VARIETIES OF MORAL STRENGTH.

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impulses. From these, also, we may derive the grateful emotion of Strength.

A much more varied interest attaches to exceptional displays of moral force or superiority.

As with the physical, there is an ordinary pitch that excites little or no interest; only the extraordinary and exalted modes possess the capability of artistic charm.

It is through the expressed feelings and the voluntary conduct that a human being is a subject of approbation or disapprobation, admiration, esteem, affection or dislike. The quality of Strength deals more exclusively with such feelings and conduct as show active power or moral energy and grandeur; the quality of Tenderness and Pathos, on the other hand, embraces the loveable.

What we may define as Moral Strength is the influence that lifts us, through our sympathies, into a higher moral being. Three marked forms may be stated.

(1) The influence of cheerfulness or buoyancy, under circumstances more or less depressing. When we ourselves are depressed, the demeanour of a cheerful person, if there is nothing objectionable attending it, is a sustaining and elating influence.

(2) The moral strength of superiority to passing impulses, in the pursuit of great objects. Greatest of all is the continued endurance of toil and fatigue, as in the Homeric Ulysses, and in the much-suffering heroes of all ages. The persistence of an Alexander, a Cæsar or a Columbus, has often worked on inferior minds as a mental tonic.

To be enslaved by appetite and passion and every transient impulse, is a prevailing weakness. The few that are entirely exempted from it are regarded with admiring surprise, and their delineation by the poetic pen is an agreeable picture of moral strength; inducing in us both the wish to. imitate them, and the temporary consciousness of superiority to our usual self.

(3) Greatest of all is the surrender of self to the welfare of others. Self-sacrifice is moral heroism, and is applauded in every age. It is the feature that gives nobility to courage in war. It makes martyrdom illustrious. It is the recommendation of the austere sects in philosophy and in religion. The preference of public well-being to private affections is the form that belongs principally to strength;

so also the superiority to the pomps, shows and vanities that delight and engross the average human being. Pope's 'Man of Ross' is a notable rendering of this kind of moral worth.

Heroic daring in war is the form of moral strength that first received the attention of poets; and it is still a principal theme.

One great and notable form of moral grandeur is expressed by the term Passion. The Greek tragedians, according to Milton, were noted for their mastery of high passion. They set forth the qualities both of Strength and of Pathos, in their most intense manifestations. These passionate outbursts have always had a great charm for mankind; but they demand skilful and artistic management. A human being, aroused into unusual fervour, sympathetically arouses the beholders; and to be more than ordinarily excited is an occasional, although not a necessary, cause of pleasure. A coarse, tumultuous excitement has very little value: there must be a well-marked passion; the passion itself must be of the strong kind, or a foil to some strong passion. When the expression is by language, the terms must have the requisite appropriateness, combined with intensity, as in the great examples of tragedy, ancient and modern. A clear, full, undistracted and adequate rendering of the outward display most characteristic of each passion is aimed at on the stage, and applies alike to the language employed, and to the actor's embodiment as witnessed by the eye.

INTELLECTUAL STRENGTH.

4. Intellectual Superiority assumes well-marked forms the Genius for Government, War, Industry; Oratory or Persuasion, Poetry or other Fine Art; Science.

Eulogy of intellectual greatness, poetically adorned, awakens in us the sympathetic emotion of Strength. Great discoverers, as Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Harvey or Watt, receive pæans of praise, couched in the highest strains of poetry. Still more loud and prolonged are the eulogies of kings, warriors and statesmen; the beginnings of which are seen in Homer. Most emphatic, and most felicitous of all, are the praises of poets, by each other: Gray's 'Progress of Poesy' is one of a hundred examples.

Pope's 'Temple of Fame' is perhaps the most elaborate and comprehensive laudation of the intellectual genius of former ages. It is made up almost purely of poetic touches

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His least

-similes and picturesque settings, and can be judged by the laws that govern the propriety of these. figurative description is this:

Superior, and alone, Confucius stood,

Who taught that useful science-to be good.

The only figure here is a delicate innuendo in describing the science of being good as 'useful'. Otherwise, the couplet is a poet's selection of the most popular and effective point in the system of Confucius. It is almost his only instance where the point of eulogy is a literal, or matter-of-fact statement. The other heroes are given in the richest poetic garb.

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Literary power, or the art of expressing and diffusing thoughts, is celebrated in a variety of epigrams. It is said -'syllables govern the world'; the pen is mightier than the sword'; a book is a church'. These are illustrative of the production of great results from apparently small

causes.

INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL STRENGTH COMBINED.

5. Many forms of greatness combine Intellectual and Moral superiority.

Chatham described Clive as that heaven-born general, whose magnanimity, resolution, determination and execution would charm a king of Prussia; and whose presence of mind astonished the Indies'.

The leader of men needs self-control and a commanding personality, as well as great force of intellect. A Demosthenes, who wielded at will the fierce democracy; a Columbus, who guided a recalcitrant crew over unknown seas; a Luther, who, from an obscure origin, became a revolutionary power -demand both moral and intellectual gifts, and are eulogized accordingly.

The charm of Ulysses, in the 'Odyssey,' is the combined intellectual power and moral endurance, so skilfully represented in the fictitious adventures assigned to him. As the hero of many wiles,' he initiated a type whose interest will never die. To this is added Horace's condensed eulogy of his moral side (Epistles, I. 2)..

Mythical and Imagined Heroes.-With these, language is everything. Being so plastic in the hands of a poet or describer, they are shaped according to purely poetic fancy; and are bound to exhibit well-selected and combined attributes

of grandeur harmoniously sustained, When they are made to depart from the human type, their management is exceedingly perilous, and seldom entirely successful; as can be seen in Paradise Lost, where marvellous occasional strokes are alternated with much that is incoherent, and unsuited to maintain the lofty interest of the poem. The conduct of Homer's deities is often greatly out of keeping with their illustrious position.

Collective Strength.-The highest and most imposing manifestation of strength is seen in the aggregation of human beings in crowds, armies and nations. The wroughtup interest of history is made out of the actions of collective humanity. Wars, conquests, the restraining discipline of mankind, the advances in civilization, are effected by human beings organized under skilled leaders. To express all these various forms of collective energy is the business of the historian, and may be a means of evoking the highest sublime. The loftiest epics involve at once individual supremacy and collective might the one supposing the other.

The greatness of kings, generals, ministers of state, party leaders, rests on the national strength at their disposal.

IMPERSONAL STRENGTH.

6. The Inanimate world supplies objects for the emotion of the Sublime.

Under Personification, has been noticed the ascribing of human feelings to the world outside of humanity. By this means, a great extension is given to the reflex interest in Strength as a quality. A very large department of nature is characterized by boundless energy, and its contemplation has an elating influence on the mind, which is described by the term Sublimity.

The great powers of inanimate nature-heat, light, winds, waves, tides, rivers, volcanoes-occupy a place in poetry, through their imposing might.

There is sublimity in the mountain mass, notwithstanding its repose. It represents upheaving energy, with cohesive for e, and suggests power on the vastest scale. In its simplicity of form as well as its familiarity, it is suited to easy conception.

The amplitude of space is allied with the physical

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sublime; and language is frequently employed in helping us to conceive its vast dimensions.

The dimension of height or loftiness, and also abysmal depth, are associated with circumstances of physical force, and inspire corresponding emotions.

The great works of human industry afford images of power, which, both in the actual view and in the language rendering, are enrolled among the stimulating causes of the emotion of Strength. Enormous steam engines, employed in the industries of mankind; great furnaces, and gunpowder blasting; huge ships; and all the permanent products of human energy on the great scale, inspire the feeling of superior might.

Architectural erections are employed in the production of sublimity (as well as beauty), and by adequate description can lend the same interest in poetry. By vastness, they affect us with the emotion of power, or the sublime.

CONSTITUENTS OF STRENGTH.

1. If Strength be a complex quality, we should endeavour to assign its constituents.

In a mixed or aggregate quality, the simple ingredients may be distributed very differently in different examples, rendering all general delineation vague and inapplicable. For each one of the foregoing classes, there will be a wide difference of treatment according to the aspect assumed, or the manner and end of the employment.

There is such a thing as Strength, by itself, pure and simple; that is, where the consequences of its employment are not thought of, or not apparent. There are other cases where the results are what chiefly affect us. These results are sometimes beneficent and sometimes maleficent-in either case, appealing to powerful emotions; and we are bound to follow out both sets of consequences.

The obvious arrangement might, therefore, seem to be: 1. Neutral Strength; 2. Beneficent Strength; 3. Maleficent Strength.

In point of fact, however, an opposite order is more suited to the examples, as we find them. Pure strength is but seldom realized in literature; so much more unction attaches to the emotions roused by the modes of employing it. Hence, the preferable course is to begin by attending to these emotional effects; after which we can make abstraction of their workings, so as to present the Sublime of Power as nearly as possible in a neutral form.

The remaining question is as to the priority of Beneficent over Maleficent Strength. In adopting these, as heads, we are necessarily led to consider the emotional results more than the fact of strength.