Part 9 (1/2)
Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one, Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, _Say, is it thy will_, _On the breezes to toss_, _Or, capriciously still_, _Like the lone albatross_, _Inc.u.mbent on night_, _As she on the air_, _To keep watch with delight_ _On the harmony there_?
John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar pa.s.sages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call _genius_. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power. Let talent writhe and contort itself as it may, it has no such magnetism.
Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton, and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but seem n.o.bler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may make friends for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his inkstand at the devil.
When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses and Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parna.s.sus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the country, a circ.u.mstance which must make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition a.s.serts, a necessary part of their idiosyncrasy.
Mr. Poe has two of the prime qualities of genius, a faculty of vigorous yet minute a.n.a.lysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination. The first of these faculties is as needful to the artist in words, as a knowledge of anatomy is to the artist in colors or in stone. This enables him to conceive truly, to maintain a proper relation of parts, and to draw a correct outline, while the second groups, fills up, and colors. Both of these Mr. Poe has displayed with singular distinctness in his prose works, the last predominating in his earlier tales, and the first in his later ones. In judging of the merit of an author, and a.s.signing him his niche among our household G.o.ds, we have a right to regard him from our own point of view, and to measure him by our own standard. But, in estimating the amount of power displayed in his works, we must be governed by his own design, and, placing them by the side of his own ideal, find how much is wanting. We differ from Mr. Poe in his opinions of the objects of art. He esteems that object to be the creation of Beauty, and perhaps it is only in the definition of that word that we disagree with him. But in what we shall say of his writings, we shall take his own standard as our guide. The temple of the G.o.d of song is equally accessible from every side, and there is room enough in it for all who bring offerings, or seek an oracle.
In his tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superst.i.tion and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a b.u.t.ton unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded, a.n.a.lysis. It is this which distinguishes the artist. His mind at once reaches forward to the effect to be produced. Having resolved to bring about certain emotions in the reader, he makes all subordinate parts tend strictly to the common centre. Even his mystery is mathematical to his own mind. To him _x_ is a known quant.i.ty all along. In any picture that he paints, he understands the chemical properties of all his colors. However vague some of his figures may seem, however formless the shadows, to him the outline is as clear and distinct as that of a geometrical diagram. For this reason Mr. Poe has no sympathy with _Mysticism_. The Mystic dwells _in_ the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially, and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a spectator _ab extra_. He a.n.a.lyzes, he dissects, he watches
----with an eye serene, The very pulse of the machine,
for such it practically is to him, with wheels and cogs and piston-rods, all working to produce a certain end.
This a.n.a.lyzing tendency of his mind balances the poetical, and, by giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has a strange success; conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible _doubt_ which is the secret of all horror. He leaves to imagination the task of finis.h.i.+ng the picture, a task to which only she is competent.
For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind.
Beside the merit of conception, Mr. Poe's writings have also that of form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly cla.s.sical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, ”The House of Usher,” in the first volume of his ”Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master of a cla.s.sic style. In this tale occurs, perhaps, the most beautiful of his poems.
The great masters of imagination have seldom resorted to the vague and the unreal as sources of effect. They have not used dread and horror alone, but only in combination with other qualities, as means of subjugating the fancies of their readers. The loftiest muse has ever a household and fireside charm about her. Mr. Poe's secret lies mainly in the skill with which he has employed the strange fascination of mystery and terror. In this his success is so great and striking as to deserve the name of art, not artifice. We cannot call his materials the n.o.blest or purest, but we must concede to him the highest merit of construction.
As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient. Unerring in his a.n.a.lysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art. His criticisms are, however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.
They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of mathematical demonstrations. Yet they stand in strikingly refres.h.i.+ng contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.
If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizans.h.i.+p.
They are especially valuable as ill.u.s.trating the great truth, too generally overlooked, that a.n.a.lytic power is a subordinate quality of the critic.
On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep. He has given proof of power and originality. He has done that which could only be done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repet.i.tion of which would produce weariness.
THACKERAY
ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the fas.h.i.+on to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a true man.
Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist, and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself, but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees, and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is and man as he might be, between the real sn.o.b and the ideal image of his Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm; the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that _ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall Jeremiah after all.
It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is, repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George Sand, and now again Thackeray and d.i.c.kens. We are not fond of comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another, nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to avoid some sort of parallel _a la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and d.i.c.kens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints character, and d.i.c.kens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are all men, those of d.i.c.kens personified oddities. The one is an artist, the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the ill.u.s.trations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for d.i.c.kens invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is perfect, that of d.i.c.kens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, d.i.c.kens from the reporter's box in the police-court. d.i.c.kens is certainly one of the greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.