Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now,
afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of
feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace
my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.
I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to
deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren
in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing
effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on
allowance day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him,
in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of
his soul; and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because
'there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.'
"I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to
find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of
their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a
greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by
them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is
my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to
express my happiness. Crying for joy and singing for joy were alike
uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast
away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as
evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the
songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion."
PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE.[16]
These volumes have met with as warm a reception "as ever unripe author's
quick conceit," to use Mr. Taylor's own language, could hope or wish;
and so deservedly, that the critic's happy task, in examining them, is
to point out, not what is most to be blamed, but what is most to be
praised.
With joy we hail a new poet. Star after star has been withdrawn from our
firmament, and when that of Coleridge set, we seemed in danger of being
left, at best, to a gray and confounding twilight; but, lo! a "ray of
pure white light" darts across the obscured depths of ether, and allures
our eyes and hearts towards the rising orb from which it emanates. Let
us tremble no more lest our summer pass away without its roses, but
receive our present visitor as the harbinger of a harvest of delights.
The natural process of the mind in forming a judgment is comparison. The
office of sound criticism is to teach that this comparison should be
made, not between the productions of differently-constituted minds, but
between any one of these and a fixed standard of perfection.
Nevertheless it is not contrary to the canon to take a survey of the
labors of many artists with reference to one, if we value them, not
according to the degree of pleasure we have experienced from them, which
must always depend upon our then age, the state of the passions and
relations with life, but according to the success of the artist in
attaining the object he himself had in view. To illustrate: In the same
room hang two pictures, Raphael's Madonna and Martin's Destruction of
Nineveh. A person enters, capable of admiring both, but young,
excitable; he is delighted with the Madonna, but probably far more so
with the other, because his imagination is at that time more developed
than the pure love for beauty which is the characteristic of a taste in
a higher state of cultivation. He prefers the Martin, because it excites
in his mind a thousand images of sublimity and terror, recalls the
brilliancy of Oriental history, and the stern pomp of the old prophetic
day, and rouses his mind to a high state of action, _then_ as congenial
with its wants as at a later day would be the feeling of contented
absorption, of perfect satisfaction with a production of the human soul,
which one of Raphael's calmly beautiful creations is fitted to cause.
Now, it would be very unfair for this person to pronounce the Martin
superior to the Raphael, because it then gave him more pleasure. But if
he said, the one is intended to excite the imagination, the other to
gratify the taste, that which fulfils its object most completely must be
the best, whether it give me most pleasure or no; he would be on the
right ground, and might consider the two pictures relatively to one
another, without danger of straying very far from the truth.
_This_ is the ground we would assume in a hasty sketch, which will not,
we hope, be deemed irrelevant, of the most prominent essays to which the
last sixty years have given rise in the department of the work now
before us, previous to stating our opinion of its merits. Many, we are
aware, ridicule the idea of filling reviews with long dissertations, and
say they only want brief accounts of such books as are coming out, by
way of saving time. With such we cannot agree. We think the office of
the reviewer is, indeed, in part, to point out to the public attention
deserving works, which might otherwise slumber too long unknown on the
bookseller's shelves, but still more to present to the reader as large a
cluster of objects round one point as possible, thus, by suggestion,
stimulating him to take a broader or more careful view of the subject
than his indolence or his business would have permitted.
The terms Classical and Romantic, which have so long divided European
critics, and exercised so powerful an influence upon their decisions,
are not much known or heeded among us,--as, indeed, _belles-lettres_
cannot, generally, in our busy state of things, be important or
influential, as among a less free and more luxurious people, to whom the
more important truths are proffered through those indirect but alluring
mediums. Here, where every thing may be spoken or written, and the
powers that be, abused without ceremony on the very highway, the Muse
has nothing to do with dagger or bowl; hardly is the censor's wand
permitted to her hand. Yet is her lyre by no means unheeded, and if it
is rather by refining our tastes than by modelling our opinions that she
influences us, yet is that influence far from unimportant. And the time
is coming, perhaps in our day, we may (if war do not untimely check the
national progress) even see and temper its beginning, when the broad
West shall swarm with an active, happy, and cultivated population; when
the South, freed from the incubus which now oppresses her best energies,
shall be able to do justice to the resources of her soil and of her
mind; when the East, gathering from every breeze the riches of the old
world, shall be the unwearied and loving agent to those regions which
lie far away from the great deep, our bulwark and our minister. Then
will the division of labor be more complete; then will a surplus of
talent be spared from the mart, the forum, and the pulpit; then will the
fine arts assume their proper dignity, as the expression of what is
highest and most ethereal in the mind of a people. Then will our
quarries be thoroughly explored, and furnish materials for stately
fabrics to adorn the face of all the land, while our ports shall be
crowded with foreign artists flocking to take lessons in the school of
American architecture. Then will our floral treasures be arranged into
harmonious gardens, which, environing tasteful homes, shall dimple all
the landscape. Then will our Allstons and our Greenoughs preside over
great academies, and be raised far above any need, except of giving
outward form to the beautiful ideas which animate them; and ornament
from the exhaustless stores of genius the marble halls where the people
meet to rejoice, or to mourn, or where dwell those wise and good whom
the people delight to honor. Then shall music answer to and exalt the
national spirit, and the poet's brows shall be graced with the civic as
well as the myrtle crown. Then shall we have an American mind, as well
as an American system, and, no longer under the sad necessity of
exchanging money for thoughts, traffic on perfectly equal terms with the
other hemisphere. Then--ah, not yet!--shall our literature make its own
laws, and give its own watchwords; till then we must learn and borrow
from that of nations who possess a higher degree of cultivation though a
much lower one of happiness.
The term Classical, used in its narrow sense, implies a servile
adherence to the Unities, but in its wide and best sense, it means such
a simplicity of plan, selection of actors and events, such judicious
limitations on time and range of subject, as may concentrate the
interest, perfect the illusion, and make the impression most distinct
and forcible. Although no advocates for the old French school, with its
slavish obedience to rule, which introduces follies greater than those
it would guard against, we lay the blame, not on their view of the
drama, but on the then bigoted nationality of the French mind, which
converted the Mussulman prophet into a De Retz, the Roman princess into
a French grisette, and infected the clear and buoyant atmosphere of
Greece with the vapors of the Seine. We speak of the old French Drama:
with the modern we do not profess to be acquainted, having met with
scarcely any specimens in our own bookstores or libraries; but if it
has been revolutionized with the rest of their literature, it is
probably as unlike as possible to the former models.
We shall speak of productions in the classical spirit first; because Mr.
Taylor is a disciple of the other school, though otherwise we should
have adopted a contrary course.
The most perfect specimens of this style with which we are acquainted
are the Filippo, the Saul, and the Myrrha of Alfieri; the Wallenstein of
Schiller; the Tasso and the Iphigenia of Goethe. England furnishes
nothing of the sort. She is thoroughly Shakspearian.
There is no higher pleasure than to see a genius of a wild, impassioned,
many-sided eagerness, restraining its exuberance by its sense of
fitness, taming its extravagance beneath the rule its taste approves,
exhibiting the soul within soul, and the force of the will over all that
we inherit. The _abandon_ of genius has its beauty--far more beautiful
its voluntary submission to wise law. A picture, a description, has
beauty, the beauty of life; these pictures, these descriptions, arranged
upon a plan, made subservient to a purpose, have a higher beauty--that
of the mind of man acting upon life. Art is nature, but nature
new-modelled, condensed, and harmonized. We are not merely like mirrors,
to reflect our own times to those more distant. The mind has a light of
its own, and by it illumines what it re-creates.
This is the ground of our preference for the classical school, and for
Alfieri beyond all pupils of that school. We hold that if a vagrant bud
of poesy here and there be blighted by conforming to its rules, our loss
is more than made up to us by our enjoyment of plan, of symmetry, of the
triumph of genius over multiplied obstacles.
It has been often said that the dramas of Alfieri contrast directly with
his character. This is, perhaps, not true; we do but see the depths of
that volcano which in early days boiled over so fiercely. The wild,
infatuated youth often becomes the stern, pitiless old man. Alfieri did
but bend his surplus strength upon literature, and became a despot to
his own haughty spirit, instead of domineering over those of others.
We have selected his three masterpieces, though he, to himself an
inexorable critic, has shown no indulgence to his own works, and the
least successful of those which remain to us, Maria Stuarda, is marked
by great excellence.
Filippo has been so ably depicted in a work now well known, "Carlyle's