In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author of ‘Hesperus’ has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces, and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well worthy of perusal.
PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘HESPERUS.’
The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.
Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own immortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.
The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries’ breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages.
If this be so, then, what does the author’s pen do? Like a child’s, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil.
The author’s strings only vibrate in unison with the reader’s octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds—not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author’s level or pass beyond it.
And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet’s grapes as though they were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when we really ought to be frightened at him.
The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support of the proposition)—relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must continue to worship what remains—that is to say, the worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal to one dragon.
This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to have any sense in it which is,—that no man is wholly indifferent to, and unaffected by, every kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to poetical reflections (illusions) that he swears allegiance—inasmuch as he does even that he thereby does homage to truth; for in all poetry it is but the part which is true which goes to the heart (or head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not be a reflection. Every semblance (meaning every thing which we see, or suppose we see) presupposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.