MISCELLANY 97
THE
FALL OF
THE HOUSE OF USHER
BY
EDGAR ALLAN POE
PART 1
Son
cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne. |
De Béranger.
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless,
in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its
proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but
many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately
reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its
wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The
MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily
illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him—and of an earnest desire to
see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of
attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady.
It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—it was the
apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed me no room for
hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very
singular summons.
Although,
as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my
friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware,
however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a
peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in
many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of
munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable
beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact,
that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at
no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in
the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very
temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while
running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises
with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the
possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have
exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue,
and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony
with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the
original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the
“House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the
peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.
I have said
that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of looking down
within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be
no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for
why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.
Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror
as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again
uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in
my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to
show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon
my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain
there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an
atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked
up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and
mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking
off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly
the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an
excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi
overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the
eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion
of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency
between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of
the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious
totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault,
with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication
of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability.
Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front,
made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the
sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing
these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting
took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of
stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate
passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I
encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague
sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while
the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebony
blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled
as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been
accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar
was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which
ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician
of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low
cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The
valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.
The room
in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long,
narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to
be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made
their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently
distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain
to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and
fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was
profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments
lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that
I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable
gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my
entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and
greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of
an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of
the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect
sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon
him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so
terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with
difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the man being
before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face
had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large,
liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but
of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with
a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin,
speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more
than web-like softness and tenuity;—these features, with an inordinate
expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not
easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing
character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey,
lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of
the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled
and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded,
and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face,
I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea
of simple humanity.
In the
manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency;
and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to
overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something
of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by
reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his
peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately
vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision
(when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of
energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding
enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural
utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable
eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was
thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me,
and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length,
into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a
constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a
remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly
soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of
these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps,
the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered
much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone
endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all
flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and
there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did
not inspire him with horror.
To an
anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said
he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not
otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in
themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the
most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of
soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in
terror. In this unnerved, in this pitiable, condition I feel that the period
will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in
some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”
I learned,
moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another
singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain
superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and
whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence
whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be
re-stated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance
of his family mansion had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over
his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets,
and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought
about upon the morale of his existence.
He
admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom
which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more
palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the
evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole
companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,”
he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the
hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he
spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote
portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared.
I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I
found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor
oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length,
closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of
the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive
that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers
through which trickled many passionate tears.
The
disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A
settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although
transient affections of a partially cataleptical character were the unusual
diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her
malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but on the closing in of
the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me
at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the
destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would
thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living,
would be seen by me no more.
For
several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself; and
during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the
melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in
a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a
closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the
recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all
attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive
quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in
one unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall
ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with
the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an
idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he
involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality
threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring
forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain
singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von
Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which
grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly,
because I shuddered knowing not why—from these paintings (vivid as their images
now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter
simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention.
If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at
least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an
intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the
contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.
One of the
phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit
of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small
picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or
tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device.
Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet
was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other
artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled
throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.
I have
just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all
music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of
stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus
confined himself upon the guitar which gave birth, in great measure, to the
fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus
could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as
well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied
himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental
collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as
observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The
words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the
more forcibly impressed with it as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic
current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a
full consciousness on the part of Usher of the tottering of his lofty reason
upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled “The Haunted Palace,” ran very
nearly, if not accurately, thus:—
I. |
|
In the
greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion— It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair. |
|
II. |
|
Banners
yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow; (This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago); And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A winged odor went away. |
|
III. |
|
Wanderers in
that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically To a lute’s well-tunèd law; Round about a throne, where sitting (Porphyrogene!) In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen. |
|
IV. |
|
And all with
pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. |
|
V. |
|
But evil
things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. |
|
VI. |
|
And travellers
now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more. |
|
I well
remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of
thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention not
so much on account of its novelty (for other men* have thought thus), as on account of the
pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was
that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy,
the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain
conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the
full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief,
however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of
the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he
imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order
of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread
them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long
undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the
still waters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be
seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The
result was discoverable, he added, in that silent yet importunate and terrible
influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and
which made him what I now saw him—what he was. Such opinions need no
comment, and I will make none.
To be
continued
