The hour was about eight. I had written a letter or two after our six
o'clock supper, and was now idle. By my side, in the centre of the room,
stood a table on which lay several periodicals--monthly and weekly,
English and American--a newspaper or two, and a few books. A rap came at
my door, and on opening it I found Doctor Bainbridge standing in the
hallway. He wore a black "Prince Albert" coat, a high silk hat, and, the
evening having blown-up chilly, a summer overcoat. I received him
perhaps a little more warmly than was in the best of taste, considering
that we had not before exchanged more than a dozen words. But I had, as
I have said, frequently seen him from my window; he was almost as much
of a stranger in the town as was I, and I received him cordially because
my feelings were really cordial. I assisted him to remove his coat, and
in other ways did all in my power to make him comfortable. He was of
slightly more than medium height, of rather delicate build, with a fair,
almost colorless complexion. His movements, his language, his attire,
indicated the gentleman--this I should have conceded him in my club at
home, or in my own drawing-room, quite as readily as here, alone, in an
obscure hotel in the State of Illinois. As we sat conversing, I was much
surprised to find in him a considerable degree of culture. He seemed to
possess that particular air which we are accustomed to think, and
generally with reason, is not to be found apart from a familiarity with
metropolitan life on its highest plane. I did not on that evening, nor
did I later, think him thoroughly schooled, except in his profession. He
was, however, fairly well educated, and his opinions seemed to me from
my own stand-point to be sound. I had observed, in a history of the
county just from the press, which lay on a table in the office of the
hotel, that in 1869 he had been graduated from an educational
institution somewhere in Pennsylvania; and, in 1873, from the Medical
Department of Columbia University. Later, I learned from himself, that,
from the age of seven to the age of eleven, he had been instructed at
home by a sister who was some nine or ten years his senior.
I seated him with the large centre-table between us, and immediately
opened the conversation on some topic of local interest. It is probable
that of the many persons whom I know and continue to like, that I liked
nine out of ten of them from our first meeting. Doctor Bainbridge had
not been long in my presence before I knew that my first impressions of
him were not deceptive; and I felt that his impression of myself was
certainly not unfavorable.
It appeared to me as we talked through the evening, that he had read
about all that I had read, and much besides. He talked of English and
French history with minute familiarity. Not only had he read English,
French, and German literature, with such Spanish, Russian, and Italian
works as had been translated into English; but he shamed me with the
thoroughness of his knowledge of Scott, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, and
others of our best writers of fiction. Goethe he particularly admired.
Of Cervantes he thought with the rest of us: He had read "Don Quixote,"
for the first time, when he was eighteen, and during a severe illness
accompanied with intense melancholia; and he had laughed himself out of
bed, and out of his melancholy. "Don Quixote" was, he said, the only
book which he had ever read in solitude--that is, read to himself--which
had compelled him to laugh aloud. Works of science, particularly
scientific works in the domain of physics, he delighted in. His
imagination was of a most charming character. It was at that time in my
life almost a passion with me to analyze human nature--to theorize over
the motives and the results of human action; over the probable causes of
known or assumed effects, and the reverse--in short, I thought myself a
philosopher. I have never met another person whom it so much interested
me to study as it did this young American. But after ample opportunity
to know him, even now as I sit writing more than twenty years later, and
I think of the pleasure of that temporary friendship in far-away
Illinois, I am puzzled about many things concerning Doctor Bainbridge.
He certainly possessed a scientific mind. He himself said that he had no
very great love for written poetry: had he a poetic mind? He loved the
beautiful in life: he loved symmetry in form, he loved harmony in color,
he loved good music. And yet, though he had read the English-writing
poets, he seemed to care less for their work than for anything else in
literature. The thought of this inconsistency has perplexed me whenever
I have thought of it through all these years. As I have intimated, he
was charmed by the beautiful, and by every known expression of beauty;
but for the strictly metrical in language-expression, he evinced almost
a distaste. I have often thought that he had, through some peculiar
circumstance in his earlier life, acquired a suggestive dislike to the
very form of verse. To this peculiarity there was, however, exception,
to which I am about to allude.
By the time we had smoked out a cigar apiece, we were exchanging views
and comments on such writers, English and American, as came to mind. One
of the books that lay on my table was a copy of Byron; though most of
the others were the works of American authors--Hawthorne, Irving,
Longfellow, Poe, and one or two others. He had picked up my Byron, and
glancing at it had remarked that if all the poets were like Byron he
would devote more time than he did to the reading of verse. I recall a
remark that, with Byron's personality in mind, he made as he returned
the book to the table. "Poor fellow!" he said. "But what are we to
expect of a man who had a volcano for a mother, and an iceberg for a
wife? A woman's character is largely formed by the quality of men that
enter into her life; a man's, even more so by the quality of women that
enter into his. I wonder if Byron ever intimately knew a true woman?--a
woman at once intellectually and morally normal, in a good wholesome
way--a woman with a good brain and a warm heart? No man, in my opinion,
is a really good man save through the influence of good women."
It is impossible for me to recall much of what he said of the American
authors of whom we talked, with the exception of Poe; and there are
reasons why I should clearly remember in substance, and almost in words,
everything that was said of him. Of all writers, with one exception, Poe
interests me the most; and I judge that in interest, both as a
personality and as a literary artist, Doctor Bainbridge placed Edgar
Allan Poe first and uppermost among those who have left to the world a
legacy of English verse or prose. And this feeling was, I truly believe,
in no measure influenced by Poe's nationality. If Bainbridge possessed
any narrow national prejudices I never learned of them.
He spoke rapturously of Poe as a poet--"The Raven," as a matter of
course, receiving high praise: Of that unique and really grand poem, he
said that he thought it the best in the English language.
It was at this point in our conversation that he told me he rarely read
verse; that he had, with certain exceptions, never done so with much
pleasure, but that in some way he had managed to read nearly all the
noted poetry published in our language. Still, he said, there were poems
which absorbed and almost fascinated him. Of the English poets of the
present century, Byron alone had written enough poetry to prove himself
a poet; and he explained that in his opinion the writing of an
occasional or chance poem, though the poem were true poetry, did not
make of the author a poet. Then he mentioned a poem which for more than
a century has been by the critical world accepted as of the highest
order of true poetry. Gradually warming to the subject, he said:
"A poem like this is not to my mind poetry. Byron wrote true poetry, and
sufficient of it in his short life to prove himself ten times over a
poet. To compare this poem with Byron's poetry--say with parts of
'Childe Harold,' or 'The Prisoner of Chillon,' or with some of his
shorter poems--would be like comparing the most perfect mechanical
device with a graceful animal--say the mechanical imitation of a tiger
or a gazelle with the living original; the first a wonderfully moving
piece of machinery, illustrating the limit of human constructive power;
perfectly under control, the movements smooth, unvarying, rhythmical,
charming, excelling in agility and power its living prototype--but
still, scientific--to the discerning eye, artful. The other, something
more than rhythmical, more than smooth, beyond the control of human
agency, beyond the power of man to analyze as to synthetize--more than
science can explain, more than even art dare claim. The one explicable,
the other inexplicable; the one from the hand of patient skill--of
talent; the other a result of force mysterious, divine. The lions of
Alexius Comnenus, it is said, could roar louder than the lions of the
desert."
"But what of Poe, and 'The Raven?'" I asked.
"The surprising thing about 'The Raven' is," he said, "and I assert only
what I believe to be from internal evidence demonstrable--first, that
the poem arose out of a true poetic impulse of the soul; and, second,
that it discloses the very highest art possible to a writer. Now I truly
believe that the first writing of 'The Raven'--and, too, the stanzas
were probably not first written in their present published
order--conveyed Poe's poetic sense just as completely as the published
poem now does. But this was not sufficient for Edgar Allan Poe--for the
scientific man, the artful man, the poetic genius with a genius for
concentrated mental toil in the effort to attain literary perfection.
This makes 'The Raven' a curiosity in true poetic expression."
"Then you believe," I said, "that both the state of feeling from which
true poetry arises, and the particular words by which the feeling is
conveyed, are inspired."
"I do. But Poe was able actually to improve the language of inspiration,
whilst transmitting uninjured the poetic conception. Those stanzas in
Grey's 'Elegy' which convey from him to us the psychic wave of poetic
impulse, may have been hundreds of times altered in their wording,
through seven years of tentative effort; and it is possible that he
succeeded in retaining the original feeling--the poem is certainly
artistic. But the feeling conveyed by Grey is commonplace enough,
anyway; whilst that transmitted by Poe is wholly unique, and intensely
absorbing--indeed, a startling revelation. I have always felt that
Byron, Milton, Shakespeare, found within their souls their poetry, and
that the linguistic expression of it came to them as naturally as did
the feeling."
"Such minds," I said, "will always be a mystery to common mortals."
"I take it," replied Bainbridge, "that waves and wavelets of poetic
feeling are common enough among men--quite as common as mental pictures
of beautiful material images; but the rarity is in the word-conception,
which I hold must as a rule be spontaneous if it is to convey
unblemished the original feeling. The musical genius is able to convey
his psychic impression in harmonious sounds; the true poet, in words. To
the rest of us the process is, as you say, a mystery--we call it
inspiration.
"Take an isolated poem, such as under, say patriotic feeling, springs
from the mind of one who never again writes poetry; does this not help
to prove my theory that all true poetry is a result of inspiration--is
in its inception and in its word-expression quite extraneous to its
apparent author?
"To both my intellect and my feeling, 'The Raven' stands a beautiful
masterpiece, which, because it is both the product of a strange psychic
state and the work of intellect will probably be the last poem, of those
now extant, to be admired by the human race when intellectual
development and growth shall finally have driven from the lives and the
minds of men all romance, all sentiment, all poetry, leaving to the race
only intellect and will."
After some further talk, and in reply to a statement of my own,
Bainbridge said,
"Of course I can speak only for myself; and for me there is music in the
poetry of Byron and of Poe, and there is the psychic effect of color.
The rhythm in certain of their poems, with the arrangement of
word-sound, produces the saddest music possible, I think, to the soul of
man--a prevailing monotone so measured as to result in an effect
decidedly strange and quite indescribable. But the real peculiarity of
their poetry--and in this Poe excels Byron--is a psychic effect the same
as that which remains after viewing certain pictures in black and white,
the shade gradations of which are so artistic as to create an illusion
of color--sombre, highly shaded, yet color. This color effect of Poe's
poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first
reading, as I feel the music of his verse--a rereading, or the lapse of
time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of
Poe in the last two or three years, and at the present moment I feel
_Ulalume_ as I would some weird scene or picture viewed long ago."
I asked him what particular color effects Poe's poetry produced in his
mind, and he replied,
"The impression of red I do not at all retain. That of black, more or
less intense, is predominant; but the color effects of almost any
variegated landscape--red being excluded, and the scene having been
viewed by moonlight, or in the dusk of evening, or possibly on a densely
clouded day--is at this moment alive within me. And yet, with a single
exception, I have never received from musical or other sounds a psychic
color effect--the exception being that certain tones of a violin leave
the same mental impression as does the sight of purple. As I am not
acquainted with the technical language of either painter or musician, I
can attempt to describe these effects only in common language. I speak
for myself only, and am anything but dogmatic on the subject of poetry.
The symbolism of Poe's verse we must solve, each for himself. To me, for
myself, the solution seems not difficult--and so no doubt says another;
but on comparison these solutions would no doubt be very different."
But highly as Bainbridge estimated Poe's verse, he placed Poe even
higher among writers of prose fiction than among poets. As I have said,
I am myself an admirer of Poe. His prose I have always thought the work
of a true genius--something, as Doctor Bainbridge said, "more than art,
aided by the most perfect art." But when we came to speak of his prose
writings, Bainbridge was able to express in language all that I had felt
of Poe, and to disclose and explain components of his genius that I had
never before fully recognized.
I then asked Bainbridge what it was in Poe's prose that he so much
admired.
"Poe's strong element of power as a writer of short stories," said
Bainbridge, "is, I think, his scientific imagination--the same capacity,
strange as the statement may appear, that, when directed into another
channel, makes a great physicist. It strikes me as inaccurate to say
that Newton discovered the law of gravitation. Newton imagined the fact
of a law of physical gravitation; and then he proceeded to prove _the_
law of gravitation, accomplishing the discovery by means of a second
attribute of genius--viz., tireless mental energy--the possession of a
talent for rigorous mental application and severe nervous strain. In the
sense that Columbus discovered America--in that sense, Newton discovered
the law of gravitation: Columbus imagined an America, and then proceeded
to make a physical demonstration of his belief by discovering the
Bahamas. The same faculty--scientific imagination--in Poe gave us 'A
Descent into the Maelstrom, The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' and other of
his tales. And not alone in physics, but in metaphysics, did his
imagination open up to him just conceptions; so that in the field of
both healthy and morbid mental action his 'intuitive' knowledge was
unerring. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is so true to the real in
conception, and so consummate in portrayal, that the more one knows
about the mind, the more he inclines to wonder whether these
compositions might not have been aided by actual personal experience.
Yet these delineations are purely imaginative. Take 'The Imp of the
Perverse, The Tell-Tale Heart,' and similar of his stories, not all of
which could in reason have come within the experience of one man, and
which are undoubtedly grounded upon intuitive suggestion."