Life Without and Life Within Part 7

Such a man as Brown or G.o.dwin has a right to say that. Their mind is no scanty, turbid rill, rejoicing to be daily fed from a thousand others, or from the clouds. Its plenteous source rushes from a high mountain between bulwarks of stone. Its course, even and full, keeps ever green its banks, and affords the means of life and joy to a million gliding shapes, that fill its deep waters, and twinkle above its golden sands.

Life and Joy! Yes, Joy! These two have been called the dark Masters, because they disclose the twilight recesses of the human heart. Yet the gravest page in the history of such men is joy, compared with the mixed, shallow, uncertain pleasures of vulgar minds. Joy! because they were all alive, and fulfilled the purposes of being. No sham, no imitation, no convention deformed or veiled their native lineaments, or checked the use of their natural force. All alive themselves, they understood that there is no happiness without truth, no perception of it without real life. Unlike most men, existence was to them not a tissue of words and seemings, but a substantial possession.

Born Hegelians, without the pretensions of science, they sought G.o.d in their own consciousness, and found him. The heart, because it saw itself so fearfully and wonderfully made, did not disown its Maker. With the highest idea of the dignity, power, and beauty of which human nature is capable, they had courage to see by what an oblique course it proceeds, yet never lose faith that it would reach its destined aim. Thus their darkest disclosures are not hobgoblin shows, but precious revelations.

Brown is great as ever human writer was in showing the self-sustaining force of which a lonely mind is capable. He takes one person, makes him brood like the bee, and extract from the common life before him all its sweetness, its bitterness, and its nourishment.

We say makes _him_, but it increases our own interest in Brown, that, a prophet in this respect of a better era, he has usually placed this thinking, royal mind in the body of a woman. This personage, too, is always feminine, both in her character and circ.u.mstances, but a conclusive proof that the term _feminine_ is not a synonyme for _weak_.

Constantia, Clara Wieland, have loving hearts, graceful and plastic natures, but they have also n.o.ble, thinking minds, full of resource, constancy, courage. The Marguerite of G.o.dwin, no less, is all refinement and the purest tenderness; but she is also the soul of honor, capable of deep discernment, and of acting in conformity with the inferences she draws. The Man of Brown and G.o.dwin has not eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and been driven to sustain himself by the sweat of his brow for nothing, but has learned the structure and laws of things, and become a being, natural, benignant, various, and desirous of supplying the loss of innocence by the attainment of virtue. So his Woman need not be quite so weak as Eve, the slave of feeling or of flattery; she also has learned to guide her helm amid the storm across the troubled waters.

The horrors which mysteriously beset these persons, and against which, so far as outward facts go, they often strive in vain, are but a representation of those powers permitted to work in the same way throughout the affairs of this world. Their demoniacal attributes only represent a morbid state of the intellect, gone to excess from want of balance with the other powers. There is an intellectual as well as a physical drunkenness, and which, no less, impels to crime. Carwin, urged on to use his ventriloquism till the presence of such a strange agent wakened the seeds of fanaticism in the breast of Wieland, is in a state no more foreign to nature than that of the wretch executed last week, who felt himself drawn as by a spell to murder his victim, because he had thought of her money and the pleasures it might bring him, till the feeling possessed his brain that hurls the gamester to ruin. The victims of such agency are like the soldier of the Rio Grande, who, both legs shot off, and his life-blood rus.h.i.+ng out with every pulse, replied serenely to his pitying comrades, that "he had now that for which the soldier enlisted." The end of the drama is not in this world, and the fiction which rounds off the whole to harmony and felicity before the curtain falls, sins against truth, and deludes the reader. The Nelsons of the human race are all the more exposed to the a.s.saults of Fate, that they are decorated with the badges of well-earned glory. Who but feels as they fall in death, or rise again to a mutilated existence, that the end is not yet? Who, that thinks, but must feel that the recompense is, where Brown places it, in the acc.u.mulation of mental treasure, in the severe a.s.say by fire that leaves the gold pure to be used some time--somewhere?

Brown,--man of the brooding eye, the teeming brain, the deep and fervent heart,--if thy country prize thee not, and had almost lost thee out of sight, it is because her heart is made shallow and cold, her eye dim, by the pomp of circ.u.mstance, the love of gross outward gain. She cannot long continue thus, for it takes a great deal of soul to keep a huge body from disease and dissolution. As there is more soul, thou wilt be more sought; and many will yet sit down with thy Constantia to the meal and water on which she sustained her full and thoughtful existence, who could not endure the ennui of aldermanic dinners, or find any relish in the imitation of French cookery. To-day many will read the words, and some have a cup large enough to receive the spirit, before it is lost in the sand on which their feet are planted.

Brown's high standard of the delights of intellectual communion and of friends.h.i.+p, correspond with the fondest hopes of early days. But in the relations of real life, at present, there is rarely more than one of the parties ready for such intercourse as he describes. On the one side there will be dryness, want of perception, or variety, a stupidity unable to appreciate life's richest boon when offered to its grasp; and the finer nature is doomed to retrace its steps, unhappy as those who, having force to raise a spirit, cannot retain or make it substantial, and stretch out their arms only to bring them back empty to the breast.

We were glad to see these reprints, but sorry to see them so carelessly done. Under the cheap system, the carelessness in printing and translating grows to a greater excess day by day. Please, Public, to remonstrate; else very soon all your books will be offered for two s.h.i.+llings apiece, and none of them in a fit state to be read.

EDGAR A. POE.[9]

Mr. Poe throws down the gauntlet in his preface by what he says of "the paltry compensations, or more paltry commendations, of mankind." Some champion might be expected to start up from the "somewhat sizable" cla.s.s embraced, or, more properly speaking, boxed on the ear, by this defiance, who might try whether the sting of Criticism was as indifferent to this knight of the pen as he professes its honey to be.

Were there such a champion, gifted with ac.u.men to dissect, and a swift-glancing wit to enliven the operation, he could find no more legitimate subject, no fairer game, than Mr. Poe, who has wielded the weapons of criticism without relenting, whether with the dagger he rent and tore the garment in which some favored Joseph had pranked himself, secure of honor in the sight of all men, or whether with uplifted tomahawk he rushed upon the new-born children of some hapless genius, who had fancied, and persuaded his friends to fancy, that they were beautiful, and worthy a long and honored life. A large band of these offended dignitaries and aggrieved parents must be on the watch for a volume of "Poems by Edgar A. Poe," ready to cut, rend, and slash in turn, and hoping to see his own Raven left alone to prey upon the slaughter of which it is the herald.

Such joust and tournament we look to see, and, indeed, have some stake in the matter, so far as we have friends whose wrongs cry aloud for the avenger. Natheless we could not take part in the _melee_, except to join the crowd of lookers-on in the cry "heaven speed the right!"

Early we read that fable of Apollo who rewarded the critic, who had painfully winnowed the wheat,--with the chaff for his pains. We joined the gentle Affirmative School, and have confidence that if we indulge ourselves chiefly with the appreciation of good qualities, Time will take care of the faults. For Time holds a strainer like that used in the diamond mines--have but patience and the water and gravel will all pa.s.s through, and only the precious stones be left. Yet we are not blind to the uses of severe criticism, and of just censure, especially in a time and place so degraded by venal and indiscriminate praise as the present.

That unholy alliance; that shameless sham, whose motto is,

"Caw me And I'll caw thee;"

that system of mutual adulation and organized puff which was carried to such perfection in the time, and may be seen drawn to the life in the correspondence, of Miss Hannah More, is fully represented in our day and generation. We see that it meets a counter-agency, from the league of Truth-tellers, few, but each of them mighty as Fingal or any other hero of the sort. Let such tell the whole truth, as well as nothing but the truth, but let their sternness be in the spirit of Love. Let them seek to understand the purpose and scope of an author, his capacity as well as his fulfilments, and how his faults are made to grow by the same suns.h.i.+ne that acts upon his virtues, for this is the case with talents no less than with character. The rich field requires frequent and careful weeding; frequent, lest the weeds exhaust the soil; careful, lest the flowers and grain be pulled up along with the weeds.

It has often been our lot to share the mistake of Gil Blas with regard to the Archbishop. We have taken people at their word, and while rejoicing that women could bear neglect without feeling mean pique, and that authors, rising above self-love, could show candor about their works, and magnanimously meet both justice and injustice, we have been rudely awakened from our dream, and found that chanticleer, who crowed so bravely, showed himself at last but a dunghill fowl. Yet Heaven grant we never become too worldly-wise thus to trust a generous word, and we surely are not so yet, for we believe Mr. Poe to be sincere when he says,--

"In defence of my own taste, it is inc.u.mbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort, in what, under happier circ.u.mstances, would have been the field of my choice."

We believe Mr. Poe to be sincere in this declaration; if he is, we respect him; if otherwise, we do not. Such things should never be said unless in hearty earnest. If in earnest, they are honorable pledges; if not, a pitiful fence and foil of vanity. Earnest or not, the words are thus far true; the productions in this volume indicate a power to do something far better. With the exception of the Raven, which seems intended chiefly to show the writer's artistic skill, and is in its way a rare and finished specimen, they are all fragments--_fyttes_ upon the lyre, almost all of which leave a something to desire or demand. This is not the case, however, with these lines:--

TO ONE IN PARADISE.

Thou wast all that 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.

Ah, dream too bright to last!

Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise But to be overcast!

A voice from out the Future cries, "On! on!"--but o'er the Past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! with me The light of life is o'er!

No more--no more--no more (Such language holds the solemn sea To the sands upon the sh.o.r.e) Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, Or the stricken eagle soar!

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.

The poems breathe a pa.s.sionate sadness, relieved sometimes by touches very lovely and tender:--

"Amid the earnest woes That crowd around my earthly path (Drear path, alas! where grows Not even one lonely rose.") * * *

"For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies, The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her eyes-- The life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes."

This kind of beauty is especially conspicuous, even rising into dignity, in the poem called the Haunted Palace.

The imagination of this writer rarely expresses itself in p.r.o.nounced forms, but rather in a sweep of images, thronging and distant like a procession of moonlight clouds on the horizon, but like them characteristic and harmonious one with another, according to their office.

The descriptive power is greatest when it takes a shape not unlike an incantation, as in the first part of the Sleeper, where

"I stand beneath the mystic moon; An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, Exhales from out a golden rim, And, softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top, Steals drowsily and musically Into the universal valley."

Why _universal_?--"resolve me that, Master Moth."

And farther on, "the lily _lolls_ upon the wave."

This word _lolls_, often made use of in these poems, presents a vulgar image to our thought; we know not how it is to that of others.

The lines which follow, about the open window, are highly poetical. So is the Bridal Ballad in its power of suggesting a whole tribe and train of thoughts and pictures, by few and simple touches.

The poems written in youth, written, indeed, we understand, in childhood, before the author was ten years old, are a great psychological curiosity. Is it the delirium of a prematurely excited brain that causes such a rapture of words? What is to be gathered from seeing the future so fully antic.i.p.ated in the germ? The pa.s.sions are not unfrequently _felt_ in their full shock, if not in their intensity, at eight or nine years old, but here they are _reflected upon_:--

"Sweet was their death--with them to die was rife With the last ecstasy of satiate life."

The scenes from Politian are done with clear, sharp strokes; the power is rather metaphysical than dramatic. We must repeat what we have heretofore said, that we could wish to see Mr. Poe engaged in a metaphysical romance. He needs a sustained flight and far range to show what his powers really are. Let us have from him the a.n.a.lysis of the Pa.s.sions, with their appropriate Fates; let us have his speculations clarified; let him intersperse dialogue or poem, as the occasion prompts, and give us something really good and strong, firmly wrought, and fairly blazoned.

ALFIERI AND CELLINI.[10]

These two publications have come to hand during the last month--a cheering gleam upon the winter of our discontent, as we saw the flood of bad translations of worse books which swelled upon the country.

We love our country well. The many false deeds and low thoughts; the devotion to interest; the forgetfulness of principle; the indifference to high and n.o.ble sentiment, which have, in so many ways, darkened her history for some years back, have not made us despair of her yet fulfilling the great destiny whose promise rose, like a star, only some half a century ago upon the hopes of the world.

Should that star be forsaken by its angel, and those hopes set finally in clouds of shame, the church which we had built out of the ruins of the ancient time must fall to the ground. This church seemed a model of divine art. It contained a labyrinth which, when threaded by aid of the clew of Faith, presented, re-viewed from its centre, the most admirable harmony and depth of meaning in its design, and comprised in its decorations all the symbols of permanent interest of which the mind of man has made use for the benefit of man. Such was to be our church, a church not made with hands, catholic, universal, all whose stones should be living stones, its officials the cherubim of Love and Knowledge, its wors.h.i.+p wiser and purer action than has before been known to men. To such a church men do indeed const.i.tute the state, and men indeed we hoped from the American church and state, men so truly human that they could not live while those made in their own likeness were bound down to the condition of brutes.