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and the various forms of Self-interest. In comparison with these, the feeling of manifested strength in itself would seem a slender gratification. Nay, more: we can but seldom obtain the picture of strength in this pure and abstract form; even when we think we obtain it, we are not sure but that a tacit reference to the possible emotional outgoing enters into the pleasure it gives.

The order of treatment best adapted to guide us in the exhaustive criticism of the literature of Strength, is assumed to be as follows:

1. The Subjects of Strength, taken in classes.

2. The Constituents of Strength, as shown by the final analysis of the quality. This will determine its most characteristic Forms and Conditions, and will be a suitable basis for the exemplification in detail.

3. The Vocabulary of Strength: the groundwork of its successful embodiment in language.

4. Other Aids and Conditions, including those that all the qualities have in common, and those referring to Strength in particular.

5. Passages examined.

SUBJECTS OF STRENGTH.

1. In illustrating the various ways of embodying Strength as a literary quality, we consider, first, the SUBJECTS of it. These are either Personal or Impersonal.

The Subjects of Strength are powerful and commanding agencies of every kind, whether physical or mental.

PERSONAL PHYSICAL STRENGTH.

2. Our interest in Persons comprises all the appearances of superior might, in any of its modes-Physical, Moral, Intellectual.

In the actual display of great personal power, we are moved, as mere spectators, to a pleasing admiration; while, through the medium of language, we may derive a share of the same grateful excitement.

Men, in all ages, have been affected by the sight of great physical superiority in individuals. When not under fear

THE ATHLETIC FIGURE.

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for themselves, they have beheld, with a certain disinterested admiration and delight, the form and bearing of a powerful frame. Not merely in war, but in minor contests of personal superiority, as in games, has been attested the charm of physical prowess. With Homer, renown is attached to all the displays of physical greatness, extending even to the avocations of peaceful industry. His divine and semi-divine personages are admired for purely muscular and mechanical energies; the mythical Hercules is expressly conceived to gratify the fond imaginations of early ages for such superiority. The more powerful animals have contracted an

interest from the same cause: as the horse for swiftness and strength; the elephant for enormous size and muscle; the lion, the tiger and the bear for concentrated energy.

The athletic figure, to produce its full effect, must be viewed, either in reality, or as represented in sculpture and painting; description is ineffectual to produce it. A heroic personage may be pictured as taller by the head than the surrounding multitude, as was said of Saul among the people. In Milton, we find occasionally depicted the commanding bulk of the Satanic chiefs. For example, of Satan himself:

His other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon.

On the other side, Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated, stood,

Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved.

His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed.

The poet, however, has a still more excellent resource. Language can assign the results or consequences of great physical energy: striking down rivals in a contest; overcoming measured resistance; performing such laborious operations as propelling missiles, working at the oar, sustaining heavy loads, felling an ox at a blow. The twelve labours of Hercules are realizable by us through description alone. The formidable personality of Achilles is conveyed by his being styled swift of foot, and the utterer of a terrible shout; he is also the irresistible slayer of the most powerful of his enemies.

While the production of great effects (by comparison with what is ordinary) is necessarily the surest token of strength, the impression is enhanced by the appearances of ease on the part of the agent. When a small expenditure brings about a great result, our sense of might is at the utmost pitch; while the opposite case-a great expenditure with small result is one of the modes of the ridiculous. A large ship carried along by the invisible breeze is a sublime spectacle. The explosion of a mine, or the discharge of a heavy gun by a slight touch, communicates the feeling of power in a high degree. The whole of this class of energies. is pre-eminently suited to description.

Milton abounds in strokes of physical energy on the part of his superhuman personages. Whether these are

adequate to their end, depends on their fulfilling the various stringent conditions of an artistic embodiment of strength. From their foundations, loosening to and fro,

They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by their shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands.

Landor has, in his Count Julian,' a fine stroke of physical Energy, indicated by consequences and by felicitous comparison; the effect being perhaps all the greater that the act is just within the scope of human strength :—

The hand that hurl'd thy chariot o'er its wheels,
That held thy steeds erect and motionless,

As molten statues on some palace gate,
Shakes as with palsied eye before thee now.

Chaucer's Miller is a picture of coarse physical energy, supported by poetic arts.

The description of Geraint, in Tennyson, may also be quoted:

And bared the knotted column of his throat,

The massive square of his heroic breast,

And arms on which the standing muscle sloped

As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it.

The physical power in this instance is portrayed by figure alone; the three circumstances being all significant of a highly muscular frame.

MORAL STRENGTH.

3. The term Moral, in contrast to Physical and to Intellectual, embraces our feelings and our voluntary

VARIETIES OF MORAL STRENGTH.

59

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 pæeans 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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