painting or a poem the necessity for this point of rest seems to
increase. In a lyric or idyll, or a painting with very few details,
there is little need for it. It is accordingly in the most elaborate
plays of Shakespeare that we find this device in its fullest value; and
it is from two or three of these that we shall draw our main
illustrations of a little-noticed but very important principle of art.
In _King Lear_ it is by the character of Kent, in _Romeo and Juliet_ by
Friar Laurence, in _Hamlet_ by Horatio, in _Othello_ by Cassio, and in
the _Merchant of Venice_ by Bassanio, that the point of rest is
supplied; and this point being also in each case a point of vital
comparison by which we measure and feel the relationships of all the
other characters, it becomes an element of far higher value than when it
is simply an, as it were, accidental point of repose, like the lopped
branch in Constable’s landscape. Each of these five characters stands
out of the stream of the main interest, and is additionally unimpressive
in itself by reason of its absolute conformity to reason and moral order
from which every other character in the play departs more or less. Thus
Horatio is the exact _punctum indifferens_ between the opposite excesses
of the characters of Hamlet and Laertes--over-reasoning inaction and
unreasoning action--between which extremes the whole interest of the
play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent is, as it were, the eye
of the tragic storm which rages round it; and the departure, in various
directions, of every character more or less from moderation, rectitude,
or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from our more or less
conscious reference to him. So with the central and comparatively
unimpressive characters in many other plays--characters unimpressive on
account of their facing the exciting and trying circumstances of the
drama with the regard of pure reason, justice, and virtue. Each of these
characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution
throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate: a
vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in
itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution
of the circumference.
It is obvious, as I have indicated, that a point of rest and comparison
is necessary only when the objects and interests are many and more or
less conflicting; but the principle is sometimes at play in forms and
works in which we should scarcely have expected to find it. An armlet,
or even a finger-ring, gives every portion of the nude figure an
increase of animation, unity, and repose. The artistic justification of
the unmeaning “burthen” of many an old ballad may probably be found, at
least in part, in the same principle; as may also be that of the
trick--as old as poetry--of occasionally repeating a line or phrase
without any apparent purpose in the repetition.
Of course the “point of rest” will not create harmony where--as in most
modern works--its elements are absent; but, where harmony exists, it
will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often
trifling, and sometimes, perhaps, even accidental accessory.
VII
IMAGINATION
There are things which can never be more than approximately defined, and
which, even when so defined, are only to be rightly understood in
proportion to the degrees in which they are possessed by those who would
attempt to comprehend them. Such are, for example, “imagination” and
“genius”; which, being faculties that are possessed in a very low degree
by nearly all and in a very high degree by extremely few, are matters of
the most general interest and the most variable apprehension. That such
faculties should, however, as far as possible, be understood is of great
practical importance to all persons; inasmuch as it greatly concerns all
to know something of the signs, sanctions, and claims of those powers by
which they are inevitably more or less ruled, externally and internally.
It is nothing against a definition of an entity which cannot be fully
defined to say that such definition is “new.” It was objected against an
interpretation by St. Augustine of some Old Testament history or
parable, that other authorities had given other interpretations. “The
more interpretations the better,” was the saint’s reply. In such cases
various definitions and interpretations are merely apprehensions of
various sides of a matter not wholly to be embraced or comprehended by
any single definition or interpretation. In recent times genius and
imagination have come to be widely regarded as one and the same thing.
They are not so, however, though they are perhaps indissolubly
connected. The most peculiar and characteristic mark of genius is
insight into subjects which are dark to ordinary vision and for which
ordinary language has no adequate expression. Imagination is rather the
language of genius: the power which traverses at a single glance the
whole external universe, and seizes on the likenesses and images, and
their combinations, which are best able to embody ideas and feelings
which are otherwise inexpressible; so that the “things which are unseen
are known by the things which are seen.” Imagination, in its higher
developments, is so quick and subtle a power that the most delicate
analysis can scarcely follow its shortest flights. Coleridge said that
it would take a whole volume to analyse the effect of a certain passage
of only a few syllables in length. In dealing with such a work as _The
Tempest_ criticism is absolutely helpless, and its noblest function is
to declare its own helplessness by directing attention to beauty beyond
beauty which defies analysis. _The Tempest_, like all very great works
of art, is the shortest and simplest, and indeed the only possible
expression of its “idea.” The idea is the product of genius proper; the
expression is the work of imagination. There are cases, however, in
which it is hard to distinguish at all between these inseparable
qualities. The initiation of a scientific theory seems often to have
been due to the action of the imagination working independently of any
peculiar direct insight; the analogy-discovering faculty--that is, the
imagination--finding a law for a whole sphere of unexplained phenomena
in the likeness of such phenomena to others of a different sphere of
which the law is known. Hence the real discoverers of such theories are
scarcely ever those who have obtained the credit of them; for nothing is
usually more abhorrent to men of extraordinary imagination than
“fact-grinding.” Such men, after having flung out their discoveries to
the contempt or neglect of their contemporaries, leave the future proof
of them to mental mechanics; religiously avoiding such work themselves,
lest, as Goethe said of himself, they should find themselves imprisoned
in “the charnel-house of science.” Genius and imagination of a very high
kind are not at all uncommon in children under twelve years of age,
especially when their education has been “neglected.” The writer can
guarantee the following facts from personal witness: A clever child of
seven, who could not read, and had certainly never heard of the
Newtonian theory of gravitation, said to his mother suddenly, “What
makes this ball drop when I leave hold of it?--Oh, I know: the ground
pulls it.” Another child, a year or two older, lay stretched on a gravel
path, staring intently on the pebbles. “They are alive,” he cried, in
the writer’s hearing; “they are always wanting to burst, but something
draws them in.” This infantine rediscovery of the doctrine of the
coinherence of attraction and repulsion in matter seems to have been an
effort of direct insight. The repetition of the Newtonian apple
revelation seems rather to have been the work of the imagination,
tracking likeness in difference; but to discern such likeness is, again,
an effort of direct insight, and justifies Aristotle’s saying that this
power of finding similitude in things diverse is a proof of the highest
human faculty, and that thence poetry is worthier than history. The
poet’s eye glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and his
faculty of discerning likeness in difference enables him to express the
unknown in the terms of the known, so as to confer upon the former a
_sensible_ credibility, and to give the latter a truly sacramental
dignity. The soul contains world upon world of the most real of
realities of which it has no consciousness until it is awakened to their
existence by some parable or metaphor, some strain of rhythm or music,
some combination of form or colour, some scene of beauty or sublimity,
which suddenly expresses the inexpressible by a lower likeness. The
vulgar cynic, blessing when he only means to bray, declares that love
between the sexes is “all imagination.” What can be truer? What baser
thing is there than such love, when it is not of imagination all
compact? or what more nearly divine when it is? Why? Because the
imagination deals with the spiritual realities to which the material
realities correspond, and of which they are only, as it were, the
ultimate and sensible expressions. And here it may be noted, by the way,
that Nature supplies the ultimate analogue of every divine mystery with
some vulgar use or circumstance, in order, as it would seem, to enable
the stupid and the gross to deny the divine without actual blasphemy.
Profligacy and “fact-grinding” destroy the imagination by habitually
dwelling in ultimate expressions while denying or forgetting the primary
realities of which they are properly only the vessels. Purity ends by
finding a goddess where impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which
of these is the reality let each man judge according to his taste.
“Fact-grinding”--which Darwin confessed and lamented had destroyed his
imagination and caused him to “nauseate Shakespeare”--commonly ends in
destroying the religious faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of
love; for neither love nor religion can survive without imagination,
which Shelley, in one of his prefaces, identifying genius with
imagination, declares to be the power of discerning spiritual facts.
Those who have no imagination regard it as all one with “fancy,” which
is only a playful mockery of imagination, bringing together things in
which there is nothing but an accidental similarity in externals.
VIII
PATHOS
Neither Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great expositors of the relation of
the emotions to art, has discussed the nature of that which is
understood by moderns as “pathos.” Aristotle has described in his
_Rhetoric_, with the greatest acuteness and sensibility, the conditions
and modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much that is excluded by
pathos; and it may be useful to endeavour to ascertain what the
limitations of the latter are, and what are its conditions in relation
more particularly to art, in which it plays so important a part.
Pity, then, differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emotional,
and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature; though the sensitive
nature, being dependent for its power and delicacy very much upon the
cultivation of will and intellect, may be indefinitely developed by
these active factors of the soul. Pity is helpful, and is not deadened
or repelled by circumstances which disgust the simply sensitive nature;
and its ardour so far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional
sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds the field of pathos
extended far beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which
gives tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing.
In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity and pathos, which is the
feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would demand for
its condition the existence of the former, with some ground of actual
reality to work beneficially upon. On the other hand, entire selfishness
would destroy even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in art or
circumstance. In the great mass of men and women there is sufficient
virtue of pity--pity that would act if it had the opportunity--to extend
in them the _feeling_ of pity, that is pathos, to a far larger range of
circumstances than their active virtue would be competent to encounter,
even if it had the chance.
Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wickedness,
with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be quite content,
cannot be certainly predicated of any individual sufferer; but pathos,
whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate distress or in a tragedy of
Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires that some obvious goodness, or
beauty, or innocence, or heroism should be the subject of suffering, and
that the circumstance or narration of it should have certain conditions
of repose, contrast, and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending
from the immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten
that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the fact of
goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer, contrast is the
chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sadness of Desdemona’s
death is immensely heightened by the black shadow of Iago; and perhaps
the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon
murdered at Khartoum, while his betrayer occupies himself, between the
acts of a comedy at the Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse
his presence there by denying that he was aware of the _contretemps_ or
by representing his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair
Rosamund’s sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang--
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled.
Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman’s tears.
Nought is there under heav’n’s wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness.
It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage of
happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still more the
way in which she is given to smiling through them. The author of the
_Rhetoric_ shows his usual incomparable subtilty of observation when he
notes that a little good coming upon or in the midst of extremity of
evil is a source of the sharpest pathos; and when the shaft of a
passionate female sorrow is feathered with beauty and pointed with a
smile there is no heart that can refuse her her will. In absolute and
uncontrolled suffering there is no pathos. Nothing in the _Inferno_ has
this quality except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing,
through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos,
“tempering extremities with extreme sweet,” or at least with the memory
of it. Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of pathos to their
“crown,” which is “remembering happier things.” No one weeps in sympathy
with the “base self-pitying tears” of Thersites, or with those of any
whose grief is without some contrasting dignity of curb. Even a little
child does not move us by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries,
a tenth part so much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control.
A great and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is
also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that which
Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceeding ill and a
little good. There is pathos in a departing pleasure, however small. It
is the fact of sunset, not its colours--which are the same as those of
sunrise--that constitutes its sadness; and in mere darkness there may be
fear and distress, but not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in
literature as the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding’s novel,
had prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come, and that of
Colonel Newcome becoming a Charterhouse pensioner. In each of these
cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast of noble reticence with
a sorrow which has no direct expression. The same necessity for contrast
renders reconciliations far more pathetic than quarrels, and the march
to battle of an army to the sound of cheerful military music more able
to draw tears than the spectacle of the battle itself.
The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few writers are
sufficiently aware of this. Humour is cumulative and diffusive, as
Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but how many a good piece
of pathos has been spoiled by the historian of Little Nell by an
attempt to make too much of it! A drop of citric acid will give
poignancy to a feast; but a draught of it----! Hence it is doubtful
whether an English eye ever shed a tear over the _Vita Nuova_, whatever
an Italian may have done. Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the
bewilderment of weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence
the exquisitely touching points in _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, _Two on a
Tower_, _The Trumpet-Major_, and other of Hardy’s novels.
Pathos is the luxury of grief, and when it ceases to be other than a
keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence Tennyson’s question in
“Love and Duty,” “Shall sharpest pathos blight us?” involves a
misunderstanding of the word; although his understanding of the thing is
well proved by such lyrics as “Tears, idle tears,” and “O well for the
fisherman’s boy.” Pleasure and beauty--which may be said to be pleasure
visible--are without their highest perfection if they are without a
touch of pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound
pleasure and to great beauty by the mere fact of the incongruity of
their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and
impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaustible and
(except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry, Catholic theology,
that the felicity of the angels and glorified saints and of God Himself
would not be perfect without the edge of pathos, which it receives from
the fall and reconciliation of man. Hence, on Holy Saturday the Church
exclaims, “O felix culpa!” and hence “there is more joy in heaven over
one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous who need
no repentance.” Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of
heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its
beatitude.
IX
POETICAL INTEGRITY
The assertion that the value of the words of a poet does and ought to
depend very much upon his personal character may seem, at the first
glance, a violent paradox; but it is demonstrably true. A wise or tender
phrase in the mouth of a Byron or a Moore will be despised, where a
commonplace of morality or affection in that of a Wordsworth or a Burns
is respected. If the author of _Don Juan_ had said that for him “the
meanest flower that blows could give thoughts that do often lie too deep
for tears,” as he would have said had it occurred to him to do so, no
one would have believed him; it would have passed for a mere “poetical
licence,” and would have been excused as such and forgotten. Byron and
Wordsworth have both declared in words of similar force and beauty that
the sights and sounds of nature “haunted them like a passion.” But the
declaration was not consistent with what we know of Byron, and it was
consistent with what we know of Wordsworth; and in the one case it
creates a like frame of mind in the reader, while in the other it passes
like a melodious wind, leaving no impression. Now this mighty element of
character resides, not in the poet’s active life, by which he is and
ought to be socially judged; but in the spiritual consistency and
integrity of his mind and heart, as it is to be inferred from the
cumulative testimony of his words, which are, after all, the safest
witnesses of what the man truly is. A man’s actions--although we are
bound socially to judge him thereby--may belie him: his words never. Out
of his mouth shall the interior man be judged; for the interior man is
what he heartily desires to be, however miserably he may fail to bring
his external life into correspondence with his desire; and the words of
the man will infallibly declare what he thus inwardly is, especially
when, as in the case of the poet, the powers of language are so
developed as to become the very glass of the soul, reflecting its purity
and integrity, or its stains and insincerities, with a fidelity of which
the writer himself is but imperfectly conscious.
To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of
interior corruption than that habitual predominance of form over
formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human
significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the
most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this poetry
has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the
transformation scene of a pantomime; and much more--called
“descriptive”--has so low a degree of significance and betrays so
inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the
writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity
which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet’s
song, he has to overcome our sense that he is an habitual trifler before
he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utterance to
what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling.
A poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature
may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical
description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain
transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest
pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its
human significance; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of
“heartless” recorded against him--a verdict which even in the time of
his favour is implicitly pronounced by the indifference with which his
professions of human principle and feeling are received, even by his
admirers.
The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic
value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. The interest
of what is called “descriptive” or “representative” in real poetry and
all real art is always human, or, in other words, “imaginative.” A
description by Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Burns, a landscape by Crome,
Gainsborough, or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected
in and giving expression to a state of mind. The state of mind is the
true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered;
and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that contained
in Mr. Ruskin’s strictures on the “pathetic fallacy.” Nature has no
beauty or pathos (using the term in its widest sense) but that with
which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a
flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of
reflecting the colours of the light. The true light of nature is the
human eye; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in
those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness!
The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, that
You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love,