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.