This dallying, as we may call it, is then pre-eminently an interest of the emotional life, 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, entirely isolated in its material form, 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." This naïveté is 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, when he 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 often
Through the gross and barriered darkness
Of that intranslucent veil,
Flashed a hand of sheen most splendid,
Mistress pure of rose and lily,
Princess, to whose matchless glory
E'en the snow's gleam paid obeisance,
Slave all murk of Aethiop moulding.
The matter is wholly different, however, when any one capable of profound emotion, 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 that passion, 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 night
Whiter 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 fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And 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 slain
By all the country up in arms) at first makes coy disdain
Prepare resistance, but at last when anyone hath led
Bold charge upon him with his dart, he then turns yawning head,
Fell anger lathers in his jaws, his great heart swells, his stern
Lasheth his strength up, sides and thighs waddle with stripes to learn
Their own power, his eyes glow, he roars, he leaps to kill,
Secure of killing: so his power then rous'd up to his will
Matchless Achilles, coming on to meet Anchises' son[106].