CHAP. III. Of Judg ment. PART II. tremely injurious to the pathos of that novel: for we can conceive nothing more ludicrously preposterous, than a gay rake, and a young girl in the country, so dressed. Tom Jones must have equally worn a tye-wig when he came to London, and was dressed after the fashion of the day: but the author, with his usual superiority of judgment, has merely told us that he was fashionably and well dressed; and omitted all particulars, which would now cast an air of ridicule upon the person of his hero.' 38. Upon the same principle, all real history, of a date sufficiently recent for such particulars to be generally known, cannot afford proper subjects for serious dramatic, and still less for epic fiction: since, even if the fashions of dress have nothing of the preposterous and ridiculous extravagance of tye-wigs, wide hoops, and long ruffles; yet, in the mind of the reader, individual is necessarily substituted to general nature; and, consequently, the imagination is cramped and restricted; so that it can no longer expand itself sufficiently to receive the exaggerated images of poetry. What exertions of personal prowess, Achilles, Ulysses, or Æneas might have been capable of, we have no means of knowing; and, therefore, listen attentively to, and feel ourselves interested in all the extravagant feats, which the CHAP. III. ment, poets attribute to them: but we all know, from PART II. unquestionable authority, that neither Julius Cæsar, nor Henry IV. of France, were men of of Judg remarkable bodily strength; but that they gained victories and subdued nations by very different means: wherefore, when poetry presumes to attribute such feats to them, the fictions appear at once to be puerile and absurd. Antiquaries, I believe, are generally agreed that Æneas never was in Italy; since the testimony of Homer clearly proves that his posterity were reigning in Troy, when the Iliad was composed*: but, nevertheless, the events of that remote period were so little known; and the accounts of them so various, uncertain, and obscure, that Virgil was perfectly at liberty to avail himself of a doubtful tradition for the subject of his poem; which loses nothing of its interest by being founded in fiction. This is not, however, the case with the principal episode in the Henriade: for every person of liberal education knows that Henry IV. never was in England, nor had any personal interview with Queen Elizabeth: wherefore the artifice of the fiction is at once detected; and the whole appears to be merely a bald and common-place trick to give the poet an opportunity * See II. xx. v. 306. PART II. of relating, in the person of the king, the preceding events of the war. CHAP. III. Of Judg ment. 39. Similar objections may be made to the bringing any allegorical personages distinctly into action; not only because the artifice of the fiction is too obvious to admit of their actions becoming interesting; but also because the ideas, which we conceive of their personal existence, are never sufficiently clear and determinate to induce us to consider them as real agents: for, as all our ideas are received through the senses, we cannot, in reality, form any distinct notions of any higher order of beings than that of men, the highest that has come within the reach of our organic perceptions. The mind has, indeed, a power, in itself, of multiplying and dividing, as well as of combining and separating without end; and it is the exertion of this faculty in multiplying number, quantity, time, space, and power, that we call infinity, eternity, and omnipotence: for of these incomprehensible subjects we have no ideas whatsoever; nor can we form any ideas of beings superior to ourselves, but by employing this faculty in exaggerating our own powers of body or mind, or in combining them with those of other animals that are equally objects of sense. The gods of Homer and the angels of Milton are alike exaggerated men ; and if other poets choose to make CHAP. III. ment. new forms for these celestial and supernatural PART II. beings, they can only do it by combining those of different terrestrial creatures, and thus producing of Judg monsters. In giving wings to angels, and horns, tails, and cloven feet to devils, we only make the one partake of the nature of birds; and the other of that of quadrupeds or reptiles. 40. In epic poetry, indeed, the forms of intellectual or supernatural agents never need be so particularized, as to be presented distinctly to the mind of the reader: but, in dramatic representations, there can be nothing left indeterminate for the imagination to work upon; whence, I believe, every person, who, after having been a reader, has become a spectator of the witches in Macbeth, has felt how totally they lose their grandeur by being exhibited on the stage in distinct forms. It is not, however, as a great author has supposed*, that obscurity is any efficient cause of the sublime; for obscurity is mere privation: but the ideas excited in the imagination are narrowed and debased by being thus confined to particular impressions upon the organs of sense; and those, too, of mean and ridiculous objects; such as men, whom we know, fantastically disguised to imitate old women. * Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. CHAP. III. ment. PART II. 41. Such subjects are, for the same reasons, little less improper for painting, and even more Of Judg- so for sculpture: for though painting may show indistinct and half-concealed forms, they will still be forms endowed with shape and colour of some sort; and consequently the powers of the imagination in augmenting and expanding will be limited in their exertions. In sculpture every thing is determinate and distinct; and, consequently, every objection acquires double force. 42. Symbolical figures may, however, be very proper subjects for either art: since, in pictures and statues, we do not consider them as real intelligent agents, but as elegant signs of convention meant to convey, under visible forms, certain abstract or generalized ideas to the understanding. In this sense they are like the personifications of poetry, although they cannot be used with the same licence, or to the same extent for passions and appetites, and even privations, are often personified with the happiest effect in poetry, of which an instance has been already cited *; but, if a painter or sculptor would represent anger or grief, he can only do it by making an angry or weeping individual; and, if he would represent hunger or thirst, he must ne * Part I. c. v. s. 31. |