The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.[53]
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.
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.[54]
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."
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.[55]
Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
Acheron "as dead leaves flutter from a bough,"[56] 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,[57]
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,[58] 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?"[59]