his girlwife, and the strong, kind auardianship of his mother-in-law that Poe found the only true happiness of his life. Perhaps it is not surprising that his works contain few or no allusions to his wife, for they reflect almost solely the feverish and gloomy passions of his life, while she represented the sane and peaceful influence of a home. Throughout his literary career Poe's heart was set upon one ob-

ject—to found a purely literary and critical magazine which should represent and direct American literature. That he failed was characteristic of the man and his time, and affords another instance of the rarity of that combination of ideas with practical ability, the want of which has wrecked men of genius in every department of life. He was a successful Editor, and most of his career was spent in the Editorial chair of various semi-literary journals—the '" Southern Literary Messenger," the '' Philadelphian Gentleman's Magazine/ the " Broadway Journal/ and others. But his success was largely due to the popularity of his own writings. Want of capital, or want of business instincts, or a combination of the two. checkmated him whenever he tried to cany his dreams into reality. He persevered to the end, indeed his death took place during a journey which he had undertaken with the view of raising funds to this end. The journal of Poe's dreams was far more than a financial speculation. It was to be an organ, free from all influence, nrejudice, or favour, by which he hoped to regenerate criticism and purify American literature. Now that literature has won a position of dignity and repute in America, it is not so easy to understand Poe's circumstances, but there is a certain parallel between American society of that time and our own. Except at Boston a literary profession, or a literary society did not exist, and with the Bostonians Poe had always a standing feud. The great lights of the middle century — Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, etc.. had scarcely 'bepun to write. Literature as a profession meant starvation, for it was not wanted. Journalism was the only resource for the would-be writer, and contemporary accounts, both of English and native writers, do not speak hi'/hly of American journalism. Poe was essentially a poet

and a literary artist .with a keen sense of critical justice and the dignity of his art, and for the sake of his daily bread, it was his fate to support a profession whose want of principle offended him keenly. We have said that there was no professional literyry class, but there were plenty of amateur poets and prose-writers, ar.d it was part of the business of the press, true to the principle of puffing everything American, to support these productions with a chorus of flattery. These false judgments, passing muster as honest coin, hurt acutely Poe's line critical sense. With all his limitations as a critic he was scrupulously sincere, and clear if not deep in his judgments. He was one of the earliest to welcome the genius of Hawthorne, and, with some deserved criticism, that of Longfellow. With his love for and belief in pure literature, it was pain and grief to him to see criticism false to her duties. He never hesitated himself, and constantly attacked the weak sentimentalism which passed as talent (as Whitman was to do many years later"). The result was that he made enemies and was constantly subject to counter attacks and even slander which did not cease with his death. Towards the end of his life, when his self-control was fast giving way before misfortune and drink, he was attacked by a poetaster, named English, for a severe criticism of him— one of a series of contemporary sketches or interviews, which Poe had published under the title of "The Literati." This man's retort took the form of a letter to the " Evening Mirror," of Philadelphia, in which he orenlv ch^rp-ed Poe with theft, foro-ery, drunkenness, cowardice, plagiarism and other offencps. Poe lost his head, and responded in a similar strain, referring to " the family resemblance of Mr. English to that of the bestlookino-, but most unprincipled of Mr. Barnum's baboons/ and introducing et'ithets such as " Blather-

skite," '' bully/ and " coward." Such an incident casts a strange light on the social refinement of the age, and is a melancholy example of the degradation of genius. Dickens' savage picture of the America of this period in " Martin Chuzzlewit " — boastful, insolent, and vulgar— may be caricature, but there is a germ of truth in it of which one has contemporary glimpses such as the foregoing. ]f the Bostonian school of Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, and the enthusiasts of Brook farm did nothing else, at least they seem to have introduced a severer, saner tone into American letters, to have given _ literature an independent standing, and to have refused in spite of poverty to he contaminated by the influence of contemporary journalism. Unfortunately, Poe stood aloof and alone— Fetrasus in pound—beating his wings in a vain attempt to rise out of the mire, until his spirit was broken and his principles degraded. The last rally of his life was a strange one, in the year or two that succeeded his wife's death. In it he produced some of his most perfect poems— "Annabel Lee," nnd " For Annie "—some striking tales, and the extravagant, semi-scientific work, " Eureka," which he confidently believed was to confound Newton and re-establish the theory of the Universe on a new basis. On the other hand, his reason had never quite recovered its balance after his wife's death, and his passionate nature seemed to break be-

yond his control. He had always had a chivalrous admiration for women which once landed him in an undeserved scandal, and now he lost all restraint and surrendered himself to sentimentalism. He first pursued a literary widow, Mrs. Whitman, until against her judgment and really to save his reason, she consented to marry him. She had hardly done so when Poe broke out in one of his orgies of drugdrinking, and she immediately ended the affair. After this came a series of romantic attachments — friendships, according to Poe, but really a riot of sentiment and strong feeling which helped to exhaust his broken constitution. The end could not have been far off, but it came in a sudden and degrading form. He was found in the streets after a night of drink and exposure, and carried to a hospital, where he never regained consciousness and died among strangers. Here ends the fitful fever-dream of his life and works. In all that Poe wrote there is a malarial taint, the delusive realism of fever, the lurid colouring, the half-belief, half-fear that it is true and the wish that it were not so. Other writers one associates with the moorland or the ocean, the rreezy country or the cheerfiul haunts of men. But Poe lias no place with healthy nature. In imagination one sees his lonely figure moving as in a nightmare, hag-ridden and melancholy, among the streets of cities, where the litrht flickers on blank walls, barred windows and endless pavements.