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!