One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered
upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the
sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe's
cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an
elaborate thing, compounded of many strange elements. There is a
certain dark, wilful melancholy in it that turns with loathing from all
human comfort. There is also contempt in it, and savage derision.
There is also in it a quality of mood that I prefer to call
_Saturnian_--the mood of those born under the planet Saturn. There is
cruelty in it, too, and voluptuous cruelty, though cold, reserved, and
evasive. It is this "cynicism" of his which makes it possible for him
to introduce into his poetry--it is of his poetry that I wish to speak--a
certain colloquial salt, pungent and acrid, and with the smell of the
tomb about it. It is colloquialism; but it is such colloquialism as
ghosts or vampires would use.
Poe remains--that has been already said, has it not?--absolutely cold
while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated
in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with
tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and
Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known.
Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the
atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried
out of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy,
pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral
this great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All that
has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in
a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world
makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd
amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness.
They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly
"good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man.
He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less.
He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant!
Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the just
man made perfect," but his simple, babyish passion for touching
pretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, and
drinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, _evil._
No really wicked person could have written "The Importance of
Being Earnest," with those delicious, paradoxical children rallying
one another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches!
Salome itself--that Scarlet Litany--which brings to us, as
in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust,
is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all
mad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders and
glows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, it
is the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Suffer
me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forth
my soul--see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thine
eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than
to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt?
Obviously the madness of physical desire is a thing that can hardly
be tempered down to the quiet stanzas of Gray's Elegy. But it is not
in itself a wicked thing; or the world would never have consecrated
it in the great Love-Legends. One may admit that the entrance of the
Nubian Executioner changes the situation; but, after all, the frenzy
of the girl's request--the terror of that Head upon the silver
charger--were implicit in her passion from the beginning; and are,
God knows! never very far from passion of that kind.
But all this is changed when we come to Edgar Allen Poe. Here we
are no longer in Troy or Antioch or Canopus or Rimini. Here it is
not any more a question of ungovernable passion carried to the limit
of madness. Here it is no more the human, too human, tradition of
each man "killing" the "thing he loves." Here we are in a world
where the human element, in passion, has altogether departed, and
left something else in its place; something which is really, in the true
sense, "inhumanly immoral." In the first place, it is a thing devoid of
any physical emotion. It is sterile, immaterial, unearthly, ice-cold. In
the second place, it is, in a ghastly sense, self-centered! It feeds upon
itself. It subdues everything to itself. Finally, let it be said, it is a
thing with a mania for Corruption. The Charnel-House is its bridal-couch,
and the midnight stars whisper to one another of its perversion.
There is no need for it "to kill the thing it loves," for it
loves only what is already dead. _Favete linguis!_ There must be no
profane misinterpretation of this subtle and delicate difference. In
analysing the evasive chemistry of a great poet's mood, one moves
warily, reverently, among a thousand betrayals. The mind of such a
being is as the sand-strewn floor of a deep sea. In this sea we poor
divers for pearls, and _stranger things,_ must hold our breath long
and long, as we watch the great glittering fish go sailing by, and
touch the trailing, rose-coloured weeds, and cross the buried coral. It
may be that no one will believe us, when we return, about what we
have seen! About those carcanets of rubies round drowned throats
and those opals that shimmered and gleamed in dead men's skulls!
At any rate, the most superficial critic of Poe's poetry must admit
that every single one of his great verses, except the little one "to
Helen," is pre-occupied with Death. Even in that Helen one, perhaps
the loveliest, though, I do not think, the most _characteristic,_ of all,
the poet's desire is to make of the girl he celebrates a sort of Classic
Odalisque, round whose palpable contours and lines he may hang
the solemn ornaments of the Dead--of the Dead to whom his soul
turns, even while embracing the living! Far, far off, from where the
real Helen waits, so "statue-like"--the "agate lamp" in her hands--wavers
the face of that other Helen, the face "that launched a thousand
ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."
The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed to
the same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy,
moon-lit "parterres," those living roses--Beardsley has planted them
since in another "enchanted garden"--and those "eyes," that grow so
luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved"
by them--these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen"
that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her
memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things
none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind--its
frozen inhumanity--can be seen even in those poems which
stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for
instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no
thought--who _must_ have no thought--"but to love and be loved by
me"--what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all the
night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life
and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the
sounding sea!"
The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himself
cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem
which begins:
"Thou wast all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine;
A green isle in the Sea, love,
A Fountain and a Shrine
All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers;
And all the flowers were mine!"
That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless,
aghast"--how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those
days of his which are "trances," and in those "nightly dreams" which
are all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always;
"In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams!"
The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or
in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction"
of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all
interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our
own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly
feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make
_what has been_ be again, and again, forever!
The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, or
even unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to
arrest _the processes of life_--to lay a freezing hand--a dead hand--upon
what we love, so that it _shall always be the same._ The really
immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions
and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then,
having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend
before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing,
and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal
recurrence of all things!
Is it any longer concealed from us wherein the "immorality" of this
lies? It lies in the fact that what we worship, what we _will not,_
through eternity, let go, is not a living person, but the "body" of a
person; a person who has so far been "drugged," as not only to die
for us--that is nothing!--but to remain dead for us, through all the
years!
In his own life--with that lovely consumptive Child-bride dying by
his side--Edgar Allen Poe lived as "morally," as rigidly, as any
Monk. The popular talk about his being a "Drug-Fiend" is ridiculous
nonsense. He was a laborious artist, chiselling and refining his
"artificial" poems, day in and day out. Where his "immorality" lies is
much deeper. It is in the mind--the mind, Master Shallow!--for he is
nothing if not an absolute "Cerebralist." Certainly Poe's verses are
"artificial." They are the most artificial of all poems ever written.
And this is natural, because they were the premeditated expression
of a premeditated cult. But to say they are artificial does not
derogate from their genius. Would that there were more such
"artificial" verses in the world!
One wonders if it is clearly understood how the "unearthly" element
in Poe differs from the "unearthly" element in Shelley. It differs
from it precisely as Death differs from Life.
Shelley's ethereal spiritualism--though, God knows, such gross
animals are we, it seems inhuman enough--is a passionate white
flame. It is the thin, wavering fire-point of all our struggles after
purity and eternity. It is a centrifugal emotion, not, as was the other's,
a centripedal one. It is the noble Platonic rising from the love of one
beautiful person to the love of many beautiful persons; and from that
onward, through translunar gradations, to the love of the supreme
Beauty itself. Shelley's "spirituality" is a living, growing, creative
thing. In its intrinsic nature it is not egoistic at all, but profoundly
altruistic. It uses Sex to leave Sex behind. In its higher levels it is
absolutely Sexless. It may transcend humanity, but it springs from
humanity. It is, in fact, humanity's dream of its own transmutation.
For all its ethereality and remoteness, it yearns, "like a God in pain,"
over the sorrows of the world. With infinite planetary pity, it would
heal those sorrows.
Edgar Allen's "spirituality" has not the least flicker of a longing to
"leave Sex behind." It is bound to Sex, as the insatiable Ghoul is
bound to the Corpse he devours. It is not concerned with the
physical ecstasies of Sex. It has no interest in such human matters.
But deprive it of the fact of Sex-difference, and it drifts away
whimpering like a dead leaf, an empty husk, a wisp of chaff, a
skeleton gossamer. The poor, actual, warm lips, "so sweetly
forsworn," may have had small interest for this "spiritual" lover, but
now that she is dead and buried, and a ghost, they must remain a
woman's lips forever! Nor have Edgar Allen's "faithful ones" the
remotest interest in what goes on around them. Occupied with their
Dead, their feeling towards common flesh and blood is the feeling of
Caligula. "What have I done to thee?" that proud, reserved face
seems to say, as it looks out on us from its dusty title-page; "what
have I done to thee, that I should despise thee so?"
Shelley's clear, erotic passion is always a "cosmic" thing. It is the
rhythmic expression of the power that creates the world. But there is
nothing "cosmic" about the enclosed gardens of Edgar Allen Poe;
and the spirits that walk among those Moon-dials and dim Parterres
are not of the kind who go streaming up, from land and ocean,
shouting with joy that Prometheus has conquered! But what a master
he is--what a master! In the suggestiveness of _names_--to mention
only one thing--can anyone touch him? That word "Porphyrogene"--the
name of the Ruler of, God knows what, Kingdom of the Dead--does
it not linger about one--and follow one--like the smell of
incense?
But the poem of all poems in which the very genius Edgar Allen is
embodied is, of course, "Ulalume." Like this, there is nothing; in
Literature--nothing in the whole field of human art. Here he is, from
beginning to end, a supreme artist; dealing with the subject for
which he was born! That undertone of sardonic, cynical _humour_--for
it can be called nothing else--which grins at us in the background
like the grin of a Skull; how extraordinarily characteristic it is! And
the touches of "infernal colloquialism," so deliberately fitted in, and
making us remember--many things!--is there anything in the world
like them?
"And now as the night was senescent,
And the star-dials hinted of morn,
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn--
Astarte's be-diamonded crescent,
Distinct with its duplicate horn!"
"And I said"--but let us pass to his Companion. The cruelty of this
conversation with "Psyche" is a thing that may well make us
shudder. The implication is, of course, double. Psyche is his own
soul; the soul in him which would live, and grow, and change, and
know the "Vita Nuova." She is also "the Companion," to whom he
has turned for consolation. She is the Second One, the Other One, in
whose living caresses he would forget, if it might be, that which lies
down there in the darkness!
"Then Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said, 'sadly this star I mistrust,
Its pallor I strangely mistrust.
O hasten! O let us not linger!
O fly! Let us fly! for we must!'"
Thus the Companion; thus the Comrade; thus the "Vita Nuova"!
Now mark what follows:
"Then I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom.
And conquered her scruples and gloom.
And we passed to the end of a Vista,
But were stopped by the door of a Tomb.
By the door of a Legended Tomb,
And I said: 'What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended Tomb?'
She replied, Ulalume--Ulalume--
Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter the
feelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber," those "Ghoul-haunted
woodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand words
of description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in that
strange country of our forbidden dreams.
What a master he is! And if you ask about his "philosophy of life,"
let the Conqueror Worm make answer:
"Lo! Tis a Gala-Night
Within the lonesome latter years--"
Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"--has
it not the very malice of the truth of things?
Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, but
to love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with
its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate,
drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his
euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's
"Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For
to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is
over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that
"does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, peacefully, we
can rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, and
somewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!
Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the
lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a
moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember
the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the
conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:
"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."
Strangely--in forlorn silence--passes before us, as we close his pages,
that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and
Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the
moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of
eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the
reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such
as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue
repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:
"O daughters of dreams and of stories,
That Life is not wearied of yet--
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"
Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite
witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe.
But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of Edgar
Allen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal
Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to
Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are not
all these One?--to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain
until the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her
Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the
Dead!
"The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers
Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire,
For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our
fingers
Could wake not the secret of the lyre.
Else, else, O God, the Singer,
I had sung, amid their rages,
The long tale of Man,
And his deeds for good and ill.
But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages--
Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still."