CONTESTS IN VARIOUS FORMS.

91

The conflicts of armies in mass involve a different management. They may be described with the precision of Kinglake, which embodies both comprehensiveness and minute details, with a few touches of personal encounter. This is the mode adapted to modern warfare. Collective strength, if well conceived, has an impressiveness of its own, but it is dependent on the picturesqueness of the description. For the more strictly poetic treatment of mass engagements, we may refer to Scott's 'Battle of Flodden,' to Carlyle's battles in Cromwell and in Friedrich, and to Macaulay, who has furnished two styles-the one in the History of England, the other in the Lays.

The Tournament is a form of single combat, which, when given in fiction, obeys all the laws of interest of the fight. Scott rejoices in this also; and Tennyson has many occasions for it in 'The Idylls of the King'.

The Chase is a variety of the same all-pervading interest, and is worked up with poetical vividness by the great masters. The Lady of the Lake (Canto I.) is a sufficient example. As the pursuit and slaughter of destructive and ferocious animals, it commanded general sympathy, and gratified our natural malevolence without any revulsion of feeling. The case is very much altered when the subjects are the feebler animals, whose mischief could easily be prevented in other ways.

Contests of strength and prowess for the mere assertion of superiority, without slaughter, are a refinement upon the interest of conflict. This is the spirit of games of strength and skill, which admit of a poetic rendering. The Odyssey affords a case, when Ulysses contends with the Phæacians at the palace of Alcinous; the interest is heightened by interchange of taunting speech, and the discomfiture of the original aggressor. In the Rape of the Lock,' Pope introduces a game at cards, and handles it in his felicitous manner.

The highest refinement of all is the War of Words, which is eminently suited to poetry, and is splendidly exemplified in the great poets of ancient and modern times. Vituperation, more or less veiled, sarcasm and innuendo, and, lastly,

cool argument, may severally be employed as weapons; and all are interesting. Nevertheless, the laws of evolution, as already typified in the primitive duel for life, have to be fully observed. The management of such encounters leads us into the very core of dramatic art. That one of the two should be humiliated is essential; or, if the reader has no favourite, he expects both to suffer by turns.

The combative interest of mankind finds endless gratification in the fight of state parties, in rival orators, in contests of diplomacy and tactics, in litigation before the Courts of Law, and in the competitive struggle among mankind generally. The novelist finds his account in all these manifestations, and augments their natural charm by his genius and his art.

BENEFICENT STRENGTH.

To exhibit the various classes of Strength-Physical, Moral, Intellectual, Collective, Natural, Supernaturalas working for BENEFICENT ends, is one of the cherished departments of literary effect.

Beneficence, viewed as such, appeals to our Tender Emotion, and its poetical handling is ruled by that circumstance. The forms of Beneficent action that manifest the quality of Strength are chiefly the displays of unusual power directed towards objects of general utility. A great law-giver like Solon, the authors of civilized progress, the founders of states by the arts of peace, call us at once to witness their prowess in overcoming difficulties and their genius in originating improvements. King Alfred was both a warlike hero and a civilizing monarch. Pope has celebrated the Man of Ross; both Burke and Bentham composed eulogies of Howard. The endurance and resource of successful missionaries of civilization are coupled in the same picture with their beneficent achievements.

The liberation of oppressed peoples, the rescue of the victims of a strong man's cruelty, exhibit the most stimulating forms of strength as beneficence; the reason, obviously, being that the higher satisfaction of revenge enters into the case. Examples must be found where the interest is divided exclusively between the delineation of power and

CELEBRATION OF CIVILIZERS.

93

the production of good. The reason for preferring general utility to the advantage of single individuals is simply that, in this last case, our regard for the person is too engrossing. We may commence with an example from Pope :

Till then, by nature crown'd, each patriarch sate,
King, priest, and parent of his growing state;
On him, their second providence, they hung,
Their law his eye, their oracle his tongue.
He from the wandering furrow call'd the food,
Taught to command the fire, controul the flood,
Draw forth the monsters of th' abyss profound,
Or fetch th' aërial eagle to the ground.

This is a highly successful attempt, in Pope's manner, to celebrate the civilizers of early society. In addition to the vigour and condensation of the language, it presents three points of interest. First, the picture of the lofty elevation of the chief of a primitive state. Second (lines 3 and 4), the admiring submission of his people—a legitimate and effective aid to the reader's feelings. Third, the detail of his feats of power-all beneficent-with only the smallest tincture of malignancy. The operations described are in themselves. familiar, and could be stated in plain prose, but Pope gives them elevation by the choice of a vigorous poetical phraseology, duly constrained into metre.

The following lines of Shelley give the effect in his more glowing manner :—

For, with strong speech, I tore the veil that hid
Nature, and Truth, and Liberty, and Love,-
As one who from some mountain's pyramid
Points to the unrisen sun!-the shades approve
His truth, and flee from every stream and grove.

The two first lines have a vigour of their own from the intensity of the figure-tore the veil,' and from the cumulation of high, but not difficult, abstractions, well arranged for a climax. The simile in the three remaining lines is an agreeable illustration in itself, without adding to the compressed energy of the previous lines. There is a slight infusion of destructive interest in tearing the veil,' and an approach to the same interest in the sun's conquest over the shades of night; so difficult is it to achieve a great effect of energy without some aid from the destructive side of power.

The Heroes and Hero-worship of Carlyle includes biographical sketches of six great men, distinguished in different

ways, and all handled by his peculiar force of genius, which, however, seldom dwells upon purely beneficent action apart from the interest of conquering and destructive energy. The Essay on Francia, the Dictator of Paraguay, depicts the author's favourite type of the benevolent despot.

Our prose literature has done fullest justice to the theme of beneficent strength. The narrative biography far surpasses the picturesque eulogy in expressing great qualities, whether of body or of mind. The display of power is most impressive when given with illustrative incidents testifying directly to its amount, by difficulty overcome, by endurance and by fertility of device. Under the same method of detail, the greatness of the results can be brought home. The writer will not neglect to add the subjective accompaniment of expressed admiration, both on his own part, and on the part of concurring admirers.

The noble tribute of Wordsworth to the heroism of Grace Darling is a specimen of the poetry of Strength in the widest compass. The picture of the wreck, the resolve of the Daughter and the Father, the fury of the crossing billows, lead up to the heroic struggle, thus briefly told :

True to the mark,

They stem the torrent of that perilous gorge,

Their arms still strengthening with the strengthening heart,
Though danger, as the Wreck is neared, becomes

More imminent.

The rescue is a piece of fine pathos. The most characteristic effect is a bold use of the subjective strain, rising to a religious pitch :

Shout, ye waves,

Send forth a song of triumph: waves and winds
Exult in this deliverance wrought through faith
In Him whose Providence your rage hath served!
Ye screaming sea-mews, in the concert join!

Cowper's Chatham' is a noble picture of beneficent strength. Full justice is done both to the strength and to the beneficence. First, as to the strength:

In him Demosthenes was heard again;
Liberty taught him her Athenian strain;
She clothed him with authority and awe,
Spoke from his lips, and in his looks gave law.
His speech, his form, his action full of grace,
And all his country beaming in his face,
He stood as some inimitable hand
Would strive to make a Paul or Tully stand,

EULOGY OF INTELLECTUAL GREATNESS.

Next, as to the work :

No sycophant or slave that dared oppose

Her sacred cause, but trembled when he rose ;
And every venal stickler for the yoke,

Felt himself crushed at the first word he spoke.

95

An example of lofty eulogy, by poetic comparisons exclusively, is furnished in De Quincey's rebuke of those that would mix up with Shakespeare's greatness the consideration of his birth :

"Both parties violate the majesty of the subject. When we are seeking for the sources of the Euphrates or the St. Lawrence, we look for no proportions to the mighty volume of waters in that particular summit amongst the chain of mountains which embosoms its earliest fountains, nor are we shocked at the obscurity of these fountains. Pursuing the career of Mahommed, or of any man who has memorably impressed his own mind or agency upon the revolutions of mankind, we feel solicitude about the circumstances which might surround his cradle to be altogether unseasonable and impertinent. Whether he were born in a hovel or a palace, whether he passed his infancy in squalid poverty, or hedged around by the glittering spears of body-guards, as mere questions of fact may be interesting, but, in the light of either accessories or counter-agencies to the native majesty of the subject, are trivial and below all philosophic valuation. So with regard to the creator of Lear and Hamlet, of Othello and Macbeth; to him from whose golden urns the nations beyond the far Atlantic, the multitude of the isles, and the generations unborn in Australian climes, even to the realms of the rising sun, must in every age draw perennial streams of intellectual life, we feel that the little accidents of birth and social condition are so unspeakably below the grandeur of the theme, are so irrelevant and disproportioned to the real interest at issue, so incommensurable with any of its relations, that a biographer of Shakespeare at once denounces himself as below his subject if he can entertain such a question as seriously affecting the glory of the poet. In some legends of saints, we find that they were born with a lambent circle or golden aureola about their heads. This angelic coronet shed light alike upon the chambers of a cottage or a palace, upon the gloomy limits of a dungeon or the vast expansion of a cathedral; but the cottage, the palace, the dungeon, the cathedral, were all equally incapable of adding one ray of colour or one pencil of light to the supernatural halo."

The grandeur of Shakespeare's work and influence is finely represented by select touches in the fifth sentence (So with regard '-).

The intellect of Newton has often been celebrated, but