The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1189]
XIX.
“Con tal que las costumbres de un autor sean puras y castas,” says the Catholic Don Tomas de las Torres, in the preface to his “Amatory Poems,” “importa muy poco qui no sean igualmente severas sus obras: “ meaning, in plain English, that, provided the personal morals of an author are pure, it matters little what those of his books are.
For so unprincipled an idea, Don Tomas, no doubt, is still having a hard time of it in Purgatory; and, by way of most pointedly manifesting their disgust at his philosophy on the topic in question, many modern theologians and divines are now busily squaring their conduct by his proposition exactly conversed.
XX.
Children are never too tender to be whipped: — like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them the more tender they become.
XXI.
Lucian, in describing the statue “ with its surface of Parian marble and its interior filled with rags,” must have been looking with a prophetic eye at some of our great “moneyed institutions.”
XXII.
That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritabile, is well understood; but the why, seems not to be commonly seen. An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty — a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity of disproportion. Thus a wrong — an injustice — done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice — never where it does not exist — but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong: — this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of right — of justice — of proportion — in a word, of [[Greek text=]] Ä¿ º±»¿½ [[=Greek text]]. But one thing is clear — that the man who is not “irritable,” (to the ordinary apprehension,) is no poet.
XXIII.
Let a man succeed ever so evidently — ever so demonstrably — in many different displays of genius, the envy of criticism will agree with the popular voice in denying him more than talent in any. Thus a poet who has achieved a great (by which I mean an effective) poem, should be cautious not to distinguish himself in any other walk of Letters. In especial — let him make no effort in Science — unless anonymously, or with the view of waiting patiently the judgment of posterity. Because universal or even versatile geniuses have rarely or never been known, therefore, thinks the world, none such can ever be. A “therefore” of this kind is, with the world, conclusive. But what is the fact, as taught us by analysis of mental power? Simply, that the highest genius — that the genius which all men instantaneously acknowledge as such — which acts upon individuals, as well as upon the mass, by a species of magnetism incomprehensible but irresistible and never resisted — that this genius which demonstrates itself in the simplest gesture — or even by the absence of all — this genius which speaks without a voice and flashes from the unopened eye — is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion — so that no one faculty has undue predominance. That factitious “genius” — that “genius” in the popular sense — which is but the manifestation of the abnormal predominance of some one faculty over all the others — and, of course, at the expense and to the detriment, of all the others — is a result of mental disease or rather, of organic malformation of mind: — it is this and nothing more. Not only will such “genius” fail, if turned aside from the path indicated by its predominant faculty; but, even when pursuing this path — when producing those works in which, certainly, it is best calculated to succeed — will give