On a bitter evening of December, I arrived by mail in a large town,
which was then the residence of an intimate friend, one of those gifted
youths who cultivate poetry and the belles-lettres, and call themselves
students at law. My first business, after supper, was to visit him at
the office of his distinguished instructor. As I have said, it was a
bitter night, clear starlight, but cold as Nova Zembla,—the
shop-windows along the street being frosted, so as almost to hide the
lights, while the wheels of coaches thundered equally loud over frozen
earth and pavements of stone. There was no snow, either on the ground
or the roofs of the houses. The wind blew so violently, that I had but
to spread my cloak like a main-sail, and scud along the street at the
rate of ten knots, greatly envied by other navigators, who were beating
slowly up, with the gale right in their teeth. One of these I capsized,
but was gone on the wings of the wind before he could even vociferate
an oath.
After this picture of an inclement night, behold us seated by a great
blazing fire, which looked so comfortable and delicious that I felt
inclined to lie down and roll among the hot coals. The usual furniture
of a lawyer’s office was around us,—rows of volumes in sheepskin, and a
multitude of writs, summonses, and other legal papers, scattered over
the desks and tables. But there were certain objects which seemed to
intimate that we had little dread of the intrusion of clients, or of
the learned counsellor himself, who, indeed, was attending court in a
distant town. A tall, decanter-shaped bottle stood on the table,
between two tumblers, and beside a pile of blotted manuscripts,
altogether dissimilar to any law documents recognized in our courts. My
friend, whom I shall call Oberon,—it was a name of fancy and friendship
between him and me,—my friend Oberon looked at these papers with a
peculiar expression of disquietude.
“I do believe,” said he, soberly, “or, at least, I could believe, if I
chose, that there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have
read them, and know what I mean,—that conception in which I endeavored
to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions
and the written records of witchcraft. Oh, I have a horror of what was
created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave
that dark idea a sort of material existence! Would they were out of my
sight!”
“And of mine, too,” thought I.
“You remember,” continued Oberon, “how the hellish thing used to suck
away the happiness of those who, by a simple concession that seemed
almost innocent, subjected themselves to his power. Just so my peace is
gone, and all by these accursed manuscripts. Have you felt nothing of
the same influence?”
“Nothing,” replied I, “unless the spell be hid in a desire to turn
novelist, after reading your delightful tales.”
“Novelist!” exclaimed Oberon, half seriously. “Then, indeed, my devil
has his claw on you! You are gone! You cannot even pray for
deliverance! But we will be the last and only victims; for this night I
mean to burn the manuscripts, and commit the fiend to his retribution
in the flames.”
“Burn your tales!” repeated I, startled at the desperation of the idea.
“Even so,” said the author, despondingly. “You cannot conceive what an
effect the composition of these tales has had on me. I have become
ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am
surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the
realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the
world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,—a solitude in the
midst of men,-where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels
as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are ashes, perhaps I
shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover, the sacrifice is
less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish them.”
“That does make a difference, indeed,” said I.
“They have been offered, by letter,” continued Oberon, reddening with
vexation, “to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to
read their answers; and read them you should, only that I burnt them as
fast as they arrived. One man publishes nothing but school-books;
another has five novels already under examination.”
“What a voluminous mass the unpublished literature of America must be!”
cried I.
“Oh, the Alexandrian manuscripts were nothing to it!” said my friend.
“Well, another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I
verily believe, to escape publishing my book. Several, however, would
not absolutely decline the agency, on my advancing half the cost of an
edition, and giving bonds for the remainder, besides a high percentage
to themselves, whether the book sells or not. Another advises a
subscription.”
“The villain!” exclaimed I.
“A fact!” said Oberon. “In short, of all the seventeen booksellers,
only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he—a literary
dabbler himself, I should judge—has the impertinence to criticise them,
proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a
general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he
will not be concerned on any terms.”
“It might not be amiss to pull that fellow’s nose,” remarked I.
“If the whole ‘trade’ had one common nose, there would be some
satisfaction in pulling it,” answered the author. “But, there does seem
to be one honest man among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he
tells me fairly, that no American publisher will meddle with an
American work,—seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new
one,—unless at the writer’s risk.”
“The paltry rogues!” cried I. “Will they live by literature, and yet
risk nothing for its sake? But, after all, you might publish on your
own account.”
“And so I might,” replied Oberon. “But the devil of the business is
this. These people have put me so out of conceit with the tales, that I
loathe the very thought of them, and actually experience a physical
sickness of the stomach, whenever I glance at them on the table. I tell
you there is a demon in them! I anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing
them in the blaze; such as I should feel in taking vengeance on an
enemy, or destroying something noxious.”
I did not very strenuously oppose this determination, being privately
of opinion, in spite of my partiality for the author, that his tales
would make a more brilliant appearance in the fire than anywhere else.
Before proceeding to execution, we broached the bottle of champagne,
which Oberon had provided for keeping up his spirits in this doleful
business. We swallowed each a tumblerful, in sparkling commotion; it
went bubbling down our throats, and brightened my eyes at once, but
left my friend sad and heavy as before. He drew the tales towards him,
with a mixture of natural affection and natural disgust, like a father
taking a deformed infant into his arms.
“Pooh! Pish! Pshaw!” exclaimed he, holding them at arm’s-length. “It
was Gray’s idea of heaven, to lounge on a sofa and read new novels.
Now, what more appropriate torture would Dante himself have contrived,
for the sinner who perpetrates a bad book, than to be continually
turning over the manuscript?”
“It would fail of effect,” said I, “because a bad author is always his
own great admirer.”
“I lack that one characteristic of my tribe,—the only desirable one,”
observed Oberon. “But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn
over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a
hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing
air, I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a
race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself
during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the
rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like
faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That
scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at
midnight: they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came,
and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own
enchantments!”
“There must have been a sort of happiness in all this,” said I, smitten
with a strange longing to make proof of it.
“There may be happiness in a fever fit,” replied the author. “And then
the various moods in which I wrote! Sometimes my ideas were like
precious stones under the earth, requiring toil to dig them up, and
care to polish and brighten them; but often a delicious stream of
thought would gush out upon the page at once, like water sparkling up
suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I gnawed my pen
hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil, as if there
were a wall of ice between me and my subject.”
“Do you now perceive a corresponding difference,” inquired I, “between
the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
mind?”
“No,” said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. “I find no
traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
humorous in a dream,—and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
awake.”
My friend now threw sticks of wood and dry chips upon the fire, and
seeing it blaze like Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, seized the champagne
bottle, and drank two or three brimming bumpers, successively. The
heady liquor combined with his agitation to throw him into a species of
rage. He laid violent hands on the tales. In one instant more, their
faults and beauties would alike have vanished in a glowing purgatory.
But, all at once, I remembered passages of high imagination, deep
pathos, original thoughts, and points of such varied excellence, that
the vastness of the sacrifice struck me most forcibly. I caught his
arm.
“Surely, you do not mean to burn them!” I exclaimed.
“Let me alone!” cried Oberon, his eyes flashing fire. “I will burn
them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have me a damned
author?—To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint
praise, bestowed, for pity’s sake, against the giver’s conscience! A
hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous thoughts! An outlaw
from the protection of the grave,—one whose ashes every careless foot
might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death! Am
I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure me from the whole? No!
There go the tales! May my hand wither when it would write another!”
The deed was done. He had thrown the manuscripts into the hottest of
the fire, which at first seemed to shrink away, but soon curled around
them, and made them a part of its own fervent brightness. Oberon stood
gazing at the conflagration, and shortly began to soliloquize, in the
wildest strain, as if Fancy resisted and became riotous, at the moment
when he would have compelled her to ascend that funeral pile. His words
described objects which he appeared to discern in the fire, fed by his
own precious thoughts; perhaps the thousand visions which the writer’s
magic had incorporated with these pages became visible to him in the
dissolving heat, brightening forth ere they vanished forever; while the
smoke, the vivid sheets of flame, the ruddy and whitening coals, caught
the aspect of a varied scenery.
“They blaze,” said he, “as if I had steeped them in the intensest
spirit of genius. There I see my lovers clasped in each other’s arms.
How pure the flame that bursts from their glowing hearts! And yonder
the features of a villain writhing in the fire that shall torment him
to eternity. My holy men, my pious and angelic women, stand like
martyrs amid the flames, their mild eyes lifted heavenward. Ring out
the bells! A city is on fire. See!—destruction roars through my dark
forests, while the lakes boil up in steaming billows, and the mountains
are volcanoes, and the sky kindles with a lurid brightness! All
elements are but one pervading flame! Ha! The fiend!”
I was somewhat startled by this latter exclamation. The tales were
almost consumed, but just then threw forth a broad sheet of fire, which
flickered as with laughter, making the whole room dance in its
brightness, and then roared portentously up the chimney.
“You saw him? You must have seen him!” cried Oberon. “How he glared at
me and laughed, in that last sheet of flame, with just the features
that I imagined for him! Well! The tales are gone.”
The papers were indeed reduced to a heap of black cinders, with a
multitude of sparks hurrying confusedly among them, the traces of the
pen being now represented by white lines, and the whole mass fluttering
to and fro in the draughts of air. The destroyer knelt down to look at
them.
“What is more potent than fire!” said he, in his gloomiest tone. “Even
thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it. In this
little time, it has annihilated the creations of long nights and days,
which I could no more reproduce, in their first glow and freshness,
than cause ashes and whitened bones to rise up and live. There, too, I
sacrificed the unborn children of my mind. All that I had
accomplished—all that I planned for future years—has perished by one
common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The deed has been my
fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life,—a long repentance of
this hour,—and at last an obscure grave, where they will bury and
forget me!”
As the author concluded his dolorous moan, the extinguished embers
arose and settled down and arose again, and finally flew up the
chimney, like a demon with sable wings. Just as they disappeared, there
was a loud and solitary cry in the street below us. “Fire!” Fire! Other
voices caught up that terrible word, and it speedily became the shout
of a multitude. Oberon started to his feet, in fresh excitement.
“A fire on such a night!” cried he. “The wind blows a gale, and
wherever it whirls the flames, the roofs will flash up like gunpowder.
Every pump is frozen up, and boiling water would turn to ice the moment
it was flung from the engine. In an hour, this wooden town will be one
great bonfire! What a glorious scene for my next—Pshaw!”
The street was now all alive with footsteps, and the air full of
voices. We heard one engine thundering round a corner, and another
rattling from a distance over the pavements. The bells of three
steeples clanged out at once, spreading the alarm to many a neighboring
town, and expressing hurry, confusion, and terror, so inimitably that I
could almost distinguish in their peal the burden of the universal
cry,—“Fire! Fire! Fire!”
“What is so eloquent as their iron tongues!” exclaimed Oberon. “My
heart leaps and trembles, but not with fear. And that other sound,
too,—deep and awful as a mighty organ,—the roar and thunder of the
multitude on the pavement below! Come! We are losing time. I will cry
out in the loudest of the uproar, and mingle my spirit with the wildest
of the confusion, and be a bubble on the top of the ferment!”
From the first outcry, my forebodings had warned me of the true object
and centre of alarm. There was nothing now but uproar, above, beneath,
and around us; footsteps stumbling pell-mell up the public staircase,
eager shouts and heavy thumps at the door, the whiz and dash of water
from the engines, and the crash of furniture thrown upon the pavement.
At once, the truth flashed upon my friend. His frenzy took the hue of
joy, and, with a wild gesture of exultation, he leaped almost to the
ceiling of the chamber.
“My tales!” cried Oberon. “The chimney! The roof! The Fiend has gone
forth by night, and startled thousands in fear and wonder from their
beds! Here I stand,—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set
the town on fire! Huzza!”