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Page 3
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it;
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us
back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our
being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the
rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest
contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but his
unkind daughters could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered
amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to
conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down,
and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood,
supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the
mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see,
they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make
every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and
insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching
every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining
image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to
torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of Cordelia gushes
from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love
and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a
fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello--with what a
mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of
departed happiness--when he exclaims,
------"Oh now, for ever
Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content;
Farewel the plumed troops and the big war,
That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel!
Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war:
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewel! Othello's occupation's gone!"
How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in
its sounding course, when in answer to the doubts expressed of his
returning love, he says,
"Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up."--
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that
line [sic],
"But there where I had garner'd up my heart,
To be discarded thence!"--
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our
sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it
sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the
desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making
us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare
and shews us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our
existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we
desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the
action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only
gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate
participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper
of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the
pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into
play with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part
of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the
will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these
different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The
domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is
in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one
of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo,
for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a
dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw
off: the tragedy of Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost
affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the
forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart, and
rouses the whole man within us.
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