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.'"[66] 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."[67]
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?[68]
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.[69]
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."[70]
Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a water-fall 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!
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."[71]