Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (40 page)

“Those cyclops . . . ,” says Groussac; “those fierce Calibans . . . ,” writes Péladan. Was Péladan right when he called these men of North America by those names? Caliban does rein on the island of Manhattan, and in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, as well—indeed, throughout the land. He has managed to institute the empire of
Matter,
from its mysterious state with Edison to its apotheosis in the hog, in that awe-inspiring city of Chicago. Caliban saturates himself with whiskey, as in Shakespeare’s play he does with wine; he grows and prospers, and, slave to no Prospero, martyred by no genius of the air, he grows fat and multiplies—his name is Legion. By the will of God there rises up amidst those powerful monsters some being of superior nature, who spreads his wings before the eternal Miranda of the ideal. At that, Caliban mobilizes Sycorax against him, and banishes him or kills him. The world has seen this with Edgar Allan Poe, that ill-starred swan who best knew the world of dreams, and death. . . .

Why did the image of Stella, Alma, my sweet queen, so soon gone forever, come to my mind on that day when, after wandering along thronged Broadway, I sat down to read the verses of Poe—whose Christian name Edgar, harmonious and legendary, itself contains such vague, sad poetry—and saw the procession of his chaste beloved women pass before me, in the silvery dust of a mystic daydream? It was because you, my adored one, are sister to the lilylike virgins sung in that misty English tongue by the unhappy dreamer, prince of
poètes maudits.
You, like they, are a flame of infinite love. Your sisters pass before the white-rose-bedecked balcony in Paradise from which you look out with generous, deep eyes, and they salute you, in the wonder of your virtue—oh my consoling angel! oh my wife!—with a smile. The first to pass by is Irene, with her strange pallor, the bright lady come o’er far-off seas; the second is Eulalie, sweet Eulalie with yellow hair and violet eyes lifted up to heaven; the third is Lenore, named by the young, radiant angels in distant Eden;
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the next is Frances, the beloved whose memory soothes your cares; then comes Ulalume, whose shade wanders the misty region of Weir, near that gloomy tarn of Auber; then Helen, she who was seen for the first time in the pearl light of the moon;
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next is Annie, Annie of kisses and caresses and prayers for the adored one; and then there is Annabel Lee, who loved with a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven; and after her comes the other Isabel, she of the loving colloquies in the moonlight; Ligeia, at last, meditative, wrapped in a veil of otherworldly splendor. . . . This is a choir of Oceanides, who console and cool the brow of our lyrical Prometheus chained to the Yankee promontory, where a raven, crueler than the Aeschylan vulture, seated on a bust of Pallas, tortures his poor heart, stabbing him with the monotonous syllables of despair. And so you are for me: In the midst of the martyrdoms of life, you refresh me and encourage me with the air from your wings, for though you departed in human form upon the voyage that has no return, when my strength fails me or when pain flogs me with its black lash, I feel the coming of your immortal being. Then, Alma, Stella, I hear the invisible gold of your angelical shield near by me. Your luminous, symbolic name rises in the sky of my nights like an incomparable guiding star, and by your ineffable light I bear the gold and frankincense and myrrh to the manger of eternal Hope.

Poe’s influence on the world’s literature has been deep and transcendent enough that his name and his work shall be remembered forever more. From the time of his death to today, there has been almost no year in which, whether in book or periodical, critics, essayists, and poets have not sung this finest of American poet’s praises. Ingram’s book illuminated the man’s life; nothing can increase the glory of the wondrous dreamer. Indeed, the publication of that book, whose translation into Spanish was carried out by Sr. Mayer, was intended for the wider public. . . .

Poe, like some Ariel made man, passed his life, one might say, under the floating influence of a strange mystery. Born in a land of practical, material life, the influence of his surroundings worked upon him in reverse. Out of a land of calculations arose this stupendous imagination. The gift of mythology seems to have been born in him out of some distant atavism, and one sees in his poetry a bright ray of the land of sun and azure where his forebears had been born. Reborn in him was the chivalric spirit of the knights Le Poer, praised in the chronicles of Gambresio. In Ireland in 1327, Arnold Le Poer hurls this terrible insult at the knight Maurice, Earl of Desmond: “Thou art a rhymer.” And for that, the men take up their swords and a dispute begins that is but the prologue to a bloody war. Five hundred years later, a descendant of the provocative Arnold will glorify his line, erecting upon the rich pedestal of the English language, and in a new world, the golden palace of his rhymes.

Poe’s noble family is of no interest, of course, except to “those who have a taste for discovering the effects produced by their country and their lineage on the mental and constitutional peculiarities of men of genius,” as the noble Mrs. Whitman has noted. Indeed, it is Poe, not the family, that gives honor and worth to all the Protestant ministers, storekeepers, investors, and street-hawkers that bear his name in the land of the honorable father of his country, George Washington.

We know that in the poet’s lineage there was a brave Sir Roger who battled alongside Strongbow; a daring Sir Arnold who defended a lady accused of witchcraft; a heroic, virile woman, the famous “Countess” of the times of Cromwell; and passing over several genealogical confusions, a general of the United States, Edgar’s grandfather. And yet after all that, this tragic creature, whose story is so strange and romantic, uttered his newborn’s cries under withered laurels; he was born to an actress, who gave birth to him in the empire of her fiercest love. The poor playeress had been orphaned at an early age; she loved the theater; she was intelligent and beautiful; and out of that sweet grace was born the pale, melancholic visionary who gave art a new world.

Poe was born with the enviable gift of physical beauty. Of all the portraits I have seen of him, none gives any idea of that special beauty that many persons who knew him have insisted upon in their descriptions of the man. There can be no doubt that in all the Poean iconography, the portrait that best represents him is that which Mr. Clarke used, an engraving of the poet during the time he was working in that gentleman’s establishment. Clarke himself protested against the false portraits of Poe that were published after his death. If not so much as those who calumniated his lovely poetic soul, those who disfigured the beauty of his face are worthy of the world’s sternest censure. Of all the portraits that have come into my hands, those that I have been most struck by are Chiffart’s, published in Quantin’s illustrated edition of the
Extraordinary Tales,
and the engraving by R. Loncup for Mayer’s translation of Ingram’s biography. In both, Poe has reached a mature age. He is not, then, that somewhat dashing, sensitive young man who, introduced to Elena Stannard, was rendered speechless, like the Dante of the
Vita Nuova.
. . . No, he is the man who has suffered, who knows at first hand how life can wound the flesh and spirit. In the first of these portraits, the artist seems to have wanted to produce a symbolic head. In the almost ornithomorphic eyes, in the air, in the tragic expression of the face, Chiffart has attempted to paint the author of “The Raven,” the visionary, the unhappy artist more than the man. In the second, there is more realism: that look of infectious sadness, that pinched mouth, that vague gesture of pain, that broad, magnificent brow on which the fatal pallor of suffering is enthroned, show the poor man in his days of worst misfortune, perhaps those just before his death. The other portraits, such as Halpin’s for Armstrong’s edition, give us
types
of the period, dandies, faces that have nothing to do with the beautiful, intelligent head that Clarke describes. Nothing truer than Gautier’s observation: “It is rare for a poet, say, or an artist, to be known under his first, enchanting aspect. Reputation comes only much later, when the fatigues of study, the struggle to earn a living, and the tortures of passion have altered that primitive physiognomy, leaving but a mask, a worn, withered mask on which every pain, every suffering has left a stigma, a bruise, a wrinkle.”

Even as a child, Poe “promised great beauty,” according to Ingram. His schoolmates speak of his agility and his robustness. His imagination and his nervous temperament were counterbalanced by the strength of his muscles. The friendly, delicate angel of poesy could double his fist and use it. . . .

When he entered West Point, a fellow student, Mr. Gibson, has noted his “weary, tedious, jaded eyes.” When he became a virile young man, the bibliophile Gowans remembers him in this way: “Poe had a remarkably agreeable exterior, and what the ladies would call ‘beauty’ most certainly predisposed one to him.” A person who heard him recite in Boston says, “He was the finest realization of a poet, in physiognomy, air, and manner.” A fine portrait by a female hand: “A stature a little less than the middle height, perhaps, but so perfectly proportioned and crowned by a head so noble, and carried so regally, that in my girlish opinion, he gave the impression of an overtowering stature. Those bright, melancholy eyes seemed to look down from a great height.” Another lady recalls the strange impression made by his eyes: “Poe’s eyes, in truth, were the feature that most impressed one, and it was to them that his face owed its peculiar attractiveness.” I have never seen anyone else’s eyes that resembled them. They were large, jet black, with long eyelashes; the iris was steel gray, and of a crystalline brightness and transparency. The jet black pupil would expand and contract with every shade of thought or emotion. I observed that his eyelids would never contract, as is so common in most people, mainly when they speak, but his gaze was always full, open, and without shrinking-back or emotion. His habitual expression was that of the dreamer, the sad man; sometimes he had a way of giving a slight glance, out of the corner of his eye, at some person who was not watching him, and with a calm, fixed gaze he would seem to be mentally measuring the caliber of that person, who would be totally unaware. “What enormous eyes Mr. Poe has!” a lady said to me. “It chills my blood to see him turn them slowly toward me and fix them upon me when I am speaking.” This same lady adds, “He wore a black, carefully trimmed mustache, but it did not completely mask a tightness of the mouth and an occasional tension in his upper lip, as though in mockery. This mockery was easily kindled, and it manifested itself in a barely perceptible yet intensely expressive movement of the lip. There is nothing of malevolence in him, but there is a great deal of sarcasm.” We know, then, that that potent, strange soul was enclosed in a lovely vessel. It appears that distinction and physical gifts must be innate in all bearers of the lyre. Is Apollo, the long-maned lyrical Numen, not the prototype of masculine beauty? But not all his children are born with such splendid gifts. The privileged ones are named Goethe, Byron, Lamartine, Poe.

Because of his vigorous and cultivated constitution, our poet was able to resist that terrible condition that an author who was also a physician quite rightly calls “the illness of sleep.” He was sublime and passionate, a nervous man, one of those divine half-madmen necessary for human progress; he was a pitiable Christ of art, who out of love for the eternal ideal had to walk the street of bitterness, and wear his crown of thorns, and bear his cross. He was born with the adorable flame of poetry, and it nourished him at the same time it martyred him.

He was orphaned as a child, but he was taken in by a man who was never able to recognize the intellectual stature of his adoptive son. Mr. Allan, whose name would pass into the future in the bright light of the poet’s name, could never imagine that the poor boy who cheered evenings at home by reciting poetry would later be one of the great princes of art.

In Poe, daydreaming reigned from childhood. . . . On the one hand, his strong mind possessed a faculty for music; on the other, a faculty for mathematics. His “daydreaming” is filled with chimeras and figures, like some astrological chart. . . . He went to school to Mr. Clarke, in Richmond, where at the same time he was nourishing himself upon the classics and reciting Latin odes he was boxing, even becoming something of a student champion. In foot races, he would have left Atalanta in his dust, and he aspired to Byron’s swimming laurels. But if he shone intellectually and physically among his schoolmates, and indeed stood head and shoulders above them, the scions of the families of the flabby aristocracy of the city looked down on the actress’s son. How much bile must that delicate creature have had to swallow, humiliated as he was by origins which in later years he would proudly boast of? Those were the first blows, and they began to engrave upon his countenance the bitter, sarcastic creases of his mouth. At a very early age he knew the lurking wolf of reason; that was why he sought to communicate with nature, so healthful, so fortifying.

“I hate above all things and detest this animal called Man,” Swift wrote Pope. Poe, in turn, speaks of the “mean-spirited friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere men.” In the book of Job, Eliphaz the Temanite exclaims, “How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?”
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Our lyrical American did not seek the aid of prayer; he was not a believer, or at least his soul was never mystical. . . . Science prevented the poet from spreading his wings and attaining the atmosphere of ideal truth. His need for analysis, the algebraic nature of his fantasy, made him produce infinitely sad effects when he dragged us to the verge of the unknown. Philosophical speculation blinded him to faith, which, like every true poet, he must have possessed. In all his works, if I am not mistaken, only twice does the name of Christ appear (though he has a hymn to Mary in
Poems and Essays
). He did, nonetheless, profess an adherence to Christian morals, and as for man’s destiny and fate, he believed in a divine Law, an inexorable Judgment. In him, equations overpowered belief, and even with respect to God and His attributes, he, like Spinoza, believed that things invisible and things that are the right object of understanding can be perceived only through the eyes of demonstration. This, forgetting the profound philosophical declaration
Intellectus noster sic se habet ad prima entium quae sunt manifestissima in natura, sicut oculus vespertilionis ad solem.
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He did not believe in the supernatural, as he himself declared, but he said that God, as creator of Nature, could, if He chose, change it. In the story of the metempsychosis of Ligeia there is a definition of God, taken from Grandwill, that Poe seems to maintain: “God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness.” . . . In “Mesmeric Revelation,” on the heels of certain philosophical digressions, Mr. Vankirk, who, like almost all the characters in Poe, is Poe himself, affirms the existence of a material God, which he calls “ultimate, or unparticled, matter.” But he adds, “The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind.”
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In the dialogue between Oinos and Agathos
²⁵
he pretends to sound the mystery of the divine intelligence, as in the dialogues of Monos and Una
²⁶
and Eiros and Charmion
²⁷
he penetrates the unknown shadow of Death, producing, as few have, strange glimpses into his conception of spirit in space and time.