OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY.
Sec. 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
color 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.
Sec. 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.[52]
Sec. 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.[53]
Sec. 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;[54] 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."[55]
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 favorite poetry, we
shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all
the more for being so.
Sec. 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."
Sec. 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.[56]
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,[57] 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?"
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?
Sec. 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 any wise 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. 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 endeavor to state the main bearings of this
matter.
Sec. 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
over-clouded, 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.
Sec. 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.
Sec. 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 any wise 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.
Sec. 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 cool 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 cut 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.
Sec. 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.
Sec. 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 fanes, ces noeuds,
Ils sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!
Que du reseau qui retient mes cheveux
Les glands d'azur retombent avec grace.
Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!
Que sur mon front ce saphir etincelle:
Vous me piquez, mal-adroite. Ah, c'est bien,
Bien,--chere 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 la mon collier?
Quoi! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint Pere!)
Il y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main
En y pensant, a peine je respire;
Pere 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.
Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait.
Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une etincelle!
Au feu. Courez; Quand l'espoir l'enivrait
Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!
L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte
Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'eleve,
Et sans pitie devore sa beaute,
Ses dixhuit ans, helas, et son doux reve!
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!'"
Sec. 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 fields shall
clap their hands."
Sec. 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!
Sec. 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.
It then being, 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, we may go on to the subject for the dealing
with which this prefatory inquiry became necessary; and why
necessary, we shall see forthwith.[58]
[52] It is quite true, that in all qualities involving sensation,
there may be a doubt whether different people receive the
same sensation from the same thing (compare Part II. Sec. I.
Chap. V. Sec. 6.); but, though this makes such facts not
distinctly explicable, it does not alter the facts
themselves. I derive a certain sensation, which I call
sweetness, from sugar. That is a fact. Another person feels a
sensation, which _he_ also calls sweetness, from sugar. That
is also a fact. The sugar's power to produce these two
sensations, which we suppose to be, and which are, in all
probability, very nearly the same in both of us, and, on the
whole, in the human race, is its sweetness.
[53] In fact (for I may as well, for once, meet our German friends
in their own style), all that has been subjected to us on
this subject seems object to this great objection; that the
subjection of all things (subject to no exceptions) to senses
which are, in us, both subject and abject, and objects of
perpetual contempt, cannot but make it our ultimate object to
subject ourselves to the senses, and to remove whatever
objections existed to such subjection. So that, finally, that
which is the subject of examination or object of attention,
uniting thus in itself the characters of subness and obness
(so that, that which has no obness in it should be called
sub-subjective, or a sub-subject, and that which has no
subness in it should be called upper or ober-objective, or an
ob-object); and we also, who suppose ourselves the objects of
every arrangement, and are certainly the subjects of every
sensual impression, thus uniting in ourselves, in an obverse
or adverse manner, the characters of obness and subness, must
both become metaphysically dejected or rejected, nothing
remaining in _us_ objective, but subjectivity, and the very
objectivity of the object being lost in the abyss of this
subjectivity of the Human.
There is, however, some meaning in the above sentence, if the
reader cares to make it out; but in a pure German sentence of
the highest style there is often none whatever. See Appendix
II. "German Philosophy."
[54] Contemplative, in the sense explained in Part III. Sec. II.
Chap. IV.
[55] Holmes (Oliver Wendell), quoted by Miss Mitford in her
Recollections of a Literary Life.
[56] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these two
orders I mean the Creative (Shakspere, 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," etc. _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.
[57] "Well said, Old mole! can'st work i' the ground so fast?"
[58] I cannot quit this subject without giving two more instances,
both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I have just
come upon, in Maude:
"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.'_"