The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1191]
XXIX.
K——, the publisher, trying to be critical, talks about books pretty much as a washerwoman would about Niagara falls or a poulterer about a phœnix.
XXX.
The ingenuity of critical malice would often be laughable but for the disgust which, even in the most perverted spirits, injustice never fails to excite. A common trick is that of decrying, impliedly, the higher, by insisting upon the lower, merits of an author. Macaulay, for example, deeply feeling how much critical acumen is enforced by cautious attention to the mere “rhetoric” which is its vehicle, has at length become the best of modern rhetoricians. His brother reviewers — anonymous, of course, and likely to remain so forever — extol “the acumen of Carlyle, the analysis of Schlegel, and the style of Macaulay.” Bancroft is a philosophical historian; but no amount of philosophy has yet taught him to despise a minute accuracy in point of fact. His brother historians talk of “the grace of Prescott, the erudition of Gibbon, and the painstaking precision of Bancroft.” Tennyson, perceiving how vividly an imaginative effect is aided, now and then, by a certain quaintness judiciously introduced, brings this latter, at times, in support of his most glorious and most delicate imagination: — whereupon his brother poets hasten to laud the imagination of Mr. Somebody, whom nobody imagined to have any, “and the somewhat affected quaintness of Tennyson.” — Let the noblest poet add to his other excellences — if he dares — that of faultless versification and scrupulous attention to grammar. He is damned at once. His rivals have it in their power to discourse of “ A. the true poet, and B. the versifier and disciple of Lindley Murray.”
XXXI.
The goddess Laverna, who is a head without a body, could not do better, perhaps, than make advances to “La Jeune France,” which, for some years to come at least, must otherwise remain a body without a head.
XXXII.
H—— calls his verse a “poem,” very much as Francis the First bestowed the title, mes déserts, upon his snug little deer-park at Fontainebleau.
XXXIII.
Mr. A—— is frequently spoken of as “one of our most industrious writers;” and, in fact, when we consider how much he has written, we perceive, at once, that he must have been industrious, or he could never (like an honest woman as he is) have so thoroughly succeeded in keeping himself from being “talked about.”
XXXIV.
That a cause leads to an effect, is scarcely more certain than that, so far as Morals are concerned, a repetition of effect tends to the generation of cause. Herein lies the principle of what we so vaguely term “Habit.”
XXXV.
With the exception of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” I have never read a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most delicate imagination, as the “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” of Miss Barrett. I am forced to admit, however, that the latter work is a palpable imitation of the former, which it surpasses in thesis, as much as it falls below it in a certain calm energy, lustrous and indomitable — such as we might imagine in a broad river of molten gold.
XXXVI.
What has become of the inferior planet which Decuppis, about nine years ago, declared he saw traversing the disc of the sun?
XXXVII.
“Ignorance is bliss” — but, that the bliss be real, the ignorance must be so profound as not to suspect itself ignorant. With this understanding, Boileau’s line may be read thus:
[[”]]Le plus fou toujours est le plus satisfait,”
— “toujours” in place of “souvent.”
XXXVIII.
Bryant and Street are both, essentially, descriptive poets; and descriptive poetry, even in its happiest manifestation, is not of the highest order. But the distinction between Bryant and Street is very broad. While the former, in reproducing the sensible images of Nature, reproduces the sentiments with which he regards them, the latter gives us the images and nothing beyond. He never forces us to feel what we feel he must have felt.
XXXIX.
In lauding Beauty, Genius merely evinces a