Profligacy and “fact-grinding” destroy the imagination by habitually dwelling in ultimate expressions while denying or forgetting the primary realities of which they are properly only the vessels. Purity ends by finding a goddess where impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which of these is the reality let each man judge according to his taste. “Fact-grinding”—which Darwin confessed and lamented had destroyed his imagination and caused him to “nauseate Shakespeare”—commonly ends in destroying the religious faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of love; for neither love nor religion can survive without imagination, which Shelley, in one of his prefaces, identifying genius with imagination, declares to be the power of discerning spiritual facts. Those who have no imagination regard it as all one with “fancy,” which is only a playful mockery of imagination, bringing together things in which there is nothing but an accidental similarity in externals.
VIII
PATHOS
Neither Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great expositors of the relation of the emotions to art, has discussed the nature of that which is understood by moderns as “pathos.” Aristotle has described in his Rhetoric, with the greatest acuteness and sensibility, the conditions and modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much that is excluded by pathos; and it may be useful to endeavour to ascertain what the limitations of the latter are, and what are its conditions in relation more particularly to art, in which it plays so important a part.
Pity, then, differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emotional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature; though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect, may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul. Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardour so far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds the field of pathos extended far beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity and pathos, which is the feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity—pity that would act if it had the opportunity—to extend in them the feeling of pity, that is pathos, to a far larger range of circumstances than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even if it had the chance.
Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wickedness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be quite content, cannot be certainly predicated of any individual sufferer; but pathos, whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate distress or in a tragedy of Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires that some obvious goodness, or beauty, or innocence, or heroism should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast, and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the fact of goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer, contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sadness of Desdemona’s death is immensely heightened by the black shadow of Iago; and perhaps the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum, while his betrayer occupies himself, between the acts of a comedy at the Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse his presence there by denying that he was aware of the contretemps or by representing his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair Rosamund’s sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang—
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled.
Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman’s tears.
Nought is there under heav’n’s wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness.
It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still more the way in which she is given to smiling through them. The author of the Rhetoric shows his usual incomparable subtilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest pathos; and when the shaft of a passionate female sorrow is feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile there is no heart that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffering there is no pathos. Nothing in the Inferno has this quality except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing, through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos, “tempering extremities with extreme sweet,” or at least with the memory of it. Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of pathos to their “crown,” which is “remembering happier things.” No one weeps in sympathy with the “base self-pitying tears” of Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some contrasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceeding ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleasure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colours—which are the same as those of sunrise—that constitutes its sadness; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding’s novel, had prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come, and that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charterhouse pensioner. In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression. The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than the spectacle of the battle itself.
The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humour is cumulative and diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the historian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it! A drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast; but a draught of it——! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a tear over the Vita Nuova, whatever an Italian may have done. Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exquisitely touching points in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Two on a Tower, The Trumpet-Major, and other of Hardy’s novels.