Why paint in
full sunshine, if the intense light obliterates details and confuses the
shadows? Does it seem a difficulty conquered? It is far oftener a
disguised insufficiency. If my reference to painting seem premature, it
is because I wished to borrow an image to show how equally grievous was
the faulty touch of many of our writers of renown. Many among them seem
striving to propagate the culture of the Mediocre and Unseemly, as a
thousandfold easier practice than the religion of the Beautiful.
My present aim is to show clearly the influence of even incomplete
_simplisme_, in certain pernicious effects upon literature. Edgar A. Poe
entered the realm of the fanciful after Hoffman, and how is it that the
initiator is less dangerous than his disciple? It is because of these
two _simplistes_, who have put reason out of consideration, the first
addressed himself only to the imagination, while the American poet
sounded the emotions to depths where terror is awakened and madness
begins to sting. Hoffman has perhaps upon his conscience some readers
confined in asylums for the deranged, but the far more perilous
hallucinations of Poe must account for greater harm. The distance is
great between imagination and sentiment, and should be so regarded. This
extravagance should surely not be allowed to usurp the place of
morality, but this is what is done, and greatness is not for them.
Another illustration lies in the transition intermediate between the
romances of Balzac, Frederic Soulie, Emile Souvestre, and Eugene Sue,
and the poetry of Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Beranger, Barbier and the
_impressionalist_ school whose decline is already at hand.
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