constrained effort of the ennuye 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 wan 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 eve, 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 odours 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 endeavours
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
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
cars. 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 vaguenesses 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 endeavour 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 splendour.
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
his 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
