My dearest Edmund,
Today I looked through the window toward Stone Hill and saw you in the Heavens all fiery bright. Come to me come to me in a shower of fire — O my bright angel — my King — you are a stag of the forest — a lion of the mountains. How my soul aches for you. May God forgive
Vail’s journal was also destroyed, but the incidents at Strawson did not pass unnoticed and found their way into several diaries, in particular that of Vail’s brother Thatcher, from which we may reconstruct the apparent course of events. It appears that Vail absented himself every other day from Rose Cottage, leaving before dawn and returning late at night. For at least one month and probably two, until the end of August, Moorash visited Charlotte Vail regularly. They never left the house. Where could they go? Thatcher Vail’s diary speaks of “disgusting licentiousness” and the “shrill laughter of devils behind muslin curtains”; in assessing such statements it must be remembered that he speaks not only as the outraged older brother but also as a man who, two years earlier, unsuccessfully courted the fifteen-year-old Charlotte Singleton and was rejected in favor of his own brother. The love of Moorash and Charlotte Vail was certainly physical, and desperately unhappy. Charlotte, who had always admired and even loved her husband, was anguished by guilt; Moorash, always scrupulous to a fault, was conscious of injuring his friend in the very act of fulfilling his request; and despite his fierce attachment to Charlotte, he kept waiting for her to ask him to go, please go, and was always conscious of holding himself back. Vail himself could no longer bear the sight of his former friend; he was simply waiting for the hellish summer to end. In early September he wrote a second letter to Moorash, in which he offered to release his wife to him, on the condition that he marry her. This letter appears to have brought about a crisis: Charlotte declared hysterically that she could never abandon her husband, and she and Moorash vowed to “die” to each other forever. The vow was broken in a week, when Charlotte in a state bordering on madness arrived unannounced at Stone Hill Cottage shortly before midnight. Moorash would not see her; she spent the night in Elizabeth’s arms, weeping uncontrollably. In the morning Elizabeth returned with her to Rose Cottage, where Vail declared that he was leaving for Boston the next day, and that Charlotte was welcome to accompany him as his lawful wife or to leave him forever. Elizabeth spent the night at Rose Cottage and saw Charlotte into the coach the next morning. Vail settled in Boston and began his swift rise to fame as a portraitist, noted for the clarity of his flesh tones; he never returned to Strawson. A portrait of him in 1846 by Chester Calcott shows a man with melancholy eyes and a stern mouth. Charlotte remained his devoted wife; only, she was often tired, and liked to keep to herself, out of the social whirl. Moorash shut himself up in his studio and finished the Nachtstück before the end of September.
THE HOUSE OF USHER
1840
Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 37 3/8 in.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Although Moorash might well have read a copy of the book, there is no reference to it in Elizabeth’s Journal, which does, however, mention “The Fall of the House of Usher” in passing (8 December 1840) and never refers to any other tale by Poe. It is therefore possible that Moorash read the story in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1839), a copy of which might have been brought to him or Elizabeth by William Pinney or any one of several other visitors during 1839 and 1840. The painting was begun some time in October and completed before Christmas.
The picture has been taken to represent the collapse of the House of Usher in the famous last paragraph (see Havemeyer, p. 79), but such a reading presents two difficulties: the word “fall” is conspicuously absent from the title of the painting, and the painting does not actually show the dreamlike house falling into the tarn. The second objection is perhaps the less decisive, for Moorash might well have intended to represent the fall in a non-literal fashion, but the title cannot so easily be explained away. The striking presence of red tints, like flakes of fire, that flash up among the browns and blacks are supposed by Havemeyer to represent the murky light of the blood-red moon, but the red tints may with equal justice be seen to allude to other reds in the tale, such as the “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light” that make their way through the trellised panes of Usher’s studio, or the drops of blood on Madeline’s white robes. It is more to the point that the dissolving, vanishing, visionary house, painted in nervous small strokes separated by intervals of brown or black, is mirrored in the dark tarn. The whole effect is less that of a fall than of the dissipation of a fever-vision: a dream-house over its dream-reflection vanishing into black depths. It is as if Moorash had imagined the House of Usher to be insubstantial by nature, to be perpetually on the verge of dissolving or disappearing.
The motif of doubling, so reminiscent of Clair de lune, and the allusion to a brother and sister, suggest that the painting, and the tale itself, must have had a strong personal meaning for Moorash. If Moorash saw himself as Roderick Usher, and Elizabeth as Usher’s sister, then the painting may express his sense of guilt over burying Elizabeth alive at Stone Hill Cottage, and over their mutual, fatal interdependence; but in the last analysis, the picture remains enigmatic.
ELIZABETH AND SOPHIA
1841
Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 × 34 5/8 in.
After Pinney’s marriage proposal to Elizabeth on the last day of August 1839 he returned with Sophia to Boston, but we read in Elizabeth’s Journal of a Thanksgiving visit at Stone Hill Cottage, and during the following spring, when Pinney returned to Black Lake, the four friends were once again often in one another’s company, though not quite as often as during the first summer. Moorash’s summer affair with Charlotte Vail was apparently kept secret from William and Sophia, who nevertheless must have heard rumors and noted his frequent and uncharacteristic absences. The precise state of knowledge among the four remains uncertain, but it appears to have been as follows: Edmund and Elizabeth never spoke of Charlotte Vail to William or Sophia, who half-knew about it and chose not to investigate. William’s relation to Elizabeth had by now taken its new shape: he resigned himself gracefully to the role of rejected suitor and resumed, with a touch of wistfulness, his enjoyment of her company. His friendship for Edmund underwent no discernible change, though there is evidence in Sophia’s letters to her friends Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton that he must at times have felt he had lost Elizabeth to her own brother. The one striking change was in Sophia: she grew markedly cool to Edmund, criticized him to her brother, and grew still more devoted to Elizabeth.