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His technique is brilliant, his wit keen, and his energy of the bold
and dashing military type. This audacious energy leads him very often
into sprawling situations, a worship of imperialism, and reckless
statements concerning moral and spiritual laws. Unlike Bret Harte, who
was in many respects one of Kipling's ideals, he leaves his bad and
coarse characters disreputable to the end. This is due in a large
measure to the lack of warmth and light in his writings. In
contradiction to this type of his works his _William the Conqueror_
and _An Habitation Enforced_ are filled with a gentle-human sympathy
that causes us to forget and forgive any vulgarity he may have used in
his more primitive and coarse characters. Even Kipling partisans must
sometimes wish that Kipling's vision were not so dimmed by the British
flag and that he might forget for a time the British soldier he loves
so ardently.

His writings since 1899 are much more mechanical than his earlier
works. He seems, at times, to resort to the orator's superficial
tricks in his attempts to attract readers. The _Athenaeum_, a friendly
organ, says of his later work: "In his new part--the missionary of
Empire--Mr. Kipling is living the strenuous life. He has frankly
abandoned story telling, and is using his complete and powerful armory
in the interests of patriotic zeal."

Whatever may be the final judgment of the world concerning Kipling's
claim to literary genius, the young student may rest assured that
there is no one in England who can compare with this strenuous and
versatile writer. He is original and powerful, interesting and
realistic. He is a lover of the men who earn their bread by the sweat
of their faces and a despiser of "flannelled fools." He lacks the
day-dreams of Stevenson and preaches from every housetop the gospel of
virile, acting morality. Many of his readers have criticised adversely
his spiritual teachings, because of the furious energy with which he
denounces an apathetic religion and eulogizes the person who works
with all his might, day after day, for the highest he knows and never
fears the day of death and judgment.


GENERAL REFERENCES

_The Book of the Short Story_, Alexander Jessup.

_The Short Story in English_, Henry Seidel Canby.

_Bibliography of Kipling's Works_, Eugene P, Saxton.

"Contradictory Elements in Rudyard Kipling," _Current Literature_, 44:
274.

"Where Kipling Stands," _Bookman_, 29: 120-122.

"Are there two Kiplings?" _Cosmopolitan_, 31: 653-660.

"Literary Style of Kipling," _Lippincott_, 73: 99-103.


COLLATERAL READINGS

_The Man Who Would be King_, Rudyard Kipling.

_William the Conqueror_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Phantom Rickshaw_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Finest Story in the World_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Under the Deodars_, Rudyard Kipling.

_An Habitation Enforced_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Plain Tales from the Hills_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Light that Failed_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Wee Willie Winkie_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Baa Baa Black Sheep_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Captains Courageous_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Jungle Books_, Rudyard Kipling.

_They_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Brushwood Boy_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Christ in Flanders_, Honore de Balzac.

_The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock_, Thomas Nelson Page.

_A New England Nun_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.

_Outcasts of Poker Flat_, Bret Harte.

_The Siege of Berlin_, Alphonse Dadoed.

_The Prisoner of Assiout_, Grant Allen.

_A Terribly Strange Bed_, Wilkie Collins.

_The Prisoners_, Guy de Maupassant.

_Mr. Isaacs_, F. Marion Crawford.

_Where Love Is, There God Is Also_, Leo Tolstoi.



THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER [1]

_By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)_

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
--De Beranger.[2]

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--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[3] 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 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 woodwork which has rotted for 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 ebon
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 arose 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 _ennuye_[4] 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 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[5] 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 restated--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[6]; 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[7] 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 sulphurous
luster 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[8]. 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
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.[9]

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 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 rimed 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,"[10] 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-tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)[11]
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.

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