The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [808]
imagination. Great intellects guess well. The laws of Kepler were, professedly, guesses. An excellent magazine paper might be written upon the subject of the progressive steps by which any great work of art — especially of literary art — attained completion. How vast a dissimilarity always exists between the germ and the fruit — between the work and its original conception ! Sometimes the original conception is abandoned, or left out of sight altogether. Most authors sit down to write with no fixed design, trusting to the inspiration of the moment; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that most books are valueless. Pen should never touch paper, until at least a well-digested general purpose be established. In fiction, the denouement — in all other composition the intended effect, should be definitely considered and arranged, before writing the first word; and no word should be then written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends to the development of the denouement, or to the strengthening of the effect. Where plot forms a portion of the contemplated interest, too much preconsideration cannot be had. Plot is very imperfectly understood, and has never been rightly defined. Many persons regard it as mere complexity of incident. In its most rigorous acceptation, it is that from which no component atom can be removed, and in which none of the component atoms ran be displaced, without rain to the whole; and although a sufficiently good plot may be constructed, without attention to the whole rigor of this definition, still it is the definition which the true artist should always keep in view, and always endeavor to consummate in his works. Some authors appear, however, to be totally deficient in constructiveness, and thus, even with plentiful invention, fad] signally in plot. Dickens belongs to this class. His "Barnaby Rudge " shows not the least ability to adapt. Godwin and Bulwer are the best constructors of plot in English literature. The former has left a preface to his "Caleb Williams," in which he says that the novel was written backwards; the author first completing the second volume, in which the hero is involved in a maze of difficulties, and then casting about him for sufficiently probable cause of these difficulties, out of which to concoct volume the first. This mode cannot surely be recommended, but evinces the idiosyncrasy of Godwin's mind. Bulwer's "Pompeii" is an instance of admirably managed plot. His "Night and Morning," sacrifices to mere plot interests of far higher value. All men of genius have their detractors; but it is merely a non distributio medii to argue, thence, that all men who have their detractors are men of genius. Yet, undoubtedly, of all despicable things, your habitual sneerer at real greatness, is the most despicable. What names excite, in mankind, the most unspeakable — the most insufferable disgust ? The Dennises — the Frérons — the Desfontaines. Their littleness is measured by the greatness of those whom they have reviled. And yet, in the face of this well-known and natural principle, there will always exist a set of homunculi, eager to grow notorious by the pertinacity of their yelpings at the heels of the distinguished. And this eagerness arises, less frequently from inability to appreciate genius, than from a species of cat-and-dog antipathy to it, which no suggestions of worldly prudence are adequate to quell. That intuitive and seemingly casual perception by which we often attain knowledge, when reason herself falters and abandons the effort, appears to resemble the sudden glancing at a star, by which we see it more clearly than by a direct gaze; or the half-closing the eyes in looking at a plot of grass the more fully to appreciate the intensity of its green. There are few men of that peculiar sensibility which is at the root of genius, who, in early youth, have not expended much of their mental energy in living too fast; and, in later years, comes the unconquerable desire to goad the imagination up to that point which it would have attained in an ordinary,