The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [986]
Mr. Tennyson is quaint only; he is never, as some have supposed him, obscure — except, indeed, to the uneducated, whom he does not address. Mr. Carlyle, on the other hand, is obscure only; he is seldom, as some have imagined him, quaint. So far he is right; for although quaintness, employed by a man of judgment and genius, may be made auxiliary to apoem, whose true thesis is beauty, and beauty alone, it is grossly, and even ridiculously, out of place in a work of prose. But in his obscurity it is scarcely necessary to say that he is wrong. Either a man intends to be understood, or he does not. If he write a book which he intendsnot to be understood, we shall be very happy indeed not to understand it; but if he write a book which he means to be understood, and, in this book, be at all possible pains to prevent us from understanding it, we can only say that he is an ass — and this, to be brief, is our private opinion of Mr. Carlyle, which we now take the liberty of making public.
It seems that having deduced, from Tennyson and Carlyle, an opinion of the sublimity of everything odd, and of the profundity of everything meaningless, Mr. Channing has conceived the idea of setting up for himself as a poet ofunusual depth, and very remarkable powers of mind. His airs and graces, in consequence, have a highly picturesque effect, and the Boston critics, who have a notion that poets are porpoises, (for they are always talking about their running in “schools,”) cannot make up their minds as to what particular school he must belong. We say the Bobby Button school, by all means. He clearly belongs to that. And should nobody ever have heard of the Bobby Button school, that is a point of no material importance. We will answer for it, as it is one of our own. Bobby Button is a gentleman with whom, for a long time, we have had the honor of an intimate acquaintance. His personal appearance is striking. He has quite a big head. His eyes protrude and have all the air of saucers. His chin retreats. His mouth is depressed at the corners. He wears a perpetual frown of contemplation. His words are slow, emphatic, few, and oracular. His “thes,” “ands,” and “buts,” have more meaning than other men’s polysyllables. His nods would have put Burleigh’s to the blush. His whole aspect, indeed, conveys the idea of a gentleman modest to a fault, and painfully overburthened with intellect. We insist, however, upon calling Mr. Channing’s school of poetry the Bobby Button school, rather because Mr. Channing’s poetry is strongly suggestive of Bobby Button, than because Mr. Button himself ever dallied, to any very great extent, with the Muses. With the exception, indeed, of a very fine “Sonnet to a Pig” — or rather the fragment of a sonnet, for he proceeded no farther than the words “O piggy wiggy,” with theO italicized for emphasis — with the exception of this, we say, we are not aware of his having produced anything worthy of that stupendous genius which is certainly in him, and only wants, like the starling of Sterne, “to get out.”
The best passage in the book before us, is to be found at page 121, and we quote it, as a matter of simple justice, in full:
Dear friend, in this fair atmosphere again,
Far from the noisy echoes of the main,
Amid the world-old mountains, and the hills
From whose strange grouping a fine power distills
The soothing and the calm, I seek repose,
The city’s noise forgot and hard stern woes.
As thou once said’st, the rarest sons of earth
Have in the dust of cities shown their worth,
Where long collision with the human curse
Has of great glory been the frequent nurse,
And only those who in sad cities dwell
Are of the green trees fully sensible.
To them the silver bells of tinkling streams