"The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."
When Poe was not thinking of beauty he was thinking of God, and so of death; and much of his thought on God and beauty came to be associated with death when he allowed it to appear in work whose aim was aesthetic rather than scientific. The confusion in his mind between beauty and melancholy, death being taken as its symbol, caused one of the flaws in his theory of aesthetic, one of the brambles that entangled his pursuit of truth. There are tears of beauty and tears of sorrow, and Poe did not distinguish between them. Artists have not yet got so far as thinkers in freeing their souls from fettering catalogues of the things they admire, which they confound with the beautiful. They will still give lists of beautiful things, betraying rather the colours of their temperaments than the acuteness of their understandings. Different men are moved to aesthetic expression by different things; it is hard for them to realise that beauty is not exclusively the possession of the things that make expression, and so beauty, possible to themselves. Poe passes very near the truth in saying:
“When indeed men speak of Beauty, they mean precisely not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect; they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating ‘the beautiful.’”
There is a taper of illumination in that sentence. It flickers when he writes:
“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy then is the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”
It dies absolutely when he continues:
“Now, never losing sight of the object, supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself, 'Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ ‘Death, was the obvious reply. 'And when,' I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?' From what I have already explained at some length, the answer here also is obvious—'When it most closely allies itself to Beauty.’ The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
There the light is dead, and Poe only tells us that he is a melancholy man who is easiest prompted to aesthetic expression by the emotions: belonging to death and bereavement. Robert Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, writes of Phantasie or Imagination, “whose organ is the middle cell of the brain,” that, “in melancholy men this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object presented to it from common sense or memory.” Monstrous and prodigious things did this man produce, whose brain sought a white light and a rarefied air in which to think, while his temperament dragged it back continually to graveyard mists and that grove of purple, poisonous flowers. Setting on one side the analytical tales, which are a subject for separate discussion, we may note that almost all the best of his remaining stories, in which his inspiration is not turned to invention by the arbitrary interference and intention of his will, are concerned directly or indirectly with the idea of death. They are variations on a Funeral March, played now almost silently with muffled notes, now with reverberating thunder, now in a capricious staccato, now with the jangling of madness, the notes tripping each other up as they rush along, and now so slowly that the breath of his listeners waits for suffocation in their throats in expectation of the phrases that are continually postponed.
But death is the catastrophe of many stories beside Poe's. It is a bulky incident in life, and consequently one that readily offers itself for the purposes of art. Poe, however, was peculiar in his use of it. He does not watch a death-bed and make notes of the humanity of the patient. He does not make us feel the painful emotions of the men and women who see their friend irrevocably departing from them. There is no irony, no sadness, no setting of familiar things in the light that in death's presence seems to pierce the curtain that divides those who have gone from those who, busying themselves with irrelevant things, are waiting to go in their turn. Most writers seek in death an enhancement of the value of life, and find in mortality a means of elucidating humanity. Death with them is a significant moment of life. Death with Poe is Death. The metaphysician is obsessed by it as the point where simple calculations slip through into the fourth dimension. The artist is concerned with death as something separate from life, something whose circumstances are special and terrible.
It has been said that the horror of Poe's tales of death is purely physical. A quality more universally theirs is that of peculiarity of circumstance. The people who die, or have killed, or are about to die, are unusual, and the manners of the deaths, or the condition of mind in which they are prepared for them, are extraordinary. In some cases the death is no physical death, but the murder of half a soul by its fellow, as in the tale of William Wilson. In others the deaths are those of reincarnated spirits (Morella) of madmen (the murderers of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat) or of souls whose bodies are snatched in the moment of dissolution by spirits who have already left the earth (Ligeia). Brooding over the idea of death, Poe found his way into other corners of speculation, and the mere fact of dying became clothed for him with the strangely coloured garments of the weird.
He plays none of the witch melody that Hawthorne knows. Poe is interested in the conscience, but does not make of it and the faith that it sometimes implies a background to throw up into relief the figures that dance to his music. No penalties to be enacted in another world heighten the importance of deeds done in this. He is not, except as a metaphysician, concerned with the soul after death, but only tunes its progress to the grave. His fingers will lift no trumpet on the day of a judgment in which he does not believe. His interest as a story-teller is with the terrors of the soul before yet it has separated from the body. Let it wake in the coffin and beat with the fingers that are still its own upon the weighted lid. Poe will be with it in its agony. Hawthorne, thinking of Heaven and Hell, forgets the worms. Poe hears them eating through the rotten wood.
But though death is the motive that runs through them, Poe's best stories are not concerned only with mortality. He parades his corpses in the dim neutral country between ordinary life and the life that remains uncharted and scarcely explored.
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