THE ANGEL ISRAFEL
The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be
found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who
settled Maryland and Virginia believed in enjoyment, and rode their
passions at a gallop. It was appropriate that these Cavaliers should
give to America an artist who taught that sensuous beauty is a mystic
revelation of God, and that poetry must be music, to the exclusion of
intellect and moral sense.
A Maryland general’s son ran away and married a young actress, and these
two lived a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, and died in a garret,
leaving three infants. One of the three was named Edgar Poe, and our
first glimpse of him shows a nurse feeding him upon a “sugar-tit” soaked
in gin. A little later we find him adopted by a sentimental lady named
Allan, and made into a kind of drawing-room pet, taught to pledge toasts
in drink. He was an exquisite little fellow, proud, sensitive and
self-willed; and in his early training we note the seeds of all his
later misery.
He began writing poetry in childhood, and we still read verses which he
composed in his ’teens. He was sent to the University of Virginia, where
along with rich men’s sons he gambled and drank. He deserted the
University, quarreled with his benefactors, and enlisted in the army.
They got him out and sent him to West Point, which is famous for having
graduated a number of soldiers, and for having failed to graduate two
artists, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler. Poe wrote verses
and drank brandy with his room-mates, and finally set about to get
himself expelled from a life which he hated.
So here he was at the age of twenty-two, a poet, a rebel and a drunkard.
He had eighteen years more to live, and during that time his life was
one long agony of struggle. He had brilliant gifts, his work found
recognition, and he got many editorial positions, but could not keep
them. He wandered from city to city, quarreled with both enemies and
friends, and exhibited all those forms of evasion and dishonesty for
which alcohol and opium are responsible....
“How much shall I say about the great curse of the South?” asks Ogi.
“Say it all,” says his wife.
“I recall those old Maryland and Virginia homesteads, dark and dusty,
falling to decay; a few sticks of furniture, moth-eaten hangings, and
silent, pale, in-door men and women--the former drinking, the latter
taking drugs and patent medicines. I remember also the well-to-do
families in the towns, the wild young cursing blades, and the old topers
with trembling hands. I remember the uncle who shot off his head in the
park, and that other uncle, with a distinguished naval record, who lived
into old age without ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my
childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and
gentle, idealistic, charming in manners--”
“I, too, had an uncle,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the tenderest heart you ever
knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the
unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would
get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he
would go so far as a ‘damn’; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed
to apologize for such a word.”
We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must
understand that his virtues were his own, while his vices were fed to
him in a “sugar-tit.” Of all American poets up to this time his was the
greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision--and for
the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because
he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because
he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders
of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he
was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a
child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of
Coleridge’s disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe’s work,
just as we took “Kubla Khan,” and show how his talent goes into the
portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair.
We cannot say to what extent Poe’s art theories were the product of his
vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories.
After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his
cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her
when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life
was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she
broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis.
The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe’s whole mature life, and you
will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful women who are
dying or dead.
In this tormented body there lived and wrought not merely a great
genius, but also a great mind. Poe was a critic, of a kind entirely new
to America. He did not distribute indiscriminate praise from motives of
patriotism and puffery; he had critical standards, right or wrong, and
was merciless to the swarms of art pretenders. Naturally, therefore, he
was hated and furiously attacked; and because of his weaknesses, he was
an easy mark for all.
His art theories were those which we are here seeking to overthrow; how
false and dangerous they were, his life attests. It is interesting to
note that in one of his youthful poems, the first real utterance of his
genius, he took a quite different view. Quoting an imaginary passage
from the Koran about the angel Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a
lute,” he wrote:
Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest.
Well might this tormented Baltimore poet long for the wisdom of the
Mohammedan angel! He spent his great analytical powers in concocting a
“moon hoax,” and in solving all the cryptograms which empty-headed
people sent him. It was as if a man should build a mighty engine, and
then set it to fanning the air. In his last pitiful years he composed an
elaborate work on metaphysics, which he called “Eureka,” meaning that he
had solved the secret of the ages, the nature of existence and the
absolute. It is like all other metaphysics--a cobweb spun out of words;
the mighty engine has here been set to fanning a vacuum.
Poe was a fighting man and an ardent propagandist. He fought for art,
for the freedom and the glory and the joy of art, as a thing apart from
humanity, and from the sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. Life
wreaked its vengeance upon him, his punishment was heavy enough, and we
should be content with voicing our pity--but for the fact that his art
theories are still alive in the world, wrecking other young artists.
This is what makes necessary the painful task of drawing moral lessons
over the graves of “mighty poets in their misery dead.”