3. METAPHOR, IMAGE, SIMILE
Thethirdsphere of content attached to the riddle and the allegory consists in theimaged thinggenerally. The riddle veiled the still independently cognized significance and the mode of its shaping in cognate, albeit heterogeneous and distantly placed traits of definition was still of most importance. Allegory on the contrary emphasized the perspicuity of the significance so strongly as the predominant aim, that the personification and its attributes appear deposed to the rank of mere signs. The imaged thing now connects this clarity of allegorical expression with that impulse of the riddle to envisage the significance which stands out clearly before the mind in the form of an externality cognate with it; the result, however, is not that it gives rise to problems which have first of all to be solved, but rather that the imaged shape appears, by means of which the preconceived conception is revealed with absolute transparency, notifying itself as that which it really is.
(a)The Metaphor
Thefirstpoint we have to draw attention to in themetaphoris this, that it may be accepted at once as essentially a simile, in so far as it expresses clear and self-subsistent significance in a similar phenomenon of reality comparable with it. In the comparison as such, however, both sides of the comparison, that is the real meaning and the image, are definitely kept apart from each other, while on the contrary in the metaphor this separation, albeit it is essentially present, isnotas yet clearlyposited.For this reason Aristotle long ago distinguished comparison andmetaphor by his statement that a "how" is added to the former which is absent from the latter. In other words the metaphorical expression specifies butoneaspect, the image. In the context, however, to which the image is attached, the real significance which is intended lies so near that it is at the same time immediately asserted without any direct separation of it from the image. When it is said, for example: "the Spring-time of these cheeks," or "a sea of tears," we are inevitably forced to accept such an expression as an image rather than an actual fact, an image whose significance the context at the same time expressly designates. In the symbol and allegory the relation of actual meaning to external form is not asserted either so immediately or necessarily. From the fact that an Egyptian staircase consists of nine stages, and a hundred other circumstances of similar pregnancy, it is only the adept, the connoisseur, and the professor who will derive a symbolical significance, and doubtless will scent out and discover much that is both mystical and symbolical into the bargain, which is so much ingenuity of research thrown away for the reason that what is discovered is not there. This may have happened often enough to my honoured friend Creutzer, no less than our latter-day Platonists and the commentators of Dante.
(a) In range and variety of form it is impossible to exhaust the resources of metaphor; its definition, however, is simple. It is a wholly abbreviated comparison, in which we find, as a fact, image and significance are not as yet set in opposition to one another, but only the image is introduced by it; at the same time, however, the meaning which is thus attached to the image is not its real meaning; this is as it were effaced, and by virtue of the content in which it is set we are enabled to recognize the significance which is really intended in the image itself, albeit that meaning is not expressly asserted.
For the reason, however, that the meaning that is thus rendered intelligible under the image only comes to light by virtue of the context, the significance which is expressed in metaphor cannot claim the importance of an independent artistic presentation; their mode of appearance is purely incidental, so that metaphors, in a still more emphatic degree,can only be employed as the external embellishment of an essentially independent work of art.
(β) The metaphor is mainly used in the expressions of speech, which we may usefully consider in this relation under the following aspects.
(αα) In the first place every language includes within its own compass a host of metaphors. They arise from the fact that a word, which in the first instance merely designates something entirely sensuous, is carried over into a spiritual sphere. "Grasp", "comprehend"[92], and generally a number of words connected with the processes of thought, have in regard to their original meaning a content that is wholly sensuous, which is consequently abandoned and exchanged for the meaning applicable to mind; the first meaning is sensuous, the second spiritual.
(ββ) By degrees, however, the metaphorical aspect disappears in the general use of such a word, which as the current coin of language is converted from an expression which is not strictly accurate to one that is so, the effect of this process being that image and import, owing to the habitual frequency with which the latter is only conceived in the former, cease to differ from one another, and the image merely immediately presents the abstract significance itself instead of a concrete mode of vision[93].
When we take, for example, the word "grasp" in the sense applicable to mental life it entirely escapes us that there is any sensuous relation implied between the hand and external objects[94]. In living languages this distinction between genuine metaphor and words which already through usage have fallen to the level of a mere means of expression is readily established; the reverse is the case with dead languages, for the reason that here mere etymology is unable finally to bring our minds to a decision, inasmuch and in so far as the question does not depend on the original source of that word, and its general development in speech, but first and foremost on the fact whether a word whichhas all the appearance of being used in a picturesque and metaphorical sense had or had not already lost by habitual usage under a meaning applying exclusively to spirit, and in the speech when alive, its first sensuous significance and been absorbed wholly in that higher sense.
(γγ) When this takes place the invention of new metaphors, which are the exclusive product of the poetical imagination becomes for the first time a vital necessity. That in which this invention is mainly concerned consistsfirstin transferring the phenomena, activities, and conditions of a higher level of fact in a way that illustrates the content of less important material, and in bringing to light significances of such inferior matter in the form and image which stands above them. The organic, for example, is by itself essentially of higher importance than the inorganic, and to carry forward that which has no life within, the range of vital phenomenal enhances its expression. We may illustrate this with the saying of Ferdusi: "The keenness of my sworddevoursthe brain of the lion, anddrinksthe dark blood of the courageous." In a yet more enhanced degree we find the same result when that which is of Nature and sensuous is imaged, and thereby raised and ennobled in the form ofspiritualphenomena. So we have such common turns of speech as "smilingfields," and "angryflood," or in the language of Calderon: "The wavessighbeneath the burden of ships." In these examples that which exclusively applies to humanity is diverted to the expression of Nature. The Latin poets use such metaphorical language often enough, as we may find in our Virgil, take the example:Quum graviter tunsis gemit area frugibus(Georg., III, 132).
Conversely and in thesecondplace that which pertains to mind is brought in the same way more close to our powers of vision through the image of natural objects. Such fanciful presentations, however, can very readily degenerate into mere trifling and far-fetched conceits, when that which is essentially without life receives notwithstanding every appearance of individuality, and really spiritual activities are assigned to it with perfect seriousness. The Italians more especially have given themselves over to illusive trickery of this kind, and even Shakespeare is not wholly free from them, as in that passage from "Richard II"(Act V, sc. I), where he makes the King say to the Queen on parting:
For why, the senseless brands will sympathizeThe heavy accent of thy moving tongueAnd in compassion weep the fire out;And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-blackFor the deposing of a rightful king.
(γ) Finally, if we look at the aim and interest of that which is metaphorical, the first thing which strikes us is that a word in the strict sense is an independently intelligible expression, the metaphor otherwise. The question consequently presents itself, what is the reason of this twofold means of expression, or, to put it another way, why is it that we have the metaphorical which essentially implies this division? The common explanation is that metaphors are used to give vivacity to poetical composition, and this animating effect is the ground in virtue of which Heyne, in particular, insists on their value. The vivacity consists in the support they offer to imaginative vision in the direction of clear definition, divesting the word, which is always something generalized, of its purely indefinite character, and bringing it home to sense by means of an image. No doubt a greater degree of vivacity is to be found in metaphors than in the strict expressions of ordinary speech; genuine vitality, however, is not to be sought for in metaphors, whether in isolation or combination, whose figurative plasticity, it is true, may frequently include a relation, which by good chance attaches at the same time to the expression an increased perspicuity and a higher definition, but quite as often, if every detail of the process of thought is thus figuratively emphasized in isolation, makes the whole unwieldy, overloading it thus with its emphasis on singular aspects.
The genius of metaphorical diction is consequently, as we shall have to elucidate more closely in our consideration of simile, to be regarded as responding to a need and potency of mind and the emotional life, which will not rest satisfied with that which is entirely simple, ordinary, and homely, but make an effort beyond this and over into something more recondite under the attraction which distinction offers and the impulse to co-ordinate contrasted effects. Thisbinding together has itself again various causes, which may be notified as follows.
(αα)First, we have it for the sake ofreinforcingan effect. The emotional life, under the pressure and movement of its passions, gives visible utterance to these forces by means of the piling up of sensuous image. More than this, it strives to express its own whirl and tumble, or persistence in the ideas which crowd upon it by means of a similar letting itself go into phenomena cognate with such a condition, and its own free movement among images of the greatest variety. In Calderon's supplication to the Cross Julia utters the following words when she looks upon the dead body of her only just deceased brother, and her lover, Eusebio, the man who has killed Lisardo, stands before her:
O that I might close for everEyes before this blood here guiltless,Blood which cries for vengeance with itsFlooding stream of purple flowers!Would that I could deem thee pardonedIn the rush of tears that blind thee:Wounds and eyes are mouths which swallowLies which seek admittance never, etc.
With a still more vehement burst of passion Eusebio starts back from the sight of her, when Julia finally is for surrendering herself to him, as he exclaims:
Flaming sparks thine eyeballs scatter;Every sigh is breath that scorches;Every word is a volcano,Every hair a scribbled lightning,Every word is Death, and everySoft caress is Hell's own anguish;Such the horror stirs within meAs I see—O awful symbol,Crucifix thy bosom carries.
The human soul on the swell of its emotion keeps adding image on image to that immediately confronting it, and with all this impetuous seeking to and fro for new means of expression barely lays to rest its own tumult.
(ββ) Asecondrationale of the metaphorical consists in this that the human soul, after adding to its own depth bythis the motion of its own life into the varied survey of objects cognate with it, is stirred at the same time to cast itself free of the externality of such objects, to the extent that it seeks to rediscover itself in what is external; it transmutes that external in its own free activity, and by clothing both itself and its passions in the forms of beauty, proclaims furthermore its power to present in visible semblance its own exaltation above the bare fact.
(γγ) Athirdground of figurative expression, and one of at least equal force, may be found in the purely ribald exuberance of the phantasy, which is unable to set before us an object in its own outlines for what they are worth, or a significance in its unadorned simplicity, but on all occasions hankers after some concrete embodiment cognate with it, or is overmastered by the ingenuity of a personal caprice, which, in order to escape the commonplace, abandons itself to the charms of the piquant novelty, a caprice that is never satisfied until it has discovered for us points of affinity in material the most remote apparently from that before us, and has thereby related the same to the most distant objects.
And we may here observe that it is not so much theprosaicandpoeticstyle generally as the style of theclassicworld in contrast with that of later periods which presents such a marked difference in the pre-eminent importance they attach to genuine or metaphorical expression respectively. It is not merely the Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, or the great historians and orators, such as Thucydides and Demosthenes, but also the great poets, Homer and Sophocles, who, albeit we find examples of the simile in all them, remain on the whole, and without exception, constant in the use of their direct form of expression[95]. Their plastic severity and sterling substance will not permit them such a multifarious product, as is bound up with the use of metaphor, nor will it suffer them, even for the sake of gathering the so-called flowers of expression, to waver fitfully in devious ways from their ideal mintage of the completely simple and co-ordinate result as of one metal cast in one mould. The metaphor, in fact, is always an interruption to the logical course of conception and invariably to that extent a distraction, because it starts images and brings themtogether, which are not immediately connected with the subject and its significance, and for this reason tend to a like extent to divert the attention from the same to matter cognate with themselves, but strange to both. The prose of ancient writers in the extraordinary clarity and flexibility of its utterance and their poetry in the repose of its completely unfolded content[96], are equally removed from the frequent use of metaphor by modern writers.
On the other hand it is particularly in the East, and above all the later literature of Mohammedan poetry, which makes use of the indirect or figurative modes of expression, and, indeed, finds them essential. The same thing may be said, if less emphatically, of modern European literature. The diction of Shakespeare, for instance, is full of metaphor. The Spaniards, too, are very fond of this flowery region, and, indeed, have wandered off into it to the point of the most tasteless exaggeration and superfluity. Jean Paul falls under the same charge. Goethe by virtue of the equal strength and clarity of his vision to a less extent. Schiller, however, is even in his prose exceedingly rich both in image and metaphor; in his case this is rather due to his effort to bring really profound ideas within the range of the imaginative vision without being forced to expound all they imply for the mind in the technical language of philosophy. We behold and find there the essential unity of the speculative reason reflected on the mirror of Life as it stands before us.
(b)The Image
We may place theimagemidway between the metaphor and the simile. It has, in fact, so close an affinity with the metaphor that we may regard it as merely a metaphorfully amplified[97], an aspect which at the same time marks its very close resemblance to the simile; there is, however, this distinction, that in the case of the image as such the significance is not set forth in its independent opposition tothe concrete external object expressly compared with it. That which we term the image arises when two phenomena or conditions, which by themselves stand substantially apart, are placed in concurrence so that one condition supplies the significance which is made intelligible by means of the other. The first, that is to say, the fundamentalmodusof the definition constitutes here the relation ofindependent consistency[98], and is the line ofdivisionof the spheres in their separation, from which both the significance and its image are deduced; and that which is common to them, the qualities and relations and so forth, are not, as in the symbol, the indefinite universal and substantive itself, but the self-defined concrete existence on the one side no less than on the other[99].
(a) Under a relation such as this the image may possess as its significance a whole series of conditions, activities, contrasts, and modes of existence, and manifest the same through a series of a similar nature from an independent if cognate source, without emphasizing in so many words the significance as such within the limits of the image. The poem of Goethe, entitled "The Song of Mahomet," is of this kind. It is merely the title here which shows us that in the image of a rocky water-spring which, in the freshness of youth, leaps over the cliff's edge into the abyss, and which then spreads away with the rush of tributary springs down the plain, ever and anon taking up fraternal rivers, which gives further a name to localities, and sees whole towns subject to its glory, until it finally bears in the tumultuous folds of its rapturous heart all these splendours, the brothers, its possessions, its children, to the great source that awaits them—it is, we repeat, merely the title which explains to us that in this comprehensive and radiant image of a mighty river we have the first bold appearance of Mahomet, then the rapid spread of his teaching, and, finally, the deliberately planned attempt to bring all nations to theonefaith set forth with such singular directness. We may view in a similar way many of the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller, those sentences edged in part with scorn, but asoften the mere vehicle of good spirits, which were flung at the public and its weak authors in particular. Take the pair of distiches which follow, as an example:
Stille kneteten wir Salpeter, Kohlen und Sewefel,Bohrten Röhren, gefall' nun auch das Feuer work euch!Einige steigen als leuchtende kugeln und andere zünden,Manche auch werfen wir nur spielend das Aug' zu erfreun[100].
Ay, we have in truth seen not a few rockets of this order changed to dull ash, to the exceeding entertainment of the better half of public opinion, only too delighted when the rabble of commonplace and miserable quality, which had for a long time spreadeagled it far and wide and laid down the law, received a genuine smack in the mouth and a bucket of cold water over its precious body into the bargain.
(β) In these last examples there is, however, already asecondaspect brought to view, which in our consideration of the image should be emphasized. In other words the content is in these cases anindividualwhich acts, brings before us objects, experiences specific states, etc., and then is reflected in theimagenot as such a subject, but merely with a reference to his particular actions, workings, and experiences. The individual himself as subject is, on the contrary, introduced without an image, and it is only his actions and relations strictly viewed which contain the form of indirect expression. Here, too, as in the case of the image generally, it is not theentiresignificance which is separated from its mode of embodiment, but the subject is alone set forth independently, while the definite content of that subject receives at the same time the form of an image; and the result is that the subject is imagined in such a way as though it was itself the means which supplied the imaged form of their existence to the objects and actions in question. The metaphorical relation is, in fact, ascribed to the individual subject expressly named. This confusion, or at least interfusion of the direct and indirect modes of expressionhas frequently been the subject of adverse criticism, but we do not find very solid ground to support it[101].
(γ) Orientals are to an extraordinary degree distinguished by the bold use they make of this type of imagery. They will unite together and intertwine in one image entirelyindependentforms of existence. Take for example this sentence of Hafiz: "The life-course of the world is a bloodstained dagger, and the drops which fall therefrom are crowns." Or that other: "The sword of the sun drips in the red of morning with the blood of Night, over which it has won the victory." Or again this: "No one has yet drawn aside the veil from the cheeks of thought as Hafis since the day when the tips of the locks of the Word's bride were curled." The meaning of this image may be apparently thus expanded. Thought is the bride of the word; so Klopstock calls the word the twin-brother of Thought, and since this bride has been adorned by man with delicately turned words, no one is likely to be more competent than Hafis to suffer the thought thus adorned to appear in the clarity of its unveiled beauty.
(c)The Simile
From this last type of imagery we may proceed without a break to the consideration ofsimile.For in the image we already find the initial appearance of the independent and imageless expression of this significance, the subject of the image being here designated. The two types are, however, distinguished by this that in the simile everything which exclusively manifests the image in a figurative form is furthermore able to receive an independently subsistent mode of expression as significance, which thereby appears alongside of its image and is placed in comparison with the same. The metaphor and image declare the significances without making that declaration explicit, so that it is onlythe context, in which either metaphor or image occur, which shows without disguise what their meaning veritably is intended to be. In the simile, on the contrary, both aspects, image and significance, albeit no doubt we find at one time it is the image, and at another the significance which is most clearly and fully emphasized, are kept completely apart and set forth each in its isolation, and only then, and in such severation are related to one another in virtue of the similarity of their content.
Viewed in this relation it is possible to characterize the simile as to some extent merely a vainrepetition, in so far, that is, as one and the same content is reproduced in a twofold, or it may be threefold or fourfold form. In part, too, we may even see in it a frequently wearisomesuperfluity, for the reason that the significance is already there as an independent factor, and requires no further mode of figuration to render it intelligible. The question consequently presses upon us here with even more insistence than in the case of the image and metaphor, what essential interest and object there may be in the employment of isolated examples or a whole number of similes. For their use is not to be justified on the commonly received ground of mere vivacity, and the contention that they increase the lucidity of expression will assist us just as little. On the contrary similes make a poem only too frequently insipid and overweighted, and an image or metaphor by itself can possess a clarity fully as pronounced without there being any previous necessity to attach the significance to either as something still outside.
We must consequently conceive the object of the simile to consist in this, that the subjective[102]imagination of the poet, however much it has brought home to the artist's consciousness the content, which it seeks to express, with distinctive emphasis according to its more abstract generality and expresses it in this universal aspect, yet it finds itself equally under a constraint to seek out a concrete form for it, and to envisualize for itself in the phenomena of sense that which already is clearly before the mind as its significance. Looked at in this way we shall find that the simile is, no less than the image and the metaphor, indicative of the bravery which invariably distinguishes imaginative powerwhen it faces its object, it matters not what, it may be a single object of sense-perception, a definite condition, or a general significance—the enterprise, that is, to bind together with its own activity that which lies remote from it in its external environment, and by so doing to carry away by force objects of the greatest variety, and unite them to the interest which its unified content possesses, and generally to annex to the matter in hand a whole world of diversified phenomena. And this power of the imagination continually to find out the new plastic shape, and cement together heterogeneous material by means of the relations and associations of sense is, in general terms, also the rational basis of the simile.
(α) In thefirstplace, then, this impulse to compare can find satisfaction simply by virtue of the demand which it satisfies, without bringing to light, that is to say, anything else in the brilliancy of its images than the bravery of the imagination itself. And this is but the same thing as that revelry[103]of imaginative power, which, more particularly in the East, with all the easy-going tranquillity of the South regales itself in the wealth and splendour of its images nor seeks any other object, while it seduces the hearer to give himself up to the same spirit. At the same time we are frequently astounded by the amazing force, with which the poet surrenders himself to ideas of the most startling contrasts, and displays a cunning of combination which far exceeds all the effort of mere wittiness as an indication of genius. Calderon, too, supplies us with many comparisons of this type, more particularly in his pictures of important and splendid pageants and festive processions, in his descriptions of chargers and cavaliers, or in his reference to ships, which on one occasion he calls "birds without pinions, and fish without fins."
(β) Asecondand more intimate aspect of these comparisons is that in virtue of which we find them to be atarrying byone and the same object, which becomes thereby the substantial centre of a series of other ideas remote from it, by pointing to or illuminating which the interest of the content compared receives a tangible increase.
This protraction of the interest round one centre may be explained in several ways.
(αα) As thefirstwe may draw attention to theabsorptionof the soul in the content, which is the source of itsanimation, and which attaches itself so intimately to it, that it is unable to detach itself from the permanent interest thus excited. We may at the same time observe that a fundamental difference once more asserts itself in this respect between the poetry of the East and the West resembling that we have already adverted to our discussion of Pantheism. In other words the Oriental is in his absorption less dominated by the personal relation, and consequently without the languish and yearning of self-interest: his longing, such as it is, remains a more impersonal delight in the object under comparison, and consequently more of a contemplation. He looks about him with a free mind, sees in everything which surrounds him, everything which stirs either his mental faculties or his heart, an existing image of that which actively concerns his sense-life and his spiritual forces, and with which he abounds. This type of the imagination which is free from all mere self-obsession, delivered, I mean, from all morbid introspection discovers its satisfaction in the figurative conception of the object itself, and most of all when that object, by virtue of the comparison instituted, is extolled, exalted, and declared in line with that which is most glorious and beautiful. The West is in its general contrast more remote from this impersonal spirit, and in its grief and pain more inclined to languish and yearn itself away.
This dallying, as we may call it, is then pre-eminently an interest of theemotionallife, more particularly of love, which delights to take refuge in the objects of its suffering and its raptures; and as often as it finds itself unable to break loose from such feelings finds naught that is wearisome in the task of repainting the object ever anew. The lover is above all things the prodigal in wishes, hopes, and ever changing conceits. Among such conceits we have to reckon the simile, to which love and the emotions generally have recourse, all the more readily for the reason that they take up and absorb the entire soul, and are themselves the independently motive source of comparison. Whatever is their immediate content, is, that is to say, a beautiful object arrested in its singularity, whether it be the mouth, the eye,or the hair of the beloved. In such a state the human soul is active, restless, and the states of joy and pain are neither without life nor in repose, but full of activity and motion, are up and down, which at least is continuous in this that it is for ever bringing all material of whatever kind into relation with the one emotional centre of the world of the heart. In other words the interest of comparison has its root in the feeling itself, which is insistently conscious of the fact, for example, that there are other objects in Nature which are beautiful, or have given rise to pain and so on. Consequently love draws these objects with the aid of the simile into the sphere of its own content, and makes the same wider and more universal thereby. If the object of the simile is, however, entirelyisolatedin itsmaterialform, and brought into juxtaposition with objects of a similar nature, we shall find, and particularly so where similes of this sort are piled one on the top of another, that such a composition is due to emotion of a still rather superficial order, and to reflection equally wanting in depth; the result will be that the variety which merely plays round an external material will readily appear to us insipid and of no vital interest, because we have here no spiritual relation interpenetrating it. We may illustrate such an effect from the fourth chapter of the Song of Solomon where we find the words: "Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing, whereof everyone bear twins, and none is barren among them. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is like a tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies[104]. Until the day break and the shadows flee away." Thisnaïvetéis to be met with in many of the comparisons of Ossian. Take for example the words: "Thou art as snow on the heather; thine hair is as mist on the kromla, whenhe curls himself up on the rock, and glistens toward the gleam in the West; thine arms are as two arrows in the halls of the mighty Fingal."
Of the same kind, only here in wholly a rhetorical way, are the following words Ovid places in the mouth of Polyphemus (Met. XIII, vv. 789-807): "Thou art more white, O Galatea, than the leaf of the snow-white meadowland; more blooming than the fields, more slender than the elm; more brilliant than glass, more arch than the tender little roebuck; smoother than the shell ever-polished by the sea; more dear than Winter's sun, or the shade in Summer; nobler than the fruit-tree, more comely than the lofty plane." And so on through all the nineteen hexameters, a description not wanting in rhetorical beauty, but as the presentation of an emotion, which rouses little interest, itself equally lacking in interest.
We may find many examples of this style of comparison in Calderon, although a halt, by the way, of this kind is more suitable to lyrical emotion simply, and fetters the march of drama far too insistently, if it is not actually motived by the subject-matter. Don Juan, for instance, during the progress of the action, describes at length in this way the beauty of a veiled lady whom he had followed. This is what he says to a third person:
Natheless in despite and oftenThrough the gross and barriered darknessOf that intranslucent veil,Flashed a hand of sheen most splendid,Mistress pure of rose and lily,Princess, to whose matchless gloryE'en the snow's gleam paid obeisance,Slave all murk of Aethiop moulding.
The matter is wholly different, however, when any one capable ofprofoundemotion, expresses his life through images and similes, in which the most secret folds of spiritual feeling are unveiled, the soul here either identifying itself with some scene of external Nature, or making such a scene the counterfeit of a spiritual content. We may cite Ossian once again in illustration of this better use of image and comparison, although the range of objects which serve him in such similitude is jejune, mainly restricted to clouds,mists, storms, trees, streams, thistles, grasses, and other facts equally obvious. Here is one of them: "The Present[105]brings joy to us, O Fingal; it is as the sun on Kromla, when the hunter has mourned its absence a whole year long and now it breaks forth from the clouds." In another passage of the same writer we find these words: "Did not Ossian hearken but now to a voice? Is it then the voice of the days that are no longer? Ofttimes, oft as the evening suns, comes the memory of times that are gone into my soul." And for another instance take this bit of narration: "Pleasant are the words of song, saith Kuchullin, and dear to the heart are the tales of times far away. They are as the quiet dew of the morning on the hill of the roe-deer, when the sun trembles faintly on his flank, and the pool lies motionless and blue in the dale." In the case of Ossian this halting by the same emotions, and their similitudes expresses the attitude of an old age which out of weariness and exhaustion turns to sorrowful and painful memories. And generally a recourse to comparisons is evidence of an inclination to melancholy and effeminate emotion. The desire and interest of such a soul lies far away and foregone; and for this reason we find as a rule that, instead of bracing itself up manfully, it yields to its longing to lose itself in something else. Many of the figurative expressions of Ossian consequently are quite as much a response to this wholly personal mood as they are a reflection of ideas mostly of a mournful colour, and of the restricted circle beyond which he is unable to pass.
But, conversely, it is quite possible thatpassion, in so far as it is able to concentrate its forces on one content, despite its own unrest, with the object of finding a counterfeit of the soul in the natural world around it, may fluctuate to and fro in a variety of images and similitudes, which are all purely conceits of the fancy over one and the same object. A fine example of this we have in that monologue of Juliet from "Romeo and Juliet," in which she apostrophizes the night as follows:
Come, night; come Romeo; come, thou day in night;For thou wilt lie upon the wings of nightWhiter than new snow on a raven's back:Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun.
(ββ) The similes of epic poetry as they come before us over and over again in Homer stand out in a marked contrast to the above type of almost purely lyrical simile in which sentiment is absorbed in the heart of its content. In the former case the aim of the poet, when he may by any chance wish to dally with the comparative mode around some specific object, is, on the one hand, interested in raising us over the active curiosity, expectancy, hope, and fear, by which we are moved relatively to the several situations and exploits of his heroes during the actual progress of events over, that is to say, the general concurrencies of cause, action, and consequence, and in fixing our attention upon the images which he places before us in their plastic repose, purely for our contemplation, serene as the works of sculpture. This repose, this absolution from the merely practical interest that we may enter into that which he places visibly before our eyes comes upon us with all the more force in so far as everything with which he compares the object is taken from a field entirely remote from it. Moreover, this halting round the simile possesses the further significance that by virtue of this kind of twofold painting of the same object its importance is emphasized, and is thus not permitted to be whirled away in the mere shifting stream of the song and the events it celebrates. Take, for example, what Homer says of Achilles, when that hero, fired with anger, confronts Aeneas ("Iliad," XX, vv. 164-175):
As when the harmful king of beasts (sore threatened to be slainBy all the country up in arms) at first makes coy disdainPrepare resistance, but at last when anyone hath ledBold charge upon him with his dart, he then turns yawning head,Fell anger lathers in his jaws, his great heart swells, his sternLasheth his strength up, sides and thighs waddle with stripes to learnTheir own power, his eyes glow, he roars, he leaps to kill,Secure of killing: so his power then rous'd up to his willMatchless Achilles, coming on to meet Anchises' son[106].
Much in the same spirit he speaks of Pallas, when she averted the arrow which Pandaros had let fly against Menelaus ("Iliad," IV, vv. 130-131):
"She did not forget him, and warded off the arrow e'en as a mother flicks away some fly from her son, as he lies in sweet slumber."
And again further on when the arrow, notwithstanding, wounds Menelaus (vv. 141-146):
Yet forth the blood flow'd, which did much his royal person grace,And show'd upon his ivory skin, as doth a purple dyeLaid, by a dame of Caïra, or lovely Maeony,On ivory, wrought in ornaments to deck the cheeks of horse;Which in her marriage room must lie; whose beauties have such force,That they are wish'd of many knights, but are such precious things,That they are kept for horse that draw the chariots of kings;Which horse, so deck'd, the charioteer esteems a grace to him;Like these, in grace, the blood upon thy solid thighs did swim,O Menelaus, etc[107].
(γ) Athirdmotive cause of similes, quite distinct from that of purely imaginative riot as also the self-absorbed sentiment or, under its other aspect, the dallying round important objects with the figurative power of the fancy, we have now to emphasize with particular reference to dramatic poetry. The content of the drama is made up of the conflict of passions, activities, pathos, actions, and the accomplishment of the thing willed by the soul, a content which does not, as in the case of the epic, take the form of a narrative of past events, but the dramatic poet places the individuals themselves before our eyes and makes them unfold their emotions personally in an objective form, and their actions as taking place in the present: his mediate position between ourselves and the objects represented therefore ceases. Looked at from this point of view it would appear as though in order to make this presence in Nature clear to us a primary requirement of drama would be that the expression of passions and the vehemence of their grief, consternation, and delight should be painted as naturally as it was possible to paint it, and consequently the simile would be here out of place. To let individuals, on the very plane of their action, in the full storm of emotion, and in the continuous strain of thebusy world, speak much in the language of metaphor or image is obviously, from the commonsense point of view, an unnatural proceeding and injurious to the directness aimed at. We are by the simile diverted from the immediate situation, and the characters, whose actions and emotions are involved in it, to something external and strange to it, which in short does not strictly belong to it, as part of its own present; consequently the general course of the dialogue must unavoidably appear to lag under the interruption thus imposed. And for this reason it came about also in Germany when at last our young bloods were all for freeing themselves from the fetters of French rhetorical taste, that the Spaniards, Italians, and French were regarded as artists who did nothing more than place their own personal flights of fancy or witticism, their own conventional attitude to society and elegance of speech in the mouth of their dramatic characters in situations, too, when the very tempest of emotion cried out for Nature's most direct expression to the exclusion of all other. We find as a result of such an insistence on the principle of realism that in many dramas, which hail from this time, the outcry of emotion, with all the exclamatory signs and hyphens which may render its nudity more visible, takes the place of a noble and dignified diction, rich in image and simile. In much the same sense even English critics have often charged Shakespeare with a superabundant and too varied recourse to the simile, some of which he not unfrequently will attach to characters in the full strain of personal bereavement, where the stress of emotion least of all admits of the tranquillity necessary to reflection, the attitude of mind which is indispensable to this type of comparison. We may no doubt admit that now and again we meet with in Shakespeare an exaggerated tendency to pile up image upon image, and that his diction is thereby overweighted. At the same time we shall see, if we examine the matter in all its bearings, that even in drama the simile is entitled to a position essential to this form of poetry and vital to its action.
In other words if the emotion makes a pause in similes for the reason that it is absorbed in its object and is unable to free itself therefrom, there is also on the plane ofactive lifea distinct purpose subserved by it, namely, to indicatethat the individual is not thus so exclusively preoccupied with the particular situation or state of the emotions then uppermost, but possesses a fine and noble nature superior to such conditions and able to assert its independence. In passion soul-life is restricted and fettered to its own seclusion, narrowed down to the point of concentrated heat, either thereby a mute, an ejaculation of monosyllables, or the rage that vents itself at random. Greatness of soul and intellectual power alike refuse to submit to such limitations: they are wings which carry the soul in a fine tranquillity over and above the storm of pathos that moves it. It is this deliverance of the soul, which the simile primarily expresses by the very mode under which it is asserted. In other words it is only a really profound composure and strength which is able to make itself the object of its pain and suffering, to compare itself with something else, and by doing so to view itself impartially[108]in a strange material; or it may be in a mood of the most terrible scorn to set forth in the external thing the confronting image of its own annihilation, and still persist in the repose of its own obdurate forces. In epical poetry, as we before observed, it was the poet's undoubted function to transmit to his audience, by means of those halts by the way which his picturesque similitudes offered, that sense of tranquillity which is essential to fine art. In dramatic art, on the contrary, thedramatis personaeappear as themselves thepoetsandartists.Here it is the characters who objectify their own soul-life in that which they are powerful enough to imagine and inform, thereby further manifesting to us the nobility of their receptive faculties and the inherent force of their emotional resources[109]. For this absorption into something else that is external is now[110]the deliverance of the world within from a purely practical interest, or at least is that which lifts the immediacy of emotion to the level of forms the soul may contemplate in freedom; and for this reason every comparison instituted simply for the comparison's sake in the way we have alreadyobserved it under the first aspect of the simile discussed, is vindicated now in a much profounder sense than was then possible; it can now only appear as a victory over the exclusive obsession of passion and the release from its masterdom. In following up the course of this liberating process we will now emphasize several important distinctions to illustrate which we shall borrow exclusively from Shakespeare.
(αα) Now in the first place we would observe that when we have a soul set before us about to meet with a grave misfortune, by which it will be shaken to its depths, and the pain of this inevitable cataclysm is at length actually entered upon, it would be nothing less than an indication of a nature essentially commonplace if it were there and then to break out into the cry of horror, pain, and desperation, and so make a clean breast of it. A strong and noble spirit on the contrary holds its lamentation as such in reserve, keeps a hand of iron upon its pain, and by this means preserves a free power to embody in far-distant material imaginatively presented the profound sense of its anguish, and to express its own tragic state under the image of that which is remote. Thus man rises superior to his suffering; he is not utterly with all that is in him bondman to it; rather he is as wholly distinct from it as he is one with it; and consequently he can still pause before that which is outside and beyond him, which he relates to his emotion as an independent force cognate with his own. This will explain to us those words of the old Northumberland in Shakespeare's "Henry IV," when he inquires of the messenger who comes to inform him of the death of Percy, what news he brings him of his son and his brother, and, on receiving no reply, gives utterance to the composure of the most poignant grief as follows:
Thou tremblest; and the whiteness of thy cheekIs apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night,And would have told him half his Troy was burnt;But Priam found the fire ere he his tongue,And I my Percy's death ere thou report'st it[111].
This attitude of the soul, which spins about itself as it were the garments of its pain, and yet retains the power throughout to image itself under new modes of comparison, receives a particularly striking illustration in the character of Richard II, where we find him repentant over the youthful frivolity of his days of prosperity. In fact there is no trait in this royal grief that is more touching or suggestive of a child's simplicity than the fact that he always expresses himself under the objective form of most pertinent images, and in the play of this type of self-expression preserves his suffering all the more profoundly. When, for example, Henry demands of him the crown, he replies:
Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown;Here cousin;On this side my hand, and on that side yours.Now is this golden crown like a deep wellThat owes two buckets, filling one another,The emptier ever dancing in the air,The other down, unseen and full of water.That bucket down and full of tears am I,Drinking my griefs while you mount up on high[112].
(ββ) The other aspect to which we would now draw attention is this, namely, that a character which is already made one with its interests, its sorrow, and its destiny, endeavours by means of the simile to release itself from this immediate union, and makes this deliverance obvious to us by the very fact that it shows itself still able to deduce such similitudes. In "Henry VIII,"[113]for instance, the Queen Katherine, on being forsaken by her royal consort, expresses the depth of her desolation in the words:
I am the most unhappy woman living!Alas, poor wenches, where are now your fortunes?Shipwreck'd upon a kingdom, where no pity,No friends, no hope; no kindred weep for me;Almost no grave allow'd me: like the lily,That once was mistress of the field and flourish'd,I'll hang my head and perish.
In a still more admirable manner in "Julius Caesar"[114]Brutus exclaims to Cassius, to whose want of spirit he has vainly striven to give the spur:
O Cassius, you are yoked with a lambThat carries anger as the flint bears fire;Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,And straight is cool again.
That Brutus in such a situation can find room for a simile is already an excellent proof that he himself has thrust his scorn into the background, and has begun to assert himself as master of it.
For the most part Shakespeare, by endowing his criminal characters with greatness of soul in crime no less than in misfortune, exalts them before he leaves them above their own evil passions: he will not let them rest in the purely abstract assertion of crimes they are for ever going to do, but never really commit, as is the French style, but actually infuses them with the imaginative power, by means of which they stand out before us as distinctly as any other personification that is new to us. Macbeth, for instance, when his last hour has struck[115], exclaims in the well-known words:
Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and furySignifying nothing.
The same thing may be said of those last words of Cardinal Wolsey in "Henry VIII,"[116]uttered at the close of his career when struck down from the summit of his greatness:
Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!This is the state of man: to-day he puts forthThe tender leaves of hopes: to-morrow blossoms,And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;And when he thinks, good easy man, full surelyHis greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,And then he falls, as I do.
(γγ) In this impersonal relation of objective fact and its expression of the comparative mode, the repose and substantialself-command of character returns to itself; it is the means whereby the pain of a great downfall is softened. So Cleopatra exclaims[117]to Charmian, after she has already put the mortal aspic to her breast:
Peace, peace!Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,That sucks the nurse asleep?As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—
The bite of the serpent relaxes her members so gently that Death is himself deceived and holds himself to be Sleep. And this image may well pass as itself a counterfeit of the mild and allaying influence of such similitudes.
Didactic,descriptive poetry and the ancient epigram.
The conception we have in general terms formed of the symbolic type of art is such that within it significance and expression are unable to unite sufficiently to appear in complete and reciprocal fusion. In unconscious symbolism theincompatibilityof these two aspects remained a fact throughout, if not actuallydeclaredas such; in the Sublime on the contrary this inadequacy wasexplicitlyasserted: the absolute significance, God, no less than His external reality, the world, are expressly represented in this excluding relation to one another. On the other hand, however, in all these types that further aspect of symbolism, namely, theaffinitywhich obtains between the significance and the external form, in which it is visibly manifested, still retained its importance. In the original type of symbolism this was exclusively the case, a type which did not as yet set forth the significance in contrast to its concrete existence. But in the Sublime, too, it remained anessentialrelation, a type which, in order to express the Supreme Being, if here under a wholly inadequate mode, required as its means the phenomena of Nature, and the events and exploits of God's chosen people. And finally it reappears in the comparative type of art a personal relation and one that is consequently amenable tocaprice.This element of caprice, however, albeit it is an entirely present fact and particularly so in the case of the metaphor, image, and simile, is notwithstanding still hidden away behind theaffinitybetween the significance and the image utilized to express it, in so far as it selects the comparison simply out of a regard for their mutual resemblance, a fundamental aspect of which is not so much theexternalform as just thisrelationset up between them by the activity of the soul and consisting in subjective emotions, points of view and ideas and their cognate modes of configuration[118]. When, however, it is not the notion of the material itself, but simply a capricious use of the judgment, which brings together the content and its artistic form, both can only be conceived as posited in an entirely external relation to one another; their association is now a juxtaposition without essential relation, simply a dressing up, that is to say, of the one side by the other. For this reason we have here to treat these last-mentioned and subordinate types of art by way of supplement. They arise from the absolute collapse of the essential phases in all true art-production; they bring before us, in short, by their independence of the principle of relativity the suicide of the symbolic type.
If we view this stage generally as a whole we find on the one hand already as wholly independent the elaborate but formless significance, for the artistic shaping of which all that we can now supply is an external ornament selected at caprice to set it off. On the other side we have the external mode pure and simple. That is to say, instead of being mediated in its identity with that on which it is imposed by the fact that this is its own essentially cognate significance it can now only be accepted and described in the aspect of its self-subsistence over against thiscentrumof significance, and consequently only as mere externality. From the above contrasted aspects we may differentiate in abstract termsdidacticfromdescriptivepoetry, a distinction which so far at least as the didactic is concerned is only to be made good under the poetic type for the reason that this aloneis able to bring before us the significance in its abstract universality.
Inasmuch, however, as the notion of art does not consist in the dissociation, but the identification of significance and form we find even at this stage not only a complete separation, but also in line with that, a relation asserted between the sides thus opposed. This relation, however, now that the partition line of symbolism has already beencrossed, is no longer of a symbolic nature, and is therefore an attempt to abolish the fundamental characteristics of that type, namely, the incompatibility, and at the same time the self-subsistence of form and content, a position that all the previous types were unable to transcend. Owing, however, to the separation of the two sides, which thus make for unity, being already presupposed by this type this attempt can only be looked upon as a mere aspiration[119], to completely satisfy which in all that it involves is reserved for a more perfect type of art, namely, the classical.
We will now briefly glance at these supplementary forms, in order to make our passage from them to the real type above mentioned more fully intelligible.
1. THE DIDACTIC POEM
When a significance, which as such co-ordinates a homogeneouscomplexusof relations, is apprehended exclusively as significance, yet does not receive the form strictly adequate to this content, but is merely invested with the external ornamentation of art, then we have before us the didactic poem. The didactic poem does not figure among the genuine types of art. For in it we find on the one hand a content already completely elaborated under a mode that is thereby necessarily prosaic, while on the other we have the artistic form, which is merely tacked to it in an external way, for this very reason that it had already been accepted by the mind in a form stamped withprosethroughout, and is merely exhibited to our common sense or reflective faculties as instruction under this prosaic aspect, that is to say,with an exclusive reference to the significance embodied in its abstract and general terms. Consequently art, in this its external relation to a content so essentially foreign to its real informing process, can only recognize in the didactic poem its external aspects, such as metre, exalted language, episodic matter, images, similes, ebullitions of sentiment, points of acceleration and transition in the march of ideas, aspects in short which do not give us the heart of the content as such, but rather surround it as an incidental accretion, with the object of alleviating and making more enjoyable the serious and dry tone of the didactic material by means of their more inspiriting atmosphere. That which is intrinsically, in the fundamental conception of it, relegated to prose, cannot receive the poet's mintage, though it may be the peg on which he may hang his mantle[120]. Just as we find, for example, that the art of gardening is in great measure a purely external rearrangement of what is already presented us by Nature, but not necessarily of that which is itself a truly lovely locality; or as the art of building ameliorates by its ornament and external decoration a locality which has been expressly devoted to prosaic purposes and affairs.
In this way Greek Philosophy made a start under the mode of the didactic poem. We may even adduce Hesiod as an example, albeit a prosaic treatment of this kind in its strict sense is only fully assured when the understanding is undisputed master of the subject with its train of reflections, consequences, and classifications, and instructs us from this standpoint alone in as pleasing and elegant a way as it can. Lucretius, too, in his relations to the philosophy of Epicurus, and Vergil, with the information he supplies on agriculture, are in part examples of the same type. Despite all their artistic adroitness they are unable to give their versification the genuine spontaneity of the artistic form. In Germany the didactic poem is new out of fashion; in France Delille, in addition to his previous efforts entitled "Les jardins, ou l'art d'embellir les paysages," and his "Homme des champs," has presented his compatriots with a further example of the didactic poem, in which he has treated physical science ascompendiously through its forms of magnetism, electricity and the rest.
2. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY
Thesecondtype which we have to examine stands out in direct contrast to the previous one. The point of departure here is not from a significance already present before the mind in an independent form of its own, but from external objects simply such as natural localities, buildings, seasons of the year or periods of time, and the modes under which they are presented to sense. But as we found in the didactic poem the content persisted in formlessgeneralityso far as its essential character was concerned, so here, if in a converse manner, theexternal materialisindependentlyset forth in the singularity which pertains to it simply as phenomenon without being drawn within the circle of the significances apparent to mind; and it is this particularity which is depicted and described in its external aspect precisely as it appears to the matter-of-fact consciousness. Such a sensuous content has no relation to true art whatever, except under theonefeature, namely, that of its external existence; and this can only claim art's recognition in so far as it represents the natural basis ofspirituallife and individuality, its actions and events, the facts, that is to say, which constitute an environing world; as merely external form separated by itself from all that pertains to such life it has no such claim.
3. RELATION OF BOTH ASPECTS
On grounds deducible from the above, neither the instructive nor the descriptive type is secured in the exclusive one-sidedness which would obliterate every vestige of art, and we find in the one case that the external reality is brought into appreciable relation with that which is seized by mind as significance, just as conversely in the other the abstract universal is related to its concrete mode of appearance.
(a) We have already explained how this is so in the case of the didactic poem. Without depicting external conditions and particular phenomena, without the episodical narration of mythological and other illustrations we shall rarely find agenuine example of it. By means, however, of a parallel series of this character in which the universal for mind is thus laid alongside of the particular object of sense we have merely a quite collateral relation set up instead of a union carried out in every detail, a parallelogism, moreover, which does not affect the entire content and its all-embracing artistic form, but merely isolated aspects and traits.
(b) Such a modicum of true relation is particularly conspicuous in the case of descriptive poetry, in so far as its delineations are accompanied with such emotions as the sight of natural landscape, the course of the days and seasons, a wooded hill, a lake, a babbling brook, a church, a picturesquely situated village and the poor man's peaceful cottage are likely to arouse. We find consequently in descriptive poetry much as we do in the didactic poem episodes which, although merely accessory, animate us, in particular through the reflection of affecting emotions, such as a tender melancholy or little touches of occasional experience taken from the more homely levels of life. Such an association of spiritual feeling with the external facts of Nature can still only too easily in this type of poetry remain wholly external in its presentation. For the natural or local condition is here assumed to be something which quite independently confronts us. Man no doubt draws near to it; under its influence he entertains this or that feeling, but there is nothing which essentially unites moonlight, forests, valleys, landscape, and so on, with the emotions of the soul they excite. I am not here either the interpreter or the animating focus of Nature, but feel, as each happens to confront me, a wholly indefinite kind of harmonious reciprocity establish itself between the objects I face and the emotional life which they stimulate. Most of all are we Germans devoted to this type of picturesque description, and along with it to every variety of exquisite feeling and heart effervescence such natural scenery can possibly evoke. It is a public high-road over which all may march in line. Even some of the odes of Klopstock are tuned to its key.
(c) Butthirdly, if we inquire whether there is not a profounder relation between these opposed aspects of the internal feeling and external object, we shall find our nearest approach to an answer in the ancientepigram.