CHAPTER LXXIX

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.”

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