describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with
the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain,
by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast: loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it:
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it: grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint: throws
us back upon the past, forward into the future: brings every moment
of our being or object of nature in startling review before us: and
in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the
highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing
but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this", what a
bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot
be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which
has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow,
like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when
he exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche,
and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion
to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring
up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling
shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out
the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his
breast, only to torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of
Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it
of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed
upon it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is
that in Othello--with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he
clings to the last traces of departed happiness, when he exclaims:
---O now, for ever,
Farewell the tranquil mind: farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner; and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!
How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in
its sounding course, when, in answer to the doubts expressed of his
returning love, he says:
Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that
passage:
But there where I have garner'd up my heart ...
To be discarded thence!
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our
sympathy without raising our disgust is that, in proportion as it
sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the
desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by
making us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion
lays bare and shows us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole
of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that
which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by
contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate
suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more
intimate participation with the antagonist world of good: makes us
drink deeper of the cup of human life: tugs at the heart-strings:
loosens the pressure about them, and calls the springs of thought and
feeling into play with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part
of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the
will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these
different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The
domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural,
is in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively
to one of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and
Lillo, [Footnote: For instance, _The Gamester_ and _George Barnwell_
They are to be found respectively in vols. xiv. and xi. of the _British
Theatre_.] for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and
lie like a dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is
unable to throw off; the tragedy of Shakespeare, which is true poetry,
stirs our inmost affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining
it with all the forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings
of the heart; and rouses the whole man within us.
The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry is not anything
peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is
not an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work
in the common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people
flock to see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the
next street, the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the
difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty.
Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain
prose: nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of
murders and executions about the streets find it necessary to have
them turned into penny ballads, before they can dispose of these
interesting and authentic documents. The grave politician drives a
thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom
he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them.
The popular preacher makes less frequent mention of Heaven than of
hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or
rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading
a description of those of others. We are as prone to make a torment
of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked,
Why we do so, the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The
sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of
pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control
over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to hate as to
love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as
our love or admiration:
Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes.
Not that we like what we loathe: but we like to indulge our hatred and
scorn of it, to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration, to make it
a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour
of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatize it by name,
to grapple with it in thought--in action, to sharpen our intellect,
to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with,
and to contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest
eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be
given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful,
mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect
coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and
of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant
"satisfaction to the thought". This is equally the origin of wit and
fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope
says of the Lord Mayor's show--
Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!
when Collins makes Danger, "with limbs of giant mould".
----Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish--
Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous, when thou shew'st thee in a child,
Than the sea-monster!
the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and
of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing
ourselves, and show it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in
spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination,
by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief
to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will. We do not wish
the thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For
knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer in this case
the dupe, though it may be the victim, of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd
than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic
critics for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common
sense and reason; for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first
and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature", seen through the
medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means
of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as
well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod
upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait,
as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which
things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common
conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes
of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common
sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference,
cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice
to either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently
of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest
in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a
greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from
old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their
consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more
take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects
without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their
preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these
various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their
stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the
glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning
nothing but a little gray worm: let the poet or the lover of poetry
visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent
moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one
part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that
not the least interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the
human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be
concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has
a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip
the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally
visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things
to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful
pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm
is much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the
progress of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon
that gives birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what
we do not know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill
them with what shapes we please--with ravenous beasts, with caverns
vast, and drear enchantments--so in our ignorance of the world about
us, we make gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no
bounds to the wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears:
And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough.
There can never be another Jacob's Dream. Since that time, the heavens
have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse
to the imagination; nor will they return to us on the squares of the
distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture
brings the matter nearer to us. It is not only the progress of
mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization, that
are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less
awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and
look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The
heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At
present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to
the incursions of wild beasts or "bandit fierce", or to the unmitigated
fury of the elements. The time has been that "our fell of hair would
at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir as life were in it". But the
police spoils all; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight
murder. _Macbeth_ is only tolerated in this country for the sake of
the music; and in the United States of America, where the philosophical
principles of government are carried still further in theory and
practice, we find that the _Beggar's Opera_ is hooted from the stage.
Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us
safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very
comfortable prose style:
Obscurity her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung.
The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead
to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting
and poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem
that the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must
affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image
more distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much
temerity that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or
connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they show
that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art.
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting
embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists
out of it, in any manner connected with it. But this last is the proper
province of the imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting
gives the event, poetry the progress of events; but it is during the
progress, in the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes
and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that
the pinch of the interest lies:
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream
The mortal instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection.
But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are
the best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly
remember in what interests us most. But it may be asked then, Is there
anything better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's
portraits, than Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two
first I shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque rather
than imaginative. Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments
that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same
if we were not acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed
before the cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon:
Christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before His death.
But that chapter does not need a commentary. It is for want of some
such resting-place for the imagination that the Greek statues are
little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to
the heart. They have not an informing principle within them. In their
faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their
beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering.
By their beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious
faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They
seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined
with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the
ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question
of long standing in what the essence of poetry consists, or what it
is that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose,
another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single
line:
Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the
song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts
that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and
change "the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo". There is a
striking instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and
rhythm to the subject, in Spenser's description of the Satyrs
accompanying Una to the cave of Sylvanus:
So from the ground she fearless doth arise,
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancing round,
Shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme;
And with green branches strewing all the ground,
Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd.
And all the way their merry pipes they sound,
That all the woods and doubled echoes ring;
And with their horned feet do wear the ground,
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;
So towards old Sylvanus they her bring,
Who with the noise awaked, cometh out.
On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the
ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary
and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the
voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements
in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or
correspondence to the individual ideas or to the tone of feeling with
which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the
inequalities and harshnesses of prose are fatal to the flow of a
poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs
the reverie of an absent man. But poetry "makes these odds all even".
It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind,
untying, as it were, "the secret soul of harmony". Wherever any object
takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood
over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment
of enthusiasm; wherever a movement of imagination or passion is
impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the
emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give
the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually
varied, according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it--this
is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the
musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a
near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing.
As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry
begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one
feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the same
principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice
utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into
each other. It is to supply the inherent defect of harmony in the
customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the
sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to mingle the
tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry", with the tide of
feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the
language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to
spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses:
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air--
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses
and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that
poetry was invented. It is to common language what springs are to a
carriage, or wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain
harmony by the modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is
done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been
well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent
upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose.
The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way "sounding always
the increase of his winning". Every prose writer has more or less of
rhythmical adaptation, except poets who, when deprived of the regular
mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in
their writings.
An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair
that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail
itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of
syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation
of images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of
wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines
of poetry are the well-known ones which tell the number of days in the
months of the year:
Thirty days hath September, &c.
But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken
the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers'
ends, besides the contents of the almanac. Pope's versification is
tiresome from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakespeare's
blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue.
All is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole
difference between poetry and prose. The _Iliad_ does not cease to be
poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's _Campaign_ has been
very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs
from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite,
familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary
impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious
processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or
violent movements either of the imagination or the passions.