COMPATIBLE AND INCOMPATIBLE EMOTIONS.

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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 taste 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,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ;

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!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,

Forced praise on our part-the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad, confident morning again.

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.

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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
Of palm and plantain, met from either side,
High in the midst, in honour of the bride :

Two palms and then two plantains, and so on,
From either side their stems branched one by one.

Shelley, in a passage of strong feeling, thus writes :—
Antonia stood and would have spoken, when

The compound voice of women and of men
Was heard approaching.

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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'.

The first three stanzas of Shelley's 'West Wind' contain harmonies that aggravate rather than alleviate the baleful influences attributed to that wind.

The Meeting of Witches' in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens is well sustained in keeping for its particular purpose.

The witch scenes in Macbeth, and in Faust, are purposely made horrible; they chime in with the horrors of the action. Scenes that, in their nature, are peaceful, happy and virtuous, would appear incongruous and discordant unless worked up with a view to contrast.

How far the horrible can be carried in such cases, is a matter of delicate adjustment. The permissible limits are illustrated in the paraphernalia of mourning for the dead; the apparel of the mourner is gloomy and sombre, but not loathsome. There is even costly refinement in the weeds of the wealthy. To carry a skull in a funeral procession would be revolting; to paint it on the hearse is thought fitting.

The assemblage of monstrous products in the witches' cauldron is rendered endurable by not going beyond remote suggestion of the horrible. We hear of the 'liver of blaspheming Jew,' nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,' and worst of all, 'finger of birth-strangled_babe;' but the indication is so slight that imagination does not pursue the hideous details.

In 'Tam o' Shanter,' we have an enumeration of yet more repulsive objects as exhibited at the dance of ' warlocks and witches' in Alloway Kirk. There is the same ground for it in the harmony with the situation; but the description is given with repulsive details.

4. The harmonious on the great scale comprehends the agreeable effect of UNITY in multitude.

Unity, as already seen, applies to the Sentence and the Paragraph; and is an aid to ease of comprehension. In a longer work, it implies perceptible adherence to a plan, wherein every detail finds a suitable place and a definite relation to the whole. In the Dramas of Shakespeare, there is a well-marked Unity of this kind; although the unities of Time and Place, as laid down by Aristotle and the French critics, are little regarded. Wordsworth is a good example of unity; not so Shelley.

COLERIDGE AND MILTON.

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EXAMPLES OF HARMONY AND DISCORD.

First is a short example from Coleridge:

Silent icicles

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

There is here a harmony of quietness or repose; the icicles in their stillness shining under the ray of the equally still moon.

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From Milton's Hymn on the Nativity,' we may quote the following stanza (5):

But peaceful was the night

Wherein the Prince of light

His reign of peace upon the earth began.

The winds, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave.

There is a general harmony here, and nothing more. The winds are still, the Ocean is mild, and the birds repose calmly on the wave. There is Milton's peculiarity of introducing a contrast of strength or violence-'forgot to rave'-by way of heightening a peaceful picture. It proves the character of his genius, that he will seldom, if ever, be found making a contrast when the subject is grand or terrible; he then accumulates images all in one direction. See, as an example, among many, the passage on Sin and Death.

His avoidance of realistic and painful harmonizing horrors, in a painful subject, can be abundantly shown. Thus, in Lycidas :—It was that fatal and perfidious bark,

Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

He could hardly have said less,in denouncing the ship; he spared us the pain of reflecting on the worthless and unprincipled builders or owners, and put the blame upon fictitious and painful circumstances.

The reserve of Shakespeare, in such circumstances, already alluded to, is strongly marked in the crowning instance of the terrors of death: 'Ay, but to die'.

Very different from this is the realistic description of Jeremy Taylor or Jonathan Edwards; their aim being persuasion, and not artistic pleasure.

Most notable in Shakespeare is his unfailing dramatic back, ground of nature to suit the incidents of the story. In connexion with this point in Julius Cæsar,' Mr. Moulton makes the following pertinent observations on the employment of such harmonies