to one theme. I find between it and, for instance, The Raven, a yet more intimate analogy; a relationship of one to the other as its converse. Thus, in The Raven, the reader is continually led on to expect an event of import which never happens; in For Annie, the very ordinary idea which we supposed we were contemplating develops into a monstrosity of fancy at once spectral, material, and beautiful. Contrasted as are the results, I believe the art to be virtually identical. The effect Poe desired to compass by a poem would seem to have been that of a single long pulsating shock, starting one does not know whence. It was a point of pride with him, both that he should be able to tell himself he had accomplished his object in conformity with rigid rules, and that his readers should never guess them. He himself paraded in print the absence of spontaneous inspiration from his composition of The Raven. It was, he has told the world, the product of a mechanical operation he had cunningly devised. He who had boasted that with him poetry was not a purpose, but a passion', details elaborately how and why he introduced beauty, with its highest expression, sadness, and death; a refrain, with a bird-by choice a raven-to repeat it, in unconscious unison with the throbbings of despair in dead Lenore's lover; and, beneath all, a suggestive undercurrent of further meaning;-deliberately confining the whole within a few more than one hundred lines.8 The explanation at the time tasked the capacity of popular belief more even than he weirdness of the poem hypnotized common understandings. A natural conjecture was that Poe either deceived himself into measuring back step by step ground his fancy had already taken in its stride, or simply was diverting himself with an experiment on public credulity. Really, however, what would have been an altogether unlikely mystification if imputed to another poet, ceases to be wholly incredible with respect to him. The iron rigour with which in The Raven the thread -chain rather-of the central idea is stretched stiff and taut favours indeed the suggestion of artifice rather than an unpremeditated flight of imagination. At all events no poet but himself could have tried to persuade his readers to think they smelt in his inspiration the sawdust and oil of the workshop. Although no critic, not even Poe himself, has attempted to apply the extreme mechanical theory to others of his poems, it cannot be denied that in general they are liable to the charge of an excess of art. None breathe of simple nature. Even the elegance of the lines to Helen with her 'Naiad airs', which bring admirers home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome,9 is but dumb sculpture, though of ivory and gold. Though a spontaneous spark-a lurid one-from the soul kindles the dead man's appeal to his love For Annie, its rush of fire is constrained; it has had to flame along a line ruled for, not by, it. Never was verse of such apparent, and so little real, freedom as all of Poe's; or, consequently, so artistic, which is less satisfying; so pure of loose taint with less of wholesome freshness. No healthful breeze blows from off its Dead Sea surface. No singing birds fly over it; though itself, in its ebb and flow, makes song, harmony, fairy music. Whatever he wrote, from his precocious and libertine, not idle, youth to the delirious end in the Baltimore hospital, possesses the same qualities of unfailing grace and tone. But the whole is like a reverie between sleep and waking, always fascinating, never restful, with an atmosphere about it as of a sepulchral vault. Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. H. Ingram. Four vols. 1874-5. Also Poetical Works, ed. James Hannay. London: Charles Grffiin, 1852. 1 The Raven, stanzas 1, 7, 18. 3 Ibid., st. 2. 5 The Bells, st. 4. 2 Lenore, st. 1. 6 Annabel Lee, stanzas 1, 2, 4. 7 For Annie, stanzas 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. • Philosophy of Composition (Works), vol. ii, pp. 262–70. To Helen (Poems written in Youth), st. 2. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1807-1882 THE poetry of echoes, of shadows, of wandering clouds, which have caught sunset purples. Literature numbers poets without forefathers or descendants. Such were Homer, the Attic dramatists, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Chatterton, Burns. There have been poets, great poets, with ancestry and successors, like Pope. Others, real too there have been; foster children suckled on milk of strangers, and in an atmosphere not their own. In default of examples and models from without, they might never have sung. Such is Longfellow. If inspiration ever were traceable, it would be seen that his library had inspired him. Diction and manner he seldom borrows; impulses, emotions, constantly. The limitations observable in his work are the inevitable consequences. No Pindaric strain is to be expected; no soaring to the heights. Momentum thus adventitious is exhausted too soon to supply impetus for a free career. It is an admirable supplement to native sweetness, intelligence, tenderness, sense of picturesqueness. A hundred delicate chords must have been thrilling through Longfellow's temperament, as the vibrations of extraneous, scarcely alien, minstrelsy touched them into music. To many natures the counter-note is actually more delightful, more awakening, than the unsoftened, full principal. Certainly the reflected character of the melody is the secret of the charm of a lovely ghost of medievalism like the Golden Legend. Never was poet humbler toward his elders in the vocation; more modest and reverential; yet in a sense also more exacting. His nature incorporated as much as it could of other poetic souls. Something was extracted here, something there. Every constituent in the new creation was genuine, with characteristics of its own, but compressed to meet the demands of the rest. Each was kept malleable to receive a stamp from the borrowing self. That self was thoughtful without being a thinker; given to learning, not to research; sympathetically inquisitive, not philosophic ; accustomed to look to a printed page to put fancy in motion. From the vast store of his reading Longfellow selected instinctively whatever he could assimilate and feel. In his poems we have the fruit of his studies; and their essence has become his. There the explanation is of the anger, the bitter contempt, which his successive earlier volumes stirred in divers critics at the times of their appearance. They were irritated by catching and losing hold continually of clues to sources from which he had drawn. They raged at the self-complacency, as they regarded it, with which he propounded discoveries by illustrious predecessors as novelties of his own. They did not care to understand that his poetry came finally from his heart, whencesoever its elements might have been derived; that what to them were truisms were for him very truths. For his public they were truths too, and living truths. He was absolutely sincere when he preached venerable moralities, like the Psalm of Life and Excelsior, as a new Gospel. The undoubting confidence with which he proclaimed it, if it raised up scoffers by the dozen, brought him disciples by the ten thousand. The jeers, coming from the intellectual class in the Old Country, must, I am afraid, have caused aches beyond the power of applause by the multitude to heal. All his work |