characters incarnate of human life, and the pure abstractions of the logical understanding. Accordingly they are represented not as Allegoric mere impersonated principles, but as incarnate principles. not mere im The office and acts of a concrete being are therefore personated principles, rightly attributed to them, with this restriction, however, but that no function of the concrete nature must ever be principles. allowed to obscure or to contradict the abstraction impersonated, but simply to help forward the action by which that abstraction is to reveal itself. There is no farther departure, therefore, in this mode of treating allegory from the naked form of mere fleshless personification than is essential to its poetic effect. T. DE QUINCEY, Notes to Lessing's Laocoon, 1827. Matter of fact is our perception of the grosser and more external shapes of truth; residuum and the mystery. a lively sense of the visible and immediate; to love fiction is to have as lively a sense of the possible and the remote. Now these two senses, if they exist at all, are of necessity as real the one as the other. The only proof of either is in our perception. To a blind man the most visible colours no more exist than the hues of a fairy tale to a man destitute of fancy. To a man of fancy, who sheds tears over a tale, the chair in which he sits has no truer existence, in its way, than the story that moves him. His being touched is his proof in both instances. fiction represents the To love matter of fact is to have But, says the mechanical understanding, modern discoveries have acquainted us with the cause of lightning and thunder, the nature of optical delusions, and fifty other apparent wonders; and therefore there is no more to be feigned about them. Fancy has done with them, at least with their causes; and witches and will-o'-the-wisps being abolished, poetry is at a stand. The strong glass of science has put an end to the assumptions of fiction. When an understanding of this description is told that thunder is caused by a collision of clouds, and that lightning is a well-known result of electricity, there may be an end, Science and the fictions of poetry. The dominion of the imagination. if he pleases, of his poetry with him. He may, if he thinks fit, or if he cannot help it, no longer see anything in the lightning but the escape of a subtle fluid, or hear anything more noble in the thunder than the crack of a bladder of water. Much good may his ignorance do him. But it is not so with understandings of a loftier or more popular kind. The wonder of children and the lofty speculations of the wise meet alike on a point, higher than he can attain to, and look over the threshold of the world. Mechanical knowledge is a great and glorious tool in the hands of man, and will change the globe. But it will still leave untouched the invisible sphere above and about us; still leave us all the great and all the gentle objects of poetry, the heavens and the human heart, the regions of genii and fairies, the fanciful or passionate images that come to us from the seas and from the flowers and all that we behold. We reason It is, in fact, remarkable, that the growth of science and the reappearance of a more poetical kind of poetry have accompanied one another. Whatever may be the difference of opinion as to the extent to which our modern poets have carried their success, their inclinations cannot be doubted. How is it that poetical impulse has taken this turn in a generation pronounced to be so mechanical? A little philosophy, says Bacon, takes men away from religion; a greater brings them round to it. This is the case with the reasoning faculty and poetry. to a certain point, and are content with the discoveries of second causes. We reason farther, and find ourselves in the same airy depths as of old. The imagination recognizes its ancient field, and begins ranging about at will, doubly bent upon liberty, because of the trammels with which it has been threatened. What signifies to her the talk about electricity and suction and gravitation and alembics and fifty other mechanical operations of the marvellous? This is but the bone and muscle of wonder. Soul, and not body, is her pursuit; the first cause, not the second; the whole effect, not a part of it; the will, the invention, the marvel itself. As long as this lies hidden, she still fancies what agents for it she pleases. The science of atmospherical phenomena hinders not her angels from "playing in the plighted clouds." The analysis of a bottle of salt water does not prevent her from "taking the wings of the morning, and remaining in the uttermost parts of the sea." ." You must prove to her first that you understand the simple elements, when decomposed; the reason that brings them together; the power that puts them in action; the relations which they have to a thousand things besides ourselves and our wants; the necessity of all this perpetual motion; the understanding that looks out of the eye; love, joy, sorrow, death and life, the future, the universe, the whole invisible abyss. Till you know all this and can plant the dry sticks of your reason, as trophies of possession, in every quarter of space, how shall you oust her from her dominion? J. H. LEIGH HUNT, Men, Women, and Books, 1847. Pope thought meanly of descriptive poetry. EXTERNAL NATURE DESCRIPTIVE POETRY POPE . . was of opinion, that descriptive poetry is a composition as absurd as a feast made up of sauces: and I know many other persons that think meanly of it. I will not presume to say it is equal, either in dignity or utility, to those compositions that lay open the internal constitution of man, and that imitate characters, manners, and sentiments. I may, however, remind such contemners of Landscape it, that, in a sister-art, landscape-painting claims the very next rank to history-painting; . . . that Titian thought it no diminution of his genius, to spend much of his time in works of the former species; and that, if their principles lead them to condemn Thomson, they must also condemn the Georgics of Virgil; and the greatest part of the noblest descriptive poem extant, I mean that of Lucretius. painting claims next rank to history. painting. Poetry does not succeed in exact J. WARTON, Essay on Pope, 1756-1782. [P]oetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect description. rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves. This is their most extensive province, and that in which they succeed the best. Description a mere ornament. E. BURKE, On the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1756. 4 ornament, but which should never form "the subject" of a poem. LORD BYRON, Letter to John Murray, 1821. tion exacts effort on the part of Pure description . is so little attractive as the direct Pure descrip exclusive object of a poem, and in reality it exacts so too great an powerful an effort on the part of the reader to realize visually, or make into an apprehensible unity, the scattered the reader. elements and circumstances of external landscapes painted only by words, that, inevitably, and reasonably, it can never hope to be a popular form of composition. T. DE QUINCEY, The Lake Poets: It has been a whim of late years with some transcen- Poetry and painting. dental writers, in the excess of the reaction of what may be called spiritual poetry against material, to deny utterly the old family relationship between poetry and painting. They seem to think, that because Darwin absurdly pronounced nothing to be poetry which could not be painted, they had only to avail themselves of the spiritual superiority of the art of the poet, and assert the contrary extreme. Now, it is granted that the subtlest creations of poetry are neither effected by a painter-like process, nor limited to his powers of suggestion. The finest idea the poet gives you of anything is by what may be called sleight of mind, striking it without particular description on the mind of the reader, feeling and all, moral as well as physical, as a face is struck on a mirror. But to say, nevertheless, that the poet does The poet not include the painter in his more visible creations, is to painter. deprive him of half his privileges, nay, of half of his very poems. Thousands of images start out of the canvas of his pages to laugh at the assertion. Where did the great Italian painters get half of the most bodily details of their subjects but out of the poets? and what becomes of a thousand landscapes, portraits, colours, lights and shades, groupings, effects, intentional and artistical pictures, in the writings of all the poets inclusive, the greatest especially? J. H. LEIGH HUNT, Imagination and Fancy, 1844. includes the |