Poe Never Said It!

Portrait of Bacon by Paul van Somer, 1617. Source: Wikipedia.

I see this falsely-attributed quotation all the time on the Web, and it makes me want to bash my brains out with a didgeridoo.

"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."

-- Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe never said this. Instead, one of Poe's characters misquoted Francis Bacon:

"There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream -- an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. 'There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, 'without some strangeness in the proportion.'"

-- From "Ligeia."

It hardly seems to matter to people on the Web that Poe's character attributes his misquotation to the actual source, right there in the same sentence. Right there in plain sight!

Here is what Francis, Lord Verulam, actually wrote:

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody but the painter that made them. Not but I think a painter may make a better face than ever was; but he must do it by a kind of felicity (as a musician that maketh an excellent air in music), and not by rule. A man shall see faces, that if you examine them part by part, you shall find never a good; and yet altogether do well."

-- From "Of Beauty," in ESSAYS OR COUNSELS, CIVIL AND MORAL [1625].

We live in a time of instantaneous access to information, yet people seem unable to learn from this information....