The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1081]
Inadvertences such as these sadly disfigure the style of “The Hutted Knoll;” and every true friend of its author must regret his inattention to the minor morals of the Muse. But these “minor morals,” it may be said, are trifles at best. Perhaps so. At all events, we should never have thought of dwelling so pertinaciously upon the unessential demerits of “Wyandotté,” could we have discovered any more momentous upon which to comment.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT.
“A well-bred man,” says Sir James Puckle, in his “Gray Cap for a Green Head,” “will never give himself the liberty to speak ill of women.” We emphasize the “man.” Setting aside, for the present, certain rare commentators and compilers of the species ——— creatures neither precisely men, women, nor Mary Wollstonecraft’s — setting these aside as unclassifiable, we may observe that the race of critics are masculine — men. With the exception, perhaps, of Mrs. Anne Royal, we can call to mind no female who has occupied, even temporarily, the Zoilus throne. And this, the Salic law, is an evil; for the inherent chivalry of the critical man renders it not only an unpleasant task to him “to speak ill of a woman,” (and a woman and her book are identical,) but an almost impossible task not to laud her ad nauseam. In general, therefore, it is the unhappy lot of the authoress to be subjected, time after time, to the downright degradation of mere puffery. On her own side of the Atlantic, Miss Barrett has indeed, in one instance at least, escaped the infliction of this lamentable contumely and wrong; but if she had been really solicitous of its infliction in America, she could not have adopted a more effectual plan than that of saying a few words about “the great American people,” in an American edition of her work, published under the superintendence of an American author.† Of the innumerable “native” notices of “The Drama of Exile,” which have come under our observation, we can call to mind not one in which there is any thing more remarkable than the critic’s dogged determination to find nothing barren, from Beersheba to Dan. Another in the “Democratic Review” has proceeded so far, it is true, as to venture a very delicate insinuation to the effect that the poetess “will not fail to speak her mind though it bring upon her a bad rhyme;” beyond this, nobody has proceeded: and as for the elaborate paper in the new Whig Monthly, all that any body can say or think, and all that Miss Barrett can feel respecting it is, that it is an eulogy as well written as it is an insult well intended. Now of all the friends of the fair author, we doubt whether one exists, with more profound — with more enthusiastic reverence and admiration of her genius, than the writer of these words. And it is for this very reason, beyond all others, that he intends to speak of her the truth. Our chief regret is, nevertheless, that the limits of this “Journal” will preclude the possibility of our speaking this truth so fully, and so much in detail, as we could wish. By far the most valuable criticism that we, or that any one could give, of the volumes now lying before us, would be the quotation of three fourths of their contents. But we have this advantage — that the work has been long published, and almost universally read — and thus, in some measure, we may proceed, concisely, as if the text of our context, were an understood thing.
In her preface to this, the “American edition” of her late poems, Miss Barrett, speaking of the Drama of Exile, says: — “I decided on publishing it, after considerable hesitation and doubt. Its subject rather fastened on me than was chosen; and the form, approaching the model of the Greek tragedy, shaped itself under my hand rather by force of pleasure than of design. But when the compositional