lovers are set vibrating in unison like two instruments. The pitch can
rise higher and higher. But carry this too far, and the nerves begin to
break, to bleed, as it were, and a form of death sets in.
The trouble about man is that he insists on being master of his own
fate, and he insists on oneness. For instance, having discovered the
ecstasy of spiritual love, he insists that he shall have this all the
time, and nothing but this, for this is life. It is what he calls
"heightening" life. He wants his nerves to be set vibrating in the
intense and exhilarating unison with the nerves of another being, and by
this means he acquires an ecstasy of vision, he finds himself in glowing
unison with all the universe.
But as a matter of fact this glowing unison is only a temporary thing,
because the first law of life is that each organism is isolate in
itself, it must return to its own isolation.
Yet man has tried the glow of unison, called love, and he _likes_ it. It
gives him his highest gratification. He wants it. He wants it all the
time. He wants it and he will have it. He doesn't want to return to his
own isolation. Or if he must, it is only as a prowling beast returns to
its lair to rest and set out again.
This brings us to Edgar Allan Poe. The clue to him lies in the motto he
chose for _Ligeia_, a quotation from the mystic Joseph Glanville: "And
the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of
the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great Will pervading all
things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the
angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his
feeble will."
It is a profound saying: and a deadly one.
Because if God is a great will, then the universe is but an instrument.
I don't know what God is. But He is not simply a will. That is too
simple. Too anthropomorphic. Because a man wants his own will, and
nothing but his will, he needn't say that God is the same will,
magnified _ad infinitum._
For me, there may be one God, but He is nameless and unknowable.
For me, there are also many gods, that come into me and leave me again.
And they have very various wills, I must say.
But the point is Poe.
Poe had experienced the ecstasies of extreme spiritual love. And he
wanted those ecstasies and nothing but those ecstasies. He wanted that
great gratification, the sense of flowing, the sense of unison, the
sense of heightening of life. He had experienced this gratification. He
was told on every hand that this ecstasy of spiritual, nervous love was
the greatest thing in life, was life itself. And he had tried it for
himself, he knew that for him it was life itself. So he wanted it. And
he _would have_ it. He set up his will against the whole of the
limitations of nature.
This is a brave man, acting on his own belief, and his own experience.
But it is also an arrogant man, and a fool.
Poe was going to get the ecstasy and the heightening, cost what it
might. He went on in a frenzy, as characteristic American women nowadays
go on in a frenzy, after the very same thing: the heightening, the flow,
the ecstasy. Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hand on.
He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.
His grand attempt and achievement was with his wife; his cousin, a girl
with a singing voice. With her he went in for the intensest flow, the
heightening, the prismatic shades of ecstasy. It was the intensest
nervous vibration of unison, pressed higher and higher in pitch, till
the blood vessels of the girl broke, and the blood began to flow out
loose. It was love. If you call it love.
Love can be terribly obscene.
It is love that causes the neuroticism of the day. It is love that is
the prime cause of tuberculosis.
The nerves that vibrate most intensely in spiritual unisons are the
sympathetic ganglia of the breast, of the throat, and the hind brain.
Drive this vibration over-intensely, and you weaken the sympathetic
tissues of the chest--the lungs--or of the throat, or of the lower
brain, and the tubercles are given a ripe field.
But Poe drove the vibrations beyond any human pitch of endurance.
Being his cousin, she was more easily keyed to him.
_Ligeia_ is the chief story. Ligeia! A mental-derived name. To him the
woman, his wife, was not Lucy. She was Ligeia. No doubt she even
preferred it thus.
_Ligeia_ is Poe's love-story, and its very fantasy makes it more truly
his own story.
It is a tale of love pushed over a verge. And love pushed to extremes is
a battle of wills between the lovers.
Love is become a battle of wills.
Which shall first destroy the other, of the lovers? Which can hold out
longest, against the other?
Ligeia is still the old-fashioned woman. Her will is still to submit.
She wills to submit to the vampire of her husband's consciousness. Even
death.
"In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her later days, even
emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet
ease, of her demeanour, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity
of her footfall. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed
study save by the dear music of her low, sweet voice as she placed her
marble hand on my shoulder."
Poe has been so praised for his style. But it seems to me a meretricious
affair. "Her marble hand" and "the elasticity of her footfall" seem more
like chair-springs and mantel-pieces than a human creature. She never
was quite a human creature to him. She was an instrument, from which he
got his extremes of sensation. His _machine à plaisir_, as somebody
says.
All Poe's style, moreover, has this mechanical quality, as his poetry
has a mechanical rhythm. He never sees anything in terms of life, almost
always in terms of matter, jewels, marble, etc.--or in terms of force,
scientific. And his cadences are all managed mechanically. This is what
is called "having a style."
What he wants to do with Ligeia is to analyse her, till he knows all her
component parts, till he has got her all in his consciousness. She is
some strange chemical salt which he must analyse out in the test-tubes
of his brain, and then--when he's finished the analysis--_E finita la
commedia!_
But she won't be quite analysed out. There is something, something he
can't get. Writing of her eyes, he says: "They were, I must believe, far
larger than the ordinary eyes of our race"--as if anybody would want
eyes "far larger" than other folks'. "They were even fuller than the
fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of Nourjahad--" Which is
blarney. "The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black and, far
over them, hung jetty lashes of great length."--Suggests a whiplash.
"The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The
strangeness, which I found in the eyes was of a nature distinct from the
formation, or the colour, or the brilliancy of the features, and must,
after all, be referred to as the _expression._"--Sounds like an
anatomist anatomizing a cat.--"Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast
latitude of sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual.
The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered
upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled
to fathom it! What was it--that something more profound than the well of
Democritus--which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it?
I was possessed with a passion to discover...."
It is easy to see why each man kills the thing he loves. To _know_ a
living thing is to kill it. You have to kill a thing to know it
satisfactorily. For this reason, the desirous consciousness, the SPIRIT,
is a vampire.
One should be sufficiently intelligent and interested to know a good
deal _about_ any person one comes into close contact with. _About_ her.
Or _about_ him.
But to try to know any living being is to try to suck the life out of
that being.
Above all things, with the woman one loves. Every sacred instinct
teaches one that one must leave her unknown. You know your woman darkly,
in the blood. To try to _know_ her mentally is to try to kill her.
Beware, oh woman, of the man who wants to _find out what you are._ And,
oh men, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you,
or get you, what you are.
It is the temptation of a vampire fiend, is this knowledge.
Man does so horribly want to master the secret of life and of
individuality _with his mind._ It is like the analysis of protoplasm.
You can only analyse _dead_ protoplasm, and know its constituents. It is
a death process.
Keep KNOWLEDGE for the world of matter, force, and function. It has got
nothing to do with being.
But Poe wanted to know--wanted to know what was the strangeness in the
eyes of Ligeia. She might have told him it was horror at his probing,
horror at being vamped by his consciousness.
But she wanted to be vamped. She wanted to be probed by his
consciousness, to be KNOWN. She paid for wanting it, too.
Nowadays it is usually the man who wants to be vamped, to be KNOWN.
Edgar Allan probed and probed t So often he seemed on the verge. But she
went over the verge of death before he came over the verge of knowledge.
And it is always so.
He decided, therefore, that the clue to the strangeness lay in the
mystery of will. "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not..."
Ligeia had a "gigantic volition.... An intensity in thought, action, or
speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index" (he really
meant indication) "of that gigantic volition which, during our long
intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its
existence."
I should have thought her long submission to him was chief and ample
"other evidence."
"Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the
ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous
vultures of stem passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate,
save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so
delighted and appalled me--by the almost magical melody, modulation,
distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice--and by the fierce
energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of
utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered."
Poor Poe, he had caught a bird of the same feather as himself. One of
those terrible cravers, who crave the further sensation. Crave to
madness or death. "Vultures of stern passion" indeed! Condors.
But having recognized that the clue was in her gigantic volition, he
should have realized that the process of this loving, this craving, this
knowing, was a struggle of wills. But Ligeia, true to the great
tradition and mode of womanly love, by her will kept herself submissive,
recipient. She is the passive body who is explored and analyzed into
death. And yet, at times, her great female will must have revolted.
"Vultures of stem passion!" With a convulsion of desire she desired his
further probing and exploring. To any lengths. But then, "tumultuous
vultures of stem passion." She had to fight with herself.
But Ligeia wanted to go on and on with the craving, with the love, with
the sensation, with the probing, with the knowing, on and on to the end.
There is no end. There is only the rupture of death. That's where men,
and women, are "had." Man is always sold, in his search for final
KNOWLEDGE.
"That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been
easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no
ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the
strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she
pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate
devotion amounted to idolatry." (Oh, the indecency of all this endless
intimate talk!) "How had I deserved to be blessed by such confessions?"
(Another man would have felt himself cursed.) "How had I deserved to be
cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them?
But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only that in
Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! unmerited, all
unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing
with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was fleeing so
rapidly away. It is this wild longing--it is this vehement desire for
life--_but_ for life--that I have no power to portray--no utterance
capable of expressing."
Well, that is ghastly enough, in all conscience.
"And from them that have not shall be taken away even that which they
have."
"To him that hath life shall be given life, and from him that hath not
life shall be taken away even that life which he hath."
Or her either.
These terribly conscious birds like Poe and his Ligeia deny the very
life that is in them, they want to turn it all into talk, into
_knowing._ And so life, which will not be known, leaves them.
But poor Ligeia, how could she help it. It was her doom. All the
centuries of the SPIRIT, all the years of American rebellion against the
Holy Ghost, had done it to her.
She dies, when she would rather do anything than die. And when she dies
the clue, which he only lived to grasp, dies with her.
Foiled!
Foiled!
No wonder she shrieks with her last breath.
On the last day Ligeia dictates to her husband a poem. As poems go, it
is rather false, meretricious. But put yourself in Ligeia's place, and
it is real enough, and ghastly beyond bearing.
"Out, out are all the lights--but all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy 'Man,'
And its hero the Conqueror Worm."
Which is the American equivalent for a William Blake poem. For Blake,
too, was one of these ghastly, obscene "Knowers."
"'O God!' half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her
arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines.
'O God! O Divine Father!--shall these things be undeviatingly so? Shall
this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in
Thee? Who--who knoweth the mysteries of the the angels, _nor unto death
utterly_, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.'"
So Ligeia dies. And yields to death at least partly. _Anche troppo._
As for her cry to God--has not God said that those who sin against the
Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven?
And the Holy Ghost is within us. It is the thing that prompts us to be
real, not to push our own cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and
high falutin, above all not to be too egoistic and wilful in our
conscious self, but to change as the spirit inside us bids us change,
and leave off when it bids us leave off, and laugh when we must laugh,
particularly at ourselves, for in deadly earnestness there is always
something a bit ridiculous. The Holy Ghost bids us never be too deadly
in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and
everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of
ridicule--everything.
Now Poe and Ligeia, alas, couldn't laugh. They were frenziedly earnest.
And frenziedly they pushed on this vibration of consciousness and unison
in consciousness. They sinned against the Holy Ghost that bids us all
laugh and forget, bids us know our own limits. And they weren't
forgiven.
Ligeia needn't blame God. She had only her own will, her "gigantic
volition" to thank, lusting after more consciousness, more beastly
KNOWING.
Ligeia dies. The husband goes to England, vulgarly buys or rents a
gloomy, grand old abbey, puts it into some sort of repair, and furnishes
it with exotic, mysterious, theatrical splendour. Never anything open
and real. This theatrical "volition" of his. The bad taste of
sensationalism.
Then he marries the fair-haired, blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of
Tremaine. That is, she would be a sort of Saxon-Cornish blue-blood
damsel. Poor Poe!
"In halls such as these--in a bridal chamber such as this--I passed,
with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of
our marriage--passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife
dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper--that she shunned and loved me
but little--I could not help perceiving, but it gave me rather pleasure
than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging rather to a demon
than a man. My memory flew hack (Oh, with what intensity of regret!) to
Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the entombed. I revelled in
recollections of her purity..." etc.
Now the vampire lust is consciously such.
In the second month of the marriage the Lady Rowena fell ill. It is the
shadow of Ligeia hangs over her. It is the ghostly Ligeia who pours
poison into Rowena's cup. It is the spirit of Ligeia, leagued with the
spirit of the husband, that now lusts in the slow destruction of Rowena.
The two vampires, dead wife and living husband.
For Ligeia has not yielded unto death _utterly._ Her fixed, frustrated
will comes back in vindictiveness. She could not have her way in life.
So she, too, will find victims in life. And the husband, all the time,
only uses Rowena as a living body on which to wreak his vengeance for
his being thwarted with Ligeia. Thwarted from the final KNOWING her.
And at last from the corpse of Rowena, Ligeia rises. Out of her death,
through the door of a corpse they have destroyed between them, reappears
Ligeia, still trying to have her will, to have more love and knowledge,
the final gratification which is never final, with her husband.
For it is true, as William James and Conan Doyle and the rest allow,
that a spirit can persist in the after-death. Persist by its own
volition. But usually, the evil persistence of a thwarted will,
returning for vengeance on life. Lemures, vampires.
It is a ghastly story of the assertion of the human will, the
will-to-love and the will-to-consciousness, asserted against death
itself. The pride of human conceit in KNOWLEDGE.
There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America.
_Eleanora_, the next story, is a fantasy revealing the sensational
delights of the man in his early marriage with the young and tender
bride. They dwelt, he, his cousin and her mother, in the sequestered
Valley of Many-coloured Grass, the valley of prismatic sensation, where
everything seems spectrum-coloured. They looked down at their _own
images_ in the River of Silence, and drew the god Eros from that wave:
out of their own self-consciousness, that is. This is a description of
the life of introspection and of the love which is begotten by the self
in the self, the self-made love. The trees are like serpents worshipping
the sun. That is, they represent the phallic passion in its poisonous or
mental activity. Everything runs to consciousness: serpents worshipping
the sun. The embrace of love, which should bring darkness and oblivion,
would with these lovers be a daytime thing bringing more heightened
consciousness, visions, spectrum-visions, prismatic. The evil thing that
daytime love-making is, and all sex-palaver.
In _Berenice_ the man must go down to the sepulchre of his beloved and
pull out her thirty-two small white teeth, which he carries in a box
with him. It is repulsive and gloating. The teeth are the instruments of
biting, of resistance, of antagonism. They often become symbols of
opposition, little instruments or entities of crushing and destroying.
Hence the dragon's teeth in the myth. Hence the man in _Berenice_ must
take possession of the irreducible part of his mistress. "_Toutes ses
dents étaient des idées,_" he says. Then they are little fixed ideas
of mordant hate, of which he possesses himself.
The other great story linking up with this group is _The Fall of the
House of Usher._ Here the love is between brother and sister. When the
self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of _otherness_ fails,
then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And
it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the
base of the incest problem. In psychoanalysis almost every trouble in
the psyche is traced to an incest-desire. But it won't do. Incest-desire
is only one of the modes by which men strive to get their gratification
of the intensest vibration of the spiritual nerves, without any
resistance. In the family, the natural vibration is most nearly in
unison. With a stranger, there is greater resistance. Incest is the
getting of gratification and the avoiding of resistance.
The root of all evil is that we all want this spiritual gratification,
this flow, this apparent heightening of life, this knowledge, this
valley of many-coloured grass, even grass and light prismatically
decomposed, giving ecstasy. We want all this _without resistance._ We
want it continually. And this is the root of all evil in us.
We ought to pray to be resisted and resisted to the bitter end. We ought
to decide to have done at last with craving.
The motto to _The Fall of the House of Usher_ is a couple of lines from
Béranger.
"Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne."
We have all the trappings of Poe's rather overdone, vulgar fantasy. "I
reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that
lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a
shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and
inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the
vacant and eye-like windows." The House of Usher, both dwelling and
family, was very old. Minute fungi overspread the exterior of the house,
hanging in festoons from the eves. Gothic archways, a valet of stealthy
step, sombre tapestries, ebon black floors, a profusion of tattered and
antique furniture, feeble gleams of encrimsoned light through latticed
panes, and over all "an air of stern, deep, irredeemable gloom"--this
makes up the interior.
The inmates of the house, Roderick and Madeline Usher, are the last
remnants of their incomparably ancient and decayed race. Roderick has
the same large, luminous eye, the same slightly arched nose of delicate
Hebrew model, as characterized Ligeia. He is ill with the nervous malady
of his family. It is he whose nerves are so strung that they vibrate to
the unknown quiverings of the ether. He, too, has lost his self, his
living soul, and become a sensitized instrument of the external
influences; his nerves are verily like an æolian harp which must
vibrate. He lives in "some struggle with the grim phantasm, Fear," for
he is only the physical, post-mortem reality of a living being.
It is a question how much, once the true centrality of the self is
broken, the instrumental consciousness of man can register. When man
becomes self-less, wafting instrumental like a harp in an open window,
how much can his elemental consciousness express? The blood as it rims
has its own sympathies and responses to the material world, quite apart
from seeing. And the nerves we know vibrate all the while to unseen
presences, unseen forces. So Roderick Usher quivers on the edge of
material existence.
It is this mechanical consciousness which gives "the fervid facility of
his impromptus." It is the same thing that gives Poe his extraordinary
facility in versification. The absence of real central or impulsive
being in himself leaves him inordinately mechanically sensitive to
sounds and effects, associations of sounds, associations of rhyme, for
example--mechanical, facile, having no root in any passion. It is all a
secondary, meretricious process. So we get Roderick Usher's poem. _The
Haunted Palace_, with its swift yet mechanical subtleties of rhyme and
rhythm, its vulgarity of epithet. It is all a sort of dream-process,
where the association between parts is mechanical, accidental as far as
passional meaning goes.