_'Tis a month before the month of May,

And the spring comes slowly up this way._

The lovely lady, Christabel,

Whom her father loves so well,

What makes her in the wood so late,

A furlong from the castle-gate?

She had dreams all yesternight

Of her own betrothèd knight;

And shè [)i]n th[)e] midnight wood will pray

For the wèal [)o]f h[)e]r lover that's far away.

She stole along, she nothing spoke,

The sighs she heav'd were soft and low,

And nought was green upon the oak,

But moss and rarest mistletoe;

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,

And in silence prayeth she.

The lady sprang up suddenly,

The lovely lady, Christabel!

It moan'd as near as near can be,

But what it is, she cannot tell.

On the other side it seems to be

Of th[)e] hùge, broàd-breàsted, òld oàk trèe.

The night is chill, the forest bare;

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?

(This 'bleak moaning' is a witch's)

There is not wind enough in the air

To move away the ringlet curl

From the lovely lady's cheek--

There is not wind enough to twirl

_The òne rèd lèaf, the làst [)o]f [)i]ts clan,

That dànc[)e]s [)a]s òft[)e]n [)a]s dànce it càn,

Hàng[)i]ng s[)o] lìght and hàng[)i]ng s[)o] hìgh,

On th[)e] tòpmost twìg th[)a]t lo[)o]ks ùp [)a]t th[)e] sky._

Hush, beating heart of Christabel!

Jesu Maria, shield her well!

She folded her arms beneath her cloak,

And stole to the other side of the oak.

What sees she there?

There she sees a damsel bright,

Drest in a robe of silken white,

That shadowy in the moonlight shone:

The neck that made that white robe wan,

Her stately neck and arms were bare:

Her blue-vein'd feet unsandall'd were;

And wildly glitter'd, here and there,

The gems entangled in her hair.

I guess 'twas _frightful_ there to see

_A lady so richly clad as she--

Beautiful exceedingly._

The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style

'beyond the reach of art'. Everything is diversified according to the

demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions; the

very uniformity of the outline is gently varied; and yet we feel that

_the whole is one and of the same character_, the single and sweet

unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more

conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that _versification

itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem_, and vindicates the

pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very

fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean

order accompanied with verse of the highest.

As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it

is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the

East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for

all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with

Southern Europe,--a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to

enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own

sake, or at least never appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary

it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide

it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many

times where luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in

Titania's speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling

remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising

addition to the jest.

Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,

Heav'n did a recompense as largely send;

He gave to misery all he had, _a tear_;

He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) _a friend_.

Gray's _Elegy_.

The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry

At every lewd, low character, 'That's _I_'.

Dryden's _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear?

_About two hundred pounds a-year._

And that which was proved true before,

Prove false again? _Two hundred more._

_Hudibras._

Compound for sins they are _inclin'd to_,

By damning those they have _no mind to_.

_Id._

----Stor'd with deletery _med'cines_,

Which whosoever took is _dead since_.

_Id._

Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme,

thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:

Win

The women, and make them draw in

The men, as Indians with a _fèmale_

Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.

_Hudibras._

He made an instrument to know

If the moon shines at full or no;

That would, as soon as e'er she _shone, straight_

Whether 'twere day or night _demonstrate_;

Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_,

And prove that she's not made of _green cheese_.

_Id._

Pronounce it, by all means, _grinches_, to make the joke more wilful.

The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in _Don

Juan_:

But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_,

Inform us truly,--haven't they _hen-peck'd you all_?

The sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of

effect.

Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the

happy word 'sprung' in the following passage from Ben Jonson was

suggested by it; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him.

--Let our trumpets sound,

And cleave both air and ground

With beating of our drums.

Let every lyre be strung,

Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_

_With touch of dainty thumbs_.

Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the

second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of

the 'artificial school of poetry'. Perhaps the most perfect master of

rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of

comedy that the world has seen,--Molière.

If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of

knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so

on? the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the

best poets with the greatest attention; and, second, the cultivation

of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every

true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the

poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love,

or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the

firmament to the daisy,--from the highest heart of man to the most

pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand,

marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes

the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It

enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he

makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of

its exalter.

If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I

should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with

narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with

the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to

relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least

sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest

poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes

all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a

judgement may be drawn from his early narratives (_Venus and Adonis_,

and the _Rape of Lucrece_), it is to be doubted whether even

Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that

incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of

which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;--if it were

possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to

Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal, but

still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the

universal, profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote

Spenser--immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the

great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted

with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer:

then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty,

out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest

lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the

narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than

feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to

be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class

may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the

superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope

would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination,

teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling

and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.

Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of

the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of

fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far

better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the

process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And

what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that

thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and

judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial

fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the

difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the

abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into

guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the

gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate

to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart

from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it

really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the

other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth

of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always

consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the

great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make

themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not

incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their

present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power

to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.

This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with

a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly

considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself

by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a

different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their

sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of

its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing

graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness

of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in

sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and

Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north,

and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too

sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful

or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of

reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness

for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine

things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both

is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full

extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the

particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the

spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and

as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so

from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and

beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.

Ariosto, for instance, does not _tell a story_ with the brevity and

concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of

matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet

you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic

of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy

sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for

this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's

perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to

his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant

with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend

Spenser in verses in which he said that 'Petrarch' was thenceforward

to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was

nothing he counted 'of any price' but the effusions of the new author.

Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter;

and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well

have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias

had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great

or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be

worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our

hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and

beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no

bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets;

whether in Homer's epic or Gray's _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of

Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of

Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and

feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself,

who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who

calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same

degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.

I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three

memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison

with science, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate'. By simple, he

means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of

imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that

different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the

context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however,

not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise

Lost_ by Richardson.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and

truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the

false. He will get no good by proposing to be 'in earnest at the

moment'. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him,

and felt to be his most precious inheritance. 'I expect neither

profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the

Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider myself as having been amply

repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its "_own exceeding great

reward_"; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined

my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit

of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets

and surrounds me.'

'Poetry', says Shelley, 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the

world, _and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar_.

It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed

in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who

have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted

content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which

it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of

our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful

which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be

greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put

himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and

pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of

moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by

acting upon the cause.'

I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but

as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think

themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed

useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be

allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared

with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing

nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him

by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes

the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him

argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility

more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may

not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities

of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance,

with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad,

as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as

the greatest two-idea'd man who varies that single idea with hugging

himself on his 'buttons' or his good dinner. But he sees also the

beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the

heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like

a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the

passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea'd

man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of

good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which

this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,

perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the

diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' cries our friend.

Pardon me--it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent,

and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man

visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water

and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical

bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it--a captain

who first tried it--and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who

put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon,

who said that poetry had 'something divine in it', and was necessary

to the satisfaction of the human mind.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

1822-1888

THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY

[Preface to 'Poems', 1853]

In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the

other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have

already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.

I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the

volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because

the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three

thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a

sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own

opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I

intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek

religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,

having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of

Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to

dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings

of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to

consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles

himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What

those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek

genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared;

the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have

disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;

modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,

we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.

The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if

consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in

any imitation or representation whatever: this is the basis of our

love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all

knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,

but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is

consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it

gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is

_not_ interesting, is that which does not add to our knowledge of any

kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a

representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of

being particular, precise, and firm.

Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be

interesting; but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than

this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but

also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader: that it shall

convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the Muses, as Hesiod says,

were born that they might be 'a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce

from cares'; and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the

knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to

their happiness. 'All Art', says Schiller, 'is dedicated to Joy, and

there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men

happy. The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest

enjoyment.'

A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been

shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting, representation; it

has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can

derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances,

represented in a work of Art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well

known, may still subsist: the representation of the most utter

calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it:

the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and

the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more

terrible.

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though

accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in

which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous

state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,

or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to

be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in

the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in

actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them

in poetry is painful also.

To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me,

that of Empedocles, as I have endeavoured to represent him, belongs;

and I have therefore excluded the Poem from the present collection.

And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation

respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of

the Poem in question? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow

that the sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated

above; and that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion

which many critics of the present day appear to entertain against

subjects chosen from distant times and countries: against the choice,

in short, of any subjects but modern ones.

'The Poet,' it is said, and by an intelligent critic, 'the Poet who

would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past,

and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and _therefore_

both of interest and novelty.'

Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining,

inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta

everywhere current at the present day, having a philosophical form and

air, but no real basis in fact; and which are calculated to vitiate

the judgement of readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they

are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of those who write

it.

What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all

times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent

interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an

interesting manner by the art of the Poet. Vainly will the latter

imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an

intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent

one by his treatment of it: he may indeed compel us to admire his

skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect.

The Poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action;

and what actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most

powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those

elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which

are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same;

that which interests them is permanent and the same also. The

modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do

with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon its

inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our

passions, that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting;

and interesting solely in proportion to its greatness and to its

passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more

interesting to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even though

upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may

have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by

its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to

all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no

right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their

claims are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the

domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the

voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced.

Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido--what modern poem presents

personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of

an 'exhausted past'? We have the domestic epic dealing with the

details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems

representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern

life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced

by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I

fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,

_Jocelyn_, _The Excursion_, leave the reader cold in comparison with

the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the

_Orestea_, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this? Simply because

in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages

nobler, the situations more intense: and this is the true basis of the

interest in a poetical work, and this alone.

It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in

themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern Poet,

because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his

own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them

forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a

past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a

contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man

of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the

ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself;

but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with

their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic

situations, which engage their passions as men; these have in them

nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern Poet as

to a contemporary.

The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its

selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the

Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference

between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me,

in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in

itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us,

attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and

images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the

whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over

the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the

action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it;

on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the

unapproached masters of the _grand style_: but their expression is so

excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of

prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because

it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it

conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so

limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which

unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of

excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent

subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions,

therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive

possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared

inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to

the genius of every fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears

to us moderns a certain baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of

the triviality with which we often reproach the remarks of the

Chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that the action itself,

the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon, was to stand the

central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no

accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator's attention

from this; that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down,

in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible

old mythic story on which the drama was founded stood, before he

entered the theatre, traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator's

mind; it stood in his memory, as a group of statuary, faintly seen, at

the end of a long and dark vista: then came the Poet, embodying

outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a sentiment

capriciously thrown in; stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded: the

light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the

riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words

were spoken, it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of

immortal beauty.

This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet

endeavoured to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action

belonged; we do not find that the _Persae_ occupied a particularly

high rank among the dramas of Aeschylus, because it represented a

matter of contemporary interest: this was not what a cultivated

Athenian required; he required that the permanent elements of his

nature should be moved; and dramas of which the action, though taken

from a long-distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this

in a higher degree than that of the _Persae_, stood higher in his

estimation accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their

exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too

near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to

form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a

tragic poem: such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet,

and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for

_pragmatic_ poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they

were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they

permitted. Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of

Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a

thousand tongues--'All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting

action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this

done, everything else will follow.'

But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they

were rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of

poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem.

How different a way of thinking from this is ours! We can hardly at

the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who

inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not

having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the

action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that

the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose

under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist

merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of

producing any total impression. We have critics who seem to direct

their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about

the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the

majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a

thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be

demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of

metaphysical criticism. They will permit the Poet to select any action

he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he

gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a

shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to

leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies

their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to

gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned

against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs

rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything

else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to

develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his

personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds

in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it

did in nature.

But the modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely

prescribes false aims.--'A true allegory of the state of one's own

mind in a representative history,' the Poet is told, 'is perhaps the

highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.'--And

accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own

mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No

assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has

ever been produced with such an aim. _Faust_ itself, in which

something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains,

and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to

Margaret, _Faust_ itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a

poetical work, is defective: its illustrious author, the greatest poet

of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the

first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by

asserting it to be 'something incommensurable'.

The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices

counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works

capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his

models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the

confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in

view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which

offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of

helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the

English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all

that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his

attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce,

at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself

with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught

to produce what is excellent independently.

Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:

a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be

mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a

doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for

the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed

advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent

subjects; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and

Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the necessity of

choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest

attaching to allegories of the state of one's own mind; like all great

poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them,

wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found

his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all

great poets, he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of

happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled: so

eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even

to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here

has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental

excellences _as a poet_; what distinguishes the artist from the mere

amateur, says Goethe, is _Architectonicè_ in the highest sense; that

power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the

profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the

abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a

poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole,

and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled

degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model

runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in

consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power,

these, and these alone. Of this preponderating quality of

Shakespeare's genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English

poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive

attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree

owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details

alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is

perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French

poet--_il dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais malheureusement il n'a rien à

dire_.

Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works

of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the

school of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic

death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of

_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, by Keats. I choose this rather than

the _Endymion_, because the latter work (which a modern critic has

classed with the _Faerie Queene_!), although undoubtedly there blows

through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly

incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The

poem of _Isabella_, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and

felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one

of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the

object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the

reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a

greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than

all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The

action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by

the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in

and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has

finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the _Decameron_:

he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has

become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things

delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is

designed to express.

I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention

on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to

this, neglecting his other excellences. These excellences, the

fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt

possessed them--possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it

may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give

scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher

poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great

poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an

excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of

intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of

expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes

into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of

fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing

plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest

language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than

whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has

had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark,

how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare's language often is.

It is so: you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies,

_King Lear_ for instance, where the language is so artificial, so

curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read

two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This

overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment

of a wonderful gift--of the power of saying a thing in a happier way

than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one

understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare

appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of

simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the

ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and

exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a

far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them:

in his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which

he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the

moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious

rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it

from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and

comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has

of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has

their important action and their large and broad manner: but he has

not their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe model; for

what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich

nature; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or

applied as an art; he is above all suggestive; more valuable,

therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But clearness of

arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style--these may to

a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned

best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than

Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.

What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models?

the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and

their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is

narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize.

An action like the action of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which turns

upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse

and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is

possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it

will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus

for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the

individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients,

better than anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important

for him to know:--the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the

necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of

expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the

effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a

whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or

by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great

classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense

significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will

be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral

impression, at which the ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which

constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them

immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing

the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of

modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works

conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its

transitoriness.

The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will

not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but

their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those

who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon

their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in

general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and

impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the

empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among

those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile

their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and

whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well;

they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in

themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--[Greek:

chalepon], as Pittacus said, [Greek: chalepon esthlon emmenai]--and

they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can

assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any

art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old

artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves

with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves

with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own

times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their

age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium

of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to

the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of

feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the

age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for

supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age

commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development

and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do

nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are

great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what

is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can

supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but that an

age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an

age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and

delightfully affected by them.

A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is

inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual

health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content

himself with remembering the judgements passed upon the present age,

in this respect, by the two men, the one of strongest head, the other

of widest culture, whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr. It

will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these

two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that

he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life

were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their

judgement as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely

follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the

false pretensions of his age; he will content himself with not being

overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can

succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and

irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the

contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable

others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.

I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this

discipline; or for the following Poems, that they breathe its spirit.

But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid

the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in

poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the

only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what

they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is

disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this

when reading words of disparagement or of cavil: that it is the

uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our

difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers

from the same uncertainty. _Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; Dii me

terrent, et Jupiter hostis._

Two kinds of _dilettanti_, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who

neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done

enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to

arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an

artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that

the first does most harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must

be _dilettanti_: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances

amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to

delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great

artists--let us, at least, have so much respect for our Art as to

prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder our successors: let us

transmit to them the practice of Poetry, with its boundaries and

wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,

perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into

oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the

influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION

(1854)

I have allowed the Preface to the former edition of these Poems to

stand almost without change, because I still believe it to be, in the

main, true. I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the force

of much that has been alleged against portions of it, or unaware that

it contains many things incompletely stated, many things which need

limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question, how far, and in

what manner, the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of

subjects apply to lyric poetry; that region of the poetical field

which is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither have I time now to

supply these deficiencies, nor is this the proper place for attempting

it: on one or two points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest

possible way, some explanation.

An objection has been ably urged to the classing together, as subjects

equally belonging to a past time, Oedipus and Macbeth. And it is no

doubt true that to Shakespeare, standing on the verge of the Middle

Ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more familiar than that of Oedipus. But

I was speaking of actions as they presented themselves to us moderns:

and it will hardly be said that the European mind, since Voltaire, has

much more affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those of

Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct

affinity with the circumstances and feelings of either; as

individuals, we are attracted towards this or that personage, we have

a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his times, solely

according to a law of personal sympathy; and those subjects for which

we feel this personal attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat

successfully. Alcestis or Joan of Arc, Charlemagne or Agamemnon--one

of these is not really nearer to us now than another; each can be made

present only by an act of poetic imagination: but this man's

imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that man's for

another.

It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in his choice of

subjects to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity: but it is not so:

I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without

regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny that the poetic

faculty can and does manifest itself in treating the most trifling

action, the most hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power should

be wasted; and that the Poet should be compelled to impart interest

and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it, and

thereby doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been excellently

said, an immortal strength in the stories of great actions: the most

gifted poet, then, may well be glad to supplement with it that mortal

weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle of life and the

world, he must for ever feel to be his individual portion.

Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of

antiquity: it has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate

them. I make no objection: all I say is, let us study them. They can

help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our

intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in

literature, in art, in religion, in morals; namely, that it is

_fantastic_, and wants _sanity_. Sanity--that is the great virtue of

the ancient literature: the want of that is the great defect of the

modern, in spite of all its variety and power. It is impossible to

read carefully the great ancients, without losing something of our

caprice and eccentricity; and to emulate them we must at least read

them.

JOHN RUSKIN

1819-1900

OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY

[_Modern Painters_, vol. iii, pt. 4, 1856]

§ 1. German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much

multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words

that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians--namely,

'Objective' and 'Subjective'.

No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless; and I

merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get them out of

my way, and out of my reader's. But to get that done, they must be

explained.

The word 'Blue', say certain philosophers, means the sensation of

colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at

a bell gentian.

Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when the eye

is turned to the object, and as, therefore, no such sensation is

produced by the object when nobody looks at it, therefore the thing,

when it is not looked at, is not blue; and thus (say they) there are

many qualities of things which depend as much on something else as on

themselves. To be sweet, a thing must have a taster; it is only sweet

while it is being tasted, and if the tongue had not the capacity of

taste, then the sugar would not have the quality of sweetness.

And then they agree that the qualities of things which thus depend

upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by

them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which

they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or

squareness, shall be called Objective.

From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther opinion,

that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only

what they are to us; and that the only real truth of them is their

appearance to, or effect upon, us. From which position, with a hearty

desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness,

and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe,

and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or

thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees

or thinks of.

§ 2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at

once, be it observed that the word 'Blue' does _not_ mean the

_sensation_ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the

_power_ of producing that sensation; and this power is always there,

in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would

remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the

earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding.

It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the

power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound,

which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say

to the contrary.

In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness

if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its

particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And,

therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever

philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue

when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.

§ 3. Hence I would say to these philosophers: If, instead of using the

sonorous phrase, 'It is objectively so,' you will use the plain old

phrase, 'It _is_ so;' and if instead of the sonorous phrase, 'It is

subjectively so,' you will say, in plain old English, 'It does so,' or

'It seems so to me;' you will, on the whole, be more intelligible to

your fellow-creatures: and besides, if you find that a thing which

generally 'does so' to other people (as a gentian looks blue to most

men), does _not_ so to you, on any particular occasion, you will not

fall into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is not so, or did

not so, but you will say simply (what you will be all the better for

speedily finding out), that something is the matter with you. If you

find that you cannot explode the gunpowder, you will not declare that

all gunpowder is subjective, and all explosion imaginary, but you will

simply suspect and declare yourself to be an ill-made match. Which, on

the whole, though there may be a distant chance of a mistake about it,

is, nevertheless, the wisest conclusion you can come to until farther

experiment.

§ 4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out

of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in

question--namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and

true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false

appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or

contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely

unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only

imputed to it by us.

For instance--

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a

spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron.

How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that

it is anything else than a plain crocus?

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about

art, we have always found that nothing could be good, or useful, or

ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something

pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless _un_true. And what

is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full

of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being

so.

§ 5. It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this

fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the

crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real

expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused

by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or

less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak

presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the

other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by

emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke--

They rowed her in across the rolling foam--

The cruel, crawling foam.

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which

attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which

the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same

effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of

external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'Pathetic

Fallacy'.

§ 6. Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently

a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which

we allow it as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I

believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the

greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness--that it is

only the second order of poets who much delight in it.[31]

[31] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these

two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante),

and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson).

But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though

their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in

_quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.

There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can

ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a

literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with

inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by

young pseudo-poets, 'that they believe there is _some_ good

in what they have written: that they hope to do better in

time,' &c. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is

no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble

us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,

and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily

educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike

out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be

presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste

their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the

touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble

among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior

poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away

the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched

commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the

weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable

manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary

men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in

the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more

noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than

to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the

world.

Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of

Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most

perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,

passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an

instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and

_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But

when Coleridge speaks of

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can,

he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf:

he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its

powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the

wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty,

even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.

Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has

fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left

dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their

departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses

summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of

the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter

and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[32] addresses the

spirit with the simple, startled words:--

Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast

thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?

[32] 'Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so

fast?'

Which Pope renders thus:--

O, say, what angry power Elpenor led

To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?

How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,

Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?

I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the

nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it

that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant

to us in the other instances?

§ 7. For a very simple reason. They are not a _pathetic_ fallacy at

all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion--a passion

which never could possibly have spoken them--agonized curiosity.

Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing

his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in

anywise what was _not_ a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and

conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful

discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly

have written the passage.[33]

[33] It is worth while comparing the way a similar question

is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--

He wept, and his bright tears

Went trickling down the golden bow he held.

Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;

While from beneath some cumb'rous boughs hard by,

With solemn step, an awful goddess came.

And there was purport in her looks for him,

Which he with eager guess began to read:

Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,

'_How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?_'

Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some

sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fallacy has no

discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. Without farther

questioning, I will endeavour to state the main bearings of this

matter.

§ 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said

above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully

with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded, or

over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state,

according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is

no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his

perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it

is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of

being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly,

the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a

grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong

enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost

efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow,

white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even

if he melts, losing none of his weight.

So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly,

because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately

the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who

perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is

anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield,

or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives

rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for

ever nothing else than itself--a little flower, apprehended in the

very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the

associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in

general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the

men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and

the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are

always some subjects which _ought_ to throw him off his balance; some,

by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and

brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the

language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild

in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker

things.

§ 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel

nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think

weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel

strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and

the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to

influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what

they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition

of prophetic inspiration.

§ 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be

clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by

imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the

influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into

the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less

man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of _alterability_. That is

to say, the one knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of

the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which

immediately affects him, to be in anywise shaken by it. His mind is

made up; his thoughts have an accustomed current; his ways are

steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once

unbalance him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock

with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him to be moved.

The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once

carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do

before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he

is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and

go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to

a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),

receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre

of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the

feeling, as it were, from far off.

Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and

can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that

will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and

Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves

subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as

choosing to be so, and therefore admit certain expressions and modes

of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.

§ 11. Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or

are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces:

we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley's, above

quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they

faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker

becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as

being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater

baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical

expressions in cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of

passion, may speak wisely and truly of 'raging waves of the sea,

foaming out their own shame'; but it is only the basest writer who

cannot speak of the sea without talking of 'raging waves',

'remorseless floods', 'ravenous billows', &c.; and it is one of the

signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of

thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the _pure fact_, out of

which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a

true one.

To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in

despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,

_Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,_

Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.

Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, expression.

'Mound' of the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; 'changing' is as

familiar as may be; 'foam that passed away', strictly literal; and the

whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which

I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether

equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and

massiveness of a large wave. The word 'wave' is used too generally of

ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does

not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word 'mound' is heavy,

large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the kind of wave meant,

nor missing the sight of it. Then the term 'changing' has a peculiar

force also. Most people think of waves as rising and falling. But if

they look at the sea carefully, they will perceive that the waves do

not rise and fall. They change. Change both place and form, but they

do not fall; one wave goes on, and on, and still on; now lower, now

higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now building itself

together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, but still the same

wave, till at last it seems struck by something, and changes, one

knows not how,--becomes another wave.

The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still more

perfectly,--'foam that passed away'. Not merely melting, disappearing,

but passing on, out of sight, on the career of the wave. Then, having

put the absolute ocean fact as far as he may before our eyes, the poet

leaves us to feel about it as we may, and to trace for ourselves the

opposite fact,--the image of the green mounds that do not change, and

the white and written stones that do not pass away; and thence to

follow out also the associated images of the calm life with the quiet

grave, and the despairing life with the fading foam:

Let no man move his bones.

As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.

But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the

expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, utterly

uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the writer. Even the

word 'mock' is hardly an exception, as it may stand merely for

'deceive' or 'defeat', without implying any impersonation of the

waves.

§ 12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two more instances to

show the peculiar dignity possessed by all passages which thus limit

their expression to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what

he can from it. Here is a notable one from the Iliad. Helen, looking

from the Scaean gate of Troy over the Grecian host, and telling Priam

the names of its captains, says at last:

I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot

see,--Castor and Pollux,--whom one mother bore with me. Have

they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed

come in their sea-wandering ships, but now will not enter

into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that

is in Me?

Then Homer:

So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth

possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.

Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. The poet

has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness

affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be

dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving. These

are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what

you will of them.

§ 13. Take another very notable instance from Casimir de la Vigne's

terrible ballad, _La Toilette de Constance_. I must quote a few lines

out of it here and there, to enable the reader who has not the book by

him, to understand its close.

Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir

Plus vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance,

Et je vais au bal ce soir

Chez l'ambassadeur de France.

Y pensez-vous, ils sont fanés, ces noeuds,

Ils sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!

Que du réseau qui retient mes cheveux

Les glands d'azur retombent avec grâce.

Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!

Que sur mon front ce saphir étincelle:

Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien,

Bien,--chère Anna! Je t'aime, je suis belle.

Celui qu'en vain je voudrais oublier

(Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere.

(Ah, fi! profane, est-ce là mon collier?

Quoi! ces grains d'or bénits par le Saint-Père!)

Il y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main,

En y pensant, à peine je respire;

Père Anselmo doit m'entendre demain,

Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?

Vite un coup d'oeil au miroir,

Le dernier. ----J'ai l'assurance

Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir

Chez l'ambassadeur de France.

Près du foyer, Constance s'admirait.

Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une étincelle!

Au feu! Courez! Quand l'espoir l'enivrait,

Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!

L'horrible feu ronge avec volupté

Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'élève,

Et sans pitié dévore sa beauté,

Ses dix-huit ans, hélas, et son doux rêve!

Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!

On disait, Pauvre Constance!

Et on dansait, jusqu'au jour,

Chez l'ambassadeur de France.

Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not say.

What you may think about it, he does not know. He has nothing to do

with that. There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber. There

they danced, till the morning, at the Ambassador's of France. Make

what you will of it.

If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have quoted

only about the third part, he will find that there is not, from

beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression,

except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as may be; there

is not a word she would not have actually used as she was dressing.

The poet stands by, impassive as a statue, recording her words just as

they come. At last the doom seizes her, and in the very presence of

death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no

longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire

gnaws with _voluptuousness--without pity_. It is soon past. The fate

is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline

atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,

They said, 'Poor Constance!'

§ 14. Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical

temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the

greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of

feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to

the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in

proportion to his government of it; there being, however, always a

point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this

government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild

fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of

Assyria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact

is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into a

confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned thought,

full of strange voices. 'Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the

cedars of Lebanon, saying, "Since thou art gone down to the grave, no

feller is come up against us."' So, still more, the thought of the

presence of Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment.

'The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into

singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.'

§ 15. But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by

the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there is not

cause enough for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere

affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad writing may almost

always, as above noticed, be known by its adoption of these fanciful

metaphorical expressions, as a sort of current coin; yet there is even

a worse, at least a more harmful, condition of writing than this, in

which such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up,

but, by some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately

wrought out with chill and studied fancy; as if we should try to make

an old lava stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead

leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.

When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the character of a

truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a moment to be

overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim:

Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.

You know him; he is near you; point him out.

Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,

Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?

This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. But now

hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl:

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;

Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;

Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,

And winds shall waft it to the powers above.

But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,

The wondering forests soon should dance again;

The moving mountains hear the powerful call,

And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language

of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite

absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of

nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but

it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt

his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in

Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:

Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,

When thus his moan he made:--

'Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,

Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,

That in some other way yon smoke

May mount into the sky.

If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,

Headlong, the waterfall must come,

Oh, let it, then, be dumb--

Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to

be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different

relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of

its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same

moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,

in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief

even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and God is kind,

and that grief is strong: it knows not well what _is_ possible to such

grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think

it could do as much as that!

§ 16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main

point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as

it _is_ a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind,

and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it

is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what

has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the

thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to

the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by

him, it is right or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion

from which it springs; always, however, implying necessarily _some_

degree of weakness in the character.

Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of

Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and

deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint, says:

If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray,

Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,

'Hope not to find delight in us,' they say,

'For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.'

Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:

'Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself,

'Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,

And nature, that is kind in woman's breast,

And reason, that in man is wise and good,

And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,--

Why do not these prevail for human life,

To keep two hearts together, that began

Their springtime with one love, and that have need

Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet

To grant, or be received; while that poor bird--

O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me

Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature,

One of God's simple children, that yet know not

The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!

As if he wished the firmament of heaven

Should listen, and give back to him the voice

Of his triumphant constancy and love.

The proclamation that he makes, how far

His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.'

The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth and

tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But,

of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in

so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The

flowers do not really reproach her. God meant them to comfort her, not

to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.

Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.

There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She

reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of

the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in

heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.

'As if,' she says,--'I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does

verily seem as if.' The reader will find, by examining the rest of the

poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this clear

though passionate strength.[34]

[34] I cannot quit this subject without giving two more

instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I

have just come upon, in _Maud_:

For a great speculation had fail'd;

And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair;

And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd,

And the _flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove, thro'

the air_.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

_The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near!'

And the white rose weeps, 'She is late.'

The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear!'

And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'_

It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the

pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so

far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is

entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the

human mind.

JOHN STUART MILL

1806-1873

THOUGHTS ON POETRY AND ITS VARIETIES (1859)

I

It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the

answers which have been returned. The vulgarest of all--one with which

no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry addresses itself

can ever have been satisfied--is that which confounds poetry with

metrical composition: yet to this wretched mockery of a definition,

many have been led back, by the failure of all their attempts to find

any other that would distinguish what they have been accustomed to

call poetry, from much which they have known only under other names.

That, however, the word 'poetry' imports something quite peculiar in

its nature, something which may exist in what is called prose as well

as in verse, something which does not even require the instrument of

words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical

sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of

sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this, we believe, is and

must be felt, though perhaps indistinctly, by all upon whom poetry in

any of its shapes produces any impression beyond that of tickling the

ear. The distinction between poetry and what is not poetry, whether

explained or not, is felt to be fundamental: and where every one feels

a difference, a difference there must be. All other appearances may be

fallacious, but the appearance of a difference is a real difference.

Appearances too, like other things, must have a cause, and that which

can cause anything, even an illusion, must be a reality. And hence,

while a half-philosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions

indicated by popular language, philosophy carried to its highest point

frames new ones, but rarely sets aside the old, content with

correcting and regularizing them. It cuts fresh channels for thought,

but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made; it traces, on the

contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the

current has spontaneously flowed.

Let us then attempt, in the way of modest inquiry, not to coerce and

confine nature within the bounds of an arbitrary definition, but

rather to find the boundaries which she herself has set, and erect a

barrier round them; not calling mankind to account for having

misapplied the word 'poetry', but attempting to clear up the

conception which they already attach to it, and to bring forward as a

distinct principle that which, as a vague feeling, has really guided

them in their employment of the term.

The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and

therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth

affirms to be its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter of

fact or science. The one addresses itself to the belief, the other to

the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading, the

other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the

understanding, the other by offering interesting objects of

contemplation to the sensibilities.

This, however, leaves us very far from a definition of poetry. This

distinguishes it from one thing, but we are bound to distinguish it

from everything. To bring thoughts or images before the mind for the

purpose of acting upon the emotions, does not belong to poetry alone.

It is equally the province (for example) of the novelist: and yet the

faculty of the poet and that of the novelist are as distinct as any

other two faculties; as the faculties of the novelist and of the

orator, or of the poet and the metaphysician. The two characters may

be united, as characters the most disparate may; but they have no

natural connexion.

Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives,

and in almost all good serious fictions there is true poetry. But

there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as

such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from

incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the

source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states

of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere

outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected

more or less by representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost

all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest

correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest

development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.

At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story,

merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is

the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least

relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is

especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and not having been even in

the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what

stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued,

and the story-teller in greatest request and honour?--In a rude state

like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all

nations in the earliest ages. But in this state of society there is

little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is,

essentially stories, and derive their principal interest from the

incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most

elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the

simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate

pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live

wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice

or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the

contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and

from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this

most grown-up and unchildlike age--the minds and hearts of greatest

depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in

poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all

events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too,

with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons

whom not merely in books but in their lives, we find perpetually

engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those

who do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual powers

or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them

to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous

persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement

it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are

rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because

they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of

the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting

only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose

imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they

might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been

different.

Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is

good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth

of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to

give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,

and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great

poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come

by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly

delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of

emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off

without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men

of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as

poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to

describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not

feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those who,

as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man but not _men_.

All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,

poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it

either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same

human features, or on the same canvas. There is one order of

composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in

its highest kind--the dramatic. Even there the two elements are

perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality, and in

the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be

scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and

character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable

_Torquato Tasso_; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got

up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions

of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent

and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling

exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely

commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders

Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in

him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many he is great as a

story-teller, to the few as a poet.

In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and

denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we

may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid--to have not

found, but made a definition, in opposition to the usage of language,

since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry

called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry

because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry

because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which

admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a

scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation

of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic.

The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth

itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be

contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of

external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan

of St. Peter's or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry

consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as

they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and

natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the

colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet

describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor

even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the

whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery,

that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts

which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of

awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is,

on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now this is describing the lion

professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really. The

lion may be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the poetry be

all the better; but if the human emotion be not painted with

scrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry, i. e. is not poetry at

all, but a failure.

Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of

poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a

definition of poetry which we happen to have seen in print, both of

them by poets and men of genius. The one is by Ebenezer Elliott, the

author of _Corn-Law Rhymes_, and other poems of still greater merit.

'Poetry', says he, 'is impassioned truth.' The other is by a writer in

_Blackwood's Magazine_, and comes, we think, still nearer the mark. He

defines poetry, 'man's thoughts tinged by his feelings'. There is in

either definition a near approximation to what we are in search of.

Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even

every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may

become poetry when shown through any impassioned medium, when invested

with the colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or

admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred or terror: and,

unless so coloured, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is

poetry. But both these definitions fail to discriminate between poetry

and eloquence. Eloquence, as well as poetry, is impassioned truth;

eloquence, as well as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings.

Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognize a

distinction between the two: there is much that every one would call

eloquence, which no one would think of classing as poetry. A question

will sometimes arise, whether some particular author is a poet; and

those who maintain the negative commonly allow that, though not a

poet, he is a highly eloquent writer. The distinction between poetry

and eloquence appears to us to be equally fundamental with the

distinction between poetry and narrative, or between poetry and

description, while it is still farther from having been satisfactorily

cleared up than either of the others.

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of

feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that

eloquence is _heard_, poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an

audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's

utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing

itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in

symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling

in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is

feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or

endeavouring to influence their belief or move them to passion or to

action.

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry

which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller's shop,

is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the stage. It is so; but there is

nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we

have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have

said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know

that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any

eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows

that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it,

he acts ill. A poet may write poetry not only with the intention of

printing it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it; that it

should _be_ poetry, being written under such influences, is less

probable; not, however, impossible; but no otherwise possible than if

he can succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such

lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express

his emotions exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is

conscious that he should feel them though they were to remain for ever

unuttered, or (at the lowest) as he knows that others feel them in

similar circumstances of solitude. But when he turns round and

addresses himself to another person; when the act of utterance is not

itself the end, but a means to an end,--viz. by the feelings he

himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or

the will, of another,--when the expression of his emotions, or of his

thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by

that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases

to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.

Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation;

eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most

feeling of their own, if intellectual culture has given them a

language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry;

those who best understand the feelings of others, are the most

eloquent. The persons, and the nations, who commonly excel in poetry,

are those whose character and tastes render them least dependent upon

the applause, or sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.

Those to whom that applause, that sympathy, that concurrence are most

necessary, generally excel most in eloquence. And hence, perhaps, the

French, who are the least poetical of all great and intellectual

nations, are among the most eloquent: the French, also, being the most

sociable, the vainest, and the least self-dependent.

If the above be, as we believe, the true theory of the distinction

commonly admitted between eloquence and poetry; or even though it be

not so, yet if, as we cannot doubt, the distinction above stated be a

real bona fide distinction, it will be found to hold, not merely in

the language of words, but in all other language, and to intersect the

whole domain of art.

Take, for example, music: we shall find in that art, so peculiarly the

expression of passion, two perfectly distinct styles; one of which may

be called the poetry, the other the oratory of music. This difference,

being seized, would put an end to much musical sectarianism. There has

been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school,

that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without

doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative

tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is

passion, but garrulous passion--the passion which pours itself into

other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect,

having a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is great in

musical oratory; but his most touching compositions are in the

opposite style--that of soliloquy. Who can imagine 'Dove sono'

_heard_? We imagine it _over_heard.

Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is

absorbed in its distress, and though there may be bystanders, it is

not thinking of them. When the mind is looking within, and not

without, its state does not often or rapidly vary; and hence the even,

uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to monotony, which a good

reader, or a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive or

melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of a prayer, or of a

complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued,

it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent;

instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at

regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry

and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of

Rossini's serious compositions, such as the air 'Tu che i miseri

conforti', in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet 'Ebben per mia

memoria', in _La Gazza Ladra_, will at once understand and feel our

meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion of both is

that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving

invocation in Beethoven's _Fidelio_--

Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern

Der Müde nicht erbleichen;

in which Madame Schröder Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of

pathetic expression. How different from Winter's beautiful 'Paga fui',

the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude; fuller of

meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for

which it was composed--for it seems to express not simple melancholy,

but the melancholy of remorse.