Edgar Allan Poe Part 6

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers. Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923. What Was Edgar Allan Poe Like There are people that give out a strange magic. Under their spell you have to believe in their personality. There is something that pushes back and makes you notice. No one knows what but it is there. They are marked with the sign of the artist. Oscar Wilde was one and so was Edgar Allan Poe. His manner was high; his gait was light and his demeanor always harmonious. He was always refined despite his poverty and had a romantic chivalrous manner. His proud features were regular, yes, he was handsome. The pure dark gray eyes held a strange violet glint. The high confident brow had marvelous symmetry. His complexion was always pale and shadowed by his dark locks. Edgar Allan Poe was beautiful in body and in soul. His gentle voice was musical. He was a strong supple athlete, a persevering swimmer that once swam over seven English miles upstream against the current from Richmond to Warwick without getting tired. He was an experienced jumper, elegant rider and excellent fencer that more than once demanded a duel from a hot-blooded opponent. He was a gentleman from top to bottom; his social manner was cool and though entangled was charming. He was sensitive and tender, earnest and solid. He was a scholar with an almost universal education. It was an equally great pleasure to see him or to listen to him. He was always sharing and his curse was that so few, so few to whom he gave his great riches were worthy enough to understand. Did a few beautiful women understand him? No, but they could sense the nobility of his soul, instinctively the way all women do. Only three people lived in his time that were capable of grasping him completely. Baudelaire and the two Brownings, but they lived over in old Europe and he never saw them. The poet was alone in his exaggerated dreams. He was beautiful, loved beautiful things and needed to surround himself with beauty. He created glorious beauty in his dreams that were real to him. The expensive country house in Landors or the marvelous estate at Arnheim. But in his poor modest life the penny mattered. He knew how to create things around him that excited the admiration of the rich. His small cottage at Fordham where he endured a paradise of agony with his death marked spouse had a precious harmony flowing through it that charmed every visitor. Stuff and clutter filled it. But it was attractive and beautiful. It was a miserable cottage on the top of a small hill but blooming cherry blossoms stood out of the green meadow. In the early dawn small songbirds enticed the poet out into the nearby pine forest. There he walked through his colorful Georginian bushes breathing the sweet perfume of wild Mignonettes and Heliotrope. The light morning air kissed his moist temples and stroked the weary eyes that had kept watch through the long night over his beloved. He visited the high bridge over the river Harlem and the rocky cliffs in the wilderness where he dreamed under the shade of ancient cedar trees. Now he rests somewhere. On the day after his death he was buried in the Westminster Church Cemetery in Baltimore. You have read of the poet dying like a vagabond and buried in a hurry like a dog found on the street. His grave will be near that of his grandfather, General David Poe, who made a name for himself in the Civil war. It should be there somewhere, there is no cross or gravestone to mark the site. No one bothered. His countrymen had other cares. Why should they worry about one dead poet! For one week they were employed with various miserable ways to soil and vilify his memory. All the false stories that have been invented since are still in circulation, a whole flood of poisonous ink sprayed over the dead lion. The mediocre fell upon him, the jealous torrents of small writers which he had so relentlessly pulled to pieces. Voiced the battle cry of the lying moralist Griswold, "He went mad in a drunken fog! He drank too much! He drank too much!" Then he was forgotten and that is all right. His countrymen are not yet mature enough to recognize the genius of their great poet. After another century they will gather his decayed bones together, erect a mighty monument and inscribe on it: "The Greatest Poet of the United States". Allow them to keep his bones over there. What we want is to listen to the poet's soul in the call of the nightingales that live here in the Alhambra. 1 The best English edition is by J.B. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia. A complete German edition (only the critical studies, humorous short stories and a few poems are not included) appeared by J.C.C. Bruns in Minden. Individual novels are in the Reclam and Meyer's public library. 2 Poe's biographer, the moralist Griswold does not hesitate to say; "In the entire literature we find only shadows and no example of Poe's missing conscience." 3 It is completely mistaken for van Vleuten to state as fact that excessive alcohol consumption will lead to Bachus being the enemy of Venus. His remark, "Every doctor knows that alcohol is the enemy of physical love, it seems that in Poe it has also destroyed its psychological equivalent." (Tomorrow"1903 page 189) For me to hear this from the mouth of a serious psychiatrist like van Vleuten is simply inconceivable. I have often had the opposite experience and several psychiatrists have confirmed to me that chronic alcoholics during intoxication often enough, sometimes even regularly, show an extraordinary increase in sex drive. This is not the place to question this detail. At the least every police officer will confirm and van Vleuten will certainly not deny that three quarters of the nightly patrons of Bordellos spend much of their time one way or the other in a highly intoxicated condition. Van Vleuten's hypothesis is wrong and his conclusion completely absurd. "Alcohol seems to have destroyed in Poe the psychic equivalent to have and the feminine was banished from his deliriums." "That is why the entire sphere of the feminine and human sexuality finds no root in the deliriums of this poet." The sphere of the feminine is not missing and Poe has of course in the purest and most noble form related it often. By the way, van Vleuten contradicts himself when he notes that the "Raven" seems to come from a delirium." (Ibid. page 189) Well, woman plays the main role in this poem how can he claim the feminine has been banished from Poe's deliriums? The sentence that "Alcohol is the enemy of physical love and even of its psychic equivalent" is certainly inaccurate; the effect is individual and entirely different in this case. Baudelaire, in writing of the sexuality in Poe's work, noted van Vleuten's comment in his own remark, "I can find no real explanation for this finding." Baudelaire, the artist of intoxication par excellence, did not avoid this well known remark and responded intentionally because he recognized its hollowness. Unfortunately not one word of the sociality as well as the sexuality that leaps to the eye of Poe's readers seems to touch van Vleuten. Does he claim these psychic equivalents did exist before they were destroyed by alcohol? Logically he must because there is no other way to explain his negation of something that is so obviously there in the internal context of Poe's work. It is also outrageous for van Vleuten in his otherwise intelligent work to take the poet and attempt to force him into a time deposited Procrustean bed with its pre-established template. He claimed, "Poe's landscapes are schematic and uniform, they show no illness and are not liable to remind one of amnesia." This psychiatrist, who himself is a gifted poet, takes these songs of a high landscape, the fifty pages from Poe's "Landor's Cottage" and "The Domain of Arnhiem" and calls them nothing more than scenic beauties of speech! I can only conclude that van Vleuten has only a fragmentary knowledge of Poe and has never read the two aforementioned cabinet pieces, or the majority of his poems with their scenic images. I can do this safely without making false allegations but I can not save him from another more serious allegation. That he has prefixed a work for an elite audience without sufficient knowledge. While it is largely in the whole certainly laudable, it contains serious errors in detail that reduce the all-encompassing image of a great genius for future readers.

Edgar Allan Poe Part 5

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

The Pit and the Pendulum

I slowly walk for a long time through the park at Alhambra under the ancient Elms that Wellington planted. On all sides I hear the babble and rustle of flowing water mixed with the sweet songs of a hundred nightingales. I stride between the high towers into the luxuriant valley of Alhambra. Who does this magic palace, these dream gardens belong to? The destitute Spanish nation that I despise? The vulgar strangers with their red books that I must take ten steps to avoid?

Oh no! It belongs to me, to me and the few capable of receiving this beauty into their souls. There is a voice in these stones, in these bushes that lends life to the spirit of beauty and brings an understanding of truth.

Everything around me and everything that is beautiful on this earth is the sacred everlasting property of the Nation of Culture that stands above the masses. It is ruler. It is owner. The beauty does not speak to anyone else. Understand this command and dare to live. Edgar Allan Poe did.

I sit on a stone bank where Aboul-Haddjadj once dreamed. In front of me a spring gushes up out of the hill and flows into a marble basin. I wonder if the Sultan ever sat alone here in the dawn hours. Oh, it is so sweet to dream here.

There was once a poet that wrote only of his conversations with the dead. He chatted with all seven Sages, all the kings of Ninevah, with Egyptian priests and Thessalonian witches, with Athenian singers, with Roman Commanders and with the knights of King Arthur's round table. Finally he didn't want to talk with living people anymore, the dead were so much more interesting!

Certainly anyone can chat with them. Every dreamer knows this and everyone that believes in dreams as the ultimate reality.

Have I not today wandered there above through the halls with my favorite? Have I not shown the world a beautiful piece of the dead that living eyes have never seen before? Now he stands before me leaning against an elm.

"Any questions?" He says.

He looks good, my caressing eyes question him and he speaks. Soon clear words drip from his lips, soon his voice babbles out of the fountain and sings out of the throats of the nightingales and rustles in the leaves of the ancient elm. The dead are so clever.

"Leave my poor life alone." He says. "Ask Goethe about his. He went hunting around the world with a prince that paid him with six stallions. I was a solitary."

I never let my gaze leave him. "Tell of your life and of your love!"

"I forgot life, forgot that I lived." He says. "Oh, not now since I've been dead, as the children say. I forgot every day on the next day. Could I have lived any other way? My true life, the one in my dreams you already know about."

A light mist rose from the ground and scurried away into the evening; a sweet cool fanned my temples. I certainly knew his dream life; it poured through me and through the world. Through his poetry his life has slowly unfolded before me.

William Wilson. Naturally this is Poe, so very much Poe that the moralist Griswold deemed Wilson's birth year as the poet's own. The boy ruled over all his schoolmates in the old boarding school at Stoke-Newington, all except one, his own self.

Those good things that he inherited as a boy, youth and man would always turn to rags because his conscience was not free of the other Wilson, his own self.

Pigheaded conscience pushed against his fascination with crime in the world and he became his own punishing judge.

This is how the poet's childhood poisoned his youthful years. What he inherited along with his education awakened still more feelings for good and evil so exaggerated in him that he went here and there trapped in an eternal struggle that nearly destroyed him.

Every little wrong he had ever experienced grew in his dreams into enormous crimes that tormented him, tormented him. Still more was the sinful thought of playing with the idea of evil in his dreams until it became real as well. He, himself, is the hero in all his gruesome stories. As the last of his kind he rights the sins of his father and like his Friedrich von Metzgerstein rides a demonic horse into the flames of hell.

How the elm leaves rustle! I hear this luckless voice in the wind. "If I had not been a poet I would have been a murderer, a fraud, a thief and a cheat."

The elm leaves clang and his voice continues, "and perhaps I would have been happier."

I think, who knows?

How is it that this tormented poet never became a criminal? Where he really lived, in his dreams, he was not only a murderer but at the same time a victim. He entombed his enemy alive in the cellar and it was himself that he entombed. (A Cask of Amontillado)

He murdered the man with the vulture eyes because he had to and buried him under the floor. The heart kept beating and beating and gave the deed away. It was again himself. (The Tell-Tale Heart) His evil twin, the double, William Wilson everywhere.

Seldom has an artist toiled so much for so few results, never has anyone so immersed themselves in their work. A German or Frenchman could more easily have freed himself from this morality. But the poet was so encumbered with a crushing religion of the soul from early childhood and in his education that he could never entirely free himself. When he was finally able to distance himself it was too late.

He was never able to stand on the other side of good and evil. The old English curse oppressed him. No fortune would spare him and like Breughel, Jean van Bosch and Goya, this poor soul had to suffer insane anguish and drink the bitter cup to the last drop.

Oh yes, if he had been a criminal he would have ended his life on a gallows instead of in a hospital for the poor. He would not have shared his thoughts and his life would still have been miserable and full of agony but not as dreadful as it was.

But a temple stands out of Golgotha, lily fields grow out of blood fertilized meadows, and we are fortunate to partake of these glorious flowers that grew out of the poisoned heart's blood of this poet.

The spring fed brook splashes through the park at Alhambra. Small lively rivulets prattle and chatter. It rushes in the narrow gravel plastered bed, rushing like the good hours of this poet's life. The hours, minutes perhaps that he was able to spend in harmless enjoyment.

In those times when he dreamed they were amusing dreams. About the man with the wonderful nose so huge that all the world sat in amazement. Painters painted it and Duchesses kissed it. This precious little story in a bizarre way is in advance of the talent of Mark Twain. Only in this one by Poe the exaggerations are finer and expressed more naturally so that no where is word play over emphasized.

Or his funny one about Hot Beggars Soup dished up in the weekly paper for good natured readers, or the instruction of Miss Zenobia with her capable and gripping Blackwood article and lastly the Honorable Thingum Bob from the World Lantern with the sublime delightful chat over his literary career.

So light, so kind is the poet's wit like the lively splashing brook babbling through the park at Alhambra.

But how the nightingales sob his dream of longing! And his soul appears to sing in the voice of the nightingale, so pure, so without blemish that the divine Cecilia would be jealous and break her violin and Apollo would smash his lyre. In his criminal dreams there was no hell deep enough for this poet but in this divine song there is no heaven high enough.

No where do we find a single sentence or gentle thought by Poe speaking of sexual love. The erotic is so completely alien to him as to no other except perhaps to a virgin. There is little to be found where he expressed social feelings as well and while he does have a heart in his breast that yearns for love it is never permitted to be expressed.

He was not able to love people and always took a small view. He pushed away the caressing hand and the endearing words died on his tongue unspoken. This is when his addiction helped and proved his ability to love animals, to pet the hound and feed the starving cats. Then he was grateful for the faithful gaze and the contented purring.

The poet was aware of this and expressed in his novel Black Cat how this love of animals was his richest source of joy. The higher love of his dying spouse gave him joy mixed with horrible pain and was certainly not the richest source of happiness in his poor life.

Edgar Allan Poe is Roderich Usher and like him has a lute from the angel Israfel of the Koran in his breast instead of a heart. When he looks at his beautiful beloved his heart stops and the lute sings. Its high song of longing sounds such sweet tones in his ear in the pure manner of Morella and Berenice, of Eleonora and Legeia. That same inner music flows through The Raven and Ulalume and is perhaps the highest art there is, this intoxication expressed through poetry and prose.

And in the poet's world song Eureka it is accompanied by these sounds, "They can not die: or if by any means they be now trodden down, so that they die, they will rise again to the life eternal."

Yes, in the short space of time that he lived he achieved what men call immortality, the highest man can ever reach now or in the future.

The worth of Edgar Allan Poe is at no time higher than in our day. Our time can learn so much from him and it has. Poe is not a problem today; he is a beacon whose clear light shines the way for others.

The awareness of his art through intoxication, the significance of stress and technique, the clear recognition of the Parnessian principle of art in the broadest sense. The strong sweeping back of the borders and the extreme significance of the inner music for all poets.

These are all moments some of which others individually stress but in their entirety and pervasive connection no artist has recognized and applied as much as the New England poet. And these moments in their entirety represent what is demanded by the modern spirit of cultural art expressed in a way that can be comprehended and studied. No artist or layman should be as grateful to any other poet as much as to Edgar Allan Poe.

When an artist is really stuck and can't make a translation there lies at hand a way to learn and enjoy being a poet by forcing a way into his inner being and bringing out the needed original translation. No other poet can show this process more than Poe can.

Now the nightingales flute and out of their small throats sings the voice of the artist I love. The light wind stops beating its frenzied wings on the leaves of the elms. The trickling brook quiets its chatter as the park of Alhambra pauses to listen to the song of the nightingales.

For a hundred years the old towers and mortar have experienced these familiar sweet evening sounds but today is different, so different. The loud beating of a dead poet's heart and the little birds are singing his soul song. The brook and the trees listen, the square red stones listen, the purple glowing snow capped mountains listen. And an infinite sigh sounds through the huge garden as in the west the warm sinking sun mournfully takes its needed parting from the poets raised song.

The twilight breathes through the elms and light misty shadows rise out of the laurel bushes to climb up toward the Moorish Palace. In ancient times long gone they sat round these marble banks. I know well who they are. Gabirol now sits next to me, now Ibn al-Khabib and Ibn Esra, and Jehudah ben Halevy and Mohammed Ibn Khaldoun and Ibn Batouta. A hundred dead poets listen hushed to the song of the nightingales. How clever are the dead.

They hear the heart of the angel Israfel whom the Koran told of, and give thankful praises to God that such music has awakened.

"Ouala ghaliba ill' Allahta 'ala" murmur the misty shadows. And the nightingales sing of dark mysteries, of the immense longing that is the pure source of life.

They sing of the greatest secret of all, that all things created and brought through eternity are filled with the breath of infinite love. They sing of beauty as the truth that comes before truth. They sing of dreams that are the life that comes before life.

Poe's soul sings and a hundred dead poets listen to the clamor and from their lips arise once more the ancient words "Ouala ghaliba ill' Allahta 'ala".

So thankful are the dead.

And the night sinks deeper here. The nightingales hush and the east wind rises and comes from the Sierra. The misty shadows disperse. I am alone again in the enchanted park of Alhambra. Alone with a great poet's soul. And how the wind blows through the ancient elms rustling the leaves and singing of Ulalume, the very same ballad in the poet's dreadful dream.

"The skies they were ashen and sober
The leaves they were crisped and sere
The leaves they were withering and sere
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year.
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber
In the misty region of Weir
It was down by the dark tarn of Auber
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir
Here once through an alley Titantic
Of cypress, I roamed with my soul."

I know well that the verse speaks of me. But I perceive my lips are not saying anything different than that of the rustling elms. I perceive that it is the grief of the October wind howling in distress at the poet's unearthly longing enspelled in human words and being pulled out of me.

It is the spark of his peculiar thought or essence that emanates from his corpse as the divine breath of nature penetrating everything. The original spark of his being is in all things and a small proof of the poet's highest law, that the source of all things is unity.

My mouth speaks the mysterious words that the wind has carried to my ears. I am becoming afraid in the dark loneliness, in this living fairy tale. I want to leave out of the valley of Alhambra. Groping in the darkness I lose my footing and miss the path. Finding a trail in the ancient cypress I come up hard against a low door. Oh, the terror that comes upon me in the darkness. I know, I know well whose grave this is. And against my will my lips speak to my soul.

"What is written, sweet sister
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied, "Ulalume, Ulalume.
Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Again and again the fear rises up within me. The dead poet's soul that rustled through the elm trees, that resounded in the nightingales song, that babbled in the spring fed brook, that howled such a dreadful song in the wind, has taken possession of me.

Only a small mote of dust with the divine breath of nature has pierced through me, through me. I know there is no escape and he will destroy me. He does not crush me. And strangely I am quiet, so quiet as if I have been completely filled by him.

The human fear gently fades away.

Now I find the path again. I stride through the gate of vines in the place leading to the Aljibes. I go in the Alcazaba, climb up the Ghafar, the mighty watchtower of the Moorish rulers.

A glowing crescent moon shines now between two moving clouds, it is the true mark of Arabian greatness that no God in heaven can wipe away.

I glance deep down into church happy Grenada, noisy and swarming with nightly street traffic. They run into the coffeehouses, they read the newspapers, polish boots and get their boots polished. They look into lit shop windows, travel in streetcars, call out, "fresh water!" and collect cigar stubs. The noise and bustle annoy me but I try to tolerate it. No one raises a glance; no one looks up to the singular splendor that is here above.

Over there on my right resounds the river Darro, behind me I hear the rushing of the torrent Geni. Bright campfires penetrate out of the caves of the gypsies and in another direction the snow capped Sierra glows silvery in the moonlight.

From where I stand between two watchtowers and the purple towers of the Moorish Mountains lies the park hidden in the darkness deep in the valley. Behind me lies the magic palace of Alhambra, hall on hall, courtyard on courtyard.

There below is the small life of this century; here above is the land of dreams. That down below in the distance is so infinitely far from me and this here above, is not every stone a part of my soul?

Haven't I been in this world of ghosts, that the living blind down below can not see? Haven't I been a part of this dream? It is the almighty beauty that makes these dreams come true. Here life blossoms and the reality down below is only a shadow game.

The deed is nothing. The thought is everything. The reality is ugly and not justified to exist. The dream is always beautiful and is true because it is beautiful. That is why I believe dreams are the only true reality.

Edgar Allan Poe Part 4

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

The Raven

Poe did not need this ancient fabrication any more. He saw how threadbare and tattered it was and boldly threw it aside. In Eureka he defined the concept of intuition in a few words as a "realization of truth" grounded in inductive and deductive reasoning so hidden in shadows that consciousness retreats from getting a grip on it or understanding of it and mocks our inability to put it into words.

Here lies a clearer understanding of the way art is created than that of his contemporaries. Those Poet-philosophers that claimed so-called "Intuition" was the opposite of philosophy. This is true in the limited narrow untheological and thoroughly modern sense and a special place has been made for the opposites, Aristotle and Bacon, placing them side by side together at the same time.

He was the greatest of these first men of modern spirit. He was a romantic, a dreamer, and a worshipper of reason who never let his feet leave solid earth.

Edgar Allan Poe was also first to openly speak on the technique of thinking a decade before Zolas's "Genius is diligence".

Edgar Allan Poe wrote of this in his forward to Eureka.

"To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think. To the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities-I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: Constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone; let us say as a romance, or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a poem.

What I propound here is true: --Therefore it can not die; --or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting!"

Poe stood completely independent from Th. Gautier and his "L'art pour l'art" principle. His claim was more than Gautier's, who only saw beauty with the eye of the painter and also lower than Gautier's in that the external form alone revealed the beauty. First beauty, then truth. To truth, that was his correction without negating beauty. That is the highest claim of any art that has ever been framed. He spoke in waking life of the longing for true value and reality, the simple reality that only the dream could fulfill.

Also here is Poe-the Romantic- Pathfinder; revealed here as the first of the modern spirits. His claim was so ultra modern that even today only a small portion of the many great writers can understand this radical spirit that sprang out independently fifty years before Zola coined his technique of creation principle and more widely than Parnassier's principle of art.

Among civilized people the fertilization of literature through Poe's spirit is now in full bloom in this century. The past saw him only as an outsider like the ridiculous pair, Puke and Snot. Certainly as someone fortune has turned her back on unlike Jules Verne and Conan Doyle who made fortunes.

It is entirely certain Poe wrote these things for his daily bread. The travels of Gordon Pym and Hanns Pfaall...etc. It was only through the need for a hot noon meal that the criminal novels (for example: Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Gold Bug) originated. Poe knew what it was like to starve! So he wrote these things, made translations and scientific collaborations whenever possible.

Really, every single story, even his weakest, make all the adventures of Sherlock Holmes fade in comparison. Why does the large public, especially the English speaking, devour Doyle's ridiculous Detective stories with enthusiasm and lay Poe's aside? It doesn't make sense!

Poe's characters like Dostojewskys are so genuine, his composition so complete that the reader's imagination is held captive in his net. That's when the reader is helpless against the painful murderous horror and seized in cruel suspense. They are continuously white with tension.

In his popular imitators this is merely pleasant titillation. The reader always knows that it is all stupid nonsense. They stand apart from the story and prefer it that way!

But Poe takes the poor drip by the hair, drags them to the abyss and catapults them into hell! They lose hearing and vision and don't know where they are anymore. That is why the average person that likes to sleep avoids Poe's horrific nightmares and is attracted to the scenic heroes of Baker Street.

He wanted to write for the large masses and set his goal way too high. He wrote way over their heads and thought they would like to read him! Then he went from publisher to publisher trying to market intelligent works to people that only wanted to buy straw!

There will come a time when the world is ready for this poet's gifts. There have already been many promising starts and we recognize the singular ways that Jean Paul, Th. Hoffman, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe have contributed to the culture of art.

Such art can no longer be dressed in nationalistic colors. First of all we need to realize that Poe's art was not for the people of America, but for the thin cultural layer whether it be German, Japanese, Latin or Jewish. We all wish and believe that no artist creates just for his people but for the entire world.

Velazquez and Cervantes are as completely unknown to the large masses in Spain as the English writers, Shakespeare and Byron, the French Rabelais and Moliere or the Dutch Rembrandt and Ruben are.

The German people don't have the slightest idea who Goethe and Schiller were and have never even heard of Heine. We hear the small blunt questions of soldiers in the regiments, "Who was Bismark? Who was Goethe?" When will blissful blind trust finally open its eyes?

Entire worlds separate the people of culture in Germany from their fellow countrymen, which they see daily on the street. There is only water that separates them from the people of culture in America.

Heine perceived that Edgar Allan Poe was great and threw it in the faces of the German experts. Even in our day most artists, scholars and experts of national culture have such little understanding that they misinterpret Horaz' refined "Odi Profanum".

The artist that tries to create for his people strives for the impossible neglecting something much more accessible and higher, to create for the entire world. Over the Germans, over the British, over the French stands a higher nation to create for, the Nation of Culture. It alone is worthy of the artist. The awareness of Poe is as solidly grounded there as Goethe but in a different, not as modern sense.

Edgar Allan Poe Part 3

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

Poe’s Cottage at Fordham

If only Edgar Allen Poe could have sat here in the Alhambra. How he would have dreamed! How the colorful stories would have flown lightly around his head before landing! With a few quick words he could have built an Alhambra whose thick towers would have withstood the rain and endured for centuries.

Here he might have found another way to reach ecstasy. He might not have needed to drink. But the poor poet's soul was stuck over there in New England strongly penning realistic prose while at the same time Washington Irving, the English model of morality, was allowed to dream in the moonlight magic of Alhambra..His Tales of Alhambra have become world famous.

Day by day I see strangers enter this sacred place, in their hand reviews and in their jacket pockets Edgar Allan Poe's book. This is how they read The Fall of the House of Usher or the Dionysian Last Days of Pompeii!

Can't you perceive the influence of Lord Lytton or Irving's spirit within this pair of beautiful stories? No, a whisper from a Catholic cemetery flows through the haunted Moorish palace in his soul. Although he was no famous poet, although he was only a common journalist, not Bulwar, not Irving created these beauties. He created Pompeii and the Alhambra in spite of them.

Poe's ability was not enough for his burning desire. The only method that worked was to gather up everything he had inside using it to awaken and carry him into ecstasy. The entire amount of stimulation he surrounded himself with was barely able to lead him to this condition.

If this unhappy poet only once in his life received a kiss from the Muse it was through his beautiful wife, Virginia Clem. The moralists want to call this intoxication holy and divine while forcefully rebuking the poet's other ecstasies, those from alcohol and from Opium, as unholy and devilish. They are equal! The valuable art that came forth from them was no less glorious.

The agony from the divinely consecrated ecstasy was scarcely inferior to the devilish! Where another was in paradise he was in hell, a passionate blissful hell whose flames were no less scorching. The hand of the poet was rich and Morella, Ligeia, Berenice and Lenore are all owed to the dying eyes of Virginia before her death was certain. He knew the gleaming red of her cheeks lied, knew it was a deception and that within the depths of her moist, shimmering eyes an unrelenting illness grinned out at him.

In the evening when he stroked her beloved locks he could sense, "She won't live many more days" and in the morning, "Another day less".

It was a dying person that his lips kissed, a dying person whose beautiful head lay next to him nights when he rested. When he was awakened by the rattle and laborious wheezing of her hard working lungs he would see the white linen shroud, see the cold drops of death sweat on her brow. The visible long drawn out death of his beloved took years. That was the only "fortune" this luckless poet ever had.

Oh yes, the coronation of his dead spouse gave him fame, but it was the fame of fear, of silent grief, the despair behind the smiling mask: A paradise of torments. Virginia sank deeply into his soul and came out in his finest stories. Who can perceive which nameless agonies gave birth to her whisper?

Before the last thread of life snapped and the still wife was laid in the tomb Edgar Poe wrote his masterpiece The Raven. Nothing like that poem or like him had ever been seen before in world literature. I would like to scream in the faces of the English hypocrites.

"His ecstasy came out of the divine intoxication of a lost bleeding heart as well as the common intoxication that comes out of a wine bottle."

Any psychiatrist that works with alcoholism can prove with ease that The Raven originated from a delirium. It's just as easy for a psychologist to prove Lenore is owed to the poet's other intoxication, Virginia.

Then compare the origins of these poems to the candid, wonderfully clear essay that Poe wrote. Every apostrophe, every line, every single syllable is founded in amazingly simple logic. It is almost as if he were solving a binomial equation! The theme certainly gives no mention of ecstasy and its origins out of his divine and not so divine intoxications.

He wrote his essay for New England magazine readers that wanted to know how to become poets and learn the speech of ecstasy. The massive hard work, the pure technique, the ability to edit, that is what art amounts to. It has never been more clearly stated than in this essay, American Poetry. It is a master example. Really.

Admittedly Godfather Schneider and others like him would never use the guide but for the artist it is the most valuable information there is. What he shows is that the divine ecstasy alone is not enough to create a perfect work of art. Hard work, despised technique, deliberation, the weight and tone of words are all indispensable.

The magnificent Alhambra was not created by the great ideas of Arab architects alone. Masons, donkey drivers, gardeners and painters each played their part.

Edgar Allen Poe was the first poet to speak with such candor and moderation of the pure craft of writing. Yes, and I will also say that even though he was an American, he was the first on the threshold of modern thinking. The shining proof of the full value of this artist is that he only speaks of technique and with no word mentions the intuition always mouthed by amateurs. Perhaps if he could have written more in the magazine for others to read, he might have been happy to tell about the intoxication technique. Never had anyone before him so analyzed their peculiar craft in such anatomical detail until each fiber was taken apart.

This is an alternative to the faith of the masses in the inspirational fables that persist in our days. Of the divine voice that dictated the Bible and the Master Artist's inspiration made possible through God's grace. When the Holy Spirit came upon them, they painted, they wrote poems and more or less composed an immaculate spirit child that was placed into this world. That was so nice, so comfortable, that certainly some great artists themselves believed in this mysterious consecration.

The Thracian singer was called "Drunk with God" even though he was sober as Socrates. This idea in its original Dionysian form nearly coincides with our modern view of intoxication and ecstasy which became in the later Apollonistic view, "The Divine Anointing" of the Christian belief that has been in a position to take over and with great enthusiasm cloud clear thinking.

All the beautiful phrases from the square in Mount Olympus, the kiss of the Muse, the divine intoxication, the Artist's "Grace of God", and so on. Thank God we no longer in the slightest think of these and where they have originated.

It took courage to scatter such a luminous fog. Few, very few poems in world literature could tolerate such relentless scrutiny. Poe could dare take this step because he had created in The Raven a poem that was so pure, so complete. All others not as perfect, the small, the ridiculous, the sublime, are ripped to pieces.

My glance falls to the plaster on the walls of the hall. The eye can not follow all these arabesque and Kufic proverbs. It gets swallowed up and lost in the fantastic harmonies of the Moorish style.

Now this Arabic miracle of art is created out of gypsum, common gypsum. How ridiculous, how small, how absurd! But although created out of gypsum it loses nothing from its composition and is a complete work of art.

The common materials have been given life by the breath of the Spirit.

Art triumphs over nature, and this art is so great that recognition of the ridiculous common materials of its creation mean nothing.

Edgar Allan Poe Part 2

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

Edgar Allen Poe

We admire the Tiger Orchid. Is the magnificent orchid less beautiful because it feeds on insects by slowly torturing them to death in the narrow way? We are joyed and amazed at the glorious lilies in the Park of Cintra. We have never seen any so large and so white! How does it happen that their exceptional beauty is owed to the clever gardener that fertilizes the ground not with pure water but with treatments of Guano, applied manure?

Sometimes a sympathetic smile comes at the wide country roads our art must travel by chance before it shines meagerly here and there like a lantern piercing the fog of intoxication. There are times when it only comes through the union of intoxication and art. Then it is the only way great inspiration can come out from within and make itself known. When this happens the highest place must be given to the scouts Hoffman, Baudelaire and Poe, who first worked consciously through intoxication to find their art.

Let's be honest! Is there an artist that can go without stimulation? No one can do without their little stimulants, tea, tobacco, coffee, beer or what ever. Do these things hinder our inspiration of art or help shape its spirit more clearly?

They often help shape it more clearly.

Art is contrary to nature. A man that lives in abstinence keeping body and mind pure and whose ancestors also lived in abstinence for long generations has poisoned blood and can never become an artist! Not even God's favor in life can awaken the ecstasy. Its spirit has been poisoned.

Nature and Art are the worst enemies. Where one exists the other is not possible.

In the best sense what precisely is an artist? A pioneer of culture in the new territory of the unconscious. In this holy sense how few deserve this proud name! Th. A. Hoffman deserves it and Jean Paul and Villiers and Baudelaire and most certainly Edgar Allan Poe. Griswold must admit to himself that this poet of the soul related in so many of his stories a secret land considered by no one before him and gave us a first glimpse of a new genre of literature.

This powerful land of the unconscious, the land of our eternal desire lies in gray hazy clouds. The beggar lies warm in the sun. The commoner crouches sated by the oven. But there are those whose desire is so immense that their inspiration must come bleeding out.

They must in triple protect their breast when they leave the land of consciousness and steer through the gray murderous flood back toward Avalon.

Many, many get dashed to ground without casting a single glimpse behind the clouds. Very few succeed at this journey. These discover new territory for the culture and the border of the unconscious is pushed back a little further.

The artists are these first great explorers. Then mankind may equip researchers to survey and investigate this new land. They send in officials and civil servants to organize and record-men of science.

It is certain that in addition to other ways the so-called poisons we call narcotics are capable of taking us across the threshold of consciousness. If anyone has success and gets solid footing on the "other side" they can metaphysically in a positive way create new works of art. They are in the finest sense an artist.

Maybe it is necessary to stress the truth that art can never converse naturally with self except while working through frenzy. Some form of stimulation is needed. Or another, that no intoxicant in the world can bring art out of a person that has none inside to begin with!

The Griswolds and Ingrams want less wine drinking, less opium smoking, less hashish eating. If they had their way no more art would be created!

But he who works through intoxication together with narcotics creates suitable conditions where ecstasy can be invoked. This highest level of ecstasy can be invoked in anyone according to his or her intelligence and capability.

Griswold was right. Edgar Allen Poe drank. And yes, he drank too much. His body reacted badly to alcohol. His addiction was hereditary, so he drank a lot. He drank too much. But his actions were deliberate. While in the intoxicated condition things came out in a frenzy that later, perhaps years later, were shaped into new works of valuable art. Such intoxication is no pleasure. It is a horrible agony where awareness is only of the yearning for the art blazing like the mark of Cain upon his brow.

It is a belittling lie of the narrow minded that artistic production is no work, that it is a joy. Those that say so and the large masses with their thankless thought chatter never have a hint or breath of the ecstasy that only the artistic condition produces. This frenzy is always an agony to experience even if the ecstasy at first brings delight.

It is said the mother cat has pleasure bringing her young into the world but they are only poor blind kittens. This may be the weekend chatter of the Buxtehuder Newspaper like the writer of "Berlin at Night" who with pleasure puts his lines on paper.

A work of art is never born without pain.

I am going out. Through the enormous palace of the Roman Emperor Charles that led the German Nation. Cross through the mighty columned courtyard and out through the long avenue of white blooming acacia. Through the meadow covered with thousands of blue Irises.

I unlock and let myself into the Tower of the Princesses. The sultan's daughters, Zayda, Zorayda and Zorahayda secretly listened at these windows to the songs of a captured knight during the time of the crusdades.

Over the valley on the hill I see the boundary where Boabdil gave his last sigh over the lost Granada. From the Generalife gardens I can clearly see the ancient cypress where the last Moorish king's wife, the beautiful Hamet, brought disaster through her tryst with Abenceragen deep in the shadows.

Every stone here tells a sad tragic legend.

Down at the bottom of the valley the road continues on the long way to the cemetery. A pair of black goats graze on the green slopes. In back, under the prison tower sits a ragged customs agent in front of his filthy den. Long eared rabbits graze close to him and nearby seven cocks battle, pecking the ground or flying after each other, combs and black feathers plucked.

Far in the east glows the snow on the purple-red Sierra Nevada.

A troop of ragged urchins moves slowly across the valley bottom. Two carry a small child's coffin on their shoulders open in the Spanish custom. Another shoulders the lid. The coffin is very simple, three yellow planks and two plain ones. But a small waxy face and dark hair appear out of the flowers, many flowers, red, yellow, white and blue flowers that have been placed inside.

No Priest, no relatives, no father or mother in the procession, only ragged urchins. Still, the dead child rests in such fresh blooming fragrance among so many colored flowers. How good they didn't close her eyes! They look around curious at the colored flowers, at the old Moorish Palace and then back to the splendor of her flowers, this small dead maiden, so contented and fortunate to never again be alive.

Edgar Allen Poe Part 1

Welcome! To see this essay in one piece or to read other stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers that I have translated please go to Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.

Edgar Allen Poe
By Hans Heinz Ewers

First published by Schuster & Loeffler, Berlin/Leipzig 1906

(English translation 2008 by Joe E. Bandel)



This booklet is dedicated to
Gustav Meyrink

Drunken Artist, dreamer, he believed dreams are the true reality just as Poe did. He wrote what he dreamed.

In the Alhambra
April 1905

Hanns Heinz Ewers




My feet stride lightly upon the morning stones of the old way that I have so often traveled up through the sacred groves at Alhambra. I long for that vast world behind the jeweled gate where time flies. I wander so lightly in the dreamland, where the elms rustle, where the spring babbles, where a hundred nightingales sing out from the laurel bushes. I can certainly reflect upon my poet there.

You should not do it. Really not. You should not go there and read any book about an artist you love. How can a priest speak about God? You need to be careful, so very careful.

This is what you should do:

You love Firdusi? Don’t you know Goethe wrote about him? Good. First of all learn what he said about the Persian before you begin. Then after you have learned enough and are ready to write about your favorite, decide what he would have written, you will not be disappointed.

It doesn’t matter what the critics write about the artist you love. If the critics boast about him being a star or say he is only a wisp of mist- it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter if the critics know enough because you know. You are telling the truth about your artist.

I haven’t done it this way. I’ve got a few drops of thick flowing German thoroughness in my blood, a sense of duty.

I thought:

Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me?

I thought:

“Perhaps—“
Many have written about Edgar Allen. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him.

There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum.

Now I need to forget what the others have said. I must forget the horrible Griswold whose poisonous vomit is not a Poe biography.

“He drank too much, he drank too much, such a shame, he drank too much!”

Also I must forget the horrible fool Ingram who would defend my artist’s honor in return by stammering “He did not drink, really, he did not drink”.



Quick, before I forget I’ll put down the dates I have about him:

Edgar Allen Poe, born on 19 January 1809 in Boston. Irish family, long pedigree, Norman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Italian blood. 1816 to England with his foster parents, a couple of years in a boarding school in Stoke-Newington, 1822 back to America, 1826 student in Richmond, then in Charlottesville, 1827 travel through Europe with unknown adventures, 1830 Cadet Officer at West Point, 1834 Head of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. 1836 married his cousin Virginia Clemm. He wrote. He lived in various places, in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Fordham. He had a rough time. “He drank too much”, (said Griswold). “He does not drink”, (said Ingram). He died on 7 October in a hospital for the poor in Baltimore, forty years old.

So, these are the all-important dates. Now I can forget.

How difficult it is. For a long time I go along the elm lined avenue up to the royal palace. I turn left and enter the gate to the mighty tower of the Law. I am glad of the hand above that averts the evil eye. I think, this might keep my moralists outside. Now I am above, alone in the familiar spaces.

I know exactly where I want to go. Quick through the myrtle courtyard, through the hall of the Mocaraben into the courtyard of the twelve lions. Enter left into the room of the two sisters and through it to the Ajimeces. Now I’m there in Mirador de Daraxa, where Boabdil’s mother Aicha lived. I sit by a window looking out on the old cypress trees.

How hard it still is to forget! There go my moralists strolling in the garden. Two English hypocrites with round hats, short pipes, black jackets and reviews in their hands.

“He drinks too much”, hisses one.

“Oh no, he does not drink at all”, chimes the other.

I would like to knock their heads together!

“Go away you rats, go away! I’m sitting here dreaming about an artist I love. He sang in your language and you sticks know nothing about him!”

They left all right. Be certain of that. I am alone once more.

He drinks too much. He does not drink. That is how the Englanders argue about their poet. They let Milton starve, they steal Shakespeare’s entire life’s work, they scrabble with crooked fingers in Byron’s and Shelley’s family history, they vilify Rossetti and Swinburne, stick Wilde in prison and point their fingers at Charles Lamb and Poe. Because they drank!

I’m so glad that I’m a German! Germany’s great men are permitted to be indecent. Indecent—Certainly that means not as decent as the good citizens and moralists. The Germans say, “Goethe was a great poet.” They knew he had vices but did not consider them.

The Englanders say, “Byron was indecent, therefore he was not a great poet.”

Only in England could the repulsive moral preacher Kingsley create a household phrase about Heine.

“Don’t speak of him. He was a bad man!”

When no one listens, when people gather round to acknowledge the “indecent” English poet they love, the Englander is finally compelled to speak and then he will lie. He does not give up on his hypocrisy. He says then, “After further examination he was not at all indecent but of high morals, completely pure and completely blameless!

This is why the English liar could not take it any more and vindicated Wilde’s honor with a Saul to Paul conversion. The same with Poe and Ingram’s reply to Griswold.

“Oh no, He did not really drink!”

The English have only now after all this time officially recognized that Edgar Allan Poe was a decent man!

We however, never make a big deal of middle class and moralistic purity. We love him even if he drank. Still more, we love him because he drank. Even though toxins destroyed his body, great art sprang out of his life’s blood, that was his gift. The layman does not determine how great art originates. It comes from out of the artist himself. No one is permitted a say in this or a derogatory judgement or cut-down.

Only the few whose insight perceives the creative process because they love him, only they are permitted to watch in silence, to comment.

Wilde related the fairy tale of the lovely rose created from the heart’s blood of a dead nightingale. The fallow student looked and wondered, never had he seen such a marvelous blood red rose. But he had no idea how it was created.

Can You Survive the New Age?

The casual visitor to this site might not realize just how important the self-empowerment information contained in Anarchist World really is. It is all too easy to push things off as crackpot opinion and continue a life of mediocrity.

Our physical world and events are driven by the non-physical world that supports it. It is a pressurized system that is driven by global, collective and individual pressures. If you are not using your physical body to generate energy and pressurize your own non-physical body you will be at the mercy of outside non-physical pressures. There are physical, sexual, emotional, mental and spiritual pressures that effect our lives.

OAK-A Modern Mystery School and the Order of Anarchistic Knights are serious movements toward human excellence using the best of traditional and modern technology and techniques. I challenge anyone anywhere to find better self-empowerment information!

In the New Age the average person will simply no longer be competitive and it will take high effort just to maintain the status quo.

Physical Energy- The base line effort will require at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise everyday to maintain minimum health. Modern medicine is already advocating this and insurance companies are joining in through the promotion of employment related fitness programs. The benefits of aerobic exercise can not be denied or debated. If you are not doing this much physical exercise each day you are already losing.

Sadly these efforts are not enough to produce the energy spikes needed for soul development and magickal empowerment. It is the creation of energy spikes that is most important. The goal is not to generate energy but to channel the energy of the earth. This requires a connection to the earth’s energy grid. Traditionally this has been done through some variant of the martial arts. A Russian Kettlebell workout is just as effective as is the use of almost any Dragon Door Product. The bottom line is that if you don’t generate enough physical energy to have vivid dreams you haven’t done enough. Vivid dreams in which you are empowered are the sign of success in the astral realms.

Sexual Energy- The base line is that healthy sexuality is an important factor in physical, mental and emotional health. Birth control including vasectomies for men as well as sexual and reproductive education are becoming the standard in today’s world. Sex for pleasure is vital in developing a charismatic and magnetic body. If you do not have healthy beliefs and attitudes about human sexuality you are already losing.

Sadly these efforts are not enough to produce the energy spikes needed for soul development and magickal empowerment. The goal for the generation of this energy is the permanent development of astral bodies. These include non-physical bodies created from sexual, emotional, mental and spiritual energies. Tantric Sexual techniques including those that prevent sperm loss in males are needed on a daily basis to make significant progress in reasonable amounts of time. Once more vivid dreams that are empowering are the sign of success in the astral realms.

Emotional Energy- The base line is that we are all emotionally damaged and in need of some psychological therapy and emotional release. Trapped and repressed emotions make some people walking time-bombs waiting to go off. If you haven’t worked on your emotional wounds you are already losing.

Sadly these efforts are not enough to clear energy pathways to allow further magickal and soul development. There can be no pockets of trapped and repressed emotional energy in the fully functioning soul. Dual energy channels need to be opened and maintained within the physical and etheric body. The Duality essays in Magister Templi begin this process and the OAK Energy Ball meditation completes this process by working with spiritual energies and harmlessly releasing the most dangerous repressed and trapped emotional energies. In my opinion the effect is similar to Dianetics processing but faster, more effective and much simpler.

Mental Energy- The base line is that in today’s world you need a college education and be skilled in a specialized work area. Sociology makes it plain that the most powerful way to rise to a higher social status is through education. If you don’t have a college degree you are already losing.

Sadly a college degree is not enough to progress in the competitive world of the New Age. What is needed is a global knowledge and a unified belief system that creates unbeatable advantages and allows cross discipline knowledge to be accessed and applied creatively in new ways. You need to think outside the box if you are going to get ahead! When you don’t know or are in doubt you hesitate and hesitation is not the way to win. The self-empowerment material in Anarchist World provides advanced concepts and self-evident truths that burn away the philosophical errors pervading our society. If you want to think outside the box visit Anarchist World to find out how.

Spiritual Energy- The base line is that your entire life needs to be in harmony with the earth’s energy grid or it will destroy you. At the least this means having a materialistic and realistic view of life. You need to be competent in what you do or you will not get physical results. This involves stress reduction through meditation and other spiritual practices.

Being competent is not enough! You need to be able to project into the future and plan ahead for unforeseen obstacles and events. The further ahead you can plan into the future the better your chances for eventual success. It is the development and permanent activation of the non-physical bodies that gives the extra-sensory perception required to make unfailing choices. A purely materialistic world view is not enough. The best way to make permanent contact with the earth’s energy grid is through initiation. Initiation allows instant connection with the earth’s energy grid and realignment of the subtle bodies.

In summary this New Age is a very competitive place and the minimum requirements just to hold your own are:

30 Minutes of daily aerobic exercise
A normal sex life with the practice of birth control
Some form of support and Psychological therapy
A college education
Meditation and other stress reduction practices

If you are not doing these things on a daily basis you are already falling behind. You life is not being pressurized enough to maintain your current life conditions. OAK and Anarchist World are talking about reaching beyond these things into the realm of human excellence. The choice belongs to you!

Federalist Papers 6E

Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the commercial kind. Yet were they as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the neighboring monarchies of the same times. Sparta was little better than a wellregulated camp; and Rome was never sated of carnage and conquest.

Carthage, though a commercial republic, was the aggressor in the very war that ended in her destruction. Hannibal had carried her arms into the heart of Italy and to the gates of Rome, before Scipio, in turn, gave him an overthrow in the territories of Carthage, and made a conquest of the commonwealth.

Venice, in later times, figured more than once in wars of ambition, till, becoming an object to the other Italian states, Pope Julius II. found means to accomplish that formidable league,⁹ which gave a deadly blow to the power and pride of this haughty republic.

The provinces of Holland, till they were overwhelmed in debts and taxes, took a leading and conspicuous part in the wars of Europe. They had furious contests with England for the dominion of the sea, and were among the most persevering and most implacable of the opponents of Louis XIV.

In the government of Britain the representatives of the people compose one branch of the national legislature. Commerce has been for ages the predominant pursuit of that country. Few nations, nevertheless, have been more frequently engaged in war; and the wars in which that kingdom has been engaged have, in numerous instances, proceeded from the people.

Federalist Papers 6D

But notwithstanding the concurring testimony of experience, in this particular, there are still to be found visionary or designing men, who stand ready to advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between the States, though dismembered and alienated from each other. The genius of republics (say they) is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.

Is it not (we may ask these projectors in politics) the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by MEN as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.

Federalist Papers 6C

The ambitious cardinal, who was prime minister to Henry VIII., permitting his vanity to aspire to the triple crown entertained hopes of succeeding in the acquisition of that splendid prize by the influence of the Emperor Charles V. To secure the favor and interest of this enterprising and powerful monarch, he precipitated England into a war with France, contrary to the plainest dictates of policy, and at the hazard of the safety and independence, as well of the kingdom over which he presided by his counsels, as of Europe in general. For if there ever was a sovereign who bid fair to realize the project of universal monarchy, it was the Emperor Charles V., of whose intrigues Wolsey was at once the instrument and the dupe.

The influence which the bigotry of one female the petulance of another and the cabals of a third had in the contemporary policy, ferments, and pacifications, of a considerable part of Europe, are topics that have been too often descanted upon not to be generally known.

To multiply examples of the agency of personal considerations in the production of great national events, either foreign or domestic, according to their direction, would be an unnecessary waste of time. Those who have but a superficial acquaintance with the sources from which they are to be drawn, will themselves recollect a variety of instances; and those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights to form their opinion either of the reality or extent of that agency. Perhaps, however, a reference, tending to illustrate the general principle, may with propriety be made to a case which has lately happened among ourselves. If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.