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by W. W. Kinsley, from The Ladies' Repository, January, 1862.
By the word gloom, we design to signify a compound of sadness and mystery. That this is its proper meaning in literature no one can fail to notice, who will analyze it as it appears in the works of the great masters. By its agency both beauty and grandeur receive their most perfect unfolding. We shall have time only to illustrate by a few notable examples the first part of this assertion, without entering at all upon its philosophical proof.
Beauty, of course, can be measured by us only through its effects, and consequently that is the highest conceived beauty which excites the greatest aesthetical influence over the most cultured minds. The conception and portrayal of this, Edgar Poe contends to be the one mission of the poet, and sadness the tone of its most effective manifestation. Accordingly the death of a beautiful woman, lamented by the lips of love, was to him the noblest theme. Read his books, and you will also find intimately blending with this sadness, though he makes no mention of it, the essential element of mystery. By his skillful use of this principle of gloom he has given proof of a most intimate acquaintance with the laws of mind. The weird spirit that pervades his writings has drawn all men unto him. Few short poems in the English language have enjoyed such wide celebrity as the Raven, the Bells, or Annabel Lee. In the bare art of the beauty of poetry, Poe had few superiors; had he been a Christian man, perhaps he would have had few equals. But he was blind to soul-beauties.
His poetic conceptions, perfect as they were of their kind, can never satisfy; for, though he had a face beautiful as Milton's, with eyes sad as the eyes of Dante; though he was gifted with a genius of sufficient delicacy for the most ethereal poet, of sufficient creative power to have placed him in the forefront of the discoverers of letters; though he was considered an intellectual marvel for the strength and accuracy of his analytic powers, he lived a life whose wickedness was equaled only by its melancholy; he came upon the very confines of moral sentiment without having one ray of its celestial light warming his heart. He has prevented us from picturing to ourselves in his dead Lenore, or his beautiful Annabel Lee a nobler woman than Ligeia. Her charms he has sketched in full. You remember her faultless face, her queenly carriage, her voice with its rich melody, her mild temperament, her keen intellect, her intense and constant love. None of these were the fruits of religious struggle. Nature gave them to her at her birth. How wanting is this, Poe's highest thought! How radically defective his worthiest ideal! Yet, he spell-binds us, resist him as we will.
In what then, we may inquire, consists his power? Is it in his descriptions, whose definite outlines, consistency of parts, minutiae of detail, singleness of purpose, complete individuality, give them all the vividness of life, causing the ideals to pass before us breathing realities? Does it consist in the clear, accurate, natural, highly-rhythmical wording with which he clothes them? These agencies, mighty and subtle though they be, could never give him his wizard power in story and song. He followed still higher promptings of his artistic nature. He gave to Ligeia's eyes a wild, sad mystery; caused her to be tossed by stern, unknown passions under a placid deportment; summoned death to her couch while in poetic frenzy; and by her reappearance in after time, gave to the element of gloom the greatest prominence possible for the full unfolding of the beauty of his conception. With the rhythmical melody of his style he blended a minor-tone of touching sadness. A perceptible wail rises from the rhythm of his Raven and Annabel Lee, a more subdued sorrow is heard sighing in his Bells and Fable on Silence. None possessed such mastery over the refrain, none used it with such brilliant or telling power.
In Hood's Bridge of Sighs there is a higher ideal beauty having its developments also through the agency of gloom. Analyze your feelings as you turn your eyes from a partly-crushed flower to a fading sunset, then to a bright-plumaged bird, fluttering with a death-wound, finally to Poe's Lost Lenore, and you will find them increasing in intensity simply, their nature undergoing no essential change. But the moment the maiden in the Bridge of Sighs enters your thought a rarer beauty unfolds itself; you enter the presence of a higher ideal. And why? Poe's picture has expressed in it more of grace and loveliness than Hood's; its aim was beauty, Hood's was not. The answer to our question lies patent. The Bridge of Sighs has greater aesthetical power, because of its suggestions. As we look into the unfortunate face, delicately featured, now paled by death, over which the cold waves are still breaking, we are filled with thoughts not of condemnation but of pity. We soon forget her sins, so touching is the story of her sorrows. Our imaginations picture the beauties of body and soul that were hers in promise be fore sin blighted their budding--
"For past all dishonor
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful."
Blessed indeed are the thoughts of Christian charity! Such lovely visions can never gladden the eyes of the most refined poetic temperament till it kindles with Gospel love. Hood, too, has introduced mystery into his poem, where it renders valuable aid to sadness in quickening the mind's fancies. The charm of his pure, graceful, buoyant style; the brook-like music of its flow; the perfect harmony between it and the spirit of the thought, all help to weave the spell of beauty. One word further and we pass to a third illustration of our subject. It is this: The thought legitimately suggested to the reader of the Bridge of Sighs, is that of a woman whose physical and spiritual beauty is perfect; without a sin stain. My own experience surely affirms the truth of this. But it does not necessarily follow that hereby are given to our minds those elements out of which we can construct the highest ideal. Indeed, this is not true, for, though it may be the most faultless beauty ever seen by an archangel, yet we have not compassed it, and can not, till we have received other preparation. Notwithstanding the forgiving sympathy Hood kindles within us has so far cleared our vision that we can now discern in the heavens the silver-shining of this Saturn, yet the telescopic power of other passions is still needed to discover to us its rings of flame.
In the pages of John Milton, this want is fully met in the picture of Eve on a background of gloom. Note the skill of the painter. First came the sound of battles, the rout of devils, the prison of blackness, the sullen boom of firebillows, groans of torment, words of hate, and dark purposes of revenge. Then Tragedy, rolling back its sulphurous cloud, and hushing itsvoice of thunder, is followed close by perfumed zephyrs, and the songs of birds. The beauties of Paradise, the garden of the Orient, where God walked at eventide, are given in imagery that tells of vast learning and of royal genius. Few passages in literature so exhibit the wealth of the English tongue. The terrible grandeur of the former scene unfolds to us, as nothing else can, the exquisite loveliness of this. The same principle of contrast Dante uses with great power in one of the last cantos of his Vision of Purgatory, where he tells of his wanderings on the banks of Lethe, after passing the wall of fire. At last Milton pictures Eve, the central figure; the queen of the garden. He describes in finished verse the beauty of her body, the beauty of her pure love, the beauty of her quiet life. But these are all half hidden to us till we see her wake weeping from her troublous dreams, and a little while after withdrawing her hand from Adam's to venture alone into the neighboring grove. The thought of loss is a powerful revelator. How like morning-glories do these beauties fold their tinted petals from our sight unless they are wet with the night dews of sadness! Powers, the great sculptor, in the moments of his highest inspiration obeying this same law of mind, left his ideal bound in chains. Strike those marble fetters from the limbs of the Greek slave, and you vail her rarest graces from the gaze of man, you curtain the window whence comes streaming the golden sunlight of her beauty. Thus far the ideal presented by Milton is none other in kind than Poe's Ligeia--purity untempted.
Again we see the dark clouds and hear the muttering thunders of the tragedy of sin; and though the arch-devil exulting over the fall is hastening to hell-gate to tell it to his fiends, yet such are the deep-laid schemes of Providence we see rising sphinx-like from the ashes of this ruin a fuller unfolding of the beauty of the Divine conception. After Eve had tasted the forbidden fruit, hope for a time went shipwreck. The possibility of forgiveness and final restoration had not yet been made known to man. Adam looked upon his consort, and wept as for the dead, and by the power of the poet our own hearts too are made to grow heavy with a sense of irrevocable loss. Now for the first time comes to the soul the beautiful angel--thought of "the Might Have Been." Here Hood leaves us in his Bridge of Sighs with a second and higher ideal beauty than Poe's, born in the mind that of one tempted yet without sin. There is satisfactory philosophy for its birth, but we can not give it now. Experience bears us witness to the fact.
Milton pursues his theme. Adam having talked with Michael on the hill, and learned his fate, hastened to the bower to waken Eve, and tell her the words of the angel. Though a little while before she had sobbed herself to sleep, God had sent comfort in her dreams, and fitted her for the high and holy mission of her sex. The voice of her welcome was of softer melody than the laughter of waters, or the songs of birds, richer than the utterances of first love, loftier in its inspirations than the plaintive appeals of human grief. Her face beamed with a beauty rarer than was found in sunsets or the light of stars; rarer than in the sunny smiles of innocence; than in the tears that fell before the disobedience; rarer even than the ideal that glided like a white-robed spirit before the eyes of Adam sorrowing for his expected loss. You who have read Moore's Oriental poem of Paradise and the Peri, remember the last gift brought by the erring spirit to the angel that was keeping the gates of Light, the gift that gained her entrance to the skies. I have often thought that if the offering required of the Peri had been the most beautiful thing upon the earth, and she had brought the sigh of zephyrs or the sound of lutes, the blush of roses or the blush of brides, the gleam of tear drops or the thought that comes to him that pities the fallen--"Not yet," the angel would say with regret,
"For Peri, see, the crystal bar
Of Eden moves not; lovelier far
Than ev'n these beauties must it be
That opes the gates of heaven for thee."
But when, renewing her search for the coveted boon, she had chanced upon the scene of Adam's talk with the angel, about which thronged happy memories of Paradisal loveliness--the graceful trailing of vines, the rich fragrance and delicate tinting of flower petals, the hanging clusters of ripened fruit, the life in the bower with its gentle, contented love--about which thronged mournful memories of the disobedience and con sequent forfeiture of all; about which gathered the sadness of final parting, the mystery of future fate; and about which in these last hours shone with heavenly radiance the faith, the hope, the constancy of the Christian woman, the lights that have kept the world from shipwreck through the centuries, had the Peri chanced upon this scene, of which gloom is a most essential element, quick would she have borne its beauty to the realms of air, and as the portal opened at her coming we should have heard her sing:
"Joy, joy, forever, my task is done,
The gates are passed, and heaven is won.
Farewell, ye odors of earth that die,
Passing away like a lover's sigh;
My feast is now of the Torba tree,
Whose scent is the breath of eternity."
