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"What could be done for Zetland, he has done: he has painted with his usual vivid accuracy the few natural objects which it afforded,—the rocky promontory, the inland sea, the fierceness of a northern ocean, and the caprice of a northern climate, with its misty calm and irresistible tempest; and he has suited to it, with admirable consistency, the habits and character of its inhabitants. Tho promise of his motto is fully performed—

nothing of them

But doth suffer a sea-change.

Their furniture and their food are, almost wholly, the produce or the gifts of the sea;—all their language and conversation is insular, and almost fishy; limited by the narrow experience, and full of the maritime superstitions and associations, of their situation. In his usual pursuit of national, as well as individual, contrast, he has described his Zetlanders before they became assimilated in feeling to their Scottish proprietors and neighbors, and has attributed to them, in a mitigated degree, the hostility towards the new comers, which gives spirit to his Saxons in 'Ivanhoe '."

(3.) The development of Character is rendered harmonious. The actions and sayings of each person have all a uniform bearing. The poet rejects not only the discordant, but also the irrelevant or indifferent.

The Canterbury Pilgrims can hardly be too much extolled for the harmonious in character.

The invention of unobvious doings and sayings in keeping with each character is required in an epic, a romance, or a drama.

(4.) Harmony is observed in the incidents and plot of the Story. There is here, as elsewhere, an absence of both the discordant and the unmeaning. Hints, prognostications, omens, dark intimations, are never in vain. The characters are suited to the work assigned to them in forwarding the catastrophe of the piece. The names of fictitious persons echo their characters: Faithful, Hopeful, Despair, Bombastes Furioso, Overreach, Surface, Broadacres, Windbag, Dryasdust.

(5.) The outbursts of Emotion require harmonious expression and accompaniments. All lyric poetry comes under this demand. Milton has expressly designed two contrasting illustrations in the odes called L'Allegro and II Penseroso. Tennyson's Mariana and Lady Godiva are strikingly harmonious throughout.

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Contrast is not a violation of Harmony; it is another poetical effect, following its own laws. (See Figures of CONTRAST.) The incongruity of the Ludicrous is likewise a different, and not incompatible, form of composition. In Carlyle's splendid description of the Battle of Dunbar, this passage occurs:—"Whoever has a heart for prayer let him pray now, for the wrestle of death is at hand. But withal let him keep his powder dry." This is a painful discord, unless the author intends it for a stroke of ludicrous degradation.

The most frequent failure in Harmony arises from the intrusion of the cold operations of the intellect into the expression of feeling. See Extract VI.

125. Y. The Ideal is aimed at in Fine Art.

The adoption in Art of what is presented in Nature is controlled, in the first place, by the requirements of harmony just stated; and to harmonize is to idealize.

But farther. It is an object with the poet or artist to rise above the tameness of reality, to portray greater beauties and higher loveliness than we can find on earth. A poem is a sustained hyperbole.

In scenic delineation, besides completing the harmony, the poet goes beyond nature in the richness of the accumulation, and colors the language with glowing illustrations.

Such are the chosen scenes of romance and of fairy-land, the happy valleys and islands of the blest, the gardens of the Hesperides, the Elysian fields, and the pictures of Paradise.

The portraying of characters likewise undergoes the idealizing process. Men and women are produced with larger intellects, greater virtues, higher charms, than life can afford; it being agreeable to contemplate such elevated natures. The bright points of real character are set forth, with omission of the dark features; strong qualities are given without the corresponding weaknesses, and incompatible virtues united in the same person. Lofty aspirations and practical sense, rigid justice and tender consideration, the fortiter and the suaviter, are

made to come together, notwithstanding the rarity of the combinations in the actual.

The grace of the feminine character united to the force of the man the manly, and not the masculine, woman—has been a favorite ideal in all ages; it was embodied in Pallas Athene (Minerva) and in Artemis (Diana), and is reproduced abundantly in our poetry and romance.

Seeing that human society labors under a chronic want of disinterestedness and mutual consideration on the part of its members, there is a demand for select or heightened pictures of love, devotedness, and sympathy, as an ideal compensation.

The Ideal of story consists in assigning the fortunes and destinies of individuals with greater liberality and stricter equity than under the real or actual. The miseries as well as the flatness of life are passed over, or redeemed; the moments of felicity are represented as if they were the rule; Poetic Justice is supreme, and measures out to each man his deserts; mixed and bad characters are admitted along with the good, but all are dealt with as the poet's, which is also the reader's, sense of justice demands.

The severe and difficult virtues of prudence, judgment, and calculation, are slighted; and success is made to follow the generous and uncalculating impulses of the heart.

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Love, beauty, and innocence, are made triumphant over brute force and savage ferocity; as in the "Una and the Lion" of the Faerie Queen.

Poetic representations may be utterly and avowedly removed from truth, as in the tales of fairy land, and the romances of chivalry, in which case the pleasure is purely ideal; or they may color so lightly as to be taken for truth and reality, and then they inspire belief and intoxicate with hope. Dreams of future bliss, for the individual, or for the race, founded on sanguine feeling and plausible anticipation, exhibit the Ideal at the summit of its power. "The good time coming," poetically illustrated and melodiously sung, will exhilarate the mind in the depths of depression. See Tennyson's Locksley Hall.

Putting together the three features, Concreteness and Com

POETRY, AN IMITATIVE ART.

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bination (III.), Harmony (IV.), and Ideality (V.), we understand what is signified by Imagination in the correct. meaning of the word. A poetically imagined scene, character, or event, is concrete, as opposed to abstractions, harmonious in its parts, and, if need be, idealized to satisfy the sentiments and feelings touched by works of Fine Art.

126. VI. Poetry has certain limitations, as being an imitative art, that is, as deriving its subjects from external nature and from human life.

Music, dancing, architecture, and fanciful decoration, can hardly be said to imitate anything, or to refer the mind to any natural object. But in painting, in sculpture, and, most of all, in Poetry, the subjects are derived from realities, and we cannot avoid considering, among other merits, the agreement or disagreement with the originals. If artistic effects are purchased at the expense of a great deviation from natural possibility or probability, although these effects are not less genuine in themselves, yet the work as a whole is marred by the offence given to our sense of truth. And, on the other hand, the skill shown by an artist in imitating or representing objects of nature, on canvas, in marble, or in language, is a new and distinct effect that excites pleasure and admiration; truth in Art is then a name for minute observation, and the adapting of a foreign material to reproduce some original. This makes the Realistic school of Art; Hogarth and Wilkie are examples in Painting; in Poetry, Crabbe is the most notable instance; while in Romance, the modern tendency is all in this direction.

When Shakespeare is called the poet of nature, the meaning is that he abides more than some other poets (Spenser, for example) by the limits of actual human life; although his representations are, in many ways, far from being close to the originals. It is essential to the interest that he gives, and a part of his greatness, to idealize beyond nature, in the intensity of the passions portrayed, in the one-sidedness of the characters, and in the intellectual power of the dialogue.

It is a rule of criticism, on this subject, that 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 to set it up as the rule. 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."

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Scott has been blamed by Senior for introducing lucky "coincidences" beyond all the bounds of probability and of admissible exaggeration.

The dangerous tendencies of Poetry being to over-stimulate the passionate impulses, such as love and ambition, to make us dissatisfied with reality, to discourage the calculations of prudence, and to give a distaste for the severity of scientific method, its character is improved as these tendencies are kept within control.

127. VJJL Interest of Plot enters largely into Poetry.

The peculiar suspense induced by uncertainty as to some approaching end has a powerful fascination, much sought after as a means of amusement. It is the interest of story, and is obtainable through the narrative kinds of Poetry—the Epic and the Drama. The poet, in constructing his ideal narratives, considers best how to bring out and sustain this kind of interest. His means are the studious concealment of the end, the introduction of circumstances to foster uncertainty, and the delay of the final issue by alternating the excitement of the

way.

It is in the Romance, or Novel, that the management of plot, or story, has been carried to the highest pitch.

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