 | The snow-image |  |
THE DEVIL IN MANUSCRIPT.
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 mainsail,
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
sheep-skin, 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
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. O! 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!
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 book-sellers.
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 schoolbooks;
another has five novels already under examination.”
“What a voluminous mass the unpublished literature
of America must be!” cried I.
“O! 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
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 criticize 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
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
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
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
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
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 stret 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 burthen 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!”
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