INFERIOR DEGREE OF THE EFFECT. 29 takes a different turn in Johnson and other eighteenth century For example: writers. From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, And Pantomime and song confirmed her sway. If there be any value in this, it is a species of vituperation, where the personifying words are used to give brevity and compactness. The English language possesses an advantage in personification, by confining the masculine and feminine genders to persons. The effect is, besides, aided by the possessive case, which also is strictly applied only to persons. In the following instance the personification is weakened by the use of its' and 'it' instead of 'her' and 'she'. The neuter pronoun is used to avoid ambiguity, but produces a sense of discord : 8. II. Attributing to things inanimate some quality of living beings. The silent night, the thirsty ground, the angry sea, a dying lamp, a speaking likeness, the sluggish Ouse,-exemplify a familiar operation of rendering objects more vivid by epithets derived from persons. They are really a special form of the Metaphor, and must be judged according to the laws of Similitudes. Like other figures of resemblance, they may be appropriate and effective, or they may be wholly useless. The same strength of emotion as in the higher form is not here necessary. The subtle tracing of human aspects in the immense variety of the vegetable world-as indicating both strength. and pathos-has been a progressing study of the poets. It is an important region of the far-reaching Nature interest, which is largely created, but not exhausted, by the personifying tendency. (See SUBJECTS.) HARMONY. 1. Of all the conditions of a work of Fine Art, the most imperative is HARMONY. A plurality of things affecting the senses or the deeper feelings of the mind, at the same time, may be emotionally indifferent to each other. On the other hand, they may be either harmonious or discordant, according as the feelings they suggest are in agreement or opposition. The discovery was early made that harmony is a source of pleasure, discord a source of pain. In a harmonious succession of effects, the particular emotion aroused is intensified by the agreement; while in discordant effects, the separate emotional impressions are weakened by their opposition. But, besides this, there is a distinct pleasure in the feeling of emotional unison, and a corresponding pain when it is conspicuously wanting. In their extreme manifestations, the pleasure or the pain may be very acute. Artists have endeavoured in their productions to superadd the pleasure of harmony to the gratification of the simple feelings. Music is sweet sounds made sweeter by harmony. Poetry possesses far wider scope; being, so to speak, made up ofhigh and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted. The pleasure of harmony, like the pleasure of beauty as a whole, increases at a rapid rate by delicacy of adjustment; and contrariwise with the pain of discords. The subject has already come up, under FIGURES OF SIMILARITY. It will appear again, with reference to the sound of language, under the head of MELODY. Harmony has to be considered on the great scale, in the adjustment of the parts of a lengthened composition, as an Epic, a Drama or a Novel. The Plot and Incidents must all work towards one result; Characters have to be made self-consistent; the Scenery and Surroundings adapted to the tenor of the events; the Language generally fitted to the Emotions to be roused. On the small scale, every distinct utterance--every stanza, sentence or line-has to be harmoniously constructed, if the highest effects of poetry are to be realized. It is in the study of these minute harmonies that rhetorical art can be best exhibited. COMPATIBLE AND INCOMPATIBLE EMOTIONS. 31 2. There are certain assignable emotions that are congruous, and certain others that are incompatible; but it is in the nice emotional meanings and associations of words, images and phrases that the most delicate test of harmony lies. The poet must be on a clear understanding with his audience, and they with him, in respect to all the emotional associations of words. Hence, the need of an education on both sides. To produce an effect of sublime grandeur, the images and the phraseology must be tinctured with the special emotion. Above all, there must be an entire absence of everything that would suggest the commonplace, the mean, the little, the grovelling. Hence the weakness of the following:— Graced as thou art with all the power of words, So known, so honoured, at the House of Lords.* The same writer says of the divine power that it— Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart. The last line is felt as a descent from the grandeur of the previous description, and this unpleasing effect is increased by the alliteration. Strength and Pathos will be found to be so far opposed, that, in their more decided forms, they must not concur in the same situation; they may, however, succeed one another by a rapid transition, or be mutually modified till they cease to conflict. The extremes of malevolence and love or affection must not meet without an interval for the mind to accommodate itself, while the objects of the two must be different; yet the milder phases of the feelings are not incompatible. * "It seems incredible that Pope could have allowed this piece of bathos to escape from his pen. The specimen of anticlimax given in Scriblerus,' Art of Sinking (Roscoe, 5, 257), And thou, Dalhousie, the great god of war, Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar,' is not more ridiculous than that here committed by Pope himself." (Mark Pattison.) Browning's 'Lost Leader' illustrates both points. In the first place, there is, throughout, a combination of Strength and Pathos without discord. Strength is felt in the form of moral indignation and quiet confidence of success; Pathos in the sadness of a great man's apostasy. Thus— Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us, --they watch from their graves ! He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves. The strength and the pathos are both of the calmer sort; the more intense forms of either feeling could not so easily blend without contradiction. Further, the poem shows the combination of anger and affection; but the anger shades into sorrow, and the affection appears in the form of pity. For example: Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! Forced praise on our part--the glimmer of twilight, Among animals, the mother tending her young is liable to rapid transitions from affection to resentment. This is the rude type of chivalry, which combines the gratification of the two opposing emotions-love and hate, amity and enmity. The gay or light-hearted condition of mind is incompatible with grief, anxiety and seriousness. There is a strong incompatibility between the warmth of feeling and the coldness of scientific or matter-of-fact calculation. The language of emotion must be carefully freed from cold scientific phraseology. Equally opposed to feeling is the statement of qualifying conditions. Herein is one great contrast between poetry and the ordinary prose. In Shelley's Skylark,' the limitation contained in the opening stanza is slightly out of harmony with the strong feeling expressed : Hail to thee, blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert, That from heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart. The following, from Keats, contains a markedly jarring element, owing to the introduction of a cold prosaic expression : -- HARMONY A PART OF POLISH. Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade Antonia stood and would have spoken, when The compound voice of women and of men 33 The word 'compound' is hardly in tune with the occasion. Harmony is a principal feature in those poets that are said to be correct, or polished, in contrast to such as excel in originality and profusion of thought and language. To polish is the work of the later poets, when the field of invention has been narrowed by their numerous predecessors. The absence of felt harmony in a succession of emotional effects, even when there is no discord, involves a loss of power. In this passage from Ossian, the impression is weak from the want of distinct harmony among the ideas, as well as from the vagueness and exaggeration of the comparisons:- As a hundred winds on Morven; as the streams of a hundred hills; as clouds fly successive over heaven; as the dark ocean assails the shore of the desert; so roaring, so vast, so terrible, the armies mixed, on Lena's echoing heath'. In Keats's 'Endymion' may be found not unfrequently a profusion of thoughts impressive enough when taken in separation, but having no distinctly felt emotional congruity. It is something more than mere harmony, although still included in correctness or polish, to avoid grating on any of our sensibilities, while producing agreeable effects. A smaller amount of pleasure-giving touches will be acceptable, if there be an entire absence of jars, whether discords or others. The grand opening of the poem of Lucretius is an instance in point. In his determination to draw poetry from the most ordinary facts and circumstances, Wordsworth sometimes introduces elements that jar on the feelings, without any adequate compensation. See examples in 'Simon Lee'. 3. In setting forth subjects of a repugnant character, there may be a softening or alleviating effect in the adjustment of the harmonies. There may also be the opposite. As examples we may quote Shelley's 'Sensitive Plant' and Tennyson's Mariana in the Moated Grange'. |