It was an evening in November; too early in the year, that is, for winter coughs to have set in. And coughs to the lecturer are like reefs to the mariner. They may wreck his frail craft. So extreme indeed was the quietude in the Wigston Memorial Hall in which Professor Monk was speaking that if he had remained mute for but a moment, even the voice of the gentle rain that was steadily descending out of the night beyond upon its corrugated roof would have become audible. Indeed his only interruption, and it had occurred but once every quarter of an hour, had been a sudden, peculiar, brief, strident roar. On his way to the hall he had noticed – incarnadining the louring heavens – what appeared to be the reflected light from the furnaces of a foundry. Possibly it was discharging its draff, its slag, its cinders. In any case, a punctual interruption of this kind is a little dramatic; a pregnant pause, and it is over. Nor did it affect him personally.
The professor had read somewhere that on occasion a certain eminent mathematician will sink in the midst of one of his lectures into a profound reverie, which may continue for ten minutes together. Meanwhile his students can pursue at leisure their day-dreams. But students are students, not the general public. He himself, while avoiding dramatic pauses, could at once read out loud and inwardly cogitate, and he much preferred a sober and academic delivery. He never allowed his voice to sink to a mutter or rise into a shout; he neither stormed nor cajoled, nor indulged even in the most modest of gestures. A nod, a raised finger, a lifted eyebrow – how effective at their apt moments these may be! He flatly rejected, that is, the theatrical arts of the alien – to let his body speak, to be stagy, oratorical.
He even regarded the bottle of water that stood on his reading-desk as a symbol rather than as a beverage. A symbol not, of course, hinting at any connection with sacred Helicon, but of the fact that his lectures were neither intoxicating nor were intended to be intoxicating. How many times, he wondered, had he repeated his present experience? Scores, at least. He had become at last a confirmed lecturer.
And yet, to judge by his feelings at this moment, he might almost have been a novice – a chrisom child. This was odd. The particular lecture he was engaged on – its subject the writings of Edgar Allan Poe – was one of his own favourites. He had delivered it at least half a dozen times, and always with a modest satisfaction. No more than just that. It owed, of course, a great deal to its theme; one that possessed an almost repulsive attraction for the queerest of readers. Anything about Edgar Allan Poe was edged with the romantic, tinged with the macabre – that strange career, its peculiar fruits.
Nevertheless, and not for the first time, as the professor stood alone up there on the platform, full in the glare of an arc-lamp suspended almost immediately over his head, he had become sharply aware not only that he was, with one single exception, the only human being present who was not sitting down, but also that he was the only human being present who was making a noise. The realization, in this intensity at any rate, was new to him; and it made him a little uneasy. Not that he had much patience with members of his own calling who pretend they dislike lecturing. That must be affectation. He enjoyed it. But he would enjoy it even more, he sometimes mused, if he could carry off with him a clear and definite notion as to the effect of what he had been saying.
Any impression of this kind might, of course, prove sadly disillusioning, but it would at least be positive. As a professional man, that is, Professor Monk lived in a faint mist. It was not that he pined for encouragement. Certainly not. His appeal was to the intelligence rather than to the emotions. He aimed at nothing in the nature of what in his subject’s native land is known as the ‘heart-to-hearter’. He had views, and tried to express them; it would therefore be helpful to discover if they were shared or rejected. Such evidence was very scanty. Again and again when, his lecture safely over, the customary rattle of applause had followed its last word, he had sat speculating precisely how much of it was due to good manners and how much to a natural sense of relief. A sigh is so much less audible than the clapping of hands. Any physical reaction after one has been sitting cramped and mute for a solid hour is of course as instinctive as sneezing is after snuff. But English audiences are oddly inscrutable.
For this reason he had more than once been tempted to insert in his paper a sentence or two that he himself felt confident was shocking, or even to leave out all the negatives on any particular page, all the nots – just to see the effect. But even English audiences are less easy to shock than once they were. Besides … well – not tonight. His only desire at the moment was to get finished, to have done. An unfamiliar longing had swept over him to go away, and never come back. Oh, for the wings of a dove, he was sighing with the Psalmist. And he knew why.
It was not the hall itself that was to blame. Lecture halls are much alike. Sunday-schoolish in atmosphere, they usually resemble railway waiting-rooms in their general effect. The fierce light beating into his spectacled eyes and on to his high conical brow was a slight embarrassment – it dazzled if it did not daze. He was accustomed to that too, however. After all, lecturers must be seen, even if they are not heard. He wished again what he had often wished before – that so-called house-decorators, when engaged on places of public assembly, would choose for their paint other tints than a dingy duck-green edged with a chocolate brown. Why, again, should the chairs selected suggest an orphanage? Were they assumed to be the only certain means of keeping listeners awake?
Still, this was all in the usual way of things. There was no walk in life without its vexations. As for his chairman, all that he could see of him at the moment was a puckered ecclesiastical boot. Simply, however, because he was motionless, he was not necessarily either inattentive or asleep. And what if he was? He himself had a genuine sympathy for chairmen. They were usually far too busy men, and tired. He had shared their trials and temptations. Nor had he the faintest hint of a complaint to make against his audience. He would have preferred, naturally, the farthest few rows of chairs to look a little less vacant; but this was a compliment to the occupants of the rest. All those who had come had stayed, and – though owing to his glasses he was unable to see them very distinctly – those who had stayed had been markedly attentive. He remembered a facetious friend once gravely asserting that it is impossible to thin a lecture down too much, and that, if it is to be appreciated to the full, at least one attempt at the jocular is essential every quarter of an hour. Make them laugh; it clears the air. That, however, was not his own method. He had neither thinned nor temporized, nor tried to amuse. Moreover, everybody was listening; no one had laughed; the theory was absurd. Then what was wrong?
Immediately in front of him and at the end of the room a circular white-faced clock hung midway above the two low, rounded arches which led out of the hall. Its hands now pointed to fourteen minutes to nine. The end then was in sight. And so, lowering his head a little, and pausing an instant, he ventured to take a second long, steady look at what he was now perfectly well aware had been the cause of his disquietude – a solitary figure who was standing (almost like a statue in its niche) within the left of these two doorways.
This person had been the only late-comer. At one moment the alcove was vacant, at the next there its occupant was. He must have sallied in out of the night as furtively as a shadow. The lecturer much preferred late-comers to early-goers. The former merely suggested the impracticable – that he should begin again; the latter that it was high time to stop. There was no doubt, however, that this particular listener had been a little on his nerves. Once having vaguely descried him, he had been unable to forget his presence there. Why stand? And why stand alone? He should himself have had the audacity to beckon him in. A warm word of welcome would have been by far the most politic method of – well, he might almost say, of accepting his challenge.
Unfortunately, any such word was now too late. Motionless in the dim light – his dark voluminous cloak around him, and hat in hand – there the stranger stood, leaning indolently the while one foot crossed over the other, against the hollow of the arch. The attitude suggested a pose, but, pose or not, he had not altered it. The glare of the arc-lamp in the professor’s eyes, his very uneasiness indeed, prevented him from clearly distinguishing the distant features. But the turn and inclination of the head, the perfect composure, the attitude, vaguely arrogant, of a profound attentiveness – everything suggested that this particular individual was either wholly engrossed in his own thoughts, or in what he was listening to. The latter should have been a consoling reflection. But, alas! one may be engrossed in destruction – as was Nero when Rome was burning, as is always the Father of Lies, and the angel of Candour. Well what of that? Like the professor himself, he had come, he would go; and that would be the end of the matter.
It was nonetheless a little odd that of all those present none seemed to have become aware of this conspicuous interloper. Yet he was obviously a stranger in these parts. What chance could have summoned him in? Not necessarily the woeful November weather. For as the professor all alone had come walking along on his way to his lecture through the drizzling lamplit streets, he had passed by not only a flaming picture palace, radiant with seductive posters, but the vestibule of a dingy dejected little theatre – which appeared a good deal more inviting, nonetheless, than the spear-headed railings and dank brick wall of the cobbled alley which led into the Memorial Hall.
There were, then, rival attractions in the town. If so, why had this theatrical-looking personage not taken advantage of them? Or was he himself one of a company of touring play-actors idling his time away until the call boy claimed him for the second act? Had he ventured out of his green room for a breath of air, or for a draught even more exhilarating? Why again is it that extremely actual things in appearance may at times so closely resemble the imagery of sleep? But what folly were all such speculations. Nevertheless, Professor Monk had continued to indulge in them, and with an amazing rapidity, while he continued to read his paper. To satisfy them was quite another matter.
His voice – and he enjoyed this scrupulous resonant use of it – his voice rang on and on, sounding even louder than usual in his own ear by reason perhaps of this attack of what might be called psychic indigestion. Nor was he aware of any suddenly revealed reason to be distrustful, let alone ashamed, of his paper. When looking it over he had taken the opportunity of re-reading some of the stories, most of the poems, and an essay or two. He had consulted here and there one of the more recent lives. Its actual composition had taken him a good deal more than a week; and it was at least systematically arranged. In four parts, that is: (a) the Environment; (b) the Man; (c) the Tales and Poems; (d) the Aftermath. Even if he had been able to extemporize he would have preferred to keep to the written word. It was a safeguard against exaggeration and mere sentiment.
As, tall, dark, steel-spectacled, and a little stiff, he stood up there decanting his views and judgments, it ensured that he said only what he meant to say, and that he meant only what he said. He disliked lectures that meander. He preferred facts to atmosphere, statements to hints, assumptions, ‘I venture’s’, and dubious implications. He detested theorizing, fireworks, and high spirits. The temperamental critic is a snare. And though poetry may, and perhaps unfortunately, must appeal to the emotions and the heart, the expounding of it is the business of the head. Besides, a paper simply and clearly arranged is far easier to report. He hoped that his audience would go away with something definite in their minds to remember, though he was not so sanguine as to suppose that they would remember much. ‘Hammer, hammer, hammer,’ he would laugh to himself, ‘on the hard high road!’
Until this hour indeed it was highly probable that many of them had never read, even if they had ever heard of, much more of Poe’s writings than The Pit and the Pendulum, and possibly The Bells. Others may have accepted him merely as the melodramatist of The Maelstrom, or The Cask of Amontillado, the sentimentalist of Annabel Lee, the cynic of The Masque of the Red Death, and the fantast of The Fall of the House of Usher. A few of the more knowledgeable might have stigmatized him not only as a gross sensationalist, of little character and no morals – and an American at that – but something of a poseur and a charlatan. This was a view, he confessed, that had been shared by no less distinguished a compatriot of Poe’s than the great novelist, Henry James, who had dismissed his work as a poet in three contemptuous words – ‘very superficial verse’. Yes, and thrillers are thrillers and shockers shockers, whether they are old or new. He himself could not agree with so sweeping a verdict, but he would not disguise the facts.
It would be only too easy indeed, he had declared, to treat the subject of Poe in what might be called a pleasing, persuasive, and popular fashion. He had tried to avoid that, to be frank and just without becoming censorious. He had admitted that to look for lessons, instruction, spiritual insight, and what in his own country is called uplift, in the career and writings of the author of The Premature Burial, The Black Cat, or such poems as The Conqueror Worm and Ulalume, was like looking for primroses and violets fresh with dew in a funereal wreath of artificially dyed immortelles. And though he would agree – and here he had cast a deprecatory glance at his chairman – that it was a lecturer’s office to expound rather than to indict, he could not avoid a dutiful word or two on the ethics of his subject. He had expressed his agreement with Longfellow that life is both real and earnest, that books are more than merely a drug, an anodyne, a solace, a way of escape. Poets, too, have their specific value, and, unlike Plato, he would certainly not dismiss them from his Ideal Republic. ‘Not bag and baggage!’ Nonetheless poetry is in the nature of honey. It is not a diet. He himself was of opinion that a delight in beauty cannot be considered a substitute for the desire for knowledge, an excuse for any laxity of moral fibre, or for the absence of any serious convictions. And he had no wish to be partisan. However that might be, poets themselves, though they secrete this enticing honey, have not always proved themselves the best of bees. Their characters and their conduct, alas! are seldom as impeccable as their syntax.
A man’s style, whether in prose or verse, in some degree, of course, reveals that man himself. And Poe on the whole wrote well. But we must be careful. A style that may be good from a merely literary point of view is not necessarily the work of a good man, nor is a bad style necessarily the work of a rascal. Otherwise, how few men of science – philosophers even – would escape damnation! Though again, what a man writes may reflect himself, as in a sort of looking-glass, it does not necessasily reflect the complete self. By no means, surely, is the whole of Burns in his love lyrics. Was even Paradise Lost all Milton? If so, the less Milton he. Byron, Baudelaire, Horace, Herrick, had they nothing of heart, mind, and soul but what was imaged in their writings? What then of Poe?
The professor had confessed impatience with the iridescent veil theory of poetry. Did the worn-out slogan Art for Art’s Sake, if examined closely, mean anything more profound than pudding for pudding’s sake, or plumbing for plumbing’s sake? Nor is a poem as a poem the better or worse for having been written at an age when most young people prefer the excitements of cricket or basket-ball; are, in fact, in Matthew Arnold’s words, young barbarians at play. Genius may sometimes manifest itself in precocity; nonetheless, such a poem as Poe’s To Helen, which he professed to have written at fourteen, must take its place with the rest of his work. It must stand or fall on its poetic merit.
Nor again, the lecturer had insisted, is any piece of literature the richer or more valuable for having been composed in an attic, in wretched circumstances. Not for a moment had he conceded that between poetry and poverty there is only the difference of the letter V – ‘The viol, the violet, and the vine’ – that sort of thing. Men of imagination may be naturally sensitive, delicately poised, easily dejected – it is the price they pay for so precious an inheritance. But is it too extreme a price? Even Robert Louis Stevenson – an artist to his finger-tips – had not excused the man of genius the obligation of meeting his butcher’s bill. Indeed he had said harsher things than that. Chaucer proved himself a man of affairs; Shakespeare made a handsome fortune and retired in his later forties to his birthplace; Robert Browning in the prime of life was occasionally mistaken for a prosperous banker; Westminster Abbey was at this moment positively surfeited with poetic remains. And that is hardly the Valhalla of the disreputable.
But even as a child Poe had been perverse and self-willed. And certainly in the brief months he spent at Jefferson’s beautiful and serene University of Virginia, and in his even briefer career as a cadet in the lovely natural surroundings of West Point – though every allowance of course should be made for the young and the gifted – he had without question shown himself arrogant, fitful, quarrelsome, unstable. Had he been the reverse of all this, which of its better qualities would be missing from his work?
There was, of course, the other side of the account to consider – Mangan, De Quincey, Coleridge. One could hardly, alas! think of their writings dissociated from certain weaknesses not merely of constitution but of moral fibre. Mangan had died in poverty in deplorable circumstances in the same year as Poe himself, 1849; and this too was the death-year of Beddoes, while Emily Brontë had died only the year before – a strange eventuality, since there was much in common between them all – ill health, adverse fortune, extremes of mood and imagination. But Branwell’s habits rather than her own were Emily Brontë’s scourge, and the tragic and morbid end to Beddoes’s career seemed to be proof of ‘a sadly unstable mind’.
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 professor 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.
Then, again, he heartily agreed with the lecturer that the piece To Helen was a remarkable feat for a lad in his early teens – most remarkable. But he deplored any suggestion that all lads of fourteen should be encouraged to be equally precocious. There were dangers. Even, too, though a man may be his own worst enemy, he may yet attain renown as a writer. Poe himself had. Nevertheless he implored them one and all to remember that it is better by far for ever to hold one’s peace than to write, however attractively, what it may some day be too late to recall. That solemn thought, he gathered, was their lecturer’s urgent lesson to them this evening.
Before, he concluded, before inviting that stronghold of their society, Miss Alibone, to propose a vote of thanks to Professor Monk, he would like to announce that at their next meeting their old friend Mr Alfred Okes, so busy in so many fields, was to talk to them on the subject of conchology – the science of sea-shells, from the whelk to the conch – the latter being famous in mythology, though it was frequently mispronounced. And on that occasion there would be lantern slides.
‘I ask you, sir’ – he suddenly rounded on the professor with the most tactful and endearing of smiles – ‘I ask you, sir, to accept our heartiest, our most cordial thanks for your most entertaining, informative, and, I will add, even edifying discourse. We have been well fed.’
The professor unsealed his tired eyes, looked up, smiled a little wanly, and hastily pocketed his paper. In a few minutes, the hall already nearly empty, he had followed his chairman down the five well-worn, red-druggeted steps into the ante-chamber. There he was welcomed by a row of empty wooden chairs, a solid grained table, a copper-plate engraving in a large black frame over the chimneypiece of a gentleman in side-whiskers, whose name, owing to the foxed condition of the print, he had been unable to decipher, and the ashes of a fire in the grate. It had been feebly alight when he arrived. It was now dead out. Why did this seemingly harmless chamber at this moment resemble the scene of a nightmare? He could not tell. His chairman seemed to be finding nothing amiss with it. He was adjusting his grey woollen muffler, he had bidden him a hearty good-night, he had turned away, adding jovially over his shoulder, as he hurried forth: ‘Ah, Professor Monk, here’s a little friend to see you – eager no doubt to drink at the fountain-head. Come in, my dear’ – and was gone.
The little friend, however, who was now beaming at the professor from under a dark felt, medallioned school-hat and from behind gold spectacles straddling a small, blunt, resolute nose, was in fact anxious only to secure his autograph and still more anxious to discover if he could possibly be related to Miss Mima Monk, the famous film star. ‘It’s the same name, you see,’ she said, ‘that’s why.’
Alas! the professor was compelled to confess, he had no relatives in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He opened the little green and gold birthday book, and turned a little wearily to November 8, to read: ‘Words are the only things that last for ever. – William Hazlitt.’ The child watched him as he made the dot after his sedate signature a little more emphatic.
‘We’ve learned some of Mr Poe’s poems in class,’ she was assuring him breathlessly. ‘I think it’s lovely. Our teacher says The Bells is meant to sound like real bells – it’s all imitation.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ the professor replied, ‘it is called onomatopoeia.’
‘Omonatopoe-oe-oeia,’ she trebled after him like a wren, and with yet another coy and beaming smile had taken her book and departed.
Her footsteps, it seemed, had suddenly quickened into a scamper, then she too was gone. The professor sighed, and rose from his chair. And then, suddenly transfixed, with one arm actually halfway through the sleeve of his antiquated mackintosh, he turned, realizing that what he had vaguely foreseen and apprehended had come to pass.
The gentleman in the black cloak until this moment unperceived in the shadow at the turn of the door had advanced into the room, and was now confronting him from the other end of the varnished table. The glass-shaded electric lamp that hung between them shed a lustre almost as of alabaster on his pallid face and wide prominent forehead – a pallor intensified by the darkness of his long hair, the marked eyebrows, the small moustache. He was a man seemingly aged about forty, rather under the middle height, and spare, but he carried himself with an air of elegance, a trace even of the foppish. His black beaver hat clasped between his delicate hands, he remained silent and motionless, his chin, the least vigorous of his finely cut features, lowered upon his black satin stock, his dark luminous grey eyes fixed on the professor’s face. There was a peculiar abstraction, even vacancy in their depths – a slightly catlike appearance, as if they were not wholly in focus; and this, in spite of the intense regard in them – a regard which brought to the professor’s mind a phrase he had read somewhere – ‘they seemed to shed darkness in that place’. And though they expressed no hostility, and Professor Monk had the advantage in stature, he was finding it difficult to meet them. They were strangely occupied eyes. Besides, the hall outside was now not only silent but empty; and it was atrociously cold.
The imp within his mind had begun chattering again. ‘He stoppeth one of three’, was echoing in the professor’s consciousness. Why The Ancient Mariner? The cold, perhaps. Meanwhile, he realized that he must break this ice. His silence was becoming discourteous. He glanced again at his visitor, and was again sharply reminded that he bore a striking resemblance … To what? To whom? There had been no pause in which to collect his thoughts. The professor met many strangers; how could he be expected with all the good will in the world to recall always either themselves or their names? Names are at best but labels.
‘Er – good evening —’ he began – but a low, insistent voice had broken in on him.
‘Where is this place?’ it was inquiring.
‘This place? Where?’ exclaimed the professor. ‘Wigston, you mean?’
‘Wigston – ah, yes. And England?’
The professor continued to listen, the prey now of another kind of discomfort. There are degrees of eccentricity – and he was alone.
‘That was my impression,’ the other was saying. ‘And these people’ – he raised his hat in a peculiarly graceful gesture towards the doorway – ‘these people were not completely ignorant of the subject of your address?’
‘Indeed, no’; a deprecating smile had crept into the professor’s face; ‘though we mustn’t of course expect —.’ But he was not allowed to complete his sentence.
‘And you yourself must have been deeply interested in your theme to venture on compounding a complete lecture upon it. Fifty-three minutes in all!’
‘Indeed, yes,’ interjected the professor warmly.
‘I see.’ The stranger paused. ‘I observed that the date on the notice-board facing the street is 2nd November, and the year 1932. You will realize that I have myself come some little distance. There are – difficulties. But it was rather the name than the date which attracted me. Edgar Allan Poe’s, I mean, and your own, too, of course. I fear I cannot compliment you upon its appearance.’
‘My name! … Oh, yes, the street?’ said the professor.
‘Rain so sooty-dark upon a scene so dismal, the niggardly glare, the stench, and what might be described as the realism of it all! You yourself perhaps are unfamiliar with Virginia – Richmond, Charlottesville, the South. You are from Oxford, perhaps? Has that ancient seat of learning also endured of late the ravages of change?’
The slim erect figure had bowed slightly – with a deprecating politeness. The professor shook his head. ‘No, not Oxford; London,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes, London. I am from …’ But at this moment, unfortunately, the neighbouring foundry had once more metallically ejected its slag, and the word was lost. ‘So Edgar Allan Poe’ – his visitor pronounced the syllables as if they were in the nature of a sarcasm or even a jest – ‘so Edgar Allan Poe is remembered even in this benighted town?’
‘Remembered!’ cried the professor. ‘Why, yes, indeed. My whole intention was to suggest for what reason he should be remembered. The acoustics of the hall, perhaps —’
‘But, indeed,’ the stranger was assuring him, ‘I heard perfectly. I was engrossed. Engrossed. A host of remote memories, echoes, speculations returned into my mind. But I have ventured to intrude on you, not to pay compliments which you might find wearisome, but in the hope that you will allow me – even at this late day and hour – to ask you one or two questions.’
The professor’s dark eyebrows expressed a faint surprise. ‘As a matter of fact —’ he began.
‘Oh, yes,’ the visitor hastened to add, ‘I was aware that your chairman had invited questions – with a disarming cordiality indeed. But though, professor, you had remarkably attentive listeners, you will agree perhaps that they were rather passively receptive than actively critical. That was my impression. There is an old saying: Every time a sheep bleats it loses a mouthful. Well, yours at least never bleated. Apart from that, however, there are questions it may be more courteous to ask in private. Such as mine. May I continue?’
‘By all means.’ The professor’s eye ranged furtively over the intensely unoccupied row of hard-wood chairs. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘Thank you,’ said the stranger; ‘when I disagree I prefer to stand. I have come, as you see, unarmed, except in respect of the tongue. We are on equal terms, then, though you might perhaps agree that in matters of the mind one solitary question may be almost mortal in effect. First, then, am I justified in deducing from what you have said that one word would summarize your own personal attitude towards the man of letters you have lately been dissecting: the word “scorn”? You were at pains, I admit, to disguise it, to salve in one sentence the wound given by another. But the tone, the flavour, the accent – I could not be mistaken. And is not scorn, professor, a dubious incitement for the critic, the expounder, the appreciator of any artist and his work? Moreover, it is one thing to despise a fellow-creature, another to malign him.’
‘Malign!’ cried the professor. ‘My sole aim and intention was to tell the truth.’
‘Ay, and so you dragged the well. And I am now enjoying the flavour of its dregs. You had ninety-eight listeners this evening. I myself counted them. You gave me plenty of time – between your ideas, I mean. That was fortunate. Your poet, let me inform you, once read his Eureka – an essay in the imaginative synthesis of philosophical and scientific thought which you evaded so skilfully by the mere mention of it – he read, I say, his Eureka – his mistress jewel – on a stormy night in a bitterly cold hall in Richmond before an audience of only sixty souls in all. It occupied two hours and a half. You and your hungry little flock, then, had not only the easier ordeal, but also a less difficult subject-matter. Apart from the title of your paper, you divided it into four parts: The Environment; the Man; the Tales and Poems; the Aftermath. Am I right? Superficially, that is a simple and lucid arrangement. Did you keep to it? Hardly. Again and again, like the moth to the candle – or shall we say, to the star! – you returned to the poet’s private life, to his unhappy childhood, aureoled, in your own pinchbeck phrase, “with the chameleonic hues of romance”. To the follies and misfortunes of his youth, to his failures, his poverty, his bereavements, his afflictions of body and mind, and what you supposed to be his soul – to his miserable death. Well, we live and die, and must leave posterity to do its best – and its worst – with us. But was it necessary to regale your docile and ignorant audience with allusions to the poet’s young mother, the forsaken, penniless actress, and to her vile, tragic death in a filthy tenement when he himself was a child? I grant you his Helen. She even reminded your quick wits of Troy. But what of his simple-minded and afflicted sister Eulalie? What of exhuming into the light of night the very remains of his ever-youthful and long-suffering Virginia – to pry and peer into their sacred secrets? You used the word morbid. Whose was the morbid, yes, and the sordid, when you declared that those poor relics had actually lain concealed awhile under the bed of one of her husband’s besotted biographers? The ashes of Annabel Lee, forsooth! And selfless and faithful old Mrs Clemm, her mother, his more-than-mother, with her basket of broken meats collected from door to door to save her loved ones from starvation. And the poet’s cloak, that in those icy winters in New York had to serve by day as a protection for his own wretched back, and by night as a coverlet for his dying Virginia’s bed. You used the term, tragedy, professor; why did you turn it into a melodrama? Is there to be no humanity or decent reticence concerning the life of a man who is dead, mainly because he was a writer? Is every poet at the hands of any showman doomed to suffer again and again the pangs of a Monsieur Waldemar? I ask you – I put the question.’
‘Let me repeat,’ said the professor frigidly, ‘you have misjudged my intention. You imply that a man’s circumstances in life have no relation to his actions, to his principles, to his ideals. I deny it. Knowledge aids understanding. How else explain, excuse, condone?’
‘Condone! It was, then, with the same compassionate aim that, having condensed a lifetime of forty years – not an exorbitant allowance – into a sensational and appetizing quarter of an hour, you dealt with the man? It was perhaps your passion for moderation that persuaded you only to hint at such words as mountebank, ingrate, wastrel, fortune-hunter, seducer, debauchee, dipsomaniac. Hints serve better. But words, professor, have the strange power of revealing not merely what a man consciously intends to say, but what, perhaps unknown to himself, he means and feels. And the simplest of your listeners can have been in little doubt of that. I confess to perplexity. Have the poets themselves ever claimed to be saints? Have the most exemplary of them ever professed to be anything but sinners? Name me one poet, one imaginative writer even, of any account, whom you yourself suspect of believing that his failings as a man in any sense or degree aided his genius. They may profess it – but not within themselves! Oh, yes, I agree that a man’s writings indelibly reflect him and all of him that matters most. And since your poet’s are all that is left of him in this world, and they alone are of lasting value, should we not look for him there? Did you attempt to depict, to describe, to illuminate that reflection? No: for that would have needed insight, the power to divine, to re-create. You are a stern and ardent moralist, professor. But since when has the platform become a pulpit? It needs, too, little courage to attack and stigmatize the dead.’
The stranger’s wandering gaze had returned slowly to the professor’s face. ‘Provided, of course, you are confident that dead he will remain. Nonetheless it seems to me a rather paltry amusement – carrion stuff.’
‘I say again,’ cried Professor Monk hotly, ‘truth was my aim. I resent this attack. It is beside the point.’
‘For my part,’ said the other, ‘I resent nothing. I am here merely to “drink from the fountain-head”. But even if we admit that from his childhood up, as a human being, gentleman, and Christian, your poet fell far short even of the happy mean, is there no other standard by which to judge him? The decalogue he shared with every man, and, like most men, and many professors, he would long since have been forgotten if he had not proved himself – I will not venture to say worthy of remembrance, but – defiant of oblivion. What he might have done even in spite of his miseries and weaknesses, his tortured nerves and treacherous body – that no man can declare. But in respect, professor, to what he actually did – as an artist, a man of letters, a poet? Does that suggest that he ever consented to sell the smallest fraction of his soul for bread, or wine, or – brief anodyne against a world which he himself had no hand in creating – even drugs? Did he condescend to write down to his readers; or, worse, up? Did he betray his intelligence; prostitute his mind; parade his heart? Did he even attempt to improve the shining hour? You would agree that the writer in his solitude must obey scruples, hold fast to an aesthetic probity, serve with a forlorn devotion in a cause which the generality of men know nothing of. But his laws are unwritten laws. Not that I suggest that your victim even in this was blameless – far from it. But you yourself seem never to have been aware of such an ordeal. You made pretty play with the artistic temperament – with your morbid, and your moody, and your melancholy, and your misanthrope – but of the artist’s conscience not one word.’
‘Even if your allegations were not grossly exaggerated,’ said the professor, ‘surely there is little novelty in such a notion, and I had to consider my listeners.’
‘Had the poets,’ said the other, ‘put their faith solely in novelty and considered only their listeners, there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Hamlet, and a few of the Greek tragedies. Surely only an artist’s best is worth his trouble? And that being so – Heaven help him – can he, need he care who shares it? Let me repeat, I am not defending Mr Poe, God forbid; he is gone long since, as your genial friend the minister on the platform would put it, to his account. It could be only then in the strangeness of some sepulchral dream that he could or would return to a world he little liked, and was little liked by. But all this apart – these dingy relics, I mean, the unsavoury events of his life and the invaluable lessons to be derived from them: what conceivable concern had they with the very subject of your paper?’
The slate-grey eyes peered out dark with anger from behind the glass of their spectacles. ‘Subject?’
‘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’,
Whan the youngest to the eldest said,
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).