POWERFUL EMOTIONS NECESSARY. 39 Nights,' Gulliver's Travels' (apart from their satirical purpose), the 'Faërie Queene' and, in general, all stories of fairies, genii, ghosts and other supernatural agents. In such cases, the stories have little, if any, relation to natural life, and the reader does not think of such a relation; the pleasures they give depending on other circumstances. Such a story as Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein' and much of Rider Haggard's romances comes under this head. Keats's 'Endymion' and 'Hyperion' are of the same class; and, indeed, to us, whatever it may have been to the original readers, such is all the mythological poetry of the ancients. 3. The main conditions for all forms of Ideality are the following: I. The emotions or passions appealed to must be naturally powerful; they must include our deepest susceptibilities: Love, Malignity or some form of our manysided Egotism. We can take pleasure in the mere conception of things that stir those feelings, even though the actual fruition is absent. The The sensual pleasures are less suitable, because of their being accompanied with too strong a craving for the reality; which craving, if ungratified, is a cause of pain. imagination of a feast gives more pain than pleasure to a hungry man. The case is very much altered when the idea is a prelude to actual gratification. This, however, is not a true test of Ideality in itself. Still, when the unknown and imagined offers a prospect of better things than we already have, as is done by truth in the shape of probability, our hopes are kindled, and the charm of the picture is then intense. This gives a fascination to Bacon's ideals of the progress of knowledge. All such gratification appeals to our egotism, in the shape of collective self-interests. II. The creation must be successful in stirring the emotions appealed to. It must be thoroughly well managed for doing the right thing and no more. This includes all the details of poetic sufficiency; the proper selection and adaptation of materials, according to the laws of poetic emotion. Such grand successes were the Homeric creations, which stirred the Greek mind for a thousand years, and are not lost upon us moderns. The characters of Helen, Andro mache, Achilles, Ulysses, were pure ideals, but so conceived and executed as to be a perennial charm. 4. The limitations imposed by the consideration of Truth are not strict or narrow, and are meant to be subservient to the general effect. When a bright ideal is held out to us, there is a very important distinction, as regards its influence, between the unrestricted licence of imagination, and ideality regulated by truth or probability. If the laws of emotion are attended to, the wildest fancies may give pleasure. But, when the picture is both well imagined and true to fact, we obtain a satisfaction of another kind. We can apply the example as a lesson, warning or encouragement for ourselves; we can base hopes upon the prospect; and thus derive some of the relief and refreshment accruing from an alleviation of the burdens of life. The happy combination of Poetry with History, or with Science, when possible, may be a loss in imaginative sweep, but a gain in solidity of footing. The usual ending of a Romantic plot in the union of the lovers is a tolerated ideal, because it gratifies a strong emotion, and because the happiness of wedded love is a splendid possibility, occasionally realized. There is a basis of nature for the delightful expectation. Compare, on the other hand, Marlowe's poem, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,' which in its ideality passes all reasonable bounds; hence the scathing lines of Sir Walter Raleigh, by way of exposing the hollowness. The beauty, great as it is, hardly redeems the want of truth. Coleridge's poem, 'When I was young,' can barely atone by its emotion for its want of truth. The happiness of early years is idealized to excess; and the feeling of the piece is a mournful, depressing melancholy. Nothing but the poetic treatment remains to inspire us. It is a rule of criticism, on this subject, that, in idealizing pictures from actual things, the departure from nature should not extend to incompatibility, or contradiction of the laws of things. It would be censurable to describe a moonlight night as following a solar eclipse; to introduce a man 150 years old; or to assign to the same person the highest rank as a poet, and as a man of science. But rare and fortunate conjunctions may be made use of, and even such conjunctions as have never been actually known to occur, provided they are such as might occur. Poetical justice is sometimes realized in fact, and the only thing against nature would be LIMITATIONS TO THE IDEAL.· to set it up as the rule. 41 It was remarked by Hobbes: "For as truth is the bound of the historian, so the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty'. Beyond the actual works of nature a poet may go; beyond the possibilities of nature never." Scott has been blamed by Senior for introducing lucky 'coincidences' beyond all the bounds of probability, and of admissible exaggeration. On the other hand, when we give ourselves up to the enjoyment of what is entirely out of relation to the facts of experience, our first demand is self-consistency. We have entered a new world, but we require that that world should be a conceivable, if not a possible, one. In this element of self-consistency, 'Gulliver' is conspicuous; all the life and institutions of Lilliput, Brobdignag, &c., being ingeniously fitted to the fundamental idea. In Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle,' the conception of a man coming back to life after many years of sleep, which seemed but a day to himself, with all the misunderstandings resulting, is consistently worked out. Keats's 'Endymion' is deficient in consistent adherence to a definite conception of his imaginary world. But, further, there must be overpowering interest in the representations; that is to say, they must satisfy the laws that regulate the rise of emotion, its maintenance, its remission and its subsidence. Mere intellectual consistency is not enough. The Midsummer Night's Dream' and the 'Faërie Queene' sustain this interest by their poetic beauty. 5. The Ideal is powerfully helped by distance, obscurity and mystery. Everything then favours and nothing checks the outgoings of the imagination. The slightest touch of remoteness in place or in time is apt to have thrilling influence. A good example is afforded in Wordsworth's lines: Will no one tell me what she sings Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow And battles long ago. The famous Ode on Immortality' is, from its subject, adapted to the suggestiveness and charm of Remoteness; and the poet works up the effect accordingly. It is in the far Past, that poets have located the Golden Age: to be reproduced somehow in a distant or millennial future. The mixture of the supernatural with the natural, as in nearly all ancient poetry, and in 'Paradise Lost,' destroys the sense of reality, except in so far as the poet makes his personages work according to human analogies, and provides expression for human situations. The Homeric Greeks treated the Deities as actual beings, and the Iliad as a representation of actual transactions, slightly coloured. With us, to introduce a supernatural agent, like Hamlet's ghost, is almost to take away our sense of actual life. If we see a murderer found out by everyday means, we are warned of the risks attending the crime; but if a ghost from the other world is necessary, we either treat the story as a mere play of imagination, or draw the lesson that murder may pass undetected. 6. By a nearly total abnegation of the Ideal, we may still achieve what is termed Realistic Art. This depends for its effects on successful IMITATION. Realism, in its inartistic sense, is truth to fact, irrespective of agreeable or disagreeable consequences. In this sense, to call a work too realistic' is to imply that the harsh or repulsive features of a coarse original have not been withdrawn, covered over, or softened by appropriate handling. The murder of Desdemona on the stage, with scarcely any concealment, is usually considered a piece of admissible realism. There is another kind of realism, truly artistic in its character, where literality is sought in order to display the power of imitation. Poetry is one of the Imitative Fine Arts. Its subjects are largely derived from nature and life. Now, the skill shown by an artist in imitating or representing natural appearances, or incidents, on canvas, in marble, or in language, is a new and distinct effect, which excites pleasure and admiration; truth in Art is then a name for minute observation, and for the adapting of a foreign material to reproduce some original. This makes the Realistic school of Art: in Painting, Hogarth and Wilkie are examples; in Poetry, Crabbe is a notable instance; while in Prose Fiction, the modern tendency is all in the realistic direction. The Realistic artist can afford to be so far truthful as not to mislead us with vain expectations. Standing mainly upon the interest of exact imitation, or fidelity to his original, he does not need to leave out the disagreeables and drawbacks inseparable from things in the actual. ORIGINALITY A CONDITION OF GREATNESS. NOVELTY. 43 1. Under the head of Novelty, we include, also, Variety, Remission and Proportional presentation. The highest form is expressed by Originality. Novelty is not itself properly an emotion, like Love Revenge or Fear; it is the expression of the highest force of all stimulants when newly applied. In the real world, few things have the same effect after repetition. So in language; it is usually on the first encounter of a striking image or thought, that the resulting charm is at the highest. Novelty is the condition of many of our chief pleasures. The literary works that have fascinated mankind, and earned the lofty title of genius, have abounded in strokes of invention or originality: witness Homer, Eschylus, Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, De Foe, Pope, Swift, Addison, Gray, Goethe, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. No combination of other merits could place any one in the first rank of poetic fame. 2. Originality is qualified by the demands of the other conditions of Style. A distinction has always been made between Invention and Refinement or Polish; some writers excelling in one, and some in the other. It has been usual to represent this distinction as one of the points in the comparison of Homer and Virgil. Among moderns, Shakespeare is pre-eminent in Originality, while occasionally deficient in the arts that constitute Elegance. Milton combines both merits. Shelley's great poetic force belongs rather to Invention than to Polish; Gray is remarkable for attention to the arts constituting Elegance and Refinement. Seeing that we must take poets as they are, we have to accept superiority in the one excellence as atoning for inferiority in the other. 3. Next to absolute originality is Variety, or the due alternation of effects. Apart from entire novelty, we may derive enjoyment by remitting, varying or alternating modes of agreeable stimulation. After a sufficient interval, one can take delight in |