" The student now guesses the
state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the
human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to
propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the
most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer,
"Nevermore." With the indulgence, to the extreme, of this
self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or
obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no
overstepping of the limits of the real.
But in subjects so handled, however skillfully, or with however
vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or
nakedness which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably
required- first, some amount of complexity, or more properly,
adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness- some
under-current, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in
especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness
(to borrow from colloquy a forcible term), which we are too fond of
confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning-
it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under-current of the
theme- which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind),
the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists.
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