Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
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 pronounced
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 anticipated in the germ? The passions 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 analysis of the
Passions, 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 noble 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
worship wiser and purer action than has before been known to men. To
such a church men do indeed constitute 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.
Should such hopes be baffled, should such a church fall in the building,
such a state find no realization except to the eye of the poet, God
would still be in the world, and surely guide each bird, that can be
patient, on the wing to its home at last. But expectations so noble,
which find so broad a basis in the past, which link it so harmoniously
with the future, cannot lightly be abandoned. The same Power leads by a
pillar of cloud as by a pillar of fire--the Power that deemed even Moses
worthy only of a distant view of the Promised Land.
And to those who cherish such expectations rational education,
considered in various ways and bearings, must be the one great topic of
interest; an enterprise in which the humblest service is precious and
honorable to any who can inspire its soul. Our thoughts anticipate with
eager foresight the race that may grow up from this amalgamation of all
races of the world which our situation induces. It was the pride and
greatness of ancient nations to keep their blood unmixed; but it must be
ours to be willing to mingle, to accept in a generous spirit what each
clime and race has to offer us.
It is, indeed, the case that much diseased substance is offered to form
this new body; and if there be not in ourselves a nucleus, a heart of
force and purity to assimilate these strange and various materials into
a very high form of organic life, they must needs induce one distorted,
corrupt, and degraded beyond the example of other times and places.
There will be no medium about it. Our grand scene of action demands
grandeur and purity; lacking these, one must suffer from so base failure
in proportion to the success that should have been.
It would be the worthiest occupation of mind to ascertain the
conditions propitious for this meeting of the nations in their new home,
and to provide preventions for obvious dangers that attend it. It would
be occupation for which the broadest and deepest knowledge of human
nature in its mental, moral, and bodily relations, the noblest freedom
from prejudice, with the finest discrimination as to differences and
relations, directed and enlightened by a prophetic sense as to what Man
is designed by God to become, would all be needed to fit the thinker.
Yet some portion of these qualities, or of some of these qualities, if
accompanied by earnestness and aspiration, may enable any one to offer
useful suggestions. The mass of ignorance and selfishness is such, that
no grain of leaven must be despised.
And as the men of all countries come hither to find a home, and become
parts of a new life, so do the books of all countries gravitate towards
this new centre. Copious infusions from all quarters mingle daily with
the new thought which is to grow into American mind, and develop
American literature.
As every ship brings us foreign teachers, a knowledge of living
contemporary tongues must in the course of fifty years become the
commonest attainment. There exists no doubt in the minds of those who
can judge, that the German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese
tongues might, by familiar instruction and _an intelligent method_, be
taught with perfect ease during the years of childhood, so that the
child would have as distinct a sense of their several natures, and
nearly as much expertness in their use, as in his own. The higher uses
of such knowledge can, of course, be expected only in a more advanced
state of the faculties; but it is pity that the acquaintance with the
medium of thought should be deferred to a period when the mind is
sufficiently grown to bend its chief attention on the thoughts
themselves. Much of the most precious part of short human lives is now
wasted from an ignorance of what might easily be done for children, and
without taking from them the time they need for common life, play, and
bodily growth, more than at present.
Meanwhile the English begins to vie with the German and French
literature in the number, though not in the goodness, of the
translations from other languages. The indefatigable Germans can
translate, and do other things too; so that geniuses often there apply
themselves to the work as an amusement: even the all-employed Goethe
has translated one of the books before us, (Memoirs of Cellini.) But in
English we know but of one, Coleridge's Wallenstein, where the reader
will feel the electric current undiminished by the medium through which
it comes to him. And then the profligate abuse of the power of
translation has been unparalleled, whether in the choice of books or the
carelessness in disguising those that were good in a hideous mask. No
falsehood can be worse than this of deforming the expression of a great
man's thoughts, of corrupting that form which he has watched, and toiled
and suffered to make beautiful and true. We know no falsehood that
should call a more painful blush to the cheek of one engaged in it.
We have no narrowness in our view of the contents of such books. We are
not afraid of new standards and new examples. Only give enough of them,
variety enough, and from well-intentioned, generous minds. America can
choose what she wants, if she has sufficient range of choice; and if
there is any real reason, any deep root in the tastes and opinions she
holds at present, she will not lightly yield them. Only give her what is
good of its kind. Her hope is not in ignorance, but in knowledge. We
are, indeed, very fond of range, and if there is check, there should be
countercheck; and in this view we are delighted to see these great
Italians domesticated here. We have had somewhat too much of the French
and Germans of late. We value unchangeably our sparkling and rapid
French friend; still more the searching, honest, and, in highest sense,
visionary German genius. But there is not on earth, and, we dare to say
it, will not be again, genius _like_ that of Italy, or that can compare
with it, in its own way.
Italy and Greece were alike in this; those sunny skies ripened their
fruits perfectly. The oil and honey of Greece, the wine of Italy, not
only suggest, but satisfy. _There_ we find fulfilment, elsewhere great
achievement only.
O, acute, cautious, calculating Yankee; O, graceful, witty, hot-blooded,
flimsy Southron; and thou, man of the West, going ahead too fast to pick
up a thought or leave a flower upon thy path,--look at these men with
their great fiery passions, but will and intellect still greater and
stronger, perfectly sincere, from a contempt of falsehood. If they had
acted wrong, they said and felt that they had, and that it was base and
hateful in them. They were sagacious, as children are, not from
calculation, but because the fine instincts of nature were unspoiled in
them. I speak now of Alfieri and Cellini. Dante had all their
instinctive greatness and deep-seated fire, with the reflective and
creative faculties besides, to an extent of which they never dreamed.
He who reads these biographies may take them from several points of
view. As pictures of manners, as sincere transcripts of the men and
their times, they are not and could not be surpassed. That truth which
Rousseau sought so painfully and vainly by self-brooding, subtle
analysis, they attained without an effort. _Why_ they felt they cared
little, but _what_ they felt they surely knew; and where a fly or worm
has injured the peach, its passage is exactly marked, so that you are