Part 13 (1/2)
The unintelligent cheerfulness of the crowd so sickens one; the disingenuous sophistry of its hired preachers fills one with such blank depression that it seems sometimes as though the only mood worthy of normal intelligence were the mood of callous indifference and universal mockery.
All men are liars, and ”the Ultimate Futility” grins horribly from its mask. Well! It is precisely at these hours, at the hours when the little pincers of the G.o.ds especially nip and squeeze, that it is good to turn the pages of Fyodor Dostoievsky. He brings us his ”Balm of Gilead”
between the hands of strange people, but it is a true ”alabaster box of precious ointment,” and though the flowers it contains are s.n.a.t.c.hed from the House of the Dead, one knows at whose feet it was once poured forth, and for whose sake it was broken!
The books that are the most valuable in this world are not the books that pretend to solve life's mystery with a system. They are the books which create a certain mood, a certain temper--the mood, in fact, which is prepared for incredible surprises--the temper which no surprise can overpower. These books of Dostoievsky must always take their place in this great roll, because, though he arrives at no conclusion and utters no oracle, the atmosphere he throws round us is the atmosphere in which Life and Death are ”equal;” the gestures his people make, in their great darkness, are the gestures of _that which goes upon its way,_ beyond Good and beyond Evil!
Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps--who can tell?--the founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he ”founds” is a religion which has been about us for more years than human history can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near--too palpable--O Christ! The terror of it!--that shadowy, monstrous weight of oppressive darkness, through which we signal to each other from our separate h.e.l.ls. _It_ sways and wavers, it gathers and re-gathers, it thickens and deepens, it lifts and sinks, and we know all the while that it is the Thing we ourselves have made, and the intolerable whispers whereof it is full are the children of our own thoughts, of our l.u.s.ts, of our fears, of our terrible creative dreams.
Dostoievsky's books seem, as one handles them, to flow mysteriously together into one book, and this book is the book of the Last Judgment. The great obscure Land he leads us over, so full of desolate marshes, and forlorn s.p.a.ces, and hemlock-roots, and drowned tree-trunks, and Golgothas of broken shards and unutterable refuse, is the Land of those visions which are our inmost selves, and for which we are _answerable_ and none else.
Across this Land we wander, feeling for some fingers, cold and dead as our own, to share that terror with, and, it may be, finding none, for as we have groped forward we have been pitiless in the darkness, and, half-dead ourselves, have trodden the dead down, and the dead are those who cannot forgive; for murdered ”love” has no heart wherewith it should forgive:--_Will the Christ never come?_
EDGAR ALLEN POE
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 pa.s.sion 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 cuc.u.mber-sandwiches!
Salome itself--that Scarlet Litany--which brings to us, as in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous l.u.s.t, is not really a ”wicked” play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all mad pa.s.sion is wicked. Certainly the l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sion from the beginning; and are, G.o.d knows! never very far from pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.n.a.lysing 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 s.h.i.+mmered 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 Cla.s.sic 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 s.h.i.+ps, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”
The longer poem under the same t.i.tle, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion, or in terrible Herodian l.u.s.t. 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 pa.s.sions 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!