Edgar Allan Poe, Kipling and the Supernatural by Pemberton Berman 1903
PREEMINENTLY in the hands of Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling has the supernatural shown its rights to a distinct province of letters. As it came to them, the Gothic novel was either a farrago of nonsense, tricked out in garb that could claim impressiveness of age alone, or else so weighted down with philosophy that its power vanished in bewilderment. Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" is a fair type of the earlier of these forms—a piling of mystery on mystery to make an absurdity idle and fantastic as Walpole's own "folly" of Strawberry Hill. Before him the supernatural had first been the deus ex machina required by the plot, then a mere stage-setting demanded for dignity— he was the herald of independent prominence for the weird and ghastly. After him the irrelevant incidents disappeared one by one, until, as in the pseudo-scientific "Frankenstein," horror was the only motive. From "Frankenstein," with its intense moral atmosphere, and its attempts to invent cause for the fear it describes, the transition was natural to the long-winded mysticism of Bulwer-Lytton —the second type of the Gothic tale. The Gothic floruit may seem to be with him: its virtues—freedom from restraint, passion, imagination—had helped on the new Romanticism; its faults—incoherence, flagrant unreality—were not noticed. In truth, it was dying. Only Poe had seen the true uses for its good qualities, and had comprehended its essential mechanism— and his tales, as a result, survived in superb isolation until Kipling showed his appreciation of conventional imperfections and applied new machinery to their betterment.
Obviously both men avoid the common failings; morality is never dragged in by the heels to hang wax-doll-like over a dying hero; no long, tangled sentences delay a swift moving terror. More positively their plots are close-knit; their characters are men and women, not allegorical sticks; and their catastrophes arise not from chance, but from heredity, environment, psychology. Writing as he did in a fashion predominant at the time, Poe naturally stands chiefly for the merits of the Gothic School. He saw the necessity of the short story as a medium for horror, he returned to the earliest apostles of the uncanny and discarded all attempts at philosophical explanation, but in general he expresses in superlative degree only characteristics already acquired. He is a Romanticist of the wildest type, subjective, passionate, unrestrained. There is a certain control in the strange marble beauty of his style, but everywhere a shrill scream seems to echo from his work; his inordinate imagination lends a touch of the tremendous, yet it heightens his wildness as well. It is always the arabesque, the monstrous, the unthinkable that appeals to him. His heroes are characteristic; revolting from the convention which demanded a priggish Hercules, he fled to the abnormal, and gave us only morphine fiends, drunkards, men mad from melancholy —unfortunately, for sympathy in one of the strongest aids to supernatural effects. If a term usually applied to phrase may be turned to subject, Poe is a perfect "Metaphysical."
In direct contrast to this stands Kipling. He represents, in great degree, the annihilation of earlier faults, the innovation of logical unity and conviction of actuality. He is romantic, but always in subordination to realism. His point of view is often enough subjective, but even so it is the voicing of universal impulses. His passion is restrained as it is in life, and this assumed restraint, this obviously forced quiet, enhances wonderfully his power. His style is matter of fact, simple, even slangy; he speaks in the tone of ordinary conversation until his climax—and then breathes a whisper that leaves us gasping with fear. His plots deal with our brothers on this very workaday earth; his locale is new to us, but there is no affectation of the unusual in it, and his moving ideas have none of the traditional complexity—there are no warning murmurs from another world, no "dull gray skies" to give premonitions. His unity of action is tremendous, single deeds and their direct consequences form his themes, but every accompanying circumstance is worked out in full. Thus in "The Mark of the Beast" all five senses, with the exception of taste, are appealed to subjectively — the unclean touch of the leper, the green light behind Fleete's eyes, the dog-smell in his room, and the wolfish howl of the Beast in agony. Poe tells of an impression, leaving the details to us; Kipling recounts every minute happening, trusting the impression to us. It is the narrative of emotion against the narrative of incident.
An appreciation of the different methods of these men can be gained in no better way than by the contrast of their most artistic tales. "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "At the End of the Passage," in contrast to the greater part of their author's work, are both terror-stories, "causing mental fear, rather than physical sickness." They tell of men caught in the blind whirl of things, and crushed by causeless destiny. Over them both there hangs an overwhelming atmosphere; in the one, of decay, of worn-out blood, of the sins of the fathers; in the other, of the heat and toil of India, of burdens too great to bear. But "The Fall of the House of Usher" is completely unlocalized, almost allegorical. It is a monotone, rather the mood of a poet than the tale of a reality— yet a mood so terrible in its imagination, so wonderful in its expression, that it leaves us dumb with awe. "At the End of the Passage" is far more effective in its mechanism. Kipling avails himself of the value of contrast, whirling us from the farce — with its undercurrent of tragedy — of Mottram's piano-playing to the terror of Hummil's child-like appeal. The strength is again increased by the attitude of skepticism; we feel that what Spurstow is afraid to face, must be real. It is the tale of a man driven to death by sleeplessness — and something more. How this something affects those who see, we are told, as we would be in life, in snatches of conversation, in trivial acts, and finally in a colossal lie, branded a lie by its physical accompaniments. Nowhere does the superb matter of factness of the machinery show better than in the use of the kodak in the climax. Bulwer-Lytton, in "The House and the Brain," uses for his final scene a magic compass, governed by an ancient parchment, and we are duly impressed; Kipling chooses the supreme of commonplace, an insensate toy of steel and glass — and we believe. It is, as everywhere, the application of modern realism to the supernatural, the preference of simple directness to grandiose affectation.
Working on different lines, these men stand to-day the masters of the supernatural. Poe builds up for us a lofty hall that is everywhere gray, and the sensuous effect is fear. Suddenly a flash of light shows all clearly, and we see a great pool of blood while the shrieks of demons echo around us. Kipling's room is one that we know, but presently it becomes dusk, and we stumble over—what, we cannot tell, for in a moment all is utter dark, and we creep out shuddering before the unknown. It is in the nature of the men, one a poetic genius, the other a man of today, knowing his machinery and using it. Poe is an impressionist, stunning our senses by his appeal; Kipling's work has the detail of a miniature, and as we look, the mind recoils from the phantom that is concealed in the picture of everyday things.
PREEMINENTLY in the hands of Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling has the supernatural shown its rights to a distinct province of letters. As it came to them, the Gothic novel was either a farrago of nonsense, tricked out in garb that could claim impressiveness of age alone, or else so weighted down with philosophy that its power vanished in bewilderment. Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" is a fair type of the earlier of these forms—a piling of mystery on mystery to make an absurdity idle and fantastic as Walpole's own "folly" of Strawberry Hill. Before him the supernatural had first been the deus ex machina required by the plot, then a mere stage-setting demanded for dignity— he was the herald of independent prominence for the weird and ghastly. After him the irrelevant incidents disappeared one by one, until, as in the pseudo-scientific "Frankenstein," horror was the only motive. From "Frankenstein," with its intense moral atmosphere, and its attempts to invent cause for the fear it describes, the transition was natural to the long-winded mysticism of Bulwer-Lytton —the second type of the Gothic tale. The Gothic floruit may seem to be with him: its virtues—freedom from restraint, passion, imagination—had helped on the new Romanticism; its faults—incoherence, flagrant unreality—were not noticed. In truth, it was dying. Only Poe had seen the true uses for its good qualities, and had comprehended its essential mechanism— and his tales, as a result, survived in superb isolation until Kipling showed his appreciation of conventional imperfections and applied new machinery to their betterment.
Obviously both men avoid the common failings; morality is never dragged in by the heels to hang wax-doll-like over a dying hero; no long, tangled sentences delay a swift moving terror. More positively their plots are close-knit; their characters are men and women, not allegorical sticks; and their catastrophes arise not from chance, but from heredity, environment, psychology. Writing as he did in a fashion predominant at the time, Poe naturally stands chiefly for the merits of the Gothic School. He saw the necessity of the short story as a medium for horror, he returned to the earliest apostles of the uncanny and discarded all attempts at philosophical explanation, but in general he expresses in superlative degree only characteristics already acquired. He is a Romanticist of the wildest type, subjective, passionate, unrestrained. There is a certain control in the strange marble beauty of his style, but everywhere a shrill scream seems to echo from his work; his inordinate imagination lends a touch of the tremendous, yet it heightens his wildness as well. It is always the arabesque, the monstrous, the unthinkable that appeals to him. His heroes are characteristic; revolting from the convention which demanded a priggish Hercules, he fled to the abnormal, and gave us only morphine fiends, drunkards, men mad from melancholy —unfortunately, for sympathy in one of the strongest aids to supernatural effects. If a term usually applied to phrase may be turned to subject, Poe is a perfect "Metaphysical."
In direct contrast to this stands Kipling. He represents, in great degree, the annihilation of earlier faults, the innovation of logical unity and conviction of actuality. He is romantic, but always in subordination to realism. His point of view is often enough subjective, but even so it is the voicing of universal impulses. His passion is restrained as it is in life, and this assumed restraint, this obviously forced quiet, enhances wonderfully his power. His style is matter of fact, simple, even slangy; he speaks in the tone of ordinary conversation until his climax—and then breathes a whisper that leaves us gasping with fear. His plots deal with our brothers on this very workaday earth; his locale is new to us, but there is no affectation of the unusual in it, and his moving ideas have none of the traditional complexity—there are no warning murmurs from another world, no "dull gray skies" to give premonitions. His unity of action is tremendous, single deeds and their direct consequences form his themes, but every accompanying circumstance is worked out in full. Thus in "The Mark of the Beast" all five senses, with the exception of taste, are appealed to subjectively — the unclean touch of the leper, the green light behind Fleete's eyes, the dog-smell in his room, and the wolfish howl of the Beast in agony. Poe tells of an impression, leaving the details to us; Kipling recounts every minute happening, trusting the impression to us. It is the narrative of emotion against the narrative of incident.
An appreciation of the different methods of these men can be gained in no better way than by the contrast of their most artistic tales. "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "At the End of the Passage," in contrast to the greater part of their author's work, are both terror-stories, "causing mental fear, rather than physical sickness." They tell of men caught in the blind whirl of things, and crushed by causeless destiny. Over them both there hangs an overwhelming atmosphere; in the one, of decay, of worn-out blood, of the sins of the fathers; in the other, of the heat and toil of India, of burdens too great to bear. But "The Fall of the House of Usher" is completely unlocalized, almost allegorical. It is a monotone, rather the mood of a poet than the tale of a reality— yet a mood so terrible in its imagination, so wonderful in its expression, that it leaves us dumb with awe. "At the End of the Passage" is far more effective in its mechanism. Kipling avails himself of the value of contrast, whirling us from the farce — with its undercurrent of tragedy — of Mottram's piano-playing to the terror of Hummil's child-like appeal. The strength is again increased by the attitude of skepticism; we feel that what Spurstow is afraid to face, must be real. It is the tale of a man driven to death by sleeplessness — and something more. How this something affects those who see, we are told, as we would be in life, in snatches of conversation, in trivial acts, and finally in a colossal lie, branded a lie by its physical accompaniments. Nowhere does the superb matter of factness of the machinery show better than in the use of the kodak in the climax. Bulwer-Lytton, in "The House and the Brain," uses for his final scene a magic compass, governed by an ancient parchment, and we are duly impressed; Kipling chooses the supreme of commonplace, an insensate toy of steel and glass — and we believe. It is, as everywhere, the application of modern realism to the supernatural, the preference of simple directness to grandiose affectation.
Working on different lines, these men stand to-day the masters of the supernatural. Poe builds up for us a lofty hall that is everywhere gray, and the sensuous effect is fear. Suddenly a flash of light shows all clearly, and we see a great pool of blood while the shrieks of demons echo around us. Kipling's room is one that we know, but presently it becomes dusk, and we stumble over—what, we cannot tell, for in a moment all is utter dark, and we creep out shuddering before the unknown. It is in the nature of the men, one a poetic genius, the other a man of today, knowing his machinery and using it. Poe is an impressionist, stunning our senses by his appeal; Kipling's work has the detail of a miniature, and as we look, the mind recoils from the phantom that is concealed in the picture of everyday things.
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