Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), April 19, 1845, vol. 1, no. 16, p. ???-???

[page 252, column 2, continued:]

IMAGINATION AND FANCY. By Leigh Hunt. No. IV of the “Library of Choice Reading,” published by Mess. Wiley and Putnam.

A better work than this, for the purpose of the “Library” could scarcely have been selected.

The delicate taste and fine fancy of Leigh Hunt are, at the present day, as warmly admitted, as many years ago they were clamorously denied. His exquisite sensibility to all impressions of the beautiful; his scholarship (by no means profound, yet peculiarly available); and his general vivacity of intellect — render him an admirable critic on all points within the compass of these qualities. No man living can put a truly good book of ordinary literature, in a better light than he. In poetical criticism, especially, he is at home — to the extent we have suggested. His mode is to give a running commentary on the poem, citing largely, Italicizing such passages as strike his fancy, and expatiating on the effects produced: his sole object, apparently, being to extort from the work the greatest amount of beauty which it can be made to yield. This, undoubtedly, is a very captivating method, and mankind are by no means the more disposed to quarrel with it on the ground that it is sometimes less useful (if the term may be here applied) than delightful.

But these are not all the capacities of Hunt. He theorises with great ability. An instinct of the fitting — a profound sentiment of the true, the graceful, the musical, the beautiful in every shape — enables him to construct critical principles which are thoroughly consistent with Nature, and which thus serve admirably as a substructure for Art. But it is in the power of passing behind his principles, that he utterly and radically fails. Of their composition — of their machinery — he is as ignorant as a child. If any thing goes wrung with his critical clock-work, he remains profoundly and curiously embarrassed — not having the commonest idea of the, steps to be taken to set it in order. He tells us that a pas, sage is beautiful, and very usually (though not always) we admit that he is right. He insists on its beauty, and we still coincide. He expatiates on it until we grow warm in his warmth. He demonstrates to our satisfaction how it is beautiful and at what particular points it is beautiful, and sometimes adventures so far as to assure us (while we agree with him) that it would be still better at certain other points if written so and so — and then should we be so inconsiderate as to ask him why it is beautiful, he would bo altogether at a loss for an answer.

In a word the forte of the author of Rimini is taste — while his foible is analysis. Of this latter quality — absolutely indispensable in all criticism that aims at instruction or reformation in letters — he is radically deficient. He himself feels his own ability to construct a fine poem, and is content to be assured of the validity of the principles upon which he constructs it, without caring to understand the ultimate character of the natural laws (of the heart and intellect) upon which the validity of the principles depends. Feeling thus, he is prone to suppose that in all men the ability may exist without the understanding — and his criticisms therefore take no account of the latter. He neglects it first, because he does not appreciate its necessity (since it is no necessity for him) and secondly through absolute incapacity for its discussion. Now the one cause predominates in hire and now the other. We can at all time trust his comments of love and admiration, [page 253:] and we may put faith to a very great extent in his definitions or general conclusions in art, but we must never ask of him too inquisitively, by what process they have been attained, or request him to put us in a condition for the attainment of similar conclusions for ourselves.

Now we are quite sure that the author of “Imagination and Fancy” would deny in a great measure the utility of that analysis for which we contend — but he would deny it just as a man born blind might be led to deny the utility of light. A far greater than Leigh Hunt has, in fact, denied it as far as he could, through implication, in the case of Lord Verulam. We allude to Macaulay, who is at much pains to detract from the wisest and brightest (we will not say the meanest of mankind) on the ground that the inductive processes of reason teach us to reason no better in teaching us the modes in which we reason. It is Macaulay who maintains, in other words, that a man is enabled to labor to no greater advantage by any understanding of the tools with which he labors, or of the material upon which his labor is bestowed! The reply to all this is, that Thomas Babington Macaulay is not a man of genius. He is a critic, but no more than a critic. We grant that the “Lays of Ancient Rome” would have received little or no improvement from any understanding, on the part of their author, of the processes of thought which enabled him to put them together. Their merit or demerit, in fact, is quite independent of any such understanding — the truth, after all, seeming to resolve itself into this — that the value of the comprehension of which we speak, is in the direct ratio of the creative ability which employs or takes advantage of the comprehension. In this sense, there are few who would deny that to Leigh Hunt the faculty of analysis would be of greater moment than to Macaulay: — and if we have expressed ourselves of the admirable work before us less warmly than may seem fitting, it is not that we fail to appreciate, or are unwilling to admit its merits, but that we feel a sentiment half of grief half of vexation, at perceiving bow very narrowly it has missed being more meritorious, by a hundred fold at least, than it actually is, as we now see it.

It would be doing our subject injustice not to give our readers at least one extract from the volume. We choose the concluding paragraphs of an answer to the query “what is poetry?”

I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Tilton; who has said, that poetry in comparison with science, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.’ By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of Imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I ant aware that different constructions have been put upon some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not Crow the original, but from an extract in the Remarks on Paradise Lost by Richardson.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; — what he has to avoid like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be “in earnest at the moment.” His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. “I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings,” says Coleridge in his Preface to his Poems; and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its ‘own exceeding great reward:’ it has soothed my Afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that wets and surrounds me.” — Pickering's edition, p. 10.

“Poetry,” says Shelley, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them. as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; be must put himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to [column 2:] the effect by acting upon the cause.” — Essays and Letters, vol. i, p. 16.

I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him argues the smaller capacity.

No man recognizes the worth of utility more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his “buttons” or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers of their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idead man; and beyond all this, he discerns the incalulable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

“And a button-maker, after all, invented it!” cries our friend.

Pardon me — it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of it? — a captain who first tried it, — and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts, was the great philosopher Bacon, who said that poetry had “something divine in it,” and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind.