Short Stories 1927-1956 (56 page)

‘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.

‘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.’