Chapter IV: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

By virtue of his journalistic gift, Poe resembled the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. He could not, like Defoe, have become general literary purveyor to the people, but he was quite ready to profit by what was uppermost in the public mind. _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_ is an illustration, as it is also a good example of Poe’s art in its most mundane form. It recounts the adventures of a runaway lad at sea. Mutiny, drunkenness, brawling, murder, shipwreck, cannibalism, madness, are the chief ingredients of the book. It is minute, circumstantial, prolix, matter of fact. The air of verisimilitude is increased by an alternation of episodes of thrilling interest with tedious accounts of how a cargo should be stowed, and the object and method of bringing a ship to. Only at rare intervals does Poe’s peculiar genius flash out.

As the longest of his writings the _Narrative_ has a peculiar value. By it we are able to get some notion of his power for ‘sustained effort,’ to use a phrase that always irritated him. That power was certainly not great; perhaps it was never fairly tested. _The Journal of Julius Rodman_ is a second attempt at the same kind of fiction. Poe was less happy in descriptions of the prairie than of the sea; the interest of the _Journal_ is feeble.

In these fictions the author holds fast to tangible things. Pym and Rodman might have had the adventures they recount. In another group of stories Poe leavens fact with imagination. Such are ‘The Balloon Hoax,’ ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,’ ‘A Descent into the Maelström,’ and the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ Real or alleged science is compounded with the elements of wonder and mystery. And with these elements comes an increase of power.

Poe, who was never backward in giving himself the credit he thought his due, often failed to understand where his own most marvellous achievements lay. In ‘Hans Pfaall’ he claimed originality in the use of scientific data. Had his stories only this to recommend them, they would long since have been forgotten. Nothing so quickly becomes old-fashioned as popular science. The display of knowledge about aerial navigation in ‘Hans Pfaall’ perhaps made a brave show in 1836, but it is childish now. A Hans Pfaall of the Twentieth Century would descend on Rotterdam in a dirigible balloon, and if questioned would be found to entertain enlightened views on storage batteries. Poe talked glibly about sines and cosines and brought noisy charges of astronomical ignorance against his brother writers, but it was not in these things that his genius displayed itself, it was rather in the way this wonder-worker makes one aware of the illimitable stretches of space, the appalling vastness, the silence, the mystery, terror, and majesty of Nature. He is the clever craftsman in his account of how the Dutch bellows-mender started on his aerial travels. But when in two or three paragraphs Poe conveys a sense of height so terrific that the plain fireside reader, indisposed to balloon ascensions, grasps the arms of his chair and clings to the floor with the toes of his slippers lest he fall--then does he display a power with which popular science has nothing to do.

This is true of ‘A Descent into the Maelström.’ What scientific fact went into the composition of the piece appears to have been taken from the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, but the valuable part, the sense of life and movement, the crash of the storm, the roar of the waves, the shriek of the vortex, like the cry of lost souls, all this is not to be found in encyclopædias. The story can be read any number of times and its magical power felt afresh each time. But the first reading cannot be described by so tame a phrase as a literary pleasure, it is an experience.

Another masterpiece is the ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The din of the storm is not easily got out of one’s ears. With the unnamed hero of the tale we ‘stand aghast at the warring of wind and ocean’ and are chilled by the ‘stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away, into the desolate sky.’

In another group of stories, ‘The Gold-Bug,’ the gruesome ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter,’ the author fabricates mysteries for the express purpose of unravelling them afterwards. Poe, who seldom attempts the creation of a character, actually created one in the person of his famous detective. Dupin is a living being in a world peopled for the most part with shadows.

Poe professed not to think much of his detective stories. The ‘ratiocinative’ tale is not a high order of literary achievement. Poe shares the honors accruing from the invention of such puzzles with Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau, and the ‘great ‘Boisgobey,’ and they in turn with the most sensational of sensation mongers.

‘The Gold-Bug’ afforded the author a vehicle for giving expression to his delight in cryptography, at the same time he availed himself of the perennial human interest in the prospect of unearthing buried treasure. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was based on a contemporary murder case. It contains a minimum of that in which Poe often revelled, namely physical horror, and a maximum of the ratiocinative element. ‘The Purloined Letter’ is in lighter vein, and illustrates the comedy side of Dupin’s adventures. Chevalier and minister cross swords with admirable grace, but no blood is drawn.

The masterpiece of the group is ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ Genuinely original, blood-curdling, the story depends for its real force not on the ingenious unravelling of a frightful mystery, but on the sense of nameless horror which creeps over us as little by little the outré character of the tragedy is disclosed. We realize that in the dread event of being murdered one might have a choice as to how it was done. The predestined victim might even pray to die by the hands of a plain God-fearing assassin and not after the manner of Madame L’Espanaye.

Of the stories classified as tales of conscience, ‘William Wilson,’ ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ‘The Imp of the Perverse,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and ‘The Black Cat,’ the first is not only the best, but is also one of the best of all stories in that genre. The image of bodily corruption is not present and the interest is held by perfectly legitimate means. ‘The Black Cat’ is a fearful and repulsive piece, and at the same time characteristic. Poe hesitated at nothing when it came to working out his theme. He who had such absolute control of the materials of his art too seldom practised reticence in exhibiting the gruesome details of a scene of cruelty.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a representative story, if not absolutely the best illustration of Poe’s genius. The motive of premature burial haunts him here as often elsewhere. But the emphasis of this tragedy of a race is laid where it belongs, in the terror of the thought of approaching madness. Poe wrote many stories which can be described each as the fifth act of a tragedy. It may be doubted whether he surpassed ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’

‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘Morella’ are highly successful experiments in the realm of the morbidly imaginative, and might be grouped under Browning’s discarded title of ‘Madhouse Cells.’ The themes are monstrous, and are only saved from being absurd by the author’s consummate ability to carry the reader with him. Poe could scale a fearful and slippery height, maintaining himself with the slenderest excuse for a foot-hold. A dozen times you would say he must fall, and a dozen times he passes the perilous point with masterly ease. In the hands of a lesser artist than he, how utterly absurd would be a scene like that in ‘Ligeia’ where the opium-eater watches by the bedside of his dead wife.

‘Metzengerstein’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ are stories of metempsychosis. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘Hop-Frog’ turn on the motive of revenge. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ an episode of the Inquisition, is a study of the preternatural acuteness of the mind while the body undergoes torture. ‘The Assignation’ is a Venetian tale of love and intrigue, and would have been conventional enough in the hands of any one but Poe. The most powerful story in the group is ‘The Red Death,’ a lurid drama of revelry in the midst of pestilence.

Difficult as are the themes, and skilful as is the handling, these tales are in a way surpassed by the extraordinary group of romances in which Poe describes the meeting of disembodied spirits. ‘The Power of Words,’ ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ are excursions into a world unknown to the rank and file of literary explorers, a world where the most adventurous might well question his ability to penetrate far. In these supermundane pieces, in the prose-poems ‘Silence’ and ‘Shadow,’ in ‘Ligeia,’ and in ‘The Domain of Arnheim,’ Poe’s art is indeed magical.

Poe seems to have been fully persuaded in his own mind that he had the gift of humor. The extravaganzas and farcical pieces bulk rather large in his collected writings. In too many of them the author cuts extraordinary mental capers in the most mirthless way. ‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,’ ‘How to write a Blackwood Article’ and its sequel, ‘A Predicament,’ satires all on the ways of editors and men of letters, are examples of Poe’s manner as a humorist. The rattling monologue and dry, hard, uncontagious laughter of a music-hall comedian is the nearest parallel. The effect is wholly disproportionate to the bewildering activity of the performer.

In farces like ‘The Spectacles,’ ‘Loss of Breath,’ and ‘The Man that was Used up,’ the motives would be revolting were not the characters manifestly constructed of wood or papier-maché. The figures are neither more nor less than marionettes. If Madame Stephanie Lalande (aged eighty-one) dashes her wig on the ground with a yell and dances a fandango upon it, ‘in an absolute ecstasy and agony of rage,’ it is what may be expected in a pantomime. Whoever wishes to laugh at the hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign, when he is discovered sans scalp, sans palate, sans arm, leg, and shoulders, is at liberty to do so, but he must laugh as do children when Punch beats his wife.

There is no question of the vivacity displayed in these pieces. ‘Bon-Bon,’ ‘The Duc de l’Omelette,’ ‘Lionizing,’ ‘Never bet the Devil your Head,’ ‘X-ing a Paragrab,’ ‘Diddling Considered as one of the Exact Sciences,’ ‘The Business Man,’ and ‘The Angel of the Odd’ are sprightly with an uncanny sprightliness. It must always be a matter for astonishment that Poe could have written them. The mystery of their being read is explained by the taste of the times.

On the other hand, ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ is genuinely amusing. The description of the peaceful estate of the pleasant Dutch toy village of Vondervotteimitiss, where the very pigs wore repeaters tied to their tails with ribbons, and the sad story of the destruction of all order and regularity by the advent of the foreign-looking young man in black kerseymere knee-breeches, are most agreeably set forth. This extravaganza is not only the best of Poe’s humorous sketches, but ranks with the work of men who were better equipped and more gifted in such work than was Poe.