The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.1
—De Béranger
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 eyelike windows—upon 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 afterdream of the reveler upon opium—the
bitter lapse into everyday 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 that lay in unruffled luster by the
dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon
the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems,
and the vacant and eyelike 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—that 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 webwork 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 long 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 somber 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 ennuyé 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 molded 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 luster 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. 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 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—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 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 sulfureous 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. 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.
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 rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in the 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,” 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-tunéd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.