Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/49

 Rh not accidental; it is a part of a studied and predetermined effect. Bacon had said, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion," and Poe quotes and re-quotes the saying both as defense and as goal of his own practise. The reader is justified in saying of Poe's studied descriptions and of his fictive characters that they are not accurate transcripts from real life, but he is not justified in saying that Poe was not an accurate observer. Sensitiveness to the abnormal presupposes an even greater sensitiveness to the normal. Everything that is strange to us in Poe's creations was strange first to him. There is never for a moment in his work any suggestion of inability to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal, between the natural and the bizarre. "Poe was not a victim of delusions," says Curtis Hidden Page, "but a creature of illusions." He loved mystery and mystification but he was not a mystic.

Note now the studied strangeness that haunts the interior of Roderick Usher's room in The Fall of the House Usher:

"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,