Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
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 God 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 circumstances, 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 noble, thinking minds, full of resource,
constancy, courage. The Marguerite of Godwin, 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 Godwin 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 rushing 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 assaults 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 accumulation of mental treasure, in the
severe assay 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 circumstance, 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
friendship, 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
shillings 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" class
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 acumen 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 pass
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
sunshine 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 incumbent 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 circumstances,
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 shore)
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 passionate sadness, relieved sometimes by touches
very lovely and tender:--
"Amid the earnest woes