It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth,
at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work will be a
very remarkable one, almost unique. But, being a close observer, I have
noticed that those who always tell the truth obtain immense credit, no
matter how much they say that militates against themselves. The pleasure
of speaking the truth at all times is immense. Lying is a very peculiar
art: some use it merely as a convenience, and often have not the ability
to forge a lie without including in it the contradiction. One takes
pity on this class, endowed only with a pauper intellect and a pauper
conscience.
Exaggerative liars are of a common class; it is somewhat difficult to
reach their motive, because they neither serve themselves nor others.
What they chiefly exaggerate is incomes; it must be due to a sanguine
temperament.
The decidedly despicable liars are those who lie about themselves; but
these have not the shrewdness to see their way safely. A man told me
that he had been dining with a distinguished party at a certain club.
He had not the knowledge necessary to give his lie substance; he was
not aware that the rules of the club he named did not admit of a member
entertaining any stranger there.
These are the three sorts of everyday liars; it is astonishing how
completely every one knows them as such without their being in the least
aware of the fact themselves, for we all pretend to believe liars to
their face!
It is like possessing a fortune to be endowed with a love of truth for
its own sake, and I doubt if any man was ever truly great without it. The
mind of the truly gifted appears to me to lie parallel with nature, so
that if an idea comes into being, all other ideas related to it are close
at hand, and in a line with it.
The value of this view to the science of criticism is incommensurable:
this I will now illustrate. The idea and its relations, which increase
its intensity and beauty, may be variously expressed. Say Shakespeare
knew a girl who was in love but concealed it, and so, pining, grew
hectic and sallow; but bore it with patience. Such would be the prose
version of the fact, and is not very emotional. But the poet would look
as steadfastly at the sufferer as would a lover, then his sympathy would
inflame, and in the developing of his mental vision he would see a rose
that must prematurely perish through the cankering worm that gnaws at
its heart. That rose is the hectic blush, its damask is reflected on the
maiden cheek as she pines. But such an image cannot end here, this image
of death in life; and in the next parallel appears a living monument of
immortalizing sculpture beyond which the mind cannot rise.
(1) She never told her love—
(2) But let concealment, like a worm in the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.
(3) She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
Poetry is co-extensive with Nature, but cannot exceed her limits. She
has her mystical number, which is three. Her suns rise; they reach their
zenith; they have their setting: it is their morning, their noon, and
their night. The earth has its three dimensions; the elements and all
the things it consists of can assume but three forms, the solid, the
liquid, the gaseous. Her productions have their three stages, and,
running through these, they begin again. Man, in common with all that is
organic, is born, he lives, he dies; the plant yearly has its growth,
its flowering, its seed-time. This is the trinity of Nature; and poetry,
which is her vocal manifestation, has its three parallels.
This truth, instances of which the reader himself may multiply at will,
serves to illuminate the poetic argument which is to follow. An idea in
imaginative poetry, which is the greatest and the only truly great, has
three parallels as already exemplified; it cannot have more, and to be
of the highest quality it cannot have less. There are as many sources of
these parallels as there are objects in the three natural kingdoms, that
most marvellous of the threefold series, the conjoint animal, vegetable,
and mineral, in which all things subsist; in which every object is an
ante-type of the poetic evolution just defined.
It is not necessary that these parallels should be separated by
intervening details of any length, whence it is that short passages,
or short poems like the sonnet, when woven with a due regard to their
effectiveness, become poetic gems. Such are the first four lines of
Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet; such are Coleridge’s lines on “Time
Real and Imaginary,” and those on “Work without Hope.” All these I will
now cite, numbering the parallels in their gradual ascent from the
subject to its evolution, and thence into its transcendental expression
in the ideal.