Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/275

POET R Y appropriately from the lofty character of Antigone in a parallel dispute with Ismene. And, on the other hand, examples of relative vision, in its furthest reaches, can be found in abundance everywhere, especially in Virgil, Dante, Calderon, and Milton ; but in our limited space we can .Dies give but two or three. Some of the most remarkable etive examples of that high kind of relative vision which may easily be mistaken for absolute vision may be found in those great prose epics of the North which Aristotle would have called poems. Here is one from the Volsunga Saga. While the brothers of Gudrun are about their treacherous business of murdering Sigurd, her husband, as he lies asleep in her arms, Brynhild, Sigurd s former love, who in the frenzy of "love turned to hate" has instigated the mur derers to the deed, hovers outside the chamber with Gunnar, her husband, and listens to the wail of her rival who is weltering in Sigurd s blood. At the sound of that wail Brynhild laughs " Then said Gunnar to her, Thou lauglicst not because thy heart roots are gladded, or else why doth thy visage wax so wan ? " This is of course very fine ; but, as any two characters in that dramatic situation might have done that dramatic business, fine as it is, as the sagaman gives us the general and not the particular, the vision at work is not absolute but relative at its very highest exercise. But our examples will be more interesting if taken from English poets. In Coleridge s " Ancient Mariner" we find an immense amount of relative vision of so high a kind that at first it seems absolute vision. AVhen the ancient mariner, in his narra tive to the wedding guest, reaches the slaying of the albatross, he stops, he can proceed no further, and the wedding guest exclaims " God save thee, Ancient Mariner, From the fiends that plague thee thus ! "Why look st thou so ? " " With my cross-bow I shot the albatross." But there are instances of relative vision especially in the great master of absolute vision, Shakespeare which are higher still, so high indeed that not to relegate them to absolute vision seems at first sight pedantic. Such an example is the famous speech of Lady Macbeth in the second act, where she says " Had he not resembled My father as lie slept, I had done t." Marvellously subtle as is this speech, it will be found, if analysed, that it expresses the general human soul rather than any one special human soul. Indeed Leigh Hunt records the case of a bargeman who, charged with robbing a sleeping traveller in his barge, used in his confession almost identical words " Had he not looked like my father as he slept, I should have killed as well as robbed him." Again, the thousand and one cases (to be found in every literature) where a character, overwhelmed by some sudden surprise or terror, asks whether the action going on is that of a dream or of real life, must all, on severe analysis, be classed under relative rather than under absolute vision, even such a fine speech, for instance, as that where Pericles, on discovering Marina, exclaims " This is the rarest dream that e er dull sleep Did mock sad fools withal ;" or as that in the third act of Titus Andronicns, where Titus, beholding his mutilated and ruined daughter, asks " When will this fearful slumber have an end ? " even here, we say, the humanity rendered is general and not particular, the vision at work is relative and not absolute. The poet, as representing the whole human race, throwing himself into the imagined situation, gives us what general humanity would have thought, felt, said, 1 Translation of Morris and Majmusson. or done in that situation, not what one particular indi vidual and he alone would have thought, felt, said, or done. Now what we have called absolute vision operates in a very different way. So vividly is the poet s mere creative instinct at work that the ego sinks into passivity becomes insensitive to all impressions other than those dictated by the vision by the "divinity" which has "seized the soul. " We have left ourselves little room for examples ; but Shakespeare is full of them. Take the scene in the first act of Hamlet where Hamlet hears for the first time, from Horatio, that his father s ghost haunts the castle. Having by short sharp questions elicited the salient facts attending the apparition, Hamlet says, "I would I had been there." To this Horatio makes the very commonplace reply, "It would have much amazed you." Note the marvellously dramatic reply of Hamlet "Very like, very like ! Stayed it long 1 ?" Sup pose that this dialogue had been attempted by any other poet than a true dramatist, or by a true dramatist in any other mood than his very highest, Hamlet, on hearing Horatio s commonplace remarks upon phenomena which to Hamlet were more subversive of the very order of the universe than if a dozen stars had fallen from their courses, would have burst out with " Amazed me !" and then would have followed an eloquent declamation about the " amazing " nature of the phenomena and their effect upon him. But so entirely has the poet become Hamlet, so completely has "the divinity seized his soul," that all language seems equally weak for expressing the turbulence within the soul of the character, and Hamlet exclaims in a sort of meditative irony, " Very like, very like!" It is exactly this one man Hamlet, and no other man, who in this situation would have so expressed himself. Charles Knight has some pertinent remarks upon this speech of Hamlet ; yet he misses its true value, and treats it from the general rather than from the particular side. Instances of absolute vision in Shakspeare crowd upon us ; but we can find room for only one other. In the pathetic speech of Othello, just before he kills himself, he declares himself to be " One not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme." Consider the marvellous timbre of the word "wrought," as coming from a character like Othello. When writing this passage, especially when writing this word, the poet had become entirely the simple English soldier-hero, as the Moor really is he had become Othello, looking upon himself " as not easily jealous," whereas he was " wrought" and " perplexed in the extreme " by tricks which Hamlet would have seen through in a moment. While all other forms of poetic art can be vitalized by where relative vision, there are two forms (and these the greatest) absolute in which absolute vision is demanded, viz., the drama, ^ 1S1 and in a lesser degree the Greek epic, especially the Iliad. This will be seen more plainly perhaps if we now vary our definitions and call relative vision egoistic imagina tion, absolute vision dramatic imagination. Drama has been already fully treated in the present work (see DRAMA). But it follows from what has been here said that very much of the dramatist s work can be, and in fact is, effected by egoistic imagination, while true dramatic imagination is only called into play on compara tively rare occasions. Not only fine but sublime dramatic poems have been written, however, where the vitalizing power has been entirely that of lyrical imagination. We need only instance the Prometheus Bound of /Eschylus, the most sublime poem in the world. The dramas of Shelley too, like those of Victor Hugo and Calderon, are informed entirely by egoistic imagination. In all these

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