A Strange Discovery by Charles Romyn Dake
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Charles Romyn Dake >> A Strange Discovery
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It was on the eighth day of my stay in Bellevue, that, on starting forth
from the hotel one morning, I saw Doctor Castleton standing before the
Loomis House, in one of his favorite attitudes--that is, with his head
and shoulders thrown back and his hands upon his hips--looking intently
at a young man who stood speaking with an aged farmer across the way,
near the street curbing--a harmless-looking youth, with dark blue eyes,
and straight, very dark hair--in fact, the clerical-looking young man
whom I had seen from my windows. Something in the man's make-up--perhaps
something in his attire--suggested the stranger in town. Doctor
Castleton's large black eyes flashed irefully, and he was evidently
gratified at my approach. A complete stranger in my place might have
thought his arrival opportune, and have looked upon himself as a
diverting instrument in higher hands employed to prevent bloodshed. As I
stopped by the doctor's side, he said, with ill-suppressed agitation,
"That d----d villain over there has got to leave town. He calls himself
a doctor, but I have set in motion the wheels of the law of this great
State of Illinois, and I'll expose the infernal rascal." Then, with a
dark, knowing look at me, he hissed (though none of his preceding words
had been audible across the street), "An 'Irregular,' sir--cursed
sugar-and-water quack--a figure 9 with the tail rubbed off. Why, sir"
(in a more conversational but still emphatic tone), "_I_ have given
sixty grains of calomel at a dose, and I have given a tenth of a grain
of calomel at a dose; I would give a man a hundred grains of quinine,
and I have done it; I have" (and here he took from his pocket a small
round lozenge or button of bone) "--I have bored into the brains of
man--into the Corinthian Capital of Mortality, so to speak. When that
man" (pointing with his right forefinger to the circle of bone in his
left palm) "was kicked in the head by his mule, three of my colleagues
were on the scene before me--standing around like old women, doing
nothing. _I_ have elaborate instruments, sir--I don't read any more
books--the world's literature is here" (tapping his forehead). "I've
thought too much to care for other men's ideas. Like old women, I was
saying, sir. 'Give me a poker,' I yelled--' give me anything.' I sent
for my trephine. Great God, how the blood flew, and the bone creaked! I
raised the depressed bone. The man lives. I've done everything, in my
life. And now a cursed quack comes to town--. Where's his wife? I
say--where's his suffering children?--Don't tell me, anybody, that the
man's not married, and run away from his suffering wife. Take his trail;
glide like the wily savage back over his course, and mark me, sir,
you'll trace the pathway of a besom of destruction: weeping mothers,
broken-hearted fathers, daughters bowed in the dust. What's he here for?
Why didn't he stay where he was? But I'll drive him out of town--you
will see--bag and baggage: the wires are set--the avalanche
approaches--he is doomed."
Two days later, at the same spot, I came upon Doctor Castleton in
conversation with the harmless-looking young man, to whom the doctor
formally presented me. The name of the young man, as stated by
Castleton, and as I already knew, was "Doctor Bainbridge." We exchanged
a few words, he extended to me an invitation to call upon him, and he
accepted an urgent request from me to visit me at the hotel. As my stay
in America would probably last but a few days longer, I proposed that
the evening of that same day be selected as the time for his visit, and
to this proposal he readily assented. Then, with a quiet smile, he bowed
and left us. As he walked away Doctor Castleton remarked,
"That young man is a genius, sir. Belongs to the Corinthian Capital of
Mortality. Trust me, sir, he's the coming man in this town. He will be a
power here, in the years to come. I read a man, sir, as you would read a
book."
I then invited Doctor Castleton to come to my rooms that evening, even
if he could spare no more than a few moments; and he promised to come,
"Though," he said, "I may not be able more than to run in, and run out
again." Bainbridge, the new Bellevue candidate for medical practice,
could devote his hours as he should elect; but Castleton, "for twenty
years the guardian of the lives of thousands," must abstract, as best he
might, a few minutes from the onerous duties entailed by the exacting
wishes of his many invalid patrons.
Later in the day, I made arrangements for a little luncheon to be served
that evening in my rooms. There was something about this Bainbridge that
impelled me to know him better. I had already made up my mind that I
should like him: his were those clear blue eyes that calmly seemed to
understand the world around--truth-loving eyes. He had to my mind the
appearance of a person with large capacity for physical pleasure, yet
that of one who possessed complete control over every like and dislike
of his being. I at first took him to be extremely reticent; but later I
learned, that, when the proper chord of sympathy was touched, he
responded in perfect torrents of spoken confidence. So I that evening
sat in the larger of my rooms--my "sitting-room"--in momentary
expectation of the arrival of one or both of my invited guests.
The THIRD Chapter
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."
I asked him which of Poe's tales he thought the best.
"That would indeed be difficult to determine," he replied. "If the
criterion is to be my own intellectual enjoyment, I should mention one;
if my feelings, then another. It is possible that I might select one in
which my intellectual enjoyment, and my feelings pure and simple, were
about equally engaged. We shall probably agree that the most important
object of fiction is to produce in the reader a state of feeling, just
as musical composition is intended to produce a state of feeling--the
short story being comparable with a brief musical production intended to
produce a single variety of emotion; the novel, to the music of an opera
with its many parts, intended each to excite a particular state of
feeling. Naturally prose fiction may, and almost necessarily does, have
other objects. Now the reading of 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
produces a certain state of emotion, and that wholly apart from any
appeal to intellect; no endeavor to do more than produce that state of
feeling is made, nothing more than that is effected, and that much is
attained in a manner which no pen that has traced short-story fiction,
save that of Poe, has ever accomplished. Hence, if the production of
feeling--an appeal to the purely moral side of the triangle of mind--be
the paramount essential in fiction, 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is
the best short story in the English language."
Here Doctor Bainbridge rose from his chair, and taking a turn or two
across the floor, continued, in tones indicating vexation,
"Why has not somebody with a ray of the imagination necessary to a
comprehension of Poe's genius given us at least a decent sketch of his
brief life! Was Poe in a state of mental aberration when he made
Griswold his literary executor? Is the world forever to hear of him only
from those who see the dark side of his life and know nothing of his
life's work?--from those who look at his life and his life's work
through the smoked glass of their dull provincial minds? Let us hope for
an assay of what is left to us of Poe--an assay which, not wholly
ignoring the little dross, will still lose no grain of the pure, virgin
gold, and give to the world something approaching what is due to the
genius himself, and what, with such a subject, is due to the world."
"Let me alter my question--or, I should say, ask a different one," I
said, when he had again seated himself: "Which of Poe's stories most
interested you? From which did you receive the most satisfaction?"
"I have been more occupied and interested by 'The Narrative of A. Gordon
Pym' than by any two or three of his other stories."
I expressed surprise at this avowal; and my comments on what appeared to
me to show a peculiar taste implied a desire for explanation. He
continued:
"Although 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' has served as a suggestion,
or even a pattern, for some of our best recent stories of adventure, and
although it has many points of excellence in itself, it is not the story
alone, but the opportunity which the story affords of an analysis of
Poe's mind, that creates the greater interest for me. I have always been
puzzled to find a reasonably adequate cause for the incomplete state of
that narrative. The supposition that Poe had not at his disposal, at the
moment he required it, the necessary time for its completion is an
hypothesis which I only mention to dispose of. At its close he wrote and
added to the narrative a 'Note' of nearly a thousand words; and in the
time required for the penning of that addition, he could have brought
the story to--perhaps an abrupt, but still, an artistic close. No. Then
did Poe not complete 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' because his
imagination failed him--failed to supply material of such a quality as
his refined and faultless taste demanded? If so, then why did he begin
it? Why write more than sixty thousand words in his usual careful and
precise style, on a subject to him little known, in to him a new field
of literary effort? He could in the time required to write 'The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' have written from five to ten short stories
along familiar lines. No: none of these hypotheses explains the
unfinished state of that narrative. My explanation is that the story has
a foundation in fact, and that Poe himself never learned more than a
foundation for the portion which he wrote. Its leading character next to
Pym is one Dirk Peters, a sailor, mutineer, etc. It is my theory that
Pym and Peters existed in fact, but that Poe never met either of them,
though he did meet sailors who had known Dirk Peters, and that he heard
from them the first part of the story, in the form in which it grew to
be repeated by seafaring men along the New England coast in the '30s and
'40s. Having heard what he supposed to be sufficient, with the aid of
his own imagination, to make an interesting story for publication, Poe
began and continued to write. Then, as he progressed, he found that his
imagination was embarrassed--frustrated by the known facts already
employed--whilst it was not assisted by new facts which he was positive
existed, but which he could not procure. As he attempted to close the
narrative, the cold, written page was a very different thing from what
he had conceived it would be as he sat in the tap-room of some New
England old 'Sailor's Home,' with a couple of glasses of Burton ale on
the table, listening through the drowsy afternoon to the fact and
fiction of some old 'tar,' as the two looked across the white-sanded
floor at the old moss-grown dock without, and listened to the salt
wavelets splashing against its rotting timbers, and watched the far-
distant sails on the outer sea. It is not very difficult to picture to
one's self Poe searching among these sailors' lodging-houses for Dirk
Peters; nor is it unreasonable to assume that he did so search for him.
If Dirk Peters was twenty-seven years old in 1827, when the mutiny
occurred, he was only forty-nine at the time of Poe's death--in fact,
would be only seventy-seven if now alive. Poe says in his 'Note,' that
'Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive,
and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may
hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion
of Mr. Pym's account.' I have no doubt that Poe eventually learned
exactly where Peters resided; but no matter how much Poe may have
desired to meet with Peters, he could not have done so. In the '40s it
was a long, tedious, expensive journey from New York to Illinois. Still,
Poe hoped some day to meet Peters, and did not care to say to the public
exactly where he could be met with. Then came Poe's unutterably sad
death, leaving the narrative incomplete."
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