Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, page 224
We yield to no one in warmth of admiration for the personal character of these sweet sisters, as that character is depicted by the mother, by Miss Sedgwick, and by Mr. Irving. But it costs us no effort to distinguish that which, in our heart, is love of their worth, from that which, in our intellect, is appreciation of their poetic ability. With the former, as critic, we have nothing to do. The distinction is one too obvious for comment; and its observation would have spared us much twaddle on the part of the commentators upon “Amir Khan.”
We will endeavor to convey, as concisely as possible, some idea of this poem as it exists, not in the fancy of the enthusiastic, but in fact. It includes four hundred and forty lines. The metre is chiefly octo-syllabic. At one point it is varied by a casual introduction of an anapæst in the first and second foot; at another (in a song) by seven stanzas of four lines each, rhyming alternately; the metre anapæstic of four feet alternating with three. The versification is always good, so far as the meagre written rules of our English prosody extend; that is to say, there is seldom a syllable too much or too little; but long and short syllables are placed at random, and a crowd of consonants sometimes renders a line unpronounceable. For example:
He loved, — and oh, he loved so well
That sorrow scarce dared break the spell.
At times, again, the rhythm lapses, in the most inartistical manner, and evidently without design, from one species to another altogether incongruous; as, for example, in the sixth line of these eight, where the tripping anapaestic stumbles into the demure iambic, recovering itself, even more awkwardly, in the conclusion:
Bright Star of the Morning! This bosom is cold —
I was forced from my native shade,
And I wrapped me around with my mantle’s fold,
A sad, mournful Circassian maid!
And I then vow’d that rapture should never move
This changeless check, this rayless eye,
And I then vowed to feel neither bliss nor love,
But I vowed I would meet thee and die.
Occasionally the versification rises into melody and even strength; as here —
‘Twas at the hour when Peris love
To gaze upon the Heaven above
Whose portals bright with many a gem
Are closed — forever closed on them.
Upon the whole, however, it is feeble, vacillating, and ineffective; given token of having been “touched up” by the hand of a friend, from a much worse, into its present condition. Such rhymes as floor and shower — ceased and breast — shade and spread — brow and wo — clear and far — clear and air — morning and dawning — forth and earth — step and deep — Khan and hand — are constantly occurring; and although, certainly, we should not, as a general rule, expect better things from a girl of sixteen, we still look in vain, and with something very much akin to a smile, for aught even approaching that “marvellous ease and grace of versification “ about which Miss Sedgwick; in the benevolence of her heart, discourses.
Nor does the story, to our dispassionate apprehension, appear “beautifully developed.” It runs thus: — Amir Khan, Subahdar of Cachemere, weds a Circassian slave who, cold as a statue and as obstinately silent, refuses to return his love. The Subahdar applied to a magician, who give him
a pensive flower
Gathered at midnight’s magic hour;
the effect of whose perfume renders him apparently lifeless while still in possession of all his senses. Amreeta, the slave, supposing her lover dead, gives way to clamorous grief, and reveals the secret love which she has long borne her lord, but refused to divulge because a slave. Amir Khan hereupon revives, and all trouble is at an end.
Of course, no one at all read in Eastern fable will be willing to give Miss Davidson credit for originality in the conception of this little story; and if she have claim to merit at all, as regards it, that claim must be founded upon the manner of narration. But it will be at once evident that the most naked outline alone can be given in the compass of four hundred and forty lines. The tale is, in sober fact, told very much as any young person might be expected to tell it. The strength of the narrator is wholly laid out upon a description of moonlight (in the usual style) with which the poem commences — upon a second description of moonlight (in precisely the same manner) with which a second division commences — and in a third description of the hall in which the entranced Subahdar reposes. This is all — absolutely all; or at the least the rest has the nakedness of mere catalogue. We recognise, throughout, the poetic sentiment, but little — very little — of poetic power. We see occasional gleams of imagination: for example —
And every crystal cloud of Heaven
Bowed as it passed the queen of even. . . . . .
Amreeta was cold as the marble floor
That glistens beneath the nightly shower. . . . . .
At that calm hour when Peris love
To gaze upon the Heaven above,
Whose portals bright with many a gem
Are closed — forever close on them. . . . . .
The Subahdar with noiseless step
Rushed like the night-breeze o’er the deep.
We look in vain for another instance worth quoting. But were the fancy seen in these examples observable either in the general conduct or in the incidents of the narrative, we should not feel obliged to disagree so unequivocally with that opinion which pronounces this clever little production “one which would not have done discredit to our most popular poets in the meridian of their fame!”
“As the work of a girl of sixteen,” most assuredly we do not think it “prodigious.” In regard to it we may repeat what we said of “Lenore,” — that we have seen finer poems in every respect, written by children of more immature age. It is a creditable composition; nothing beyond this. And, in so saying, we shall startle none but the brainless, and the adopters of ready-made ideas. We are convinced that we express the unuttered sentiment of every educated individual who has read the poem. Nor, having given the plain facts of the case, do we feel called upon to proffer any apology for our flat refusal to play ditto either to Miss Sedgwick, to Mr. Irving, or to Mr. Southey.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
IN speaking of MR. WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, who has just published a very neat little volume of poems, we feel the necessity of employing the indefinite rather than the definite article. He isa, and by no meansthe, William Ellery Channing. He is onlythe son of the great essayist deceased. He is just such a person, in despite of hisclarum et venerabile nomen, as Pindar would have designated by the significant term [[Greek Text:]] τις [[:Greek Text]]. It may be said in his favor that nobody ever heard of him. Like an honest woman, he has always succeeded in keeping himself from being made the subject of gossip. His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes so to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all. They are not precisely English — nor will we insult a great nation by calling them Kickapoo; perhaps they are Channingese. We may convey some general idea of them by two foreign terms not in common use — the Italian pavoneggiarsi, “to strut like a peacock,” and the German word for “sky-rocketing,”schwarmerei. They are more preposterous, in a word, than any poems except those of the author of “Sam Patch;” for we presume we are right (are we not?) in taking it for granted that the author of “Sam Patch” is the very worst of all the wretched poets that ever existed upon earth.
In spite, however, of the customary phrase about a man’s “making a fool of himself,” we doubt if any one was ever a fool of his own free will and accord. A poet, therefore, should not always be taken too strictly to task. He should be treated with leniency, and, even when damned, should be damned with respect. Nobility of descent, too, should be allowed its privileges not more in social life than in letters. The son of a great author cannot be handled too tenderly by the critical Jack Ketch. Mr. Channing must be hung, that’s true. He must be hung in terrorem — and for this there is no help under the sun; but then we shall do him all manner of justice, and observe every species of decorum, and be especially careful of his feelings, and hang him gingerly and gracefully, with a silken cord, as the Spaniards hang their grandees of the blue blood, their nobles of thesangre azula.
To be serious, then; as we always wish to be if possible. Mr. Channing (whom we suppose to be a very young man, since we are precluded from supposing him avery old one,) appears to have been inoculated, at the same moment, withvirus from Tennyson and from Carlyle. And here we do not wish to be misunderstood. For Tennyson, as for a man imbued with the richest and rarest poetic impulses, we have an admiration — a reverence unbounded. His “Morte D’Arthur,” his “Locksley Hall,” his “Sleeping Beauty,” his “Lady of Shalott,” his “Lotos Eaters,” his “Ænone,” and many other poems, are not surpassed, in all that gives to Poetry its distinctive value, by the compositions of any one living or dead. And his leading error — that error which renders him unpopular — a point, to be sure, of no particular importance — that very error, we say, is founded in truth — in a keen perception of the elements of poetic beauty. We allude to his quaintness — to what the world chooses to term his affectation. No true poet — no critic whose approbation is worth even a copy of the volume we now hold in our hand — will deny that he feels impressed, sometimes even to tears, by many of those very affectations which he is impelled by the prejudice of his education, or by the cant of his reason, to condemn. He should thus be led to examine the extent of the one, and to be wary of the deductions of the other. In fact, the profound intuition of Lord Bacon has supplied, in one of his immortal apothegmns, the whole philosophy of the point at issue. “There is no exquisite beauty,” he truly says, “without somestrangeness in its proportions.” We maintain, then, that Tennyson errs, not in his occasional quaintness, but in its continual and obtrusive excess. And, in accusing Mr. Channing of having been inoculated with virus from Tennyson, we merely mean to say that he has adopted and exaggerated that noble poet’s characteristic defect, having mistaken it for his principal merit.
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
Seem brighter than an angel’s laugh in dreams.
The four lines italicized are highly meritorious, and the whole extract is so far decent and intelligible, that we experienced a feeling of surprise upon meeting it amid the doggerel which surrounds it. Not less was our astonishment upon finding, at page 18, a fine thought so well embodied as the following:
Or see the early stars, a mild sweet train,
Come out to bury the diurnal sun.
But, in the way of commendation, we have now done. We have carefully explored the whole volume, in vain, for a single additional line worth even the most qualified applause.
The utterabandon — the charmingnegligé — the perfect looseness (to use a western phrase) of his rhythm, is one of Mr. C’s. most noticeable, and certainly one of his most refreshing traits. It would be quite a pleasure to hear him read or scan, or to hear anybody else read or scan, such a line as this, at page 3, for example:
Masculine almost though softly carv’d in grace,
where “masculine” has to be read as a trochee, and “almost” as an iambus; or this, at page 8:
That compels me on through wood, and fell, and moor,
where “that compels” has to be pronounced as equivalent to the iambus “me on;” or this, at page 18:
I leave thee, the maid spoke to the true youth,
where both the “thes “ demand a strong accent to preserve the iambic rhythm; or this, at page 29:
So in our steps strides truth and honest trust,
where (to say nothing of the grammar, whichmay be Dutch, but is not English) it is quite impossible to get through with the “step strides truth” without dislocating the under jaw; or this, at page 32:
These rene azure the keen stars are now;
or this, on the same page:
Sometime of sorrow, joy to thy Future;
or this, at page 56:
