Fiction sparingly art-not working after an actual model, but realizing an idea. J. S. MILL, What is Poetry?, 1833. Fiction, even to the Fine Arts, is not a quite permissible permissible. thing. Sparingly permissible, within iron limits; or if you will reckon strictly, not permissible at all! Fiction, I think, or idle falsity of any kind, was never tolerable, except in a world which did itself abound in practical lies and solemn shams. . . A serious soul, can it wish, even in hours of relaxation, that you should fiddle empty nonsense to it? A serious soul would desire to be entertained, either with absolute silence or with what was Poetic truth. truth, and had fruit in it, as was made by the Maker of us all. With the idle soul I can fancy it far otherwise; but only with the idle. Not abstract propositions lect, but con crete real senses, the affections. The pure universal of the intellect has no counterpart in nature. T. CARLYLE, Latter-Day Pamphlets (Jesuitism), 1850. [I]t is the very essence of poetry to present, not abstract to the intel- propositions to the intellect, but concrete real truth to the senses, the affections,—to the whole man, in short; and truth to the this can be done only by presenting objects as they exist and act upon one another, and upon our minds, in the real world, not logical objects formed by the action of our analytic faculty, and abstracted from reality. Such universality as poetry has is derived from the fact, that the individual contains the genus and the species, and that the pure universal of the intellect has no counterpart in nature, and is therefore not a truth in the sense in which poetry concerns itself with truth. And poets who attempt to get beyond individual truth, implicitly containing generic and specific truth, fall into one of two mistakes: they either present the truth as abstract statement, dressed up in rhetorical ornament, and so fail to fulfil the true function of their genius,-or, feeling the necessity of avoiding this, they invent a fictitious allegorical machinery, with which they obscure the statement, and are, in fact, treating a special instance, with this difference,—that the individual Individual truth im plicitly con taining specific and generic truth. traits are fanciful and arbitrary, instead of being those of actual experience. The result, in the latter case, is that the reader makes the universality by his abstraction of details, getting, at last, back to a mere abstract statement, and so loses all the force of true poetic teaching; while, as the only compensation, his imagination is amused by the ingenuity and beauty of the machinery. And, in both cases, by aiming at an universality which belongs to science, poetry loses her true prerogative; and no longer commanding the sympathies, fails to teach,-becoming at once less useful and less delightful. The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin are instances of the one mode of treatment; The Two Voices may partly serve to illustrate the other. G. BRIMLEY, Tennyson's Poems, 1855. tion and the passions a nature. imagination. Poetry, then, is an imitation of nature, but the imagina- The imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature. Neither a mere description of natural objects nor a mere part of man's delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry without the heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is The heightnot only a direct but also a reflected light, that, while it enings of the shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us as with a flash of lightning the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination. beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that The poetical uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be impression of contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as G an object. Poetry the language of tion. it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure, by expressing it in the boldest. manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances. [Poetry] is strictly the the imagina language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded, by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the less true to nature because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more though false true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the This lan guage true to nature in point of fact. The very soul of nature. object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. The flame o' the taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame W. HAZLITT, The English Poets, 1818. The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathizes with whatever is beautiful and grand and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such Ib. The poet represents images of objects or passions as conceives The truth is, that neither the painter nor the poet represents objects or passions as they actually exist in nature, but the images of them, as he sees or conceives them in his own mind, and consequently it is these images only he sees or which he communicates to the mind of others. that picturesque or poetic conception, the perfection or imperfection of which distinguishes a great artist from an inferior one. 66 This is them in his own mind. must be emotion. descriptive W. ROSCOE, Letter to W. L. Bowles, 1825. [A]lthough not always expressing emotion, poetry must Everything always by some art excite it, and never let its necessary action or statements or prosaic passages be prosaic in effect. Wordsworth often offends in this way by descriptions which are nothing more than catalogues; "These are the axioms of poetry," says Solger. 'Everything must be action or emotion. .. Hence a purely descriptive poetry is A purely impossible, if it confine itself to its subject without action poetry or emotion; in Homer you never see a particular subject impossible. merely described, but the description is always contained in some action. So the clothing of Agamemnon, or the shield of Achilles, where the subjects represented appear themselves as living and in action 1 and the reason of this is given by Hegel when he says, "not things and their practical existence, but pictures and imaginative symbols are the materials of poetry." G. H. LEWES, Inner Life of Art, 1865. 1 Solger, Aesthetik. The works object of art. NATURAL FICTION There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the of Nature the works of Nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what Nature will have set forth. So doth the astronomer look upon the stars, and, by that he seeth, setteth down what order Nature hath taken therein. So do the geometrician and arithmetician. . . . Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another Nature, in making doth grow in things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. The poet Nature. Forms such as never were in Nature. Nature's world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden. Imitation or fiction. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. But let those things alone and go to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is employed, and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagines, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon's Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil's Aeneas: neither let this be jestingly conceived, because the works of the one be essential, the other in imitation or fiction; for any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that |