Part 3

Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of that repose which until recent times has especially “marked the manners of the great.” Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive. Step into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of _un_rest, if they were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and architecture; and if it is not true of music, it is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a point or points of rest, in keynote, fundamental strain, or reiterated refrain.

It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into focal proportion; and this is true with regard to those painters who paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome, Constable, and Gainsborough’s landscapes do not fade off from a certain point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed; yet there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose.

The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is not in itself the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the _punctum indifferens_ to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elaborate landscape it may be--as it is in one of Constable’s--the sawn-off end of a branch of a tree: or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael Angelo’s pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden “Madonna” of Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.

In proportion to the extent and variety of points of interest in a 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.